DavePress

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!

• Purely online communities are unlikely to succeed - you need some kind of face-to-face meetings to build a sense of belonging and trust in other community members
• Communities need a defined sense of purpose and a way of measuring achievement of that purpose
• Active facilitation is required in seeding discussions, getting folk involved and keeping things on the right track
• Nobody is satisfied with the tools they have available!
• Barriers to entry must be as low as possible. Choose the most basic tool you can get away with - people may be happy to give up their time to take part in a community, but not if they have to spend hours learning the platform
• Payback - what’s in it for the community members? Whether financial, reputational or whatever, there needs to be something positive that those involved can get - even if it’s just a warm fuzzy feeling inside

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.

Thought I might post an update on my efforts at establishing a social media group in Kettering, Northants. Having been subscribed to various feeds searching for Kettering based content, which mainly produced details of various car boot sales in the area, I might finally be getting somewhere.

A couple of guys have been posting some great photos to Flickr, which have been tagged as Kettering, and with a bit of digging, it’s definitely the one near me, rather than in the States!

This is a clear issue - the tag ‘kettering’ is too vague, and maybe something like ketteringuk or ketteringnorthants needs to be used to ensure it’s unique. Of course, this sort of thing can’t be promoted until people start coming together.

So, I have sent a flickr mail to these guys seeing if they are interested in maybe a pub meet or a photo walk. Hopefully they won’t think I am being too forward

Jon Bounds has put together a nice little site for guiding people around Birmingham. It’s wiki based, so anyone can get involved, and there is some nice Google Maps action going on there too. There’s quite a big group of social media savvy folk gathering in Brum, thanks to Nick Booth’s Birmingham Bloggers meetups, and hopefully this group of people will be able to fill the site up with some great content. It is also the latest in a line of useful tools being built around Birmingham in the social web space - see BirminghamBloggers (put together by Paul Bradshaw) for example.

I attended the first Birmingham Bloggers meet but haven’t made one since - mainly because I have been tied up with other stuff, but its fair to say that I struggled to feel like I really belonged there. I work in Coventry, down the road from Brum, but live close to Kettering in Northamptonshire. What struck me at the meet was how strong a sense of geographical belonging was evident. It’s wonderful, but meant I kind of felt a bit excluded.

I’ve been thinking over the last week or so about how one can create local groups around topics of interest, and how this can tie in, or learn from, initiatives like Birmingham Bloggers, the Membership Project and the Tuttle Club.

I have no idea whether there is any appetite for any kind of social media meet in Kettering. I’ve looked around, and there is a Flickr group or two for Northamptonshire; and a county based Linux Users Group, within which there may well be a few bloggers. Perhaps something based on a larger area is more appropriate for less urban areas?

I’ve set up a few feeds to check for Kettering popping up in Flickr, Google Blog Search, del.icio.us and Technorati - it will be interesting to see exactly what starts to appear. Can anyone think of other ways of monitoring for this kind of stuff?

It doesn’t help that the local paper doesn’t provide an RSS feed; and while the borough Council does, it doesn’t actually work (at least for me, anyway).

So what are some of the things that might be needed to form a community around social media in a local context? Firstly a common tag which can be used to identify content, whether blog posts, photos in flickr, video on youtube, del.icio.us links etc. This has to be right and everyone clear on what the tag is - if people start using different tags then it’s going to be difficult to keep track of stuff. It’s probably also worthwhile created a hashtag for Twitter and other stuff like that - even if people aren’t using it straight away, it will be useful to have in place for the future.

The common tag is really the starting point of the community, because people can use it to follow conversations with their RSS readers. The second step is to create a hub where a lot of this content can be aggregated in one place. The easiest way of doing this is with a public personalised start page like those at Netvibes or Pageflakes. This gives some centre to the community, a single place for people to go and find out what the latest is.

Hopefully by this time people are talking to each other by leaving comments on blogs and other mediums, but the conversation is likely to be spread about and it might be difficult for people to feel completely involved. It’s probably time to arrange a face to face meeting, whether a few drinks in the pub or a photo  walk if there are lots of flickr fans about. How can this be organised though? It’s time for something to be built: maybe a wiki, or a Google Group mailing list or just a space on a social network that everyone is on. The latter is good because you can pick up new members easily, but not everyone will be on that network. I wonder, though, if putting this communication channel together should come earlier?

