Monday, 10 December, 2012

Google+ launches communities

Google+ is an interesting – if quiet – place. It’s not used by very many people, which is a shame, as the interface is rather nice and it features some really cool bits of technology.

Hangouts, for instance, are fantastic – on demand video conferencing which integrates neatly with Google’s other services likes Docs and so on.

However, because so few people are active there, it does feel a bit empty at times. When asked if organisations should use it as a space for engagement, I tend to say no – as time would be better spent working with the much larger existing communities on Twitter and Facebook.

Perhaps though Google+ is just a different space for doing different things. I wonder if it’s a better vehicle for collaboration than communication.

Take the new communities – basically the G+ version of Facebook Groups. You create your community, invite people in and then share updates, links, videos and so on just as you do in other similar spaces.

I’ve set up a ‘digital innovation’ community to test it out – do join in!

Here’s a video to explain more:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpUDWCSRQIU&w=560&h=315]

Communities are nicely integrated into other Google services – for example you can share links into your communities directly from Google Reader; and with a bit of fiddling can make a Google Doc editable by all members of a community. Of course, this being G+, you also have the ability to video conference via Hangouts whenever you want.

I have reservations about how useful G+ communities will be for public engagement activities. However, as I mentioned above, they are particularly suited I think to project working.

Indeed, the suite of tools that Google has made for collaboration, including Communities, the email based Groups, Docs, Hangouts, the wiki-like Sites – is fantastic and mostly free.

If you are a small organisation or team, and don’t have too many hangups about information security and so on, Google does pretty much everything you need to work smarter out of the box. Well worth having a play.

PermalinkGoogle+ launches communities

Thursday, 22 November, 2012

Notes on making collaborative technology successful

I spent an interesting morning at the Online Information conference on Tuesday – ably chaired by my pal Steve Dale – and the session I enjoyed most was about implementing collaborative technology in organisations – one example was from a big media and communications provider, the other a government department.

Here are some of the thoughts that the session inspired me to write down…

1. There’s always a disconnect between what the organisation wants and what the user wants.

This doesn’t mean you are doomed to fail – but it means you are if you don’t think about how to balance these competing elements.

Knowledge management is a classic example of this problem – the organisation wants its people to share their know-how so they won’t be missed so much when they leave. But maintaining their indispensability is a pretty important thing for employees who want to stay in work.

The answer here is, I think, not to pretend that the disconnect doesn’t exist – just manage it. Don’t try selling organisational benefits to staff – instead focus that on what’s in it for them. Find a way of aligning what the organisation wants and what makes the users’ lives easier and better.

2. Calling it something new is a bad idea. Just make it ‘work’.

Imagine you’re sat at your desk and someone approaches you, beaming, and announces that from now on we’re all going to start managing our knowledge! Or sharing our collective wisdom! Or collaborating!

My eyes are rolling just thinking about it. By giving an activity a name you separate it from other, existing activity. It becomes more work rather than just a new, better way of doing the existing work.

If people see something as a new responsibility or an additional task, they are unlikely to want to do it. Instead frame these tools as more efficient ways of getting the job done better.

3. Getting good engagement requires skills that not many organisations have.

One of the key ones is community management, which I have banged on about quite a bit before. Encouraging people to an online space and to get involved is exactly a community management activity and anyone trying to do it really ought to spend some time learning about it (which might be going on a course, but could just be spending some time reading about it).

There’s other stuff too like curation, social reporting, writing for the web, networking and so on… none of which are full time jobs but skills that are needed and roles which should be performed if you are going to engage users with your platform. Assuming the skills exist or that they aren’t needed will result in failure, I’m afraid.

4. If you find yourself in the position where you’re having to convince people to collaborate or share, you’ve probably already failed.

I do wonder sometimes whether allowing people to discover social tools in the workplace for themselves might make them more likely to take them up. It might make for slightly slower levels of engagement but I dare say they will be more sustainable in the long term.

There’s something here to learn from the success of Yammer in many organisations, which is often started up under the radar by individual staff members with no strategy or management buy-in. Because it belongs to the people using it, and it isn’t being imposed, it feels like a space people actually want to use, and there’s no need to convince people.

What I am saying here might sound a bit like ‘if you build it, they will come’. That’s not what I’m saying.

Maybe I’m saying ‘if you plead with people to come to something you’ve built, they will regard you and your thing with contempt’.

