The hacker ethic: or work as play

Nat Wei (yes, him again, sorry about this) posted a link on Twitter this morning to this report - P2P and Human Evolution. P2P for those not into downloading music illegally (I'm not but that's a different blog post), stands for Peer to Peer. In its first and thus technological meaning it's about sharing data between two nodes or multiple nodes on a network, where a node is you, instead of downloading data from a central server, like you do when you use iTunes. So, it's sharing data i.e. music, electronic books or software, between many people instead of putting it centrally and everyone downloading from that central point.

P2P in the context of this report, I think is a little different and more literal. It removes the technological aspect but the analogy stays the same. I.e. it is a map for society which removes centrality (is that even a word?) and instead replaces it with networks, relationships, reliance and support from us to other people like us. We support each other, person to person, and remove the need for central government to dictate how we will care for each other. It sounds like the removal of the nanny state so many complain about, yet the absence of disestablishment of legistlation is notable in its absence from this.

What really piqued my interest in this report was section 3.1.C.
I wrote about hacking a little bit ago. I tried to explain something of the ethos of a hacker, and what hacking means, that it is not about breaking the law, or obtaining access to things which are deemed by Authority to be off limits for a pre-ordained reason, but rather that it is a way of approaching life - all of it - and making the existing systems and processes which exist everywhere in daily life run more efficiently, fit together better, exist for a reason. Hackers do play with things, the things being the systems and processes. By getting inside either a technological or life process, seeing how it works, deconstructing it and laying it bare, an understanding of the intricacy is gained, mystery is removed and efficiency can be obtained. In other words - chuck the manual out of the window and play with something to see how it works and fits together (a note here - do not refer a geek of any kind to the manual. It's akin to suggesting their IQ is 60 points lower than it is).

Playing, in a lot of peoples minds, is what children do. The time for playing is past when you 'grow up'. There is no value in playing with something, only value in getting straight to the point and producing work as quickly as possible.

I'd like to argue with that, because I play. Lots of us do. I work damn hard but I play in the process of doing it. I play with technology - by pressing different buttons on coffee machines you can get lots of interesting frothy extra sugary combinations in your cup even if the button isn't labelled to tell you this is what happens - and I play with software and code and maps. I play with ideas. I sit in the office and argue the hell with some people who are lovely enough to put up with it, and in the process of playing about with ideas and concepts I come up with hard cold ideas which have had the fluff chipped off around the edges and which are actually something which can be implemented in the big wide world.

Big ideas don't happen in offices. Offices don't encourage thinking. I sit in front of my desk and I look at my screen and I feel guilty for reading my RSS feeds for research, or reading Twitter to catch others sparks which fuel my ideas, because it feels as if it's playing, not valuable, not quantifiable, and therefore not justifiable. But all my ideas, all the things we will be implementing in the near future, all of these things were not ideas I got from sitting at my desk at work. They came while walking to the shop at lunch. They came while smoking a cigarette (I'm on flexi, I knock 10 mins off every day for my two cigarettes I smoke during work time, back in your box), while riding my bike, while belaying my partner, while travelling home. Anywhere but at my desk.

Work is not for play. But in playing with things, testing things, discussing them, wrestling with them, yes I know pontificating about them, comes understanding, then quietness and then spirals of ideas coming from the understanding. Play has it's value. When we were children, we learnt about gravity and sticking molecules together using water to change their state so that the shape we created with those molecules would persist. We played in a sandpit. It had edges, that sandpit. Clearly defined edges over which the sand could not and did not leak. Inside the sandpit, we could be as messy as we liked, pouring water everywhere, creating havoc with bits of shiny plastics, creating waterfalls with bits of spinning plastic and yes, playing, but also yes, finding the edges, but also yes, gaining an understanding which we could take out of the sandpit and apply to life.

I do, as much as it is actually possible in an office in side a Council in Lancashire, have a little bit of a sandpit to play in, and as a result, the organisation gets the best from me. I don't claim for the hours I spend thinking outside of work because I enjoy the thinking - but also because there is a small part of me that frets that people wont understand when they see me sat around talking, that they wont understand the enormous value of that talking,discussing and argueing to me. So instead there is a trade. But I am allowed to think and ask questions and trade knowledge, I am allowed to wander outside my remit sometimes, I am allowed to play. In return, if I think of something I always share it, send emails and tweets at people who I think might like to know even if they can't do something with it right now, and everyone wins.

If we could all start doing that outside of work, if we could all sit in the sandpit and just allow ourselves to play a while without claiming for time, claiming for hours, claiming for money, claiming for brain power, then we could create magical ideas, chip the fluff off the edge of them and then go and inplement them.

I'm going to go implement something myself shortly. It's not my idea, it's someone elses, but the importance of doing as well as talking is not lost on me. But something I'd like to point out to Nat Wei is this. I can offer to teach as many people as want to listen all the tech knowledge I have, all the geek knowledge I have, all the digital and social media knowledge I have - but at the end of the day, I am entirely reliant on local facilities being nice enough to give me space for free to do it within and on the people coming to bring their own tea and coffee.

We need a tea and coffee fund. Sorry, but there it is.

Just numbers?

Read the emails. All the emails. The ones explaining in clear terms what had been calculated. The kind ones warning us of what we'd read tomorrow morning. They helped. I read them. I couldn't comprehend.

I talked to my other half. He didn't understand, but in the process of talking, I slowly did.

Then I read The Guardian and I wished to go back to this mornings oblivion.

There is nothing I can write here. Nothing I can say. Not because I'm self censoring because I think everyone knows whose side I am on and whose I am not, but simply that there are no words to describe the sheer enormity of those numbers and statistics.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I believe they do all the talking for me.

{void}

Einstein's eyes

Albert Einstein. Not a man I'd guess you'd be seeing quoted in this blog. No, you haven't wandered unthinking into the wrong one. Unthinking is in fact exactly what I'm not going to be doing. I like thinking, I do. Not alone in this, it seems :O)

It's not my job to think like this. My job is almost entirely irrelevant to this blog. In fact the separation between the two is quite important to me because the temptation to tears strips off people and situations is not something I wish to give in to, and so the separation will remain. Observant people may have noticed a certain displeasure recently. Ask, I'll explain, but not here. No place for negativity here.

And so, back to Einstein. A wonderful man for the quite obvious reasons - someone else might have made the leaps in physics he did, but that he did so at the time he did speaks volumes of a man who saw things differently. So differently, in fact, that the theory of relativity which entirely relies, depending on perspective, on the ability to see things from different angles.

But it's not the physics I'm interested in. Even I can't pull relativity into social media - well okay, I could, but I'm not going to. No, instead I want to examine the particular way of looking at things which Einstein seemed to have and try and focus on the "seeing things differently" aspect.

There are two ways to live your life - one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle.

You're reading my words. I probably only typed this 10 minutes before you read them. Think about it. Instant thought transferal, almost. To thousands of people. 1 person. 1 tiny little person who likes to think a bit. Miracles? Start with seeing the small ones. Now, think about all the massive ones you could perpetuate from where you're sitting right now, imagine your wonder if you were to go back 20 years and look at what you are capable of, right now. Don't tell me miracles can't happen. Nor that something is impossible. Only concede that something is 'a little difficult right now' but it wont always be.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

An insult commonly levelled at academics is that they're incredibly intelligent but have no common sense whatsoever. Well, tell me the value of common sense, if not having it means no prejudices at all? I'll live with no prejudices, thanks. Common sense isn't something I particularly miss. Thinking someone is a bad person because of something they have absolutely no control over? I'm not swapping.

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

Well no. No we can't. We really can't. And so whilst big society is coming in for some abuse at the moment, lets consider the problem. Very few people in this country give a damn about their next door neighbour. Apathy reigns. The cold hard fact is, we're screwed if we don't reverse that trend. I don't think the big society does anything other than identify the antithesis to this, which is that caring is a commodity gone well out of fashion. The issue, the biggest one of all, is that people don't start caring just because central government tell them to. You cannot instruct a human nature. All you can do is change your whole way of thinking, in the centre, and hope that your actions which are informed by that change of thinking can filter outwards on the spiderweb of our humanity.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.

I ask a lot of questions. Lots of us do. It's not that we want to annoy or irritate. It's not that we want to make your working or professional life hell. It's not for the devilment of it though sometimes, lord knows, your reaction tempts us to it. No. Questioning the things which are taken as set in stone means that interesting and innovative ways of doing things can happen. Stepping around the edges. Wriggling under the barriers. Call what you like, asking questions and not accepting that the first answer is always the right one is not troublemaking. It's supposed to make you think too. It's supposed to stop you from running down the same old track.

A lot of things covered in this blog, as already mentioned are not in my day jobs remit. The time I spend on Twitter, in the majority, is nothing to do with my day job either. Instead, the comments I make and the questions I ask are informed by my life experiences, by the things which I have endured, but also the things which I have been lucky enough to enjoy. I don't ask difficult questions or make difficult comments to wind people up. I instead want to challenge the assumption that because authority says something is working, that we should simply accept that it is. Where are the facts, the cold hard evidence, the best practice case studies, to back those statements of a well performing system to back that assumption up? If they're not there, who is accountable, what is the experience of the people on the ground, and what are you going to do to ensure that if peoples experience of your service is negative, what you are you going to do to fix that problem?