If the group starts to have some interesting discussions that are developing, it might be worth putting together a group blog as a focal point for others. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a blog about the group itself but about the issues that the group is interested in. As the group matures and other projects get started other stuff can be developed to meet the need, whether it be wikis or other collaborative environments like Basecamp.

So, the things to do to establish a local social media community (according to me) are:

• Establish tags
• Aggregate content
• Communicate
• Meet
• Develop

I might try and put this into effect and see who else is about in Kettering or Northamptonshire who digs this stuff. If you pick up this post somehow and are interested, let me know.

Otherwise, what other thoughts do folk have on using social media to form local groups?

Tom Watson posted up his speech announcing the Power of Information Task Force on his blog yesterday and it contained some really good stuff. I guess that those who want to can snicker about the notion of creating a task force to promote innovation (shouldn’t we be organising without organisations?), but I’m glad that there will be some folk looking into this stuff, and it would be nice if they do so in an open and collaborative way.

Only last week, the Prime Minister became the first head of Government in Europe to launch his own channel on Twitter, which I can tell you from experience, is extremely useful to his ministers at least.

But we need to make it easier for others too.

Hazel Blears with be leading this agenda when her department will address this in a White Paper on engagement in the summer.

But I want to take the Power of Information agenda further and do it faster. So today I am announcing the establishment of the Power of Information Taskforce. I’m pleased to say that Richard Allan has agreed to Chair the Taskforce. Richard has a vast breadth of knowledge in this field. He’s also an all round good guy and I know he will help us provide clarity to government departments as they contend with the power of information agenda.

Most interesting for me were the bits that focused on community engagement and participation. Let’s have a look at one or two now.

And in the week where the digital world went crazy over Mystarbucksidea.com (I’ve already voted for free Wifi), NHS choices launched a blog about diabetes, bringing together the people who treat the illness and the people who receive treatment. It’s a brilliant ideas and hopefully will foster a new information community who can work together to improve things.

I was diagnosed a type 1 diabetic about a year ago, so have quite an interest in this. I was 27 when I was diagnosed, which is a funny age I think, and led to it taking quite a while for the doctors to figure out if I was type 1 (meaning injections) or type 2 (meaning I had to eat less). I still haven’t got to grips with it yet: I’m supposed to inject myself four times a day but manage it twice at best, largely with the result that I feel pretty crap all the time. Last summer I was hospitalised twice and suffered a crippling bout of depression. I guess I am exactly the sort of person that this blog is supposed to be reaching out to: I’ve got the disease, I’m crap at dealing with it, and I like blogs. I hadn’t heard about it though, which renders it pretty useless. Still, now I do, thanks to Tom, I’ll engage with it, leave a comment or two and see what happens. The blog idea is nice, but I wonder whether more of a social network type approach would be better - linking me up with other diabetics who have been through similar issues.

My officials have been working up draft guidance on how public servants can use social media. And the Power of Information Report made a series of recommendations about this too.

I want the taskforce to ensure that the COI and Cabinet Office produce a set of guidelines that adheres to the letter of the law when it comes to the civil service code but also lives within the spirit of the age. I’ll be putting some very draft proposals to the taskforce to consider later this week.

Here, here. I wrote in the wake of the Civil Sef affair that Public servants should be blogging, or engaging through other social networking tools. Public servants are too often characterised as faceless bureaucrats and the more that can be done to dissuade people from that notion, the better. But to get more public sector workers being open, they need to feel safe to do so, and sensible policies will help to do that.

We will also look at, and learn from, the way people are communicating with each other.

The 19th century co-operative movements had their roots in people pooling resources to make, buy or distribute physical goods. Modern online communities are the new co-operatives.

This is a point I have been meaning to blog about for some time: the relationship between online collaborative communities and the co-operative movement. The point is that while the tools are new, the relationships aren’t, and people have been working together to tackle problems since the year dot. What the tools do is make the process easier and more transparent and because they also make it easier to do without forming institutions or organisations, they also remove some of the political undercurrents too. More needs to be written on this, I think.

And when we know we get a delivery channel right we should use the ‘collaboration’ part of Ed’s vision to best effect, to gain, social leverage, as Professor Shirky would say.