5. Don’t prescribe what people can do. Let them surprise you.

This ties in a bit with my first and second points but is more focused on activity and features. What I mean here is that if you launch a social system with the intention of it being a knowledge management tool, and people end up using it to manage their projects, then let them.

If instead of correctly managing the versions of various official documents within the strictures of your beautifully designed taxonomy, people end up discussing the ramifications of the latest restructure, then let them.

Telling people they aren’t doing things right is unlikely to endear them to you or your platform. Of course step in if people are behaving anti-socially or whatever, but by and large they them do what they want to do, and just be glad that they want to do it on your system. Once they begin to trust it and like it, they might just start doing some of the things you originally hoped they would.

PermalinkNotes on making collaborative technology successful

Tuesday, 20 November, 2012

Confessions of a justified camper

A little while ago, Paul Coxon wrote a blog post querying the long term viability of unconferences in the public sector. I didn’t respond, because I felt I couldn’t do so without sounding defensive and chippy.

This evening, the weekly Twitter chat, #lgovsm, was based on Paul’s ideas. I did decide to involve myself, and it turned out that everything I said was defensive and chippy. Ah well.

Paul’s basic point is that there are a lot of unconference type events going on – perhaps too many – and that this saturation means people will soon get annoyed that they don’t get enough out of all these events, all these Saturdays that they have to give up and so the ‘movement’ will implode and the sector will be no better off.

I think my issue here is not necessarily with what Paul is saying – he is of course perfectly entitled to his opinions. Nor am I touchy about criticism of these events – after all, I am only vaguely responsible for two a year, and there’s usually some critique of them afterwards, which doesn’t tend to bother me.

Instead, I think Paul is perhaps criticising a group of events – and I can only speak for the ones I am involved with of course – against a set of criteria (ROI, measurable outcomes etc) that we never aimed to meet – which strikes me as being a trifle unfair.

Unconferences for me are social learning events. People learn from each other. But it’s just one type of learning event, and there’s room for many. I get involved in traditional conferences too, and they can be extremely valuable when done well (e.g. when they have me speaking at them).

So here’s a quick overview of how I see this stuff and why I think that some of the things Paul is talking about don’t matter for me all that much.

1. When I am involved in these things, I have no objectives other than people turn up, sessions are pitched, people talk to one another and there is plenty of smiling. That’s it. Others may have their own outcomes in mind – good for them!

2. The content of the event is of course driven by the attendees and that can have variable results. I’ve attended some sessions at ‘camps that were frankly rubbish. I’ve attended others that were simply a room of people telling one another how great they are. The point is that I could leave, and I did.

The other point is that if people want to spend time discussing how great they are then of course that’s fine and I am delighted to have provided a space for them to do that in.

3. The echo chamber argument is true to a certain extent and not in another. The attendance of the events I am involved in grows all the time and there’s roughly a 50% churn in attendees each time. So new people come, veterans come, and they all add what they feel comfortable with. There’s a lot of agreement, because it’s a self selecting group – and again, that’s fine. But it’s not true to say it is a load of continual back-slapping, because it isn’t. There is debate and disagreement – albeit very polite debate and disagreement.

4. I feel no responsibility for anyone else’s personal development. If you got nothing from an event, then that’s a shame, but at least you tried.

5. The best people to attend an event are those that attend the event. I don’t like the idea of trying to get specific groups along – it’s a melting pot of the enthusiastic, the curious and the weird. Let’s keep it that way.

6. What a good unconference is, at the end of the day, is a room full of interesting people. What people choose to do with within the time and space that they have chosen to be in is entirely up to them.

7. There are lots of ‘camp type events going on. I guess we will now when saturation happens because people will stop going. But of course nobody goes to all of these things (I hope!!) and it’s a case of picking and choosing the best ones for you. Nobody ought to feel under an obligation to attend (unless it’s the sort of thing like when you go to the pub with your mates, even though you really don’t feel like it, just in case you miss something).

8. Sponsors see value in these sorts of events, increasingly so. Also, they don’t ask for ROI, or direct sales, or access to budget holders. They come for two reasons, I think. First, it’s to get to talk to people they rarely get to talk to – often the people who actually use their products, or products like theirs. Second, they just want to support the sector, and a bit of the sector that feels dynamic and motivated.

9. If you feel you can do these events in a better way, that appeals to different people, or more people, then go for it! Steph might even let you have some money to make it happen.

