Sunday, 6 July, 2008

On consultation

On Thursday night I was lucky enough to be invited to Number 11 for a few drinks with various online luminaries, including a bunch of guys who went on Web Mission 08 and lots of lovely government webbies too, courtesy of Tom Watson, the Minister for Doing Fun Things with the Web. William Heath describes some of the oddities of the evening on the Ideal Government blog.

One of the cool people I got to hang out with was Harry Metcalfe, who I met very briefly at BarcampUKGovWeb, and who is the guy behind Tell Them What You Think, a MySociety sponsored hosted project to bring government consultations to the masses through the web.

Essentially, Tell Them What You Think scrapes consultations that are published on various government websites, and sticks them in one place. The potential consultee can then browse or search for stuff that interests them, and respond as appropriate. Screen scraping isn’t ideal, and is a bit of a brutish way of doing things, but is entirely necessary when data is published in a way that isn’t easily reused. As always, Wikipedia is your friend.

This chatter with Harry coincided neatly with an item that popped up in my RSS feeds last week, from my local authority, Kettering Borough Council (yes! They publish news in RSS!). This stated:

The Borough Council would like to gain the public’s views on the East Kettering Strategic Design Supplementary Planning Document. This draft document will form a key part of the Local Development Framework for the Borough, a suite of documents that contain planning policies and will guide future development. The Supplementary Planning Document aims to proactively promote high quality design within the Urban Extension.

The Council is taking people’s views in through three different methods:

  • Face to face events in various different locations throughout the affected areas
  • By taking postal responses to the consultation documents which have been published online
  • By using the online consultation facility called ‘Limehouse’

Limehouse does sound rather interesting, and a quick google shows that plenty of other authorities are using it too. Would be interested to hear any reports on how well it works in the comments.

Even if Limehouse is lame, at least Kettering are trying, and also blending off and online methods to ensure as many people can get involved as possible.

My concern though is that we shouldn’t be thinking about consultation any more, and instead the word we should be using is ‘participation’. This ties in with my post a little while back on taking the boringness out of engagement. Tell Them What You Think is great, a brilliantly put together service, but I wonder whether having a place for people to go to is really the answer to this stuff.

Shouldn’t we be using the power of the social web to deliver interesting stuff to the people who might be interested in it? Do we really want everyone to be engaged on every issue, or just those that have an interest and an understanding of it?

This is why the identification and engagement with existing community groups is so vital in this area. These are people who could actually be bothered to organise themselves around an issue of shared interest or concern. The social web has a tremendous abiity to aggregate people together, but first the issues must be disaggregated until they are small enough for people to be able to get to grips with them in a meaningful way. They then need to be delivered to those people directly, and be able to receive responses in a number of formats to fit with the way the people, or groups, like to work themselves.

Saturday, 5 July, 2008

Friday, 4 July, 2008

2gether no more

So, it’s all over. 2gether08, Steve Moore‘s vision of getting good people from the media, government, third sector, social entrepreneurs and the world of webbies together, was a fantastic couple of days in the (mostly) sunshine. There is so much to talk about, and loads going round in my head.

First up, my session. We had 45 minutes to run the social media game. It kind of worked.

Me presenting at 2gether08The room split into two groups, one looking at Tracey‘s issue of creating an online umbrella community for local low carbom networks, and one looking at supporting respite carers online. Each team produced a set of specifications, which were then passed to the other team to act as ‘consultants’ – picking out the tools which could be used to meet the challenge.

Big shouts to Lloyd Davis, Tim Davies (I think I got the surname spelling the right way round…), Matt Waring, Mitch Sava and Paul Henderson for their help in guiding the n00bs around what some of this stuff actually does.

One of the cool parts of the game is that not all the tools are techie, and it was soon picked out by both groups that a blended approach of on and offline is required for a successful social web strategy. Pretty much every organisation could benefit from taking the time to play games to figure this stuff out. I’m planning on making the leap into self-employment in the very near future, and I’d like to develop the game, and others like it, into ways of showing organisations that planning can be made fun, and that meetings don’t have to be boring.

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I also handed out a load of paper, which seemed to go down well. Tim’s social media primers were very popular, as was Paul Caplan’s Social Media Guide, and Colin McKay’s marvellous Secret Underground Guide to Social Media for Organisations.

Hopefully everyone enjoyed the session, and big thanks to everyone that joined in. I’m absolutely convinced that for events, conferences or whatever, doing fun stuff is more important that sitting and listening to people on stages.

Of course the real value of any event of this kind is in the network, which means hanging around during breaks, and while you should be in session, meeting new folk and chatting to old friends. I made a tonne of great new connections and have a wallet full of moo cards to prove it.

As Lloyd says, though, at some point the talking has to stop and the doing has to start:

I feel it physically. It’s painful. I think sometimes it’s the thing that winds me up most about events – the raising of potential and the lack of resolution. I know I’m going to feel it again tomorrow. The only answer I have by the way is something Umair Haque said this morning: “Organise something” Y’know like “just do it” but no, really do it.

Amen to that.

Monday, 30 June, 2008

Posterous

Posterous

Posterous is the easiest blogging platform in the world to use. No, really.

All you have to do to get started is to send an email to post@posterous.com – no signup needed to begin with. I have given it a go here, and am pretty impressed with the way it handled Gmail’s rich text emails. Attachments like photos are added to your posts, and audio can be played with a flash player that’s automatically embedded when you send an mp3 to Posterous.