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.

If, every single day, every single business man, local government Director and Chief Executive, MP and economist, think tank bod and government advisor woke up and thought 'imagine if we.........' we'd be in a better world., Stop thinking about what you can do in a world with restraints. Start thinking about what you can do in a world without them. Don't follow like sheep along the paths everyone else is walking - your area is different, probably. Different demographics, different geographics, different inputs, throughputs and outputs. Insteasd of looking at what everyone else is doing, think about what is right for where you live, work, represent or champion - ask the questions which mean the walls come down, ask the questions which use the infrastructure that's coming to it's absolute best, ask yourself how you can graps the coming challenges and change them into opportunities.

Use a little imagination. Aspire. Inspire. Lead. 

The world through Einsteins eyes is one of infinite possibility, imagination, curiosity and questioning. If he could lay the first brick in the path which eventually led all the way to CERN, what can you do if you tilt your head 45 degrees and apply a different filter in front of your eyes? You're the ones in power, you're the ones with the chance, you're the ones elected and selected to represent us little people. Use it. Don't bough beneath it.

Quantifying community cohesion

This is a wonder in the other direction, I freely admit, but it ties into social media quite closely, I think.

One of the biggest potentials often quoted for social media is improving community cohesion. I don't like buzzwords, so lets call it.....getting people to talk to each other a little bit more without any of the barriers in the way which the recent evolution of society has created.

Putting it that way makes one of the things I've been musing over today a little easier. You see, thinking of ways to quantify community cohesion is a little difficult. Or rather thinking of ways to measure the effeciveness of social media as a tool to increase community cohesion is a little difficult which is where all of this stems from as I attempt with some determination to wrestle all my thoughts, hopes, aspirations, doubts and questions on social media and its use to us into something approaching a professional document.

It's taken 5 hours of background processing but I'm finally at least at a place where I can understand that talking about community cohesion isn't terribly helpful, but that encouraging people to talk to each other and understand where each other is coming from actually is. So where does that get me? Well, if conversations are happening in places I don't know about, then chances are I wont be measuring those conversations. So the obvious answer to me is to bring the conversations into an arena where I can see them, which involves asking the right questions, providing some house rules and then listening very carefully.

But the other thing which I am wondering about is how you measure a sense of community within a town or county or country. In fluffy terms, it would be obvious - are people being nice to each other, do people help each other on and off buses or across roads, do people grit their own drives and the rest of the street be damned or do they grit the road as well, do people knock on their next door neighbours door to find out if they need a hand with the weekly shop, do people share information regarding dodgy people randomly loitering in the neighbourhood, do people investigate when they hear smashed glass at 3am............

None of this is quantifiable, measurable, put a finger uponable. It's all wavy hands stuff. I'm not interested in wavy hands stuff for the purpose of this exercise, I'm interested in real world outcomes.

Which I suppose is where big society comes in, isn't it. It's where it's come in all along. You can take the temperature of a towns sense of community by the amount of community projects which spring up inside it. By the amount of volunteers registered within it. By the amount of free time people donate on a daily/weekly/monthly basis in order to help someone they don't know out for no other reason than that they felt like helping someone. It's about people helping to build things physically, like youth clubs and church halls, but it's also about the more ephemeral stuff, the time spent leading the youth groups, leading local walks and bike rides, teaching people how to do the fundamental things in life like read and write.

If you wanted to measure community cohesion, which I think is less about people talking to each other, than perhaps about people practically helping each other, then I think I would map the community projects, efforts, outings and outcomes of the local community. It would be an interesting temperature to take in Blackburn with Darwen.

Of course, what I've actually done here is talk about community. Because talking about cohesion is a whole other post. What I wish, more than anything, is that I could march up to certain people within our Department and sit down and ask them if they'll talk to me so I can pick their brains. But I just don't know that it's appropriate, that it would be welcomed, that I am brave enough to do that without some kind of introduction or preamble. So the question then becomes, how on earth will I ever understand cohesion, or rather where people are and aren't talking and why and why not, unless I do.

A call to arms?

I wonder if it was meant to be a call to arms? The following is entirely provoked by Lord Wei's blog entry Call for Reformers.

Before I start, let me make it entirely clear that I am not in the habit of according anyone any respect based on job titles, peerages or anything else. You talk sense, I like you. You talk utter crap, well I'll call you on it - but only if I know I know more on the subject.

Big society is a bit of an odd one for me. It's quite dear to my heart cos I'm a big hearted smart kid. Not so smart I could work at Nasa, but smart enough that I can and do pick up and understand a lot of things. I love the world I live in, but I intensely passionately believe it could be better. It could be so much better. That we could avoid situations like Baby P if people still spoke up when they saw something was wrong. That the RSPCA would get involved in less cases of animal abuse if we still bothered to pick up the phone when we heard something wrong. That if people spoke more, over garden fences and across streets, in the way that they used to (and still do in some far flung untouched areas of the country), then we would all live in a safer more hopeful future.

I am an idealist. I am a believer in what is right and what is wrong. I am a kind person. I choose to be that way, am not that way because a religion or a person tells me to be. I simply like to help. I love to solve problems. I want to fix. I see systems, and processes, and departments and attitudes which are wrong, which malfunction, which don't collaborate but which work in silos and I hate it.

I want to help change things. It's not ambition, it's not high hopes and aspirations, it's not glory or fame or money or recognition. It's the echo of a life my mother told me existed but which I never experienced. It's about the antithesis of isolation, of being let down by systems which were supposed to protect, of struggling to hold on by your fingertips.

If no one stands up and says 'this is wrong', if no one stands up and says 'I have an idea, why don't we ask that person over there how to fix it, but they're not right next to me, so why don't we build a network where two people, three people, ten people, ten hundred people can collaborate, speak, talk, explain, question, build' why then nothing will ever change and nothing will ever get done and we will never change, our society will never change.

Change is reform. Change is not always the answer. But the requirements of the world we live in are changing whether we like it or not - and it pains me to say it but it is outside of our control now. The genie has been let out of the bottle. In a country where religion has relinquished its control almost entirely of the indigineous population, what replaces it?

The choice to do good because you can. For no other reason. To contribute to building a framework where kindness is valued because snowballs gather people to them. Movements gather people to them. Know your audience, know where they live, where they talk, where they moan and where they dream, go to them, find them, pull them to you and then give them something - the something which points them in the direction to start building, give them something to work on, given them a question to start answering, give them hope and let them dream in freedom.

If you are going to issue a call to arms, please be ready for the answer. Please have a plan. Please know what you know and lay out your stall. We are legion and we are putting faith in you and we are answering your call. Now you have to prove you're worth the trust and the faith.

The view behind the lecturn

It was like some kind of bizarre game of I have never. I have never given a presentation before. I have never used a projector system. I have never stood in front of a group of people I mostly didn't know and spoken, I have never stood behind a lecturn.

In the mindset of a woman who's answer to a large amount of questions is 'because it's there' or 'because I can' you would perhaps think that standing up in front of anyone and explaining what exactly I am involved with on a day to basis at work might be quite easy. Well, part of what I do. I was asked specifically to talk about social media and blogging in local government. It ended up, as you can see below, focusing quite heavily on social media in the presentation, though I spoke in greater depth about blogging and how it's been used and will be used in the future.

It's not easy. But it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be either, once I'd stopped shaking. I relaxed, the stats and numbers came without looking at notes and the usual ridiculous enthusiasm reared it's (ugly?) head. Actually, it was quite fun, and the interesting and challenging questions at the end of the presentation were a bit of an eye opener - I still assume everyone else is ahead of us or at least on the same page - it transpires some haven't even opened the book yet. The conversations afterwards were eye opening and fun too - though I don't still know why a man called Steve would spend such a ridiculous amount of time telling me I could leave the public sector and make a lot of money if I wanted to. It was an interesting perspective on an Americans perception of the value of working in public sector, mind.

My rather appallingly put together presentation can be seen below. I kept it simple because I needed to. There's an audio recording floating about somewhere which I might post at some point too.

Finally, I'd strongly recommend going along to the Northern Bloggers meet up which happens every month at the Old Broadcasting House in Leeds. Advice given, interesting talks, slightly geeky but not intimidatingly so. If you do, I'll see you next month because I'm a convert now too. If nothing else, they took a chance on a speaker they barely knew, were entirely complimentary in their feedback and as a result, should I ever be asked again, my first reaction will not be to run as quickly as my legs can take me in the other direction. Butterfly wings: flap flap.

Local government: Analogue to Digital

View more presentations from loulouk.

Waterproof post-it notes

Waterproof post-it notes don't exist. But if they did? Here's what I'd do. No barriers, right?

Imagine crowd sourcing taken to somewhere near the limits. Town planning. How many town planners actually live in the town they plan, I wonder. How many drive around the roads they one way systemise, how many use the ramps and diversions. Imagine if you could crowd source all the people who regularly use the physical infrastructure of the town or city where you live. All the footfall which passes across the pavements, all the people who pass through your local shopping centres shop doors. All the people who look for litter bins and can't find one, all the people who walk the streets and look for benches and can't find them. The people who cross roads and have to wait 10 minutes for a break in traffic, the people who walk along the darkened path and wonder why there are no streetlights.