10. It might be that nobody will want unconferences any more, which would be fine by me. They are a pig to sort out, and other than a bit of goodwill, aren’t terribly productive. But it seems to be that for the moment, there is plenty of demand and plenty more people who want to be involved, and plenty of interest in more specific, focus events.

Unconferences are an important part of the learning mix for any sector, but it’s important not to think of them as more than they are, nor to ascribe overly high expectations for what they might achieve.

By the way, UKGovCamp is back on 19th January 2013. See you there?

PermalinkConfessions of a justified camper

Experiments in social learning

Social learning is a really interesting concept. It’s basically the idea that we can often learn better from each other rather than from an expert or teacher.

There’s an obvious usage for the internet and the kind of social tools I write about here in social learning, and an additional argument in favour of making them available within organisations.

Creating easy to use, informal spaces for learning to happen is something I am really committed to – GovCamp and LocalGovCamp are offline examples and lately I have been experimenting in online social learning too.

Two examples are fairly similar. Earlier this week, FutureGov‘s Dom Campbell and I were in Exeter, speaking with Devon County Council’s managers about the opportunities of digital innovation in local government.

My talk was an expansion of this ancient blog post, entitled If Place is a system, lets make it an open source one (slides here). Part of the talk is to tell some of the interesting stories about the birth of hypertext, the internet, the world wide web and free software.

Folk like Vannevar Bush, Doug Englebart, Ted Nelson, Richard Stallman and others. People for whom the primary role of technology was to support learning and knowledge sharing.

Devon

Anyway, before the event, Carl Haggerty and I threw together a very quick private WordPress site to enable some social learning to happen around the talks Dom and I were giving. We kept it very, very simple, choosing five or six examples of digital innovation, providing a bit of background with some text, links and videos, and then opening up the comments for people to discuss how that technology might affect their service.

So, nothing clever, technology-wise. But such a simple setup clearly resonated with people – we had 67 comments in less than a week – many of which were left in the evenings, or at the weekend.

By doing this, we managed to turn a short, half day learning event into a conversation, with ideas and experience being shared between people at a time and in a place covenient to them. It makes complete sense.

I’m taking a similar approach with a group of up and coming local government folk who are taking part in the SOLACE Springboard programme. Again, I’m providing a one hour workshop session later this month, on digital innovation.

To make this a bit more useful, I’ve built a similar site to the Devon one, with a few pages outlining some of the concepts, with some text, videos, documents, links and so on, and encouragement to use the comments to discuss these issues before and after the face to face session.

Again, the aim is to reinforce the discussion at the face to face event and add some value to it – not necessarily to replace it entirely.

The key thing to me in terms of making social learning like this work is to make it as easy to get involved with as possible and to allow it to be as self-directed as possible – not to make too many rules or force people to do things in a certain way. Again – pretty much like GovCamp!

The second example takes more of a lead from social networking ideas, and uses BuddyPress to create a dedicated social learning network.

This was done following conversations with my friends David Wilcox and Steve Dale, inspired by the work on social learning shared by Harold Jarche.

Social Learning NetworkThe site has all the usual social networky bits like profiles, friends, activity walls, groups, wiki type pages and so on. But of course it isn’t the features that matter but how you use them. Steve and David have used this platform to provide an easy to use environment for an exploratory learning exercise on behalf of the Nominet Trust around the use of technology by those in later life – something they both know a lot about, of course 🙂

People share their stories, links to interesting things and so on – and follow up what interests them. Nobody claims to be an expert, there are no hierarchies and people get as involved as they want to.

As I have mentioned here before, we do a fair bit of training for various organisations and increasing I see that we need to offer an element at least of online social learning as part of this.

I’m even planning how a whole course could be delivered in this way – although I suspect that’s for another post.

On a slightly related note, this post by Clay Shirky on the concept of the “massive open online course” is a really good read.

PermalinkExperiments in social learning

Tuesday, 6 November, 2012

Great resources for online community building

At the weekend I got my copy of Rich Millington‘s new book, Buzzing Communities, through the post. It’s excellent and provides everything you need to know about building successful online communities.

Thinking seriously about community building is something that I think digital engagement efforts in government and beyond are lacking a lot of the time. In many ways, I think it is the secret sauce that will take online engagement to the next level.

