It's not grim up North

In todays Guardian Online, in the Comment is Free section, is either a) a scathing disparagement of Northern towns beginning with B, or b) someone's attempt at humour gone utterly wrong.

I work in Blackburn and live in Accrington, both towns located in an area of Northern England generally referred to as East Lancashire. Both are ex-mill towns, by which I mean to say they were towns that during the industrial revolution produced textiles and cotton and were centres of innovation and hard work (something called the Spinning Jenny was invented here which revolutionised textile production). They thrived. People came to work here. Money was here and my ancestors had some of it until they gambled it all away.

Then tech moved on, the mills closed and what was left behind was a workforce with a redundant skill set, lots of abandoned buildings and what we call 'brownfield' sites where buildings are knocked down and nothing replaces them. It's also these towns where I'm sure I remember someone trying to sell a street of terraced houses for 50p and failing. My town looks like this, in places:

And that's the town that I think this article is talking about. But it's odd. I am an ex Londoner. If you ask me what I remember of my 7 years there, I will tell you of 7/7, of blood stained swabs left behind at bus stops as a pregnant woman who'd been stabbed in the stomach by her boyfriend was airlifted to hospital, of screams at night, endless sirens, always a drama, never a second of peace and quiet, everyone rushing madly around, no one thinking an hours commute costing over £1,000 a year as anything strange or unusual. I think of shallow bankers, coke filled nightclubs, sub cultures and scenes ruined by gangs and violence. I love London, let there be no mistake, but it is not a box of chocolates to live there and anyone who tells you it is has more money than sense or hasn't comedown long enough to notice yet.

By contrast, I tend to focus on different things to journalists based in the capital when asked about where I live. Because I live somewhere where this can happen. I live somewhere where yes, there is a massive population under 25. But there is also an older population as well, who choose to spend their time volunteering, helping, fund raising and looking after people. We have food festivals where I can buy Wild Boar which hasn't had to overnight it down to Borough Market. There's more than one place to buy venison burgers here. The Farmers Markets include soil and other such unsavoury substances. The Farm Shops sell beautiful gifts, but also offer boxed deliveries which don't take 24 hours from picking to your door - more like 2 hours. I live somewhere where cooking a proper curry isn't a mission involving 7 buses, a map and a bravery pill - I just pop down the road and buy all the ingredients in one shop.

We stood a week ago looking at a map of the United Kingdom, showing all the National Parks. In a circle around where I live are the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales, the Peak District, Snowdonia National Park. All within 90 minutes drive outside of rush hour. Oh, did I not mention rush hour? It lasts an hour. It does what it says on the tin - just like absolutely everything else around here.

2 hours in a car and you can get to Scotland. North York Moors. Northumberland and Hadrian's Wall. If you camp, good luck ticking off every site in Cool Camping in a summer. No chance. If you love cheesy seaside, go to Southport. If you want sand dunes, and orchids (yes there are, I saw one) and wind blasting, go South of Southport. If you want a quick walk up a hill and across a moor away from everyone in the entire world, stand in the centre of one of our mill towns and walk for 30 minutes, you'll be right.

My commute to work involves horses, a peacock, some highland cows, some sheep (with requisite lambs), some other breed of cow I don't even recognise and sometimes, depending on which desk I am going to, cloud inversions down in the valleys which I am afraid tend to lead to me starting days in wide eyed wonder. I don't live in some middle class idyll here. I live in a terraced house opposite a house which looks very much like the one in the picture above but I tell you something for nothing at all. I have been tempted repeatedly to apply for better paying, better prospected jobs in London frequently over the past 6 months. And every time, I've not done so because the money simply isn't enough to tempt me away from here. Because while the backs are sometimes annoying, while our 'yard' is simply that, while the kids playing cricket opposite our houses will one day do our cars window in, while a stolen car has sheared the front of one of our cars clean away in a crash, while crime rates here are not perfect and while racial tensions are here sometimes too.....

