An online notebook
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An online notebook
I’ve already posted this to the Cisco08 blog, but thought maybe some folk here would be interested in Charles Leadbeater’s talk at Cisco’s Public Sector Summit in Stockholm today:
I just used a Flip Ultra to record, and so the quality isn’t bad, considering… Apologies for the occasionally shakey camera-work – 30 minutes is a long time holding a camera up!
After the sheer audio/visual genius of the previous two efforts in my video diary chronicling my trip to Sweden, I thought I would do another one. As a bonus, there is another Swedish Confectionary Review at the end.
I decided to give Vimeo a go at hosting this one, rather than YouTube. Vimeo seems easy enough, but I wonder how value there is in using YouTube just because lots of people use it and most people are comfortable with how it works?
Swedish update from Dave Briggs on Vimeo.
If you ask me to stop, I will.
The Cisco08.com site is being displayed all around the Clarion Hotel here in Stockholm on big displays:
This is a great way of letting people know that the content is there, and it has attracted quite a lot interest amongst the delegates here. Excellent!
I am having fun here in Stockholm providing social web backup to the Public Sector Summit – an event arranged by Cisco to discuss how technology and government can help each other.
We have quite a bit of activity going on, including the use of twitter and flickr – and shortly I’m hoping to be able to get some video up on YouTube. We also have a group blog, which you can find at www.cisco08.com. Everything gets picked up through use of the cisco08 tag.
As well as providing a platform for people to use to blog (which they are doing, fantastically) the blog home page also aggregates content from all the different social media services in one place. This is displayed on large screens around the venue so people can see what’s going on (a little bit of javascript refreshes the page every 10 minutes so we don’t have to run around refreshing each one!).
I’d encourage anyone with an interest in government at any level and the way technology can be used to swing by the site and see what you can pick up from it: and of course, leave a comment or send a message on twitter if you want to!
I have been rather enjoying myself on my trip to Sweden today, even after a very short night’s sleep in the world’s smallest hotel room.
I kind of even enjoyed waiting for a bus at 4.25am under Heathrow’s terminal 4:
But on getting to terminal 5, this FILTHY breakfast gave me some much-needed stamina, I must say.
I’m delighted to note that my room here in Stockholm is much larger and nicer than the one I was in last night. Here’s a quick video update on that subject and on what I’m actually doing here in Sweden:
I’m on my way to Stockholm, where I will be doing some social reporting and blog coaching at Cisco’s Public Sector Summit.
I’m flying from Heathrow tomorrow (Monday) morning, at 7.25am and to save myself a bit of hassle I am stopping over tonight so all I have to do is roll out of bed, onto a bus and I should be at terminal five within ten minutes.
I’m staying in the Yotel in terminal four, which specialises in, well, tiny rooms! I knew it was going to be small, but was quite shocked when I walked in the door of my ‘cabin’. I made a quick video with my Flip Ultra to demonstrate just how bijou this room is:
I must say, I have never been quite so scared of falling out of bed!
Another Saturday evening post about how the internet can have a positive effect on the way democracy and government operates. This one is straight from the US.
An Open Transition is a site set up by a coalition of folk including Lawrence Lessig, Mozilla and the Participatory Culture Foundation. It states:
President-elect Obama has made a very clear commitment to changing the way government works with its citizens. To this end, we offer these three principles to guide the transition in its objective to build upon the very best of the Internet to produce the very best for government.
Those three principles are:
There’s also a video explaining things a bit more:
It will be interesting to follow this one, and see what influence it might have.
Quite a few folk have been lucky enough to see Us Now, a film made by Banyak Films in association with the RSA. Ivo Gormley directs.
Here is how the film is described on its website:
Us Now is a documentary film project about the power of mass
collaboration, government and the Internet.Us Now tells the stories of online networks that are challenging the
existing notion of hierarchy. For the first time, it brings together
the fore-most thinkers in the field of participative governance to
describe the future of government.
A great part of the project is that so much material has been made available online. You can see loads of stuff on the Clips page of the Us Now website. I’ve embedded the trailer below, for now.
Any readers of this blog will know that I am passionate about the ways in which advances in web technology can improve the way our democracy and government works. High profile projects like this – trying to draw the thinking together in ways that will get the attention of those not yet involved in the conversation – can only help improve things. Great work.
In a comment on Jeremy’s blog, Ivo mentions the possibility of using the film as the basis of a session at the forthcoming UK government barcamp, next month. What a fantastic idea – sign me up!
Stuff I have bookmarked for November 26th through December 5th:
Here are the slides from my talk at Public Sector Forums in Birmingham yesterday. Hopefully they make some kind of sense…
It was an interesting day and I had some great conversations with delegates. The main issues seem to be – as you might be able to guess – the blocking of social web sites in the workplace, and convincing managers and politicians of the value of this type of work.
Some of the other talks were fascinating – not least Dan Champion‘s accessibility assault on web 2.0, which also provided solutions to some of the problems; and Lincolnshire County Council’s use of advertising on their corporate website as a revenue stream. There are plenty of arguments to be had about that one, I’m sure.
