Sunday, 21 December, 2008

Putting Citizens First: Transforming Online Government

Paul Canning points us to some remarkably good stuff from government web folk from across the pond in the States: a white paper called Putting Citizens First: Transforming Online Government. Paul writes:

That such a document could exist is solely because webbies in US government are organised and have a voice. ‘Webbies’ meaning professionals with web specific skills, those which have emerged over the past 15-20 years.

It’s language could only come from webbies. We have nothing anywhere close to this document in the UK.

The organisation in question is the Federal Web Managers Council. The vision for this transformation is set out as:

  • Easily find relevant, accurate, and up-to-date information;
  • Understand information the first time they read it;
  • Complete common tasks efficiently;
  • Get the same answer whether they use the web, phone, email, live chat, read a brochure, or visit in-person;
  • Provide feedback and ideas and hear what the government will do with them;
  • Access critical information if they have a disability or aren’t proficient in English.

Paul has reproduced the whole text in his post – it really is required reading.

Wednesday, 17 December, 2008

Cloudcamb notes

Cloudcamb

Here are the notes I mananged to make at CloudCamb, which was organised jolly well by Matt Wood (MZA on twitter).

Simone Brunozzi, Technical Evangelist, Amazon Web Services (simon on twitter)

Cloud computing helps answer the ‘prediction problem’ – knowing what your tech needs will be in the future

Need to expand to take advantage of an opportunity

What about periodical demand?

Results in extra cost and delays

lack of power and flexibility in infrastructure

Cloud computing allows a business to: focus on your skills, limit cap ex, scale quickly, reliable, innovate and save money

Principles of AWS: cloud computing, easy to use, secure, flexible, on demand, pay per use, self service, platform agnostic

Services: include S3 – storage, EC2 – virtual server, Cloudfront – content delivery, Database – SimpleDB

By end 2007 AWS were using more bandwidth than all Amazon retail sites put together. S3 objects (basically, files hosted) 800m in q3 2003, 29bn q3 2008

Cloud computing suits cloud computing. No upfront investment, cost effective, follow your success, shorter time to market

AMAZON S3 – Smugmug.com saved $500k pa using S3 (ie just by moving storage of files). Scalable online storage, cheap & reliable, simple APIs (REST, SOAP)

AMAZON EC2 – Vitual servers on demand, from $0.10 per hour, Linux, Windows, OpenSolaris all available. Elastic IP , Elastic Block store, availability zones, SLA 99.95% Licences for software can be paid for by the hour. Animoto Feb 08 80 ‘instances’ of EC2. Then launched facebook app went up to over 3500 by April. Would have been impossible to scale like that traditionally.

AMAZON CLOUDFRONT – Improve content delivery through caching. Easy setup, no committment, 8 locations in US, 4 in europe, 2 in Asia. Elastic and reliable. Tiered pricing.

AWS offers: fault tolerance, scalability, rapid innovation possible, no barriers of adoption, better pricing model, no upfront investment, faster time to market, choice, partners

Who uses? NY Times, Nasdaq, Washington Post, Linden Labs, amongst others

Future: operational excellent, security, certification for developers, international expansion, management console, load balance, auto-scaling, monitoring

EC2 now available in europe – though no Windows stuff

Amazon yet to not be able to provide service to a customer

Toby White – Inkling Software (tow21 on twitter)

Toby is talking about ‘Running a startup in the cloud’

All of Inkling’s servers run on EC2. But cost so far has been more than traditional servers, but that is not what matters. S3 is cheap, EC2 less so.

Ease of use – Inkling have few staff, have better things to do than server admin

Amazon makes process very easy, setting up new instances etc. Scriptable, repeatable and testable. Version controlling of AMIs. Forces you to consider these issues, which is a good thing.

Karim Chine – Computational e-Science in the Cloud: towards a federative and collaborative platform

Karim started by showing just how easy it is to use Amazon EC2. ElasticFox is an FF extension that helps manage the service.

There is a lot of science in this particular talk. I’m not sure I can keep up. It’s something about reproduceable computational results. I think. Just read this, if you want to know more.

