An online notebook
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An online notebook
From eGov monitor:
The European Commission has just launched the first ever European e-Inclusion Awards. As part of the European Commission’s e-Inclusion Initiative, the Awards will celebrate the best and most imaginative uses of Information and Communications Technology to reduce digital and social exclusion.
There has been a conversation going on in the forums of the Public Sector Social Media Community of Practice for little while now about the browsers made available to public sector workers. Most folk seem to be running something like internet explorer 6, but there is evidence that much older technology is being used.
This must be holding people back both in terms of being able to make the most of web 2.0 technology as part of the way we work, as well as using social web tools to better engage and increase participation.
To try and garner some more views on this, I have set up a simple survey using Google Docs to try and assess where we are with things, and to see if it is worth setting up a little campaign to get Firefox onto public sector workstations. We can dream…
If you are a public servant, or spend a significant amount of time using public sector IT, do please complete the survey – it won’t take five minutes, I promise.
Am using Google Reader at the moment as the new version of NetNewsWire, which I foolishly downloaded, seems to have problems doing anything.
There’s a number of new features that I need to investigate that weren’t around when I last used the service, like notes on shared items and friends lists. I tend to share the stuff I think worthy of comment via del.icio.us, which posts directly to this blog once a day, but in case I start sharing bits, the URL is http://www.google.com/reader/shared/08096379081421145011. As soon as I have shared something, I will stick it up on my FriendFeed too.
One of the problems of being a new media fanboy like me is that we sometimes get a bit too excited about this stuff, and fail to see some of the downsides of web 2.0. That’s why I have a copy of Andrew Keen‘s Cult of the Amateur on my bookshelf – I like to pick it up now and again to remind myself of the other way of thinking about using the web to increase participation and engagement. I might not agree with Keen, but it’s important to take a regular dose of what he has to say, I think.
In all of the pro-web 2.0 literature (Here Comes Everybody, We-Think etc etc) Wikipedia is often cited as an example of mass-collaboration in action, which of course it is. But I often wonder about how relevant Wikipedia is as the poster-child of genuine distributed organisation. This comment from Andy Roberts puts it pretty succinctly:
It was set up and continues to be run by a multi-millionaire advocate of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism philosophy.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I think Wikipedia is a great thing, and it’s usually one of the first resources I turn to when I need to get the skinny on something. But I do have concerns about it being held up as being a model to follow for other online communities.
Part of this is because of the complicated relationship between Wikipedia and Wikia, the for-profit site which provides wiki spaces for groups to produce content together. Wikia is developing a search engine, using Wiki technology with various ties into Wikipedia. There has been much comment on the fact that Wikia seems to be using the freely provided work of volunteers to power a project intended to make money for Wikia.
A great source of information, opinion and gossip about Wikipedia, Wikia and the search project is Seth Finkelstein’s Infothought blog. You don’t have to agree with everything he says, but his dissident viewpoint is often refreshing. I recommend you subscribe.
Just a quickie, this: when you are assigning tags to a piece of online content, how do you prefer to segregate different items on the list:
Would be interesting to know people’s thoughts.
It’s my birthday today, I am now in my 30th year. 29 years old! Hopefully this won’t mean lots of pontificating over the next 12 months about what I have achieved, and what I am going to do with myself in the future.
Anyway, I had some lovely gifts, including a top selection of dead tree web 2.0 reading material:
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| The Future of the Internet Johnathan Zittrain |
Everything is Miscellaneous David Weinberger |
Groundswell Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff |
Plenty to get my teeth into there.
I also got lots of lovely birthday well-wishes via Twitter and Facebook – so thanks to everyone for that. Best of all though was this from Paul Caplan via Flickr:
Inspired a little by Jeremy’s post on his blog’s first birthday, I thought I might have a little dig into the numbers for this blog. It’s only been going since November 2006, so about six months and frankly was going nowhere until barcampukgovweb mania gave it a bit of a bigger profile, which then was further extended in the wake of the Civil Surf affair. Anyhow, here’s the facts:
I love the way that the social web creates connections between people, and allows us to pass those connections on to those that we think might be interested.
I had a great chat today with a guy called Peter Haine (note the ‘e’ – it’s not him). I first came across Peter because he had posted in the forum on the Improvement & Development Agency‘s website, asking for feedback from people about how they have found success or otherwise in online communities. A fascinating topic, and even better, Peter is based at the Techno Centre in Coventry, just round the corner from where I work.
Peter works at the Applied Research Centre for eWorking, part of Coventry University, and as a result the office in which he works is chock full of neat little gadgets to make working outside the office easier: digital pens, laser keyboard things, ludicrously tiny keyboards. As a gadget-freak, it was a kind of heaven for me.
The research project into online communities that Peter is currently engaged in is funded by JISC, through their Emerge programme. The report is coming through shortly, and I am really looking forward to reading it. Whilst there is a real determination in both the private and public sectors to try and engage with communities and to take a community based approach to increasing participation, engagement and brand loyalty, there isn’t, as far as I am aware, much in the way of research into both how effective it actually and and how that effectiveness can be achieved. Hopefully this work will help start this process develop.
Peter did let me into a couple of points that he had discovered from his research. He did admit that some of it might seem obvious – but of course that doesn’t make it invalid nor does it mean people always remember to do it!
So, Peter gave me plenty of useful, interesting information. What I gave him, hopefully, was the benefit of some of my connections, most notably Steve Dale and Ed Mitchell, who I later introduced to Peter in a couple of emails. Hopefully they can help Peter, and him them, in the future.