It was also a real pleasure to meet one of the other speakers, Medway Council’s Simon Wakeman, whose excellent blog I have been following for a while. Simon spoke with a good deal of knowledge and authority about how Councils should be approaching the use of the web on mobile devices – which will be an increasingly important channel in the future. You can find Simon’s slides here.
Thanks to Ian Dunmore, Jack Pickard, Ian Cuddy and others for laying on such a great event.
Amazon have been selling downloadable MP3s in the States for a while now, and finally you can get them in the UK.
For those currently getting their legal digital music from the likes of iTunes, you should find the prices at Amazon much more to your taste!
Amazon also claim their downloads are DRM free, meaning you can use them on whatever software or playing device you like, and you can burn CDs to your heart’s content.
Lovely.
Always a pleasure to snap one of these.
This was spotted yesterday morning, at Stansted airport.
Alastair Smith at Newcastle City Council today brought my attention to the fact that the ICELE eDemocracy guides were no longer available. Effectively, the link to the page where they were distributed via the Lulu website no longer works.
Luckily for Alastair, and perhaps others, I saved the downloadable PDFs of the guides a while ago, and so now am happy to make them available here on DavePress for folk that want them:
I think I have them all, although four doesn’t seem that many. If you have any others I have missed, do let me know.
Great interview by David Wilcox with Clay Shirky – check it out here if the embed doesn’t work for you.
I’m going to be talking to a bunch of public sector folk on Thursday as part of a Public Sector Forums event entitled Public Sector Websites – Essential Issues for Managers, Developers and Others.
It should be a good day – as well as me, other speakers include:
My bit is on ‘Social Networking and other Tools of Engagement’. Here’s the blurb:
Dave will begin to identify what the social web can do, and help equip the delegation with the skills and tools that will enable them to succeed using those tools.
Should be a good day. If you aren’t already booked up, what are you waiting for? 😉
There has been quite a bit of twitterfuss over the last week about Mr Tweet, a hideously named service which analyses your current network and then suggests new people that you ought to be following, amongst other snippets of information.
To get your report, all you need to do is follow Mr Tweet on Twitter, and then you get a direct message when your feedback is ready. I’m still waiting for mine.
Other places you can go to find cool people to follow includes my Govwebby list, or the Twitterpacks wiki, which has lots of different feeds listed in a directory structure, whether by topic or location. Worth checking out.
I’ve given DavePress yet another facelift. This one is a lot lighter and hopefully more friendly too.
Personally, I especially like the ‘adverts’ in the top right corner, pimping my social media wares, such as my newsletter, ReadWriteGov and LGSearch.
There is still some tidying up to do, but I’m nearly there…
Tom Watson is making a list of people who aren’t yet on Twitter, but who ought to be for all our benefit.
Stephen Fry (if it be he) has become an instant success using micro-blogging platfrom, Twitter. Life would be enriched if more of Britain’s treasured characters were sharing their daily thoughts with social networkers. So I’m compiling a list of the 50 well known people who should tweet. Good, bad, charming, rude, the rogues and the pious, you name them and I’ll write to them over Christmas to urge them to join Twitter.
Add your suggestions in the comments on his post.
Helen Nicol writes an interesting post about how to get wikis taken up within organisations. Using Wikipedia as an example, she writes, is a bad idea, because it sets unrealistic expectations of the amount of content likely to be generated, and will also likely scare people away.
Unfortunately, many companies begin their wiki experiments by trying to create the definitive knowledge asset on, say, knowledge management. This is a big ask for people who’ve never had their own contributions edited by someone they don’t know. It turns people off, and prevents them from recognising the potential in wikis. They need to start with a simple and non-threatening activity like a progress report or lessons learned review. Even a shared agenda would help as I said in this post some time ago. Starting small will really help people gain confidence enough to start working on bigger projects like knowledge assets.
This taps into a real problem for those wishing to encourage the adoption of these tools within their organisations. Saying wikis are like Wikipedia (which they can be, but…) is a bit like describing blogs as online diaries (which they can be, but…).
As I often say, the best thing is just to start using something, with a freely available tool, whether a blog or a wiki or whatever and then use that to demonstrate what you mean to the unbelievers. Much easier than making people think they have to start recording the sum of all human knowledge, or start publishing their innermost thoughts on the web!
Great comment left by Maureen Charles of Cambridgeshire County Council on the ReadWriteGov blog, acting as a real reminder of why I started arranging these events and the value they can have:
I was really impressed by the event in Peterborough. What resonated for me was all the ideas it gave for engaging young people. I couldn’t see straight away how to use them but the seeds were planted! After some creative thinking, I’m just now at the point where one idea is taking shape. Our participation worker who works with young people in care, has filmed them talking about their group “Just Us”. I’ve posted the video on “You Tube” and linked to it from the website. A start! Thank you.
No, Maureen, thank you.