Month: October 2010

Almost live transparency from Greater Manchester Police

GMP

A really interesting experiment is happening in Manchester today, thanks to the local police force.

Greater Manchester Police are, according to their website,

publishing details of every incident that it deals with on Twitter to allow the public to see what officers at one of the largest UK forces face on a daily basis.

This video explains more:

You can follow all the action on the GMP website, where they are aggregating together the outputs from three different Twitter streams, or just get the latest from @gmpolice.

As I said, interesting stuff, and a great use of the scale that social media tools like Twitter offer in terms of quickly publishing a lot of information. Imagine doing something like this through traditional web publishing tools!

It’s also a great example of a public service using transparency proactively and positively. It doesn’t always have to be bad news.

Big and small societies

Nick BoothI had the pleasure on this lunchtime of spending time with Nick Booth – the man (the legend?) behind Podnosh, and the phenomenon that are Social Media Surgeries. What I love about Nick is that he is a connector – he knows government, and he knows communities – and he introduces them to each other all the time, on the web or in real life.

Anyway, this isn’t a post (just) about inflating Nick’s ego. We spent an hour and a half discussing business, the state of local government, where our own relevance might lie in these austere times, and that sort of thing. We naturally ended up discussing the Big Society, what it might actually mean and how it might actually work.

We probably didn’t cover much ground that others haven’t, but it was a useful discussion. I think that what I took away from it most of all was the idea that the lack of money to fund civic activity should be seen as a feature, not a bug.

In other words, don’t complain about there being no money attached to the Big Society. Make the point of it doing stuff that doesn’t need a grant to work. If your idea can’t operate without funding, maybe this is the wrong time for that idea.

* * * * *

Last night, on Twitter, my attention was grabbed by another Birmingham resident, Andy Mabbett, who posted up a couple of tweets tagged with #smallsociety. His point was:

do one small thing each day, to make the world around you better…Imagine if we all picked up one piece of litter and put it in a bin; or reported one pothole or faulty street light.

I love this idea. It also ties in beautifully with one of my favourite phrases to describe the internet, David Weinberger‘s ‘small pieces, loosely joined’.

Perhaps the big society is just lots of small societies joined together. Maybe the internet could be the adhesive.

Photo credit: Pete Ashton.

Update!

I’ve been accused of “big society romanticism” by Patrick Butler in the Guardian. I refuse to accept such a charge lying down!

I’m not saying this funding-free environment is a good thing. But it is a thing, possibly the thing and all I was doing was to point out that maybe it’s a change in mindset that’s required to get through the next few years, and make the most of the fact that the big society agenda – whatever its faults – has some serious backing in government.

Do I see a funding-free utopia ahead, where the gaps in public services are filled by willing volunteers, suddenly happy to give up their time to do the stuff they have got used to government doing for so many years? Of course not.

But I also think that dismissing attempts to think positively about the position we are in as ‘romanticism’ isn’t going to get anyone anywhere.

101 cool tools: Addictomatic

Second in my series of posts highlighting 101 cool online tools is Addictomatic.

It’s a great little service for doing instant online monitoring. Just feed the homepage with a search term, and it will quickly come back to you with a bunch of results across the web – from video sites, blogs, Twitter, photos and others.

You can then pick and choose which of the services are most useful to you, and bookmark the resulting URL, which you can return to whenever you like for an update.

If you’re wanting to do some quick online research to see what people are saying about you, or the issues that matter to you, then Addictomatic is just what you need.

How I use online stuff

Carl has posted a couple of interesting bits about how he uses social websites, and how this is changing:

I don’t tend to think about what I use – probably because this stuff is now completely embedded into work… but a quick scan through makes me realise that I haven’t really started to properly use any new service for about three years!

No location based services at all! I’m on the cutting edge, me.

Blogging

I use WordPress here at DavePress, which has been around in one form or another for about 5 years. I mostly write posts in MarsEdit, but use the web interface for stuff like comment moderation, updating the software, etc.

Twitter

I started tweeting in February 2007 and haven’t stopped. I ping it with blog posts from here, links to stuff I see elsewhere, the occasional question and the odd bit of ephemera. I mostly use Tweetie on the desktop, and the official Twitter apps for Android and iOS.

Delicious

I don’t really use Delicious as a bookmarking tool – in the sense that they are sites I want to visit later. Instead, it’s part of my publishing workflow – so these are sites I think my readers and followers might be interested in.

I never visit the Delicious web page, and only interact with it through the Chrome browser plugin. I automatically ping the links I save to Twitter – again, through the browser plugin.

Google Reader

I probably spend more time on this site than any other, perhaps with the exception of email. It’s where all that stuff I find so you don’t have to comes from.

Facebook

Now and again I visit the site, usually to catch up with messages I have been notified about, and while I’m there I’ll catch up with what some folk have been up to. I ping Facebook with blog entries too, which I am sure my friends are delighted about.

But I barely use Facebook, even for non-geeky social stuff – perhaps I just don’t do non-geeky social stuff?

LinkedIn

I do visit LinkedIn on a daily or perhaps every-other-day basis, usually to approve connection requests and to respond to requests for recommendations (if you feel the need to write something nice about me, my profile is here). It certainly seems like LinkedIn is a thriving community of people who perhaps don’t use Twitter quite so much.

My Twitter postings update LinkedIn automatically, which is the limit of my activity there, really.

Slideshare

My job means I do a lot of talks at conferences, and I tend to upload them to Slideshare when they change significantly. This automatically pings Twitter to say I have uploaded them. I also occasionally mark someone else’s slides as a favourite, which also pings Twitter.

Evernote

The most recent addition to my armoury. I type almost everything up in Evernote – blog post ideas, meeting notes, random things that pop into my head. I also clip web pages I want to read later here.

Tumblr

I clip interesting YouTube videos to my Tumblr site, using a bookmarklet in my browser – I never visit the actual site. It pings Twitter with every new video.

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