All Aboard the Great Yorkshire & Humber LocalGovCamp Train!
Departing from: The National Railway Museum in York (only 2hrs from London)
Departure date: Saturday 12 June 2010
For tickets and more information: www.localgovcamp-yh.co.uk
This first LocalGovCamp under the new Coalition Government will undoubtedly see some big issues debated, not least the future of local government itself.
The landscape has changed considerably since Dave organised the first event in Birmingham last June and our focus is now firmly on achieving more with less, or even less with less. So what of technology, social media, co-design and citizen participation? What about new ways of working enabled by technology and what of our digital future and vision?
If these questions are of interest, or you have some of your own, hop on the train and join in the debate in beautiful York. Bring an open mind, some passion and some ideas to share and explore. Bring a sense of fun too, it is a Saturday after all.
LocalGovCamp Yorkshire & Humber will also feature short parallel work streams for elected members on the use of social media, sessions being led by colleagues from Kirklees with input from Cllr Tim Cheetham (Barnsley), Cllr Simon Cooke (Bradford) and Ingrid Koehler (IDeA & Connected Councillor Programme).
If you work in local government perhaps you can ensure your Democratic Services colleagues inform your elected members of this opportunity.
The event is FREE for all to attend and as a bonus we’ll be having a World Cup themed after party to celebrate (we hope) victory for England in their first match!
You can book your tickets now: www.localgovcamp-yh.eventbrite.com
Twitter: @localgovcampYH and #LGCYH
UKGovCamp group: http://www.ukgovcamp.com/groups/yorkshire-and-the-humber-localgovcamp/
See you in York – WooooOOOoooWooooOOOooo!
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Dave says: Paul is a director of Learning Pool, and thus my boss. When he offers to contribute a post to this blog, I don’t have to say yes, but it kind of makes sense to do so. As well as being someone who knows how to run a great business, Paul also has an understanding of big IT that I simply don’t, thus he is much better placed to write about this than me!
Everyone knows that Learning Pool is all about collaboration, sharing and saving money.
Over the last three years it has also been all about growing a busy and successful business too.
While most of us at #teamlovely just want to meet customers, sell business and do interesting projects, someone has to make sure the lights stay on and that our growing team can continue to work efficiently, no matter where they were.
A few months ago I realised that at least some of this responsibility was mine. I was sitting in an airport (can’t remember which one) unable to connect to our exchange server.Frustrated, I called our tech team and asked them what was up. They fixed the immediate issue but reminded me that the server we were using was
- old;
- underspecified;
- overworked.
Some joviality along the lines of ‘it should see my diary and see what overworked really is!’ later, I received a quote to replace our internal systems with the latest that Microsoft and Dell had to offer.
The response left me running straight into the arms of Google!
We implemented Google Apps in around five weeks and are using the service for email and documents. In the next few weeks we’ll also be moving to Google Sites, from Sharepoint, having trialled this extensively and successfully.
While the project was pretty straightforward, there were a few things to consider that we would have thought should be just easy:
- How do you set up a LAN without an expensive piece of Microsoft kit and associated licencing? – Google have no good ideas about this so we’ve gone with a standard Windows Server workgroup (much to the displeasure of @ianmoran!);
- How do you deploy updates to each PC? – answer is that you don’t so you’re expecting all your users to be diligent about keeping their kit up to date;
- What about all that historical data? – there are a number of solutions for getting archived email data into the Google cloud. We found a real restriction with our upload speed which made this process a pain we could have done without.
And so to Google Apps…
The Good
- Excellent support. The guys at Google listened to what we wanted to achieve and then in a very matter of face way did it;
- You can save money. The total cost of ownership of a Google based approach is much lower than a traditional solution. We’ve spent around £6,000 on hardware and licenses. The alternative was a £35,000 project. While we will need to pay an annual subscription to Google, having to pay out less cash has been very welcome;
- Collaboration – Google docs just works. Several people can collaborate on a document across the net in real time;
- Google works offline – we didn’t really expect it to, but it does!
- No more Sharepoint – while I’m sure Sharepoint is a valuable and well built tool, it became the subject of intense hatred at Learning Pool over the last few years. I guess we didn’t invest enough in the initial set up and training. Although my experience is that Google Sites is far better in terms of its ability to enable collaboration.
