Humbling enormities

I grew up in quite a remote village. The nearest record shop was Andy's Records and was in Taunton, a 20 mile round trip on a shuttle bus which went about as much the long way around as it was possible to do so.

I never felt very comfortable in there, and when I did finally start to earn a few pounds cleaning a bakery every Saturday morning, I was often too tired to really think about spending the £10 I earned so it went into a pot on the kitchen window sill and my mother usually ended up using it instead. 

What I'm trying to say is, I loved music when I was a child but there wasn't a lot of opportunity to listen to it, really. I finally got a radio of my own when I was 14. I think a Walkman came a year later. I remember the radio only ever finding Radio 1 and listening to the top 40 and trying to record tapes to listen to later but I also remember those recorded tapes being the only tapes I had for my Walkman.

There's a reason I'm telling you this, bear with me.

I had odd taste as a child - still do. I have grown up and acquired understanding of musical genres through a succession of boyfriends and their musical tastes obliterating mine because I didn't really know what mine were. But one of the first tapes I owned was a bootleg Fantazia tape - Fantazia being, I think, a rave promotions company based in Somerset who ran illegal raves which then became legal raves in the 90's. Electronic music is often what I'll listen to when the earplugs and buttons are mine to control alone. 

I remember there being names, through university especially, of music producers and bands I wanted to buy the albums of but never had the money to. I was a skint student, and after university, I was almost poorer still, despite working Mon- Fri 9-5 doing data entry for an insurance company and also working 10-3am in a club Thu-Sun nights. Buying music seemed....a commitment I couldn't afford to make if I didn't know I definitely liked all the music on the tape or later CD which I was handing over precious pennies for.

And so we come to Spotify.

So far this morning I've been through Fluke, Autechre, CJ Bolland, Andrew Weatherall, Aphex Twin, Future Sound of London, Darren Emerson, Sunday Best, System 7, The Chemical Brothers, some Prodigy remixes I didn't know were on there, Eat Static, Apollo 440, The Orb, 808 State....trips down memory lane. Beats and tunes I've heard in clubs and never knew the names of the magicians behind the creations. That I can do that, that I can not only do that, but add all of it to a play list, then go to my phone and store the play list off line so it doesn't matter we're camping somewhere where 3G is some distant legend akin to dragons just absolutely breaks my little mind.

And for this I pay £15 a month. Now putting aside for the moment the sheer novelty of having the £15 a month to splurge on such things, how much would it have cost me to track all these gorgeous albums down? Pi by Autechre alone would, I suspect, require some persistence. And all of this, all of it is in my pocket and thanks to a silly white wire can come through the car speakers, thanks to some mobile speakers can play in our tent, thanks to earphones that don't fall out when I'm bike commuting (I only ever have 1 ear in!) fuelling my pedal strokes all the way home. 

This morning I have been reminded of why digital is beautiful. We all take it for granted, I think, and thus focus on the negatives. But when you think of a girl in her bedroom desperately twiddling a knob trying to get reception on soundwaves to a girl cross legged on a sofa searching for music and adding it to a play list on nothing but a 'I think I heard their name mentioned by a DJ friend once' whim, there is a revolution in-between. An enormous invisible revolution but a revolution all the same. 

I'm sorry, where did you say you were again?

I've just watched the web explode as someone finally put 'Apple are collecting data on your whereabouts' into terms a layman could understand. I could have added 'without you knowing about it' but you know what? I'm going to take a guess here and say if any of us had bothered to read the User Agreement when we signed up to the latest lot of terms and conditions for iTunes, we would have known.

But of course we don't. 

Except if you go digging. Which, if you bother to, reveals some interesting information. The first exhibit is the latest Apple iTunes Privacy policy. At best it can be described as wooly, containing as it does such phrases as:

 we may collect a variety of information, including your name, mailing address, phone number, email address, contact preferences, and credit card information.

Further reading further reveals:

 In the U.S., we may ask for your Social Security number (SSN) but only in limited circumstances such as when setting up a wireless account and activating your iPhone or when determining whether to extend commercial credit.

An SSN in the States is the equivalent, I think, of our NI numbers. Pretty personal stuff, sort of the equivalent of our NI numbers. No mention made of any security measures which will be taken to protect this information should you be stupid enough to give your SSN to a music service.