Ask them. Open up your streets and ask them. Invite the curious, the residents, the armchair intelligent, the planning geeks and the planning bods from other Boroughs. Ask them to tell you where they'd like the bins to be. Where the pedestrian crossing should be moved to, why that sign is always pointing the wrong way and where the drop in the kerb is in absolutely the wrong place for the electric wheelchairs running over it. If waterproof post-it notes existed, by the end of the day, you should have a multi-coloured environment of suggestions and commentary, positive and negative, telling you exactly how the users of the world you've created feel about it when they try and interact with it.

Because waterproof post-it notes don't exist for the moment - why not use Google maps? It's got a zoom level accurate enough to suggest where a bin or a bench should be moved to. It's got a comment facility.

Just saying.

Ask. I think you might be surprised how many people would answer.

These are my dreams, tell me yours?

If there were no barriers, what would I do?

• I'd turn all libraries into digital but also physical hubs. Libraries are valuable assets taking up valuable space, usually somewhere near the centre of our towns and cities. Put a coffee bar in. Put a wireless network in. Invite people to use the space as temporary passing office space for start ups. Ask people to use them as digital training spaces for free. Stick a Social Media Surgery in there for good measure. Use the librarians as curators of locally relevant digital content as well as physical books which also still have their place, though funding restrictions will mean that no library will be able to stock everything, instead authorities will need to ensure book stocks can be quickly and easily distributed between locations. A lady called Jane kicked this idea off. Andy helped shape it. Someone called @amyrsward tripped it.
• I'd stick tiny little sensor pads at the bottom of all grit bins programmed to transmit a signal when the weight pressing on the sensor dropped below a certain pre-specified pounds per square inch. I'd stick a GPS transponder in there. I'd link it to a map on a supervisors dashboard so that he was notified visually when any grit bin fell below a pre-defined level. I'd use the mapping to progamme a route to all red flagged grit bins each morning to fill them up, taking fuel and carbon emissions into account. With thanks to Charlotte Gilhooly for collaborative joy.
• I'd use the underneaths of street sweepers and refuse trucks to attach a sonar device to, and then get that to report back on potholes in the road that they drive over. A lass called Caroline came up with this one.
• I'd make it so that everyone had the ability to book self service GP and nurse slots at their local surgery over the web to save on queuing and costs of telephone conversations.
• I'd create a conversational framework for GP's and consultants where auditable conversations could happen on whether people needed to be referred in the first place and ensuring that people were given the correct priority in the queue.
• I'd create wiki's for professional Networks in the NHS so that professionals nationwide could share best practice and knowledge. I'd stick a tunnel in there for 3rd sector so they could join in on the conversation too.
• I'd make all patient records digital, and enable comments on all entries in a record, accesible by the lead GP, any consultants involved in care and the patient themselves.

And that's just for starters. Digital consultations, digital clinics, digital mentors. Across farming, education, environment, carbon, leisure, entertainment....a thousand things, a thousand ideas, all of them currently impossible.

One day they will be possible. If anything were possible, what would you do?

With thanks to Adrian Short for the bravery pill.

IP blocked

I'm going to ask my partner to IP block this blog tomorrow. Self censorship entirely, no one has asked me not to blog. Call it a hiatus of respect. Respect for the people, perhaps myself included, who have given blood, sweat, tears, determination, single mindedness, enthusiasm, innovation, passion, heart, fire, honesty, love and belief to our jobs in the public sector.

I suspect tomorrow is going to be bad. But the soul wrenching will not be for me. It will be for friends. For the time they have given freely, for the extra hours and the 'extra miles'. For the stress endured and the smiles given freely to customers. For the straight talking and the talking around the edges. For the inspiration and the 5am starts. For the sometimes ridiculously abusive working conditions. For the endless patience and the being caught on the back foot, rallying and turning things around. For the hard budget decisions which have already been made, for the posts which haven't been filled and the people who have stepped into those gaps, often with little training or guidance. For the street cleaner who used the water in his sweeper to put out a car fire, for the gritters out until 2am, 3am, 4am. For the Officer who makes us more carbon and energy efficient meaning we save money, to the Recycling Manager who reduces our expenditure on Landfill Tax. For the determination to provide a good service despite the snow and ice, to the people who commit to communicating who we are and what we do, 24 hours a day when it really matters.

I love my job. I know very many people who love theirs too. They grump and they moan, as do I. But fundamentally, they too are militant optimists, believing in the service they provide and the difference that it makes. Their voices are never heard digitally, but they are there and they are many. I don't presume to speak for them, only to acknowledge them, to point in their direction, to say 'this is what we do, this Local Authority I work in, this is what we do and we are proud of it'.

I am afraid. Change is scary. But, ultimately, I guess I can always go back to data entry, right?

Multiple flavours of geeks

I thought I'd have a play with Google Docs inbuilt drawing programme. This is the result. I'm not part of any of those groups, but I know at least one person who does, I think, fit into each of those categories and a lot who fit into multiple categories. I am willing to concede there might be some D & D gamers who are also Web Designers. I am happy to concede there might be a Programmer who is also a So hip it hurts Shoreditch boy/girl. But in my very humble experience, this is what I sit in the middle of and we're not got to the server engineers, system administrators or ICT project managers yet.

The point I am inelegantly trying to make?

I sit in the middle of absolutely everyone I know. I don't belong in any circle. I just sit in the middle and watch everyone doing amazing things.

It occured to me this evening, reading about the upcoming Leeds Hack, that if I could get everyone I know into one room, all at the same time, without an agenda, that we could fix the digital world. All of it. Completely.

When we build the big society brokerage systems, can we make sure there's a space for programming for free, web designing for free, web coding for free?

Thanks. :O)

The view from the bottom

If society is Big, then what's the view from the bottom? Ben Page touched on this at Solace 2010, something I didn't attend but I watched in Twittertime. He's sent me some fab stats on this, unfortunately and annoyingly, they're not in my inbox because my domain forwarding is broken and no one seems able to tell me why.

Anyway, Ben from Ipsos Mori touched on the barriers in front of the 'working class' in engaging with the big society. I'm putting it in lower case instead of upper case for a reason. Big Society is a call to arms, big society is what is actually happening on the ground, or at least that's the way I see it. But barriers. He identified that the challenges weren't apathy, that there were issues instead with possibilities, opportunities and expectations. But we knew that. Surely we all knew that?

I don't suppose I am working class any more. I have no idea. I sit in the middle in all things, and perhaps this is just another example. Bridge. One foot in one world, and one in another. But the view from the bottom, I think I can speak for.

I volunteered to do something in the traditional terms of the word this year for the first time ever. I stood on top of a windswept Bowland moor top for 3 hours. I stood in a car parking space and made sure no one parked where the judges needed to park for the King of the Mountain mini race inside the first Stage of the Tour of Britain. I got shouted at by a dick of a motorhome driver. I didn't mind. I got blown to hell. I didn't mind. I watched the cloud we sat inside clear and a panorama of West Lancashire open up before me and smiled happily. The judges arrived, parked their car, waited. We watched the helicopters rise and then fall in the distance. Every police motorbike culled from a 100 mile radius swept past us. First the breakaway passed us and faded off into the downhill distance. Then the peloton arrived and the wind around me blew the other way, temporarily, as the combined force, energy, fire and passion of 70 men blew past me, barely out of breath after the Category 2 climb. I smiled. I smiled and smiled and smiled. I wasn't paid to be there. I wasn't paid to wait. I wasn't paid to break down the barriers afterwards and help the men and women who were to remove all traces of the Tour of Britain for this year. Instead, I found a reason to get out of bed at 8am on a Sunday morning. A sense of teamwork. A clearing of the cobwebs and some soul food which will lead inevitably to me purchasing a road bike with the express intention of one day being fit enough to ride that same stage they rode, all by myself. I volunteered ostensibly to do nothing more than stand on a hill. My reward was a new found love.

Is that the big society?

It wasn't when I volunteered. It never crossed my mind. I didn't think 'oh I'm supposed to be trying to be some bright young thing and it's important to do something instead of just sitting here typing frantically and oh look, a big society opportunity, excellent'.

No.

I thought 'I love bikes, love riding my bike, lets go help some other people put on a race where people who love bikes far more than I do can push themselves to the absolute physical limit through wind and rain, up hills and down'.

Selling the big society is pointless. It's not about the sell. Don't sell it to me. Just tell me, in some coheisve, easy to use, non patronising and non accusatory way how I can give my time to do something useful with a spare few hours. I've got time. I've got plenty of time. I've not always got health but I've got a net connection. I'd offer to help kids read without a second thought but I work so that's out. I can type damn fast - does anyone need that? I can stand on a hill for 3 hours, anyone want me? I can sew a bit, talk a bit, put together nifty presentations, teach you the basics of tech, interpret legalese for you, I can explain the basics of group dynamics......just tell me how to put this in the right place for the right people at the right time and I will be happy. If you build it, we will come, well those of us who are digital. And, frankly, if you can't work out the benefits of ensuring everyone is digital by now, nothing I can say will make you realise.

You've got an army on the end of the network. Point us in the right direction, use the right tone of voice to do it, communicate with us regularly, and we will build it. But we will need a little bit of funding for expenses and training each other how to pick it up and pass it on and we'll need reminding every now and again exactly why we're doing this. The rest, we'll pick up and do ourselves.