Also, if you include a link to, say, a YouTube video, Posterous automatically embeds the video in your blog, rather than just linking to it. Find out more about what Posterous can do.

If you take the time to register with the site, you can add a profile and an avatar, which is quite nice. Posterous is a good alternative to quick blogging tools like Tumblr, for example, and given the ease of use, maybe even Twitter.

The only concern will be around security. The site reckons it can spot spoof email addresses, but there have ben examples already of people posting to other people’s blogs. Hopefully this can be ironed out in the future, because Posterous has real potential, I feel, not least because of it’s reliance on email, which for most people is work, while the web is playing.

Flipping ‘eck

I gave in on Saturday, and bought myself one of these beauties:

Flip Ultra

The quality of the recorded video is pretty high, better than your average mobile phone, I’d say – and certainly better than my iPhone which doesn’t do video at all. The flip-out USB connector works excellently, and saves on the considerable hassle of messing about with cables. Haven’t tried uploading to YouTube or anything yet, but the software (which runs from the Flip itself, and doesn’t require installation) seems easy enough to use.

Am looking forward to taking it around 2gether08 later this week.

Thing are coming 2gether

I am looking forward to the 2gether festival this Wednesday and Thursday, lots of cool people coming, and lots of exciting sessions to attend. You can find out more at the event’s blog, or by looking around the associated social network, built on Crowdvine.

I was flattered to be asked to run a session on social media and web 2.0 tools, which is happening at around 11am on Wednesday. I probably would have preferred it to be later so that people buzzing with ideas could turn up and work out how to put them into action. This way, though, people will know what’s possible and be forearmed with the knowledge of the tools as they hear about other initiatives, which is cool.

I’m going to be running a social media game, along the lines of that developed by David Wilcox and Beth Kanter. I’m designing and making the cards as we speak, and will be printing out various guides and cheat sheets like those developed by Tim Davies, Colin McKay and Paul Caplan. I’m also going to be helped out by David, Tim, Paul Henderson, Matt Waring, Mitch Sava and Jeremy Gould, who (if required!) will be helping out the groups playing the game by explaining and demoing stuff.

That’s not all, though – I have also been drafted in by Tracey Todhunter to help develop her ideas for a ‘communiversity’ for low carbon communities. She writes about it here. We’re going to start off in my session, so Tracey and her colleagues can develop a strategy using the game; and then take the results into her session to drum up support and refine things.

Here Tracey talks to David Wilcox about the project:

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It’s going to be an exciting couple of days.

Sunday, 29 June, 2008

Derek Wyatt TV

Derek Wyatt, member of parliament for Sittingbourne and Sheppey, has a rather nice site bringing together all his questions in Parliament on video. What a great idea! A shame, though, that clicking on the thumbnails of the videos produces some kind of .NET error – ou have to cick the +view links instead.

Go Home, Bill

Robert X Cringely on Bill Gates’ retirement:

If we were to place the importance of Bill Gates in the history of both Microsoft and the personal computer industry he’d be up there with most anyone. I’m not here to claim that Bill’s contributions weren’t significant, because they were. At half a dozen points during the history of Microsoft Bill pushed or pulled in such a way to change the course of his company and the industry as a whole, there is no doubt of that. The question is whether he REMAINS as important, which he clearly doesn’t or they wouldn’t let him leave. If it would help Microsoft they’d prop up Bill like the body of Lenin in Red Square to motivate the troops and intimidate the competition. And he’d let them do that, too.

Friday, 27 June, 2008

Civil servants, blogs and anonymity

Back onto one of my favourite subjects: bloggers’ anonymity. There’s plenty of background here.

Paul Johnston wrote in the comments:

Great to see this upswing in civil servant blogging, but quite understandably they seem to be anonymous. Very understandable in my opinion and in my view quite acceptable if that is what suits the individuals best. I assume these civil servants want to remain anonymous a) to reduce the likelihood of the media doing anything silly with what they write b) to emphasize that what they say has nothing to do with the views of their employer. Are you still uncomfortable with that, Dave?

I replied that it doesn’t make me uncomfortable, just that I think transparency is always preferable. Besides, Mark O’Neill of DCMS has revealed his identity, it’s just Chris the Digital Pioneer who is staying in the shadows for now. I guess it depends on what you are doing, and one of the victims of the brevity of the guidance is that it’s hard to apply it all to every way a civil servant can participate online.

Take the recent example of Dylan Jeffrey from DCLG posting a comment on this blog, giving his department’s position on a topic under discussion. Had he done this anonymously, it would have been pretty useless.

Jeremy Gould blogs openly as himself, and as a result has become influential in the world of eGov, and has done a significant amount to push the agenda forward. This wouldn’t have been posible if no-one knew who he was.

As for the liklihood of media twisting words or messages – well, Civil Serf pretty much answers that one. Point one is that the media will report it even if it is anonymous; and number two is that discovering the identity of the blogger becomes part of the game. In the meantime, the anonymous blogger, perhaps lulled into a false sense of security, has blogged things that perhaps they really shouldn’t and ends up in even more trouble once they are outed, which is inevitable.

I don’t really have that much of a problem with anonymous bloggers, really, I just think that nobody really stays anonymous for long and that whatever they are trying to achieve with their blog in the vast majority of cases would be more successful if their identity is known. There are exceptions: people in oppressive regimes, etc, but for civil servants, as the guidance says, “be a civil servant”!