An agile attitude

agile adj (sometimes agiler, agilest) able to move, change direction, etc quickly and easily; nimble; active. agilely adverb. agility noun.
ETYMOLOGY: 16c: from Latin agilis, from agere to do.

When you think of a public sector organisation, is the word agile up there? Responsive? Dynamic? Able to react immediately to changes in external forces/factors/politics/leadership?

Or, do you think of a cruise liner akin to the Titanic, with a Captain at the helm, reading from maps with nautical tools, who, on seeing the icebergs in the distance can do nothing but try and avert disaster, hauling frantically on the wheel, deep down knowing that the iceberg is going to hit, but desperately trying anyway?

3 months ago, I think, I saw a conversation on my stream between @rikbarker and someone else. A female programmer as it happens, now a PM, but I'll not embarrass her. She is not above the parapet and wouldn't appreciate being hauled there. Anyway, they were discussing the agile software development approach. I've no idea why it pinged, only that it did and I followed the conversation with interest. By the end of it, I tweeted something along the lines of 'I wonder if we could implement agile dev strat in local gov'. And there it ended. And idle musing commenced.

Fast forward a month and it came up in a discussion with someone else, but in my organisation. There was interest, but my thoughts on the subject were nowhere near cohesive enough to pitch it to someone who could, and I think would, run with it.

Fast forward again, to Tuesday. A social visit to a friend, @rikbarker, turned into a long conversation about agile approaches, local government, social media, doing more with less and about the most amazing business approach I've heard since seeing Futuregov in action - Technophobia. I seriously can't enthuse enough, I sat and listened to a friend tell me all the things I wanted to happen when we do web and digital were possible, could be possible, that magic could happen, that sanity could be retained, that money could be spent wisely. I'm not easily swayed. Man talked about the best kind of sense. But agile came up again. And again. Totally pure application in this case, in a developing environment, but again I thought 'why don't we do this?'

So today I asked on Twitter again, how do we do this, and the floodgates opened. People involved in the rolling discussion to this point: many - people utterly confused about where I am coming from and what relevance a programming approach has to public sector: many. Except one person, @pubstrat, who I think is in exactly the same place I am at the moment, but it is nice to know I am not chasing rainbows, nevertheless.

You see, it's nothing to do with IT. Nothing. At all. Wipe those two letters entirely from your mind. Instead, think of agility and what it means. As public sector employees, we are told we should be pro-active because that is where best value lies. I want to argue with that, if only because I don't believe you can be pro-active in an environment where your stakeholders are entirely out of your control. And lets be brutally honest about this, in the public sector, they are. Leaders are politicians, Councillors are politically aligned, our citizens too, the ones who care and actually show up to meetings. Central government control our spends and those are being cut but those cuts could also be reversed in a moment, should something unlikely but possible happen. So we are beholden to central party politics, local party politics, and local mood. These things can spin on a penny, elections being the most obvious flare point.

These are not in our control. So instead of planning around the way things are expected to be, how about we acknowlege a lack of control and plan for it? Yes, plan projects. Create project queues. Have processes for incoming job requests. But set a priority and revisit it. Frequently. In the process of gathering requirements, an often long and arduous task, review every few weeks with a quick phone call to the source of the requirements and check that things are still the same. If they are, all well and good, 3 minutes on the phone. If they're not, react and reassign, and then realign the project. If you don't check, what then? It might mean you procure an item based on a false set of requirements which are no longer valid.

This is agility. Quick moving responses to every changing influences. It's not a strategy. It's not a tick list. It's a culture and an ethos. Accept that technology is moving faster than we can keep up with and check in with people that what they wanted a month ago is still what they want. It doesn't have to involve scrum meetings or frequent breakouts. It does if you're in IT but that's not an issue I am addressing here, it's been addressed far better than I ever could over there. Instead, I'm simply musing on a concept which says:

• discuss requirements
• agree objectives
• prioritise objectives
• agree first challenge
• agree first review point
• implement first challenge
• review appropriateness/effectiveness of solution to first challenge
• adjust everything else around whether first solution met initial requirements
• discuss if initial requirements have changed
• if changed, respond appropriately, acknowledging you've only wasted 2 days, 2 weeks, 2 months and not 2 years
• agree next challenge
• implement next challenge
• rinse and repeat

Review, review, review. Check. Talk, collaborate, ask questions, build lightly, implement lightly, don't spend weeks and months writing strategies and policies which are irrelevant by the time they're published. Be dynamic. Switch directions in an instant.

As an addendum to this, our whiteboard has our work queues on it in our team. My bit is tagged with progress post it notes. I didn't think about what I was doing when I did it, only that I did it. And I did it because I wanted to change states in an instant, if I needed to. I did it because they're progress bars. And I did it because priorities, for me, in a job description which spans insane amounts of information and stakeholders, be able to respond in an instant. Small beginnings. I don't know if they can replicated upwards, but I do know this blog is for dreaming in and this is my dream.

The sound of one string vibrating

Twitter is where you go to share. Where something resonates so deeply inside of you, sometimes, that you can do nothing but reach for the keyboard and tap, the deep seated need to say to someone, anyone, even when no one is within speaking distance that 'I saw this and it hit home' or 'I read this and it made me think' or 'I listened to this and it made me laugh so hard'.

The things which resonate with me are different to the ones which resonate to you. I am different to you. We are all different. We are told, from a very early age, that we are unique, that we are all special, that we are all fundamentally different, from DNA to home circumstances, religion to facial features. We are different and that is something to be celebrated.

This is post is about collection. A collection of minds. Because as I use Twitter as a place to drop my thoughts, my sparks, my epiphanies, my laughter and occasionally my heart, something magical happens. Something strange, if we all are to believe we are unique. People retweet our words. In a blink, sometimes hundrends of people, simply by the act of retweeting, add their silent affirmation to a statement or a collection of words. Sometimes they add a personal comment and sometimes they don't. Sometimes there is disapproval and disagreement. But more often than not, there is the condoning of a concept, or the further expansion of a concept as something hits the Twitter stream and people feel the need to wrestle publically and in full view with the things which I believe 10 years ago would have happened behind closed doors or in a closed group around a pub table.

Suddenly, we are not alone. The thinkers and the dreamers. We have found each other, the leaders, the CEO's, the politicians and the academics. There are even artists and actors. A cacophony of voices speaking with similar voice, talking and argueing, debating and discussing, freely and with no holds barred. No fear in saying 'you are wrong and this is why'. No offence taken in being on the receiving end of such comments. Links shared, differences of opinion bounced back and forth. People forthright in the condemnation but also quick to praise, to say 'yes this is what I believe in too'.

I have come to know, through Twitter, some of the greatest minds I will ever know. They challenge me. They push me. They ask me questions and in answering I am forced to accord courtesy and not be flippant, not make a joke out of embarrassment. Instead I sit and I think, and sometimes I step away from the keyboard and the questions spin on the backburner but I always come back with the answer that I have carefully though through, if it didn't come spinning out of my fingers immediately.

In this way, publically, I and thousands of others share our thoughts, our hopes. We ask what we want from 2011 and we answer and see that others want the same things. Dream the same dreams. Are starting to believe that it could be possible that we could build a small part of the world where to think is to be valued, where to think and question, incessantly question why does this system work this way, why does that process not work and how can we hack it, how can we fix it, how can we make this better? Be good. Be social. Be smart. Be passionate. Be yourself.

Be. Your. Self.