Onwards and we find a section on how Apple use personal information. It's not pretty:

From time to time, we may use your personal information to send important notices, such as communications about purchases and changes to our terms, conditions, and policies. Because this information is important to your interaction with Apple, you may not opt out of receiving these communications.

You may not opt out.  One assumes then, that it's not enough to force me to agree a new term and condition whenever I use iTunes or download an app on my iPhone. No. Apple want us to agree to any new terms and conditions quickly, because of course it's in their interest to, and so they demand permission to email you whenever they wish to tell you this. Despite there being a perfectly adequate alternative to it.

It gets worse - Disclosure to Third Parties;

At times Apple may make certain personal information available to strategic partners that work with Apple to provide products and services, or that help Apple market to customers.

Who are these strategic partners? May we know whether this includes the aforementioned SSN? No we may not. 

Think this is appalling? Be glad that most of you reading this are in the United Kingdom. You get different Terms of Service to the US and they're much better than the US's in some ways. Apple can't terminate your iTunes account on a whim with no justification.

By this point, I suspect some of you might be a little bit cross with Apple.

Don't be.

You agreed to the Terms of Service. Chances are, you just didn't read them. Don't be mad at Apple, don't be mad at them destroying your illusion of trust on the internet. Instead ask yourself this:

If I'm not bothering to read the Terms of Service, does it a) mean I deserve every breach of my privacy I am on the end of or b) that laws and guidance regarding Terms of service are too lax and need to be changed so that we do bother to read them.

I'm settling for a) because I am an old hand at this and I have watched Terms of Service go from 1 page to too many to count over the span of 10 plus years. I acknowledge every time I click on Agree that I am conceding that yet another faceless corporation is going to be trawling my website browsing history and personal details, movements and shopping habits - and that I am almost forced to agree to this if I want to use the same technology or websites that everyone else is using.

I suspect some of you are not quite so jaded. Go do something about it - I hear Sir Nigel Shadbolt is having a bit of a push on such matters.

In the meantime, call me odd, but I'm only surprised by Apple collecting my location data in as far as I am shocked no one else is doing it.

I deserve everything I get.

I believe

I believe:

• everyone has a right to an education appropriate to their level of intelligence - some people want to learn and some people don't, some people will learn and some people wont, some people need to learn and can't. The latter is a damning indictment of our approach to learning. The former is a waste of money. We must be better at delivering adaptive education which caters for all - but collectively as groups, not collectively as one size fits all
• everyone should be given the opportunity to think about the big things as well as the small things in their schools, organisation or companies. Good ideas are not salary or grade related. The ability to implement them is. If you don't have a suggestion box which you actually read and feedback on, then you're possibly missing out on revenue in all those cases. Right now, revenue is good, in all those cases.
• everyone should have the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of life, if they are not being taught at home. These include, but are not limited to: budgeting, credit management, home maintenance, finding people to fix things, diet management, cooking, relationships
• young people need to be taught how the web can be an opportunity as well as a threat. But also be made to understand that whether they like it or not, the older generation will judge them on their email address. And their Facebook profile. And their Twitter account. Asking them not to simply wont work.
• the revolution will not be Twitterised. It will be digitalised. There is a big big difference.
• the people who will change the world are not the obvious ones. Not the ones in power, not the ones at the top, not the ones who you would think would find it easy to do so but who on further examination are tied down by so many whips, party lines, spin doctors, expectations and restraints that any hope of being straight, honourable or expressing a free opinion are long gone. 
• that everyone has a right to digital as Tim Berners-Lee says. That it is a human right. That it is important enough, on a social, economic, financial, productivity, well being and self learning scale for it to be considered so. That digital exclusion are two words we should not be hearing in the 21st century, that the cost is no longer justifiable as an excuse and that this.must.change - and Martha Lane Fox is only half the story and the other half is simply not being told.
• that transparency is something to live by. That it is different to over sharing. That it can reassure and rebuild the trust destroyed by the MP's expenses scandal but also by years of paying Council Tax and never really understanding or knowing where it goes. I believe we must be much smarter in our communication of the internal workings of every public institution, not just government, and we must allow people with different views, ideas, frustrations and experiences to bring to their bear those things so that we may have a rainbow range of services instead of our current monochromatic offerings. We could sparkle. Instead, we simply glint occasionally.
• I can write words in the right order in order to express myself freely, with passion and feeling, with truth and belief, with love and hope. 

