Sunday, 26 April, 2009

Bookmarks for April 19th through April 26th

Stuff I have bookmarked for April 19th through April 26th:

#Bookmarks for April 19th through April 26th

Add LGSearch to your browser

LGSearch

LGSearch is a search engine for the UK public sector that I developed quite a while ago. It’s built on Google Custom Search, and isn’t particularly clever, but is rather useful.

Anyway, inspired by Simon’s recent efforts on behalf of DirectGov, I thought I would make it easy for Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 users to add LGSearch to the list of search engines they can access from within their browsers.

Simply click here to install LGSearch, or visit this page to find out more about it.

#Add LGSearch to your browser

Friday, 24 April, 2009

Monday, 20 April, 2009

The importance of evaluation

Stephen Hale at the FCO has an excellent, interesting and important post about measuring the success of the London G20 Summit site.

With wonderful openness and transparency, Stephen has set out some of the factors by which the site’s success could be measured, along with the results. Its fascinating reading, and provides lots of lessons for anyone approaching an engagement project like this.

Indeed, this ties in with Steph’s recent (and overly-modest) post about the achievements of the engagement bods at DIUS over the last year or so. He wrote:

We still haven’t nailed some of the basics like evaluation, [or] the business case

Figuring out whether or not something has actually worked is terrifically important, and the long term efficacy of online engagement relies on this nut being cracked.

Stephen’s post highlighted some really good practice here: outline what your project aims to do, and come up with some measures around it so you can work out whether it worked or not.

As Steph mentions, having an up-front business case is really important – a written down formulation of what the project actually is and what it ought to achieve.

Now, business cases and evaluation criteria can be developed in isolation and in a project-by-project basis. I wonder, though, how much more value could be created by developing a ‘package’ of evaluation which could be used as a foundation by everyone involved in government online engagement?

Of course, each project has its own unique things that will need to be measured and tested, but surely there are some basic things that every evaluation exercise would need to look at?

How about some common evaluation documents were created, and that every project undertaken ensured that the basic, common stuff was recorded, as well as the unique bits. That way, some kind of comparative analysis would be possible, especially if everyone submitted their results into a common database.

Just how hard would it be to come up with a common framework for online engagement projects? I think it is worth a shot.

#The importance of evaluation

Thursday, 16 April, 2009

Tuesday, 14 April, 2009

Citizen Engagement in Australia

Despina Babbage from the Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development in the government of the state of Victoria in Australia emailed me this morning to let me know about her blog, which is all about citizen engagement.

It’s well worth subscribing to, as Despina does a great job of pulling together activity from all over the world – and it’s nice to hear from others what they think about what we are doing here in the UK, too!

#Citizen Engagement in Australia

Monday, 13 April, 2009

Bookmarks for April 4th through April 13th

Stuff I have bookmarked for April 4th through April 13th:

#Bookmarks for April 4th through April 13th

Sunday, 12 April, 2009

Mash the State

Mash the State is a campaign to “encourage UK government and public sector organisations to make their data available to the general public.”

The first part of the campaign is dedicated to getting local authorities in the UK using RSS to disseminate information from their websites. Currently only 66 of 434 local councils currently produce RSS.

Helpfully, a PDF one pager has been published to explain why this is a good idea. There is also a blog so you can keep up with developments.

Mash the State is the brainchild of Adrian Short, who has also founded a civic hacking club in Sutton, London; and developed a rather neat local news aggregator.

#Mash the State

Tuesday, 7 April, 2009

Day 1 of Councillors Connected

The first day of the Councillors Connected online conference was really successful, with some excellent contributions from a whole host of different people. Here are some of my highlights:

A fantastic debate about the meaning of local to different people. Cllr Mike Causey kicked things off, asking

There’s a lot of good aspirations around social networking, the internet, and local government. However – and I write this as a Conservative councillor – even the very good paper from the Conservative party recently, outlining their vision for local government, does not address the fundamental thinking that must exist behind any such proposal – how local is local?

Conrad Taylor added to this theme:

I live in Southwark, but if I need to dispose responsibly of an old video machine and some batteries, my “local” waste disposal centre is in Mercury Way (Lewisham). Transport also shapes what is “local”: it’s easier for me to get to Waterloo than many places “more local” on an as-the-crow-flies basis because it is a single bus journey to Waterloo.

Paul Canning urged local authorities to make use of existing online communities and not to create new online spaces:

I think that anything which is funded and set up needs to firstly engage with this existing local discussion infrastructure and not appear to replace it. Many of these blogs and forums in my town have an audience, a community of interest. For example we have a very active local youth dominated forum mainly about music but also about activism and local issues.

After some more discussion, Mike Causey came back with his considered response:

I want to post how much my thinking is helped by this thread. And, at the risk of being accused of thinking up new jargon, the above ‘word’ might be a way to express the germ of an idea in my head. Especially the concept of local being so individual, and the potential of web and social media innovation to build bridges between this and artificial constructs and areas of our councils.

Excellent stuff, and a great way of showing how online discussions can be used to refine thinking and develop new ideas. I have hardly scratched the surface of this debate though, to see it in all its glory you will need to join the CoP.

Some other great threads on the day:

Today looks like it will be another cracking day, with Hugh Flouch of Harringay Online already posting a great piece on Community Websites: Friend or Foe?

#Day 1 of Councillors Connected

Monday, 6 April, 2009

Councillors connected

Over the next three days, a rather special event is taking place online – a virtual conference for council officers and members to learn about the benefits of using social media to engage with communities.