I have learnt. It took a year. Different woman, different life, different circles, same venn diagrams. I am a tiny tiny little cog in a massive think tank. We are all a think tank. From Citizensheep to Podnosh, from Paul Clarke to Pubstrat, from Emercoleman to HadleyBeeman, from John Baradell to Tom Watson, from DemSoc to Danosirra, from bosses to not bosses and more besides, we are thinking, we are fixing, we are sharing. Fears are whistled down the wind. There's no space any more for being shy or being afraid or parapets. I am not that person. Instead there is just a need to learn, to make mistakes and learn from them, to allow my mind to run free and see what it creates, and on Twitter, this year, I have flown. I have finally set out my stall. I have let go and jumped. This blog is the testament to Twitter as a proving ground for shy people to practice speaking their mind.

I didn't know I had any opinions, a year ago. I didn't know I had any skills, a year ago. I didn't know I would find so many friends, a year ago. And they are friends, your society norms be damned. I have met and hugged and discussed and smoked with and laughed and fought with. I have grown up. I am still a child because to be a child permits the asking of all the questions and I think, permits a forgiveness of me in the people I ask questions of.

I am looking forward to 2011 so very fiercly. I have a ball of excitment in the pit of my stomach. Because I am going to take the pause button off and I am going to see what happens. Already, in the last week, ridiculous emails have been sent. Unimaginable emails. And I am grateful. So very grateful. But to say no is to acknowledge that that is not my path. It cannot be my path. I don't know where I want to walk, only who I want to follow. I don't know where the path will go and all I can do is walk it and pray there will be no cliff hidden in the forest at the end.

I will have an office wall one day, to hang the framed words someone sent to me today.

So, as an early NYE post, here's to 2011. To social enterprise and caring. To picking people up and dusting them off and giving them a helping hand. To caring and not being afraid to show it. To finding the broken proccesses, in our democracy, in community engagement, in cohesion and every kind of exclusion, to helping young people be brave and bold and brilliant, to helping 'disabled' people be truly enabled, to planning differently, communicating differently, thinking differently.

But dear Twitter. 2010 has been one hell of a ride. You changed my life. Thank you.

Data tools - reviews

Data visualisation & mapping tools are something I've been curious about for a long time but never quite had a few hours to devote to tracking them all down and playing with them. Well, someone else has tracked them all down, so I thought I'd spend a fun few hours (my definition of fun is not your definition of fun, I appreciate that), playing with them, reviewing them and putting the results here, if only so in 3 months time when I need a tool, I can come back to this and hopefully know which one to use without getting horribly confused.

Chartle

Purports to offer simplicity, uniquity and interactivity. I've got some arguments with this. You can't make claims like that and not expect me to be harsh. The welcome splash screen is an abomination, but we're not judging on design here....no wait, a website splash screen for a website helping to me design lovely charts and graphs shouldn't make my eyes bleed. -1 point. Also on the front screen is the warning of things to come - a) it's in Beta and b) improved import from Excel. So another -1 point because already I've got a sneaking suspicion the word simplicity is nothing but marketing speak. Click on Create your own and another window spawns. Click your type of graphic - pie, bar, line etc.

I'm not going to do a walkthrough for every tool, but things I noticed in producing the graphic below: Import means pointing something at a spreadsheet on my desktop and hitting Import, not copying & pasting, it's easy to forget to click the Import button, you have to hand type the Title which in this day & age seems terribly retro, on importing the data, the axis retain the descriptors from the example - you're not asked to change them. To change them, you click on Special. I don't class being able to name my axis from your default assignation Special. I call it Mandatory. And confusing as I distinctly remember clicking 'first row are headers' in the Import tab. Each key tap dynamically updates so people who hate Googles live searching are going to detest this, as are those of us on netbooks.

The biggest thing this falls down on, however, is that I can't specify or change any colours on the actual chart. My whole chart is blue. I might not like blue. I might want to have each bar in different colours, or group bars visually for some reason. I can't.


So there you have it - it took very little time to do but there's some serious tweaking to be done on this site before I'll go back and use it in anger. Once it's launched, however, I will be going back and reviewing again.

ColorBrewer

Load it up. Go on. What do you see? A map of something which looks vaguely like the US down to County level and a world of pain. Click on the How to use page and all becomes clear - it's colour diagnostics for your infographics to ensure the colour differentiation is great enough between colours sat next to each other that the infographic is of value and not a mass of 'oh my eyes'. Genius in other words. It's got print friendly and colour blind friendly options, you can overlay roads and you can pull all the suggested colour schemes out in RGB, CMYK or Hex. You can also Export your colours to Excel.

This is a simple tool, and quite a specific one, but it's done well with a good selection of options but without overcomplicating things. Will definitly be using it.

Dundas Data Visualisation

Paid for so not reviewed as I'm a casual user at this stage. Someone else I'm sure will review it - flag below if you come across one. Included here only for completeness.

Exhibit

Confusion reigned because the link from the Digital Research Tools Wiki goes to a landing page and not the tool itself. Once you've followed the yellow brick road, you get to Exhibit. Unfortunately, you get to a page showing you what Exhibit can do but absolutely no clue on how to begin creating such lovely looking things. And since I suspect that working it out is going to take days and not hours, it's not something for the casual user so there the review ends.

Flare

I've deliberately linked to the tutorial page, within which it explains a working flash development environment. Not suitable for a casual user again, going to take more than a few hours to work it out. Again.


Geocommons

Incredibly interesting looking web based GIS tool by the looks of it - however I tried to search for layers to add to my map and found difficulties finding anything UK based as there doesn't seem to bea filter, so tried exiting the add layer dialogue which promptly caused an adobe shockwave plugin crash. Which is where my patience ended, I'm afraid, as I suspect a lot of others would.

This is the point where I started to lose the will to live so I scanned down the list and picked a tool at random - the Internet Community Text Analyser. It beautifully sums up a number of issues which I will summarise at the bottom of this post.

The ICTA is a good summary of my morning so far. I wanted to analyse my Twitter stream on Loulouk, including @replies. The whole lot. ICTA says it can deal with RSS feeds. So I tried initially using Twitter's raw offering of rss and validated it in Google Reader. Because of the introduction of oath, it stopped displaying anything after November 2009. Okay, fine. So I do a bit of investigating and find Free My Feed. I enter the RSS from Twitter, my username, Loulouk, and my password. For the first 4 attempts it said no Feed found. In writing this, it's generated a freed feed which will not require oath. So I've gone to ICTA and entered that web address that Free my Feed gave me, entered a name for it and hit Import and Save. It parses - no error. Wonderful. Except it says 20 records. Yep, it's trying to tell me I've tweeted 20 times from my account. I've also got a webpage full of white space, with a few lines of text at the top but we'll ignore that for the moment.  So on clicking Next, what do I find after a page where I'm supposed to remove something but I'm not quite sure what?

Nothing. Zeroes everywhere. No explanation that I should wait or click on the Analyze button then wait (because it appears as I should as after a few seconds things start spinning and loading, though I'm not entirely sure what). On loading, it tells me # of names found is 1. Which is impossible because on the previous screen, inside those 20 messages it clearly showed more than one name. So what does it mean when it says name? Click on the ? and you get:

This is how many unique personal names that ICTA found in this dataset.

By clicking on this number, you can review all names found by ICTA, add or delete names as necessary.

 And this, this is why I am coming to detest arbitrary lists of useful tools. Half of them don't work. Realy desperately do not work. Of the half which do and are out of Beta mode, 90% of them require you to be a 'developer' or have a damn good understanding of GIS - Open Heat Maps was another tool I had a quick play with - I had the csv on my desktop of the location of all the Boris Bike stations lying around so I tried to use that. This is what I got:






Yes, apparently there is a Boris Bike station in the middle of the Atlantic. Handy. Do you know why it's there? Because the data which TLA give out on the docking station locations includes co-ordinates and the co-ordinates are in Eastings and Northings which means they are a type of co-ordinate projection called Universal Transverse Mercator. There are, quite literally, hundreds of different projection systems. The ones you will be familiar with are porobably the one which gives co-ordinates in degrees, minutes and seconds, which is referred to as Latitude and Longitude and finally the Ordnance Survey term of reference - the British National Grid which uses a sequence of letters and numbers to enable you to pinpoint your exact position.