One of the key parts of this is a platform-agnostic mindset. Whether your efforts at building a community work or not is unlikely going to be down to your decisions on technology (unless your decisions are really bad of course). Instead, community management is a set of skills with which you start a small community and build it up by encouraging activity, fostering conversations and meeting the needs of members.

No matter whether your chosen medium is a forum, a blog, a Facebook page or even just a Twitter feed, you can use community management techniques to foster engagement and encourage people to stay involved.

So, I thoroughly recommend Rich’s book. While you’re at it, here are some free bits he has made available too:

PermalinkGreat resources for online community building

Saturday, 3 November, 2012

Wednesday, 31 October, 2012

Whose content is it, anyway?

Lloyd Davis has a thoughtful post on his blog about all the content he has been putting online for the last decade and a half:

I want to take stock and put it all in some order. It’s one of those things that really needs doing. I think I know pretty much what I’m doing here now – there’s writey stuff, there’s visual stuff and there’s audio stuff and sometimes it all gets mixed up but that’s about the size of it…

I hate the way that these are all differently integrated – ideally, I mean in that ideal world where I had a team of people to sort this out for me, I’d have everything also hosted independently and from today I’d not be using any of these services as the primary channel/home for anything.

I think Lloyd is right to be concerned – as he sees value in his content he wants to ensure he has some control, or ownership over it.

For a lot of people, of course, this won’t matter at all – perhaps they don’t consider their online output to have that much long term value. Indeed, for some people it will depend on the medium. I’m not overly fussed about my Tweets, for instance.

There are bits of my digital footprint that I work hard to ensure won’t disappear though. Take this blog for instance. I’ve been writing it since 2004 and there are nearly 2,500 posts on it. Not all – or even any – has that much value, but I’d be sad if I ever lost it.

So, I run my own server, with my own version of WordPress rather than relying on a third party service. I also back the whole thing up in three different places – locally on the server, on Amazon’s cloud and on my laptop.

Then there are the photos. My Flickr stream is full of them of course, which were either taken on a digital camera – in which case a copy must sit on a computer somewhere, from which I uploaded them, or a smartphone – in which case they might well be lost.

Photos I upload to Instagram via my phone automatically get sent to Flickr via IFTTT now, so there’s two copies of those, and anything uploaded to Flickr subsequently gets added to Dropbox, which then downloads to my laptop, preserving another copy.

Of course, there are loads of photos on my laptop, thousands, going back years, that aren’t online anywhere and are therefore at risk should something happen to my computer! Hence, backups to a local device (an Apple Time Capsule). I ought to sort out a cloud backup service like Carbonite too.

So, the answer is backups and lots of them. Not just local ones, either, but in the cloud somewhere too just in case your own hardware fails. My other advice, if you’re worried about this stuff (don’t bother if not), is to have a play with something like WordPress, get some web hosting, try importing content into it. Even if you don’t tell anyone about it, use it as an archiving service – where pretty much everything is under your control.

In other words, own your own destiny wherever you can. Where you host stuff on the web, make sure you have a local copy; and try to have a copy of content you treasure in the cloud too, just in case. Services like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Pinterest – all of them – don’t owe you anything and you shouldn’t trust them to always be there or to always do the right thing with your content.

PermalinkWhose content is it, anyway?

The state of online collaboration

Apologies for the lack of posting lately on here. The reason for this quietness can be seen in this set on Flickr.

Anyway, my friends at Clinked – who make a rather good online collaboration and project management platform – have produced an interesting infographic on the state of online collaboration. I’ve pasted it in below.

It sets out where a lot of organisations are when it comes to using collaborative tools internally, as well as some of the arguments for increased deployment.

I’m talking with organisations across the public sector all the time and still, this sort of use of technology is far from widespread. Tools like Clinked, Huddle, Basecamp, Yammer and so on all provide a low cost way of beginning to work more effectively through sharing and conversation. It’s possible to start small, just sharing between a team or on a project or two, and then rolling out from there, learning lessons along the way.

So, here’s the infographic. As always, am interested in folk’s ideas on this stuff – leave’em in the comments.

PermalinkThe state of online collaboration

Tuesday, 9 October, 2012

Webchatting about localism

Our site for NALC, What Next for Localism, is going pretty well. Quite a few ideas submitted and some conversation starting up around them and the articles published on the blog.

To further development the online discussion, we’ll be hosting a live web chat on the site next Tuesday (16th October) at 1pm on the future of localism.