Let me use a recent story to illustrate this point. I recently registered my local Labour Party with groupsnearyou.com. This is a new site provided by the MySociety people. It’s a site for people who run small scale community focused groups.

Through the site, I found West Bromwich Freecycle.

I’m the Member of Parliament for West Bromwich East and I didn’t know about an important recycling initiative going on in my own patch. This information now means that a bag load of clothing for a small child and a habitat sofa are about given a second chance to give pleasure.

Nice example, not least because of the use of an existing network to connect with others. The delivery channel - in this case the connecting of local groups - does not therefore need to be created by the government, or the Labour Party, rather by interested folk, doing things in an open and collaborative way like MySociety does.  This taps into another long running question of mine which asks whose responsibility is it to push for improvements in civic life using social tools? Is it the government, at whatever level? Is it organisations like MySociety? Or is it every individual with a laptop and a broadband connection? I am beginning to suspect the answer is the latter - individuals pushing the boundaries and demonstrating where the value is, with the institutions following up once the point has been proved. Organisations like MySociety can help but they aren’t necessarily needed

Overall, a great speech to hear from a cabinet minister. I look forward to seeing what happens next.

OurPress is a project I have been working on for aaaages, which stalled quite badly for a while. Essentially, the idea emerged in a discussion with Nick Booth in the comments of a blog post of his. We were talking about the paucity of options available to community groups to easily create open, social websites. At first I thought of Drupal, but soon moved on from there.
I had the idea of setting something up with the multi-user version of WordPress, called WordPressµ, which is what is used to run WordPress.com. Sites could be created either as blogs, or as static sites using WordPress pages. Help and guidance would be provided in getting stuff up and running, and customisation of templates would be possible, with the results being shared among the rest of the users too. I gave the idea the name OurPress, and was shocked to find the .org was still available. I snaffled it right away, as well as a few of the .whatever variants.

Then the project pretty much stalled, for two reasons. One, I forgot about it (probably because of Facebook or Twitter or something equally shiny); and two because I couldn’t find anywhere decent to host it. The trouble was that WordPressµ demands that you have something called ‘wildcard DNS’ to be able to create blogs at addresses like myblog.ourpress.org (for example). The other option is to have them at ourpress.org/myblog but problems can be created with static pages having the same name as blogs and the whole thing getting confused.

However, I recently returned to looking at the project, after a chat with Shane McCracken, and in my search for a host, I hit upon gold, or rather orange, in the form of A Small Orange. ASO are a bunch of cool guys in the US who happily host pretty much anything. They were quite happy to set up the wildcard DNS for me and when I asked if I could integrate with Google Apps, someone went ahead and amended all my MX records for me! Ace stuff!

Here’s the deal with the Google Apps: I get to have 200 accounts for free, so I can pretty much offer everyone who has an OurPress blog a free email account which will be blogname@ourpress.org. When I create the email account I will also setup an OurPress branded iGoogle page which will track web responses to the blog in question, so people have that important element set up even if they haven’t heard of RSS themselves before. Also, using Sites, I will give them access to a tonne of documentation about using the OurPress platform and blogging, social media etc.

Essentially, OurPress will be a completely contained and functional online platform to run community websites. And it’ll be free.

So who might want to use OurPress?

• Community groups, whether based around a club or a village without any resources to put into developing a website
• Individuals who want to start a site to create a community online
• People who want to develop a project to help communities or civic life in general
• Individuals who want to blog about their work within the community
• Small charitable or not-for-profit organisations or projects that don’t want to invest in their own domain, hosting etc just yet
• Local politicians, perhaps

The advantages of OurPress over, say, WordPress.com include:

• Support in setup and running from me and anyone else who fancies getting involved (hint, hint)
• The Google Apps integration
• Folk will know that it is a ’safe’ platform with no content hosted that will possibly reflect badly on them/their organisation
• The creation of a community around all those on the platform
• No adverts anywhere (and there are ads on WordPress.com, folks)

So where am I up to? I’ve installed WordPressµ and that’s about it. I need to get a look ‘n’ feel sorted for the homepage and arrange how the sign-up process will work for new blogs, but other than that, I am more or less there. Any comments or suggestions gratefully received!