I don't know what projection, what type of system, Open Heat Maps is using. There is no option in the process offered to change the projection. And this is why there are dots in places on the map which frankly would incur such a monumental penalty in being over the return time limit that it doesn't bear thinking about.

So what I have learned today?

A) A projection standard is going to become an issue far quicker than I had thought as more and more people without geography degrees (me) or GIS degrees (me) try and play around with data to make it mean something, say something, represent something.
B) Beta means beta means beta. Don't expect it to work. It's a nice surprise then when it actually does.
C) People compose lists on a regular basis which point to tools which they clearly have not tested in any way shape or form. Once you know this and accept this, frustration disappears.
D) Data standards are also going to be a massive issue outside of co-ordinate data. But the issues shown above in co-ordinate data are being replicated across swathes of the UK and US as people rush to publish their data without first questioning the validity of it, the usefulness of it, the integrity of it or how someone will take it and compare it to anything else without metadata standards which are adhered to.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to try and retrieve some of my enthusiasm for examining, visualising, interrogating and spatially mapping data. It's waned somewhat.

(NHS ) A communicative diversion part II

I asked a while ago why NHS communication was still done using paper. I've got some more questions, because I'm that kind of girl and because I'm a service user and I happen to think service users are good places to start when you want to find the holes in a service, something Sarah Lay identified beautifully when she became Citizen Sarah.

So. Without going into too much detail, I'm now seeing one specialist in Burnley and one in Blackburn about the same problem. A third specialist was involved for a while, did the best they could to fix the problem and then discharged me, which now means my file with East Lancs Hospital Trust now has 2.5 years of contributions from my GP practice in Accrington, a specialist in Blackburn and one in Burnley. That's a lot of miles, though not as many as perhaps it would be in Cornwall or the Highlands. But the issues are the same no matter where you might live.

I noticed when visiting the nurse recently in Accrington (yes I know this is getting ludicrous but I'm not making this up, I sorely wish I was), that she had my notes on screen, and a scan of a letter sent from one of the specialists in Burnley. So, she was viewing an electronic scan of paper. So I assume what has happened is that the surgery, which is controlled by a different Trust to the Hospital, has gone digital - when I joined 2.5 years ago there was a wait as they loaded up the previous notes - but the Hospital has not. And I'm a bit confused. I know Trusts are seperate entities from each other, but surely this must be happening all around the country. And am I the only person who sees something a little bit wrong with the equivalent of a network engineer being less digitally enabled than the 1st line helpdesk technician?

How long does it take each specialist to wade through the notes the other specialist has added? I can tell you, because I've sat next to them while they've attempted to catch up, because I see someone different every single time I attend one Department in particular. 5 minutes. There's no summary, no description of each document, no keyword attribution to index by, no tag cloud to click on to ensure she sees only the notes from her own Department and not the ones from the Blackburn side or Accrington. She has to flip pages, scan read, try and work out if it's relevant and then flip another page. Is this efficient? Good use of the time of someone for whom 5 minutes in monetary terms is problem 6 times mine? No. I don't think it is.

Then there's the issue of transport. I've got one file which was being batted about between two Departmens within the same hospital. Now I've got one file being batted about between two different Departments, across two towns, never mind two sites. And there's no digital connection between the two, so one assumes they've being driven across. Well I'm so glad I'm contributing to a carbon footprint I've no control over. No really. And what happens if it doesn't turn up, gets missed or gets lost? Because the more something is moved and across greater distances, the more likely this is to happen, we all know that. Do I have to come back because my notes aren't there?

All this frustrates and worries me. I know there have been behemoth projects to try and fix this, I know the issues with costs. But we've got to fix this because frankly, I cannot be the only person seeing all this happening and wondering which century she is in. There's issues with storage as mentioned before - as my notes now wing their way back and forth across the Pennines, one assumes they live somewhere inbetween appointments - where is that, how much does it cost to rent, how many hundreds of square metres does it take to store them all and how much do we pay people to administer them, archive them, retrieve them and drive them around?

My care hasn't so far suffered for these logistical nightmares, but sooner or later there is going to be an issue because it's inevitable. Apart from anything else, there's going to need to be another file and what on earth happens then? One part arrives and gets seperated from the other, never to be seen together again?

It's inefficient, carbon creating, mind boggling, ridiculously unintregrated system design. If the government want to make a fundamental change to the way the NHS operates, they'd do well to sit up and take notice of the digital implications of the future. I am absolutely aware of the security, insurance and personal implications of my health data being electronic, probably more than most. But I think I'm finally at the point where I am boggling so much at the ridiculousness of this, getting so cross at having to sit and wait again as yet another person tries to read fast, completely misses the salient points and has to be informed by the patient what exactly the problem is and what it isn't, that I just don't care any more. There has got to be a solution. I don't care if I can't see it, I don't care if I can't log into a portal and read my notes, I don't care if it sits on a locked network like Gov Connect or GSI, I don't care if it does get hacked and distributed all over the net for all to see.

I care about the people who are not as switched on as me who are sitting next to specialists trying to skim read 30 pages of documents who aren't compos mentis enough to correct the specialist when they get it wrong in their haste to deal with the issue. I care about the specialists who seem to be doing more reading than fixing. I care about carbon footprints and things going missing, blown away in the wind. I care about joining dots and linking data, joined up thinking, tagging and indexing, descriptions and comments.

As an addendum to this, I'd like to say that 'No decision about the patient without the patient' is something neither my GP's, or any of the specialists I have seen need to be told and that I am in the hands of people who treat me as a human being, talk to me almost as an equal, listen to me, take on board my suggestions and generally are absolutely amazing. They're just being crippled a little by inadequately designed legacy systems which need updating and fast. These amazing people need to be enabled, not disabled - they want to change the world. They need the tools. Their intelligence and skills are in vastly different places to ours, so we need to help them. They could do better. So much better.

Comment only when qualified - Bookstart

Bookstart. I am about to make myself very unpopular, but the following is based on my personal experiences, experiences entirely linked to where I grew up. Empirical evidence may be dodgy ground from which to shoot arrows but I think it's important so I'm going to shoot and be damned.

Bookstart on paper is a very lovely thing. There is evidence to suggest that reading books is a good thing (tm) and I'd be the first in line to defend to the absolute death the worth of books to people who want to learn and are bored to tears in school lessons. They are sanity giving escape portals, mind blowing many world thought provokers, they are laugher and light providers for people stuck, for whatever reason, in one place for a long period of time. I love books. Let me make this abundantly clear. I own 500 of the damn things, I collect them (feeble attempts aside), and I still loan books from libraries.

Where does this love of books come from?

My father loved words. He owned a home printing press and I learnt to spell using the tiny little metal sets of letters. My mothers attitude to learning consists of 'I left school at 15 because I had to, not because I wanted to, so books shall be where I make up the lost time, oh yes!' as she sails forth into the local library and systematically drains each section of every worthwhile book while consuming an amount of data which frankly terrifies me, before coming out the other side having taught herself psychology, neurology, astro-physics, German, French, Russian and shorthand. For fun.

If I hadn't grown up with a fierce love of books, there would have been something wrong. Really quite wrong. And in the grand scheme of things very many things were wrong but this was not one of them and for that I am actually seriously grateful. I'm proud to be retro in my love of books.

The respect for books as precious things, things to be taken very great care of was also imbued from an early age. Knowledge is precious, therefore the things which convey that knowledge are, by association, also precious. I didn't manage to mark a page by turning the corner of the paper down until I was at least 25, out of pure guilt. Books. An intrinsic and inseperable part of me, as a human being.

