BWD winter - one Council, two people, a lot of determination

Lots and lots of blog inches have been devoted to bemoaning the direness of local governments reaction to the winter weather we are currently experiencing. I can't rebut them all. I'm tired of rebutting them all, frankly.

So, instead, I'm going to explain what happens when a Council has a Director of Communications who understands social media and lets his staff have free reign (within reason), a Head of Communications who is supportive, endlessly patient and relentlessly cheerleads when needed and a PR Officer who just wants residents to understand exactly what happened last year, why it happened, that we've taken steps to ensure it doesn't happen again this year but acknowledges that if it does happen again, being in an arena where people are discussing that failure is perhaps far more of value than sticking fingers in ears and singing la la la.

Essentially, though, BWD Winter is a labour of love for two people - the PR Officer and me. I know it for what it is - a beautiful opportunity to demonstrate exactly what a combination of digital, social media, mapping, Flickr and YouTube can do when all resources are thrown at it and no punches are pulled. It's definitely love, because it's taken a lot of work and determination to circumnavigate our somewhat elderly Content Managenment System. It's definitely love because the PR Officer is frequently speaking to Highways and Grit Control at  8pm on a Sunday evening. Services between 9-5pm? Not in winter. So the communications systems have changed to reflect that.

It started with a Winter Services hub page on our website. Just, you know, bog standard really. Info about gritters somehow made interesting, awesome pics of gritters doing their thing (if you're into that kind of thing, some people are, who am I to comment). Then an internal email newsletter appeared, keeping Directors and Members up to date with developments and concerns to forewarn them of incoming issues, but also to celebrate successes. Lovely internal comms but no use to the residents.

Then, one morning, the PR Officer came bouncing up to me and asked if we could have a Facebook page. Yeah, course, I said. 48 hours or so later, we'd got a BWD Winter Facebook page. And no Likes. So off we went, all of our team, merrily commenting and throwing it into our friends streams. I'm sure there is a better way of seeding a new page or group into peoples consciousness - but we were experimenting. It snowballed quite quickly (ha ha ha) and 100 Likes later, in the middle of September, when snow was but a distant cystallised twinkle in the eye, we thought we might be onto something. The grit got delivered, pictures got taken, up they went. People talked and chatted and commented between themselves, and our PR Officer replied every time a question was asked. She still does. If she doesn't know the answer, she asks Highways. If she doesn't have any pictures she wants, she asks the gritters to take some. No professional shots here, just staff taking two minutes to pop outside with their 5 megapixel snapper. Content, magically appeared.

Then we figured tying it to Twitter might be an idea. It's tied to the FB page because we're broadcasting, of course we are, but we check for replies. Check for questions. Make sure no one is missed. But Facebook is the hub of the dynamic content, which in some ways considering the demographics of our area, is exactly the way it should be.

So, what else are we publishing on our Facebook page? Pictures aren't information, pretty as they are. So there's Met Office updates, school closure updates. There will be service updates on refuse and recycling collection should we get to the point, as we did last year, where the Head of Environment decides at 7am to pull the service. We'll explain that decision, we'll explain alternative collection points if we need to implement them. We'll also map them. We'll come back to that later. We'll explain about burst pipes in schools, we'll relay traffic hotspots and accident blackposts courtesy of the Gritter Control who will receive up to the minute traffic information - from the people driving up and down the roads - the gritter drivers.

It's not all data though. Not all boring stuff. There's a call for scenic photographs on the Facebook page at the moment so we can share the pretty. When the snow comes down properly, we'll hopefully be holding a best snowman competition - no monetary prizes though, only that all submissions will be published on the Council Flickr page in a specific set, and that the winner will go in a simple frame and be displayed in the Town Hall foyer. Momentary fame but a reward for bothering, nevertheless.

A few week ago, it came to my notice that people were publishing lots of gritting route info down in the West Midlands. @danslee and @sarahlay being the prime suspects. So off we went on an epic journey through 2 Departments and assorted meetings and negotiations, to get permission, get them hand drawn, get them to display properly using basic Google maps and get our aging Content Management System not to throw a complete hissy fit on loading something other than text, image or documents. It took relentless negotiating with people and tech to get those maps up. They're up. By any means necessary took on a whole new meaning. Mapping the grit bins has been simplicity itself in comparison, but a shining star in Transport still needed to run 3 revisions before being confident that most of the markers were in the right place, if not on the right side of the road. It's certainly brought asset mapping and tracking into the forefront of Highways mindset, which perhaps is a good thing? Certainly the bins will be numbered cheaply next year, and thanks to a discussion spawned by that, lampposts will be QR coded too, quite probably. Because perhaps the magic of social media collaboration between Communications and other Departments is not the actual conversation, but that the conversation on such things has been started at all. Bridge building.

So, now, our web hub has:

• Basic information on gritting, why we do it, when we do it and how we do it
• Maps showing the locations of all grit bins within the Borough which people are encouraged to feedback on if we've got it wrong
• Maps showing all our gritting routes as a term of reference for those bothered to find out when we say on our Facebook page which routes we're gritting, primary or secondary
• A link to a Facebook page with over 450 likes and 4000 impressions a day on busy days, where conversations, two way conversations are happening
• A link to a Twitter stream being checked regularly for feedback
• A Flickr gallery of gritters pictures, which will shortly be updated with residents scenic photographs

So what's the value of all this hard work and constant liasing and updating? Well. I guess this is where we find out.

