Sunday, 4 July, 2010

Saturday, 3 July, 2010

Bookmarks for June 17th through July 3rd

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

#Bookmarks for June 17th through July 3rd

Tuesday, 29 June, 2010

Clay Shirky at the LSE

Cognitive SurplusI had an enjoyable couple of hours yesterday evening at the LSE, attending Clay Shirky‘s lecture on cognitive surplus, which was launching his book of the same name.

It was an enjoyable hour, and a real pleasure to hear stories and arguments for the use of social technology for social good.

I must admit, however, that having read Shirky’s previous book, Here Comes Everybody, and watched other lectures of his online, that perhaps his thinking hasn’t really developed that far. Cognitive Surplus seems to be a continuation of the themes examined in Here Comes Everybody rather than anything radically new.

Having said that, I haven’t read the book, but will report back when I have (it isn’t available on Kindle in the UK yet for some reason, which is annoying).

Here are the notes I took during the talk, which may or may not be useful.

  • Time we have available (free time) which is growing
  • Platform for making use of that time effectively (Internet)
  • Use of the network: consume, produce, share
  • Wikipedia = 100 million hours of time in 10ish years
  • Tv = 200 billion hours watched every year in US
  • The time spent watching adverts in the US over one weekend is roughly equivalent to one wikipedia
  • Very small numbers of change can have huge effects
  • Ushahidi – Kenyan tracks updates from various media. Been open sourced and used around the world.
  • Generosity + digital tech
  • Successful digital projects are those that appeal to our human instincts
  • Transition from alchemy to chemistry – same tech but different approach/culture. Supported by printing press and the new scientific journals.
  • Patientslikeme – huge documentation project of sufferers. Large amounts of aggregate data: shared value. Commercial project. “digital sharecropping”. Why do people contribute for free? They like it!
  • Social pressure often more effective than contractual (example of picking kids up from school on time) once broken also not self healing.
  • Openness and sharing is a good thing. Patientslikeme want to effect a culture change in the medical profession. Therefore tech is secondary to the project. Makes it possible but the objective is cultural.
  • Levels o participation and collaboration: lolcats are communal. Wikipedia has public value. Patientslikeme creates civic value. Gets more difficult and complicated as you go along. Also the civic is the most important.
  • Role of government – to help to create the space for social capital and cognitive surplus to emerge. Digital divide: participation rates much higher in better educated households
  • Things to think about: scarcity, loose joins, cheapness of distributing information, Internet routes itself around faults
#Clay Shirky at the LSE

Thursday, 24 June, 2010

Events, dear boy…

Quite a few events coming up in the next couple of weeks that I should probably let you know about.

Next week I’m attending a few things: on Monday, the Clay Shirky lecture on Cognitive Surplus at the LSE, followed by the Learning Pool steering group meeting on Tuesday. I’ll be talking to the group about our plans for further engagement work along the lines of our Let’s Talk Central project with Central Bedfordshire Council, as well as some updates to our Modern Councillor service, which I hope to be able to tell everyone about real soon.

Then on Thursday I am going to be talking to the Centre for Public Scrutiny conference about engaging with local communities online. I will be particularly looking forward to this as my second job in local government was as a scrutiny officer at a district council.

I’m ending the week in Bristol, at NALC‘s conference celebrating local democracy. I’ll be showing some local council clerks and councillors how they can be spending a little bit of time and no money at all on cool ways of engaging with their communities online.

After a rest – or should I say, chance to catch up on email – over the weekend, I hit the road again, or rather the train, heading down to NESTA’s ‘Digital Disrupters‘ event on Monday 5th.

Then it’s Wednesday at the LGA conference in Bournemouth where I’m facilitating a fringe session, optimistically titled “A thoroughly modern council”. You can sign up for it here.

Finally, on Friday I travel again to the south-west, this time to Cheltenham to the Institute of Local Council Management summer seminar. I’ll be talking about “using social networking technologies for mobilising political and community action”.

Busy times! I shouldn’t complain though, if it were any different I would probably be quite bored.

#Events, dear boy…

Tuesday, 22 June, 2010

Quora

QuoraQuora is an interesting looking service, providing a fairly straightforward question and answer platform. It’s been in closed beta for a while, but now has been unleashed onto the public at large.