To give some quick context, the village I grew up in had 400 people in it. No girls were the same age as me, the closest was 3 years older than me. We lived in a row of Council houses, and the families to our right were not the families to our left, but the ones to our left were older, grandparents, and the ones to our right were young families. So to the right was where I spent all my time. The line, by the way, was real, but only 1pt. For the purposes of this post I am drawing it in 5pt.

I am trying to very hard to leave the dreaded c word out of this.

The children of the families to our right were my friends. I grew up with them, I roamed across endless corn fields on adventures to find the abandoned castle with them (yes it's real, yes, it's on a map, yes I could map read at 8, I am not making any of this up, we're talking about fiction, not creating it), I played on hay bales, fell out of trees with them, and generally caused utter havoc with them (the worst thing we ever did was steal some apples. Once. We got caught. There ended my criminal career). It sounds idyllic I suppose. It wasn't.

The children I hung out with didn't own books. They had no interest in owning books. They didn't bother with the mobile library which came to the village even though it got around the problem of having no car - the parents walked the 10 mile round trip to the local supermarket each Saturday. Their life was reduced down to very little. Earn money somehow, doing the odd bits of gardening and farmhand work, pay the bills, feed the family. We didn't have any money either, but my parents, because of their background, put a massive amount of focus on making sure our education was also right at the top of the priority list and so, as a result, books were acquired from charity shops and loaned from school and nabbed from the mobile library. And here is the fundamental problem that I have with the Bookstart programme. It makes an assumption of priorities of the parents of the children the books are actually aimed at. It assumes literacy of the parents - the link above to the Bookstart website is deliberately to their FAQ section which makes no mention of filtering recipients on that. It is quite clear to me that the programme is entirely well meaning, that on paper it's motivations are good, that behind that organisation are people who care passionately about sharing their own values of love for knowledge and books and reading.

But I wonder. I wonder how many of the distributed books actually get read. I wonder what the outcomes are and how they're measured. I wonder about the return on investment, because I have changed on some fundamental level and no longer believe that simply wanting to help people and do good things is enough. I hope I have built a post entirely on wrong assumptions. I hope someone can come and prove me wrong, tell me that these packs change lives, change priorities, encourage parents living day to day, on very little money, to push their childrens education right up to the top of the list. But I've got a horrible suspicion that they don't and they wont.

When you're too busy surviving, your field of vision narrows to the very essentials. Maslows hierarchy of needs seems to be coming in for some bashing of late. My personal experience means I will never be so bold as to dismiss. It is hard to care about things which looks like luxuries when the next bill has come through the door and all your focus is suddenly, by necessity, switched to how you're going to pay this one and what must be sold or given up or cancelled in order to do so. At times like that, books get sold, Christmas presents get returned and priorities are ground down to simply one.

Identity crisis

I use Twitter a lot. Stating the obvious, really. But it's causing a little bit of a problem, and it's not one I'm sure how to fix. And I am supposed to be 'the expert' in our organisation, so I am somewhat embarrassed and frustrated by my own inability to walk forth and say 'the solution is this, put it in the guidelines'.

The simple fact is, I'm a geek. So, I like the usual things stereotypical geeks like: XKCD, Dr Who, attending random sci-fi conventions, unconferences and bar camps, as well as attending assorted genres of live music gigs, concerts and festivals. Mix this with 1600 followers containing assorted local and national journalists, Heads of Department and Sections, Directors, Ministers and other various 'important people' out in the real world and suddenly it feels as though it would be quite an imposition to tweet that, for example, I thought Matt Smith was looking particularly fit in the Christmas Day Dr Who special.

Added to this that when attending events with hashtags attached to them, I tend to tweet at a rate of 20 or so an hour (or more) you can see where the problem lies.

When someone follows you, it feels as if you're a guest in their digital space. You're taking up pixels. The more people who follow you, the more this becomes true, the more the pressure mounts, to say something worthy, something important. You don't retweet things because no one else would find it interesting. You don't say anything about anything becaue no one would be interested and eventually, the very reason people followed you in the first place - because you are interesting - is snuffed out.

So here's my advice to other people wondering about the weird cross between 'personalisation', 'personal brand' and being yourself on Twitter. If you're the kind of person who has a lot of real life friends on Twitter, and a whole social bubble off Twitter, create a seperate account. Use it to organise D & D sessions, tweet from gigs and festivals, for posting that random picture. Chill out, relax, do what you always did. Set up another account for 'work' and make sure that there's some of you on there as well, but keep the geeky randomness seperate. But if the work you do is Ruby or something equally geeky that not all your friends will be interested in, don't be surprised if they follow your 'work' account and quickly unfollow you. They simply wont be interested in that cool bit of code and while the odd tweet here and there wont annoy, I speak from immediate experience when I say when the signal to noise ratio goes above a certain point, Twitter will no longer be where you can organise a quick present swap at Xmas - no one will be following you.

Most people wont have this problem. Most people are offline more than on. Most people can combine beautifully themselves and their work and irritate neither camp excessively. This problem, I think, might be a uniquely geeky one.

What has been fascinating to me over the last day or so is the kind of person who understands entirely why I've done this, and the kind of person who cannot understand at all. And the demographics don't break down the way you'd think. Non geeks understand, just as much as geeks do, though my geeky friends perhaps understand most of all as they're finding a similar collision of cultures.

There is a new world order out there. Being you is absolutely a good thing. An expected thing. It allows people to trust you, warm to you, understand what motivates and drives you. But there is a line, nevertheless, which must not be crossed and I have finally found it easier to draw the line myself, than expect others to do it for me.

The new world order isn't quite as simplistic and easy to comprehend as I was expecting it to be. I suspect there are some more challenges upcoming in the near future around what constitutes a friend, the connections which are made on social media which don't necessarily transfer into the real world, what happens when you get to know someone on social media, meet them face to face and have nothing to say......

I'll keep writing about them and sharing experiences, because I think it's important. No one is an expert in this, no matter what they might think, we all get caught out. Wrong account tweeted from, wrong thing said, a view harshly and clumsily expressed. Tweets can be deleted but words are still seen.

I'd like to think the world has space for a fluffy little geek, but ultimately, there is a professional expectation of a woman to be a certain way in the workplace, and so that way I will be.

Words echoing

Words which have been thrown away, recently:

"the ties that bind"

I dislike intensely being bound to anything. The word bind, or being bound, implies a lack of choice, enforced incapacity. I'm not good at that. I fight back. I kick back. I automatically want to cut the ties, tear them to shreds, break them apart, burn them, destroy them. I want to be somewhere because I choose to be there, like to be there, because being there fires sparks in my mind and hope and joy in my heart. I've endured enough darkness and restrction. You can't put a butterfly back into a bottle. Or maybe you can? But binding me to somewhere, will automatically ensure that I do not wish to be there any longer. Where I stay is where I choose to be, whether it might appear that there are bindings, or no. My ties might not look the same as yours, different knots, invisible restrictions.

"get over yourself Lou. No seriously, get over yourself"

I never realised it came across that way. Had never considered it for a second. Explains so much, the slight hesitancy and confusion, the impatience and frustration. People don't think it's real, that I am, somehow, not telling the truth about the way things were and the way things are, because my friends who know me well, or rather who knew me well, no longer seem to want to have a place in the world where I am now what and who I am. So, to have someone who's earned respect for a beautiful mind and a massive intelligence to tell me, and tell me straight? Needed. Appreciated. Okay. Perhaps this post is part of the process. There's a choice at the end of it, I know there is. In the absence of anyone with the time nor inclination to listen, instead I try and organise the chaos here. There is nowhere else. The conversations which have come after with the idiocy out of the way, with the assuredness of straight talking and none of this complicated dancing around each other trying to play power games, but instead a completely straight clear open exchange of thoughts and concepts have been liberating. Reignited a spark.

