An online notebook
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An online notebook
Overall, I’m quite pleased with the response to this conversation about the web we lost because one of my central points is that the arrogance and insularity of the old-guard, conventional wisdom creators of social media, including myself, was one of the primary reasons we lost some important values of the early social web. Seeing this resonate with those of us responsible gives me hope that perhaps we can work to remedy our errors.
I find this stuff so you don’t have to:
Well worth listening or watching this talk from Dan Gillmor:
Once, personal technology and the Internet meant that we didn’t need permission to compute, communicate and innovate. Now, governments and tech companies are systematically restricting our liberties, and creating an online surveillance state. In many cases, however, we’re letting it happen, by trading freedom for convenience and (often the illusion of) security. Yes, we need better laws and regulations. But what steps can we take as individuals to be more secure and free — to take back the permissions we’re losing?
Do you need a digital engagement strategy to get it right? Perhaps you don’t, but it can’t not help, surely.
Start with a vision. What do we want to achieve? Where do we want to end up? Pick an arbitrary date in the future – say 2015 – and imagine how you’d like things to be done then. What steps to get there?
One way I’d look at it would be that with budgets under lots of pressure, a digital by default (or design) approach has a load of advantages for organisations. You won’t reach everyone online, but you will get to plenty of people in a cost effective way.
Next, think organisationally. We want everyone we work with to get the benefit of this new digital way of working! How can we achieve that? It might be by having digital enthusiasts in each department talking regularly to their colleagues about how putting information and opening up services online can help improve things and make them more efficient.
Think about how having lots of people on Twitter and Facebook might affect the organisation. What training might they need? How can we know about all the profiles and pages that have been set up? How can you support people to keep up the momentum, or to help them make the right response to a question? How to help them not cock something up and get the organisation into hot water – or how to get them out of trouble if they do?
Consider breaking down activity into different types, such as having business-as-usual digital activity (ie ongoing), digital campaigns (ie time limited) and the difference between communicating, engaging and collaborating.
Now, write this stuff up on a sheet of paper. It shouldn’t take more than a side of A4. Show it to your boss, their boss, the chief exec. Get the most senior person you can to endorse it.
Start doing stuff yourself. Play with some tools. Find which ones work for you in your role, and for your team and service area. Monitor responses, successful interactions, not so successful interactions. Get your colleagues involved, ask them to cover for you when you’re on holiday, or off sick. Then encourage them to do their own thing once they realise it’s really not that bad. It’s actually fun!
Next, identify the willing. Find those digital enthusiasts, show them your bit of paper and the signature on it. Get them to show it to their bosses, and their bosses. Do talks at team meetings about it. Show people what you’ve been doing and how it worked. Tell them what went wrong and how you fixed it.
Get your digital enthusiasts to meet up every so often to share experience and stories. Maybe have an online community of practice so you can keep discussions going, even when you’re not in the same room. Encourage them, support them, cajole them, replace them when they leave.
Show other teams your community of practice. Show them how they could have one too, to share their learning, experience and problems with one another.
Revisit your strategy. Are you closer to achieving those goals? Is the organisation becoming more digital? Is the use of online tools for communication, engagement and service delivery becoming embedded in lots of people’s working lives?
What needs to change? What could be improved? Change it. Improve it.
Make it happen.
Need help getting the skills and knowledge to make this stuff a reality? Check out our online Successful Digital Engagement course now!.
Ryan Holiday writes in Our Regressive Web:
We’re regressing because we’re so focused on the new that we forgot the importance of the old. The tech press is too busy chattering about other “innovations” like retargeting, paywalls, native advertising. Except those changes are at the margins—at best. And because of that distraction or lack of understanding of the bigger picture, we’ve watched some of our best products get destroyed—as other services launched bonafide extortion as a business model.
These days, I write pretty much everything in plain text. This is driven by two main things:
How I write pretty much anything of any length (blog posts, reports, proposals, longer emails) is to write them in a text editor – I’ve settled on WriteRoom – using the Markdown markup language.
I then also preview them in Marked so I have an idea of how they look when published – which I do by either copying the HTML into a WordPress post, or exporting a PDF to send on to someone else.
I’m sure you can get equivalents to these tools on other platforms like Windows or Linux, if you need to.
Using Markdown in a plain text document provides the answer to both of my issues I mention above.
My main annoyance with word processors is the lack of control over what they are doing, particularly with regard to formatting. In most cases, complexity gets in the way. Ever been editing a Word document, and find you can’t change the way a bit of text is formatted?
Maybe you’ve found yourself in the wrong section, or maybe the styles are broken from when someone else edited the document before you. Who knows? It’s annoying.
