Monday, 11 October, 2010

The pipe problem

PipesAt Public Sector Online (which Elaine did a marvellous job of writing up on the LP blog) last Monday, the question was asked – as it often is at these events – what could be done about the fact that the majority of folk working in government, access to the common social websites is blocked.

Cue nods around the room. It’s still an issue, despite the fact that almost every sensible person one talks to says that blocking isn’t the thing to do.

What are the reasons for the blocking? I think there are three main ones. The first two are straw men, to be honest. The third is more troubling and difficult to get around.

1. Staff will waste time

I don’t think I need to spend too much time on this one, as every reader of this blog surely knows that this is a management issue and not a technology one. If people want to waste time, they’ll find a way; and ever organisation already has policy and process to manage this and stop it happening.

2. Information security and risk of virus infection etc

Two parts to this. Firstly that using social web sites, whether for communication or collaboration, increases the likelihood of losing sensitive information. I’ve heard of people in councils being blocked from Slideshare for this very reason. Imagine that! Someone accidentally creating a powerpoint deck full of confidential data, and then deciding that they should publish it publicly on Slideshare!

This is unfathomably moronic, not least because of course there have been far more instances of people losing or leaking paper files, and nobody as far as I am aware has banned the use of those. It’s an education thing, innit?

Likewise the virus issue. People clicking dodgy links is the main problem here, and that’s as likely to happen via email as anything else. Nobody blocks email (shame). Instead, educate people not to click dodgy links. Easy.

3. The pipe isn’t big enough

This is the real issue I think. I have had lots of conversations with IT folk in public sector organisations who simply state that if someone in the organisation watches a video on YouTube, then that’s the network down for pretty much everyone else.

We’ve all been there – who hasn’t tried to access the web at a lunchtime, only for it to be unusably slow?

I can’t help but think that this is one of the main reasons behind organisations blocking access to interesting websites. Perhaps the other two reasons are just covering up the fact that many government organisations have infrastructure that really isn’t fit for purpose?

I honestly don’t know and I also don’t know how expensive a situation this sort of thing is to resolve, or how much of a priority it would be to fix in these austere times.

Credit: photo by Ozh.

CityCamp London

Dominic and his team at FutureGov did a fabulous job of running CityCamp London this weekend.

Sadly I could only make Friday afternoon’s ‘stimulate’ session, which saw a roomful of people at the RSA get together to listen to some great talks about cities, technology and design.

But following the tweets over the weekend for the ‘participate’ and ‘collaborate’ sessions it seems like there was an incredible amount of energy and desire to improve things. It will be fascinating to see what projects emerge from the event.

I must say, my thoughts on Friday were focused around the idea of place, and how places work as systems. I’ve never lived in a city – except on a part time basis when at University – and so I couldn’t help but wonder how an event based around a village, or a market town, would turn out.

Cities, especially vast ones like London, are so big, and so complicated, that they are very difficult to fix, I think. However, whilst villages and towns are obviously on a smaller scale, they also lack the numbers of people wanting to be involved, and having the skills needed to make stuff happen.

This is probably something I need to think about a bit more, and will return to when I have something half-sensible to say.

Anyway, I made some notes during Matt Jones of Berg’s presentation. They are a mixture of things he said, things I wanted to look up and my own thoughts. I’ve pasted them in below the video of Matt’s talk and I will leave you to decide how useful they are.

Matt Jones, Design Director, Berg from aquila on Vimeo.

  • Networked urbanism ? Ruralism?
  • What about villagecamp or towncamp?
  • How do we improve where we live and how does the Internet as a platform support that?
  • Unintended consequences of complex system design. Build it and they come, and you didn’t build big enough.
  • Never waste a good crisis.
  • City (place?) as a system.
  • Use of a system does not equal need for the system.
  • How much is a town or a village a system? Are they multiple systems or one big one? How can the systems be plotted and improved?
  • Government is just a part of these systems.
  • Where does open government fit in? Government must be more open to be an effective part of the system.
  • Data is not truth.
  • The works, Kate ascher (book)
  • Always design a thing thinking about it in it’s next largest context.
  • Shirky – situated software. Look it up. Also the nearlynet.
  • Synecdoche. The part that represents the whole.
  • Open data makes information Hunan scale. Tom Armitage.
  • Hertzian Times (book)
  • Speedbird.wordpress.com
  • Doorway – simon unwin. Porch and doorways – interfaces between public and private.

Sunday, 10 October, 2010

Oh dear, Andrew Marr…

I don’t tend to respond to this sort of thing, but this one pressed several of my buttons.

The so-called “citizen journalists” will never offer a real replacement to newspapers and television news, he told Cheltenham Literature Festival.

He said: “Most citizen journalism strikes me as nothing to do with journalism at all.

A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people.”

Sigh.

First point – the irony of Marr insulting people due to the appearance of physical features attached to their heads is hard to ignore.

Second – I’m no particular fan of journalism as a profession, especially given all the bleating about it that goes on in the mainstream media. Journalists write stuff down. There really isn’t that much that’s special about it. Lots of people can do it, and they are doing so. Get over it.

Thirdly, bloggers are angry ranters, are they? Has Marr read any of the columns that appear in newspapers every day of the week? Is he entirely unaware of the filth peddled by the likes of Jan Moir on a regular basis?

