DavePress

The Economist has published an interesting article on “Why business succeeds on the web and government mostly fails”:

Why is government unable to reap the same benefits as business, which uses technology to lower costs, please customers and raise profits? The three main reasons are lack of competitive pressure, a tendency to reinvent the wheel and a focus on technology rather than organisation.

…

That reflects another problem. In the private sector, tight budgets for information technology spark innovation. But bureaucrats are suckers for overpriced, overpromised and overengineered systems. The contrast is all the sharper given some of the successes shown by those using open-source software: the District of Columbia, for example, has junked its servers and proprietary software in favour of the standard package of applications offered and hosted by Google.

Hmmm. Thanks to John Naughton for the tip.

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.

For Immediate Release is one of my favourite podcasts, which has Shel Holtz, Neville Hobson and a host of other contributors talking social media, web 2.0 and how it affects public relations and business communications. It’s good stuff.

Yesterday, Neville needed someone to step in to fill a few minutes, so I stepped up to the plate and spoke about barcampukgovweb. Neville has been very sweet and praised my efforts, but I think he might just be trying to make me feel better Seriously, though, it was real honour to be a part of the show.

Anyway, you can download the episode here. I come in at about 16 minutes. I’d really like some feedback, as online audio is something I would like to do more of in the future. In other words, see this as your chance to stop me.

I didn’t get on very well with YouTube, but have managed to get the Pageflakes screencast on my blip.tv channel.

*** VIDEO DELETED BECAUSE IT WAS BORKED! ***

An interesting point made by Tom Steinberg of MySociety at barcampukgovweb was when he was asked about the best platform to use to operate an online working group. An example of a working group like this could be those who attended the barcamp - how could they manage their interactions online in the future?

Tom’s response was that the mailing list was the best way for a group of people to communicate online, and so for the barcampers, the best thing to do would be to stick with the Google Group already created (by me, heh heh). I chipped in at this point with my theory as to why email lists seem to work well, especially with government types. It’s because email is work, and the web is not work. People are now so used to working through their email, that they are quite happy for it to be used for a number of purposes, whether it be news alerts (more popular than RSS feeds) or community interactions (more popular than social networks).

There are problems with email lists though, especially for community based collaborative efforts. Scalability is a major issue, with only 25-30 regular contributors being feasible on a list. The second is when individual work streams start to develop, which some list subscribers just aren’t interested in. Thirdly, you can’t work collaboratively on documents, and at that point additional services have to start to be used.

Lloyd Davis has started to put up the video he took on his blip.tv channel. I’ll repost them here as I come across them. Here Lloyd talks to Rob McKinnon.

I think this is the first video from the barcampukgovweb to get online - David Wilcox chatting to organiser Jeremy Gould.

Lloyd Davies gave a great introduction to Seesmic as one of his sessions at the barcamp, and I was chuffed when he let me have an invite to the service. Now, I have done nothing with video on the web, yet, and thought that maybe getting into this cool new service would kick start me.

So what’s Seesmic? Well, it’s to YouTube what Twitter is to WordPress. Kind of the same but smaller and shorter.

It’s got another thing in common with Twitter - it’s flakey as hell.

Lloyd warned me that the interface (a gigantic job lot of Flash) is crap, but that didn’t really prepare me for how woeful it is. I record my first embarrassing attempt at a video (apologies for the poor sound, I need to sort out my webcam settings) this morning, and now, nearly 12 hours later, it still hasn’t appeared in the ‘My Videos’ page, and the people I set as folk I want to follow still don’t appear either.

But I am sticking with it for now, and will try and get into the habit of regularly putting content up on Seesmic. It might even encourage me to start adding some more traditional video content to this blog. We’ll see.

This is probably going to be the first post of many as I try and get my head around the barcamp, what it all meant, and what happens now. The latter is the most important, I feel.

The day went well, everyone got along famously and it was brilliant - and worth the train fare - just to meet some really cool people for the first time, like Jeremy Gould, Lloyd Davies, David Wilcox, Jenny Brown, Tim Davies, and (finally!) Simon Dickson - who is, as I expected, a real livewire and a truly top guy. I also got to catch up with Steve Dale - always a joy - and Nick Booth, who is planning the next meeting of the Birmingham Social Media Club, as I think it is now going to be called. What was interesting was that this group of folk got on very well, and a germ of an idea was floating about with regard to meeting up more regularly, working more collaboratively to try and push forward our shared agenda, which is to get the public sector using the web properly.

One thing I am pleased with is the Pageflakes page I put together, which seems to have done a good job of pulling together the outputs from the day - photos on flickr (this one is of Steve Dale talking CoPs), for example, and blog posts are popping up in the Google Blog Search and Technorati feeds. Cool. Perhaps this is the future of distributed online communities: use the tools you are comfortable with and build the community through common tags and RSS feeds. Why should I have to write a blog post about the barcamp, for example, on any platform other than my own blog? I don’t want or need another account, or site to maintain - just let me use the one I already have in a social way.

Two questions popped into my head during the day though. Neither were answered - which is perhaps not surprising and not necessarily a bad thing - but nor were they asked, which might be a bigger issue. Firstly: what’s the big idea? Where are we going with this? What do we want out of it? Secondly: what are we actually going to do?

There is talk of a new ‘Digital People’ project, involving those inside gov as well as those outside who have services and skills to offer, which may help to take the agenda forward. It should certainly cement the relationships which have begun to be built at the barcamp. But what’s the endgame here? What’s the point? Consultation is certainly a possibility, and perhaps political engagement too. But we need a clear idea of what we want to achieve before we can even begin to think about how that might happen.

Here are some posts I have spotted so far following the event: Tim Davies, Feargal Hogan… more to be added as they emerge.

While I was in the customised search mood, I thought it might be useful to have one for the upcoming barcampukgovweb. Click the logo below to jump to it.