Far better to be able to see the source of all this formatting, which is what MarkDown provides. Obviously I’d much prefer using WordStar under CP/M but that’s probably not possible these days.
Markdown is a super simple markup language that means you can make words italic or bold just by wrapping them in asterisks, or you can set heading levels by using hash symbols. Even inserting links is an easy process with square brackets and parentheses.
Plus, plain text is a super portable file format – it can be opened on any system in pretty much any editor. This answers my paranoia problem. Nobody can stop me opening or sharing my work!
Adrian Short wrote a nice piece a while ago about plain text and how wonderful it is.
You can write plain text in any text editor or word processor. You can read plain text in any text editor or word processor. There’s no formatting to get screwed up. No-one owns the format. It’s completely interoperable. You can send plain text to anyone knowing that they’ll always be able to read it, no matter what computer they’re using or which software they’ve got installed.
Yeah!
I find this stuff so you don’t have to:
As always, I am trying to be helpful.
No, really! I am.
So, here’s a new thing. Every so often I will answer some questions put to me by visitors to this blog.
All you have to do is ask a question, about a topic big or small, in the comments below.
Then, once I have come up with an answer, I’ll record a video or something and publish it here on the blog.
It could be about anything to do with online innovation, so could be external digital engagement, or internal online collaboration. Something small like what sort of content to use to engage people on Twitter, or something big, like the best way to implement a strategic approach to social media in an organisation.
So, go ahead! Ask a question in the comments, and then I’ll pick one to answer in a few days.
I’ve been a bit serious lately on the blog. Sorry. Here’s a bit of whimsy to lighten the mood.
Worcestershire County Council have produced this video to inform the public about what they are doing about pot holes. As you’ll notice, they haven’t gone for the usual talking head interview approach.
I rather like it – and I do think that to make the most of the internet as a marketing channel, more humorous stuff like this is needed.
Here’s another great example, this time from Lincolnshire County Council, using the fairly new short video service from Twitter, called Vine. Click it to watch if it doesn’t play for you.
It’s only now, a couple of weeks after the announcement, that I feel I can talk about the demise of Google Reader. Up til now, the whole thing has just been too upsetting. Reader is the site I turn to first in the day, before email or Twitter, and the one I check last as well.
I have about 600 odd feeds pouring into my Reader account which I skim through everyday – some I read in their entirety every time, others I’m happy to just dip into now and again as the fancy takes me. It’s ok – RSS isn’t email, you don’t have to read it all.
Reader is also an important part of my publishing workflow. A lot of people find the links I tweet and the regular posts of links on this blog to be helpful. That’s all driven by Reader and by the stupidly simple act of clicking once to ‘star’ a post. Then, thanks to IFTTT, they get sent to my blog and to Twitter, like magic.
Reader was an app that used RSS feeds, an open standard – excellent! It’s because of this that we can move our subscriptions to one or more of the many possible replacement services that exist or are springing up.
What’s more, Reader was also an API that other apps could hook into. The most used purpose for this was to synchronise the read status of feeds between apps – for example between a desktop and a mobile interface.
For instance, on my laptop I use the Reader web app, but on my phone I use Reeder which always picks up where I left off thanks to Google’s API.
The trouble comes because people came to rely on Google’s Reader API to deliver a service, and development around similar services just stopped. So when Google decided to take their ball home, it meant nobody could play with it any more.
Still, the fact that RSS and OPML are open standards means we have other software options to move our feed lists to, and while they may no longer rely on Google’s vast infastructure and databases, they ought to work well enough to meet most of our needs.
But the point is worth making again – we can only do this because the open standards existed and we all use them – deliberately or not.
The second point is that even when a piece of software like Reader operates using these standards, if people come to rely on them, then control is surrendered in exchange for convenience. That’s fine, as long as we know this is happening and can take steps to regain control when it’s needed.
So, I’m not saying that we should all stop using other people’s services, that we should abandon convenience in favour of control. Just that we should have back ups in place – of our content, sure, but also backup plans so that our activity can carry on even when our favourite tools disappear, as they surely all will do.
We held the latest UKGovCamp at IBM, a venerable old technology company. Will Facebook last as long as IBM? Will Google? Will Amazon?
Best be prepared by assuming probably not.
Because we’ve all bought into the techno-utopianism of the early Internet, we tend to assume that it’s always going to be open to everyone. But as more and more of the world goes online, it’s clear that we’re heading in a very different direction — towards an online world dominated by huge, primarily foreign-owned, corporations which are creating walled gardens in which internet users will be corralled and treated like captive consumers, much as travellers are in UK airports now. The dream that the Internet would make everything available to everyone on equal terms is fading fast.
