Linked augmentation

The following post is entirely Hadley Beeman's (@hadleybeeman) fault. So much is, actually, when it comes to opendata and linked data - just Google her and you'll find it why. For the US orientated among you, Hadley is essentially our national lead on opendata in the UK, she's an American and she yay's. In public. Unashamedly. And that makes her just awesome because us Brits, frankly, we do not yay enough.

Anyway.

This tweet kicked off a waterfall of thoughts and feelings:
"Soundthing: Ambient music selection: just walking into a pub with your phone can bend the pub's playlist towards your Spotify prefs. #gsxsw"
The tag is also worth investigating - gsxsw was curated by Rewired State (Emma Mulqueeny) and held at the Guardian newspaper offices this weekend - it was a hack day with a bit of a difference. Hack days might be a  Brit thing also - if so, Google it, there's some amazing stuff going from idea to actuality here at the moment under these banners.

So, the tweet led me to respond with the idea that not only would the pubs sound system bend to me and my mates Spotified taste in music, but that this would somewhere be recorded for future questioning - that somehow I would land in a new city and know where to find like minded music lovers because I could see on  a map layer or something similar all the pubs which linked with my Spotify preferences by more than x percent, where I set the percentage. So, for example, and purely hypothetically (ahem) if I hated 80's music with a passion most people only reserved for politicians, I could avoid pubs which played any 80's music at all. Or, if I was ambivalent to ambient but absolutely loved techno, I could set the filter percentages accordingly and go and find my tribe. Or if I was feeling kinda brave and adventurous, I could change the settings randomly with a button and land somewhere entirely new and unlikely.

But, I thought, what if you took that further? What if you took that out of a pub environment, that linked data which told me where I should be depending on my musical preferences, and as Hadley suggested with food, you applied it to something else?

I'm going to segue a little and tell you a story, based purely on an experience I had yesterday. It's true and it's relevant, so bare with me a little if this comes across as self indulgent.

I've got quite severe tendonitis which flares up every now and again. It means my tendon contracts which then pulls on the muscle above it which dislikes it, which then has a knock on effect upwards again. Riding my bike fixes it, I've not ridden my bike for a bit thanks to snow and torrential rain. You try mountain biking in snow on tech Northern trails sometime. Anyway.

We went out for the day and parked up in Manchester, in a car park we don't normally use. The car park is essentially one of those 'this used to have something built on it (in this case Boddingtons Brewery), it now doesn't, someone decided to make money off the land by parking cars on it'. My other half led us towards a sneaky exit he knew which wasn't the official exit. Just by the exit out onto the street was a short but incredibly steep upward incline. My calf muscles combined have lost about 1/2 inch of flexibility. Lots of unladylike swearing ensued. For the next 30 minutes walking was faintly hideous. It eventually stopped when I relented and dived into a handy second hand bookshop to let them calm down a little and stop contracting.

It could have been avoided, those 30 minutes of pain, and I'll tell you how. Augmented linked data. Somewhere else out there, I have no doubt, is someone else with slightly broken calf muscles who's probably done exactly the same thing and was discomforted enough to want to ensure someone else didn't suffer the same ouchiness. Currently, there is no way for her to do that. Currently, there is no way for me to do that. I can't tell anyone. Putting it on a forum would be pointless, it would get lost in the noise. Putting it an email to someone would get me nowhere. I now know something about the environment in a car park in Manchester would could save someone else some pain and I can't share.

In each of our heads is data. We know things. Some of these things are small, so infinitesimally small that we might never think of sharing them or that they might be of worth to someone else, and some of those things are very big things. Some of those big things are only big to us and some of those big things would  make the world a better place if we could share them with everyone.

Imagine, then, a way of sharing, if you wanted to, everything you ever knew about obstacles or opportunities. A world where on your GPS there was a layer you could switch on or off which linked in to the local councils database in the area you were passing through and told you where the major potholes were or into the local police database so you could know as a motorcyclist where the accident blackspots and blind corners were. Or, even, which gate you needed to slow down for as you passed it because the cows always came across the road for milking at 4:45pm and as a result the road would be slippy and possibly treacherous for the next few hours after.

Imagine a world where local knowledge was at your fingertips. Don't park down that side street because anyone who does gets broken into - or if you must remove the GPS suction circle from your windscreen because the only people who get broken into are the people who forget. Imagine a world where you knew which restaurants and pubs were genuinely child friendly because other parents had indicated it so and you could see this in real time when driving down a street without having to get your smartphone out of your pocket, because your GPS told you? No more relying on the restaurant owners claims to be child friendly when his definition includes a high chair but nothing else.

But most of all, to me, imagine a world where you could see issues before they arose. Where people with sensory overload problems could reference to other people with similar issues without ever needing to know their name, but only by linking with someone just because they have a similar intolerance, and following where they've been and had problems, but more importantly where they've been and not had any problems at all.