The Bad
- Google is a work in progress. I can pretty much guarantee that if you see something you don’t like, the answer from Google will be “we’re fixing that”. On the one hand that makes me feel better about the approach we take at Learning Pool – I have no doubt some of our customers feel the same frustration. At least we know they are working on it I guess;
- Collaboration requires a Google account – I think this will be a seriously limiting factor in the long run, particularly as we work with organisations who are mainly public sector;
- We still use Outlook – much and all as we would love to get rid of this, we’re reliant on Outlook for integration with our CRM – something we just can’t live without. No doubt though that Google mail works best in the browser;
- Managing PCs on our ‘network’ is now pretty difficult – over time this could become a real overhead but we’re working on it as best we can for now;
- Google Spreadsheets – in my opinion this just doesn’t work right now – the functionality isn’t rich enough and its routinely too slow to use and so there’s no way we can leave Excel behind just yet;
- Google sites don’t really support hierarchy – this means that all your sites exist at the same level and you need to stitch it together with some html yourself;
- Search on Google sites isn’t security trimmed. If a user searches all sites they’ll get documents returned that they don’t have permission to. We did have a bit of a chuckle at how Google have mucked up the search function – they are working on it of course (release due in a few weeks!)
On the whole then I’d recommend Google Apps as a way forward for providing groupware for a small to medium sized enterprise like Learning Pool. We like the idea of software as a service and five weeks into the project, most things work just as well as before and some things work a lot better indeed.
Nice work Google (and the Learning Pool and Konnexion teams too of course!). Kenny, our Head of Tech, has written two posts covering the operational side of the big switch over on the LP blog.
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Dave says: Carl is a local government blogging legend, who works at Devon County Council as an Enterprise Architect. This post originally appeared on his blog, but he graciously allowed it to be published here, too.
Inspired by the excellent Joanne Jacobs at the recent Likeminds event in Exeter to think more about the role of games and game play in solving problems and creating solutions.
I started to think about how Government in general could be seen as a game so that we could not only engage people in the problems and challenges we all face but actually inspire them to be part of the solution and help make changes happen. In the lunchtime session that Joanne facilitated she spoke very passionately about the role of games and how we all play games all the time but just don’t realise it.
I kind of hit a blank wall as the big picture of Government is pretty boring, but the individual components that make it are actually interesting. So how do you start to get to a level of engagement and participation that inspires the average person on the street to want to get involved.
I then came across this excellent TED video of Game designer Jane McGonigal who spoke about harnessing the power of game mechanics to make a better world. Surely this is the stuff that Government innovators should be thinking about.
In the video she talks about “gamers” and the super powers they have developed and how these super powers can help us solve the worlds problems.
The 4 super powers that gamers have are:
Urgent Optimism – extreme self motivation – a desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success.
Social Fabric – We like people better when we play games with people – it requires trust that people will play by the same rules, value the same goal – this enables us to create stronger social relationships as a result
Blissful productivity – an average World of Warcraft gamer plays 22 hours a week: We are optimised as humans to work hard and if we could channel that productivity into solving real world problems what could we achieve?
Epic meaning – attached to an awe inspiring mission.
All this creates Super Empowered Hopeful Individuals – People who are individually capable of changing the world – but currently only online /virtual worlds
So what is the chance of Government creating a meaningful game that inspires people to get involved, help change the world around them and contribute positively to the social fabric around them – Hold on a minute, haven’t we got something that is supposed to do this = Democracy? The challenge we have to make engagement and participation more engaging not just to young people but to people in general is to start inviting people into the game and make the game more interesting to start with.
So some observations:
If people have “Urgent Optimism” then what are we doing to tap into that to help solve and tackle obstacles?
if people have a “Social Fabric” what we are we doing to build trust with them and do we play by the same rules and share the same goals?
If people have “Blissful Productivity” then what are we doing to mobilise and optimise the people around us in our communities to work hard at solving real world problems
If people can be inspired around “Epic Meaning” what meaning are we providing in our engagement and participation offering?
We should recognise that games are powerful in more ways than we can imagine, we need to think hard and fast about how we can develop the right kinds of games to engage people and to involve people in shaping their future and solving common problems
The video is 20 minutes but is well worth watching.
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This glossary of social media and digital engagement terms comes from a recent piece of my strategy work. It’s skewed towards the government sector, in terms of language and examples. Feel free to use any of this that might be useful for other purposes. Or to challenge my definitions. Or, perhaps, to add glaring things I’ve missed. There are probably no definitive answers to some of these, but I hope you find them interesting and thought-provoking.