With thanks to the PR Officer who started all this, @luciehigham, the Head of Comms who's been immensely supportive, @marcschmid, the Director who allows us a bit of lee way, @tomstanard and most of all to @leejorgensen, the bloke who puts up with me sitting at my desk clapping my hands excitedly when it works, and who helps me fix it by being calm when it doesn't. And whose righteous google maps hack means those grit bins are all on the same map instead of being paginated.

Teamwork. Even when we're heading towards having no money at all, that costs nothing at all. And some days, some times, on things like this, we've got it in spades. Cost of doing above = nothing. Happy residents feeling informed? Around 4,000 but we reckon word of mouth might mean just a few more.

Revelations will be digitalised

Wikileaks. Who knows? Who cares? Out in the big wide world, who knows of Wikileaks?

Tomorrow morning, I expect to wake up to a BBC who have caught up. I expect there to be feet of commentary on the disclosed cables sent from Washington commenting on hiring hitmen, detailing dealing with defectors and endorsing and condoning the acquisition of passwords and encryption keys of UN officials. I expect analysis and investigation.

Half of me suspects I wont get it. Or, I suppose, fears I wont get it. The fact that the Guardian have been brave enough to pick the whole story up, publish detailed and useful analysis and make all of the cables available has staggered me - yes, they're a national newspaper, and yes, they've still got more credibility and clout than Wikileaks do, but still. Brave steps by the editor.

The sad fact is though, that reported or not, most of the BBC audience simply wont understand the enormity of the cables leaks. They wont understand that the Andy Coulson affair where newspaper reporters hacked voicemails to listen in on telephone conversations was nothing but a flake in a snowstorm. They wont be able to comprehend the jaw dropping audacity of a country encouraging diplomats to acquire intelligence that one assumes would have been used for eavesdropping and hacking UN officials. That's before we've got to the issues regarding embarrassing comments on 'teflon' German officials.

This isn't a revolution. But it is an entirely digital revelation. The enormity of this knowledge escaping into the big wide world will be lost, I think in the noise of the discussion about whether Wikileaks should be allowed to keep running. I think it will be lost in the hunt and the chase. I think distraction will be employed to bury the story by whatever means necessary.

But eventually, the elephant in the room for all governments is going to need to be acknowledged. The horse has bolted. Barn door not swinging any more, but tied on with bits of blue nylon string. Horse now galloping merrily down a beach through crashing waves. It's too late to stop Wikileaks. It's too late to wrest control back from people who don't like the way you do things. Democracy changed. The ways in which your electorate express displeasure with the way you use the power we accorded you, has changed. Scrutiny committees? Inquiries? They will still happen, but the true scrutiny, the real commentary, the ripping apart at the seems of the incessant need to dodge the difficult questions by people in positions of power, is no longer protected by the Official Secrets Act.

The simple fact is, I wont be reading about CIA and FBI indiscretions in 50 years time when Freedom of Information allows documents to emerge into the public domain. There is no buffer any more. No delay. No guarantee that the actions of the dinosaurs at the top will remain hidden until careers are ended and prayers are said for souls long ceded. No. Scrutiny is real time. Answers demanded in real time.

Revelations and revolutions. In real time.

Why I love the internet

This post was inspired by @timolloyd and his rather wise post on A Victorian advertising director in which he reminds us that we must not lose sight of why we love the web in our constant determination to know as much as is humanely possible about our areas of work.

So, cos 10 is a nice round number, here are my top 10 reasons why I love the web.

Twitter

Well of course? It's solely responsible for my getting consistently dragged into work related stuff, but of course that's entirely because I follow people who talk about the things I am interested in, and the things I am interested in, happen to be entirely aligned with the subjects I work with. This makes me lucky. This also makes it difficult to escape. But somehow, I don't mind.

You see, Twitter keeps throwing me curveballs. It's the gift that keeps on giving. For me, it has become the first tool I log into and the last I log off. There are 3 different apps for it on my iPhone. I follow ridiculous amounts of people and read nearly every single persons tweets at some point during the day though I must confess I can't keep up during work time any more. It's allowd me to argue and discuss, commiserate and sympathise. It's become a little of a support network during the current difficult times. But most of all, very most of all, because of Twitter 2 very important things have happened.
a) I have changed as a person and I think for the better
b) My life has changed and is almost unrecognisable to how it was 12 months ago.

The explanations for those two things are a post in themselves. I've been meaning to write it for weeks.

'Different' shopping sites

I was spoiled in London. Hours at the weekend disappeared in the markets at Camden, in Covent Garden and in 'vingtage' shops around Waterloo and down the Holloway Road. Moving away from London has done wonders for various areas of my life but my shopping habit wasn't one of them.

So, made.com, Folksy and Etsy rock my world on a regular basis, among many others. Want something to wear to a party without getting into that discussion about getting out of bed on the same side that morning? Etsy. Want a coffee table that people wont instantly recognise as coming from a certain store beginning with I but will look fab and is a reasonable price for something designed elegantly? Made.com.