"what are you waiting for? permission?"

Back and back and back again. I don't know. A chat in a pub with someone where egos, job titles, money earnt, status, position, gender were checked at the door? Help. I'm waiting for help. Honesty. It's there, I know it is, but I'm 300 miles away and the frustration is in danger of destroying any hope or chance.

"DO IT"

I want to. More than anything. There are no buts. There are no ifs. There is just the crossroads.


Users at the crossroads of life: One

Anyone got time for a pint?

Head in the clouds

Delicious is a sobering reminder of why dumping all your data into someone elses hands can be a very bad thing indeed.

Somewhere in my list of posts I've written and never published is one titled exactly like this one, written in February this year. This is a rehash of that, in some ways, but things have moved on a long way, both in where I work and what I do for a living, but also in the digital landscape, so I can't simply hit publish.

'The cloud' for those unfamiliar with the sometimes ridiculous names geeks give to technologies, is a bit hard to define, but essentially, when you save your information, documents, maps or data of any kind to somewhere which is not either in your house, or on your companies network, it's saved to the cloud. For example, gmail is email in the cloud. All the emails you send and receive are stored far away somewhere in America. If gmail broke, you wouldn't be able to access your email. Google documents is cloud computing, so is Flickr, so are Bing or Google maps. And so is Delicious, the place where a large amount of people saved their favourite web pages to, in the form of bookmarks.

Yahoo! bought Delicious. Now, it transpires, it is in on their hit list, or rather their 'sunset' list. Details are emerging that this might mean it's on it's asset sell list, but there's no guarantees anyone will buy it. So, at the flick of a switch in a remote server farm somewhere over in America, someone will cut my connection to my bookmark list.

I have no comeback. No legal grounds to demand the switch is flicked back. I can export my bookmarks to somewhere else, another service, but those services don't seem to be quite the same. I put them with delicious for a reason, it was a good service. But I assume a loss making service, and so it's on the switch off list.

That post I wrote back in Feb? It asked why we were all so quick to trust our data to the cloud, and this was one of the reasons. There were many others. Do a search on Bing and on Google for the same road you live on and zoom out a little and you will see the discrepancies in road curves and levels of detail. Try and write a complicated document in Google docs in Word, with annotations and footnotes and see what happens when you pull it back down off the cloud again. Check the terms of use for Google maps and understand that anything you map with them, anything at all, they claim intellectual property rights to. Fine if you don't care about such things but for those of us who are trying to explain internally in our organisations that Google might be free but it's free for a reason, it's a really big deal.

So what's the solution? I'm not sure there is one. Ultimately, if you use a service, and it's free, and you don't pay for it, you've no rights. If you use a service which nabs IPR off you, you've no rights either. If a hurricane hits the server farm your data is stored on, what can you do? It's all about risk analysis. What's the liklihood of the server farm your cloud data is sitting on getting hit by a terorrist attack, a natural disaster or a company takeover? If your data is that important to you, I would humbly suggest that these are the questions which you should be asking yourself. To be social and to share is a wonderful thing, but perhaps there is a limit to what can and should be put in the cloud? Maybe we should all be keeping regular back ups?

I don't have the answers, but I think it's important someone asks the questions. We all assume that Yahoo and Google will be around forever. Some of us assume that they're 'geek' companies, trying to provide tools for the geeks to use and use well and that if those tools are used, the companies will somehow feel some responsibility to maintain them. This is not the case. They are companies, floated companies, with shareholders and the bottom line will always be, profit to return to those shareholders.

The cloud is not fluffy. The cloud is for making money. Social networking, also, is there to ultimately make money. Companies do not make money from goodwill. People don't sit around and chat all day to be friendly. People do it to make money. One eye always on profit.

Don't be deceived by the fluffy name. It's not fluffy at all, and clouds can disappear in seconds.

There is no Undo button

You're not supposed to talk about emotions. But. This post does.

I deliberately haven't written about what it feels like to walk into a room, with the rest of your Department, stupidly missing the signals until noticing two union reps in the room and some very serious faces. The sinking feeling. The inappropriate laughter and jokes in the face of not quite knowing what else to do. The pin drop silence as the words arrive that you stupidly thought wouldn't be said. The numbers scrolling across the screen. The obvious discomfort of the person speaking. The desperate frantic effort of thinking of ways to mitigate the numbers, to do things differently, to avoid the inevitable.

I'm a girl. I don't cry easily. I'm a geek girl, we don't, I don't think. Sat in a room, a question asked, dangerously close to losing all composure.

I know, we know, we are the web team. A thousand words since from people who don't know the fragility of decisions within a Council trying to reassure, to rationalise, to comfort. Friends trying to understand and failing, I've been there before, I've made people redundant myself, why is it hitting so hard now when relatively it didn't then?

I got my 90 day at risk letter the day after. That was 3 weeks or so ago, now. Now I watch on Twitter as others are delivered the same news, sweeping waves of noticed presents for Xmas. Good people. Dedicated people. Committed people. I hear the whispers and the things I knew deep down would happen, now are. A sense of inevitability encapsulated in a moment as I think of all the people I have met who are good, so very good at their jobs, loved their jobs, could have been paid more somewhere else but didn't want to be, wanted to be where they are now. Friends. People I respect. People who have given freely support, kind words, laughter and received the same from me. In some cases, even surrogate dads.

How is it different? I don't know. But it is. I took voluntary redundancy shortly after making a man 30 years my senior redundant. It didn't bite me anywhere near as hard as it would have done him. And yet he took it with a grace and acceptance that I am failing to have.

I know, rationally, that there is 'at risk' and there is 'at risk'. I know, sort of, that should there be no place for me any more in our Department, I would find, somehow, somewhere else to be. So it is not for me, this shock or sadness. It is for others. If I am not permitted that, I think we live in a sorry world indeed. So forgive me my current irrationality, my ups and downs, the biting anger which shows through when I don't pay attention. It is the sheer scale of this thing. I would be the first, the very first, to acknowledge and accept that local government needed streamlining. I could have sat and explained to anyone who had asked, why and where. I could have and have suggested ways to mitigate that and some of those things, the practical suggestions have been implemented.

But, you see, it feels a little like a bulldozer to fix a problem which needed finesse. It has caused such sadness, anger, resentment and horrid words to be uttered. In some cases, the damage of this will never be repaired because some words said can not be forgotten. Situations like this bring out the very worst in people, as well as the very best, and I am not proud, not proud at all of the fact that I have veered wildly from one end of the spectrum to the other in the last 3 weeks - on the one hand it has motivated me to get off my behind and work as hard as I possibly can to tick off as many of my open projects as I can - on the other it has meant that some days I have done nothing but listen to others bile, resentment and anger.

Resilience is an often used word at the moment, as is emotional intelligence. Well, I know a lot more about myself than I did 3 weeks ago, I can tell you that for nothing. I'm not thankful for that, but I can acknowledge that. I have tried my very best to remain a credit to the Department within which are, frankly, some of the most inspiring and professional people I've ever worked with, and tried not to be an embarrassment.

I have failed. But in failing I have learnt a harsh lesson. I should have written this post 3 weeks ago. The cycle of acceptance says everyone deals differently. I was stupid - I missed the one thing which would have allowed me to coral my thoughts, vent my anger, and move on.

I work for Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council. I am proud to work for Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council. If I do not continue to work for Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council, I will still be proud that I did. If I am permitted to remain working for Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council, it will be a while, I think, before I can be proud again, but we will rebuild, we will reshape, we will absorb. It seems after todays announcement from our Finance Department, we have no choice.