I love it here. The sun sets and the colour of the stone glows. I can ride my mountain bike down a bridleway city boys could only dream of within 20 minutes of peddling up the hill outside my door. If I drive 50 minutes I can hack around Gisburn in all its random home grown, home baked volunteer built glory. If I want to go for a coffee I can, now, if I want free wireless while I'm sipping that coffee, I can have that too. I love the warmth and the sarky sense of humour. I love the freedom of expression but also the fact that when it comes down to it, barely anyone from our towns turned out for that EDL rally. I love that there is a sense of pride in some places, and none in others, and that's just like London and the home counties too.

We are not so different, up here, to you down there. I've lived in both and grown up in neither, and I know this. I have lived in both places and I know this. Each has its own to offer. Each has its own to deter. Neither is perfect. And the sooner everyone admits that, the better of we'll all be.

Alpha.gov - because you know it makes sense

I'm not committing to a 5 minute post. It might be, it might not but the simple fact is I've been asked to write this, by someone I have the utmost respect for, and so a job done at all must be done properly.

If you're reading this blog, I am guessing you don't need an explanation of what alpha.gov. uk is. I am admittedly way behind the curve on posting about this - though I assure you I have not hesitated in giving @alphagov a monumentally hard time on Twitter. They have done nothing but respond with impeccable patience and commitment is the first thing that I would like to point out.

The second thing is that when I asked them what their future commitment would be to ensuring social media was incorporated into the main Alpha website in every way possible, I received a 'we don't know'.

But I promised to focus only on what is there at the moment, not what is not and so;

• Set location doesn't work if you live in Accrington with my postcode. And I assure you, I do live in Accrington, in the Ward of Scaitcliffe. Not the village of Church. Not a biggy except this site is supposed to be referring out to the relevant local government services for the UK residents and what if Church is administered by a different Council for bin collection than where I actually live? I know this will be resolved and I know there are already discussions happening on implications of location setting even when the postcode dataset is replaced with a correct one - and this discussion is good, is positive and sets the wheels spinning
• I search for unique tax reference code as this is a search which I have actually carried out recently. It returns one result - File your tax return online. As it happens, I didn't want to do that yet when I searched for this on the main site - I simply wanted to find out what it was and how I got it. Alpha isn't telling me that.
• Popular Tools and Topics. How is this generated? Is it linked to a Cookie of some kind which tracks my passage and others through the site and then links 'person x looked at this site or made this search and went on to view page 1, therefore you might want to as well' algorithm? As it happens, I don't want to view a guide to Redundancy nor any of the other offerings either. 
• Then I notice the Load more search results button. Why didn't I notice it before? Well, I don't know. But I didn't and if I didn't how many other users wont?
• It doesn't do anything when you click it. Ah.
• So I follow the only link I am given - File your tax return online. Out pops a box on the right hand side - did I find what I was looking for. Well no I didn't. But I am on a different path now and so I'm not going to click on it because I'm assuming it will take me away from where I am. And this too is a problem because even had I find the right thing I'd searched for - well I still don't want to break my workflow at this point to go and tell someone I did find something I searched for. It might not, of course, take me away from the page, but it doesn't tell me that.
• The more about this service section is fabulous as documented elsewhere. Except where does it tell me what my UTR actually is and how I get one if I don't have one? Nowhere. And that's odd, because every other conceivable configuration of question is actually answered on this page and it's ace.
• Last comment on this page - hyperlinks of National Insurance Number, of Government Gateway ID would be awesome.
• I hit Get Started. Oh. My. Frikking. Eyes. 

Other comments stepping out of specific workflows:

• The box at the bottom right hand corner says Bills. I thought 'Paying my'. It's not, it's Bills passing through Parliament. I might be being stupid, mind.
• The adverts - I'll come to this a bit later but the adverts at the bottom do not fit. I think a different way needs to be found than banners because it's...akin to shoving an Arts & Crafts coffee table into a 4th floor Docklands Penthouse. 

 The positive stuff:

• The header section, well not the header but that bit at the top? Lovely. Love the logo, love the fonts, love the layout, actually, though there's tonnes of white space which sometimes grates a bit with me, but I do know I am alone in that. Help is nicely accentuated and you don't miss it. Clicking on it takes you to an empty section however, which is a shame.
• As a signpost sight to existing government web estate it is fantastic. It doesn't irritate me, in fact the user experience, despite the above is a pleasure. I only got lost once - the load more search results button. The UK Government box needs moving and some attention needs paying to the subject headings but this will come. 
• Did I mention I love the fonts? I love the fonts. I also love the icons, I mostly love the colour scheme (sort the bottom right box out though). 
• Most of all, however, I love the care, love and attention which has been very clearly lavished on this site. Chapeaux. 

