Sunday, 24 March, 2013

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

#Link roundup

Tuesday, 19 March, 2013

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

#Link roundup

Thursday, 14 March, 2013

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

#Link roundup

Tuesday, 12 March, 2013

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

#Link roundup

Monday, 11 March, 2013

You went to UKGovCamp, what next?

ukgc13

Image credit: David Pearson

UKGovCamp happened on Saturday at the second time of asking and I think it went rather well. Take a look at the chatter on Twitter or the photos on Flickr and make your own mind up.

The mixture of attendees – government folk, suppliers, activists and the merely curious – and the relaxed atmosphere seem to create an environment that enables conversations to flow, and ideas to be exchanged.

Every year there is much talk about what happens next. Where are the outcomes? What are the measurable outputs of the event? What projects happened that wouldn’t have done if we hadn’t all met up?

Usually my answer is simply that I don’t care. It’s not about what happens next, it’s about what happens on the day and that’s it – what follows is up to individuals and self organised groups, if they want to. There should be any pressure to actually do anything. Seriously!

But often times, people do want to know what’s next. They enjoy GovCamp and want work to be like it all the time! I don’t blame them.

Of course, how you get open, collaborative working practices going within a large organisation is jolly tricky and the answers probably won’t be found in a blog post. However, start small and you can achieve great things. So, the most obvious thing to do, I think, is to run your own GovCamp.

It doesn’t have to be big or too wide ranging. It could just be your team or department. Or open things up a bit more by running a place based event that brings together public servants with businesses, civil sector organisations and individuals. The important thing is not to feel you have to replicate GovCamp, but to run an appropriately scaled event that meets the needs and culture of your organisation and of course your resources too.

Shropcamp back in 2011 was a lovely example of this, or the regular Hyperlocal West Midlands event, or Brewcamp. Different scales for different sets of requirements, but always open and collaborative.

So if you wish your boss ‘got’ GovCamp, or even came along now and again, don’t delay. Bring it to them. Show them the magic.

#You went to UKGovCamp, what next?

Thursday, 7 March, 2013

Link roundup

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

#Link roundup

Monday, 4 March, 2013

School of digital

SchoolofDigital is bringing together something I’ve been wanting to do for a few years now – effective online training that brings together the advantages of e-learning with the benefits of face to face training.

It’s a hard nut to crack, but with some of the experiments I’ve been running recently with Steve Dale, David Wilcox and others; and following the online learning thought leadership of the likes of Donald Clark, I think I’ve come up with the best balance.

Hence SchoolofDigital – which is where I’ll be running courses on innovating online, by using innovative online delivery methods. The key elements are:

  • asynchronous – learners don’t have to be in the same place at the same time
  • social and personal – as well as shared resources, content and discussion areas, learners get one to one support from the course facilitator
  • responsive – because this isn’t a pre-prepared day long course, there is the opportunity for content to be created to meet the specific needs of delegates as they arise

The first course we will be running will start at the beginning of May, and is on successful digital engagement.

Here’s a quick summary of how that course will work:

The course consists of eight lessons, which last for a week each. Total learner time per lesson is around an hour, which they can do in one chunk or spread throughout the week – it is entirely up to them. The idea is to provide a social, asynchronous learning environment  where the learner can access materials and get involved at a time that suits them, within the framework of a weekly lesson format. We do as little synchronised activity as possible, to make things as flexible as we can.

Support is provided both to the group as a whole, with discussion and sharing of experience and knowledge encouraged; and privately through email or telephone discussion between the course facilitator and learners.

Each lesson will include some or all of the following elements:

  • An introductory video introducing the topic and explaining some details
  • Downloadable templates, resources, guides and case studies
  • Links to further reading and case studies
  • Interviews with practitioners
  • Screencast demos of how to perform certain actions
  • Learner discussion areas
  • One to one private email or telephone support
  • Additional content in response to queries and requests
  • Assignments to practice learning

The eight lessons in this course are:

  1. Introductions, objectives, how the course and the platform works
  2. What is digital engagement and what defines success?
  3. Strategies for successful digtial engagement
  4. Popular platforms
  5. Emerging platforms
  6. Other tools and techniques
  7. Skills and roles
  8. Bringing it all together

The course is suitable for people already comfortable with the internet and social media, and who want to take their use of these tools to the next level in terms of meeting personal or organisational objectives.

The course costs £450 + VAT per delegate.

#School of digital

Saturday, 2 March, 2013

Wednesday, 27 February, 2013

Link roundup

(Am starting to post interesting links to the blog again, via Google Reader. Presentation leaves a little to be desired, but am working on it…)

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

#Link roundup

Monday, 7 January, 2013

Friday, 4 January, 2013

Thursday, 3 January, 2013

Thursday, 20 December, 2012

Far from the maddening cloud

Reading some of the coverage of Instagram’s change in their terms of service, you’d have thought a murder had been committed. Or maybe that the world was about to end.

A few years down what might once have been called the Web 2.0 road, well funded companies are finding that they have built their networks, grown their user bases, and now shareholders are looking for some return on their investment. We should not, therefore, be surprised that the rules are changing, that the digital ground we’ve been standing on is shifting beneath our feet.

Nothing at the end of the day is free. Somewhere down the line, somebody is paying – whether it is you with a subscription, a VC’s investment money or an advertiser taking advantage of your online data.

The cloud brings with it incredible advantages – access to your digital assets wherever you are, no matter what device you are using. The ability to share with others, to collaborate with them, to enable people to remix your work and share it on.

Thanks to the cloud – and whatever it was called before it was the cloud – we are all writers, photographers  film makers, publishers, producers, networkers, community organisers. It gives us access to unimaginably large groups of people who will have an interest in what we are doing, and the tools to spark a conversation with all those people.

It also has its downsides though. As ever, there’s a tradeoff. Sometimes that tradeoff will be worthwhile. Lots of Instagram users obviously thought that it wasn’t – and that’s fine. Services and products will live and die as a result of how they manage their service, and balance the needs of the users and the needs of their balance sheet.

What’s important I think, to consider, is that part of the shift towards cloud, with all the advantages mentioned above, also is putting control over our cultural assets into the hands of corporations whose only mission is to generate a profit. Amazon is not your local library. Apple isn’t the British Museum.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this – I’m not making a political or economic point here. But if all your books aren’t in fact your own, and in fact are merely rented from Amazon on your Kindle; or those music tracks you thought were yours can be taken away from you without you being in control – then that’s a worrying thing and everyone need to approach this carefully.

Likewise with your social media content. If you don’t want your photos popping up in adverts for pile cream, then don’t put them on Instagram (or indeed probably anywhere on the internet).

So what to do? I think just be aware. When people say to you, “use this site, it’s free!”, remember that it isn’t. If you store content you created yourself online, make sure you have a copy of your own. If any of your content matters so much to you that you don’t want anyone re-using it in ways you can’t control, don’t put it on the internet.

In effect, don’t trust anyone, particularly tech startup companies, or indeed giant corporations. They won’t be around forever and they won’t always keep their word. Most of the time that’s fine, and the trade-off between control and convenience works out for everyone.

But we all have content, assets, that matter to us – and don’t entrust those to anyone you don’t know, no matter how slick their user interface.

#Far from the maddening cloud

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.

#Google+ 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.

#Notes 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?

#Confessions 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.

#Experiments 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:

#Great 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.

#Whose content is it, anyway?