Dave

Wikis and whatnot

Work continues apace on what is only the second day of LGNewMedia. While the four sections of the site all look very different, I’m hoping to add some consistency of visuals by producing a common logo, based on the one used at LGSearch. Once that’s done, I think things will look a little more uniform. I have done nothing to set the forum up yet, though I have quite a bit of experience with phpBB so hopefully that won’t take too long!

My original choice for a wiki was PMWiki, which is lightweight and more than adequate for my needs. However, I have suspicions that it might just be a little too techy for a lot of people’s experience, so I went with MediaWiki, the engine that drives Wikipedia. This is a case, frankly, of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but MediaWiki is way easier to use that PMWiki and can produce some nicer looking designs.

So, I have the front page of the wiki looking quite nice, with some highlighted headings for the various sections of the site. The only problem I am facing is that the text links in the top right of the screen on this blog, the forum and LGSearch are missing, and I haven’t figured out yet how to edit the wiki template to put them in there! Am sure it will come in time.

The other slight disappointment is that I am unable to run the latest version of MediaWiki, as it requires PHP5 to run on your server. My hosts only have PHP4 point something, so I am having to run a legacy version of the software. Oh well, it’ll do for the likes of me, I’m sure!

Update: The wiki is now hosted at Wikispaces.

Hello world!

Well, this is the first post on the new LGNewMedia site. The site is in continual development to try and get everything tied in and a reasonably common theme across the board.

So, what’s LGNewMedia all about? Well, we aim to spread the word about new, or social, media and the benefits it can have for the local government sector in the UK. The site is made up of four main sections:

  • This blog, which aims to provide useful information and news about new media and local government
  • A forum, where like-minded folk can get together and chat
  • A wiki, where community projects can be organised
  • LGSearch, a local government focussed search engine

And these are the sorts of new media tools that local councils should be using to develop their internal and external communication strategies, as well as increasing the levels of collaboration and cooperation between officers.

Another key aim of this site is to promote the use of open source tools wherever possible. For example, this site runs on WordPress, phpBB and PMWiki – all of which are freely available open source packages. The total running costs of this site are probably in the region of £30 a year. The initial work of setting up the site took about 2 hours. The point is, there is no resource based argument against new media projects. They are cheap, and they are quick.

I’ll post more as the site develops. In the meantime, do have a poke around and if you would like to get involved, just let me know!

Findless

Simon Dickson, a consultant ‘bringing new media thinking to UK news and government’, has launched Findless (pronounced Find-less, rather than Findluss, which was my original reading!):

a new editorialised search engine network. Why ‘findless’? Well, aside from hopefully being memorable, it sums up our philosophy that ‘less is more’ when it comes to search results. We’ve all seen the heatmaps: startling numbers of people instinctively click on the first search result in the list. All the more important, then, to strip out all the sites whose SEO may be great, but whose content may be lacking. Most people we’ve asked immediately think it’s an odd choice of name… but pretty soon, they get it.

We’re starting with two areas, chosen because we (my wife and I) have worked in the fields in question, and know the good sites without having to think too hard. One is health and safety, the other is education. Coincidentally, in both cases, the quality information is spread very widely, and you may not instinctively know where to look.

Very similar, then, to LGSearch. I’ve left a comment on Simon’s blog for him to get in touch. It’d be cool to figure out a way to link all this stuff up.

[tags]Google Coop, CSE, Simon Dickson, Findless, LGSearch[/tags]

More LGSearch

LGSearch, my local government Google Coop effort, has proven pretty popular amongst people working in the sector – on the blog I’ve stuck up some of the nice things people have been saying.

I’ve had some interesting discussions with Steve Dale, who works as a knowledge management consultant for I&DeA. Sounds like some of the plans I’ve got for the site link up with some of the work he is doing. It’ll be interesting to see how things work out.

Here’s an extract from an email I sent to Steve:

I’ll quickly jot down my plans for where I think LGSearch might be headed. My first task is to integrate a search for other authorities (Police, Fire, Health), then to have national government departments and agencies in there too. Google Coop does allow you to filter searches down by tagging the sites being searched – so it will be easy enough for people to drill down into results to find what they are after.

I initially started the LGSearch blog literally as a way of getting information on the web without having to code much HTML. However, I have found myself having to resist the urge to post on non-LGSearch related matters, largely on topics of social media and local government. This has made me consider the prospect of starting a new site (LGNewMedia?) of which the search would just be a part, with the aim of the site being to promote the use of social media, with guides and how-tos, lists of resources etc, running from a blog.

I’ve also been developing a wiki, which is currently hosted alongside, and branded as, LGSearch. Feel free to have a look, though it isn’t public yet – it runs on PMWiki, which seems pretty good. This was to be in answer to those people who wanted to set up their own searches. So, I’d have some wiki pages on how to use Google Coop, as well as an updated list of what sites were being used within LGSearch. Another possibility would be to use the wiki to house a list of sites and resources identified as being useful – so providing a directory approach as well as the search based one, if that makes sense.

Of course, the more I thought about the wiki, the more applications I have thought of for it, i.e. providing space for social media projects, sharing best practice etc, the more it became clear that it belonged under the putative umbrella of LGNewMedia.

Other ideas for LGNewMedia included the ubiquitous forum – though these can become barren wastelands of inactivity, of course – and even a Digg style system of people sharing useful links. Again, the lack of traffic might be an issue here. But the main parts of the site will be the blog for communicating and the wiki for collaboration.

The other key aim for the LGNewMedia site would be that it runs on freely available and easily obtainable open source software: WordPress for the main blog, PMWiki for the wiki, probably phpBB for the forum and Pligg for the Digg-link thing.

Rather than using several different systems, I’ve been thinking about using Drupal, which is pretty extensible, as the CMS for the whole thing. But, in conversation with Ben, it sounds like Drupal is not wiki-friendly, and the wiki will hopefully be the most important part of the whole arrangment. So it looks like I need to learn some better CSS to get a common template sorted out.

[tags]lgsearch, pmwiki, wordpress, drupal, pligg, phpbb, wiki, social media[/tags]

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