These are the things which I believe. These are the things I must not forget. 

Choose your own Democracy?

I don't know if it's true in the States, but over here, when I was a child, some books in a series called Choose your own Adventure were absolutely massive. Huge, in fact. They were bartered and traded with mass excitement, boys faces shiny with enthusiasm and determination to get hold of the missing book for their collection.

They were books which told stories but in a slightly different way. You started on page 1, but at the end of the first few pages you'd be asked to make a decision on behalf of the characters, and depending on which choice you made, you'd be sent either to page x or page y and from there asked to make yet another decision, resulting in the reader skipping all over the place in order to chase down the books ending. I never had the patience to read through every single choice to make sure I'd read the entire book, but I suspect there were those who did.

So, during Local by Social Blackburn, while talking to Gav Redhead about making democracy more accessible to young people, something pinged, and I wondered, why on earth not?

Because you see, there's a precedence here. Shakespeare manga style anyone? SQL taught via manga, anyone? So why not create a website where you become an adventurer through local or central democracy - in each case becoming a hero - either an MP or a Councillor (yes, yes, the word hero will cause some raised eyebrows but I do know some who are, so there) who has to navigate through the average week or month in that job role - and at every decision, the reader is sent to the correct outcome so that they can see the consequences, for example, of okaying that planning application for a travellers site down the road, or for that extension to number 33.

I suspect, in the process, a nice tool for explaining what exactly it is we all do all day might emerge, but also something to be used to explain all our different job roles to those poor sods who think a career in local or central government will be showered in glory (I'm joking, I love it but gloried it aint).

Illustrations could be line cartoon style with lots of humour. If a website the coding should be relatively simple, because of course you don't have to fit all the options within the constraints of a bound book, there would be no print or publication costs, just the coding of the site and the content writing.

If gamification is the future - well isn't the most obvious target market for that the people who are spending probably the most time gaming? We should be smarter about this, using where the eyeballs already are and understanding that maybe not only the way we work needs to change, with games masking our work giving us incentives to be more productive, but also acknowledging that it's about using communication channels differently to educate and explain things like the importance of voting, of explaining what it is exactly the people they're voting for do all day, making democracy more accessible.

Parliament.gov.uk goes some way to doing that, but it's hardly a website aimed at the under 18's, now, is it?

A Very confused girl on AV

Yesterday, talk turned to the AV vote - as obviously I am about to get my first taste of local democracy/national democracy in action in our local government elections.

As a result of this, we're all also in Purdah, which means we can't say or do or retweet anything at all even remotely political. Well we probably could but the whole thing is so complicated that I'm just erring on the side of extreme caution. This is also why this blog is quite quiet at the moment - well that and the fact that half the Western local government world in the UK seem to have stopped blogging - or my RSS feeds are broken, I'm not sure which, to be honest.

Anyway, AV stands for Alternative Voting. I had to Google it. Yep, I as clueless as everyone else seems to be on this, I freely admit. At the moment, we have something called First Past the Post and it somehow means that if , for example the Beer Party come first in 200 places, for some reason they don't get 200 seats in the Houses of Parliament.

Conversely, the option the Yes to AV crowd want us to vote for means that if there's a Beer Party and a Cake Party and a Tea Party and everyone puts the Tea Party as their second vote, but split their first votes between the Beer Party and the Cake Party, potentially the Tea Party will get into power in Whitehall, cos the first votes where split.

I think.

You see I am not entirely sure. No one I know is entirely sure except the rather fabulous @ben_greenwood who with the imitable help of @andrewrhodes managed to explain this using Cake, Beer and Tea yesterday in a way I understood enough at the time to know that both proportional representation (where the second vote of everyone would attain power) and the first past the post systems are utterly flawed, do not result in democracy being done, and frankly, we're in a bit of a mess.

I can't wait to see the turn out figures. I really can't. And of course no one will attribute the lack of votes on AV to people being utterly clueless and lost in all the random terminology, smoke and mirrors campaigning and frankly impenetrable explanations being bandied about on that there telly. Instead, everyone will jump up and down in panic and conclude the British Public will get what they deserve when it comes to voting because they simply don't care enoguh about it to get off their behinds and tick a box.