Stack magazines

I know it's not strictly speaking a website, but without the web it wouldn't work, it wouldn't exist and if it did I would never know about it. Pay £4.90 a month. Sit. Wait behind the door (well, not really but....). Every month get a magazine delivered. What's so different about that? Well, each month, I don't know what I'm going to get. And I absolutely love that. For some reason, the more digital I've become, the more fascinated I've become with print magazines. With design. With colours and fonts and layouts and the choice of paper. It's not quite an obsession but I have no idea where I'm going to put them all, so I've resorted to recycling them by finding people to pass them on to, because they're too beautiful to simply throw away.

Last month I got Shook. This month I got Oh Comely and a lovely freebie called Article. Next month? Who knows. In a world full of predictable media, I really quite love not knowing.

XKCD

It's where the geeks go to laugh at themselves. It's where every geek has gone and wondered, 'can they mind read?' It's a comic of such searingly accurate observations and life experiences that occasionally I can't deal with the wince factor, in much the same The Big Bang Theory gets to me (flowcharting how to ask a girl on a date anyone?). The particular strip is linked for a reason. I <3 it very much. I started in tech support and I don't think it ever really leaves you. And hey, someone recognised girls can do tech support too. They may also be entirely responsible for my own pathetic attempts at stick figure comics.

The #uksnow map

It's geeky. It's a mash up. It's a crowdsource of epic proportions which resulted in some very ruffled Americans last year when #uksnow suddenly trended in the midst of their tea party randomness and they were forced to acknowledge an unusual weather event was happening somewhere outside their continent....sorry, country. All you have to do is tweet the first part of your postcode, a rating of between 0 and 10/10 for the rate the snow is falling, and hashtag it #uksnow. The beauty is in the simplicity - instructions a non geek can understand, useful output that a non geek can understand. If all crowd sourcing could be this simple, quick and elegant, we could be doing beautiful things.

In the meantime, if you're me, you can sit mesmerised by the gentle drift of the snow falling outside, while watching the rapid movement of data from all around the country on your screen. Data isn't beautiful? No? Sure?

Design Boom

I've always been fascinated by interesting structures and buildings. The web means I can use sites like Design Boom as a window on a world I'm never likely to see, but which I find fascinating - the world of architects who see no limits, only possibilities. I find most of the buildings inspiring and intricate in their complexity - but also their simplicity, because making living spaces simple seems to me to be a fine art all of itself. It's like a window into a world that you only used to be able to see into if you had a really niche magazine seller around the corner. What the web does best - niches.

The Ashmolean Museum

But it could as well be any other museum which has spent untold time, hours and energy in catalogueing their collection so that sad people like me can wonder at art and archeology from the comfort of their chair, leading to discovering such gems as this neo-Babylonian line art. It's not just the Ashmolean doing it, of course, the power of history can reach out and grab you from many museums across the globe. But for a museum I've never visited (and I do love a good museum), I know a remarkable amount about their collections, and it's entirely down to the world wide web.

Trip Advisor


Mundane. But for one reason or another, booking cheap hotel rooms seems to be a skill I've acquired by necessity and when faced with a page of hotels I've never heard of, all charging me £40 a night for a room, knowing which one to pick used to be down eeny meeny miny mo. Not any more. Now I get to spend hours obsessively pouring over peoples reviews, trying to work out whether the person reviewing the hotel everyone else thought was wonderful had been shoved into a star below what they were used to on a business trip and were just determined to find fault, balanced against whether a room which is fab for £40 a night is actually fab for £40 a night or I'd be better off staying a tent. In a field. In the middle of nowhere. In January. In a snowstorm.

As a result of Trip Advisor (combined excellently, I must say, with lastminute.com), I can attend free unconferences in London, see the Foo Fighters in Milton Keynes and generally swan around the country willy nilly, for not very much money at all. And get a shower in the morning on the way out to Sonisphere. What on earth is there not to love?

Amazon

Not for who they are now. But for who they were in 1998 when I first discovered them. I love books. I didn't have very many when I was younger for various reasons. One of the greatest pleasures in life is still the smell of coffee mixing with the smell of fresh paper and ink. It triggers a relaxation response in me whether I want it to or not. But before I could afford to walk into any bookshop and buy any book I liked, there was Amazon. The biggest bookshop in the world. A start up in the dot com world who succeeded and persister and quite rightly too. The shop of whom I can ask to source the most random books imaginable, back then, and who would deliver every time.

It is, perhaps, testament to the magic of Amazon, that 14 years after launch, I can walk into Foyles on Charing Cross Road and ask for a copy of Freakonomics and be told to try Amazon.

Every computer game walk through site ever created

Me and computer games. You'd think I'd be brilliant at them, probably. Geek, computer games. Surely I'd buy loads, play loads, actually complete all of them.

Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Until I discovered the free game walk throughs littering the web, I'd never actually completed a computer game - even the ridiculously simple RPG's on my Nintendo DS - I always got stuck. I either couldn't find the dungeon I was supposed to find, died so epically that it became pointless to carry on, or ran around in circles for an hour without finding an exit. It wasn't until someone pointed out walk throughs weren't cheating if you were genuinely stuck and were going to waste the £30 you spent on the game in the first place without them that I actually managed to finish a game. And then another one. And another one. Suddenly, I could see the point of buying a computer game again. I'm sure everyone else has been doing it for years, but they've been a complete revelation to me which is why they're here.


So. 10 reason why I love the internet. I could list 100, probably a 1000 if pushed. I've been here a while. But this is my current top 10. I'd love to know yours?