The view from the bottom? Enable me, don't lecture me.

At the end of the day

Maybe a job is just a job. Maybe you can give too much for nothing back at all. Maybe banging your head against barriers all day every day gets to everyone eventually.

So I think it's time to do something a bit different. Get involved with the Social Media Surgery crowd. Maybe stop feeling like an army of one, isolated and alone. Hook up with some inspiring people doing inspiring things for free and relax a little, pick it up and pass it on and help some people for no other reason than I can, and they need it and it's actually really that simple. Feel like I can make a difference to something, that words aren't disappearing into the wind.

Before I was an employed social media and CMS geek I was a GIS geek. Time to go back and dust off the old skills and take some data and do interesting things with it. Time to map out the current digital state so that people can see how far behind we actually are. Time to drop some reality into proceedings and start to ask the difficult questions. And then back off. Walk away. Leave the people who can actually make a difference to do their thing, if they want to, and if they don't? Still got something to hold on to. Still got something to work towards.

I never knew working with people you'd been chatting with on Twitter was going to be so difficult. Didn't realise the transition between people I could say anything to and people I can say nothing to would be so hard. Struggling with it so very much, crossing lines all over the place, struggling to know where the lines now are. Time to step back from that too. I'm done with being a one woman army. Time to get some support and remember that the tech is shiny and can do cool and funky things, but that it's pointless communicating if there is no one on the end to talk back.

I'm done with certain things, but there are other things to pick up. I'll go and see what people have to say, I'll accept invitations with appreciation, I'll go and ask some difficult questions and if I like the answers and other people like the questions, then maybe life will go in an entirely different direction for a while.

It doesn't matter, at the end of the day. Whatever will be, will be. But I'm switching off a part of me that cared too much because one women armies are not needed, not wanted and not liked. And while I don't want to be liked, have never really been bothered by such things, being disliked is not something anyone would ever want.

At the end of the day, you can care too much. Power: off.

>Hack it

 Verb// to cut a path through something.
Noun// no appropriate definition exists.
Source// Chambers online dictionary
Failure// to comprehend the nature/ethos/etymology or life approach of a really rather large amount of people.

//Once upon a time there was a film called Hackers. It showed a bunch of teenagers cracking passwords (obtaining them illegally without the owners knowledge by running dictionary look up programmes against a password entry field), logging into systems and changing them. Most notably, at the end of the film, they 'hack', by which I mean to say they gain access illegally, to the traffic light system of New York City. For reference, a situation not without the realms of possibility, as proved in Los Angeles, where losing control of only 4 traffic light hubs caused gridlock. "Hack the planet" becomes the rather ridiculous tagline of the film, inducing millions of script kiddies the world over to think they actually can.

//Even before that, there was Kevin Mitnick. A 'real' hacker, who infiltrated the security systems of real companies, at the time of his eventual arrest, he was considered to be the most wanted computer criminal in the United States. He used something called social engineering, which we'll come to later, to obtain passwords, hack systems, hack networks and copy protected data. In the traditional sense of the word, Kevin Mitnick was a hacker. In a rather more common turn of events than most will ever realise, Mitnick now runs his own computer security consultancy, Mitnick Security Consulting LLC.

//In the middle of all this, Loyd Blankenship aka The Mentor wrote The Hacker Manifesto. It was fuelled by an arrest and possibly quite a justified one. Who knows. Who can ever know. But the fundamental truths which eminated and resonated from his words echo down the years, and even now speak to the hearts of the kids who are now adults who never stopped asking the question. All of the questions, the big and the small, the easy and the hard.

My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.

Curiosity is not a crime. The direction it gets directed towards can make it become the motivator to commit a crime. The world changed.

//Hack. A word. It can mean many things to many different people. A lot of people think of the Mitnicks of this world when I say the word and I'm left floundering a little, trying to backtrack out of the corner I've verbally painted myself into, rather than explain the following, the subtle nuances, the blacks and the whites and the shades of grey, the morals, ethics and social engineering pitfalls, where manipulation becomes brain hacking others and where brain hacking yourself simply means 'temet nosce'.

//Hacking, to me and many others, is nothing to do with a computer network. It's to do with efficiency. Finding the shortest path to the quickest solution. It's about learning keyboard shortcuts so that windows can fly open and shut as if by magic so hands don't need to leave the keyboard, thus wasting precious time. It's about knowing you can hit enter on most text boxes to submit. It's about knowing that hitting U a few times in a country dropdown box will always get you to United Kingdom without using the mouse, but it's about so much more.

It's about learning the shortcuts. It's about the fact that most people turn left when entering a theme park, so always turning right and not having to queue except at the crossover rides, which can be circumnavigated by Q Jump tickets provided at the entrance. It's about standing at the right end of the platform on the tube, so that you are at the exit when you get off at the other end. It's about finding the side of the stage at a festival that no one ever bothers to walk to cos they're drunk and not thinking straight and having half a field to dance in to The Prodigy.

It's a thousand different things, from making your own cables to connect technology, to hacking your own brain so that you behave in a different way and become a better person. But social engineering is where I draw the line.

\\Social engineering. You may as well call it manipulation. The cold calculated process of looking at the human race as nothing more than data packets being directed by routers around a network, and picking those packets out of the network, draining them for all their knowledge, and then placing them back into the network none the wiser, while you run off and take the credit for all their ideas. Looking at people as sheep, and using it to your advantage by predicting peoples behaviour and then maliciously manipulating that information for your own gain. Catching someone at their most vulnerable and distracted and asking them a difficult question that you know is likely to ellicit an honest answer when it wouldn't normally. Seeing peoples motivations clearly, and dangling carrots in front of them, only to whip them away when you've got what you want from them. Pretending to play nice and not being honest about your motivations.

With geeks, real geeks, there is no guarantee of nice play. Social engineering was a term coined by hackers who are geeks who use what they know of the human race to get passwords and other 'helpful' data out of them. It is, essentially, the cold hard manipulation of a person.


That's the line. Processes can be hacked. Workflows. Websites to be more efficient and engage with people better. Big society, as a concept, is just a hack. A hack of the way society behaves, a massive behaviour change.


Ultimately, hack, to me, just means change something for the better, be that more efficient, more cost effective, more streamlined, more friendly, more engaging, even prettier.


It does not mean take advantage of the stupid people.

Butterflies and Hurricanes

Working in public sector is a challenge. At the moment, it is a massive challenge. The political, financial, economic and cohesive challenges are each massive issues in their own right. To be subject to each of these vagaries on a daily basis can be disheartening, can sap anyones relentless enthusiasm and determination.

Change everything you are
And everything you were
Your number has been called

Numbers up. Funding's gone. Grants pulled. Questions asked. Relentless questions asked. Quangos abolished, rules of the game spun 180 on us in the space of 6 months. Workloads doubling, will be tripled, eventually quadrupled? Who knows. Hatches battened and posts left empty, hanging swinging in the wind. A service on pause while those who are in power decide our futures, our funding, our frameworks and our hopes to deliver a service which is fit for purpose but also efficient; inspiring and innovative but also locked down to a tight budget.

Change. Change everything? Do you want to be a player in the digital future? Do you want your service to be accessible and relevant to the people you serve, who you were elected by? Can you conceive of a world where eyeball time is precious and reserved for those who are family and friends, where paying the bill is a slice of time carefully allocated, something to be whizzed through painlessly in 30 seconds, as easily as purchasing the weekly shop at Sainsburys or the aquisition of a new pair of shoes from Asos?

This country is going digital whether you like it or not. Your protestations that people use it only for fun and chatter are becoming akin to the sound of the last dinosaurs roaring as the meteorites came cascading down. Facebook brings people with similar concerns together, allows people to express the frustrations that previously were expressed across a garden fence. Except now there are 3000 garden fences and all the chatter becomes frustration becomes action and movement. Letters are written digitally through 38 Degrees. Potholes are reported through Fix My Street. People are connected through hashtags on Twitter. Connected. Digitally. Armies of people who care, who want to contribute, who have the time, who are asking the question repeatedly and relentlessly 'how can I contribute, how can I make a difference, how can I fix a problem, where can I give this time I have spare, I want to help, how do I help?'

If it isn't your job to convene these people, if it isn't your job to talk to these people, if it isn't your remit to engage with these people, then whose job is it?

No more talking. No more waiting for the floodgates to open. They are opening. The avalanche will drown you if you do not put into place the systems and workflows to deal with all of this. If you don't happen to have a friendly geek in your orgnisation who can and will explain all of this to you in words of one syllable, put a call out on Twitter, ask one of the many Heads of Service and Directors who you know who are digitally aware. Ask them the questions - if they can't answer the question, they will know someone who can. There'll be an innovator, a changer, an enthusiast, a geek - whatever you want to call us - near you who will come and speak to you and explain. There are conferences online and offline. Make the effort. Oftentime, all it will take is one question to the right person. If you don't know who the right person is, find someone who does. We'll help. This isn't some exclusive club. This is a patchwork of assistance and patience waiting on tap for you to call.

Best, you've got to be the best
You've got to change the world
And use this chance to be heard
Your time is now

Bridges have to be built. Someone has to stand in the middle. The external understanding of the challenges and directives that the public sector is subject to is limited. A few, a very few, understand because they left before the aspirations and shine could be pummelled out of them. The internal understanding of how digital will and can change is growing. Public sector has an image, it appears, of the antithesis of incubation of ideas, innovation, doing things differently and flying by the seat of the pants.