The turnouts and outcomes of the local elections for local Councillors I may of course not comment on due to Purdah. But we all know what's going to happen, I think.

Girl walks into a Twitter conversation

This is another entirely random 'what if?' post. I freely admit that not the right amount of serious considered intellectual thought has gone into this.

But.

What if, right, we all rotated Chief Executives every few years or so? I can't quite remember how it started and finding the conversation would be difficult, but I walked into a Twitter conversation with Toby Blume, and this was the musing which came out of it.

Because, you see, sometimes the power of what if, is not the answer but the liberation in realising that prefixing a sentence with those trwo words almost gives you permission to answer with the ludicrous and frankly unworkable.

Out of the ludicrous and unworkable, maybe things can emerge which are refined, corners hacked off, and which might actually be good ideas?

So what if we did all swap Chief Executives every few years?

Well, I suppose you'd want to match similar sized, similar demographic areas. I suppose you'd want them to be experienced in managing a similar budget. Maybe you might want them to come from the same tier of local government as your are is. Or maybe the value would be in having a simple rotary system which stated that if you became CEX you'd have to commit to following the pre-defined trail of assignments.

Why bother?

Well I'm not a Chief Executive so I can only guess at the benefits - but different experience applied to the same problem often results in problems being solved if the person before couldn't. Different management cultures sometimes result in different structures which allow people to excel in ways they couldn't before, or help highlight issues in cascades of information and ethos. Different backgrounds results in switches perhaps to more revenue focused operations rather than simply ticking over and covering costs.

By which I mean to say, our Chief Executives are currently a patchwork of assorted backgrounds, genders, experiences, visions, ethos', ethics, perceptions, innovative histories and rulebook tearing. In only bringing to bear one square of the patchwork to any one area, are we maybe missing a trick in building a blanket coverage of England where not only does every area get to benefit from the superstars, but also some of the would be superstars get to move into areas where the hard work has perhaps been done, and lessons can be learnt in a gentler and less pressured environment which has happened as a result of the superstars fine tuning.

Because I do wonder, you see, what makes a Chief Executive. I do wonder what qualifies a person to become one. I do wonder where the training school is which teaches you how to be one. I do wonder, some days, quite why anyone would ever want that job in the first place, being as how from down here, it looks quite frankly terrifying.

But most of all, I do wonder if talent would be absorbed a little easier into the existing pool of CEX's if it were possible to ease them in gently - as a result of gaps being managed in rotation systems to enable that to happen.

The usual disclaimer applies. We've not even got to Councillors yet.

Fierce pride

I'm not sure if I am still allowed to say where I work but what the hell.

The Local Government Chronicle 50 has made me smile, made me go 'oh wow' and made me so epically proud to work for Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council.

I was proud before. I've said it before a long old time ago. I am still proud. I am angry, yes but the anger is not and never has been directed at anyone within our organisation. I am simply struggling with understanding and knowing what it is I am allowed to say and what it is I am not.

But I am proud, this evening and frankly, I don't give a damn whether I'm allowed to say it or not. I'm proud to know inspirational, dedicated, innovative, sometimes bonkers but always true to themselves people.

Nice work fellas.

I use the word fella, of course, because somewhat oddly, though there are many ladies on the list, I don't know any of them well enough to send congratulations messages.

I can say nice work to the lady who compiled it though.

Who the hell are you to judge my worth?

I work in local government.
Apparently, this makes me:

• lazy
• unsuitable for to work in the private sector ever again
• guaranteed not to be accepted onto temping agency books
• looked down upon by private sector colleagues in the same job roles
• behind the times
• incapable of maintaining my own self development
• incapable of keeping up with the 'real hard working people' over in the private sector

I work for a start up once. It had about 15 people or so when I started. 1 person in Payroll, no Finance, no HR, a few internal ICT support guys. No management structure to speak of. I started as a 1st line support technician, I loved my job and I worked my ass off. I worked so damn hard I blew the targets out of the water.

2 years later the company employed 500 people, had a HR, Finance and internal support team. It was contemplating floating and investment was flying in. There was a proper management team, internal training and support and a fierce team spirit which saw us all drinking, socialising and in some cases, my case actually, living together with some of the people we worked with. I was a Team Leader in my early 20's managing 15 1st line technicians and a 2nd line tech too.

A year later the dot com bubble burst. The owner is now being investigated, quietly, for fraud, judging by emails I've received from American reporters a few years ago.

