An online notebook
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An online notebook
A quick administrative note. If you can see this post, it means that my blog has successfully rehosted.
Apologies for any inconvenience – if you spot anything not working, broken links and so on, please do let me know.
Curating content online is a fairly hot topic these days – information overload being what it is, folk tend to like it when someone spends a bit of time picking the wheat from the chaff for them.
It doesn’t have to be too time-consuming an exercise either and there are lots of tools to help you put together a workflow that puts the web to work for you, rather than the other way around.
Here’s mine. It may work for you, or just bits of it. Don’t feel the need to copy it all if you don’t want to, or indeed ignore everything if it all seems utterly idiotic to you.
The place to start is with my chosen service for RSS subscriptions. I know people keep saying that RSS is dead as a way to consume content, but it continues to work for me. I use Feedly to subscribe to about 800 feeds from various sites. I rarely read them all – there are a few sites I especially look out for, but generally I treat it as a stream to dip into rather than a list that must all be read. To this end, I always mark everything as read on a Sunday evening so I can start the week with a blank slate.
Here’s the thing though, I don’t actually use the Feedly web interface at all – I just use it as the synchronisation service to manage my subscriptions and to ensure that they are up to date across my various devices. My preferred client to actually read through the content from my feeds is Reeder 2 on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad. The interface is just one that I am comfortable with and it makes reading through stuff a joy.
When I decide something is worth saving and sharing, I bookmark it using Pinboard. I used to be a big fan of Delicious, but since the various changes of ownership of that service, I decided to go somewhere a bit more reliable, hence Pinboard – an indie service that you have to pay for. I bookmark stuff either by using the helpful button within Reeder, or by opening the item in a browser and using a bookmarklet button. I’m a bit lazy and tend to just leave the title as is – with the odd edit for length (see later) and don’t bother adding a description. I do tag things though, and try to limit myself to just one or two tags.
Everything I bookmark appears on Twitter shortly afterwards, thanks to a recipe on IFTTT. IFTTT is a super useful service that helps you build up automated workflows triggered by online activity. So, in this case, IFTTT spots when I add a new bookmark in Pinboard, and then tweets it for me. I make IFTTT put some quote marks around the title of the article which I think helps to distinguish it from something I have written myself.
With this Twitter process in mind, I will often amend the title of the bookmark, knowing that it is the main bit that gets tweeted. I might add a hashtag, for instance, or @ mention the author to add a little context, without breaking the meaning when the link is viewed in other contexts.
I save everything I bookmark for later reading into Pocket, thanks to another IFTTT script. This is especially useful for longer items. Pocket saves a copy of the articles I save locally on my phone, so if I have a spare few minutes at any time, there’s always something interesting to read.
I include several links in my email newsletter. Right now this is a manual process – when writing the email, I scan through my recent bookmarks in Pinboard and pull out the most interesting ones, then write a bit of commentary about them. This could be automated via Mailchimp’s feature to build an email through the RSS feed generated by Pinboard, but I suspect this would end up taking more work to edit and so on than I currently expend doing it manually.
Articles I curate only currently appear in the footer of my blog as a widget called ‘Link list’. I very much doubt anybody looks at it. In the past I did have automated posts collecting recently bookmarked links together, which I lost when I recently rehosted my site. I ought to look into reinstating this, as I think it can be pretty useful.
I asked on Twitter how others curate, and these are the responses I got by the time of publishing this post:
@davebriggs scanning rss feeds of all my fave blogs/ news sources on Netvibes and using Buffer to url shorten/ bookmark and schedule or post
— Jemima (she/her) 🙈 @JemimaG.bsky.social 🦋 (@JemimaG) December 8, 2014
@davebriggs Press/Feedly for rss + tweetdeck -> Instapaper for stuff to read, Pinboard for stuff to share (which autogenerates blog posts)
— Stefan Czerniawski (@pubstrat) December 8, 2014
What is your curation workflow? It would be great to hear about it!
I recorded this a little while ago to go alongside some other training and consulting work I was doing at the time.
I basically explain how to plan out digital engagement work to ensure it is most likely to succeed, by thinking about your own objectives, the needs of the people you want to engage with, and that sort of thing.