The future will be digitalised

I've never seen anything like it. I never thought I'd see anything like it. This post isn't planned. It's not going to be cohesive, elegant or eloquent. It is, instead, a reaction to the events currently happening in central London and across the UK, as the nations next generation take the future into their own hands and draw their line - digitally.

Tweets from @ucloccupation, who at one point were suspended for too much activity by Twitter are an astounding example of the way social media can be used to get your message across in real time. The 100 or so students camping out at UCL are being peaceful. Entirely peaceful. Pictures posted to the feed including this one show young people doing what young people do......

Actually, no they don't. That right there, apparently, is the 'media table'.

Think about that for a second. Yes, this has been brewing for weeks and yes there's been some time to rally for the troops and organise the output and organise the events. But a 'media table'? Really? What the hell are we teaching these kids at university nowadays that they're so organised and switched on?

Of course, it's not the teaching. It's society. In our focus on the way society has become so celebrity orientated we forgot something - it's also become intensely media aware. We assumed everyone was taking the lessons from Katie Price and thinking that getting your tits out was the only way to acquire fame and success. We did the next generation a great injustice in doing so. And now we learn, now we see. The future generation took all we taught them, indirectly, about self promotion and branded perfumes and they learnt the lesson well. Then they took the lesson and they applied it to their politics, to their morals and their codes. They picked it up and passed it on, and passing it on as we speak, the network of tweeting students in occupation spreading. Talking to journalists without needing to pick up the phone. Using Twitter like a knife to cut through the noise and explain. Passing the account from hand to hand and producing soundbites from individual protestors.

The point?

Typing furiously. Using the tools. Channel shifts. Ways of communication absolutely changed in the future world where by any means necessary means choosing words and having the intelligence to understand the power of words.

The future will be digitalised.

A little bird tweeting

I am naught but a little bird tweeting. I am not a journalist, I am a geek. A geek in love with words, yes, but nevertheless a geek. A woman who loves to describe, shape, evoke, revoke, aspire, inspire, play and provoke, but a geek, first and foremost.

Geeks don't like it when things are not 'fair'. I don't mean not fair in a tantrum rattle throwing way, I mean a basic human right violated, criminal getting away with it kind of not fair. Something done wrong, which could easily be righted, a thing unprovoked and unwarranted, undone.

On Thursday, a man called Paul Chambers lost his appeal against his conviction earlier this summer, under some random nuisance call legislation, for posting a tweet joking about Robin Hood airport being closed. No matter that the tweet was a written communication, no matter that it was a joke and everyone knowing the man who read his stream would have know this without needing to be told, no matter that he is one man writing in public what a thousand will have said in private - the conviction stands and he is saddled with a total £2000 bill as well.

Also on Thursday, a Birmingham Councillor posted a tweet inciting the stoning of a Muslim columnist for the Evening Standard and The Independant, also on Twitter. Gareth Compton apologised, used in his defense the comment:

Twitter is a forum for glib comment of the moment. It was a glib comment. Who could possibly think it was serious?

 If the Judge in the appeal for Paul Chambers cast doubt on his defense that he was not keeping up with news and current affairs, then one assumes this is also the defense Gareth Compton is using. So tell me, do tell me please, how it is possible that Gareth Compton is not being charged with anything for a 'glib comment' on Twitter which was tantamount to inciting murder in text, while a young man has been punished for life for doing exactly the same thing - except I think we can all agree that perhaps his comment was more obviously a joke, given the context?

Ah, but here we come to the crux of the matter. Context. Both these tweets are taken out of context, and as such contain no history, no attached framework which explains the context within which they were said. And lo! because legislation has not kept apace with technology developments, we now have a situation where we are using 80 year old legislation to prosecute 21st century commentary. Which, therefore, does not require context, but only allows a comment to be judged on what it is - a comment out of time.

So we come to this morning. Ah yes, I hear you cry, but you're biased. Well actually, I'm not. I've never spoken to the lady in question, until this morning I did not follow her, and though we know many people in common because this is the nature of Twitter, we did not know each other at all. I now follow her, and she now follows me. But this is inconsequential, as I have not read her stream at all.

The lady I am talking about, of course, is one Sarah Baskerville, aka Baskers, which is her tag on Twitter. The Daily Mail, this morning, saw fit to print a character assasination of someone, by name, in Quentin Letts column. It is worth noting the number of comments on the piece linked above. It appears The Daily Mails abhoration of freedom of speech extends to its readership, who are not permitted to express displeasure at the contents of the articles they are reading.

Baskers is a civil servant. She writes a wonderful blog. In it, she comes across as a rather intelligent, bright young woman, in a job which she admits she could try harder at but also admits is not glamourous or particularly frontline. So instead of descending into a spiral of self pity and demotivation, she has looked outside of her little silo and has decided to push the transparency agenda as hard as she can, involving herself voluntarily, and giving her time freely, to attend unconferences and bar camps and to talk to the geeks who are trying to do cool and funky things with data, in order to bridge a gap, a gap of understanding, of comprehension, of workflow and of civic mystery.

In other words, last time I looked, a shining role model of what Big Society is. Is it not? Is this how we reward the people who work for us not only 9-5 in front of a desk, but also out in the wild, telling people the good, but also occasionally the bad, and in the process gaining audience and credibility in their honesty? Is this the thanks we will give to a generation of men and women who see the right and shout about it, but also see the wrong and shout about that too - and then get off their asses and go and try and do something about it? Do we want sheep who will do nothing but what's instructed, never to think for themselves, never to innovate or find the edges?