I've worked in the public sector since about 2003. 7 years. I've never been promoted above Administrator. I don't drink with my colleagues. I don't receive bonuses, or training to develop me in new directions, only to make me more useful to the organisation. There is no rest room to go and sit in with quiet music and pool tables. There is rarely laughter, there is no money, there is no opportunity of promotion because no one leaves the public sector until they retire or they're forced to.

Don't tar me and every other person who you know who works in the public sector with the same brush. Some of us have work ethics. Some of us don't go home at 5pm on the dot. Some of us will work until 10pm if asked and most of us for the kind of pay you wouldn't even get out of bed for. 

I chose to be here because I believed I could make a difference. But don't you dare be so arrogant as to presume you are better than me because you work over in private. 

This post brought to you, not by any one person, or conversation, or situation, but from years, and I do mean years of feeling like a second class citizen for having some ethics I wanted to work by.

JFDI & the fear of failure

I remember still the smell of Bunsen burners, the noise, the rickety stands holding glass vials above the flames, and the worn, scarred initialled benches we all worked on in our Science lab.

It was in science that I learnt something I didn't know I didn't know. I learnt to quantify and focus on the process of trying to find an outcome through experimentation. That makes it sound terribly serious, and of course it wasn't - the process was supposed to be fun and often was despite our teachers best efforts to the contrary. 

But the approach - I want outcome x so I'm going to try inputs a, b and c and see which works best is something which is strikes me that those working with social media are still doing. Actually, I'll rephrase that. It's something the JFDI bods are currently doing in social media.

It seems there are two kinds of people. Those who look at what everyone else is doing, read the case studies, read the books, measure everyone elses outcomes and successes and then simply copy the inputs and hope for the same outcomes.

This requires careful thought, however, of a few things some people seem to be missing.

Every Council authority, every new NHS cluster, every Fire station and every Local Strategic Partnership looks different. Feels different. Sounds different, ringing as they do with the diverse dialects and accents of our wonderful country. One size does not fit all.

We are in danger of becoming prescriptive, not innovative. A recipe which includes Flickr for collecting residents photographs for us to use on our webpages and promotional material. A Facebook page for winter services, a main one for general announcements where no one ever bothers to like any posts or comments back, one for our leisure centres. A Twitter stream broadcasting out, ticking a box, everyone talking about engagement, but engagement rarely happening if my experience of watching one lad trying to talk to a supposed trailblazer Council about an outstanding invoice is anything to go by. A YouTube channel with lots of boring talking heads pushing their own agendas which no one ever watches.

JFDI is not a way of life. It's not something which should be done 100% of the time - you'd never be able to track all of the outcomes - and if you think it is then you're completely missing the point. JFDI is an ethos which borrows everything from the lessons you learnt way back in the science lab. State your required outcome, be sure of it, understand it, unravel it - and then pick a couple of different inputs and see what happens, see what comes out of them. Spend time nurturing the one which gets the most local interest. Not national or international interest, not newspaper interest, local interest. You are trying to engage and serve local people and not all local people behave the same. Tech savvy clusters of residents might turn their nose up at yet another Facebook page because they don't use Facebook. A predominantly older cluster of residents might just want a simple webpage with a comment facility to feedback through. 

It doesn't have to be complicated. It doesn't have to be simple. It has to fit the communication and engagement needs of the particular dynamics and demographics of your area.

You're going to have to put some effort in.

You're going to have to understand your local area.

You're going to have to work out whether you can afford to think a bit differently.

You're going to have to identify your required outcomes.

You're going to need to accept that sometimes, the data just isn't there and pick a tool or idea and JFDI.

It might fail.

No one likes that word. Wired UK magazine devoted most of their issue this month to the notion that as a country, perhaps the reason we don't produce as many tech successes is because of our fear of failure. Because of the stigma we attach to bankruptcy and business shutdowns.

JFDI is risky. But if you do everything in the list above, you can mitigate that risk and you can justify it, should someone come knocking on the door. And despite what some people are standing in front of you and telling you, sometimes JFDI does result in sustainable outcomes. BWD Winter, a Facebook page with 4,000 eyeballs reading its posts, with a community regulating itself, with end users directly thanking the drivers of the grit trucks, proves that. BWD Winter was set up in 48 hours, pretty much. We had clear outcomes we wanted to achieve and we had prior local resident behaviour to judge our decisions on, but ultimately, we JFDI.