It refers to a template throughout – you can download a copy of that here – it’s in PowerPoint format.
Hope it’s useful!
I’m a massive fan of the writing of Ben Thompson – and so should you be. The analysis he provides on his blog is superb – and it’s free!
Interestingly, he also provides extra content for a fee – a daily email with even more in depth analysis of the technology topics of the day. Just $10 a month, or $100 for the whole year. Members also get access to a forum where you can chat to Ben and others who are interested in his work.
I subscribe – the extra content is great, the forum helpful, but more than anything, I want to support this guy to keep doing great work.
Ben posted recently that he has broken through the magic barrier of 1,000 paying subscribers. 1,000 True Fans is the title of a post by Kevin Kelly outlining how the long tail of the internet means that focused, high quality niche communities can be financially sustainable.
So, 1,000 members doesn’t sound like a lot, relative to all the people on the Internet, or the memberships of supersites like Facebook or Twitter. But 1,000 people paying $100 a year is $100,000 a year! To do a thing you love doing! Add in a few consulting days a month and there’s a good living to be made.
I’ve written before about how I would love to find a way to be able to just live off content creation. After all, I have this blog, with thousands of readers, an email newsletter with over 700 people subscribed, a reasonably popular podcast, and my webinars seem to go down well too.
Of course, it’s hard work. I’d imagine the pressure can build up when you have to produce really great content every single day. Figuring out what people might pay for and what they would expect for free isn’t easy either.
But it is super-interesting to know that to make a living as an independent is achievable and that you don’t need to have Buzzfeed levels of traffic to do it.
I had a good time presenting a webinar this morning about managing online communities.
As always, I recorded the whole thing for your infotainment:
Rich Millington from Feverbee gave a great talk at the MozCon event on building communities that people actually want to join.
Lots in here that I have been discovering myself lately around creating a shared mission, and a sense of being an exclusive bunch.
I had a very interesting time at the Digital Evolution unconference and networking evening this week – wonderfully hosted by the Tinder Foundation and Google and with the irrepressible Will Perrin at the helm.
Sadly I couldn’t make it to the proper conference the next day, but the buzz around the event was amazing and Helen Milner and her team can take credit for reinvigorating the conversation around digital inclusion.
Anyway, back to the unconference.
The first discussion I took part in focused on digital policy, particularly from the government side of things, and the question was that posed in the title of this post: do we want everyone to get online?
I’m not sure that we do, at least, not when the question is framed in that way.
Who is ‘we’? Who is ‘everyone’? What is meant by ‘online’?
For me, getting everyone online is not a sensible policy objective. It doesn’t really make an awful lot of sense. Where are the outcomes?
Speaking for myself, I’d like us to have a society where nobody is disadvantaged because they lack the ability to access information or services – whatever the platform.
So for me the emphasis must be on human beings and making their lives better, more fulfilling, and ensuring their interactions with government and businesses are as stress and hassle free as they can be.
The internet is a ever more important platform for the delivery of information and services. However, this doesn’t mean that everyone should be using it for everything. Even if you have great internet access and skills, for some things a non-digital approach might be most appropriate.
The approach I think must always therefore be human-focused, not technology- or organisation-focused, and it should be prioritised so that those with most need are considered first, with all their complexity.
This will mean in future that the role which those currently working in digital inclusion have may shift in future, as access becomes ever closer to universal. There are some really meaty issues to be stuck into particularly around the agendas of wearables and the internet of things.
On the latter point, in the near future might we be in the position where folk are online whether they like it or not, because the paving slab they are stood on is connected to the internet, or the supermarket scans their faces before they even step into the store?
So as well as human-focused, the approach must also be constructively critical. The internet is very good at lots of things. It also brings with it challenges, particularly around privacy, but also around our relationships with organisations, which may come from cultures that do not share many values with our own (Silicon Valley, I’m looking at you).
Digital inclusion folk, by keeping laser focused on the needs of people, and by being healthily sceptical about the potential of technology can, I think, help individuals come to their own decisions about the best way they can make the most of digital and the net.
We don’t want everyone to be online. We want people to be able to make informed choices about how they live their lives, to use the net when they want to, and only when they want to, so that they may act in their own best interests, and of those they care for.