Seriously, though, some of the stuff I understood about this show that the ability for people involved in scientific projects to collaborate over the internet in this way is superb, and the technology is clearly pretty innovative, not to mention hugely complicated. Given that I am attending a meeting in a building called the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, I would imagine that a lot of other people here would know a lot more about this than me.

The Social Media Exchange

The Social Media Exchange is an event being organised by Jude Habib of Sound Delivery, and is happening on 26 January at the Resource Centre on Holloway Road in London. You can find out more by downloading this PDF.

According to Jude:

The Social Media Exchange is a a series of bitesize masterclasses, practical creative surgeries, discussions, collaboration and networking opportunities for all your multi-media communication needs for 2009. Pick and mix sessions, all in one day.

I’m going to be there, amongst other luminaries such as Steve Bridger and Amy Sample Ward, running a session called ‘WordPress for Good’ – how WP can be used by small voluntary organisations to provide a cheap and easy way of having a really professional and social online presence.

It looks like it will be a really good day. Email socialmediaexchange@sounddelivery.org.uk to book a place.

5 Different uses for RSS

RSS is a great technology, one of those that underpins the new usefulness of the web. It’s a simple way of keeping in touch with what is happening in lots of different places, without having to keep visiting lots of sites every day.

Here’s a video from those wonderful Common Craft folk explaining RSS better than I ever could:

One of the really fab things about RSS are the different uses to which it can be put. Here’s five off the top of my head – have you any others?

1. Keeping up with bloggers

I don’t think blogging would have taken off nearly as fast as it did without its very early adoption of RSS as a method of syndicating content. Blogs by their nature are updated on a regular basis, and in a lot of cases a lot more often than other more traditional sites. Keeping up with all that content would be impossible without a way of bringing all those updated into one place.

2. News to you

News site soon cottoned onto the potential of RSS, to the point where now any news organisation worth its salt provides content in this way. Other organisations are starting to adopt it as well, and government is getting there. The need to keep eyeballs on adverts has resulted in some feeds containing only teaser content, to force the reader to go to the originating site anyway. This is a Bad Thing, in my view, and the one positive thing that will come out of RSS feeds that include adverts in them is that it might mean we get rid of partial feeds.

3. Monitoring what’s being said

Now that search engines such as Google are providing RSS feeds for their alerts service – as well as Blogsearches – it makes it all the more easy to set up monitoring dashboards, rather like the ones developed by Steph Gray and others at DIUS. Scanning the web for mentions of key names and topics means that nothing on the web needs to be missed, no matter how small the source.

4. Chchchchchanges

Collaborating on wikis, and forums etc is a wonderful way to experience how the web can help bring people together to share and develop content together. But how to know when people have made updates to pages, or projects, or conversations? One way has always been to get email alerts, but that can lead to having a very full inbox. Any web service worth its salt these days provides RSS for updates, meaning you can keep yourself in the know, and well organised at the same time.

5. Republish, repurpose

This is the most exciting, for me. Because RSS is an open standard it means other services can make use of it to republish material in new ways. Take Steph’s digitalgovuk site – all built using the RSS feeds that Delicious spits out – or Simon Dickson’s OnePolitics – which makes following political blogs both easy and easy on the eye. When you start getting into the territory of combining RSS with other technology like maps and so on, the possibilities seem limitless.

What other uses for RSS are there that are important to you?

Tuesday, 16 December, 2008

Barcamp-Teacamp this Thursday (18/12/08)

Teacamps are the rather British regular get togethers for people interested in cool webby stuff in government. They take place every other Thursday at the House of Fraser cafe on Victoria Street.

Turnout has been a little disappointing of late, so I hear – I’m one of those that hasn’t appeared for a few meets – but it would be great to have as many people along as possible this week. For  one, it’s nearly Christmas and it would be good to pass on season’s greetings in person.

Mainly, though, it seems like a really good opportunity to discuss the upcoming Barcamp, which is taking place at the end of January. From what I gather, preparations are progressing nicely, but it would be great for a pre-meet to take place, where folk can talk together about what they are planning to present, or maybe what they would like to see from others.

So, hope to see lots of you there – 2pm, Thursday 18 Dec, House of Fraser cafe.

Web based or desktop?

