DavePress

BarcampUKGovWeb is back, back, baaaaack!

Dave — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:27:29 +0000

Tom Watson points us all to a new wiki for getting the next barcamp for UK (and elsewhere) government webbies going.

Sign up and start thinking about you could present about! I have already put down that I’m interested in running a social media surgery which worked so well at the UK Youth event in September, and which is being pioneered amongst the blogging community in Birmingham.

For a flavour of what went on last year, check out the aggregated stuff on the pageflake. For discussion of the event, last year’s Google Group is being used again.

I am really happy to promote and support this event as much as I possibly can - last year’s event had a tremendous effect on me, in the friendships I made and the developments I my career. It’s an easy and maybe glib-sounding thing to say, but I wouldn’t be where I am today without the Barcamp, and I encourage everyone to make as much of it as they can this time around!

Jeremy has now blogged it too.

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It could be Rotterdam, or anywhere

Dave — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:39:48 +0000

Actually, no it couldn’t, because Rotterdam is a beautiful city, and I am having tremendous fun here with Nick Booth.

We are at an R4R event for residents groups throughout Europe, with two aims: to demonstrate the power of the social web, and to show just how easy it is to do.

We are armed with some basic kit: Flip Ultras and point and click cameras, as well as our mobile phones (don’t worry, in order to stave off bankruptcy for a little longer I’ve switched roaming off on my iPhone…). The point being that you don’t need to spend a lot of money on tech to be able to publish content online.

We’re running a blog here, in order to demonstrate how easy it is, which has been populated with some of the other work Nick has done with R4R.

Nick and I actually got up at 5.30 am this morning, and we have since used four forms of transport: taxi, plane, train and finally water-taxi. Here’s a pretty rough video of us getting on the water-taxi, with Maurice Specht, who generously guided us around.

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Birmingham Bloggers Get Together

UK Online Centres want to collaborate!

Dave — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 22:44:30 +0000

I have just come back from a meetup in Birmingham of folk interested in the Digital Mentor concept and how we can all collaborate on a bid. I got to meet some great people for the first time, and catch up with some familiar faces.

Also present was Ben Brown from UK Online Centres, who had travelled from Bristol for the meeting. Great effort on his part, and also to UKOC for having the gumption to send one of their people to a pub in Birmingham to chat about working together with a bunch of strangers!

Anne Faulkner from OKOC has now posted a great comment on the Digital Mentor blog, sketching out how they see an open, collaborative bid, in co-operation with other organisations like Citizens Online and Ruralnet, working.

UK online centres and Citizens Online know this approach isn’t the easy option, but we figured that if we want to deliver a project about partnership and online collaboration, we should try to put it into practice as part of the bidding process. We think we need both breadth and depth in this project, and we’re interested in developing a framework which enables a range of organisations and individuals to share their expertise.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this develops, and getting involved where I can!

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Stephen Hale now blogging at FCO

Dave — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 08:17:02 +0000

Simon Dickson reports that Stephen Hale, the FCO’s “Head of Engagement, Digital Diplomacy” is now blogging:

Makes sense for numerous reasons of course, not least as a means of setting a good example for colleagues. I mean, would you trust a ‘blogging expert’ who didn’t blog?

Stephen’s first few posts are all pretty interesting, and he’ll make a great addition to the Public Sector Blogs line up. I’ve now added him to the list.

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Bookmarks for November 7th through November 11th

Dave — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:00:28 +0000

Stuff I have bookmarked for November 7th through November 11th:

Where Have You Wheelie Bin? - Share your photos of wheelie bins. Via Tom Watson.
sipgate.co.uk - free phone service over your broadband link - voice over ip provider. - A free VOIP service that seems to offer a no cost telephone number to ring!
Flax: find freedom - Open source search engine
The Cambridge Network - "The Mission of the Cambridge Network is to link like minded people from business and academia to each other and to the global high technology community for the benefit of the Cambridge region. "
Digital tormet - Tracey Todhunter explains her concerns about the digital mentor initiative

eDemocracy08 today

Dave — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 09:50:37 +0000

I will shortly be heading down to London to eDemocracy08, Headstar’s annual shindig for anyone interested in how technology and democracy can be improved by one another.

I actually have some involvement at this year’s event, having being generously invited by those friendly folk at Delib to share a panel session with Chris Quigley, Gez Smith and Steph Gray talking open source. Here’s the skinny:

Open Source in e-Democracy - How good can it be if it’s free?

Chair: Chris Quigley, Director, Delib

Steph Gray, Head of Social Media, Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills

Gez Smith, Senior Consultant, Delib

Dave Briggs, Digital Enabler, DavePress Ltd

Over the last few years, UK e-Democracy has been characterised by small pockets of piloting and ‘innovation’, often to the exclusion of demonstrable impact and software sustainability. In contrast to this, the wider internet has seen an explosion of participative software, free to use and open to be redeveloped, integrated and customised to suit individual situations. This session explores the role of such open source software in e-democracy. Featuring perspectives from central government, local government and the private sector, the session will look at the benefits and drawbacks of the open source approach, the value of software vs knowledge, and what all this might mean for e-democracy in the future. In the spirit of open collaboration, it will also hopefully feature a good participative discussion too!

Now, if that doesn’t sound like something you would enjoy then you must be mental.

Before these things, I always struggle a bit to think of what I am going to say. Part of this is that I just don’t know in which direction the conversation is going to head, and so having something heavily prepared might mean I end up banging on irrelevantly and irrate everyone present. However, in an attempt to do at least some groundwork, I thought I would put my open source principles to the test and try crowd sourcing the topic with my buddies on Twitter.