The podcast is back, BACK, BAAAAAAAAAAACK!
I’m joined in this episode by Esko Reinikainen, of the Satori Lab.
Here’s a link to download the original mp3 file if you would like to do that.
If you would like to subscribe to the podcast in your favourite podcasting app, the feed is http://davebriggs.libsyn.com/rss or you can find the podcast on iTunes.
Show notes and related links (in a slightly jumbled order):
Hope you enjoy it!
I’ve done a fair bit of councillor training on digital in the past. Every time it focuses on social media, digital engagement and how members can use the web to interact with the public.
It usually goes away, people have an interesting time and one or two actually start doing new stuff as a result.
However.
Right now I am not convinced that this is the most helpful thing we could be doing with councillors when it comes to digital, the internet, and technology in general.
Just as the work I have been doing recently on capability with civil servants emphasises the importance of understanding the mindset and approaches of digital ways of working, the same is also true of elected members.
After all, members – particularly those with a role on the executive in their authorities – are making decisions with digital implications all the time. They are asked to signed off digital and IT strategies. They might be asked to give their OK to a big spend on the implementation of a new system. They might be signed up to a big transformation programme with a heavy emphasis on digital ways of working.
Do they really have the capability to be making these decisions? Are they asking the right questions of officers? Can they really be held accountable for decisions made which – in al truthfulness – they possibly don’t understand?
I think this is something that needs to be looked at.
The trouble is, as anyone who has been involved in member development knows, providing ‘training’ to councillors is really hard. They are very busy people who operate in a political environment. This means they have little time, and little appetite to admitting weakness or ignorance.
So I think there is something to learn here from the top of the office coaching programme that Stephen and Jason run at DH.
This is where the eight (I think) people right at the top of the organisation get one to one coaching with digital experts once a month – an opportunity to ask questions without fear of looking silly in front of colleagues, and to really dig into what relevance digital has for them and their bit of the organisation.
I’m pretty sure something like this could work very well with councillors – matching them up with digital coaches who could give up an hour a month for (say) six months to provide answers to questions, coaching and mentoring on specific topics and being a sounding board when needed.
It would be great to get people’s thoughts on whether this is a problem that needs a solution, and whether a lightweight volunteer coaching programme would work.
So yesterday I ran the ‘what next for digital engagement’ web chat.
It went ok. You can find out for yourself by checking out the archive of the chat.
In the end not that many folk turned up – but that’s not a problem, after all, it’s the quality not the quantity that counts!
However, we ran into problems with the software I used, which was CoverItLive.
CiL allows the person running the chat to moderate what people are saying. Moderating every single message can be tiresome and adds lag to the process, so I tend to just whitelist people once they have said one, sensible thing.
However, one participant decided to be mischievous and realised that they could change the name they used within the chat, and started spoofing other chatsters and posting a couple of unpleasant images.
I must admit, it’s probably the first time such a thing has happened to one of my activities.
Anyway, so what would I do next time?
1) I’ve have a look for alternatives to CoverItLive
2) I’d seriously consider moderating every message to retain control
3) I’d make sure I knew exactly how to boot people from the chat before it started. During yesterday’s chat, I didn’t know how this was done.
4) These things might work better in less open spaces with more trust, like my community.
Thanks to the top people at Learning Pool, here’s a great video of Donald Clark talking about learning theory through the ages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7t4uDHQqWk
Apologies for the light blogging of late. I’ve just been super busy and – if I am honest – a bit lacking in inspiration.
Anyway.
I’m starting a new online community based around people like you: folk who read this blog, get my newsletter and take part in my webinars.
I’m guessing that we all have quite a lot in common – problems, solutions, stories, knowledge – and that it makes sense to share what we have as a group.
Also I will be creating special content to go into this community that won’t be on my blog or other online spaces – all of which will be created based on what you, the community, ask for.
Right now for example, there’s a video tutorial explaining how digital capability is being approached at the Department of Health, where I am working at the moment.
I’m not building something huge here. My aim is to have a nice, small, manageable group of people who all contribute and help each other out. I’ll leave the empire building to others 🙂
If this sounds like something you would like to be a part of, just head over to the community where you can sign up for an account.