It’s all about capturing the activity we all do on sites like Twitter: asking questions, giving answers, and researching topics online. Quora adds to this activity by turning it into a searchable and collaborative archive:

Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.

Part of the reason for some of the hype around Quora is the fact that it has been founded by a bunch of people involved in Facebook’s early days. They know how to build a decent web app.

TechCrunch have a decent write-up, with a warning of a potential problem now the site is public:

Their biggest challenge is about to begin. Quora has generated attention not just because of its slick interface, but because of the extremely high quality of its answers up until this point — it isn’t unusual for someone to ask a question and have it answered by a top expert in the field within a matter of hours (or less). Likewise, questions about various Internet companies often attract answers from longtime employees. The big question now is whether or not Quora will be able to maintain that quality as it deals with an influx of new users.

I’ve signed up, and you can find me here. Will be fascinating to see how this works out.

Update: writing this reminded me about Formspring, which hasn’t really taken off for me. Quora differs because it is based on subjects and issues rather than individuals. My Formspring page is here.

#Quora

Everything you ever need to know about the internet

John NaughtonJohn Naughton is consistently one of the – if not the – best writers we have about technology. His A Brief History Of The Future is a simply fantastic introduction to the internet: why and how it came about, from Vannevar Bush‘s vision of the Memex through Douglas Englebart‘s ‘Mother of all demos‘ to Arpanet and Tim Berners-Lee‘s use of HTTP and HTML to form the world wide web. It was the first book I thought to lend Breda when she joined my little team at Learning Pool.

His blog and Observer column are well worth regularly checking too. Occasionally I am lucky enough to meet up with John, along with that other titan of technology, Quentin Stafford-Fraser, for lunch in Cambridge. It’s difficult not to feel utterly fraudulent during these conversations, but I do my best.

John’s name has been punted all round Twitter during the last couple of days thanks to a feature article that appeared in the Observer on Sunday, called Everything you ever need to know about the internet. It’s a great context-setting piece, reminding us all how new this stuff is – and yet, at the same time, that many of the issues involved are as old as time.

This ties in with some of what I have been thinking and writing recently about people’s attitudes to the internet – such as the fact that it shouldn’t be viewed as just another channel, and that it is a profoundly creative space. I suspect a lot of this comes down to a lack of real understanding of what the net is about.

So, go read the article. Then print it out and put it in your boss’s in-tray. The world will be a better place.

#Everything you ever need to know about the internet

Collaborative innovation

This is a great video from John Seely Brown, who is a really interesting guy. His website blurb states that

I’m a visiting scholar at USC and the independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge.

In a previous life, I was the Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). I was deeply involved in the management of radical innovation and in the formation of corporate strategy and strategic positioning of Xerox as The Document Company.

He also has a book out, which looks good: The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion.

Anyway, here’s a video of a recent talk he gave on collaborative innovation. Well worth a watch.

#Collaborative innovation

Thursday, 17 June, 2010

Reflecting on Local by Social

I wrote up quite a bit of what was said at the Local by Social event yesterday, but didn’t add much in the way of comment or analysis. This post makes up for that. I’ll try and sum up what the themes were for me which really stood out.

First of all, of course, great work FutureGov and IDeA!

Local by Social

Me, Steve Bridger and Lloyd Davis, by Paul Clarke

1. We probably are moving on from talking about social media

I did think just how far things have moved on in the last few years. I remember conversations had with Steve Dale back in 2006 when it seemed like nobody else in local government was remotely interested. Now it seems like most authorities are at least aware of the developments in the web and how citizens are using it – and are starting to think how they might engage with it.

I think that ‘social media’ as being seen as a distinct element of activity is starting to disappear, with some bits heading into comms, other bits into web teams and so on. Our project with Central Bedfordshire, Let’s Talk Central, was delivered through the consultation team, for example.

In other words, using social media tools is becoming less of a thing, and more just a set of skills for delivering tasks and activity, which is almost certainly the right thing to do.

However, it still seems to be that comms and marketing folk are those most often attracted to events like this, which is a shame as service managers and policy types need to be a part of this conversation too.