It ought to be a great opportunity to debate the issues and opportunities with a group of like-minded folk – so bookmark the page and stick a reminder in your calendar!

PermalinkWebchatting about localism

Tuesday, 2 October, 2012

Tools I use for learning

Recently, as part of a survey of members of the Social Learning Centre, I put together a list of ten sites or apps I use a lot in my own learning activity. Actually, I thought ten was rather a lot, so to share it here, I thought I’d whittle it down to half that number.

I think it’s useful to always remind yourself of the tools you use regularly in your own activity, particularly if you spend time designing sites, systems and platforms for others to use.

What’s also interesting for me is that everything in this list is pretty old! It turns out I am not exactly on the cutting edge. Who knew?

Google Reader

The source of all knowledge! OK, maybe not, but I’m subscribed to over 500 blogs and sites in Reader and it’s the second place I go to every day, after my email inbox. Maybe 80% of everything I scan through on there is of no use, but that’s ok –  the 20% is what matters.

I do worry about the future of Reader – RSS is not the hippest of technologies and I’m concerned Google might switch it off some day… which would make me very sad.

Everything I find really useful gets starred in Reader, and thanks to IFTTT, gets pinged to Twitter as a link, and dumped into Evernote as an archive.

Evernote

My portable archive of everything. Web pages get copied into Evernote, everything I star in Reader ends up in here, notes in meetings and during phone calls… pretty much everything that passes my eyes online ends up here in case I need it later.

What’s interesting about Evernote is that it has reached that stage of ubiquity in my way of working where I don’t even recognise that it’s there most of the time, I just perform various actions, look stuff up in it, type in notes, clip a web page, without even thinking. Evernote fits right into my workflow, which is a key thing for any technology.

Wikipedia

I was thinking about putting Google search in here, but actually most of the time what Google produces is a link to a Wikipedia page, so I thought I’d disintermediate for you. No matter what I’m doing, I find myself looking stuff up on Wikipedia to find out more – reading a book, watching TV, whatever. It’s one of the things I use my Nexus 7 tablet for – just so handy a form factor for quickly looking stuff up.

Twitter

Not just where I share stuff I found illuminating, but where I get to find things out too. Whether ‘overhearing’ interesting conversations or picking up on links and stories shared by others, Twitter is a hugely important part of my learning network.

Interestingly (perhaps) is that now I have been on Twitter for a little while, and built up a fairly substantial follower/following count, I find it less useful for asking questions myself and getting responses. Perhaps this is because the network is just that much more busy these days – who knows? – but the apparently logical idea that if you have more followers you get more responses doesn’t seem to be true.

Maybe I’m just asking the wrong questions.

WordPress

Blogging is where all the stuff I’ve learned elsewhere gets written up and formulated into something that’s usually even less coherent than it was before. This has gotten increasingly difficult as the various stresses and strains of life, running a business, etc get in the way; but I do try to blog thoughts and ideas as often as I can.

Hopefully this helps others – but the primary benefit is my own. The process of writing for a public audience forces you to critically analyse your ideas and thinking and there is as much value in the countless posts that never get published because of their idiocy as there is in those that are seen and commented by others.

WordPress is a publishing platform that I feel I have grown up with since I started using it back in 2004 and it just gets out of the way for me.

PermalinkTools I use for learning

Monday, 1 October, 2012

Digital councillors

digitalcllr is a place where we are bringing together all the work we have been doing recently with elected members.

Mostly that means training, but we also offer a service to host websites for councillors, for free.

On the digitalcllr site, we’re also putting up content now and again that might be helpful to elected members starting to dabble in online engagement.

This morning, for instance, I posted some online safety tips, that may well come in handy.

We also create video content, interviewing councillors about their use of social media. Here’s Cllr Roger Gambba-Jones talking about his use of Twitter and a blog, for example.

If you’re a councillor needing some support in using social media, get in touch! Likewise if you are a democratic services or member development bod.

PermalinkDigital councillors

Friday, 28 September, 2012

What next for localism?

We’ve been working quite closely with the National Association of Local Councils this year. We produced the Planning for Councillors microsite a few months ago, and have contributed to the three People in Action conferences run around the country over the summer.

The parish and town council sector may have a certain image, but it’s hard not to be enthused by the likes of Justin Griggs, whose presentation at the recent Open Space South West event (slides here) was an illuminating discussion of a sector growing in importance.

So when Justin asked for some help in generating a debate online about the future of localism, we were only too pleased to!