We must, absolutely must, stop being so frightened of failure. We're in danger of becoming extinct if we don't.

It's all gone a little bit quiet

Twitter is quite broken.

It begs an interesting question, really. What on earth did we all do before it came along?

People are messaging me and I can't see the messages. I worry it makes me seem rude.
I am missing all the retweets of all the interesting stuff that I would normally retweet on and now post to our Yammer site to share with the people at work as well.
I am missing the idle chit chat. About nail varnish colour wheels and the right size of beautiful leather satchels.
I can't see the #30daysofbiking tag to catch up with how that's going.

It feels just like another layer of life is happening and I can't see it nor take part in it.

Once it's intertwined and wrapped, removing it feels kind of strange. But all the same, perhaps this weekend in drenched sun and full of heat and books, magazines and writing, oh so very much writing to be done, well maybe that's just what I need.

But I really must decide what I am to do with #lgovsm - because 1pm on a Friday is most definitely not working.

Understanding success

I'm struggling with something at the moment. I might be the only one. But I figured if I don't post I wont find out. 

I don't know how to judge my own success at my job.

There, I've said it.

In my old post, I had clear targets and objectives. I knew what I needed to do and by one and 9 times out of 10 I went home with a clear desk, comfortable in the knowledge I was performing and most of the time, certainly meeting other peoples expectations of me, if not exceeding them. I spent a lot of time a bit bored around the edges so I spent a lot of time finding things to do, things to teach myself, project teams to get involved with and the job evolved and so did I into someone who was a little bit more confident than when I started.

I feel the complete opposite at the moment.

Social media is becoming a topic of conversation in places I never thought it would in our organisation. We've got the go ahead to create a young peoples consultation events and info page, pending a safeguarding protocol which we do need and I'm glad we're going to have. Pennies are dropping for Directors. I'm giving presentations and not cocking them up, frankly, not babbling, not rushing, not disintegrating into a nervous panicking mess. Our Managing Director is on Yammer and it's going well, being used for really cool projects and knowledge sharing and everyone is being incredibly positive. I think I managed to save ICT £25,000 the other day by pointing them at an open source but supported solution rather than a big shiny all singing all dancing alternative which was almost identical in functionality to the open source one. I'm holding my own in meetings I'm quietly terrified of and I'm going to be pulling together a few prominently enthusiastic people into a digital comms user group replete with post it notes and brainstorming to try and focus on the barriers but also the successes we're achieving in each Department as well as sharing best practice. Yes, we could do it on Yammer but sometimes only post it notes will do.

All of these things are wonderful. All of these things are, frankly, astounding in places, all things considered.

So why on earth do I feel like a failure? Why can't I adjust my thinking so I don't see never clearing my desk as a failure? Why can I not just be satisfied with what I am achieving? Why do I feel like I am letting my bosses at various levels down? Why am I incapable of accepting that some small part of all of those successes and movements and forward thinking things might be something I contributed a tiny bit to?

I am incapable of believing, it seems, that I can do something good. Despite wanting very much to do so. And I just don't understand at all.

Behind every gobby woman...

This is a post about my boyfriend.
It's also a post inspired by Matthew Taylor's recent blog post on the RSA site about ingenuity.

I think differently. But so does my boyfriend. And we are not the same and it's not just biological or temperamental. It's literally, a different way of thinking differently.

I don't think I necessarily innovate. I come up with ideas. Some people like to call that innovating. I'm Northern, I call it looking at something, wondering why people are still doing it the slow way and then suggesting changes and helping people make them before disappearing off and leaving them to do keep an eye on the changed system themselves to make sure it's still doing what it's supposed to. Though I suppose innovating might be a shorter way of saying that.

Whatever.

My boyfriend is ingenious. And frankly, not enough is made of the rather unique and I happen to think amazing ability of my boyfriend to think of the ridiculous to fix something - because 9 times out of 10, it ends up not actually being ridiculous, but being fantastic. And, innovative. But it's the outcome which is innovative, not the skillset which allows him to think that way.

Take, for example, our first camping expedition. We bought an airbed from Argos. Now, never buying camping equipment from Argos ever again aside, we learnt something from the experience. We learn that when the valve stopper on the airbed is utterly useless and is letting all the air out at 4am, there is a perfectly obvious solution to the problem - to shove a maglite into the valve instead.