Wrong.

The challenge of the public sector where digital is concerned is to only understand this. Innovation happens in the wriggle room we all find in the spaces around the barriers. Great things are happening in little pockets of the country, ordinary people stepping up to the plate and doing extraordinary things. I am trying to be someone who finds the wriggle room, who remains relentlessly positive, who doesn't think about 'we can't' but instead thinks 'how can we?'. It's not an attitude I've always had in the public sector and it's a new feeling, I suspect, for quite a few people. It's as if a generation of leaders and inspirations were holding their breath, and the time to let it out and get to work has come and is finally here.

I don't want to be better than anyone else. I am not competing with anyone else. I have to be the best I can be. If that means brainstorming 100 ideas and only 1 of them being viable, only one of them having the capability to wriggle under the barriers, then so be it. If I am told no, then I will simply come back with a different idea, shaped differently, phrased differently. Public sector life doesn't have to be about being mediocre, it doesn't have to be about the bad pay cheque and the dwindling pension. It can be about forgetting all about that and simply seeing the challenge, focusing on the challenge and trying the best you can to do the best with what you are given, no matter how little that might be.

It is easy to innovate with endless cash. It is easy to imagine the world redrawn with funding streams and grants. Now the challenge is for us, all of us, in cities, towns and villages, in schools and in hospitals, to try and think of ways to allow us to deliver more for less. Digital has to be part of the answer. To ignore it entirely is to miss the bus. There will be no thanks for doing this, there will be no recognition. There's no credit or fame or glory in working in the public sector.

All there is is a challenge. A problem to be solved. A barrier to be wriggled under. A digital option to be considered.

Your time is now.

Inspiring digital dreams

Everyone, I think, has a list of inspirations. I'd hope so, anyway. People who spark spirals of thoughts, people who you admire and respect, some whom you are in awe of. They're not definitive lists, well this one isn't, there are many people missing and a large amount of them are from my other love and passion, mountain biking. But this is about tech and digital and these are the people who inspire my digital dreams.

@cyberdoyle
Take a woman. An ordinary woman. A farmers wife from the depths of the Lancashire countryside. Smart. Fiery. Determined. A woman who has a mission, and the mission is very simple. Pass the digital access onto everyone else, and I do mean literally everyone else because it's changed her life. She makes no bones about it. She speaks of it so eloquently in her YouTube video which is a submission to the Sheffield Doc/Fest under Digital Revolutions that I got a bit teary eyed. Part of it was hearing the voice finally of someone who's digital voice I have been following since February on Twitter. Part of it is the power of the simplicity of her words. Some of it is the recognition that digital has changed my world too. All of it is testament to a grandmother, a mother, and a wife who uses the tech in about the best way I know how - to quite literally try to change the world for everyone who hasn't had the opportunity to use it yet. The woman is nothing short of amazing. Nothing short of a one woman army. Every time I become jaded with the digital agenda, with what we are all trying to do in our very different ways, she reminds me of why we write the words, brainstorm at our desks, tweet and retweet and use all the brains someone gave us to push the digital inclusion message as hard as possible.

She will change the world. She is just a farmers wife from Lancashire. What, exactly, are you doing? Because this is the question I ask myself when I read her tweets and there is the essence of inspiration.

Tom Watson, Labour Party MP for West Bromwich East
The Digital Economy Act was a wake up call for a digital generation. It wasn't meant to be, of course, it wasn't written as a call to arms. Some of the most powerful Acts in history have passed unnoticed. This one did its best to. It didn't. Instead, a mobile army of tweeters and digital activists came together on a single issue and a new generation of kids interest in politics was sparked. Including mine.
In the midst of this absolute shitstorm of discussion, irritation, shock, horror, relentless questioning of the political process, and abhoration of the ability of such a massively wide reaching Bill to become reality without even being given the grace of a proper hearing, was one man. This one. On the 8th April 2010, an MP on Twitter became a much needed link between this generation and politics. He stood up and voted against the Bill becoming an Act. He publically declared that it was the first time in his entire political life he had disobeyed a whip.He answered a barrage of questions on political process. He committed to some digital declarations. He made me, and a whole hell of a lot of other people wish he was their local MP.
When I asked him on Twitter why he wouldn't stand for Labour Leader nor would be expressing any interest whatsoever in being part of the shadow cabinet, he replied something along the lines of 'because I want to be able to express my opinions freely'.
In an age where politicians are faceless money spenders, with no morals and who don't inspire anything but the need to reach for the off switch on the remote, Tom Watson is an inspiration to me. Perhaps the greatest thing about Twitter is that I think he knows that, knows that his actions and words inspired very many people of a disenchanted generation, and that one day, somewhere, someone will stand as an MP, entirely because of his openness, frankness, determination to stand up for what's right, and the straightness of his answers. It wont be me. But I suspect he sat at a conference a few months ago next to one of those people. A kick ass MP.


Dominic Campbell, FutureGov
It's never one person. I know that. But the other person who I suspect is in some way partly responsible doesn't appear to step into the spotlight so much and so I'll do nothing more than acknowledge that discovering her existence inspired too.
I don't quite know how Dom appeared. I don't quite know how I discovered the existence of FutureGov. I don't think it was long ago, though it feels like forever. Some people do that. They sort of land in your sphere of awareness and then, well then suddenly they're on your radar and you watch them living their life in realtime and you wonder how on earth it can be entirely possible that one person can keep going, can keep moving, can keep travelling so damn much and not disintegrate into a puddle.
Dom is one of those people (well obviously). It's like watching some mad dynamo. Then you discover the business behind it and the mind behind the business behind it and you start to wonder if time machines really do exist because it couldn't actually be possible, could it, that one person could have so many fingers in so many pies and juggle all of them? From events organising (#ccldn is for City Camp London which is where I just spent my weekend) to TweetyHall, from inspiring to mentoring. That someone a similar age to me can understand that friendships come in both genders, know that I needed a mentor and some advice and gave it freely, that someone can be so painfully shy and yet be gobby as fuck are all reasons for liking someone. But the inspiration comes from the knowledge that the reasons are not all about making money. That the motivations are, I think, honourable. That making money doesn't have to be at the expense of inclusion or thinking of the lost people and that a sensitivity to peoples needs who struggle a little with the world for whatever reason is not something to be embarrassed about, but rather to be embraced to effect real change. Local government has a chance to benefit from a real innovator with a real heart. It might not matter to a lot of people, but it matters to me, because I am a sap. If future government could be shaped by people with such motivations, then we might just not drop the important people along the way.

Tom Stannard, Director of Policy & Communications
If I'm going to get stick for any of these, it'll be this one. So be it. I don't see why I can't find someone I work for (2 layers below, is that for, even?) inspiring. No one from work reads this except for those in our team anyway, and they all know me well enough by now, I think, to know that ass licking is not my style. Apart from anything else, the inspiration started before. The respect earned has come since.
It's not easy being enthusiastic in local gov. It's not easy being a trailblazer. It's even harder to be a trailblazer in a world where to do so is not only to stick ones head above the parapet but to invite derision. Hard words, hard facts, but true ones all the same. Dismissing Twitter as squawking is perhaps one of the more polite ways certain groups of people dismiss Twitter. Facebook was never meant to be the powerful tool for collecting groups of people that it is now. It was supposed to disintegrate into Farmville playing and little boys boasting about their recent conquests and little else. It hasn't. Tom knew that 18 months ago. He knew it before me. He knew it before a lot of other Councils did too. So the innovation happened, the team were pointed in a direction and little pieces of change started to glow in the darkness of a sector ignorant of futures. The first time I tweeted him I had no idea who he was. I got a tweet from another menber of his team telling me he had no idea who I was. Well I didn't have any idea who he was either. I generally don't. In fact, on Twitter, I make a damn big point of not reading the bio's of the people I follow and who follow me. They're just people. Interesting, smart, inspiring and challenging people. It means I'm not intimidated by job titles or well, titles. Like everyone else in this post, Tom takes this well. Better by rights than he should do. He answers my stupid questions, but also the challenging ones. He has effectively created a Department where some days I wonder if I've wondered into a digital agency and not a local gov Department. He is approachable, enthusiastic, determined and processes amounts of data that I am in awe of.
I'm not going to write anything else. There are paragraphs more that I could. Suffice to say, here I lay my hat, not only because of Tom, but because of Marc and Lee and many others in the team. But the team I work within inspires me too, and is one I am so so proud to be a part of, because it is led by an innovator. It's led by someone who is not afraid to state cold hard truth, but also by someone who doesn't see skies, I don't think, only futures. Leadership is not an easy thing to get right. It's hard to please all of the people, all of the time. I am watching and learning from someone I consider to be a leader in the very literal sense of the word.

Right, for today, that's where I leave it. There are more. But if I ever do anything interesting, innovative, inspiring or changing in my life, it will be for knowing these 4 people and a few others. Fires occasionally threaten to go out but they never die. Bring. It. On.

Take a deep breath (part iii)

Taking the stabilisers off. Us public sector kids don't tend to spend much time 'facilitating' sessions. I've never actually attended a workshop either. So, perhaps it wasn't surprising that the digital inclusion session I suddenly realised I was facilitating on Thursday night wasn't quite the success it would have been had Nat been running it.