But don't expect me to forgive this disproportionate bomb landing on a Borough which was just, only just, pulling itself out from the gutter. Don't expect me to rationalise it away. Don't expect me to forget, when the Borough in which I live, Hyndburn, and the Ward in which I live in, Scaitcliffe, are some of the most deprived areas outside of London you will see. As I walk out of my door each morning, opposite the house with its windows stoned in by the local 'youths', don't expect me to have a short memory. Someone made a deliberate conscious choice to ensure the people with nothing ended up in deficit. Anger does not come from seeing my friends made redundant, because they will find other jobs, because they are good at what they do.

Anger, sheer blinding white heat anger, comes from a financial policy which says exclusion will be compounded, that deprivation will be practically enforced and that neglect and abuse will go unchallenged and unnoticed. In a Council where shared services are already happening, where 8 Directors have been let go, where a Chief Executive post has been merged, where voluntary redundancies and early retirements have all already been cycled through, there comes a point, there really does, where you think, do they know the devastation they wreak? Do they understand what this will do on the ground? What happens if no one wants to run the libraries or the play centres or the creches or the thousands of other services which West Somerset, for one, will most definitely not be able to run any more?

I think the answer is no.

There's no Undo button.

PR vs the geeks

Lets see if I can explain the new world order to some people who have most definitly missed the point. Vodafone. You have missed the point. Your PR agency has missed the point. Your web devs have deliberately not missed the point but not told you. I suspect if you'd asked them, the entirety of your mobile technical support centre could have handed you the point nicely wrapped in a gift box with bows - but they'd have chosen not to.

It's not Christmas yet and you just dropped a bomb. This isn't surprising to me, because I don't count you as a particularly young and hip brand any more - you got left behind in the mobile provider wars when you didn't secure the iPhone before everyone else and even now you do have it your coverage of my bit of the UK is so appalling that I might as well use my 'phone' as a paperweight.

But all this aside, what you did this morning (Sunday, 12th December 2010) is hilariously appalling. I've only been in front of my PC for 40 minutes. In 40 minutes my perception of you as a company who has the ability to do business in the modern world is now exactly zero. I don't matter. Your stakeholders matter, of course they do, that's why you're dodging a rather large tax bill and continue to do so despite the horrific damage to your reputation this has caused amongst a demoraphic who 2 weeks ago were your main customers. The only people who matter to you are your stakeholders.

Unfortunately, when you decided you were going to use the hashtag #mademesmile to promote your 12 smiles of Xmas you forgot something quite fundamental. You decided, lord alone only knows why, in your infinite wisdom, that not only were you going to try and run a campaign to recover some of your lost reputation after the demonstrations last week, but you were going to do it in the very arena where the people who organised that demonstration gather, speak together, organise and collude.

Your arrogance, because I can only assume it is that, is going to be your downfall. Because, you see, whilst the #ukuncut bunch are not your stakeholders and don't matter and the police will deal with them and ensure you never have to put up with their pesky demonstrations again - you've now got a bigger problem. You're a laughing stock among the demographic who are your main customers. And in among those customers are the sons and daughters of your stakeholders. Who this morning will have woken to the biggest joke of this Xmas season so far - a company who listened to a PR agency who surely must be the stupidist people this side of the Atlantic?

Because who in their right minds would recommend a campaign like this is a good idea? I can only imagine we've come back to the same old problem yet again - they're a PR agency. They do PR. They've always done PR. The words social media will appear somewhere on their hastily redesigned business cards, but don't be fooled.

PR is about managing reputations. Marketing is about selling things to people. Social media? Here be dragons if you don't understand people. People who are not stupid. People who are smarter than you. More organised than you. More agile than you. More responsive than you. Can move quicker, mobilise quicker, think quicker. It's not rocket science, but it's not PR and it's not marketing. The skills required to navigate your way successfully through this new ocean, are not ones your average PR nor marketing bod have.

The simple fact is, Vodafone, you asked the wrong people. I'll give you a clue. If someone is dressed in D & G and Armani, they're not social media bods. If they're smart and smelling of gel, they're not social media people. If they're smart casual and wearing a Star Wars t-shirt - trust them, they know what they're talking about. If they're wearing trainers, pristine ones, which look like somehow they've impossibly come out of a box fresh from the 1980's, listen to them, they know of what they speak. Hell, if they look like their mother dressed them, you'll get better advice on social media than you will from people who've tacked those two words onto their online advert which has so many different colours in it it looks like a Pantone advert.

You are all still listening to advice from the wrong people, because you are all still working to the same stereotypes you always did.

If you don't want to become the next Vodafone, for gods sake go see someone sensible like Technophobia or someone decent. Let the PR bods do what they do best, let the marketing guys do what they do best but this? This is best left to the geeks.

#lgovsm

2 weeks ago I asked on Twitter if anyone was running the equivalent of #nhssm for local gov bods in the UK. I was very specific about the social media aspect of it - it's social media which it is becoming incredibly clear is still a bit of a massive mountain for some teams in local gov to climb, there's a lot of frustration and confusion flying around by DM and it seemed to me a time and place to moan/rant/share good practice/celebrate success was a damn good idea.

I didn't want to run it. I'll be totally honest. 2 weeks ago I felt like someone had found the valve in the inflatable me and pulled the stopper, letting all the confidence I'd been slowly building rush away. Work events have not helped with this, though as time has passed and I've dealt with the expected emotions (even understanding they were normal emotions to have helped enormously) and I'm back, pretty much, to where I was before the meteorite landed on our team.

Dave Briggs from Learning Pool very kindly offered to set up #lgchat (Wordpress) which would allow local gov types to talk about anything and everything to do with local gov. I will be in front of my PC every Thur at 3pm if I can be because I think the discussions which will inevitably happen will give me great insight into how people outside local gov see us.

However. There are a number of reasons why after much musing I decided to kick out on my own and go back to my original idea. Social media looks easy to everyone outside local government. If I were paid a pound every time someone said a sentence with 'but you just....' or 'why can't you.....' or 'it's free and simple, what's the problem' I'd be a millionaire.

It's not that simple. I don't care what anyone outside says, it's not that simple and that's coming from someone in a team inside a Council where social media is about to become as normal a way to communicate, I think, as picking up the telephone. There is a sea change, somewhere in peoples heads, a complete sea change in attitude. But anyway, there are barriers, there are still barriers, there will always be barriers. People outside don't know about GovConnect, don't know about the internal ICT project queues, don't know about locked down PC's which mean you can't install Tweetdeck, don't know, perhaps, that 5,000 people switching streaming Tweetdeck to on, could potentially impact negatively on aging WAN's (and LAN's). Then there's the fact that Flash updates are often stopped, that twinkly websites wont run, that lots and lots and lots of Councils don't allow their staff to use the web outside of their lunch time.

For these reasons and a thousand others, #lgovsm is simple. It's going to be kept simple. There's a webpage where transcripts of the chats will go so people who can't get on the web at all at work can come and read and take part in the discussion off Twitter. It'll be there for the people who are in meetings or out with the girls. It's at 1pm so people can go onto Twitter in their lunch breaks without getting into trouble. There's no complicated flash websites or anything involved. And if you can't get onto Twitter cos it's filtered under chat on the website blocking software, well then the blog on Tumblr is there too.

There is a place for both chats. But one is aimed very much at the bottom, while I think one is very much aimed at the top. And I am the right person to be running the one aimed at the operational people, the people who make things happen, who make things move, who run under the radar, who by whatever means necessary get the tech to work so other people can speak across it. That's me. The other isn't, not yet.

So, if you work in local government and you want to come and chat, see you on Friday at 1pm. The hashtag is #lgovchat. The Tumblr blog where the transcripts will be held is here. W'll be running for an hour, we'll spend about 20 minutes per question which will be put forward hopefully by all of you. You can submit questions to be discussed on the Tumblr. You can DM them to me if you want on Twitter @loulouk

Very most of all, everyone is welcome. Directors, CE's, Heads of Service, Officers, Managers, partners, voluntary sector who work with local gov, all Departments are welcome from Childrens Services to Environmental Services. There's no money for training, none for conferences, none for learning. Time to learn from each other and perhaps accept that the experts in local government social media are us. We're it. The buck stops with us.