The What Next for Localism site we have built is a simple one to allow people to give their views and ideas on what needs to happen next to push forward the localism agenda.

This is quite a departure for the usual way of doing things for NALC, and it’s great that a new approach is being taken. Hopefully it wil mean that a new bunch of people will get involved in NALC’s work that normally don’t bother.

I know that the team are hoping to hear from as many people as possible, with innovative and challenging ideas about the future of localism – so please do visit the site and add your views!

PermalinkWhat next for localism?

Wednesday, 19 September, 2012

Two councils collaborating

We recently helped Breckland Council and South Holland District Council work a bit better together by building them a shared, social intranet called The Place.

Today the Chief Executive of both councils, Terry Huggins, had a piece in on the Guardian’s website talking about it all. Here’s a snippet:

When Breckland council and South Holland district council , located in different counties and 50 miles apart, decided to share a seniormanagement team, it was quickly apparent that good communication would be vital.

Video conferencing and webex were inadequate. What was needed was a facility to leave messages, share ideas, communicate news, and collaborate on documents.

With these aims in mind we set up ‘the Place’, our own collaboration and communication platform, developed by online innovation agency, Kind of Digital.

The Place is like our own version of Facebook, but secure, and private to the two councils. Each member has a profile, listing their contact information and also searchable lists of what they do and what skills they have.

Everyone has the ability to post Twitter-style status updates to the whole network, and can join groups of shared interest to collaborate on documents and other activities.

The similarity of the Place to other technology such as Facebook and Twitter is important to its success. Many of our people are now comfortable and familiar with those sites in their personal lives. By making a work system look and operate in a similar way, we rapidly improve levels of engagement with it.

We researched and tested various software products, but decided to work with Kind of Digital as they could develop something customised to our exact needs.

That doesn’t mean we’ve wasted time reinventing the wheel. The Place is built on open source software, reducing development costs and time, and freeing resources to engage staff with using the system.

If you’ve got a need for something like this, you know where I am.

PermalinkTwo councils collaborating

Tuesday, 18 September, 2012

Clinked – interesting collaboration platform

I’ve just come across Clinked – a new online collaboration platform that might be a useful competitor to the likes of Huddle, Basecamp and Yammer.

One of the things I like about it is that as well as the different project groups that can be set up, it also features a central area where everyone can share stuff, ask questions and so on. So it combines the project management of tools like Huddle with some of the more social features of Yammer.

Here’s a video that explains it a little more:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSSDvezmAdQ

If you’re in the market for one of these tools – and who isn’t?!? – then it could well work for you. There’s a free option so you can trial it with a small group first.

PermalinkClinked – interesting collaboration platform

Wednesday, 29 August, 2012

Here’s OurHousing!

The Nominet Trust has announced what for us is some jolly exciting news, which is that they have approved us for funding to develop OurHousing, a new social startup that will encourage dialogue between social housing tenants and their landlords to improve services and enhance community spirit.

Fraser and I are delighted because we’ve been working on this, under the radar, for most of the year so far.

We’ve been really impressed with sites like Patient Opinion and MyPolice, which use the web in very simple, but useful ways to bring public service users into the process of improving those services. At the same time, we’ve been keeping tabs on the movement to digitally enable those living in social housing, whether as tenants or within shared ownership schemes.

Bringing these two strands together made perfect sense, and OurHousing was born. Social housing customers leave feedback about their landlords on the site, where it can be discussed publicly, and the landlords can respond officially. As a result of these discussions, services can be improved with the knowledge gained via the independent feedback process.

In developing OurHousing, we have been helped enormously by Jayne Hilditch of Thames Valley Housing. TVH is a development partner of OurHousing, supporting us financially by investing early in the service, and by advising us on the finer points of the social housing sector and relevant policy.

Our team is also starting to develop, with Philip John providing the technical nous, and Janet Harkinleading on the marketing effort. We’re also blessed with a fabulous advisor on the business side of things, in my old boss Mary McKenna.

We’ve a long way to go, but  with the funding we have attracted, the people on the team and our own enthusiasm and motivation, we feel we’ve got a product that can make a real difference to people’s lives.

Please keep in touch with us, by signing up for our newsletter, and following us on Twitter. If you’re from a housing provider, and would like to know more about the service and perhaps getting involved, then please get in touch.

PermalinkHere’s OurHousing!