However.

We all got there eventually, thanks to Nat and a lovely chap from Birmingham. It's a difficult subject, because everyone agrees inclusion is important, but selling that when there's no longer a legal requirement to 'include' anyone in the conversation is a little tough. I don't think a conclusion was agreed because we over ran, partly due to my ineptness and partly due to no one knowing where the room was and people arriving 10 minutes after start as a result. Okay, okay, my appalling facilitation was mostly to blame and I am really sorry. I let important people down, the people we're not including.

On a personal level, I managed to speak in front of people I don't know without my voice disintegrating into that horrible breathy awfulness that usually happens when I speak formally in front of people. But it feels like a personal victory at the expense of lots of other peoples time and I am mortified about that.

Anyway. A public failure but Nat and the fab chap from Birmingham sat and gave their time and explained and it was taken on board and I watched how others did it throughout the day and I understood. Step back. I was the wrong person to facilitate that session because I care too much. That doesn't mean caring too much is bad, it means I was the wrong person to facilitate that session. Lesson learned.

Onwards to the second session. Open data. Frustrating. Enormously frustrating. Central government has issued a directive ironically called Inspire which contains its own definitions of the metadata which must be attached to that. The open data movement doesn't undermine this, it supercedes it. As the not actually present but really rather wonderful Adrian Short said at the time, because local government has a directive which defers openness to 2018, we instead need a motivation to open up our data early, a reason. I don't have the answers, but I do know there is a steady drip drop of open data leaking from Councils and they are the baby steps upon which great leaps will be built. It's the same story with everything else, let the trailblazers lead and prove nothing bad will come from being at the front and others will follow through choice. Positive re-enforcement. It's inelegant and clunky, but show Councils what can happen when you open data up and the incentive will be there to open up more.

It was also at this point which I became almost crushed under the realisation that not only do people outside of local government not know about the realities of working inside it, with our ancient tech, our lack of flash patches, our locked down systems which often don't allow access to social media (BwD is ahead on this score), our IT departments mired in procurement and protocol and Gov Connect Code of Connection paperwork, our directives, our GIS systems and our desperate determination to try and innovate around all these challenges and the hard work and ridiculous hours we pull in order to do this and do it well - but some really couldn't give a damn, either.

Futuregov get it. But there's been enough embarrasing gushing in here for one day.

So. I sat outside the venue, smoked too much, ranted at the boyfriend who doesn't work in local government either and isn't a GIS geek and felt disheartened, alone and isolated.

Then someone who wasn't even at City Camp London popped up. Adrian Short has done wonderful things with open data down in Sutton. In fact before we go there, and in a related unrelatedness of relatedness, I met Charlotte, aka @chargihooly on Friday and she left an impression. Ballcocks in grit bins linked to sensers which transmit when the ballcock has a pre-determined drop in pound per square inch pressure over a point to indicate to a central point when a grit bin is getting near empty wasn't what I thought I'd be discussing on a Friday night in London but it was one of those moments where two people fizz at each other unselfconsciously and together find the beginnings of a solution to a weirdass problem. I'm taking it back and I'm asking the question of our Head of Environmental Services. Implementation costs need to be balanced against savings in fuel and carbon emissions. I'll let you know.

Anyway, Adrian popped up, tweeted about mapping and data and it helped. Someone, even not present got where I was coming from. Brain rallied.

On to the Big Society session. More lip biting. Not alone this time either, Louis arrived, frustrated glances were exchanged. As usual, I sat in the middle of all the conversation and noise and understood where certain people were coming from in feeling like the government had come along and put a name to something they'd been doing for years, unrecognised, but also that you can't disavow belonging to something which has the potential to be a juggernaut driving social change for the better of us all, because of the political colour of the party putting the engine in the juggernaut. Wonderful ideas about voluntary brokerage services came out of this, about matching people with an hour to a charity or person who only needs an hour. I hope it comes to fruition because it was one of many ideas which were muted this weekend which I would actually use.

In fact, lets examine that for a second. I wore two heads this weekend, one as a local government rep (thought not local to London), and as an ex-London resident. I'm not an innovator in the sense everyone else there was. In fact I'm not sure I'm an innovator any more. I contributed no ideas this weekend, mostly because I simply either couldn't get a word in edgeways, couldn't hear the discussion or couldn't get over the intimidation I was feeling. All my fault, it's important to note, but impenetrable. I had the ideas. I have the ideas. I just can't express them yet. What I need, of course, is someone to ask me questions, very many questions, relentless strings of them, to help me pull everything out of my head, but no one has the tie to do something so utterly pointless and self indulgent and selfish. So I need to find another way. It will come.

Anyway, of all the workshops I attended, the Big Society one was the most interesting and the most inspiring. Good expressions of collaboration, understandings of small cogs in the bigger picture. Good points about volunteering to gain experience and being looked down on. Interesting conversations about ladies who lunch too.

Onwards again, via a breather and a much appreciated conversation with Ingrid Koehler on......well there are some things which are not for blogging but it helped. It really did. Thank you.

Onwards to Procurement. I landed in that room entirely because there was no other session which really appealled. I probably shouldn't have attended but I wasn't aware of the correct protocols at the time. I really shouldn't have opened my mouth. Bad mistake. Huge mistake. I accorded some people the expectation of my mostly positive experience in environments like that recently and got slapped down quite neatly. Not the brightest end to the brightest of days, really. I wanted to explain how ridiculous the procurement process is, that peoples experiences of it from the outside is appalling. I don't think I can be arsed, to be honest. If you're interested, ask Dominic. It is ridiculous thought.

Evening. Exhausted. I've worked 10-11 hour days every day for about 2 weeks and bits and pieces on weekends too. I'm ill. That's not an excuse, that's a statement of fact. I'm temporarily disabled in random ways which mean that all the changes in lighting on Friday, for example, meant I emerged from the room the presentations were being held in struggling with staying upright and shivering madly. Just one thing which contributed to a frazzledness which led me to sit down and watch Pseudo and just switch off for a while. I heard conversations about me moaning about things being impenetrable and not making the effort and just died a little. If you take nothing else away from this post, take this: disability, diversity, whatever you want to call it, is not always visible. This weekend cost me more than money.

So. What did I learn? Well. I met some amazing people. People who inspired, who are role models, who I will keep an eye on in future to see where they go and what they achieve. I have many ideas about what we can do to bridge the gap between perception and reality. I have help with that already. I have faith that the projects which were pitched today and won will come to fruition and start to change the world in little ways. I have a renewed belief that we're doing cool things up our way, and big relief to be home. It's going to be a while, I think, before I jump into the fire again, but I did it. Costs aside, it was worth it.

Take a deep breath (part ii)

City Camp Ldn. I went because of many things. Futuregov fascinated me. Dominic Campbell inspired me. The concept made a little bit of my soul glow just a little bit brighter, the hope that people might convene and make things easier, not only for us local govvies, but also for the residents we are trying to serve in the way they'd like to be served? Couldn't resist.

I've only been to BarCamp Blackpool and the NWEGG conference before this. Ever. It was an intense experience, a little overwhelming, a little intimidating, but always challenging and therefore worthwhile. I don't see battling with things to be negative. I refuse to accept that trying to get your head around something is negative. Sitting saying nothing and then going home and bitching is negative.I don't do that. Ever.

Day 1. Started at the RSA, a beautiful building which remined my of the Courtauld Institute down at Somerset House. Same feel to the public spaces. Imbued with history, absolutely not my taste in art. Ah well. Plenty to distract from the art, with such luminaries as Kevin Curry, the creator of the City Camp 'brand' and Dave Worsell from GovDelivery. The note on my iPhone which I tapped on madly during these presentations say:

We need to create and focus on good in BwD not bad. Small things. Positive things. We tend to focus as a race on the negative, why not the positive? Small things, little wheels turning, like Boris' bikes. Fetes, carnivals, community events - can these be digital to reduce cost? An avalanche of small things creates the magic of the whole.

Barcelona website - nab ideas for the town centre website.

Harnessing those that care. Where are they and how do we use them and does digital inclusion mean a bigger army? Older people, for example, might have the time and willingness to help but not the know how or the access. Free eyes and ears to contribute.

Check out Fon for distributed wi-fi (I honestly didn't know about this, why aren't we all doing this? It's like seeding)

Don't see what we always saw, can we podcast bwd differently? The weird, wonderful, different and bizarre. We are diverse and different and many colours and backgrounds and interests, can we use that to create a sense of community by acknowledging what makes us different from everywhere else, turn challenges into positivity. Create treasure hunts through the town which are on apps but replicated on web so no one excluded by the tech? Can we sms broadcast in specified small catchment areas for example? Turn our town in differently layered space to explore for people? Do they care? How do you know when people want to engage? Is this a worthwhile way of spending public money and which directorate does this fall into?

By the time we got to John Tolva, Director of Citizenship & Technology at IBM, there was no brain left for spirals and instead I sat and let his machine gun delivery seep into my psyche. I grinned. I grinned some more. Someone who is so passionate and enthusiastic about his world, about changing his town planned world that he can't get the words out fast enough. Tripping and darting those words came out, relentless and fast, the slides seamlessly changing and progressing. It was one of the most exhausting presentations I've ever seen, but also, one of the most inspirational. And I am not, nor ever will be, into planning.

