Posted June 30th, 2009 by admin. No Comments
I’ve had a fantastic day at Channel 4’s What Happens Next education conference, and at TeachMeet this evening, and I promise to write further on this, however, I am most curious about the update to the Digital Britain report, released today after the report was released earlier this month. I haven’t had a chance to read the full update yet, but I find it fascinating that the serious deficit in the original report – a series of actions items – seems as though it may have been addressed. I’m not yet saying that this is kudos to the department, but if they have responded effectively to this deficit. My judgement will be delivered tomorrow!
Tags: digitalbritain
Posted June 29th, 2009 by admin. No Comments
Oh dear lord. The media in England have gone nuts over the supposed ‘heatwave’ striking the region. Every channel is talking about the dangers of heat exhaustion and the NHS has been put on a Level 2 Alert.
Let me just clarify for those outside the UK: the temperature over the past couple of days and forecast for the next few days has been between 28° and 32° Celsius. It’s utterly delightful. Overnight temperatures which cool down to the mid-high teens and warm, balmy days that are broken by the odd cool breeze or light tropical shower and thunderstorm. Okay I come from a warm climate, but I’m actually quite intolerant of genuine heat and used to complain when my mother refused to put her air conditioner on at her home in weather over 30°. And in Brisbane, I used to turn my air con on regularly in hotter weather, using the ceiling fan overnight. But here in London you don’t need an air conditioner, nor even a fan. This is probably the best weather on the planet right now and all the locals can do is resort to the Voice of Doom.
Geez Brittanians! Just enjoy it for goodness sake. It happens so rarely, and it’s not remotely dangerous weather till it hits totals in excess of 35°, and you don’t have a breeze. Stop being such killjoys!
Posted June 26th, 2009 by admin. 2 Comments
I’m liveblogging from the global networks, local network event at Canada House on Trafalgar Square this afternoon. This post will grow over the afternoon, so keep refereshing your page, but if you’re interested in details about the event, see here: http://gov2govuk.eventbrite.com/ There are so many geeks listed on the attendee list that Mark O’Neill is worried that they’re planning on gassing us to get rid of London’s entire social media community.
Geeks are running late. We’re starting at 4:25pm to accommodate.
16:24 Getting started. Place is probably 3/4 full. Canada House giving us a welcome. Public diplomacy has been hijacked by PR control freaks who believe that communicating with their publics means broadcasting messages out rather than 2-way communications.
16:28 Canada House just got its first twitter account. First problem – what’s the userID?
16:29 Chris Huer telling us how the afternoon is going to work. Talking about social media in terms of internald and external comms and then international relations and dipomacy. Intros of the panellists now.
16:31 We’ve been told to stand up. Difficult when you’re blogging.
16:33 Social media “makes things visible”. By opening up the means of production and the opportunities for connection between people beyond traditional boundaries, we have the opportunity generate transparency, trust and “truthiness” (thank you Stephen Colbert). Obama’s campaign mobilised social media by making the vote personal.
16:36 Jennifer Jansson from Six Degrees says that social media is about opportunities for access to greater information. Lovisa Williams, US State Department, says that State Dept sees social media is about building relationships. Stephen Hale, Head of Engagement, Digital Diplomacy, UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office says signidficance of social media is removing barriers to communication between people. Emer Coleman, Greater London Authority is interested in using social media for policy making and to generate conversations between Londoners. Dominic Campbell, futuregov, likes social media because it can help him read minds.
16:40 Questions to the panellists and requesting responses to what we think social media is, but he’s not really waiting for a response.
16:41 Dominic Campbell notes his progress into futuregov and this event has primarily through twitter.
16:42 Lovisa Williams talks about the US State Dept’s barcamp as a means of finding people who are working in this space. This essentially set up the Govt 2.0 department in the US.
16:47 Jennifer says that difficulty is countering the apathy of young people. These social media are a useful tool in inspiring action and interest.
16:47 Helen Jones Canadian High Commission asks how to overcome the rampant bureaucracy she has to deal with where tweets have to be cleared and approved, translated etc before enaging. Stephen Hale notes you can’t have that level of bureaucracy for an effective engagement strategy. He notes that senior and approved staff are allowed to tweet.
16:49 Mark O’Neill notes in 10 years of working next door, this is the 1st time he can get thru the door. So it is opening up. But he notes that one of the conversations he has to have are about the logistics as well as the culture and competences in tweeting. He notes he tweets his expenses claims as a means of enhancing transparency. The problem is when you have to distinguish between a conversation channel and a broadcast channel. One of the challenges is being able to sustain conversation. [[JJ's Note: media like BBC have noted this for some time.]]