Just recently, I have stopped using the WordPress inbuilt editor, which runs in the web browser, and have started using MarsEdit – a piece of desktop software I have previously been rather unkind about – to write my blog posts. Since getting a PC, just recently I have continued in this offline blogging vein by using Windows Live Writer.

This started me thinking about the ways I use online services – through web based or desktop applications. As always, the first thing I did was to ask my Twitter buddies:

  • Me: What makes you decide whether to use a web app rather than a desktop one? eg webmail vs client, or google reader vs feedemon or netnewswire?
  • Simon Wakeman: functionality functionality functionality…it depends, I use a mix of each, although my multi-PC multi-site work life lends itself to a cloud-based apps (newsgtr excepted)
  • Nick Booth: experimentation or if someone shows me something I like – then I’ll use it.
  • Matt Kelland: web apps are a last resort for me – only if I need collab access to the data AND I know I will always be online when I need it
  • Kevin Campbell-Wright: I’m with Simon Wakeman
  • Steven Tuck: using desktop for things where I want alerts eg twhirl, feeddeemon and web based for portability google docs, email.
  • Andrew Beekan: Accessibility. When it comes to readers and mail I like to be able to access wherever I am. Docs, I use a mix of Office & Zoho.
  • Michael Grimes: Because I can access them easily from anywhere (with an internet connection).

The answer, it appear, is ‘it depends’.

Let’s have a look at some examples of what I use and where.

Email

I use webmail all the time – Gmail in this case using Apps for your domain. However, I have also set up Apple’s Mail client to download my email through IMAP for backup purposes, which I do roughly once a week. The main advantage of using the client application on my desktop is that it works when I’m not online… but that is rarely the case and my iPhone can be used for emails that just can’t wait. So, I’m happy with webmail. Unless anyone wants to convince me otherwise?

News reading

I started out reading RSS feeds late 2004, using Bloglines (Google Reader didn’t even exist in those days…). Then, as a Windows man, I discovered the wonder that is FeedDemon, a desktop application that really is the Rolls Royce of aggregators. When Google Reader came out (for the second time, the first version was rubbish) I toyed with it for a while before returning to FeedDemon.

When I switched to a Mac, I immediately downloaded NetNewsWire, the equivalent to FeedDemon. Sadly, I found that it just wasn’t the same experience, both in terms of ease of use and features. So, I switched to Google Reader, and that was that.

(It’s worth pointing out that both FeedDemon and NetNewsWire are part of the Newsgator family of RSS products, including the online RSS reader. All three sync together, so you could use NNW on a Mac, FD on a PC and NG at a third machine, and all would be up to date with what you have read and what you haven’t. Pretty neat.)

I really got into some of the features of Reader, like sharing items, with and without comments, which get automatically re-reported in FriendFeed. I also have got used to using Google Gears to download an offline copy of my feeds to read on the train. So, am also a web-based man when it comes to RSS. I have, though, just reloaded my latest subscription list into NetNewsWire to give it another go – along with the iPhone app and the fact that I now have a PC with FeedDemon on it – which could convince me to switch back…possibly.

Blog writing

A quicky this as I seem to write about it so much – I prefer writing blog posts offline. It’s irrational in these days of always-on broadband, but I feel rushed using the built in WordPress editor. There’s more on this topic here. On a Mac, the only sensible choice of offline editor is MarsEdit, whose lack of rich text editing is, frankly, a strength. The only time I use the built in editor these days is when I am using a different machine to my MacBook, or if I need to use a lot of bullet points (which are a bit annoying to do in MarsEdit).

Twitter

I use a client for Twitter – Twhirl. Others may rant on about the benefits of others, like Tweetdeck (which is big and ugly and horrible in my view) but I have found Twhirl seems to do stuff just the way I’d expect and like it to. Which is more than can be said for the Twitter web interface, on the homepage. The brightest thing Twitter ever did was to outsource its UI, if the website is anything to go by…

Word processing

See blog posting. I just like typing into a desktop app more than a box on a web page. Even when the document I am writing needs to be shared, I’d still rather type it locally first, then upload to Google Docs or whatever. What are your thoughts on the online/offline decision? I’m clearly pretty confused about which I prefer and when!