Somewhere in the midst of this the Chief Exec of the RSA, Matthew Taylor hosted a sofa interview with Caroline Pidgeon, Steve Reed and Paul Osborn. This was where the actuality of a Twitterfall behind the panel collided sharply with the ethics of such things, and two camps emerged, with Dominic Campbell having the rather horrible task of deciding whether it was morally right to be discussing peoples words behind the place they were speaking them, when they couldn't actually see them. An unenviable decision, to be fair. My person viewpoint? If you say stupid things I disagree with on something I know from personal experience, I'll call you on it. If you say something brilliant, then I will congratulate you on it. Equal opportunity of outcomes generated by the user content being produced.

I still stand by something which came out of this panel. If I contact a Councillor by Twitter, it does not mean I do not care about the issue I am contacting them about. It means Twitter has given me a voice I never felt I had before, and I am flapping my wings, using the tech to allow me to ask questions. Eventually I will ask the questions in reality. But for now, Twitter is my happy place and many others too, and to dismiss it as squawking is indicative of a collective viewpoint which does not use the tech, has no knowledge of the tech, wont try and understand the tech and therefore derides the tech, because that's easier.

I'd have admired him more if he'd asked the audience why they preferred to use it to talk to their Councillors and what was wrong with the exisitng systems of communicating with Councillors which means us, the residents, are not using them, but turning to Twitter instead.

Then, Nat McDermott spoke about Inclusive Culture and I smiled again. Nat is like a cross between a butterfly and a nuclear reactor. The projects she has been involved with cross in places with places I've worked and therefore know about, which helps. But you know that moment when someone speaks and a room pays attention and you know, you just know, that this is going in, that people are taking notice and that because the subject is quite dear to your own heart, you sigh a big sigh of a relief and just grin?

Yeah. Woman is amazing. Empowering disadvantaged groups to test their skills in communicating online in safe and accepting places before going out into the big wide world and using those skills to play with everyone else is just genius. Seriously inspirational and the highlight of the Friday for me.

Then it was time for socialising in the beautiful vaults of the RSA. I met a compound bow wound tight in the form of CEO of a company responsible for a website which helps compare womens clothing sizes but who also seemed to produce documentaries or films and whose name I never quite caught, and Louis Moseley who left an impression so complicated and profound that it's a little difficult to actualy explain. It's not often someone floors me, nor renders me almost speechless. It's not often I am disquitened yet so inspired. It's not every day I get gobsmacked by someones politics and it's not every day I have to examine my own reaction to the colour of someones politics really damn carefull and admit to some prejudices of my own and try and resolve them. To say an impression as left would be an understatement and I am slightly saddened that I am unlilkely to ever see him again, but if that's the calibre of mind and perception which Eden Valley is benefitting from, then bits of Cumbria are indeed in safe hands, something which was confirmed by a rather more local lady than I.

As a footnote to all of this......and without embarrassing someone too much, don't be sure your tweets are ignored if you don't get a response. Seems some people are causing ripples in places they'd never have had any access to, before Twitter came along. I must confess to grinning like a loon upon discovering this, because no one I know but have never met deserves the curiosity quite so much.

So. Day 1. I went to bed with Clay Shirky (I'd never heard of him before), a pounding head, but a hopeful heart.

Take a deep breath

I am writing this on the train as I travel home from London. See, even I haven't lost the novelty of being able to type that sentence.

I spent Friday and Saturday in the company of bright young things (well all ages actually, but their demeanour demands they are referred to as bright young things) as part of City Camp Ldn convened by the rather lovely people of Futuregov. I would like to make it absolutely clear at this juncture that I really do think the Futuregov crowd are stars - frustration may have been in my tweets from the event over the last two days but the frustration has never been with the organisers.

Someone also commented that they hoped I was being paid to attend the event. I wasn't. He was referring to my rather public confusion at some aspects of the event. I feel it necessary to explain something to those who are new to this blog and me. There is no bullshit here. No facades and no fakery. I am an honest person, I wear my heart on my sleeve and at 33 years of age this is unlikely to change. It allows me to connect with people on rather fabulous levels, it allows me to know who is shiny and who is not. The very public wrestling with the world that I do on Twitter is intentionally there and it's there for a reason.

I am not alone in the way I feel. I know this from speaking to other people. Therefore if I vocalise the things I am struggling with, it means others who are less comfortable with being quite so open don't need to. Also, hopefully, somewhere out there is someone reading this blog and my tweets who can see the things I struggle with and also the things which fire my imagination and who is wondering if they could stick their head above the parapet too. In transparency, maybe there comes an encouragement, to try, to dip a toe in the water?

I don't know. I do know I unsettle some people. But I also know that if I don't ask questions, don't persist, don't be relentless in this, then I will just give up everyone and everything as a bad job and I don't want to do that. I don't for a second believe I can change the world. I just want to. There's a difference. I'm not arrogant or egotistical, not deluded or deceptive. I know what I know, I am honest about what I don't, and I expect people to be civil if they can't manage friendly.

Having got all that out of the way, which feels negative even though it shouldn't be, I think I'll start a separate post on the weekend. I suspect it's going to turn out to be a bit of an epic, for ewhich I apologise.

What are you waiting for?

You hold your breath. You have moments when you are caught in the headlights, a still unmoveable object in the middle of a cacophony of whizzing data. A chip on the motherboard of life, electrical pulses flying, ideas arcing above your head. You are paralysed. Brain still processing, eyes still flickering, other movement stilled.

Tentatively, you step into the edges of the data streams. Blog feeds collected, news streams scanned, conversations sparking and falling away again as fast as the data itself moved, for conversations are only data, care and heart and love colouring some, intrigue and passion and ferocity colouring others. But all of them worthwhile, all of them different colours, a beautiful rainbow created by beautiful minds.

A 10" window on the world. A data world. Pixellated beauty of intelligence and minds coming together in semi public streams, the worlds largest pub, spiderwebbing conversations pulling others in, epiphanies spiralling out of control into the impossible, the speakers resolutely denying that impossible exists. Here is no place for impossibilities, here is for everyone and everything, for the ideas which were ridiculous but now are not, for the lights which have been shaded to shine brighter than anyone thought possible.

The pace is fierce. The intensity of belief is catastrophic in its potential to do something so complicated and yet so simple. Change the world. Change the rules. Don't listen to your parents who told you to never aspire. Don't listen to your friends who told you furiously typing didn't mean anyone was listening. Don't listen to the people who can't understand that inspiration comes only once to some of us and that hard work should be avoided at all costs.

Instead start to believe. Start to ask the questions. The big ones and the small. Go back to the start when we were all innocent and naive and wide eyed with wonder and ask only this? What are you waiting for?

Don't hesitate. Don't pause too long. Stop over thinking, start doing. Stop the noise, stop the statis, stop the paralysis, stop the negative assumptions. Start the future, start the discussion, start the tearing down of the old ways of doing things and lay the building bricks of the buildings other will live in. Move. Get involved. It's not political, it's not dangerous, there is no wrong answer, only the potential to ask the wrong questions but to receive the right answers.

This is a missive to me. To the part of me wants to hide from the tornado of thoughts, ideas, opinions and beliefs. No more hiding. No more furious typing. The point is not in being the person to change the world, it is only to put together the pieces, to suggest and enable the small pieces in the puzzle, so that together we may build a bigger picture which will change the world.

With thanks to @johnpopham, @dominiccampbell and @johnsturgess

#girlsinit

I don't normally do this. I really don't. But this is important so it must be done.

I've just signed up to a petition being run be e-skills UK. They are also running an IT Ambassadors rollout which will eventually see people who sign up going into local schools they are paired with and speaking about why they are in IT. With free CRB checks included.

I've signed the petition and I've volunteered to go and talk tech to some teenagers despite avoiding public speaking like the plague. Here's why.

17% of the UK IT workforce are female.

I could stop this blog post right here. Everyone reading this knows that to be a fact. Everyone reading this knows why this is a bad thing. Everyone reading this has undoubtedly had a discussion with a woman in tech at some point in their career which has come at the problem or issue from such a different angle to the one you were coming at it from that you've been blown away.

I'm not a rampant feminist. I just think every sector that delivers a service to 100% of the population (because everyone needs IT) should be representative of the people it serves. Occasionally, girls see things differently. Our best ICT Project Manager in our organisation is a woman. She is focused on detail without being mired in it, MS Project is her weapon of choice and she deploys it well, she is trustworthy but knows when to break that trust for the good of the project, and more importantly perhaps, while I have no idea how much her boss values her, she is the one PM whose name you can mention to anyone, and I do mean anyone in the organisation and to the last, the very last, the person you are talking to will visibly brighten (or relax if it's in terms of that person managing their project) and have marvelous things to say about her.

I shouldn't really need to be making this point but I she is not alone. I know a few women who IT project manage and are damn good at it. Three of the girls on our IT helpdesk are women. They outnumber the boys. Each one of them I trust implicitly to know what I'm talking about, I don't need to filter the tech, I just tell them the problem as I see it in my hodge podge mix of geek and non geek talk and they understand and fix it. So do the blokes. But tellingly, not all of them. And it's people skills where those blokes fall down.