Finally, accesibility and social media are the two subjects I will pinning people to the wall on. I make no apologies for that, but I do hope the above mitigates the hard times I have given some people. I'm a fan. I'm just....a gobby one.

5 minute post - when the numbers don't add up

Some questions. I suspect these won't make me popular, but someone needs to be asking, I think.

Firstly, digital is where it's at. I know this, I embrace this, though with the usual caveats about digital inclusion.

But we've got some serious issues. According to a Citizens Panel we ran last year, 7% of our Borough use Twitter. More than I thought, I must confess, though in my defence for encouraging the set up of Twitter streams at all, I tend to think that those in the Borough who do use Twitter probably belong to a certain Acorn group and as a result of that, may be more engaged. I could be wrong though.

But if only 7% of a Borough are on Twitter, then ofc we wouldn't focus all of our social media communication efforts on Twitter. So we don't.

So what I want to know is, are we unusual? Does anyone else know how many people they're talking to? Can anyone provide figures on how many people talk back? Has anyone asked our residents if they want us to talk to them on Twitter? Additionally, although I am all for using social media to tell stories, is Twitter the right medium? Can it scope for that? Or is it merely acting as a signpost to the content, and at what point does that cross over into merely broadcasting at people again?

It seems to me, Twitter is perfect for brief exchanges. Quick problem reporting, quick checking of a telephone number or the right person to speak to. Link to news by all means but if that's all you're doing and your audience are definitely on Twitter, or your residents, are definitely on Twitter because we no longer want them to be an audience, we want them to be conversationalists, of course, and terminology is important, well...

I don't like Facebook. I don't use Facebook. But increasingly I am coming to accept that at the moment that's where everyone is, even if there are early signs that that particular love affair might be ending. And if we're not there, and 46% of our Borough are, then we are doing a disservice by not keepng up.

Thankfully, we are. But...there's a research gap here. A knowledge gap. A business case gap. And I don't see anyone filling it.

Life in a Day

Yesterday I witnessed something digital. I witnessed A Shiny World. I watched Life in a Day.

On the 24th July 2010 80,000 people filmed their lives on assorted devices and submitted them - responding to a call made on YouTube for people to shrink the world and share their lives. Just ordinary lives. Nothing special, nothing earth shattering, nothing ground breaking.

It didn't need to be. The resulting film of global normality is instead a screaming beacon of the prevalence of humanity, the disparity of existences and the harshness of human life and death. But it is also a testament to the impossible becoming possible as it weaves on a multi-cultural loom supported by technology available to only a few 10 years ago.

We see rituals to lost mothers in Japanese apartments where every space, every inch is used and maximised and the son does not understand why the father does as he does. We see new born babies exchanged for boxes of chocolates, disposed of production line style with no smile and seemingly no care. We see Austria, or perhaps Switzerland as it really is, idyllic forests, mountains and goats with melodic cowbells interspersed with swearing, coughs that come from lungs and tales of wolves which will come in the night. We see that brain bolts can miss and that humanity can inflict pain, but we also see that those who feel they defend us do so with humour and silliness. But the one that wont go away, in the midst of the jaw dropping time lapse photography, the searing reality of a boy with nothing gleefully explaining Wikipedia 'has everything in it', of breast feeding babies and a thousand newspapers opened is the story of the man who is fearless, now, because he feared always his wife would get cancer, and then she did.

I cried.

Digital can seem emotionless, as if humanity has been stripped from the letters scrolling across the page. Life in a Day is a systematic destruction and rebuilding of human nature showing the very best, but also the very worst of human nature.

It was a beautiful day.

5 minute post - out of chaos comes order

Out of chaos comes order. I sometimes wonder if the reverse is true too. That in the pursuit of order, health and safety, ticking boxes and ensuring everyone runs to the same hours, the same lunch breaks, the same commuter corridors, whether we have eliminated any space for chaos, and for the switch in mental or physical reactions that this requires.