16:55 Emer says that you need to deal with the management issues associated with communications professionals, and facilitating the often anarchic approaches advocated by social media professionals.
16:58 Question is raised: are social media tools for communication or are they tools for commujnicating more broadly with the public?
17:02 Just asked what do we need to do distinguish where social media sucks and when its useful? Strategies need to be more public. Might be useful to engage specific communities for specific functions.
17:07 Who else can we bring in to encourage engagement? We have to start somewhere, so we’ve brought together a room full of geeks. How do we bring in next? What other tools should we use, what else should we build?
17:10 US State Govt used ning to develop http://connect.state.gov/ and this was designed to ensure that the site was branded and that the community was ‘closed’ for ’safe communications. Launched in October, with a video competition on values. 90% or more is usergen. Full time community manger monitoring the site 24/7 for all uploaded content. Currently has 11,000 members. [[JJ's note: will be interesting to see what happens when this site gets too big for ning.]]
17:15 Dominic noting that in order to plan the social media strategy you need to establish the communication strategy first, or at least to consider how social media can support what the objectives are of a department. Dominic asks what the role of the Director of Digital Engagement should do and how we’re supposed to measure his performance.
17:18 Stephen Hale says that digital diplomacy in the Foreign Office is using the web to communicate. They use wiki for document development for instance.
17:20 What should we be measuring? Social networking analysis representative says we’re still building cathedrals. If there’s no change in policy or process, the act of generating engagement is pointless as it is not resulting in changes on process and legislature.
17:25 Mark O’Neill says we need to rethink ‘engagement’. Government has a sense of telling people what to do, not asking them what to do. Social media is a tool which can facilitate action but it’s also a way of talking rubbish or hiding inaction in the rhetoric of collaboration – hiding in the plain sight of an unconference.
17:33 Shift of social engagement is that public no longer go to the govt, govt now goes to the people. [[JJ's note: O'RLY?]]
17:40 Need to ensure that the citizens have the opportunity to access resources with adequate connectivity and processing power. Lawyers and IT departments like to limit the stupidity of amateur users.
17:44 US State department had to work with the legal departments everyday and it has been an uphill battle to deal with their individual concerns.
17:49 If you find that your business or IT tools you should have some arguments ready where you can go up the chain in your IT processes to be able to build apps to serve us. [[JJ's note: why do you have to go up the chain? Why can't we get the public and the people to build it - eg: sicamp]]
17:52 Diplomacy used to be states talking to states. Now it’s states talking to citizens. Changing behaviour is conducive with social media. Foreign service career progression is best supported by sticking to media releases.
17:59 closing with a quote from Thomas Jefferson. Thanks for watching!
Posted June 25th, 2009 by admin. 2 Comments
This week in Australia, the establishment of a new taskforce was announced, the Government 2.0 Taskforce, in emulation of the UK’s Power of Information Taskforce which reported in March of this year. Leaving aside the woeful title of Australia’s new advisory body, the objectives and powers of the initiative are worthy; the taskforce that, in the age of twitter, shall hereafter be named ‘#gov2tf’, is charged with advising the Australian Government on issues of opening up public sector information to promote transparency, and finding new ways to encourage online engagement in public issues management among the community. As an advancement to the British precedent, Australia’s gov2tf has an A$2.45 million project fund which will be allocated by the taskforce to projects which:
“support the development of Web 2.0 tools and applications that either enable engagement between government and the community or support the innovative use of government information”.
To be honest, I’m not sure about the fund. I see of course that it is important to identify initiatives that can be adopted to promote democratic engagement, but the problem with funding these projects is that selection of initiatives is always based on fulfilling a series of criteria, including application and reporting mechanisms that choke the innovation out of the project with enforced bureaucracy. I find it far more useful for a taskforce like this to simply draw attention to initiatives and projects that already exist. And don’t tell me they don’t exist, because they do. There are plenty of examples of technology-mediated public engagement initiatives, and the sharp rise in unconferences and collective application building events (funded or unfunded) are evidence of that proactive innovation. The problem is that the great work going on in these voluntary networks is not recognised nor highlighted by government.
I’m a fan of criterion based assessment, and I have been an active advocate of measurement techniques for new media. But this is one area where I think governments can afford to let go of their criteria and reporting obsession.