I find this stuff so you don’t have to:
It’s probably about time we sorted LocalGovCamp out again!
For various reasons it’s going to be running after the summer rather than before, as has previously been the case.
So, the two potential dates are 21st or 28th September. Let me know if you feel strongly one way or another in the comments.
Location will be Birmingham as usual, although I am on the lookout for another (cheaper) venue than Maple House, which rather busted the budget last year and made the vein on the side of my forehead swell to an unpleasant degree.
It will be an interesting time to run the event, as cuts bite deeper into local authority budgets. I’m hoping there will be some discussion about how digital can help councils deliver better services for less, and also how we can tackle some of the digital inclusion issues that will emerge around welfare reform.
As always, I’ll be on the lookout for sponsors once I have an idea around costs – the usual benefactors will get an email soon, but if anyone new wants to chip in, just let me know. An Eventbrite page will be up once the details are all confirmed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XluovrUA6Bk
Donald Barthelme, in See the Moon?, in 1968:
Fragments are the only forms I trust.
Italo Calvino, in If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveller, in 1979:
…the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
Gordon Burn, in Born Yesterday from 2008, writing about the erstwhile Eastenders actress Susan Tully:
A colleague had logged her onto YouTube for the first time that very afternoon, and the fact that just tapping the words ‘Michelle Fowler’ into the thing could back so many moment of the past crowding back – a pandemonium of fragments (an aggregation of fragments is the only kind of whole we have now)…
Jaron Lanier, in You are not a Gadget in 2010:
Instead of people being treated as the sources of their own creativity, commercial aggregation and abstraction sites presented anonymized fragments of creativity as products that might have fallen from the sty or been dug up from the ground, obscuring the true sources.
I find this stuff so you don’t have to:
It strikes me that digital literacy is becoming more and more important, as more and more of the things we do in life are digitalised.
It helps to understand how computers work if you want to buy some music these days, or watch a film, or read a book.
Not just the physcial act of downloading, and paying, and pressing the buttons to get it to display. But also some kind of knowledge of the companies providing the service, on what terms, and with what motivations.
Howard Rheingold in his book Net Smart outlines five key skills needed for digital success:
I dare say all those five are required for existing at all in the digital world we are increasingly finding ourselves in, and not just when we are doing what is apparently digital stuff. Even when you’re offline, you need to be thinking through these things.
I’ve been reading a bit of Jaron Lanier‘s stuff lately, which resonate with a few of the folk that read here. He’s a digital visionary, who these days isn’t sure we are headed in the right direction… This from a recent interview with John Naughton (who himself has some interesting perspectives on these issues):
The thing to remember about HTML, though, is that Tim [Berners-Lee] was not trying to redesign the world. He was trying to do a quick thing for a very particular context – a physics lab. The beauty of HTML was that one-way linking made it very simple to spread because you could put something up and take no responsibility whatsoever. And that creates a society in which people display no responsibility whatsoever. That’s the problem…
Societies and cultures become locked on to ideas. The “open culture” idea – which was really just an experimental thought in the 1980s – has now become an orthodoxy with its cadres of adherents. I dearly wish I could make them realise how experimental it was and how we should not treat it as anything sacrosanct.
The idea that there is philosophy behind the tools we are using in an interesting one, and that those philosophies may come to define and change our behaviour because of the tools we decide to use. I do believe that the ability we all have to publish the things we create is incredibly affirming and powerful, and a good thing. But other stuff worries me, such as the fragmentation of culture and identity into tiny pieces, and the way our culture is being handed over to Silicon Valley companies that don’t necessarily have our or society’s best interests at the forefront of their priorities.
Currently this most affects those that create and publish content, although in the near future, as gardens get walls built around them, it will become a bigger and bigger issue for those that consume culture: whether text, books, music, video, whatever. Oftentimes it is making a value judgement between convenience and control – which often correlates to closed and open, respectively.
However, we are where we are. If we are to shape where we will go next, we need the skills and understanding to make the right choices, to protect ourselves both as individuals and as communities. We need to keep our wits about us and our eyes open. But how many people can we really say do, right now?
There are a number of reasons why you might want to start blogging:
All of these are great reasons. But basically it comes down to wanting to do whatever it is that you do better.
Because if you start a blog, after a little while, that will be the result – no matter what your original motivation.
One reason a great blogger will never give you is “because my boss told me to”. Good bloggers do it because they want to, because it works for them, and not because it serves their employer’s purposes.
Not much I can add to these. Well worth a watch. If you can’t see them, in the titles I have linked to the original YouTube pages.