2. Rethinking relationships

Much of the discussion at Local by Social was not about using social media but what was made possible by social media – which is a healthy way of looking at things. Much of this is focused on relationships – between government and governed, service designers and users, between individuals living in an area.

If anything local government should be looking to foster relationships and take an active part whenever it can. Reinventing relationships too, where necessary – giving people power to organise stuff for themselves where they want to, only stepping in when needed.

Another relationship to be rethought is between government and supplier, of course. All the presentations from social innovators were from small organisations which may not fit in too well with existing procurement systems and whatnot. To tap into these great ideas and enthusiastic people, process might need to give way.

3. Focus on outcomes

Following on from this, councils must think strategically about what it is they are trying to achieve rather than what is being done and who is doing it. It may well be that patchworks of service delivery models are required – some areas may have residents who can organise themselves, others may not.

It looks like a lot of the discussion around efficiency savings in local government is focusing on reducing staff numbers, restructuring and cutting services. In other words, doing the same things, only cheaper. This means councils could fall into the trap of doing the wrong things righter as opposed to taking the opportunity to really rethink who delivers what and how.

4. Be bold

Another key message from the day was that this is exactly the time for local government to throw off its shackles, rethink approaches to risk, and embrace innovative ways of working. I guess this comes down to attitude – is innovation a costly luxury, or a vital part of meeting demand in a time of cost cuts?

For a forward thinking person, the latter is obviously preferable, but is it likely to be the route taken by most local government managers? I’m not sure. But those that do will find themselves getting ahead of the rest.

Of course, who actually does the innovation is an interesting question. As I have mentioned above, the council’s role in this innovation might just be to pass the work onto someone who can actually do the innovating…

5. Don’t be boring

More and more I’m drawn back to what I posted about 18 months ago – that government should get away from the idea that for something to be useful it has to be very serious and dare I say it, boring. The greatest example of this at Local by Social was from Do the Green Thing, a wonderful campaign about getting people engaged in being a bit more environmentally aware. Take their videos for example, simple, funny and memorable:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaY9aauk3eE

Again, this is exactly what Let’s Talk Central is about – we don’t want to force people to read huge documents, or fill in surveys with hundreds of questions, or make them send emails into black holes from which they never get a response. We wanted to get people to talk about what they are interested in, using a medium they are comfortable with, in the space where they like to go.

Communications from councils are too boring. Consultation with councils is too boring. Decision making processes in councils are too boring. Selling to councils is too boring. I’m not talking dumbing down, I’m talking making things attractive to people, to encourage them to get involved.

For me, this is the most important thing to fix, and it’s probably the easiest of them all as well.

Further coverage of Local by Social:

#Reflecting on Local by Social

Bookmarks for June 7th through June 17th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

#Bookmarks for June 7th through June 17th

Wednesday, 16 June, 2010

Local by Social: Networked Neighbourhoods

Here’s Hugh Flouch!

  • Hyperlocal communities
  • Harringay Online – 2,900 members, 4-500 visits a day, 2-300 visitors a day
  • Has discussion forum, event promotion, information about public services, photo gallery and local history archive
  • ‘a bible of local information and gossip’ – BBC news
  • ‘the biggest residents’ association in the borough’ – a local cllr
  • It’s also a peer support group
  • Is translating into on the ground impact. Campaigns eg on betting shops and transport issues.
  • Events are organised by the community, meetups, festivals and parties
  • Next move is into co-production. During the snow, the site was used to organise action on snow clearing
  • Now doing research into London’s ‘digital neighbourhoods’
  • Using local sites results in meeting new neighbours and a greater sense of belonging
  • Also increases likelihood of contacting politicians or local council officers
  • Also results in improved perception of local politicians etc
#Local by Social: Networked Neighbourhoods

Local by Social: School of Everything

Paul Miller now up, from the School of Everything.