Simon Dickson pointed me to a post on the Telegraph’s Three Line Whip blog about the IDeA Communities of Practice platform:

These ‘Communities of Practice’ are an attempt, according to their creators, to harness the power of social networking to share problems, ideas and expertise.

It seems like a worthy idea - but is still fundamentally quite cautious. As I pointed out this weekend in a piece for ConservativeHome, government is still reluctant to let the people see behind the curtain. The ‘Communities of Practice’ are closed shops, designed to let those in the biz talk to each other without disruptive elements intruding…

But there is a more radical view, which is that government, and its personnel, do not have a monopoly of good ideas - and that opening up policy-making will make for better policy and a more engaged public. I go over the pros and cons in the final section of my recent pamphlet for the Centre for Policy Studies, but would be interested to get an idea as to whether people on this site think policy should be left to the experts. I suspect I know what the answer will be…

A predictable reaction possibly. But in reality, it isn’t a closed shop. Just by connecting all those in local government alone there would be a huge number of different voices and perspectives involved. But there are also people from across the public sector, not to mention Councillors and people who work for the sector as independent consultants.

It would be interesting to find out what would happen if Joe Public tried to join. I suspect they would be engaged with and not turned away. How interested are folk in the minutiae of local government working practices? Maybe there should be something similar created to connect people with an interest in local politics, to help them work together and engage with their local authorities.

Worse, though is in the comments, where one particularly moronic contributor states:

…except for the fact that this is funded by the long-suffering taxpayer. Remember that those that govern despise the governed and resent any intrusion into their cosy unproductive world.

There is no need to cut essential services to fund tax cuts - there are hundreds of millions to be saved by abolishing these glorified social clubs.

Sigh. There’s actually a multitude of examples of where this technology has saved money - travel can be avoided by collaborating online, for example. But this sort of vile attitude towards public servants probably isn’t worth even spending the time to argue with.

I’m the (or rather now, ‘a’, but more on that later) facilitator at an online community of practice for social media and online collaboration using the Communities of Practice platform put together by Steve Dale at the Improvement and Development Agency. It’s ostensibly for local government, but I like to operate a big tent, and so anyone with a public sector interest can come along.

Yesterday we ran our first face-to-face meeting ludicrously entitled the ‘Big Day Out’. Given that it was held where I work, at the LSC National Office in Coventry, it wasn’t much of a day out for me, but hey! who cares. I took a few photos, some of which are below, the rest here.

The day ran pretty well, starting with a short and probably quite boring introduction from me:

We then moved onto more interesting stuff, notably chats from Hadley Beeman and Shane McCracken on what they have been up to recently.

(That’s Hadley, by the way. Not Shane.)

Later on we played a little game, a cut-down version of David Wilcox’s Social Media Game - although as Tim Davies pointed out mine is best overall because the cards are laminated. Two teams set each other scenarios which they had to solve using different social media and web 2.0 tools.

I think it was a useful exercise as everyone got to learn something about a web service they didn’t know existed before.

Next up was Steve Dale, chatting to us about the latest developments tech-wise on the CoP platform. There’s going to be some really interesting new features added, which will at the very least make facilitating the communities an awful lot easier.

Finally we had a little chat about the future of the Community, what we could do to improve participation and what we got out of it all. Michael Norton of the IDeA had a wicked-cool idea about setting group social media challenges, making us go out and try new stuff, and reporting back on our findings. One is already under way on YouTube. Nice one!

Throughout the day, the ever resourceful Carl Letman was doing a great job of videoing some of the action, and soon I should be able to post some highlights up here. If you need any video work doing, whether on or offline, Carl really is your man.

I also requested a bit of help of the facilitation side, and thankfully I got a great response from Michael, Hadley, Steve and Carl. So hopefully we should be able to keep the Community active and ensure that everyone gets the support they need.

What was also nice was that everyone said they would like to do it again. Hopefully if the word gets out that it was a fun day, then more folk might be encouraged to come along. Noel Hatch of Kent County Council has already offered to host, and suggested we could run it virtually in parallel using Second Life. He’s mad. Let’s do it.