Which do you prefer – doing everything in the browser, on the desktop or a bit of both?

Monday, 15 December, 2008

Bookmarks for December 7th through December 15th

Stuff I have bookmarked for December 7th through December 15th:

Video hosting services

Whilst beavering away this week in Stockholm on Cisco08, I had a chance to play with a few different video hosting services, namely YouTube, Vimeo and Blip. Here’s what I found:

YouTube

YouTube was the default choice for me going into the event, simply because it is a name that everyone recognises and most people are used to the format and the way it works. It’s also easy to upload quickly from a Flip using the built in software. There is also a huge community around it, with rating, favouriting and commenting on videos well established.

However, I found that the quality of picture and (especially) audio was poor on the uploaded videos on YouTube, and the service seemed pretty slow at getting the videos ready for publishing after they had been uploaded. Also, you are limited to less than 10 minutes of video in any one go, which is a pain for longer pieces, such as recorded sessions at events (though short interviews are no problem).

Another problem is that users can’t download the video from YouTube, so it is pretty restrictive.

Vimeo

Vimeo is much less well known outside the circle of social media fanboys and girls, which is a shame as it seems a much better service that is currently provided by YouTube.

The interface is really easy to use and it seems quicker at uploading video, and converting it for use online. One other small but neat feature is that it sends you an email when the video is ready: nice. The quality of the video picture and audio seems much higher than YouTube and the embeddable player is nice to use without some of YouTube rather intrusive buttons and links.

Vimeo also allows logged-in users to download the original video files.

The downside of Vimeo is that you are limited to 500mb of video uploads a week unless you upgrade to a Pro account.

Blip

Blip is aimed less at the occasional video poster and more at folk who want to regularly upload content as a ‘show’ – you aren’t forced to do this, but it is clearly the intention of the site that it’s there for the more dedicated creators of video content. For example, you can get a share of ad revenue from your videos if you like, and the embedded player is highly customisable too.

Blip doesn’t seem to have many restrictions in terms of what it allows you too upload, and also makes it possible to download the original video files. However, I don’t find the player quite as user-friendly as the Vimeo one, and all the options on publishing your video are quite confusing and distracting.

Conclusion

I am going to more or less ditch YouTube for the video I produce. The quality isn’t there in terms of the output and this outweighs the recognition factor for me. Vimeo is great for short videos and for anything below roughly ten minutes, that’s the service I will use. Blip is great quality, and fantastic for longer pieces, but the slightly less friendly user experience means my initial choice will always be Vimeo.

Which is your video host of choice?

We are all networked learners

More great stuff from David Wilcox musing on the experience of social reporting in Portugal. Whilst there, he was lucky enough to come across Etienne Wenger, a highly regarded thinker in the field of knowledge management and learning, who I first came across due to his promotion of communities of practice.

My conclusion, inspired by Etienne Wenger – above – is that social reporters can aspire to be “social artists” who help create social learning spaces where people can work together on social issues. It’s something anyone can do, with the right attitude and some skills, but I think social reporters should definitely make it a key part of their work.

It would appear that Etienne’s thinking is taking him away from clearly defined communities into a more informal arrangement of learning through sharing as part of wider networks: the ‘social learning spaces’.

This is fascinating stuff, and as I am currently putting together a programme of workshops to help civil servants understand what they need to do to engage with the social web, I wonder how these social learning spaces might be implemented as a part of that.

Here we are seeing different elements of the way the social web can be used – reporting at events, sharing knowledge across networks, collaborative learning, online storytelling, engagement activity between government citizens – merging together into one, like a big Venn diagram.

I think this makes all of us who use the social web on a regular basis networked learners. Every tweet, every Flickr photo, every online video, every shared link, every blog post adds to the sum of what we can know, and we have this knowledge served up, directly to us hundreds of times a day. We probably aren’t even aware that it is happening, but by a process of ambient osmosis, it is.

Of course, what is required with any of this is the willingness to collaborate and share, and the awareness of that fact that we all need to benefit from this networked learning. The technology is just an enabler. But who wouldn’t want to be involved with an initiative that has so much to offer?