I wonder if we've all got our comfy slippers on. I wonder if those Councils who have flexi time, who have discounted gym memberships to the Council run gyms, who enourage people to leave the office not when they are told to, but when they feel they need a break - I wonder if they are the Councils which are more innovative, more chaotic, but also cumulatively achieve more. I wonder if we expect our working day to look the way it does because we are told to, and whether if we could scrap it and go back to the drawing board, how many of us would choose to work the way we do.

Sometimes, not knowing immediately where people are is hard. Sometimes it requires people to step up. The stepping up jolts people out of their comfort zones, momentarily. Sometimes, going to the gym for an hour in your lunch break can give the mental space to allow you to think, truly think, about the problems you left lying on your desk.

Chaos is not always negative. Chaos can sometimes have some very positive effects. I think I'd like to lobby for something in the middle for all Council cultures. I think we need a bit of a jolt.

5 minute post - when is an app needed?

I'm going to start a new experiment with this blog. 5 minute posts. 5 minutes to write them, hopefully only 5 minutes to read them.

I've been talking about apps a lot recently. I've just read Digital by Default by SOCITM in which it states that it's little flash up survey dialogue box responses say 8% of respondents have downloaded an app. It goes on to state apps are 'popular'.

Reaching 8% of your audience as a result of at least a £500 initial investment (and that's for an app done as a test piece by a bunch of local students) of public money, seems to me, madness. There must be better ways to spend £500 to communicate, broadcast or permit residents to report problems over the web.

I'd like to propose that it comes in the more boring and yet effective way of providing a version of your webpage which recognises when it's being accessed by a mobile phone and automatically presents a stripped down webpage, limited scrollbar usage needed to navigate with no images, only text, and the top 10 tasks for your site displayed right at the top. Along with a phone number.

That last sentence, by the way, is almost entirely based on the contents and learning from that SOCITM report. So it is worth reading.

5 minutes. Done.

Room for the halves

Sometimes I wonder if we've forgotten that non geeks can have good ideas too. Forgotten that it's not just developers who see opportunities to make things better. In local government, the deelopers are so far away from the front line that they need analysts in the middle to translate.

The same, I think is true outside of local government too. Developers can see opportunities, of course they can. But as the Local by Social series recently found out, put residents, developers and ideas bods in a room with local government added for good measure and you start to hear real issues raised, real every day problems raised by people who in some cases are sick of raising those same problems week after week and getting no joy - but put them in a room with people from lots of different backgrounds and skillsets and magic can happen.

I don't mean any disrespect to developers. I don't mean to say that they're doing anything wrong. They're not. I remain impressed with the epic stuff emerging from assorted Hack Days.

But I can't help thinking about the nature of tech, of the source of the tech being zeroes and ones. What happens if the world is only built by those who see in zeroes and ones? What happens if no one non-techy ever questions those people because they're not techy enough and don't feel that they really understand? What happens when it is necessary to state that user experience of a new shiny website should be observed directly? Something so fundamentally obvious that it makes my head hurt that this is a new concept, somehow, yet doesn't surprise me either, as years of battling with appallingly designed websites are suddenly explained.

Technology is wonderful. It is magic in the palm of my hand. But it is inanimate. It does not speak. It does not feel. Only humans can do that, and for humanity to end up with a web which is truly representative, enabling, empowering and intuitive, input must be encouraged from those for whom it is not second nature to email, tap or swipe.

I believe the future of the Internet should be in the hands of the halves, as well as the zeroes and ones.

What if?

Trip Advisor happened for local gov. People rated things, kept eyes on things, fed back easily if there was an issue. Maybe not needed in smaller Council areas, maybe only in cities but still, what if? Public toilets. Takeaways and restaurants for cleanliness. Parks for upkeep, for plant choice, even? Rate us on everything.

Why? Because it'd be doing our jobs for us. Well you didn't expect anything else, did you? But, also, because you are our customers, our critics, our eyes and ears. Because you use the services that we sometimes don't. Because if the same thing is wrong, day in and day out, and you never tell us, nothing will ever change.

Sounds pretty ace to you?

Then work out how offline bods get to have as much of a say as the online crowd. Because I really can't. So I think we'll file it under 'awesome things which can come when we are all online'

If you think it's not important, think about online age skews. Then think about who's going to rate retirement homes, elderly care provision, meals on wheels etc. It's not all quite as simple as it should be.