What, you mean you wouldn't have thought of that?

Well, neither would I.

I believe ingenuity is something you're either born with or you're not. It's not something you can learn, although I believe you can train your brain a little more to look at tools, opportunities and examples around you to have a library to call on when you're in a similar situation. But the ability to think on you're feet, instantly, and draw on immediate resources to design a solution, and then implement it almost instantly is an ability which every team should have at their fingertips.

The thing is, it's a valuable commodity, and the reason for that is that there are few people who can think like this. Make, the magazine produced by O'Reilly celebrates this mentality, I think, encourages it, hones it, focuses it into something more visible. But 9 times out of 10, you wont even know that the person next to you in your team has this ability, because it's rarely called on in modern life.

Except when camping in a field. Or, as I discovered, when halfway along a 10 mile out and back route on our mountain bikes, miles away from civilisation or a mechanic, when your falling over skills lead to dented chain links and you've no spare. Or as where he works find out on a daily basis as he manages to somehow fix every server which ends up on his lab table whilst rarely needing to order new parts - he simply makes do with what he's already got left over from other projects, cannibalises it and makes do and mend.

Matthew Taylor is right. 100% right. Make do and mend is a mentality we have not needed in quite some time. We just threw it out and bought a new one rather than making any serious attempt to fix anything.

Well, this is the age of the Makers, the Fixers, the Menders. And I think my boyfriend is in for a bit of a shock as he realises his skillset that he thinks absolutely nothing of, that he doesn't even consider a skillset, is about to be one of the most sought after, not only in local government, but outside of it as well.

I'd point you at his blog at this point. But he doesn't have one. You see, he's too busy doing to be writing about it.

Telling the truth

Some people think Blackburn is a bit of a trailblazer on the social media side of things. I'd much rather people looked to Kirklees when handing out such accolades.

However, what I do think I can comment on, what I do think I am qualified to comment on, is the state of social media in local government, even if my view is only limited to Twitter and to my own organisation.

So I'm going to tell you how I see it, because I am a little tired of reading things from people who are commenting on local government and social media and wondering which planet they're on.

Believe me when I say, the conversation absolutely cannot move on from the tools. At some levels it can. And in some Departments within the organisation, it can. But it is very easy when you spend 24/7 in the padded cell of the social media bubble to think everyone is on the same page as you. They are not. There is, at the moment, perhaps one person per Department in our organisation who is what you might call a 'social media champion'. Some of them know Twitter, and some of them know Facebook. Some of them know why we need to be doing what we're doing and not how and some vice versa.

There needs to be some cohesion and that's what our Department is trying to do. And we're succeeding. Our Corporate Communications Manager and I spent Friday morning talking to some Directors about social media. About the tools and the uses, the cost savings and the pay offs. As a result, the carebears are going on tour around the rest of the organisation. But this is where we are. The ball is running down the hill, it's gathering moss but it sure as hell aint at the bottom as yet.

If we don't keep teaching people about the tools, if we assume everyone knows how to use the tools, we are doing a dangerous thing. In Blackburn, the massive majority of over 50's are not on Facebook. Look at your management teams. Ask them if they are. You will find they are not, that their daughters and nieces are, that they use it to chat, but that they are not. They do not understand why you should use it for business, they do not yet know the applications which it can be put to use for. It is our job to tell them. It is our job to continue to highlight the cost savings and the internal communication opportunities at a time when both those things are absolutely crucial for the survival of our sector.

The battle is not won. 'Everyone' does not understand social media in local government. Go on a hunt for case studies. Go on a hunt for success stories. We cannot abandon our efforts to teach people the tools either - email had one tool needed to utilise it - and we all can still quote examples, I'm sure of those in recent memory who still didn't quite manage to get their heads around it. Social media is email x 10 - the skill sets will be naturally acquired by some, but for many it will require simple basic tuition, some in groups and some on a 1-2-1 basis.

We are in danger of having the digital inclusion arguments within our own organisations. Make no mistake, the implications for leaving anyone within our stripped down organisations at the bus stop as this bus pulls away are far bigger than they were with email communication. The rules are different, the pace of the world is different, we must absorb Public Health responsibilities and all the social marketing and communications implications of that - we must ensure that the staff that we are left with are ably and adequately equipped to do business.