It’s happening on the IDeA Community of Practice platform, which does mean there are a couple of hoops to jump through before you can start posting. But it will be worth it!

Some of those contributing to the debates and discussions are:

  • Councillor Richard Kemp, of Liverpool City Council, Deputy Char of the LGA Executive and Leader of the LGA Liberal Democrat Group
  • Councillor James Cousins, of the London Borough of Wandsworth and co-founder of the Cllr Tweeps site
  • Dominic Campbell of FutureGov Consultancy
  • Shane McCracken of Gallomanor and CivicSurf (blogging mentor project for councillors)
  • Stuart Bruce, Wolfstar PR, former councillor
  • Hugh Flouch of Haringay Online (hyper-local networking site)
  • Simon Wakeman, Head of Marketing at Medway Council

I am helping out by facilitating some of the discussions and adding useful tidbits to the various conversations that will be going on. Hope to see lots of people joining in!

#Councillors connected

Wednesday, 1 April, 2009

Bookmarks for March 29th through April 1st

Stuff I have bookmarked for March 29th through April 1st:

#Bookmarks for March 29th through April 1st

Saturday, 28 March, 2009

Bookmarks for March 22nd through March 28th

Stuff I have bookmarked for March 22nd through March 28th:

#Bookmarks for March 22nd through March 28th

Thursday, 26 March, 2009

EtherPad – cool collaboration tool!

EtherPad is a great tool for working with others on a document at the same time.

As the website states:

Other “real-time” editors like Google Docs work by broadcasting an updated copy of the document to everyone every 15 seconds. This creates a noticeable lag that gets in the way of collaboration. You start editing something, only to find 10 seconds later that someone else deleted it.

Etherpad updates every copy of the document every half second. This 30x increase in speed changes the experience completely. Your edits hardly ever clash with other users’. So you work confidently instead of tentatively.

Why doesn’t Google Docs update every half second like Etherpad does? Because it’s really, really hard. We’re fairly experienced programmers, and to make this work we had to solve problems that, as far as we know, no one had solved before.

It’s great – everyone involved has a different colour to highlight their contributions and it’s easy to move content around and decide what changes to keep and which to discard.

Well worth giving a go.

#EtherPad – cool collaboration tool!

Wednesday, 25 March, 2009

Social reporting at All Together Now

I’m looking forward to tomorrow, as a gang of folk from DIUS‘s engagement team (led ably by Steph) and I will be spending the day reporting from the All Together Now event in London.

Hosted by Channel 4, DIUS and BECTA, the event’s convener, Steve Moore says:

the focus of this event is not specifically about next media or future technology it is instead focused on what people – particularly young people – are doing now with the tools and platforms that exist NOW! In my view the scaffolding has come down. We are the tools to connect with millions of people, access to most of our accumulated knowledge with two clicks of a mouse and ability to give voice publicly to our thoughts and ideas without permission. The egalitarian ideals that drove the development of networked computing that helped foster the internet and helped created the Web have now been matched by an infrastructure of massively popular technologies. Altogether Now resolutely focuses on what people are doing with these new affordances, how they bringing themselves and their peers into experiments in what is possible and all of this is happening now. It is teenagers that are at forefront of these developments. It is students who are pioneering and making amazing stuff so this event is about watching, listening to what is happening out there right now. Participatory culture is alive, vibrant and it’s implications are at once profound and present.

It should be a great day. We are going to be videoing, photographing, twittering and blogging away like nobody’s business, and all the results will (wifi permitting) be published on the event’s social network as soon as we can.

All together now

You are of course welcome to join the network and add your stuff, or if you prefer working in your own space, just tag your content with atn09 and we’ll pick it up.

#Social reporting at All Together Now

Monday, 23 March, 2009

Sunday, 22 March, 2009

People like video

In an article on the BBC Technology News page, I read about how the British web-going public are really getting into online video:

British demand for online video sites has shot up over the past year, according to a new report.

Written by research firm Hitwise it found that UK internet traffic to video websites was up 40.7%.

YouTube is the most popular destination, followed by the BBC iPlayer and Google Video.

Which is rather interesting. I remember reading loads of blog posts – locations long forgotten, sadly – last year talking about how people couldn’t be bothered to sit and watch video, and that simple text based messages were the best way to engage an audience.

Using online video, however, is increasingly popular, and government is trying to make the most of this new channel. Downing Street has plenty of stuff going up on its YouTube channel, and DIUS’ channel has been around a while too, and was used to good effect recently as part of their Mature Students consultation.

For a list of all the (known) central government YouTubers, see Neil’s great list.

In fact, mentioning Neil at this point is rather pertinent, as his new department, BERR, have recently started a YouTube channel – BERRtube – featuring some really good content.

One such example is the collaboration between BERR and Yoosk, which saw Theo Paphitis questioning Lord Mandelson on issues raised by the public. Take this example, on the subject of bank bailouts:

What makes this video work well for me is that: it isn’t just a talking head, but an interaction between two people, both individuals are recognisable, it clearly isn’t a ‘normal’ government broadcast and it is nice and short.

Paul Canning has written a fair bit on online videos, especially their role in marketing and making them go ‘viral’. I’m not sure any of the government produced stuff is quite at the viral stage yet. But that is not to say that it isn’t of value, nor that by taking baby steps now, more exciting stuff won’t happen a little further down the line.

#People like video

Bookmarks for March 15th through March 22nd

Stuff I have bookmarked for March 15th through March 22nd:

#Bookmarks for March 15th through March 22nd