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Policing 2.0: The Citizen and Social Media

While Andrew was so marvelously blogging Government 2010 last Thursday, I was at an event organised by the National Police Improvement Agency, giving a presentation which was an overview of web 2.0 and what it means for public sector services like the Police.

Here are my slides:

Also talking at the event were Will from Talk About Local, Sarah and Lauren from the excellent MyPolice (Sarah wrote a guest post here on DavePress about the project a while ago) and Nick from COI; along with several great representatives from the Policing world who talked about the stuff they are doing in the real world, with blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and even running virtual local meetings with CoverItLive. Inspiring stuff.

Check out all the tweets from the event here.

Massive props to Nick Keane for getting this going. With any first events of a type, the main thing to do is to whip up enthusiasm, and get people talking. Nick achieved that today, and I’m excited about whatever comes next.

Zoho Discussions

You may not have heard of Zoho, but they are one of the leading providers of cloud-based applications on the web. If you are looking for an alternative to the likes of Google Docs, you might not go too far wrong with Zoho.

They have just released a new service, called Discussions which allows you to run internal or external discussion forums, and includes loads of functionality like rating posts, creating idea style forums – a bit like UserVoice or IdeaScale – and a bunch of other stuff.

Well worth looking into, and this video explains more:

It isn’t just government…

…that is struggling with some of this stuff.

Take a look at Phil Bradley’s marvellous post, railing against the attitudes of CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals):

The next section really did make my jaw drop. “In terms of “official” activity, cyber life is just like real like (sic) – if it happens in a CILIP-sanctioned space, it’s official; if it happens down the pub or in someone else’s space, it isn’t.” This is a classic ‘ownership’ issue – if we say it’s real then it’s real, and if we say it isn’t real, then it’s not. If I’m in a CILIP sanctioned space (whatever that is!) do my words and arguments take on more meaning than if I’m not? Or perhaps I need to have an official CILIP representative to add some gravitas to my comments? We don’t live in a world when the organization or PR department can control the message any longer – things have moved on, and the webpage/site, while important, is no longer the sole place in which activity can take place.

Looks like another good example for David’s (and others) membership project.

Online social media surgery

I love the social media surgery concept, which was pioneered by Pete Ashton in Birmingham, used by me at UK Youth Online and then turned into something amazing by Pete, Nick and others in Birmingham.

I think there is a lot of value in having an online equivalent, just a place where people can ask questions about this stuff and hopefully get some answers from anyone who is browsing at the time. So I have started to build something.

It’s is very much early days, but the prototype site is at socialmediasurgery.com. It’s (obviously) built in Drupal, and as far as I have got so far is repurposing the blog function to act as questions, and comments as answers. Sophisticated it ain’t.

You can add a profile with some details of who you are in it, which might help you get the answers you need, or decide whether you trust the people providing them. There is also a simple rating system in place for answers, so if a response has one star it might well be worth taking with a pinch of social media salt.

Beyond changing a few colours, I haven’t got near to theming the site, I thought it far better to get the features in first. So if it looks like the default Drupal theme, it is. I will get round to changing it at some point.

Other stuff I want to get in:

  • Make the voting system more sophisticated for answers, so the top rated ones float to the top, say, or at least are displayed in a sidebar somewhere
  • Have some kind of karma system, so people who provide well rated answers get some kind of authority rating
  • Ability for users to mark a question as something they are also having problems with

…and probably loads of other stuff too.

So that’s it really. Please let me have any feedback or suggestions, but otherwise, let people who might benefit from the site know about it, and of course do register yourselves in case you can help someone, or get some help yourself…

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