Historically, employing techs meant conceding that perhaps inter-social and customer service skills needed to be sacrificed. The world has changed immensely in the last 10 years. But there is something to be valued in a tech who has excellent customer service skills and still knows how to be calming, polite, empathic and gentle with people. Tech is still scary to a lot of people, you might think they understand what you're saying - truth be told they're probably doing what a rather nice lady I had a chat with the other day about this does - sloping off with their tail between their legs, never daring to ask another question because they've just been geek talked into oblivion and back and would rather die than have it happen again.

This is not the way to do business. This is not the way to provide a service.

Empathy is inherently a trait we all possess. I think perhaps women are better at being comfortable with displaying it. Is the reason that so many women work in customer service because it's traditionally been a low paid role, or because women are simply better at listening to what people are actually saying, what terms they're saying it in, and then mirroring the questioners terminology and phrasing in order to make that person feel more comfortable? Is that they can hear fear in someones voice, or can remember feeling that fear and want to reassure before moving on to solving the problem? Is it because we are comfortable with delivering information slower, sacrificing speed for ensuring that a message really is received and understood.

I'm not for a second suggesting men don't do their jobs in tech well. I'm not suggesting there are some things women can do which meant can't. Everyone can learn. What I am suggesting is that the lack of women currently in IT is depriving us of some great minds, inspirational viewpoints and differently motivated people who have an awful lot to contribute and who are contributing to almost every other sector of society pretty damn well thank you very much. Except ours. And that's wrong.

So, please sign up. Pick it up and pass it on.

A whole lot of heart

Intelligence and heart. And social media, that's here too. But. Intelligence and heart.

I've hidden behind a computer for a long old time. I've kept beneath the parapet, never telling anyone what I thought, never venturing an opinion and sometimes I think never actually having one. I contributed to discussions only when others were drunk so they'd forget the words I'd say in the morning but grabbing the fleeting opportunity to test the water in expressing something. Anything.

Then someone asked a question. I knew the answer to the question. I knew I knew the answer but still I hesitated, because the person asking the question was a Head of Service and whilst I was entirely comfortable with expressing opinions with my then HoS, because he was my mentor and I trusted him and worked so very well together, I didn't know the person asking the question at all.

But I knew the answer. So I wrote the answer in an email. I didn't send the email for 48 hours. I came back on Monday morning, retrieved the draft and reread it. And I sat at my desk in my portakabin and I looked at the words I wrote, and I wondered who'd written them and then pressed Send.

The person I sent it to was @marcschmid

He forwarded the email to @tomstannard - I use their Twitter names because the conversation started on Twitter. A job became available in their team. I was told I had an interview over Twitter. I was told I had the job over Twitter. We still sort work stuff over Twitter too. And email. And face to face. It's as natural to all of us as breathing to use the right channel for the right time in the right way to get hold of the right person at the right time, depending on many different factors.

I explained this today. It got the usual reaction 'wow sounds like you lot have got the hang of this social media thing'. Well yes.......and no. But today I learnt that we can hold our heads high. That we are innovating in company, ever growing company, but we are still ahead some. That I was wrong in my assumption that everyone else was ahead of us. They're not. That we are using social media well and in the right way and I cannot take credit for that, all those foundations were built way before I came along.

But I also learnt that I know what I know. I think what I think. And it is the same as others think, I am not alone, I am not an army of one. I learnt that women can stand in front of conferences and speak and people will listen. I learnt that intelligence and heart are not things to be hidden, but things to be shown with no consideration for those things being unusual or strange.

I learnt. So much. I have 6 pages of notes thanks to the NWEGG social media conference I attended today. I talked and learnt from people, I discussed and enthused, and was enthused at. And oh, but there is nothing I love more than someone enthusing at me. It's the fuel that I need to continue to think, to continue to brainstorm, to continue the epiphanies. These are my dreams for the future, tell me yours, tell me yours, please tell me yours? What do you see? What would you want if there were no barriers at all? Imagine a world built from the ground up, what would you wish for? Can we create that, can we shape that, can we, is it possible? Why must we be constraind by what we've always done? I. need. that.

I need to wrap this feeling up and take it with me. I need to not forget. I am not stupid. I am not leading us down the wrong path. I am not speaking alone. I am not alone, I am backed up by research, great minds, innovative people, shiny people.

Intelligence with heart. Be smart and care. Don't be ashamed of having a brain which you enjoy thinking with and don't be afraid to admit that you care. These are the things I learnt from many many awesome people today.

For the sending of an email, for the pressing of the Send button, for the asking of a question, I am grateful.

A classless society to be a big society?

We are not a classless society. From where you are sitting, it may look like it is, and I commend you and congratulate you on your luck. I suspect you have been born into a different world to mine and many others. If you are sitting there raising an eyebrow in slight bewilderment about the concept that big society needs to address class issues, then let me try and explain. I am not comfortable with the task of explaining, because it is a complex issue that I will inevitably end up breaking down into a small blog post, but I have to try because annoying trends are emerging.

A while ago I said that I didn't think the big society could work in my street. I acknowledge fully I was wrong. I missed the point. The point, of course, being that the big society is very much alive and well here, but that due to cultural differences, we are welcome, but only when assistance is required for very specific problems. Otherwise, there is a language and cultural barrier which through no fault of anyones seems to be insurmountable at the moment. I believe that in 10 years time this will not be true. I believe this very much.

So after much soul searching, I came to the conclusion that I'd missed the point of big society, and that perhaps being a complete and utter sap, I believed in it more than I'd actually realised, because actually, attending conferences, discussions, joining in with debates online on Twitter, talking to people and trying to change their viewpoint of the world and trying to establish who the people are who can help me change the world a tiny little bit - all of that is the big society. It's about people giving up their time to share, talk, collaborate, inspire, challenge and discuss. It's about sparking epiphanies in others as much as it is about getting something out of it for yourself. Well, for some of us. :O) It's about giving something up for no reward, I think, about sharing with people with no expectation of reward, only a deep seated aspiration to try and change the colours of the world slightly for those who might come after.

My motivations, I suspect, are being questioned in some quarters. It's simple. I might come across as being exceptionally stupid and naive but I am a reasonably good judge of character - and this judging is usually done when people aren't aware they're being watched. I don't mean stalked - I mean people watching - the same people watching that we all do. The small difference might be that I do it consciously - perhaps not, I don't know. But I watch how people deal with others, above them, at the same level as them, below them. Process the data, and make decisions. Decisions about whether someone is the right person to trust. Decisions about whether someones motivations are the same as mine. Decisions about risk taking, rewards or lack of them, being trusted myself and about faith.

I do this for everyone I come into contact with, truth be told. From political leaders to friends, at every level. I can't help the way I am. It's how I roll. I give information freely to people, but it's filtered, always filtered until I trust someone.

Why is this important?

I grew up at the bottom.

Big society requires people to come together. It requires ideas and trust and faith and good intentions. It requires the commitment to give your time, ideas, enthusiasm and passion to some one or something with no hope of return or reward. It's not an easy thing to do. It requires excellent communication skills to convey your ideas. It requires immense confidence to stand up in situations you are terrified of being in and bely no signs of your fear but instead project the concrete absolute projection of believability. You're not fooling anyone. You're not lying. If someone saw how scared you really were, they might think you were, because they would be judging the person in front of them on their own social experience and not the social experience of the person in front of them. But it is necessary to stand in front of these people, these people who are not your people, to ask for money, acquire funding, acquire benefactores and gain support, which creates noise, which results in success.

Some of us are more comfortable than others. Some of us acquired a 'sod it lets see what happens' attitude somewhere along the way and the fear dissipates in the reflection of other peoples questions, curiosity and interest. Some of us are chasing something a little more elusive than job roles, a boyfriend who can pay all the bills or fame and glory. I can't speak for everyone who comes from where I come from, because you know I've not met anyone else yet who comes from where I come from and finds themselves here in this insane world of endless possibilities, or certainly what looks some days like a world of endless possibilities and other days looks like nothing short of an insurmountable obstacle course where I simply don't have the skills, any of the skills, to negotiate it.

But I don't want to hear only one conversation. I want to hear everyones voices. I assume the government wants to hear everyones voices, despite someone from the Tory party slapping down some of the disabled Twitter army last night. I'm going to assume her crass ignorance is in the minority. In order to hear everyones voices, please make sure you ask. Everyone. Don't expect everyone to be gobby enough to come to you. Don't expect everyone to be ballsy enough to come to you. Don't expect everyone to have come to the conclusion that there is nothing to lose and only in trying, in asking the difficult questions, in pushing harder and harder and harder is there a chance that a small tiny piece of the world might look different, might come together, might be okay. Not magnificent, but simply okay.

In order for the big society to happen, money is needed. In order to get money for your project, you have to, essentially, pitch. The thought fills me with absolute terror. I'll do anything to avoid it, absolutely anything. I don't think I'll be alone. So what do we do? Who do we go to? Who will advocate on our behalf? Who will be the presentable, eloquent, confident voice for us?

Is that even the answer? Or is the answer to actually teach people how to speak for themselves. Give them the tools. Allow them to practice, hone their speeches and their skills and then go and take their fire, passion, enthusiasm and care to the table and not choke on the words before a sentence has passed.

A conversation has to involve all. Please, will someone work out a way for everyone to have a voice?