Blog: Derived from “Web log” – originally a regularly-updated journal on which visitors (and the original author) could leave comments. Now generally used for a site (or section of a larger site) where text-based content can be created in the form of short articles, almost always open for comments to be posted. These comments may be subject to some degree of moderation.
Campaign site: Website created in association with a specific promotional campaign; usually for a defined period of time; may include facilities to receive user feedback and present an opportunity for engagement.
Commentable document: A facility for hosting a document under review, usually divided into manageable sections, and permitting comments to be left for the author – and to permit dialogue between commenters. Combines some of the features of a wiki for collaborative working, but retaining an initial document structure throughout. Has been used on a number of government policy documents made available for digital consultation. One tool that delivers this functionality (an implementation of WordPress) is Commentariat. e.g. http://interactive.bis.gov.uk/lowcarbon
Content-based networking sites: e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, TripAdvisor – sites based on content of a certain type (e.g. video, images, reviews) with a strong element of user feedback, user-generated content (UGC) and elements of social networking (e.g. ability to create groups, forums, favourites, peer-to-peer relationships etc.)
Crowdsourcing: The use of digital (or other) media to allow the contribution of information or ideas from a wide range of people, usually around a topic, a question, or a request for innovative suggestions.
Dashboard: a utility that searches and aggregates information from many channels across the internet, and displays it all in one place, in real time, for management, monitoring or consumption purposes. Example: www.netvibes.com/socialcare
Digital engagement: The use of interactive techniques to improve service delivery and information provision via digital media technology.
Email subscription: Although not ‘social’ in terms of community formation and peer-to-peer interaction, allowing users to register email addresses to receive personal(ised) updates represents a form of digital engagement. Digital tools build a two-way relationship: the user receiving content, and also experiencing some sense of being part of a community, even as information recipient.
Forum: Area for registered members to discuss specific topics. Can form part of a wider overall site. Characterised by a core user base making multiple contributions and often sharing relationships or culture. Forum content may or not be moderated.
Group: A type of forum generated by users within a social networking or similar type of site. Shares many of the characteristics of a forum, but can be more volatile. Members (who are a subset of the members of a larger form or social network) will typically interact for a shorter period of time, usually around a specific single issue. Creation of fan pages (or similar designations) also effectively forms a Group.
Metadata: Information about information. Often invisible to the user, metadata allows content to be classified, structured and sorted. Tags represent a use of metadata.
Microblogging: e.g. Twitter, Identi.ca, Yammer (the latter within corporate environments). Member communities sharing short message content, openly and by direct peer-to-peer message. Highly flexible in their use, and prone to rapid escalation of issues: creation of “a Twittermob”.
Moderation: Editorial judgement over or control of user-generated online content. Numerous varieties exist, from moderation by peers or by the site owner/author, to outsourced arrangements where professional moderators assess and process comments on a larger scale.
Post: To publish content to a blog, micro-blog, forum or website, either as a new topic or as a comment on existing content. Also, as a noun, to describe the content posted (synonymous with ‘blog post’, ‘forum post’ etc.).
Private social networking site: A social network intended for a specific community of interest. Offers similar features to an open social networking site, but almost always sets conditions and controls over entry and participation. E.g. sites set up using Ning.
User-generated content: Any content provided by users, rather than the owners of an online environment. May or may not be moderated (see above)
User feedback: A specific type of user-generated content: that created as a response to provided informational content. Can take the form of freeform text comments, ‘votes’, likes/dislikes, or more detailed survey-type information.
Social bookmarking: A method by which people can store, organize, search and share articles, blog posts and other information. There are many different libraries, each with their own bookmark, including Digg, de.lici.ous and Reddit. Increasingly, posting content links as tweets or to Facebook profiles provides a common form of bookmarking.
Social marketing: The use of marketing techniques to achieve desired social outcomes (e.g. behaviour change). May or may not involve the use of social media. Included here to avoid confusion with social media marketing.
Social media: Digital tools that permit people and organisations to interact freely with low (or no) barriers to entering a conversation. The nature of the relationships between social media users is often as important as the content they share – the ’social’ aspect is very important.
Social media marketing: The use of social media to promote a particular cause or product. May or may not have social marketing implications. Included here to avoid confusion with social marketing.
Social networking site: A website offering general-purpose networking features to all who may want to join. Facebook dominates the adult market; Bebo has a focus on a younger/teenage audience; MySpace is now focused on music/video content and may be regarded as a content-based networking site, albeit one with a high membership.