What governments need in the emergent technology arena is not another fund, or another written report. What it needs is to turn up to some of these events, and to talk about the initiatives publicly. This doesn’t mean that speech writers need to spend hours composing long diatribes about how marvellous it is to live in such a deeply connected age. It just means that politicians and decision makers need to say, “What do you think about government putting some money into sustaining things like twitter to assist the protestors in Iran? Tell me by filling in the poll at onlineopinion.com.au. And if you don’t have a PC at home, and you can’t get access to your public library, send me an SMS to 55555 with your response.” Speeches will be a lot shorter, and public engagement initiatives will be promoted far more effectively.
There’s an irony about emergent technology policy and planning that the outputs of these groups are largely predictable and ‘old tech’. Even where a public fund is used to identify new tools, the majority of these will either slip into obscurity after launch or will be greatly applauded for a while but not widely adopted or contributed to, by the policy makers themselves, or those who are not already active participants in public engagement. So the great ‘achievements’ of technology taskforces are celebrated in one thick and largely unread public report, and the new initiatives sparkle at their sauvignon-blanc launches, but thereafter are populated only by the usual suspects. Instead of insisting on a specific set of standards, I rather wish government officials would make a habit of putting a spotlight on a new initiative every day. It might be tiring, but it would make more interesting reading than the avalanche of speeches, reports and criteria that usually pour out of these groups, and it would certainly make public engagement more attractive.
Tags: gov2tf, government, poit, policy, technology
Posted June 23rd, 2009 by admin. No Comments
I promised to share more of what happened at Unsheffield over the weekend so I’m living up to that promise.
Sunday at Unsheffield was certainly a quieter day but it was still an engaging day. A few heads were aching after a fairly decent Saturday night of drinking but those of us who were there at the start of the day soon dived in to the discussions taking place.
First of the sessions I attended was on the rise of the netbook, and the issues associated with getting non-tech people to adopt (and be happy with) Linux operating systems. We collectively identified three primary user classes of netbook owners:
1. Tech heads and tech enthusiasts;
2. Business people needing a highly portable device; and
3. Students.
We also decided that there were effectively three different versions of netbook:
(i) Good battery life, small (often solid state) hard drive, small screen;
(ii) Reasonable battery life, average hard drive and avergage screen; and
(iii) Poor battery life, large hard drive and usually larger screen.
It wasn’t hard to determine that tech enthusiasts are not so terribly worried about adopting Linux – indeed they were keen to use. But even among the tech enthusiasts there ws a general consensus that using online applications wasn’t terribly effective and a small hard drive did limit usability greatly. Even with a highly efficient operating system like Linux with Open Office and other open source software, the smaller hard drive netbooks effectively forced users into treating the device as a surf’n'turf (web search and email reading) device.
Among the business users there was also a consensus that Linux is okay but unless you can provide enough of the software options needed by business, and unless the operating system was essentially a Windows clone, it wasn’t attractive. I pointed out my own little netbook runs on WinXP but I have virtually all opn source software sitting on top of that – Open Office, GIMP, Fileziller, and so on. But having an XP base allows me to make my clients feel comfortable because the basic infrastructure looks essentially the same. Of course having a Windows machine means you need a large hard drive and a lot of RAM. And the payoff is a short battery life. Ambient power devices, or at least wireless power pads again were raised as possible solutions to that weakness in design.
The biggest opportunity for Linux design then, seemed to be in the education market. And support from school boards for open source architecture adds weight to this niche. It was generally agreed that usability design and product testing should focus on the education sector and that it be recognised that working offline is still a major need among netbook users. Assuming cloud access is simply unfeasible, even in major urban centres.
The next session I attended was on social media consultancy, taglined ‘the profession that daren’t speak its name’. Apparently I was the only participant in the session who was prepared to descrbe myself as a social media consultnt. But the general consensus was that the notion of social media consultancy was problematic, partly because so many people have jumped on the social media bandwagon and are damaging the reputation of people who are genuinely experienced technologists, and partly because there was a sense of disconnect between ’social media’ and ‘consultancy’. Some views were that social media can’t be all of what you do. Others said that consultancy doesn’t lend itself to social media because it assumes a ‘drop-in’ model of interaction where social media requires sustained relationship development. I countered on both points, saying that social media in its entirety referred to all technologies through which relationships are forged and maintained, thus social media can comfortably exist as a niche sector, and that consultancy is about training individuals who are going to be developing relationships, not simply setting up accounts or user IDs on various platforms and spamming people. A social media consultant is someone who considers both short and long term goals of an organisation, and develops the best strategy for humanising the organisation, as well as assisting an organisation to move from broadcast-model communication, to collaborative development of products, ideas and opportunities. It’s not a PR role, nor is it an advertising role. It’s not a purely communications role, nor is it a market research or product development role. It’s instead someone who understands strategy and technology, education/training and changes in consumer behaviour. That’s a highly specialised individual and requires substantial skill. The room agreed, but the problem naturally arose: wha do we do about all the social media douchebags out there?