We are not businesses. We will not be able to provide the service we provide as well as we should if we switch our focus to shareholders instead of stakeholders. But ignoring the training and comprehension needs of our workforces, of our senior management teams, is simply not an option.

Open Act

This is a pitch/idea shaping exercise/idea bounce/is this really a good idea post.

Firstly some disclaimers. I didn't study law. The closest I came was studying a module at university for my HND in Business and Finance (no I don't have a degree, yes I am looking at rectifying that, possibly, yes it might be in journalism) so I know tort, I know duty of care, I know that the word 'reasonable' can have 17 different meanings depending on which County it's interpreted in. That's all.

I also know few people read the small print. Because it isn't in plain English half the time. The other half of the time it's too small to actually read.

I know that law is something I am allowed to have an opinion on which I can express freely and without restraint without needing to be wary of Purdah or politically restricted posts. I am not in a politically restricted post, of course, but I might as well be because I am being expected to act in the manner of someone 3 grades higher than me, even if I am not - and no, there's no bitterness there. But I cannot do the things in local gov I would like to do right now because I am in local gov - but that doesn't mean I cannot apply disruption elsewhere.

Finally, I know that I passionately feel that you should not need to have studied law, for example, to know the following:

• There is a Bill at second reading stage in the House of Commons called European Convention on Human Rights (Withdrawal) Bill Bill. Summary: A Bill to make provision for the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Convention on Human Rights.
• There is a Bill at second reading stage in the House of Commons called Face Coverings (Regulation) Bill. Summary: A Bill to regulate the wearing of certain face coverings; and for connected purposes. 
• Further reading reveals the subject to exemptions in subsection (3), wearing a garment or other object intended by the wearer as its primary purpose to obscure the face in a public place shall be guilty of an offence.
• It should be noted that subsection (3) specifies only 'in a place of worship'. It does not specify for purposes of religion, a rather different thing entirely.
• There is a Bill at second reading stage in the House of Commons called Remembrance Sunday (Closure of Shops) Bill. Summary: A Bill to provide for the extension of Christmas Day restrictions on the opening of retail premises to Remembrance Sunday; and for connected purposes.

Some of those items do not make me happy on a personal level. Some of those items, I believe, have a necessity to be out in the open and up for public discussion amongst the groups of people those Bills will directly affect. I believe that parliament have done what we can reasonably expect of them to do in being open and transparent. I believe the failure lies with those of us who could translate those words into plain English but choose not to.

I would like to give people the opportunity to choose to do the right thing and act as interpreters and relays for the information which is in the public domain but I don't believe can be easily understood.

Therefore, I would like to propose a database driven website on the front end, with an open wiki on the back end. The wiki will take each new Bill, dissect it and translate it into plain English, in an unbiased and non-politically influenced way. This translation will stay in the Wiki for those who require more detail of Bills along with an original copy of the Bill and all subsequent revisions at each step of the Bill process through Parliament. A summary will be created and keywords allocated to each Bill translation and it is this which will be fed through to the database which drives the front end site.

The front end site will allow users to search on keywords for Bills which are relevant to them, their community group, their religious group, their charity or their organisation. It will display summaries of Bills as results of the keyword search. A link will be provided to the back end Wiki with the full translation in plain English should it be needed.

It will also be possible to visit the site once, set up email subscriptions based on keyword searches and then have notifications emailed to you when a new Bill summary is uploaded to the database which satisfies those keywords. Additionally, it will subsequently be possible to subscribe to an individual Bill and be notified each time it progresses through parliament or a committee meets to discuss the Bill. 

The Wiki driving this and the translations will need to be provided by community volunteers. Driven, dedicated, passionate volunteers with an ability to read 'legalese' and translate it and reasonably quickly. Once all current Bills at the various stages through the process have been translated, it is anticipated that fewer people will be needed to keep on top of the rolling introductions of new Bills and the workload will drop, but the initial workload will be high.

I believe, very strongly, that everyone in this country has a right to discuss and feedback to parliament on the Bills which may eventually become Acts which may affect those citizens every day movements, their human rights, and their personal freedoms. 

Many thanks for reading this far. Offers of help would be very welcome. Criticism and feedback are also welcome - the problem with leaving comments has been fixed.