  • SoE is all about getting more people to learn – the things they want to learn about
  • Since Sept 2008
  • Private enterprise backed by investment
  • SoE can help reduce costs, do more with less, reinvent the organisation of lifelong learning
  • Listings on SoE is free, and can find out what people are searching for in a particular geographic area
  • Can target provision to better meet demand
  • Find hidden resources to support lifelong learning – involve independent teachers and groups – and a database of venues
  • SoE is a database, not just about the web but also TV, print media, mobile etc
  • Working on citizen generated education. A tool is being developed to help organise local peer learning groups
#Local by Social: School of Everything

Local by Social: Patient Opinion

Patient Opinion is a great site for people to leave feedback about their experiences with health services.

  • Really micro level issues can be discussed and action taken
  • Based on the telling of stories by service users
  • Great example of dodgy toilet seats!
  • Ratings for responses from institutions
  • Patient Opinion makes it possible to access thoughtful, passionate people who aren’t motivated to complain
  • Higher threshold for willingness to share with public services – eg easier to share a cat video than a story about your weird disease
  • Lessons: transparency and conversations drive change, adaptable to council work, scalable, cost effective, business model and values
  • Government cannot do this kind of work well – and nor the purely private sector. This work belongs in social enterprises
#Local by Social: Patient Opinion

Local by Social: Do the Green Thing

Katie from Do the Green Thing is next.

  • Trying to tackle climate change creatively
  • People are inclined to help with the environment, but how do you make them become a bit more active? Obligation probably not the best route
  • Make it something that people actually want to do
  • People looking for inspiration not a guilt trip
  • The focus is on easy actions anyone can take
  • A nice video! I will embed it when I get a chance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuI9ZOu18Gc

  • Keeping things fun and informal – there is a lot that local gov could learn from this
  • Lots of interest across the world in Do the Green Thing. It’s really cool!
#Local by Social: Do the Green Thing

Local by Social: Creating future services

Next up is Hugo Manassei from Participle.

  • Participle take on a new issue a year, so far: ageing, families and youth
  • People are skipping the “third age” – period when you have retired but are physically healthy and active. This is bad for individuals but also for the state
  • Invert Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
  • Southwark Circle – membership org for anyone over age of 50 (tho younger people aren’t prevented from joining) in Southwark. Helpers (some volunteers, some professional) and members. Over 400 members from all parts of society.
  • People join because they have a practical task that needs to be completed, also for learning purpose.
  • Tech is a hyperlocal network managed by 3 people. Entirely virtual, no office or community centre.
  • Members in different periods of their life find value in Southwark Circle. People join wanting to receive help but end up becoming helpers themselves.
  • Cost is £10 a year to be a member. Token system to pay for help.
  • Works with various existing services and charities.
  • Cost savings in 5 years – £2.18m.
  • Suffolk Circle about to launch, then Hammersmith and Fulham
  • All about strengthening communities
#Local by Social: Creating future services

Local by Social: Networked Innovation

John Hayes from IDeA takes to the platform.

  • IDeA is 11 years old, just like Google
  • 353 authorities, providing 700 services each (in a Unitary authority), 2.1 million people working in local government
  • All these people, services and authorities have things in common – hence the communities of practice
  • Sustainable self-improvement, efficiency and vfm, connecting people to people
  • The CoPs – 60k members, 75k monthly visits, 22k monthly contributions, 1.3k communities
  • New experiences of networking in personal lives – ie consumer social media and social networking – need to replicate within work context
  • Supporting new ways of working through Local by Social book and the councillors guide to digital engagement
  • Recognising the change in behavior and relationships between people, practitioners and communities
  • The cuts! The cuts!
  • Knowledge hub – new CoPs, more open, more integrated. Mashups and benchmarking also feature and use of linked data
  • Less of looking to the centre for ideas, more sharing good practice amongst practitioners
  • Built with the sector, for the sector
#Local by Social: Networked Innovation

Local by Social: Andy Gibson

Now it is Andy Gibson’s turn. He wrote the Local by Social book!

