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.

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.

[HTML1]

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.

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.

Load more posts!