Can I suggest to the Daily Mail that the roi on Baskers is not only monetary? That she is a link between the past and the future? That her way of doing things - honestly and openly - is the future that generation y are bringing en masse whether you like it or not?

Except no, I cannot. Because the comment thread is closed. And here we come to the root of the cause of all this noise. The fear. The fear that social networking, social media is untrackable, untraceable, rippling and evolving. Out of control? Perhaps in only the sense that everything is out of control, in its evolution. Could we have predicted the expanding capabilities of the computer chip 10 years ago? Should we have stamped on that development because we had no idea of where it would end? As a species, are we going to stamp on all things which we cannot predict, because we do not wish to see where the unsigned path will lead? Why is freedom of speech free only verbally, why is it becoming clear that freedom of speech textually is going to be a gnarly issue, attempts made to constrict and punish? Why has Twitter suddenly become the focus of so much attention? Is it because it is easier to read bursts of 140 and find the thoughtlessly posted comments, than it is to wade through every blog in existence? But reading only one 140 burst only gives a moment, not the context.

So here's the thing. I am going to ask very many people to tell me the good things about Twitter. The positive things. The life changing things and the little things which make peoples day. If social media is telling a story, well come tell me yours, because if you believe the media this week, Twitter is only negative, and I don't believe that for a second.

So, in the spirit of militant optimism, this is the line. I am drawing it. Time to fight back in black and white, to tell the story of networking, of entrepreneurs, of love and laughter, of connections and friendships for life, of lobbying and engaging with constituents, of doing business and telling people they've got jobs, of memes and hash tags, of all the things Twitter which has brought us, of all the conversations in sight and out. All things can be used and abused. Alcohol causes utter chaos every Friday and Saturday night. But in the interests of balance, I think it's time to pour a glass of wine, just the one, and to savour every drop, sensibly.

ETA: A story of the Gaza convoy hostages via my friend @annelidworm who used social media with others to bring the plight of his friend to the attention of the traditional media. Incidentally, I've met him once, but spoken to him, on and off, for well over 15 years - using social media. 

90 minutes (and the rest)

Social media, I am told, is for telling stories. So here's a story about what led to a 90 minute meeting played out through many media and communication channels, but which ultimately was about something as simple as asking a question, and receiving an answer.

It started with curiosity. Someone at work mentioned there would be a public consultation meeting on Monday evening (8th November). I asked our Director on Twitter if it might be okay if I went, because as someone who shall rename nameless correctly identified, us digital geeky types tend to understand the most complicated technology easily, but boggle when it comes to the vagaries of local government and democracy actually in action.

In the process of discussing this, @marcschmid popped up and asked me if I'd like to tweet from the event. I agreed, it's something I've wanted to get done from our official account, @blackburdarwen for ages.

In the midst of this #gab10 happened and I didn't really think about the mechanics of what we'd be doing, simply that we were doing it. I finally got around to mentioning we would be doing it on Sunday evening.

Monday came, and in the absence of @sturgey I attended the final planning meeting. The meeting might have been shouted about by the Communications half of our Policy & Communications Department but the planning, intricacies, paperwork, research, challenges, agendas and minutae were the responsibility entirely of the Policy half. It's the first time I've had the pleasure of working with them on something and it was a pleasure. Well organised, everything dotted and crossed - I left the meeting a little in awe, but also a little sad to find that tweeting was perceived to be a frippery, an irrelevance.

Time passed. Policies noise levels (we share an open plan office) rose throughout the afternoon to a crescendo and then fell away as the organisers drifted across to King Georges Hall to ensure everything was in place and look after the details.

5pm suddenly crept up. Wielding nothing but an iPhone (mine) and a mifi (using 3G) off I went. Arrived. Plugged in the iPhone. Plugged in the mifi. Watched the yellow flashing light. Watched the red flashing light. Experienced that sinking feeling which comes from tying to get a 3G signal in the basement of a Victorian building. Went outside, sat on the bottom step. Watched the lights, watched the Apple spinning circle. Time passed. Mild panic reared its head. Someone nabbed a technician working for the theatre. He couldn't help, radio'd someone who could. Time passed. I paced. Time passed. Got introduced to Tom Moseley from the Lancashire Telegraph. Stress levels slightly too high to be attempt anything other than briefly charming. Wondered off muttering about relays and network cables. Later discovered Tom had managed to find the only corner of the Windsor Suite I'd not tried for signal and set himself up comfortably. Time passed. Technician arrived. Found a network cable. Plugged it into the back of the mifi box in a vain hope. Hope dashed.

Sit. Think.

Call the other half of the web team. He delivers a laptop, summoned from someone somewhere. @tomstannard appears while I'm waiting in the foyer for team member to turn up. Try not to babble. Try to convey everything under control while quietly fretting. Team member turns up, saving me from acting as a temporary theatre usher. Set up laptop, plug in network cable. Start talking to the laptop, practically begging it to work. Tap in wrong password. CLONK goes the laptop. Cringe. Am sitting in the sound booth at the back of the room. Hunch down in my chair so no one sees me. Tap in right password. Watch it load. Watch it load. Time passes.....