  • Andy is hoping to provide some perspective on all the digital stuff
  • As railroads transformed the way we work and our society, so will the new online tools
  • Imagine a London with no public transport. Would be very different, service provision would be much harder.
  • Comms is fundamental to everything that we do. Move away from broadcasting into a two way conversation.
  • Enabling communities to come together and help themselves
  • Potential to reinvent democracy
  • Opportunity for involvement of service users in design of those services
  • Budget crisis in public services – radical streamlining of government. Crisis is a good time for innovation!
  • Budget issues has brought impetus – the need to do things differently is here, now
  • Money decisions are an indication of priorities.
  • Pressure to innovate means people need to have ideas at the ready. Attitude to risk may shift – do something in a risky way, or don’t do it at all
  • Need for agility, eg in procurement and in development
  • Need for government folk to horizon scan and build the arguments. Need to be ready for when the change happens.
#Local by Social: Andy Gibson

Local by Social: Public Service 2.0

Dominic Campbell is first up. Yay!

  • Dom is going to talk about some of the research he has been doing with Harvard University
  • “This isn’t about technology” – too right!
  • New kind of change facing local gov – one that is web enabled
  • Move to communicative governance from new public management – more about people rather than processes
  • Big society as a banner or brand for grouping together lots of civic activity that’s been going on for a while
  • Fix the system or create a new one?
  • Gov 2.0, transparency and campaigning – Micah Sifry’s branches of we.gov – but misses social innovation and enterprise, says Dom
  • Dom recommends The Power of Social Innovation by Stephen Goldsmith (and I agree, it’s good!)
  • NESTA’s social innovator website is good (link to come soon)
  • Tim O’Reilly – government as a platform
  • Less mob, more flash – flocklocal does flashmobbing for social good
  • Working with social innovators for change – is this just outsourcing by stealth?
  • System world (old school gov) meets life world – such as NHS Choices working with Patient Opinion. Edges of government blurring
  • Collective social action online – Clay Shirky stuff.
  • Local Government in Britain is probably the most vibrant space for discussing and actually doing change
  • Need to connect on and offline… role of mobile… also digital divide
  • “Creating truly new ways of transforming services, governing and creating public value”
  • Networks matter – where are the networks and communities in your area?
  • Service design – rewiring the way government thinks about its customers
  • Need to blend the results and learning from eGovernment with the new social era
  • Dom mentions the safeguarding 2.0 project FutureGov are working on – sounds like good stuff!
  • Human networks matter – what is the social graph of an at-risk child? How can the relationships and information flow be improved within that graph?
  • 1. Lay foundations (digital inclusion, open data); 2. Foster culture change (inside and outside the org, leadership); 3. I missed the third thing, gah!
  • FutureGov is building a social innovation marketplace – called Simpl – for people to post ideas and find or give help. Ready in the summer!
#Local by Social: Public Service 2.0

Local by Social

I’m at the Local by Social event today, being run by FutureGov and the IDeA. It should be a lot of fun, and I’ll let you share in that fun by live blogging as much of the event as I can!

#Local by Social

Monday, 14 June, 2010

Websites I love: Project Gutenberg

Project GutenbergThere are a lot of people who still see the internet as being something that is purely the domain of right-wing lunatics and porn fiends, which is of course a shame. The internet has created, or at least helped to create some wonderful things.

One of those wonderful things is Project Gutenberg, a website which makes available out-of-copyright books for reading on electronic devices. Started in 1971, where texts had to be typed into a mainframe computer by hand, the project boasted 30,000 books by the end of 2009.

Books are made available in a number of formats, one of which is always plain text to ensure it can display on more or less any device. Other formats include HTML and also some of the popular e-reader formats like .mobi and .epub.

Reading off a proper computer monitor is a bit of a nightmare, which is why using Gutenberg’s texts with an e-reader works so well. For me, getting the books onto the Kindle is just a case of plugging the Kindle in and copying the files across to it from my Mac – it takes seconds. Formatting is always pretty good, and it’s a great way of carrying round loads of great books to read, for nothing.

So if you’re ever struggling for great examples of people coming together to do Good Things using the web, don’t forget Project Gutenberg!

#Websites I love: Project Gutenberg

Sunday, 13 June, 2010

Rounding up LocalGovCamp YH

LocalGovCamp Yorkshire and Humber was a great day, superbly organised by Ken Eastwood, Kevin Campbell-Wright, Melanie Reid and a host of helpers. It was by a mile the least involved I have ever been in one of these events and, to be honest, my enjoyment of it was considerably increased as a result – as was everyone else’s, I should think.