Tags: Keywords describing online information that allow other users to search for relevant information.
Twitter: The best known of the micro-blogging platforms. Users contribute short messages, either on the twitter.com website, or using a number of third-party ‘client’ applications: whatever the route, interaction happens in a consistent and open way. Terms include:
Tweet: to post content (short messages up to 140 characters long)
Re-tweet: to republish another’s post. Good for spreading messages widely, or adding commentary to them
Hashtags: words or phrases preceded by ‘#’. This allows them to be grouped together and easily searched.
Webchat: A structured discussion using instant messaging to a host, who then responds. Usually moderated.
Example: http://webchat.number10.gov.uk
Wiki: An open collaboration environment in which users may freely (or with some controls) create and modify content as a community. The best known example is Wikipedia, where an open community collaborates to create an encyclopaedia, but wikis can be used for tasks as varied as communal creation of a policy document, or managing the names and interests of attendees to an event.
Dave writes… Paul Clarke is a very nice man who is also very clever and good at lots of things. He blogs at honestlyreal where a version of this post previously appeared. You’ll find him on Twitter – @paul_clarke. He’ll also be coming to the Learning Pool conference on 12th May to take a few photos and join in the conversations.
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Alongside watching James Graham Gardner’s book on innovation develop online, I was reminded recently about the concept of ‘everyday innovation’ – making innovation something that we all do in our day jobs, rather than something mystical and abstract which is done by pointy-heads in research labs (and alternatively, as more than something as meaninglessly fluffy as a bit of random brainstorming).
In as much as the stuff my team does is ‘innovative’ in a low-key, process-oriented kind of way, I thought I’d describe how we go about it. There’s really not a great deal to it.
1. Gather stuff
Read lots about the work and experiences of people in similar fields to you (for me, government webbies), parallel fields (government non-webbies; webbies outside of government; supplier blogs; technology magazines) and totally different fields (random New York bloggers; lifehackers; science bloggers).
Use tools like Delicious, Instapaper and starred items/favourites in Twitter and Google Reader to keep track of interesting ideas, technologies and individuals. For example, I tag interesting Wordpress plug-ins, themes, projects and people so I can find them when I need them.
Go to events (like UK GovWeb Barcamp, TeaCamp, gov 2.0 conferences) and make time to talk to people who work in interesting fields, even if there’s not an immediate project on the table to work on. My first professional WordPress project, the commentable version of Innovation Nation, came out of a chance coffee with Glyn from Open Rights Group about their use of the tool. Of course, there’s a small risk of developing a reputation as a time-waster here, so be up front about your interest and whether you’re just interested or want specific help.
Play (briefly) with new tools you come across. Get a sense of whether they’re useful yet, whether they’re good value and how they might be used. Most tend to be free, after all, so try them for 10 minutes and see what you get out of them.
Bottom line: have plenty of links, tools and contacts floating around ready to use.
2. Connect things together in a new way
Take something you’ve gathered – maybe a tool, a contact or an approach – and see how it would fit into one of the projects that lands on your desk:
- Need to promote the minister’s speech: how about podcasting via Skype with help from JISC?
- Need to consult on a multidimensional policy document: how about publishing in WordPress using tags or commissioning a Plain English version?
- Need to widen reach of an event: try social reporting it using Ning and Audioboo
Build in analytics and measures to help you track the success or otherwise of the new approach – Google Analytics, Bit.ly stats, or some manual work to benchmark before and after mentions/downloads/perceptions and feedback from the people involved. When you’re innovating, it’s not just about the output – whether the process itself worked is a valuable learning too.
Think about the risks involved too and what you can do about them. What if it doesn’t work? (Fall back to the traditional way of doing it). What if we get overwhelmed with feedback? (Great problem to have! Anyway, in that unlikely event, there are people who can help) But it’s not accessible! (Do your best, and have good, accessible alternative content in place. If it takes off and you start using the approach regularly, you can make it more fully accessible in due course).
Bottom line: take a real world project, try doing it with a new tool or technique. See if it works better or worse than the normal way. Have answers to people who ask you about the risks involved.
3. Share it widely
On the face of it, this looks like the hardest part, in that projects that don’t work or seem risky are potential bad news stories that won’t do much for your credibility. Personally, I’ve hardly ever encountered resistance to talking about the things we’ve tried or negativity when I’ve done so, though to be honest I usually try to couch the less successful results in context of some positives too. Being human, I sometimes don’t bother writing – even though I should – about the most dismal failures. But without talking about your approach and its results, I’d argue you’re not really innovating – to do that, you have to provide something others can see, learn from and build on.
