Barcamp on Ning

The upcoming Barcamp for UK government webby stuff now has a social network, thanks to Ning!

In many ways, this is a copycat …err… following good practice attempt after the excellent network set up by Tim Davies for the UK Youth Online event back in September. Having a more social environment for people to talk to each other before, during and after the event might help foster connections made and help get things done.

Of course, it isn’t to everyone’s taste and those that prefer email can stick with the Google Group and dedicated wiki-ers can use GovHack or the event wiki if they choose to.

I’m overcoming some of the issues I have had with Ning – a lot of the designs are now cleaner than earlier efforts, they are making a good fist (sorry) at getting rid of the ‘adult’ networks, and it’s easy to pull in content from elsewhere. Also, the simple act of paying a bit to get rid of the ads improves things.

So do swing by http://www.ukgovweb.org/ even if you can’t make it on the day to be a part of the conversations around this great event!

FixMyStreet on DirectGov!

Tom Watson reports via Twitter that MySociety’s FixMyStreet is now embedded in DirectGov. On the page in question, a boxout gives you the option of reporting a problem via FixMyStreet rather than through the usual route of DirectGov linking you through to your local authority.

An interesting example of making volunteer effort a part of the ‘official’ government offering. I have had some interesting discussions with some local gov folk about how useful FixMyStreet actually is, so it will be fascinating to see how this is received.

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.

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.

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