Of course the obvious suggestion was a professional association, and we all groaned collectively at the notion of bureaucratising something that inherently shouldn’t need bureaucracy. Eventually we all agreed that we’re never going to eliminate the poor social media consultants from the sector just as you cannot entirely eliminate the poor practitioners in any field. But organisations that are considering social media consultancy advice need to do a reference check on practitioners and actually use social media to determine the validity of the consultant’s claim to expertise. Access former customers, current partners and current projecvts to see just how reliable their claims are.
The next session I attended was an open rant and there were several issues I’m unable to cover here, but perhaps it’s best summarised as: don’t get friends to do work for you, and youthful eagerness should be encouraged but tempered with a healthy dose of realism. And after this session I attended a live website analysis session which was fun, but I’m waiting on the results to post about that separately.
After lunch, I attended a session focused on developing a pilot project on open business collaboration. A fascinating concept, Jay Cousins is trying to build a methodology for prototyping a product and developing a repeatable process for commercialisation in a manner that is reflective of open source software development. There’s no ‘platform’ for engagement as such, but tasks in the development of a product will be shared to the broad business community and allocated on the basis of volunteering and skills, not on direct investment. In return, contributors to a product will share in the profits. It’s effectively a community building project, but instead of building something on a physical site, it’s building a product or service that can then be sold through mainstream (or even new public) distrubution channels. And the expertise of the collective can grow as new product options come to light.
Amidst this discussion the question was asked: where do the product ideas come from? We noted that ideas could simply be posted to a site, almost in reverse of the instructables or etsy sites, so people are asking for a product to be made, rather than showing how it’s done. There was also the suggestion that in business, a bunch of organisations like Google allow their workers to spend time developing projects which often don’t come to light. If these ideas could be shared in the collective business development interface, then perhaps some outside minds could think of better ways of executing on projects and make these products profitable.
I’m particularly interested in this project, though of course I can see many potential challenges. Competition in the marketplace often involves first mover advantage and in-confidence product development, so this project would be always faced with a balancing act between protecting the competitiveness and potential profitability of products that come through its doors, and being open about the specifics of product design and branding. But I’m hopeful the collaboration methodologies research coming out of our Amplified work may help bring this ambitious project to life.
The final session I attended at Unsheffield was focused on what can be done with 100Mbps broadband connectivity. The example of the South Yorkshire Digital Region project was put forward as a test case of what organisations should be doing once this connection becomes available. I have to sa this session frustrated me a bit. The answers to what you do with 100Mbps are actually easy: you just augment what you’re doing now and add value to the real world experiences that are out there. But what is more irritating, is that all these augmentations can be done now. I’ve personaly been involved in some sentional augmented reality projects that have used extremely simple technology to realise. It’s not bandwidth you need. It’s a network of people and businesses to make that happen. But as the topic was focused on what we can do with 100Mbps (not, as I was wont to ask, whether we needed it), we had to stay on track.
There was some debate in the room about whether video conferencing is effective under a 2Mbps connection or less. I argue it can, and is quite effective under 512Kbps connections, let alone 2Mbps. The reason why few people actually use it has far more to do with the fact that they don’t need or want to use it. One (very reasonable) point was that you can’t connect via VPN to high-bandwidth corporate intranets effectively under less than 5Mbps, but I had to point out that very few people who work in these large corporate environments can easily work from home anyway, and as a sum total of a residential area, it’s likely to affect a very small percentage of the market. Perhaps depressingly, the most obvious use of 100Mbps connections was flawless access to BBC iPlayer (passive media) and online gaming. But is this truly something we can afford to pay billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to facilitate? I left that session rather troubled, I have to say.
But in general, I found Unsheffield to be a superb event on both days. The ideas of Day 1 and the debates of Day 2 were both stimulating and enlightening. I look forward to meeting again with many of the attendees at future technical events in the UK.
Tags: uns1, unsheffield