Blog and tweet about it. Take screenshots and present them as warts-and-all case studies at events. Volunteer to run seminars internally and externally to share your learnings. If you can, release what you’ve done in a form and with a licence others can re-use – especially if it’s code or a methodology. Sure, it takes time, but not only will others get something, you’ll benefit from the feedback and improvements people suggest.
Bottom line: make an effort to communicate what you did, how, and what you learned. Be frank and open, but above all, be shameless.
Steph works in digital communications in central government and blogs at http://blog.helpfultechnology.com
Photo credit: Eisenrah
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We’ll keep it *very* local so as to not get confused with UKGC10.
This will be an all-day event on (or around) 25 Feb in partnership with IDeA. Venue will be Central London. Exact date and location tbc.
Themes will be relevant to anyone working with local government in the social media/digital engagement space. We are aiming to create spaces for discussion and engagement, the sharing of experiences and creation of new ideas. Conversations are encouraged. We will have lots of parallel sessions and break-out spaces. In the tradition of localgovcamps, you set the agenda in the beginning of the morning and afternoon sessions.
Apart from local authorities, MPs, councillors, ICT and social media specialists, we are inviting arts centres and other local heroes to work with us on involving their existing communities in learning how to engage online.
So even if you’re not able to make it for the whole day, come for however long you can!
You can register for your ticket on the Eventbrite page.
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It’s frequently costly. It almost always achieves little. It lets people tick the “use the internet to engage with the public” box without actually achieving much.
I am, of course, talking about webcasting council meetings. The idea has honourable roots. But the world has moved on.
Both print and broadcast media have steadily moved away from providing lengthy, verbatim reporting of what goes on in elected bodies. That’s despite such coverage being very cheap and easy to produce. Stick a journalist in front of the Parliamentary TV channel, give them a bookmark to Hansard and you’re away. Yet the volume of such coverage has fallen hugely in the last few years – because it’s not what the public wants.
We may wish the public thought otherwise, but when the public is so clearly turning its back on being interested in such verbatim coverage, it’s rather implausible to think that they would lap it up for their local council, if only it were available.
It is therefore no surprise that the audience figures for council webcasting are almost always low. It is a telling sign that it is extremely rare to find a council boasting about the size of its webcast audiences. To be fair, there are some niches and exceptions, but overall the picture is clear: webcast council meetings don’t get much of an audience.
That has been consistently the case, as the systematic evaluation of pilots back in 2005 as part of the Local e-Democracy National Project showed. None of the pilots got a large audience.
It is true that the number of members of the public turning up in person to council meetings is often so small that a tiny online audience can seem quite large by comparison. But it is not an audience that comes for free.
Webcasting costs. It costs money that could be spent elsewhere. Council webcasting is relatively cheap compared with big council IT projects, but it’s relatively expensive when compared to the costs of exploiting social media tools. For example, Croydon’s £33,000 budget for its 2006-7 webcasting pilot could have paid for a substantial social media campaign.
It isn’t just the immediate audience that is limited, so is the follow up audience because by locking up content in audio-visual format webcasting hides it from search engines. That is starting to change, with some speech to text conversion technology starting to creep in to search tools, but for the moment the money spent on webcasting usually could more effectively be spent on putting other content online in search engine friendly ways that serve the public.
A few less minimalistic pdf files of agendas and a few more pages rich with background information and links would go much further than many a webcast.
Webcasting does, perhaps, have one plus point. Councils often cover the basics when it comes to promoting webcasting: mention in the council newsletter, mention on the council website, mention in their email list. Added up this marketing still doesn’t provide a decent audience – which is a healthy reminder of how not only does the substance have to be attractive but also how hard you have to work to build up a decent website and email audience to which you can promote activities.
But overall, whilst piloting webcasting made sense, now we know the lesson: it rarely delivers.
Mark Pack is Associate Director, Digital at Mandate Communications (www.YourMandate.com). Previously he was Head of Innovations at the Liberal Democrats, heading up the team which arranged the first use of Google Video by a major UK political party, the first UK party leader on YouTube and the first UK election campaign to use Ustream. He blogs about politics, history and technology at www.MarkPack.org.uk. He’s on Twitter at @markpack.