I look forward to chatting with you!
I was invited by James Cattell the other day to accompany him to a meeting to talk about what the best community software platforms are.
I think we rather disappointed the people we talked to, in that neither of us could recommend a particular system.
Instead we both advocated, in effect, a minimum viable community. Start with the simplest, lowest common denominator technology available. Something you know that everyone has access to, and they are used to using.
When people start bumping against the limitations of the technology, they might start suggesting new ways of doing things. This is the time to start thinking about what else could be done – when there is a user demand within your community.
The point is that picking a technology winner too early will put off some of your users – whether because they don’t like what you’ve chosen, or they aren’t comfortable with it, or because it doesn’t work for them.
Concentrate on getting members for your community and get them engaged, and when they start to want to do new things, let them guide you.
If you’re interested in building and managing online communities, you might like to sign up for my free upcoming webinar on the subject!
It’s been a while since I’ve run a live chat, so it’s probably a good time to do another.
As for a topic, I think it would be really interesting to have a look at digital engagement and where things might be going in the future. After all, we are all pretty comfortable with doing commentable documents, online surveys, Twitter chats and the like – but what’s the new thing? How can we make this really useful?
If you’re interested, the chat will be happening on this page, on 10th November at 11am and will last for about an hour.
If you visit the webchat page, you can sign up with CoverItLive to get a reminder nearer the time.
Look forward to seeing you there!
To make things happen, it helps if you have opinions.
Apple are a great example of a company that has opinions. They express those opinions in their products, and like most opinions, some people don’t like them – but that’s fine.
For instance – lots of people moan about the lightning cable used to charge iPhones and iPads – why don’t Apple just use micro-USB like everyone else? The answer is because Apple is of the opinion that micro-USB isn’t good enough, hence the need to design their own.
Apple have made lots of similar decisions based on opinions – like whether the original iMac needed a floppy drive (nope) or if laptops need CD/DVD drives (nah).
GDS is equally opinionated. As an organisation, they have views on the way websites should work, and how they should be made. You might not agree with them, but there’s no doubting where they stand.
Opinions help in two ways. Firstly, they set you apart from the crowd (this can work in a good and a bad way, of course, depending on how appalling your opinions are). Secondly, they help you to move on.
Here’s a real world example. At the Department for Heath, I’m working on digital capability, as are lots of other people in lots of other organisations. Everyone has different views on what digital means, and what capability means.
Again, that’s fine. What we’ve done though is to have an opinion on what those things mean, and how they should be delivered. Quickly coming to this opinion has enabled us to move forward quickly, with the confidence that comes of having a good idea where we want to get to.
We’re not so opinionated, of course, that we can’t change direction if we need to. The joy of an agile approach is being able to respond to feedback and experience.
By taking a position though, and executing on it, we’ve been able to kick start our capability programme. Not everyone may agree, but then they probably never will.
So if you find yourself in a situation where a project is stalling, perhaps the thing to do is to have an opinion about it. After all, you have to start somewhere.
This workshop will equip anyone involved in digital transformation and channel shift projects with the skills and tools they need to deliver fantastic results.
The workshop will be led by the needs of those attending, focusing in on those areas of strategy, leadership, delivery and capability that have been identified as of key importance.
Things that will be covered include:
Who should attend this workshop?
Much of the background thinking that informs this workshop can be found in the 10 ‘Think Digital’ principles I developed, and which you can find out more about on my website.
For a sneak peak, the video below is a recording of a webinar I gave in September 2014 discussing digital strategy, leadership and capability:
When I delivered the Civil Service Learning digital engagement for policymakers course with Steph Gray, Steph put in a really neat slide which explained that different people have different needs from any one engagement exercise.
Some people are happy to just know a bit more about what is going on. Others want to be able to have their say. Some people don’t want to be bothered about it at all!
This is an important thing to remember when trying to engage people with your policy, campaign, event or service. A single digital solution will put off as many people as it attracts.
Planning a digital engagement exercise needs to include consideration of each different audience, what their needs are, and what they are able to offer.
For those that just want to know more, try a clear English version of your policy to help people understand what you are trying to do.