See you there.

My other half and me

A little off message, this. Nothing to do with social media or local government, but it is about geek. Specifically, it's about a pair of geeks, my other half and me.

The house is currently full of a ringing Blackberry. Al, my other half, who is a senior something engineer - network, systems, servers, I lose track - is on call. He works for a national IT company, a company who look after the servers, systems and telecommunications of a large amount of companies you'll have heard of. The first email pinged and he leapt up like all the hounds of hell had landed. Nabbed a piece of paper, muttering to himself, checked IP's, apparently it's not so bad that that one dropped. Remote logged in to servers somewhere else, hundreds of miles away, more than likely, phoned tucked under one ear, co-ordinating a response to a system failure, and a screen scrolling, black background, white terminal font scrolling frantically up the screen. Line breaks appear - 'that's really not good at all'. He was supposed to come off call at 10pm. It's 2 minutes past but he's still there, co-ordinating, talking, frantically tapping. He wont remember to claim the time. He's private sector, but his attitude isn't.

I'm public sector. My evening? I went to the hairdressers, I spent the money I don't spend in pubs drinking (I do drink, just not at the moment) chilling out, chatting to the girls there, explaining grit (I don't quite ever manage to get away from it), explaining BWD Winter, explaining whart social media is and why it's important, but also chatting about films watched, presents bought, plans for next year. I came home, ate, flipped to News 24 and stayed there, serenaded earlier by the sounds of Simons Cat leaking out of the speakers of Al's super shiny laptop.

My laptop is not super shiny but it is tiny and practical. My little 10 inch window on the world. I'm a bit ill, some days a bit more than others. It doesn't get in the way though, because while I'm at work my brain still spins even when other things don't, people are kind and ignore, painkillers fix the worst and I'm practised at this by now. Evenings are not so easy, and so this 10 inch little screen is my....link? It's my social life while the other real one is by necessity temporarily on hold, it's my link to intelligent, smart and inspirational people who tolerate my incessant ridiculous questions, my occasionally dummy throwing, but hopefully also, occasionally, just very occasionally something interesting which wings its way from my brain through my fingers and out into the big wide world.

This evening is not normal. Usually, the work life balance in this house is entirely the other way around - I'm the one working.


We are geeks. The lines blur. Often, geeks work doing the things they love very much. So when the things we love roll over into time we weren't supposed to be doing work things in, we either don't notice, or we don't mind. But, because of this, there is also the risk that we don't notice when we've had enough, because we still think of work as fun. And so we carry on, working and working, through hours which should be spent doing something else in order to retain some sanity, because we forget that those lines are there for a reason - so we can rest one bit of our brain and use another bit instead.

If you manage geeks, and you don't already know this, this might be quite an important bit of information. In order for your friendly neighbourhood geek to flourish, don't water them, tell them to stop. Have evenings. Have weekends. A little work in the evening, fine. A lot of work in the evening. Not fine. Reading things which hapen to be work related but out of genuine interest and out of choice? Fine. Discussing things on Twitter in passing which are work related? Okay. Doing nothing but talking about work or doing work all evening, absolutely not fine.

We might not be the best people to limit our own workloads. We need you to keep an eye and occasionally intervene.

Brought to you by some kind conversations with people who noticed and had words. Thank you.You're not geeks and you still noticed.

Tracing a road around the world

I've always loved maps. There's a 'joke' about a certain kind of kid swallowing the dictionary. I wasn't ever that kid. Nope, I was the kid who read the atlas instead. We actually had one, which attentive readers will perhaps understand was something of a win.

Atlases, and a love of maps, all kinds of maps, playing with maps, drawing maps, interacting with maps is something that I used to be a little bit shy about admitting. No more. The world has changed, or perhaps rather the circles I move within have changed, I'm not sure. But regardless, the simple pleasure of getting a system to place a marker in the right place, then colour it depending on pre-determined requirements still fills me with glee. It will always fill me with glee.

So, I guess we start at the beginning again, bearing in mind that the best holiday I ever had was navigating off a Michelin map through the Pyrenees as my partner got arm ache from driving around all the hairpins, that I can comfortably navigate people through the centre of London with the aid of an A-Z, in our house we don't use Tom Tom, we use Lou Lou and that I don't ever have to turn the map the right way round to orientate myself. I'm not boasting here, simply pre-empting the inevitable 'but you're a girl, girls can't read maps/can't navigate/can't read signs/can't read maps without turning them around'. This one can, just so we're clear. I am not alone in this, just so we're clear. They're not pre-requisites to being able to map data onto a map, just so we're clear. But loving maps, so intensely, understanding their power but also their restrictions? That really helps, I think.

There are two kinds of maps in the world. One comes as a photograph, a picture, a jpeg. We call them raster images - they are simply images and nothing more. They cannot be asked questions of, you can't search them, if you zoom into them, the points on the map ( the distance between your house and the local pub, for example) will move, but not in relation to each other to any kind of scale. Flat, 2 dimensional map. They've got their uses, of course they do, they're great as a print out on some water resilient paper to take out on the hill with you. They're great for printing out and taking into London with you on a sight seeing trip.

But. You can't move anything, change anything, search for anything, update anything. It's static. A snapshot in time of the way things were, because the second you printed it, it's out of date. History.

The second type of map, we call vector. What it actually means is, 3 dimensional. Sometimes quite literally with the help of some funky tools and as this lovely map of Hong Kong shows.But more often than not, it's 3 dimensional in an entirely different way in that it's searchable, scaleable and interactive. You can drop pins on it, move around the map and the pin will stay in the right place - over the top of the house you dropped it on.  You can search by street name and you can plot a path on it - well draw one actually, you don't have to plot anything at all.

There are 2 kinds of mapping tool The first kind are the ones like Google, Bing and the previously linked to 3D Hong Kong map. They're useful to a point, but the point quickly becomes limiting. You can search it, and it will take you to the street you were looking for. But it will be a rough approximation of a street. Put the satellite layer over the top and you'll see what I mean - they're ever so slightly out of sync.

Next, try dropping a pin somewhere on a Google map with the zoom level not zoomed all the way in. Now zoom all the way in. Pin isn't quite on the corner of that junction that you dropped it on any more. It's moved. Fine if you trust that people are capable of spotting a bright yellow bin full of grit from 20 feet away. Not good if that pin represents the something you need to be accurate. Next, search for Witton Park on Google maps. Zoom in to the 2nd from last setting. Note that Witton is spelt as Whitton - right next to each other. One of those spellings is right. One is wrong. Do you know who I can report that to? No one.

Finally, embedding Google maps is a complete nightmare. If you have more than 30 things or so to map, then it will trip over to page 2. And then page 3. Which is fine if you're viewing a map in Google and you realise that that's what happening (some people wont and will think, for example, that you've only mapped the grit bins in Darwen and ignored Blackburn completely). When you come to embed the map into a webpage, the fact that there is more than one page of information you've mapped isn't mentioned. In order to get all the points to display in your embedded map, you have to go to Google Maps, hit the RSS button, get the RSS url of your points and chuck it back into Google Maps again. Then you are graced with a map which you can embed which will show everyone all your points.

I could go on. I think you get the point. You might ask why on earth anyone ever uses Google Maps. I'll explain that at the bottom but over the next few paragraphs, I suspect it will become clear.