Try and log into Tweetdeck. Nope. No joy. Finally concede that twitter.com in old mode is my best friend. Finally start tweeting, hot, bothered and slightly hyper, 3 minutes after the meeting starts.

25 tweets and 30 minutes, possibly 40 minutes later - I lost track - I'm exhausted but it's working. A new found respect for the media team who sit behind us in the office, as I realise how hard it is to hear words said, pick out salient points, ensure no skew or bias, distill to 140 characters, add the hashtag and hit the tweet button. On a track pad. Later find the mouse in the bag. Smile quietly to myself. Sit back. Watch. A room full of people engaged and discussing. Yes, discussing hard, deeply depressing, difficult cruel subjects. But here. Talking. Engaging. Discussing. Involved. Democracy.

The point of this post is that perhaps it is not the post you expected to see. It is the post of one tiny little cog in a massive machinery. Many people contributed to one girls ability to sit at the back of a room and watch, observe and listen and then pass it on to the big wide world. It is the mechanics of a process. It is teamwork (I saw some of our team members in Communcations actually doing their jobs in the wild yesterday for the first time), it is thinking differently, it is management at senior level having faith, it is Leaders saying yes and having patiemce, it is persistence and relentlessness, it is planning and foresight, it is acknowledging that people who cannot attend physically might want to attend nevertheless. But most of all, very most of all, it is simplicity itself. Document what you see, what you hear - and pass it on.

With thanks to The Guardian Society daily for quietly and unobtrusively making my day.

#gab10

The 11:41 train from Preston to Penrith was the first indication that something was a little wrong. I was almost alone in my coach, save for a few under 30's.

None of them got off at Penrith.

I found my lift and off we drove, for me into the complete unknown. Great Asby is not the sort of place you would expect to temporarily become the centre of a Twitter storm. It's 18 miles South East of Penrith, past Appleby in Westmoreland and off down some violently undulating country lanes for a few further miles. We arrived in sunshine to a village with a stream through it in spate, surrounded by the kind of stunningly beautiful houses I dream of one day owning but never will.

So how does a web/social media geek end up in the middle of nowhere in one of the most beautiful counties in this fair country of ours for a reason other than riding her mountain bike? Well, it's a long story, but it involves City Camp London, enthusing at someone with no idea who they were (this is quite normal for me), and random throwaway comments becoming invitations to attend events with no idea as to what I was supposed to bring to the table. I like adventures (those reading my other blog possibly know this better than most) and so the invitation was accepted and off I went into the beautiful unknown.

On arrival I was immediately out geeked. This is always a good sign at any event, because it means I'm about to learn something. I don't, generally, see the point of life unless it ticks one of two boxes - passing things I know on, or sitting spending time learning from others who know far than me. Yesterday was the learning equivalent of a 7 course banquet. I left with a head stuffed full of so many ideas and concerns, things to follow up and people to cross examine in great detail that I don't quite know if I'll be sleeping for the next month if I'm to follow up on everything I want to.

So anyway. The reason for convening some excellent people in a village hall was the inaugral meeting of the Cumbrian digital broadband champions. When the meeting was convened, things in Cumbria looked a little different - BDUK hadn't picked them as a pilot area for their broadband connectivity roll out for a start.

I suppose I should also make something else entirely clear at this juncture. I am not easily impressed. Indeed, I brought quite a healthy amount of scepticism to the meeting yesterday. I was convinced the vultures were circling Cumbria and that some people were about to make some very bad decisions on where money should be spent, on who should be choosing who should be spending it, and what would be done with all the fabulous connectivity once it had been rolled out.

I was wrong.

The thrust of the people chosen to present yesterday was very much focused around the JFDI ethos. People building their own connection relay networks, digging their own trenches, making their own fibre bundles, climbing their own church spires and setting up their own Limited companies. People, ordinary people, designing school fibre networks for the whole of Lancashire, of dreaming impossible dreams - and then just implementing them. The organiser of this collection of people was Rory Stewart, MP for Penrith and Borders, a rather interesting man in himself. Throughout the day he managed to act as an interpreter for those in the audience not familiar with the wildly geeky vocabulary of fibre to the home, cabinets and megabits, sheep herder when people were not too sure what they were supposed to be doing next, defender of speakers when the audience became a little too voracious in their questioning (myself included), charming and clever interviewer and finally, holder of flipchart paper as some digital champions read out the workshop results in the afternoon.

Yes. You did read that right.

I'm not a fan of posh Tory boys. I suspect that might have been evident well before now. Yesterday I learnt most definitely that that is a prejudice all of its own and I wont be judging anyone on the colour of their politics again. Humility, empathy, talent, an enormous ability to connect with people, enthusiasm, inspiration and leadership - well I guess they get bestowed on a wide variety of people and that's just the end of that. It's what you do with them that counts, what should always count.

Other people left a lasting impression. In the midst of explanations about infrastructure, and a chance to hold a real life piece of fibre (2mm thick, possibly, and distributed by the rather fabulous @cyberdoyle aka Chris who I'll come back to later) there was Simon Jones from Cisco. I am a sucker for a smart inspirational enthusiastic visionary. Suddenly, in a tiny little village hall in the middle of nowhere I was thrown back to City Camp London and the feeling of jaw dropping 'you've done what?' feeling as presenters marched in front of us delivering dreams and actions of such audacity that you wondered if they'd landed from another planet. Simon Jones would have fitted in just fine at City Camp. Out of the same mould as Matthew Taylor,  and many others I've been honoured to listen to, he explained the possibilities of a super fast broadband connection - 50 mbs a second or so - and what that connectivity had done with video conferencing in Salford Universiy via Dialogue Cafes and in Kenya allowing farmers to collaborate in co-operatives.