What might mobile democracy look like?

I’ve often said that the problem with participation in local democracy is that it just isn’t convenient enough. Meetings? Pah! I’m too busy trying to earn a living, quite frankly.

So mobile offers a really interesting opportunity. After all, the smartphones that sit in the pockets of an ever-growing number of people have a level of ubiquity that could make it work. You could also bring in some other recent developments (don’t say buzzwords) like gamification to further boost engagement levels.

Here’s an idea on how something could work.

It’s based on a pretty old e-democracy principle – e-panels! Rather than have a citizen panel of say 50 people, you develop an online group of hundreds or even thousands. Then you give them things to do, which are suitable to a mobile device.

The key to this is making the activities short, simple and reasonably interesting. If you look at the really popular games on smartphones, things like Angry Birds, Temple Run, World of Goo and so on, they are all games that can be picked up and played for a couple of minutes. They don’t tend to be long, drawn out strategic affairs.

So, some of the things that the mobile democracy app (or mobile friendly website…) could do might be to choose between several options. Perhaps something really blunt like “Libraries or lolly pop ladies?”; or between two images, one with a housing development in it and one without. Maybe ask people to take and submit a photo along a theme.

These aren’t referendums or anything like that, of course. But by regularly asking large numbers of people to respond, an organisation can build up a picture of what people think, which ways they lean on various issues.

By having a big group to work from, it wouldn’t matter if not everyone responds every time, and again, it’s about developing that database of people and their views.

Gamification might provide another way of increasing levels of participation – I’m always nervous about rewards – but perhaps leaderboards with badges would encourage people getting stuck in. There’s a danger that doing such things reduces the quality of responses – people would just respond with anything rather than thinking about it, just to get that top spot – but hopefully having large enough groups of people involved would minimise the impact.

I’d be interested in other people’s thoughts on this as always. Seen anything out there in terms of using mobile to promote and encourage democratic participation? Or perhaps you think I’m barking up the wrong tree?

PermalinkWhat might mobile democracy look like?

Friday, 24 August, 2012

Youth councils – any good examples?

I’m starting to look at youth councils with a local authority, particularly in terms of how digital can improve levels of participation.

I’ve got some ideas, admittedly not youth council-centric, but rather taking stuff I’ve learned from other online engagement projects and hoping it will fit.

So I’m Googling away like mad, looking up different youth councils and some of the things they are doing online. I’ve not turned up much in the way of really innovative ideas just yet.

So, I’m turning to you, faithful readers. Seen anything good? Let me know!

PermalinkYouth councils – any good examples?

Thursday, 23 August, 2012

Decline and fall?

Twitter has been taking a bit of a pasting in the technology media world recently. Could this mean it is facing a bleak future, and could become the new MySpace, or Friendster? Or even – the horror! – FriendsReunited?

The biggest furore came when they recently changed the terms of use for their API or application programming interface – the data feed that various other services can use to manipulate Twitter content.

Effectively Twitter are limiting access to the API for many of the apps that people have come to know and love. For example, many of the ‘client’ applications people use to access Twitter, which are independent of Twitter itself, are going to find life more difficult in the future.

On top of annoying the developer community, Twitter has irritated its own user base too, with the over hasty censoring of accounts; and the growth of advertising on the platform.

This latter point is the important one. Twitter has grown into a vast social network, but hasn’t actually made much money over the last five years. What it needs to do is to turn it’s userbase into cash – and the best way of doing that, they think, is ads. Hence the clampdown on third party client apps – which may interfere with the way the ads appear to users.

Finally, a few folk are feeling increasingly nervous about the fact that content they create, such as tweets, isn’t owned by them. It’s all held in a database by Twitter, and they can choose to do with it what they will.

To a certain extent, people should probably just stop whining. After all, Twitter never claimed to be anything other than a for profit corporate company – this day was going to come sooner or later. But given the way Twitter has developed, their recent behaviour does stick in the craw somewhat.

  • Who came up with the idea for @ replies? Not Twitter – it was the users and third party developers.
  • Who came up with the idea for hashtags? Not Twitter – it was the users and third party developers.
  • Who came up with the bird motif? Not Twitter – it was a third party developer.
  • Who puts all the content into Twitter? Not Twitter – it’s the users.

The list can go on. Again, all those people who invested time, content and ideas into Twitter have little to complain about, really. Twitter never claimed to be open source. They’re free to take people’s suggestions and incorporate them as they please. That’s part of the deal with using a ‘free’ service.