Jeremiah Owyang posts about a report he has written for Forrester. The executive summary is all we really need:

To host a successful community, think of it as you would product development: Start by focusing on objectives, chart a road map, assemble the right team, and plan to be flexible. Then build your success by launching the community with the backing of your most enthusiastic customers and staying engaged as the community grows. Above all, remember that control is in the hands of the members, so put their needs first, build trust, and become an active part of the community.

Good stuff. Jeremiah’s focus is in the use companies can make of communities in order to sell stuff. But the principles can easily be applied to public sector organisations that provide services to the wider community. Get those with an active interest in the same (online) space and make them feel involved and useful.

Had a great meeting today with two of my fellow facilitators at the Community of Practice for Knowledge Management in the Public Sector (don’t worry, we’re working on the name). The community has been running for a little while now and has had two successful real-life meetings. For some reason though, the connections haven’t continued online, and the web based CoP has been very slow.

This brings to the fore the very important issue of facilitation of online communities – whether social networks, collaborative environments like the CoPs, simple forums, blogs or wikis. Facilitation differs very much from the traditional online role of the moderator, which to my mind concentrates on the negatives like deleting nasty content and banning naughty users. Facilitators seek to engage people with the platform, using a number of techniques that can be both hi and lo-tech.

No discussion of communities and facilitation can go by without these two masterful posts from Ed Mitchell on the topics. Must-read stuff, as well as a great example of the quality writing that exists in the blogosphere.

Many of the objections to using social media and web 2.0 technology can be countered by having an effective facilitation strategy, backed up by having people in the facilitation role who know what they are doing. Stuff like lack of engagement, sites looking empty, failing to follow up on conversations etc.

Here’s some of the stuff I think facilitators oughtt be doing:

Firstly, the facilitator must encourage discussion on the platform. This can be through seeding discussion by adding background content and then asking a question to try and spark a conversation, for example.

Second, back-channels should be used to ensure the conversation is maintained. For instance, if someone you know who is very knowledgeable about a topic that is being discussed, but isn’t presently engaged in that discussion, then the facilitator should drop them an email or telephone call to get them involved.

Thirdly, the facilitator should be a guide to the platform being used - helping users find the most appropriate way of posting their content. This is especially true of a platform like that I was discussing today, where forums, blogs, wikis and document sharing are all possible, and only really the first and last on that list get used - I’m sure just because folk are used to them and not to some of the newer tools.

Fourth, get people meeting face to face. Facilitation is not just about the online, the offline is just as vital. Social networks are great for bringing people together and getting them to work together, but there is a definite trust element that’s missing until people actually get to meet each other. Facilitators need to be as comfortable introducing people to people face-to-face as they are online. It also helps to always have stuff like coloured post-it notes, sticky dots, glue sticks and magic markers to hand.

Fifth, figure out ways of using the technology to help people get the information they want. For example, hotseating is cool thing to do: find a person who is rather knowledgeable about a subject, get them to write a blog post about it, and then invite people to ask them questions in the comments. Make it a time limited thing, so there is some sense of urgency, and you’re away. Or here’s another: set the community a blogging challenge, where every member has to write a blog post along a common theme, maybe with a suitable prize for the best one. It’s a good way of generating content and getting people used to using the tools.

So there’s five, and I’m sure there are tonnes more.

Anyone?

The community that formed around the barcamp for uk gov web types (hence the name) has been working hard to start developing idea and connections that can start to have a real beneficial effect on the way that public services are using the web as a medium for communication and collaboration.

One of the ways this is working is through the Google Group, which is seeing some interesting discussions and some germs of top quality ideas are starting to emerge.

The trick is to capture these ideas and the various links and put them in a space where collaboration can start to happen. This can now be achieved using the GovHack wiki, set up by Adam McGreggor. A section for projects has been created, and once the discussions on the mailing list reach a point where it’s appropriate to do so, a page is created on the wiki to allow the ‘work’ to begin.

So, things are moving gradually, but at least they are moving. Mini-meets, like yesterday’s in a cafe at the House of Fraser store in Victoria, London, can only help as ideas are bandied about and possible solutions demonstrated. We need to ensure, though, that as much is documented as possible, so those that can’t engage face-to-face can still use the mailing list and the wiki to get involved.

I think it’s amazing that this is taking off in the way it has - fine, it’s incremental and evolutionary rather than there being any massive quick developments - but hey! maybe that’s just the British way. And there’s nowt wrong with that.