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Vicky, from Boilerhouse and Socitm, pops by to tell us about the latest developments with the public sector web professionals network.
On 27 November, Socitm will be holding a workshop as the first stage in a project to define a professional skills framework for people who work on public sector websites.
This is part of it wider initiative to set up a web professionals group for this large and diverse group that includes:
- programmers and coders
- web developers (with technical skills)
- web designers
- content managers/editors
- social networking experts
- measurement/monitoring specialists
- web marketers
- web managers
- customer service or IT heads with web responsibilities
- e-communications professionals
The initiative kicked off earlier this year with a meeting called by Socitm and involving web managers and practitioners from local government across the UK, central government departments, the government supersites, and the third sector. Also present were representatives form some existing and past groups formed by webbies, including the Public Sector Web Professionals Group, SPIN and the Scottish Web Forum.
There was general agreement among those present that meeting web practitioners’ professional development needs would in future need more than informal groups, voluntary effort and free networking tools. It was also recognised that defining a skills framework for web practitioners and organising training, development and possibly accreditation around this framework would be a core activity for any professional group formed.
Following this meeting Socitm commissioned research to identify whether any other professional association or skills organisation was already doing or planning to do something similar. Discussions were held with a range of professional and skills organisations in ICT, interactive media, marketing, communications and publishing. We also talked with the CoI and the Government Communications Network about their plans in this area, and made useful contact with the Federal Web Managers Council in the USA. Contact was made with some web networks in the NHS to share and discuss idea, leading to some positive feedback about the potential for webbies in the health sector to join our activity.
At this point, the Socitm agreed in principle to set up a web professionals’ interest group for people involved in any aspect of web management and development. Individuals at any level of seniority or career stage, employed or freelancing in the public or third sectors, or in any organisation working with them would be open to join. The group would then run under the Socitm constitution, with the group electing a chair and officer and developing a programme of activity supported by Socitm’s paid staff. Members would be eligible for the normal benefits of Socitm membership as well as additional benefits exclusive to ‘web members’.
As well as agreeing to set up a group or community for web professionals, Socitm agreed to fund initial development on a skills framework. This is seen a central to the development of a sustainable future programme of activity that will attract web professionals to join and support the group. The workshop on 27 November marks the start of this activity
We are looking for people with experience of managing web teams in the public sector to get involved in this activity. There are a limited number of places available at the workshop, and a wider opportunity to participate in evaluating and offering feedback on the initial framework developed at the workshop.
If you would like to get involved, please complete the form to tell us a little more about your relevant skills and experience, and whether you are willing and able to attend the workshop on 27 November, which will run in London from 1000 – 1600. If by any chance you are unable to access this, email me at [email protected].
We will be publishing the register of those interested in the community library.
Many thanks are due to Paul Canning for his work in getting this activity going, some of you will have been following his blogs on this topic in the CoP and elsewhere.
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And open data! I’ve got to declare an interest here. I’m a cofounder of Timetric – so I, of course, think that open data is a really great thing and we need a lot more of it!
The panel for this session is chaired by Ewan Mackintosh, a 4iP commissioner, joined by:
- Paul Canning from Public Sector Web Professionals, part of SOCITM: he’s setting up a professional body, and skills-development framework, for people who work with the web within Government. (There are around 5000 of them!)
- Colm Hayden, technical director of information integration company Anaeko: their software can be used to join and connect Government backend systems, providing machine-readable integrated views onto Government data. They’re aiming to make projects like the Sunlight Foundation’s FedSpending.org possible. The best of those can then move back in as official Government services.
- Stewart McRae, an evangelist from IBM. He started 35 years ago in the days of punched cards: it’s easy to forget, but (thanks to the PC and the internet) we’ve come a long way!
- Chris Taggart of Openly Local, which is aiming to be the TheyWorkForYou of local government. He’s arguing that without access to data, people are (in a sense) disenfranchised.
Chris says making data available is about engagement: you can’t get to the “democracy” page on Birmingham City Council’s website without Javascript and cookies switched on. OpenlyLocal pulled the data out and rebuilt the site themselves, making it available to people using screen readers. (Paul Canning points out this has really bad political implications for the council.)
Colm suggests that you can never centralise all the data – but you can centralise the catalogue of the data. This then ties in with the Linked Data message. (In the UK, incidentally, that also means the data.gov.uk vision, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues!)