However, people have started to hit back. app.net is a new Twitter clone with a slight difference: you have to pay $50 to use it. This means no ads, an open API and no corporations interfering with the way the service runs.

It also provides an option to download all your data, which kind of answers the content control issue.

I’ve started using it and my profile is just here: https://alpha.app.net/davebriggs. It’s slow, as you can imagine any new network is – let alone one that you have to pay to join. I’m not convinced it will succeed as anything other than an online ghetto for people who have fallen out of love with Twitter.

Also, remember Diaspora? Thought not. They tried to do a similar thing, but to Facebook. Didn’t work – nobody cared enough.

Others like Dave Winer (the somewhat cantankerous tech legend who invented RSS amongst other things) are promoting a much more open way of publishing, where people control their own servers running their own software, and through protocols and standards, they talk to one another. In other words, decentralising the whole social networking concept.

An example of this emerged recently, called tent.io.

This makes sense for people with the chops to run software like this, and perhaps to serious, professional content creators. But for people chatting about what’s happening on Xfactor? Probably not.

What does this mean for digital engagers in government and beyond?

Not a lot. Keep calm and carry on, as the increasingly irritating posters, tea towels, coasters and rolls of toilet paper keep telling us. Twitter isn’t going away. Many of these debates are fairly arcane and only of interest to the tiny percentage of the population that actually care.

Twitter remains an easy to access, free to use channel for people to quickly share their thoughts about what is happening to them at that moment, and it has enormous reach too.

For those that do worry about owning your content, keeping records and backing up, you can always make use of tools like ifttt to keep a copy of everything you publish.

Twitter will be with us for a long while yet.

PermalinkDecline and fall?

How open are council meetings?

DCLG have today announced that residents, bloggers, tweeters, community activists and hyperlocal sites should have the same access and facilities to council meetings as traditional newspaper journalists. This is important because it means Government recognises the valuable contribute the wider community makes to accountability in local government.

It’s a very timely announcement. For a while now I’ve been interested in the openness of council meetings. Namely, whether citizens, media or councillors are permitted to live tweet/blog, record audio of or film public meetings.

I have secured permission to film the meetings of my local council meetings in Lichfield and heard stories of others being forced to leave or even arrested for attempting to do the same.

These are just a few examples of the current state of play so an effort to document which councils allow their meetings to be opened up I created Open Council Meetings, a simple project to track which councils allow tweeting, recording and filming of meetings.

My hope is that the project can help bring together localgov enthusiasts, hyperlocal bloggers and active citizens to monitor the situation and put pressure on councils to open up.

 

PermalinkHow open are council meetings?

Tuesday, 21 August, 2012

Online consultations – how to get them right

I received an email today, from a local council contact, for me to respond to a consultation about an ongoing piece of work. This was to a web page, where I could download a 25-odd page document, and then an email and physical address where I could send my views. Some immediate problems with it sprung to mind:

  • the barrier to entry – reading 25 pages on a screen is hard, so you have to print it out – it’s also quite a big ask in terms of time and attention
  • it didn’t give me any questions to answer, or themes to comment on. Just ‘send us any comments’ – doesn’t frame the consultation well
  • the method of responding isn’t very intuitive or user friendly
  • the whole page had no images, just lots and lots of text

What made this worse was that the subject of the consultation was a digital one – ripe for doing something interesting online!

Fraser HendersonLuckily for me, we have Fraser Henderson on the team at Kind of Digital, who is a bit of an expert on consultation and played a big part in putting together the Digital Engagement Cookbook, as well as working on numerous other projects.

He’s also built his own knowledge base on consultation good practice, called HelpMeConsult, which is well worth checking out.

Here’s Fraser quick guide to doing online consultation well:

  1. Spell out a consultation “mandate” (what has been decided and what hasn’t/how results are analysed/timescales/etc)
  2. Make sure people give informed feedback by presenting background information in an easily digestible format.  For example, use video or break questions into chunks.
  3. Use alerts  – for when a consultation of interest is happening, is about to close or when the results are in.
  4. Allow conversations to form between participants, including debate about the outcome.
  5. Don’t just ask questions.  Think about more interactive input types such as getting people to click or draw – it’s more compelling and a better use of the medium.

Those are Fraser’s tips – anything you would add?

PermalinkOnline consultations – how to get them right