I got some good stuff back:

podnosh @davebriggs open source lets you spend money on building community instead of wrestling with shitely restrictive software?
stevepurkiss @davebriggs 1.Dont give your freedoms away, make sure to use Free/Libre OSS (not just OSS). 2.Collaborate on projects. 3.Put something back.
peeebeee @davebriggs Could quote some anti-patterns re Sharepoint perhaps?
marxculture @davebriggs http://tinyurl.com/6f5uha [link to a story about the work done in Parliament on the Hansard prototype site, using OS technology such as OpenSolaris, MySQL, Ruby on Rails etc]
ssutherland @davebriggs OSS a good fit 4 public sector cos of vfm and likelihood of future proofing solutions. Sector still needs to grasp key OS issues
gavinwray @davebriggs How o s advocates can tackle attitude of ‘cheap/free must be low quality & unsupported; expensive & proprietary must be good’
waugaman @davebriggs COMPLETELY agree w @podnosh - also general OS community is wide/deep enough to allow 4 service/product of diff user/dev needs…eg diff in folks who use joomla v drupal or wordpress.com v .org
watfordgap @davebriggs and OS is a bit like twitter. Community of developers wanting to help fix problems and make code better for YOU
philoakley @davebriggs The promise of oss is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.

I’ll try and work as much of this stuff in as I can. My own thoughts include:

Just because it’s free doesn’t mean it won’t cost you anything - using online stuff like OS blogging platforms such as WordPress, forums like phpBB or wikis like MediaWiki doesn’t mean that the project will be cost-free. No matter how open your platform, if you don’t commit resource to ongoing management and facilitation, it will fail
The difference between government deploying OS web software and desktop applications - the former is almost certainly easier to do
Taking an open source approach to working, whether in policy development or consultations, doesn’t mean someone else does the work for you. Linux has not many more than 160-odd active developers, OpenOffice.org just around 25. Millions of people use Wikipedia, but less than 4,000 are classed as very active contributors. WordPress has a large volunteer base, but there are four main developers who coordinate and validate the work of others

I’m sure more will occur to me over the course of today. Oh, and just to note - I wrote this post in WordPress, running Firefox on Ubuntu.

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ReadWriteGov content now up

Dave — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:57:52 +0000

I have finally gotten round to posting up some of the content from the ReadWriteGov event in Peterborough last month.

Sadly there is no audio as the acoustics in the room, coupled with the lack of a lapel mic, meant the quality of the recording was, to be frank, piss-poor.

Click a person’s name to be taken to stuff from their session.

More of these events are being planned, so subscribe to the blog to find out when and where it’s next happening…

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Online social media surgery

Dave — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 09:31:49 +0000

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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Digital mentors picking up speed

Dave — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 11:16:29 +0000

Things are starting to pick up with the digital mentors initiative, which is a part of the digital inclusion programme supported by the department for Communities and Local Government.

There is now the option to express an interest in tendering for the money to run the pilots, which is a reasonably healthy £900k. To help support this process, there is a workshop being held at BERR on Victoria Street, London on 19th November between 3 and 5pm.

Further developments have seen UK Online Centres, one of the obvious candidates to put in a bid, reach out to the community being developed at www.digitalmentor.org through a blog post by the Managing Director of UKOC, Helen Milner. This is great news - rather than use their own website to push out messages, UKOC are going where the people are to enable collaboration on their bid. Helen wrote:

We all obviously share a passion to ensure that the digital mentor programme is a success, and that it embraces the best of community development and technological innovation. I’m keen to discuss ideas for the programme here on this blog so that we can use open innovation principles to develop a bid together.

Do come to the blog, the wiki and the email list and help out in any way you can.

David Wilcox as ever has his finger on the pulse, and has produced an excellent summary post over at Social Reporter, including pointing out the exciting news that Ruralnet are also keen to be involved. He writes:

UK Online Centres have the local presence, experience and capacity to head up a bid, so I hope they are willing to do that. Ruralnet also have a strong track record through their work with Net:Gain and DirectSupport. Together with independent trainers, consultants and activists we can put together a strong core team, with an oppen invitation to others to join.

There seems to be some real coming together over this: an acknowledgement that a) no single organisation or individual has all the right answers to meet this challenge; and b) that this is too important a project to be allowed to go wrong.

By working together, we can make sure this succeeds.

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Bookmarks for October 30th through November 6th

Dave — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:00:02 +0000

Stuff I have bookmarked for October 30th through November 6th:

Change.gov - Obama's pre-inauguration website. *Great* URL!
Sunderland Community BarCamp - Sunderland Council appear to be hosting their own Barcamp. Crazy!
Innovation Catalyst | The Young Foundation - "Despite all the good work of the last decade in local government, there is still a need within the sector to develop new approaches to delivery if we are going to meet the challenges facing public services both now and in the future."
The cynicism at the heart of the communities agenda - "With this in mind, the proposed duty on local authorities to "promote democracy" is not only a curiously bloodless way of engaging the disengaged. More worrying is the notion that democracy can be imposed by diktat. This authoritarian bent to the communities agenda reveals a thinly veiled attempt to paper over the exhaustion of politics and the increasing isolation of a clueless and desparate political class. "
Demos | Publications | Network Citizens - "humans are social animals, spinning intricate webs of relationships with friends, colleagues, neighbours and enemies. These networks have always been with us, but the advance of networking technologies, changes to our interconnected economy and an altering job market have super-charged the power of networking, catapulting it to the heart of organisational thinking."