The photos can be found here – or within the whole localgovcamp stream here. I – and hopefully others! – will link to coverage in the group on UKGovCamp.

Partly this was because I could actually attend and take part in some sessions! My thoughts on them follow.

Ken Eastwood

Photo of Ken Eastwood by Kevin Campbell-Wright

1. Digital vision

This session was introduced by Martin Cantor of Barnsley Council, and was based around a paper circulated via the LocalGovCamp Huddle workspace (I’ve emailed Martin to ask if I can post it up here too). The vision starts with:

In a world where:

  • everyone knows what the internet has to offer
  • everyone is comfortable using the internet
  • the internet is easily available everywhere people go
  • the things people want are available online
  • online activity is simple

then we have a truly digital world.  In this world, the technology will be not just ubiquitous, but invisible and taken for granted, just as electricity now is.

In other words, we have to acknowledge that technology is changing the way we work, play, travel, shop, socialise and learn. A debate ensued about various aspects of this vision, including questions around what the role of government is with regard to overseeing and indeed implementing the vision.

2. Enterprise 2.0

The agenda

Photo of the agenda by Ingrid Koehler

A session I ran jointly with Ken Eastwood of Barnsley Council. I introduced the session and the concept of Enterprise 2.0 which effectively just means social software behind the firewall.The points I made to frame the session were that

  1. The interesting thing about this technology isn’t the technology but the cultural and organisational implications of using it
  2. How can organisations effectively engage with outside groups like citizens and stakeholders when the people inside that organisation don’t talk to each other?
  3. (Almost) all intranets are crap

Ken led us through Barnsley’s soon to be launched ‘Buzz’ platform, based on SocialText, where staff will be encouraged to connect with one another, discuss work and non-work related issues and generally break down silos. It looks great, and I’m looking forward to hearing the success stories to come from it.

Again, a discussion then took place, with loads of interesting insights shared and questions asked. One significant area of debate was around the role of IT in all this – interestingly Barnsley have gone with the hosted, SaaS version of SocialText as opposed to getting it installed on in-house IT infrastructure (this strikes me as sensible, and a more service-oriented approach to IT purchasing will be a key element of cost savings and generally doing this better in this area in the future).

The other interesting point was that although deploying enterprise 2.0 is a technology project, it shouldn’t be led by technologists. A successful implementation technologically speaking might mean that everything works, but not that people are actually using it. So, leave the plumbing to the techies, but keep the strategy and direction in the hands of those within the business.

3. Informal online engagement

Me

Photo of me by Ingrid Koehler

A session led by me around Central Bedfordshire’s Let’s Talk Central project, which Learning Pool worked on. I did a brief – entirely unprepared – talk about the background to the project and giving my views on consultation activity before opening things up to questions and discussions.

Essentially my point was that a lot of local government engagement and consultation work is incredibly dull and not the sort of thing that would really encourage residents to take part. With Let’s Talk Central, the focus was always on keeping it high level, and just finding out how people feel about stuff. Obviously there is still a place for in depth research, surveys, focus groups and that sort of thing, but it doesn’t have to be the be-all and end-all and councils shouldn’t be afraid of keeping things informal.

4. Get over yourself

This was an interesting session, led by Emma Langman of Progression Partnership. It was essentially a discussion session about leadership, where Emma posed some questions and things to think about to the group. Some robust discussion then took place and I think there may have been some confusion about the purpose of the session – Emma certainly didn’t claim to have any answers or solutions, which I think may have frustrated some of those who attended hoping for some revelations.

I do think that this is a subject that needs discussing though. The challenges faced in the public sector will necessitate a change in organisational culture and that has to be set from those at the top, which will mean a shift from traditional command and control style leadership to a more flexible open approach, such as that described by Charlene Li in her recent book. Indeed this is the type of leadership already being demonstrated by Mark Lloyd at Cambridgeshire County Council and others.

How this behaviour and attitude can be spread throughout the sector, and encouraged in places where it isn’t already happening, I’m really not sure – which may be why most people left this session with more questions than answers in their heads.

Emma Langman

Photo of Emma Langman by Kevin Campbell-Wright

#Rounding up LocalGovCamp YH