But what about Joe Bloggs, the ultimate user? Ewan brings it back to that: Channel 4 is all about the audience. People have to go somewhere where they can use the data. Stewart talks about a new media which is about data-mining: the next Google could be someone who hits a goldmine of an idea. Some way of building something about the around the data, and a brand to build around it. Over time, the most successful and attractive services will gather momentum, but there’ll be niche and boutique services.
Ewan asks: will this shakeout creating another aristocracy of the Web? The answer to that might be Linked Data, says Colm: as long as you can link all the versions and representations together, then you can still navigate all the different uses of the data. Also, how do you gain an audience for these Open Data products?
Chris’s response is that:
You’ll know that open data’s successful when no-one knows they’re using it.
Instead, you’ll just go to your local council website, which happens to use Open Data under the covers: it’ll go off to data.gov.uk or another store and run some queries, return the results, and those results’ll be useful. Ewan also speaks on the need to make the experience of using open data surprising and delightful; there aren’t that many people addicted to, say, mySociety’s websites out there!
Ewan then asks the question: what stories get covered by open data and social media? The MPs expenses scandal and Trafigura were traditional investiative journalism; the US Airways ditching on the Hudson River in New York was broken on Twitter, but traditional media supplied the depth and context. Without traditional media, you wouldn’t have found out that no-one was hurt, or about the pilot’s background story. Chris responds by saying we’re in a transitional period: social, participatory journalism is only now beginning to find its feet.
Finally, unintended consequences – Stewart points out there’s a privacy concern, in that what if correlations can be drawn from open data to identify people? And transparency: Colm claims open data isn’t just about transparency, but also about building better services and better businesses, and Chris wants us all to be – in Ewan’s word – treated like adults, and open data is part of that.
Another fascinating session, and a tremendous day’s conference. I hope you enjoyed the live blogging: if you want more from me, join my at my blog, or my blog on data journalism (part of the day job), or on Twitter. Thanks for having me!
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This panel, chaired by Computer Weekly’s Tony Collins, started with a call from the stage to stop twittering; sit there, and cover our eyes and mouth. That’s the experience of digital exclusion.
According to Martha Lane Fox’s research, 10 million people (a sixth of the UK!) have never used a computer; 17 million people (nearly a third) neither own one or have access to one. Stephen Hilton of Bristol City Council pointed this out right at the start of this panel; in a room full of twitterers and bloggers and digital natives.
The panel’s completed by John Shewell from Brighton and Hove Council, Anthony Zacharzewski from the Democratic Society and IBM’s Jan Gower.
Anthony points out that the Government’s heart is in the right place. However, it’s often seen in a rather narrow mindset, couched entirely in terms of economic rationales. He argues that digital inclusion should be done because, like all social inclusion, it’s simply the right thing to do. He warns us to avoid paternalism, too: different people will want to do different things online. Not everyone is a Guardian-reading middle-class liberal!
The panel are pretty unanimous about digital inclusion being only a part of a social inclusion strategy. As Jan Gower says, you need to be very clear on what the needs of all the parts of society are – we tend to look at the process first, rather than the individual, and looking at the needs of individuals first would lead to more humane, better-designed services.
One of the risks here is, as mentioned earlier, avoiding being over-prescriptive or even paternalistic. An example raised by Anthony: Sure Start started as a very local service, which was a strength – local communities knew best what their local needs were. As it was expanded, it lost its local distinctiveness and moved towards cookie-cutter approaches, to its detriment in both effectiveness and in losing the radical thinking originally involved. John suggested that local government’s role is to enable, not to dictate: this is how councils handle adult social care.
There are technological barriers too. Dave Coplin from Microsoft talks about bandwidth: shouldn’t we do more to get fast Internet connections into peoples’ houses? Jan Gower acknowledges that it’s the elephant in the room, but the problem is that any measure to pay for it is going to look like a tax. The politics is the hard problem.
Finally, what would we like to see from the next government? Anthony wants to see an understanding that devolving power means devolving it to individual citizens. Stephen wants the Government to drive the message that digital inclusion isn’t an IT issue; it’s a better council services issue, and needs to go forward at council chief executive level. John also wants to see strong leadership, but also wider participation and more investment. He believes it’s a massive opportunity, but it has to be seized now. Jan agrees: “if it’s a priority, make it a priority.”
There’s one more session today, and it’s on my home turf: open data, chaired by 4iP’s Ewan Mackintosh. If there’s anything you’d like me to ask, ping me on Twitter!