So I come back to a fundamental question that I feel I keep asking and no one wants to answer or address. When are we going to spend some money, not on initiatives to use the shiny in new and interesting easy, but money on enabling everyone to have equal access to the shiny.

This big metal circular things with the ladders up the side

Otherwise known as silos. The things which contain grain and other mysterious substances which I was told to stay away from as a child roaming the fields surrounding our village freely - silos and slurry pits, the enemies of the right to roam.

Leaving slurry pits aside (though there temptation to weave them into this post is strong), silos are also the things which people appear to choose to work in, unless consistently and constantly nudged out of them. Or is that the case? I'm not sure.

You see, you wouldn't find a manager ignoring any budgeting training offered as soon as he'd received his promotion which suddenly meant he had to care about such things. You wouldn't find a manager ignoring the dealing with conflict training, nor the dealing with repeated sickness absence training either. Both provided consistently and adequately at the least by our internal Human Resourses Department in every organisation, both public and private, that I have worked for.

So why is there no ICT training? I'm not talking about Beginners Excel here (though it would be encouraging if most of my managers in the past had some modicum of a clue about the SUM function, because frankly, how do you budget these days without it? Current managers, I'd like to state, are most definitely familiar with such things). I'm talking understanding the ICT function. I'm talking about understanding why ICT Departments often swallow large budgets, something which at the moment might be more than a little cause for some resentment. I am talking about procuring from ICT as a customer and understanding how to ask for the right equipment - sometimes a straight 'this PC is broken, can I have a new one' is not the best outcome when the users needs, job requirements and technology have all moved on from 10 years ago, the average age of a public sector base unit, in my experience. I'm talking a basic attempt at understanding the infrastructure - it should be on the intranet and mapped so that when ICT say something has fallen over, other Directors can understand the business implications and knock on effects for themselves without needing to be told - after all, if the payroll system fell over, you'd know immediately what the impact of that was, wouldn't you?

In the same way that understanding budget forecasts, reserves and other technicalities of financial nuance is your responsibility as a manager the more senior you become, I strongly suggest that now is the time to be asking some questions about where your ICT budget is being spent. Is your organisation geared up for the increased reliance on computers, social media, streaming live conferences to save money in attending them, the bandwidth requirement of an entire organisation using Tweetdeck to stream information? Are you still locked down from viewing some sites and if so why (just because you don't use those sites does not mean your staff could not be benefitting greatly from seeing them from a learning and development point of view). Do you understand the direction ICT is taking in either investing in bigger data farms as opposed to storing data in the cloud (on Google Documents, for example) and are you familiar with the security problems, been given an overview of the Data Protection Act or know why some people within your organisation are given laptops and can work from home and others cannot?

Ignorance is not an excuse. If you are smart enough to get your head around financial implications of central government directives and mandates you are smart enough to understand overviews of everything your ICT Department is doing.

And before ICT bods start breathing a sigh of relief - you're next. These people are your customers and your stakeholders. They procure from you, they give you money, they see less budget because you see more. You tell them day in and day out only why they may not have something - and never why they suddenly might be able to. You do not, in my experience, explaing your reasoning, you do not make yourselves accessible, you do not come out of your Department unless absolutely forced or on tech support duty, you don't explain your future plans for infrastructure or business transformation. When do you communiate, it is in terminology and acronyms only Bill Gates could love.

Sort it out. You've got a PR problem. It's a really easy thing to fix. Don't stop saying no - just tell people why you're saying no - if you can't open Facebook to the masses because your 15 year old infrastructure wont cope with the increased traffic - tell your customers so. Use diagrams if you must. But whatever it takes, explain.

There's fault on both sides here, and this post is written from personal experience (though it is categorically not indicative of the current modus operandi of our current ICT Department). If your experience is different, please let me know. If you think I am being unfair, please let me know.

But from where I am sitting, at the hub of all of this, is silo working, severe intimidation of those outside of ICT by the unintentionally thoughtless bandying of acronmys and obscure terminology by those within it and absolutely appalling communication.

This post inspired entirely by @pubstrat's rather excellent post on ICT in central government.