For those who would like to be involved but perhaps don’t have the expertise to contribute in a major way, provide some kind of interactive quiz or exercise to allow them to give their overall view without getting bogged down in detail.
Then, for those with deep knowledge of the policy area you are engaging with, provide easy ways for them to be able to share that knowledge and their views – through a nice survey or commendable document, say.
The important thing is to do the research and planning to begin with – who will have a view on this? What will they want to do? How much understanding do they have?
Once you’ve done this, it ought to be much easier to design engaging tools to help make it happen.
We’re probably due an update, not least because people keep asking me about VirtualGovCamp – and one of main topics people are querying is how on earth this thing is going to work.
To reiterate some of the things I have previously written about this, VirtualGovCamp will live and die by its asynchronicity. That is, nobody will have to be in the same place at the same time to take part. People can access the content and the discussion at any time they want.
That means that there will be very limited use of live interactive stuff like webinars, hangouts and so on. They aren’t banned, necessarily, but they are not the basic, core way people will interact.
In terms of platform, it has to be WordPress I think. So, every ‘session’ will be a WordPress page. The person who suggested the session, who will be called a facilitator, will add content to that page to help inform that discussion.
That content could be made up of videos, text, images, audio, presentations and so on. It could be content that the facilitator has produced themselves, or bits and pieces they’ve found elsewhere on the web, or indeed a mixture of both of those things.
Then, conversation and stuff takes place in the comments. Simple as that.
Now, if a facilitator really wants to do something live, then that’s fine, but the output would need to be embedded in the page so that others can still comment afterwards.
More on how this will all be organised next.
Have you signed up to show your interest in VirtualGovCamp yet? Do so with the form on the homepage!
There’s an interesting bit of open policy work going on at the moment with the Deputy Prime Minister’s office working with the Policy Lab and Open Policy Making team, who are both based at the Cabinet Office. I’m lucky enough to be involved in a small way, too.
It’s called Northern Futures, and is all about finding ways that the northern cities in England can work together to compete with cities around the world.
The elements of open policy making here are an online ideas generation site, and a series of policy jam sessions.
The ideas site, based on Delib’s excellent Dialogue App tool, allows anyone to submit their own suggestions for answers to three questions:
The best answers to these questions will be taken forward to the policy jams. There will be eight jams taking place at the same time across eight cities in the north, each looking at their own ideas and producing iterations on those ideas, and potentially prototypes too.
I’m delighted to be helping out with the process and will be facilitating the policy jam that will be taking place in Hull. It will be the first time I have been back to the city since my graduation!
The Hull event will be taking place at the city’s History Centre, which looks like a cracking venue. I’m hoping we will get a whole range of people attending – strategists, policy experts, technologists and so on.
The other cities involved will be Manchester, Leeds, York, Sheffield, Newcastle, Liverpool and Lancaster. You can express an interest in being involved by signing up on the Eventbrite page. Note – signing up here doesn’t guarantee a place, it’s more an expression of interest.
If you’re up for a challenge and would like to get involved in a pretty meaty policy initiative, then this is a great opportunity. Get on the ideas site and share your inspiration, and come along to one of the policy jam sessions – especially the one in Hull, which will be brilliant and almost certainly the best of the lot.
One of the things that I love about being a blogger is the encouragement it gives me to write.
Writing helps.
It’s fair to say, I think, that if you want to get good at something, then writing about it is a key part of the learning process.
You don’t even have to do it online, or even on a computer. Having a notebook you can put thoughts and reflections down in on a regular basis will do wonders for you in terms of thinking through problems and assessing what you are doing.
If you have an idea for something, making yourself write it down, think about the words you use and how you articulate it, will help you spot what’s good and what’s not so good about it.
As I said, you don’t have to do this on a blog. But there’s an advantage to sharing your writing online.
It adds another level of thinking critically about your writing. Knowing that other people could well be reading makes you think a bit more about each phrase and each sentence. It sanity checks your ideas – if you’re embarrassed to be blogging about it, maybe it’s not such a great solution to your problem.
This obviously works for individuals, but it works for teams too, and organisations. Share with people what you are thinking and what you are doing. Force yourself to articulate it in terms that will be clear to those that are reading them.
It will help improve your work and your understanding – even if nobody else ever reads it.