The Online Information conference is coming up again in December, and having attended it last year, I was determined to actually present something this time around.
David Wilcox and I have been talking a great deal in recent times about the ideas around ‘organisation lite’ – using social tools, whether on or offline, to help organisations get it right in terms of platforms, roles and worldviews. We thought this would make an excellent topic for a joint presentation.
So, we’ll be talking Shirky, Leadbeater et al, with plenty of real life examples and case studies.
So far, so pretty normal. But we want to try and walk the talk ourselves, and so we are developing our submission, paper and presentation out in the open on a blog. We’ve been doing bits and pieces on there already, but with a week to go till the submissions have to be in, we need to get this out and get others involved.
So, please visit the blog and leave feedback, suggestions and examples of stuff we might be able to use. As we write bits of the paper and develop the presentation, we will be publishing them on the blog for folk to comment on and, hopefully, improve. Everyone involved will, of course, get credit, and we’ll be publishing the finished stuff under Creative Commons, so hopefully everyone will be able to benefit.
This weekend there is a really exciting event going on at the Bargehouse in London – it’s simply called Shine.
For three days, The Bargehouse at the heart of London’s Southbank will host a mash-up gathering, an ‘Un’Conference that will invigorate your thinking and give you the practical help to advance your business, whatever stage you’re at.
Long presentations, boring speeches and being trapped in closed rooms are out. Peer-to-peer exchanges, info-snacking and flexible sessions are in.
The content is contributed by participants, and there is no compulsory programme. Make your own event.
Sounds good to me.
Sadly I won’t be able to make it though – I already had a load of fun stuff planned as it’s my birthday on Sunday – but I’ll be getting involved at a distance through the social reporting blog that has been set up by David Wilcox, Nick Temple and Paul Henderson.
They will be posting blog entries, videos, photos and other media on the site, which also aggregates bits on content in the sidebar, like del.icio.us links and twitter posts via hashtags.
All of this can only be brought together with a bit of forward planning with regard to agreeing on a common tag, which for this event is shine2008, perhaps unsurprisingly.
There is also a Qik event page, where you can have the chance to watch some live video streaming from a mobile phone.
Jon Bounds has come up with another brilliant idea – using the ‘people powered customer support’ site GetSatisfaction to create a community around the services provided by Birmingham City Council.
So, I thought, could this work for a local council? Imagine time saved by council officials if knowledgeable citizens helped answer questions, imagine the resources available (once someone had explained how to apply for a licence, the information would be there for everyone), imagine a monolithic body “joining the conversation”.
Rather than deciding to attempt to persuade my local council (Birmingham City Council – one of the largest in the UK) that this would be a good idea, I discovered that – as the site is “a space for an open conversation between you and other people with interests and passions in this organization.” – anyone can set a company page up. So I have.
It ill be interesting to see whether the City Council gets involved. I guess it is like a Fix My Street but for all Council services. Might just have to make one for my local council in Kettering…
My second post has appeared at the DC10plus blog, on some of the other, non-video elements of our social reporting experiment at the Digital Inclusion conference:
By using tags in this way, it means that anyone can publish content and have it associated with an event or organisation. An alternative would be to create an account to upload content to on each service, but that limits participation only to those with access to that account. By using tags, everyone can get involved…
So, we have put these building blocks in place for the conference, but they are now there to be used forever. Let’s see what the community can make of them.
Sadly the UK Youth Engagement Barcamp, planned for the 17th May, has been postponed, due to a lack of venue. This is a shame as I was really looking forward to what was bound to be a cracking event, but with a bit more time to plan and figure things out, it should be even better.
The other upshot of this is that with the 17th now free, I could make MediaCamp Bucks, being held at New University Buckinghamshire, which looks pretty exciting. Thanks to Paul Henderson for pointing it out.
John Naughton links to an event taking place in Cambridge on 19th May:
Nick Davies, a well-known and award-winning investigative journalist, has recently published Flat Earth News, a controversial and highly-critical analysis of the British news media in which he argues that the business of truth has been “slowly subverted by the mass production of ignorance”. The book examines national news stories which, Davies argues, “turn out to be pseudo events manufactured by the PR industry and the global news stories which prove to be fiction generated by a new machinery of international propaganda.” With the help of researchers from Cardiff University, who ran a detailed analysis of the contents and sources for our daily news, Davies found that “most reporters most of the time are not allowed to dig up stories or check their facts”, leading him to describe UK journalism as “a profession corrupted at the core”. In the book, he also presents a new model for understanding news.
I’ll be there – anyone else?
Having an iPhone has really liberated me in term of the way that I use Flickr. This would be true of any phone with decent internet connectivity, and indeed there are plenty of handsets out there with better camera functionality than the iPhone. But the ability to easily take a picture and upload it to Flickr via email in a matter of seconds is fantastic – like this, which I took in Chipping Norton yesterday:
This has led me to have a bit of a wonder about Flickr and where the value of it lies. One thing Flickr does brilliantly is to create a community of photographers, from amateurs through to seasoned professionals, who discuss one another’s photos and chat about lenses, resolutions and whatnot.
But Flickr has another community too – people out on the streets with cameraphones, who don’t really care about the angles of the shots they are taking, wh just want to capture the moment and share it online. Such users can easily find themselves at the forefront of important events, thrust into the role of citizen journalist.
These two communities exist side-by-side rather well, despite the fact that they are using the same service for quite different purposes. Which is more important to Flickr, I wonder – and which to society?