Communities

Lots of new Voicebox content!

It’s good to see plenty of new content being added to the Voicebox blog – the home of the UK online centres and Citizens Online bid for the CLG digital mentor fund.

For example, Mike Amos-Simpson on ‘What is Open Collaboration?‘:

I find the idea of developing and running a programme in the open very attractive for lots of reasons. There’s a sense of it being more ‘honest’, there’s the opportunity that even if you’re not directly involved you can contribute, there’s a degree of accountability with people allowed to freely add their views, and of course there’s the potential to bring on board a far wider range of expertise than you could with a traditional closed collaboration.

And Gail Bradbrook on ‘Research and Mapping Objectives‘:

I think we need to develop an open and flowing process, so that we get as much quality information as possible to understand the types of projects that exist, why they exist (what drives them) and what the benefits are as well as disadvantages in the process, in particular focused on sustainability. What we can learn that is good for training others and what training needs may exist. What else do people think we need to find out?

If you would like to add your voice to the, er, box then just get in touch with admin@voice-bx.org.uk!

It could be Rotterdam, or anywhere

Actually, no it couldn’t, because Rotterdam is a beautiful city, and I am having tremendous fun here with Nick Booth.


We are at an R4R event for residents groups throughout Europe, with two aims: to demonstrate the power of the social web, and to show just how easy it is to do.

We are armed with some basic kit: Flip Ultras and point and click cameras, as well as our mobile phones (don’t worry, in order to stave off bankruptcy for a little longer I’ve switched roaming off on my iPhone…). The point being that you don’t need to spend a lot of money on tech to be able to publish content online.

We’re running a blog here, in order to demonstrate how easy it is, which has been populated with some of the other work Nick has done with R4R.

Nick and I actually got up at 5.30 am this morning, and we have since used four forms of transport: taxi, plane, train and finally water-taxi. Here’s a pretty rough video of us getting on the water-taxi, with Maurice Specht, who generously guided us around.

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UK Online Centres want to collaborate!

I have just come back from a meetup in Birmingham of folk interested in the Digital Mentor concept and how we can all collaborate on a bid. I got to meet some great people for the first time, and catch up with some familiar faces.

Also present was Ben Brown from UK Online Centres, who had travelled from Bristol for the meeting. Great effort on his part, and also to UKOC for having the gumption to send one of their people to a pub in Birmingham to chat about working together with a bunch of strangers!

Anne Faulkner from OKOC has now posted a great comment on the Digital Mentor blog, sketching out how they see an open, collaborative bid, in co-operation with other organisations like Citizens Online and Ruralnet, working.

UK online centres and Citizens Online know this approach isn’t the easy option, but we figured that if we want to deliver a project about partnership and online collaboration, we should try to put it into practice as part of the bidding process. We think we need both breadth and depth in this project, and we’re interested in developing a framework which enables a range of organisations and individuals to share their expertise.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this develops, and getting involved where I can!

Online social media surgery

I love the social media surgery concept, which was pioneered by Pete Ashton in Birmingham, used by me at UK Youth Online and then turned into something amazing by Pete, Nick and others in Birmingham.

I think there is a lot of value in having an online equivalent, just a place where people can ask questions about this stuff and hopefully get some answers from anyone who is browsing at the time. So I have started to build something.

It’s is very much early days, but the prototype site is at socialmediasurgery.com. It’s (obviously) built in Drupal, and as far as I have got so far is repurposing the blog function to act as questions, and comments as answers. Sophisticated it ain’t.

You can add a profile with some details of who you are in it, which might help you get the answers you need, or decide whether you trust the people providing them. There is also a simple rating system in place for answers, so if a response has one star it might well be worth taking with a pinch of social media salt.

Beyond changing a few colours, I haven’t got near to theming the site, I thought it far better to get the features in first. So if it looks like the default Drupal theme, it is. I will get round to changing it at some point.

Other stuff I want to get in:

  • Make the voting system more sophisticated for answers, so the top rated ones float to the top, say, or at least are displayed in a sidebar somewhere
  • Have some kind of karma system, so people who provide well rated answers get some kind of authority rating
  • Ability for users to mark a question as something they are also having problems with

…and probably loads of other stuff too.

So that’s it really. Please let me have any feedback or suggestions, but otherwise, let people who might benefit from the site know about it, and of course do register yourselves in case you can help someone, or get some help yourself…

Engagement in Kettering

My local authority, Kettering Borough Council, is doing some great work in the democratic engagement field, firstly by taking part in an excellent nationwide democracy project, and also by promoting local online communities.

First up, Kettering is taking part in the annual ‘I’m a Councillor, Get Me Out of Here!‘ project which is run with my good friends at Gallomanor. It’s an excellent initiative:

For the two weeks of the event, young people use web technology they feel comfortable with, to ‘meet’ local councillors from their area. They ask questions and have live chats with councillors, and then vote for their favourite to become ‘youth champion’ for the area.

Secondly, a local group in the village of Burton Latimer have started their own website to help promote their activities and maybe get some others involved too. Great! Even better is that the Council are giving them space on their own website to promote it. Excellent work all round, I’d say.

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