Wonderful lovely right up my street kind of stuff. Humanity and the web, social enterprises and the web, communicating for collaboration and community good - on the web. Using the web. You can see his presentation thanks to John Popham on YouTube.

Somewhere in there I met Ali aka @fit_to_print who is quite quite wonderful in that she is a normal lady in a normal world thinking in extraordinary ways - her idea of using mobile libraries as campaign vehicles to collate views, explain broadband and its associated opportunities to people was one of those ideas where something in my tummy did a little flip, where I knew I'd just heard something and seen a revelation which will work, which will be implemented, which will connect with people using traditional methods but change traditional peoples lives. Those moments, of watching others epiphanies, of watching the glee and the enthusiasm and listening to the words tripping out of someones mouth as the speed of the realisation is slightly ahead of the ability to express it - those are the moments. The magical moments. They are the moments where tiny shards of the future are made. Just awesome.

Then there's @cyberdoyle. Within 5 minutes of meeting her, you know that a) she is exactly who you expect her to be after following her stream on Twitter - straight to the point, smart as all hell, so incredibly not aware of how smart she actually is and fantastically brilliant and talking and enthusing at people without making them want to back away slowly. Watching her in action, watching her talk to important people and being so comfortable in doing so, so assured and so passionate, was a lesson not only in fighting hard for what you believe in, but also a lesson for me in the ability of ordinary people to be extraordinary. None of us have any excuses to accept status quo's after meeting that women. If I could, I would introduce half the people I know to her just so they could see that apathy does not reign in places in this country.

Speaking of apathy, this picture (via John Popham), mapping where each of the digital champions had come from spoke volumes to me. Firstly, all those people gave up their Saturday afternoons to be in a village hall when the sun was shining outside. All of them are volunteers. All of them are spread to the four winds. Some of them run businesses on 1 megabit connections. Some of them have no internet connection at all. Still others are connecting to the web on a 28.8k modem. All of them, I think, were over 45. Bar Rory's team, the guest speakers and a few 'experts' invited along, no one in the hall was under 45. Someone apparently said they were struggling to enthuse their local parish with the opportunities broadband would bring to the community, and that they had responded that if the older generation couldnt be enthused then maybe the under 20's could be. The reply? There aren't any, they've all left because there is no broadband.

Which is where I was going with the opening sentence of this post. Cumbria has a massive opportunity here. They stand on the cusp of being complete trailblazers in so many different areas, from education connection and delivery to healthcare provision, from ending isolation and disengagement to possibly doubling their economic contribution. But without the next generation to pick it up and pass it on to, what is the value of all this connection? Even more than that, what price the lack of input and vision from the younger generation in this whole process? If the loudest voices are skewed to a certain generation, what will be missed in a world where Facebook is for play and not for learning, information gathering, engagement or campaigning?

The vultures are circling Cumbria as it becomes known that a massive amount of money is being spoken of. The biggest task of all is going to be knowing who to listen to and who to believe, and ensuring that that money is spent wisely, carefully, and with the right people so that the absolute maximum return on investment is gained and Cumbria is not left with a broadband network which does not deliver the speed requirements of those using it for their businesses and their lives. Even more than that, there is a massive responsibility on the local County Council, to lead and inspire, to see the possibilities of this gift of infrastructure, and to plan quickly and efficiently how they will switch delivery of their services from paper to digital. In a County where connection has been cobbled together in assorted systems by assorted interested parties, the challenge is going to be to prepare adquately and to trailblaze fiercely in the delivery of online services and to prove how much money can be saved in switching to digital transactions, to become more efficient but more engaged in their service delivery and more responsive and agile, not only in their thinking but in their minute to minute service response.

Gifts are wonderful things, and Cumbria has received a great gift. The making of a county is in the balance here, no small thing. Rory has the right political hands for this gift to be placed in, I am now convinced of that. But whose hands will the telecommunications, technological, visionary and service delivery be placed in, and are those hands swift enough, big enough, quick enough to not only hold on to the gift, but to shape it, hone it and carve it so that it is fit for the future of a county which needs it so badly to be done well.

I am holding my breath. I am not alone.

Information sources:
#gab10 is the hashtag, the collation of which can be seen on What the Hashtag? via @cyberdoyle
The Wordle of the hashtagged Twitter stream via @cyberdoyle
The YouTube list of associated videos via @johnpopham
The Flickr set from the event from @johnpopham
A 'social reporter' blog post from @johnpopham

Introspective

GIS is to #opendata as.......

GIS (Geographic Information System) is to open data as Microsoft Word is to a bunch of incohesive words and letters. Or at least, when you've been working with GIS for a bit, that's how it looks. A slightly distorted view of course, because GIS wasn't involved in the 15 minute dalliance with some data I danced the other night, but nevertheless, data and GIS is intrinsically linked for me and so I thought I'd try and explain why - with a diagram!