The second kind of map is Ordnance Survey built and oh boy is it accurate. Need to know where a set of steps is or how wide a pavement is? OS mapping can tell you. Until April 1st this year (2010) the maps were acknowledged to be so accurate that people paid a lot of money to access that data. Witton gets spelt the right way. If it weren't I'd know exactly who to speak to to get it corrected. They not only provide line maps, they also provide maps with door numbers on to help you orientate yourself (or check your co-ordinates are correct). There is still a bit of a zoom problem, in that if you draw on the map at a certain zoom level, it will move slightly when you zoom in, say from 5km to 1km. But under 1km where you switch to a more detailed map, it's accurate. Points dropped don't wander off. It's accurate, it's reliable.

More interestingly, it can also be fed into Geographical Information Systems (GIS). GIS is a loose term for the set of tools which allows you to place massive amounts of points onto OS mapping, quickly and reasonably simply. Most people have done a degree in these systems and are can make them dance. I've taught myself almost entirely and so am a little behind. To add insult to injury, GIS systems are enormously expensive and so I don't have access to one any more because it's not part of my job. Which is where Open Space comes in. Open Space allows you to do similar things to what you historically could only do with an expensive GIS tool.

So, why, I hear you ask, have I mapped our grit bins and gritting routes using Google?

Ordnance Survey have made a big big deal of their Open Space tools. This 'path' map is an amazing example of what can be done - entirely for free. Except. There's always an except, isn't there. In the bottom left hand corner, you will note a little column which depending on the time of day you view it, will either be green or red. Hover over it with your mouse and you will see "XX% of daily map tile limit used". Open Space, when publicising their wonderful new tools, seem to forget to mention this. You get 150 'views' a day unless you pay for more. We'd go over that in about 3-4 hours, I'd guess. What happens after you exceed that 150 views? Well, we don't know but we're assuming that no information is served at all. Which isn't going to look very good now, is it?

And we're skint. Utterly and completely broke, as a Council, with £48 million of savings to make before 31st March 2011. So I didn't map the routes/bins in anything but Google, because Google was free. Which is why they can afford to ignore complaints of spelling. Why inaccuracies can be forgiven. Why display errors meaning suddenly my screen shows 10 markers all on top of each other practically, for no reason whatsoever, must be simply ignored.

It's free.

So, in true Brit style, we make do and mend. In the meantime, I've bought myself a book and will hopefully be teaching myself how to code so I can make Google behave a little better, so I can code around some of the things which are causing a problem. But (I may be wrong here, but I don't think I am) even then, once you start to code and hack about with Google in anything more complicated than what we've done already, Google control access to their maps with something called an API key. And once again, imposes limits for page views.

So what's the answer?

I don't know. This is where I hope someone else picks it up and passes it on - back to me. Can anyone help? Is there an open source way of displaying a map, inside a box, with a zoom in and out tool, a search tool and is accurate, which I can embed in our web pages and will cost me nothing, be entirely reliable and not melt my brain in the process of trying to work it out?

So. To summarise. There might only be 2 different kinds of map. And only 2 different ways of seeing those maps and interacting with 1 kind of those 2 different kinds of map. But when you start to delve a little further, it's really rather more complicated than it might first appear. And free is free for a reason.

Turning a chrysalis into a butterfly (Twitter)

Used to be, someone saying 'she's such a nice person' made me wince. Used to be, being nice wasn't a personality trait people wanted to have. Connotations of naivety, stupidity, immaturity. No one can reach their 30's and be nice, there has to be some motivation, some manipulative reason, no one gives things for free without wanting something back.

It got old. Real old. And really uncomfortable, frankly. A curse to be dodged, unacceptable to demonstrate kindness. Hide it away, and get grumpier and grumpier because I'm appalling at pretending to be something I'm not.

Then I joined Twitter. You knew it was coming, right? Of course you did, if you're on Twitter. At first I thought it was just the mountain bikers who were lovely, sending kit off to people they'd never met cos they didn't want it any more and they couldn't be bothered to go through the hassle of actually selling it. Then, as I became more immersed in public sector streams and discussions, something became clear to me. For the first time in my life, I was a little bit spiky and a little bit sarky compared to most of the people around me. And it felt really really really good. But that's not the half of it.

There's the being smart thing. Everyone on Twitter with a few exceptions, is incredibly smart. Politically, technically....thousand different ways. Lots and lots and lots of incredibly intelligent people. All of whom are completely unapologetic about it. Comfortable with it. Don't flaunt it but don't hide it either. Bit of a revelation for a kid who's always been a little bit uncomfortable about admitting she knows stuff for fear of coming off as a complete smartass. Actually, to be honest, I got given so much shit at school for getting A's it all went downhill from there really. I just didn't want to stand out so I just didn't own up to knowing stuff. The first time I did a pub quiz with my other half and his friends (now my friends too, thank goodness) it was a bit of a revelation. People knowing stuff. Admitting knowing stuff. Competing to know stuff. Gosh. I knew none of the answers and it was fab. Utterly.

Essentially, those two simple things, suddenly being exposed to a massive amount of people who were nice and shared stuff 'cos it was the right thing to do' and who were smart and liked to think 'cos there's nothing wrong with that at all' have revolved my world.

Shy. Quiet. No opinions. Silent listener. Nothing to contribute. Head down. Invisible. Lacking motivation. Uninspired. Negative.

All those things. Especially the last. I told someone at work that the other day. They looked rather bemused. So they might. But I was. Terribly. And you know, there were reasons, and I'm wise enough standing where I do right now, to know they were good reasons and 99% of the rest of the population would have had the same life attitude I did, but nevertheless I'm not proud it took so long to flip things. I got bored and never learnt anything new to fill the holes. I got bored and never looked for challenges and things to absorb me. I was bored and couldn't see past the end of my nose in order to fix the problem.

You see, I didn't think I could change things. I didn't. Watching (seemingly) ordinary people do extraordinary things via Twitter means eventually there comes a slow realisation that actually, anything might be possible. You might be able to lose weight - person x is. You might be able to ride your bike further than you ever have before - person y did. You might be able to eventually set up your business and become your own boss - person z, a, b & c did. It's not nudge - it's something more than that.

The ability of social networking to expose hicks from dead end backwaters and families where aspiration is not a word ever uttered to thousands of people who do aspire,  do inspire, do strive, are driven, are nice, do try, are motivated, aren't negative?

The very demographics of the web currently mean that very few of you will know of the things I speak of. But if you do, then I suspect you too will know what I speak of. Social mobility. Looking from the bottom; up and asking the question, the fundamental question.

What can I do if I really, seriously, passionately and honestly, put my mind to it?

I'm 33 years old. I think, really, it might be a nice thing to do to try and work out how we can accelerate the process a little bit so it doesn't take the people I assume will come after me, quite so damn long to figure all this out. It's not a business plan. It's not a plan at all. But it's an acknowledgement, I think, that there will come a time when my current job or whatever comes after it wont be quite the right thing, despite my loving my current job and I suspect loving whatever may come after it, and that eventually, I must stop talking and start doing.

I only just grew my wings. But I'm going to flap them, because it's feels enormously selfish not to, somehow. Pick it up and pass it on.

No, thank you

You don't do things for thanks in local government. If you did, you'd die waiting.

But militant optimism takes a sore beating when you've put hours, nay days of time into getting something to work, working around CMS issues and API issues which require paths on virtual servers which we think mirror meaning pages served can come from either server a or server b, making tying an API key to a dedicated server nigh on impossible, trying to stop vanilla Google maps paginating, yada yada yada and all that happens is you annoy people, make them cross, and cause problems.

You wish you'd never bothered. I actually wish I'd never bothered.

Yep, today, I understood why a small minority of local government workers are apathetic, soul destroyed, with no motivation and no hope.

Then I remembered I get to do fun things in my job and it was all okay again. But still. I kind of wish I'd not bothered and that makes me sad. Really really sad.