Finally, and the bit that really gets my goat: the lazy assumption that people who like computers are weird, scabby losers that hang out in their bedrooms all day long. I’ve said it before, but the fact that wearing ignorance of technology as a badge of honour is still acceptable these days is a disgrace, and it’s the sort of tosh that Marr is trotting out here that only encourages it.

“Angry rant” over.

Events, dear boy…

My diary is starting to fill up a bit with events to attend, and those I have been asked to speak at. Here’s a quick run down.

FirePRO Conference – Wednesday 13th October

I’ll be speaking to the conference for public relations officers in the Fire and Rescue Services.

My session is all about “How to get the most from social media”:

Is social media a ‘nice to have’ or is it an essential part of a modern communication strategy? This session will discuss ways of integrating social media into mainstream communication and ask whether FRSs can work together to maximise the benefits of online communication.

SLCC National Conference – Saturday 16th October

I’ll be talking to local council clerks about how they can use the web to get people more involved in local democracy and the activity of parish, town and community councils.

Beyond 2010 – 20th and 21st October

I’ll be attending this great looking event in Birmingham as a punter rather than a speaker, and am really looking forward to it given the great line up. Nick wrote it up nicely here.

How to save money and influence people: Implementing behaviour change strategies – 24th November

This LGA conference is all about how councils can manage the significant changes necessary to meet the challenges facing local government – without utterly alienating staff. I’ll be talking about the role that social technology can play in this.

WLGA Member Support and Development Conference – 26th November

I’ll be talking to this Welsh LGA conference about how councillors can be supported in their use of the web to engage with residents.

Tuesday, 5 October, 2010

The death of crowd control

James Gardner:

The point,  of course, is that if the central thinking is that communications are about crowd control, then organisations are really forcing the many-to-many communication outside their organisation. Although I don’t think we are about crowd control at the department, the fact that we don’t have our new communications channels yet has already resulted in crowds forming beyond the firewall. Imagine the circumstance when new channels, far being lacking, aren’t even allowed.

My conclusion, based on this, is that crowd control is pretty much dead. And that centralised command-and-control will soon follow.

Sunday, 3 October, 2010

Public Sector Online 2010

psonline

Tomorrow (that’s Monday, 4th October) I’ll be at The Guardian‘s Public Sector Online conference, which looks like it should be a great day.

I’m on at 15:30, for the closing panel titled “Innovation in social media”. Here’s the skinny:

As more people use social networking sites to keep informed, and organisations use them to spread information and market services, what are the best ways for public sector bodies to engage with the public?

  • The rise in the use of social networks as a line of communication
  • Twittiquette – best use of Tweets
  • Twitter as a public service: e.g. Gritterfeeds
  • Generating and monitoring content – Social media etiquette
  • Online engagement – encouraging two way usage

Joining me on the panel will be:

Which means that, even if nobody else has any fun, at least I’ll get to hang out with some cool people for an hour or so!

If you are attending, do get in touch and let’s meet up! Twitter will probably be the easiest way.

Saturday, 2 October, 2010

Scheming Virtuously: A Handbook for Public Servants

I love stuff like this.

Nick CNick Charney works in government in Canada, and is also a prolific and excellent blogger. He’s also pretty active on GovLoop, which is where I first came across him I think. Anyway, follow his stuff.

Nick has just published an ebook called Scheming Virtuously: A Handbook for Public Servants which is great reading.

It’s “a tactical guide for any public servant looking to make an impact. It offers practical advice on how to be innovative in the public service while managing your relationships and reputation.” Awesome!

I have embedded the document below, or for those whose employers don’t trust them, here’s the direct PDF download.

I mentioned to Nick that the style reminded me a little of Colin McKay’s wonderful (even after 3 years!) Secret Guide to Social Media in Large Organizations – and it turns out that document helped inspire Nick to write his guide. Good stuff.

101 cool tools: Paper.li

This is a new regular series of posts where I highlight a cool online service that you may or may not have heard of. Whether I ever make it to 101 is debatable I feel… I’ve also set up a Twitter feed where links to these posts will be automatically pumped.

This is the first post, and it’s about paper.li.

paperli

Paper.li is a service that integrates with Twitter, and creates a dynamically produced page, that looks a bit like a newspaper, from the links that are added to Twitter.

You can create a paper from your own (or indeed, someone else’s) followers, or a hashtag, or one of your lists of Twitter users. Here’s what mine looked like when I created it just now:

dbpaper

Here’s an explanation from the website about how it works:

  • extract all tweets that include URLs
  • extract the content found on these URLs:
    • text, e.g. blog post, newspaper article
    • photo, e.g. Flickr, yfrog, Twitpic, …
    • video, e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, …
  • analyze the extracted text for topic, e.g. Politics, Technology, …
  • surface the day’s most relevant articles (using paper.li magic)
  • construct a newspaper frontpage using the filtered articles, photos and videos

So you can quickly produce an automatically curated page of useful content that people you are interested in have found – on the topics you are interested in. It really is just a case of signing up, typing your terms in and clicking go.

The downside is that you have little control over what it produces. You can see a local council, for example, producing a paper containing content concerning the local area – but it may have to come with caveats!