Look ma, no hands! Now, as regular readers will know, I'm not very good at diagrams. Or data visualisations or mash ups or whatever the cool and funky kids are calling them these days - I'm not a cool and funky kid either so I wouldn't know. But this is a pitiful attempt at an explanation, nevertheless because letters are boring and pictures are shiny.

Open data is the end of the story as I hope I've made clear here. Operations is the start. Operations is what generates all the data to go out into the open. Operations means childrens services, it means street scene or refuse collection and street cleansing with some park maintenance in there as well depending on what you're calling it this year, it's the actual day to day stuff like how many fly tips we collected or how many parking tickets we issued or how many library books we lent. It's our bread and butter, it's what we do, it paints a picture in numbers of the service we provide to everyone on a day to day basis.

The data from all that operational activity currently goes in one direction but eventually, one day, will go in two as shown here. At the moment, it goes into management information and in a lot of cases it gets fed, if appropriate and in most cases it is, into the GIS server and processed by our GIS software to make easy to understand visual representations of the data which our Managers can use to make informed management decisions quickly and easily, because the data is not 64,000 rows of ascii (raw letters), but instead thematic mapping, showing them where their hotspots and notspots are, where they need to focus more resource and where there was a problem 12 months ago but now isn't and so they can move resource. It's done more often than 12 monthly, but for the purpose of this, we'll call it 12 months.

The appropriateness of the information going into GIS software is generally whether it's spatial. Spatial means, relational, means does it have a latitude or longitude on it, does it have GPS data attached to it, will mapping it spatially make sense for the data to mean something. In a lot of cases, well actually, in most cases it does, from school catchment areas crossed with deprivation indices crossed with academic achievement levels to a thousand and one other 'mash ups' as they're now called.

Research and intelligence and policy actually have a two way relationship with GIS. They pull data out of the datasets parked there by ops and they crunch it, create 'mash ups' and provide it to Directors and Heads of Service to inform them. They do trend analysis and many other complicated and funky things. Policy take this crunched data too and they build our strategic advice on it. They tell people in words of one syllable (and yes sometimes more) where we were, where we are and where we will be if things continue as they are, but also where we will be if they do not. They don't hold crystal balls, they assure me, but I'm not so sure. GIS and much other non-spatial data is their bread and butter, I think (someone will correct me if I am wrong here, I'm sure).

The datasets which drive all this, will one day go straight onto data.gov.uk once signed off too. INSPIRE says they will. Please read the link, if you've got this far, you need to know about the existence of this Directive.

Which brings me to the other side of open data and the things in data.gov.uk which will sit next to the Operations generated stuff. The cost of satisying Freedom of Information requests was quoted at me by someone at a conference recently from their Authority and I will not post here what it was but it was enough to make my jaw drop. If we are transparent where it comes to information, if we are open, the assumption is that we will actually never receive FOI's ever again, because it will all be easily found, therefore cutting out the middlemen of the poor Administrators and Officers tasked with fulfilling these requests and instead leaving them to do their main job roles. But for the moment, perhaps it would be a nice interim policy for people to put the results of FOI's onto the web automatically, in the assumption that if one person wants to request the information, then perhaps a second will too? It's obviously of interest to someone, right?

And then there's spending data. Generated by Operations but kept by Finance. This is left to last, because Government have almost wrapped this one up. All spend over £500 will be published by local government in January 2011. All NHS PCT spend over £25,000 is already online.

Here ends the tour of data within local government. If you got this far, you know as much as I do, almost. Which in the interests of openness, is exactly the way I believe it should be.

15 minutes of brain

All it takes is 15 minutes.

• Go to data.gov.uk
• Look at the most recently uploaded dataset
• Happens to be Local police recorded crime data, a breakdown force by force, offence type by offence from 1 March, 2002 until 1 March 2010 or thereabouts.
• Download the .csv
• Open the .csv
• Filter the data by Offence Group (in this case Drug Offences)
• No need to filter the data by Offence Sub-Group in this case, but you can
• C & P out into another Excel tab the Offence data
• Filter the data byYear (in this case 12 months to 1 March, 2003)
• C & P out into another Excel tab the years data (still only showing drug offences)
• Delete 12 months to column
• Delete Region Name column
• Delete Offence Group column
• Delete Offence Sub-Group column
• Highlight the two remaining columns and all data
• Create a graph
• Make the graph look pretty
• Upload it to ScribD
• Embed it in your blog

15 minutes and I know Devon and Cornwall have a disproportionately high drug offence rate considering their population, in comparison to their surrounding neighbours of Dorset and Avon & Somerset (yes I know Avon doesn't exist as a county any more, they're slow to catch up down there).

Crime Stats From Datadotgovdotuk




You might need to download the spreadsheet or view it over at ScribD - I'm on a 10" netpad and it's not so great at displaying things properly.

This is why data.gov.uk is one of the best websites on the internet. This is why open data is a wonderful thing. This is what can be done when youn open up your data. When I've got more time, I'll cross reference this info with population info of each of the areas the forces cover. Then I might look at deprivation indices inside those areas. Or possibly, you know, someone else might who can make the data look prettier because, after all, this was a 15 minutes job. This is not me showing off. This is merely a 'this is what is possible in 15 minutes'.

My father always told me curiosity killed the cat. No it doesn't. It opens up whole new worlds of information and it kills no one to stick it in a .csv and give it to people like me to play with.