A world where I'd never have walked up the slope because someone with the same issue as me had a way of indicating somehow that people with x issue should use the gate on the flat at the other end, should walk the long way around, should not even think about attempting if in a wheelchair.

In my world, in my future, I believe these things will happen. I believe everyone will see through the same eyes I do - through eyes which see data layered across and streamed through reality in real time. One where my world is shaped by others experiences who are like me. One where there are no potholes to break your suspension and no steep inclines to break your muscles.

Don't tell me tech can't change the world for the better. Don't tell me maps don't matter and visualisation is pointless. Don't tell me these are pipe dreams. If no one dreams, reality will never be changed. Yes, thinking small allows people to JFDI. But sometimes, just sometimes, someone has got to think BIG.

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.

#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.

Revelations will be digitalised

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revelations and revolutions. In real time.

A little bird tweeting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#gab10

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

None of them got off at Penrith.

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

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

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

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

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

I was wrong.

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

Yes. You did read that right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am holding my breath. I am not alone.

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

The hacker ethic: or work as play

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waterproof post-it notes

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

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

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

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

Just saying.

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

These are my dreams, tell me yours?

If there were no barriers, what would I do?

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

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

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

With thanks to Adrian Short for the bravery pill.

Butterflies and Hurricanes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wrong.

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

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

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

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

Your time is now.

What are you waiting for?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With thanks to @johnpopham, @dominiccampbell and @johnsturgess

#girlsinit

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

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

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

17% of the UK IT workforce are female.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A digital commitment

I am a digital bunny but I do hereby declare:

• To always explain when you're misusing technical terminology
• To always do the explaining in plain English
• To always be straight about what the tech can and can't do to the best of my knowledge
• To own up if I find out from someone smarter than me that something was possible when I told you it wasn't
• To never use the terms 'reaching out', 'blue sky thinking', 'web n.0', 'thinking outside of the box', or any other vacuous terms unless absolutely necessary and unless they're needed as a bridging tool between tech and non tech.
• To never laugh when you get it wrong
• To never rain all over your enthusiasm
• To explain in clear language why something is absolutely definitely a bad idea technically, but also when I'm saying no because snowflakes falling down an email is just not an option.
• To explain the geek speak in all forms, repeatedly as many times as asked
• To tell you when I genuinely don't know something, but to always try and point you in the direction of someone who does.
• To use the word virus carefully, with due care and attention
• To look away when you're typing your password in front of me in full faith
• To inspire and enthuse others as best I can
• To pass it on, always, and never keep data to myself if it's possible to make it open
• To enable you instead of always showing you how it's done
• To ignore your fear but come back to it another day if that's what's needed
• To pay attention and notice when your eyes are glazing over and step away
• To not squee, LOL, *hug* or ROFL in a professional capacity
• To retain a sense of humour, always, because this shit is complicated and all of us want to throw out PC's out of the window at some point

Digital engagement, inclusion and ability should be open to all, not those who were born with the keys.
Digital capability should not be restricted to those lucky enough to be on the end of an unbundled exchange.
Digital speed should not be restricted because of your geographical location.
Digital accessibility should not be an issue. Ever. The software is there, it is our job to ensure it always has something to spell out.
Digital snobbery has no place in this world. Blogeratti, twiteratti - this is about elitism whether you like it or not. Get over yourself.
Digital activism is not militancy.It is not the new army. It is a bunch of geeks giving people a platform to voice their passion, belief and enthusiasm. Engagement doesn't always tell you what you want to hear. Listen. The future is hearing both sides of the story.
Digital worlds can exist next to analogue ones. Analogue tastes better, smells better and the sunshine feels fantastic as you climb out of the freezing cold lake. There will always be a place for it, don't disappear out of it.
Digital friendships are a reality. Treat them with the same respect as you would the friends you meet for coffee/beer. Don't lie, don't disappear without a word, don't assume who the people you are talking to are. Ask them. Engagement isn't just for 'citizens', people need to interact too.

In this world that is changing so fast, sometimes it can feel like ethics are fading away. So this is my commitment to everyone I deal with.

I will play nicely.

If you always do what you always did......

If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got.(Anon)

Thinking digitally and thinking differently. Big ideas and big changes in direction for public sector. But fundamentally, we are at the crossroads, and I'm afraid depending on your area, we're there right now. Not in a few months when you've written a strategy and done some research, but right now. Times aren't changing, they have changed. And if you stick to the same business approaches that you've always used, I think increasingly you'll find your returns dwindling.

Yesterday, through talking to various people, I decided that the phrase social media is one I'm going to try and step away from. Thankfully, it seems I'm not alone. We are communicating digitally, shaping worlds digitally, enabling communication digitally and reconnecting communities digitally. Social media is, in most peoples heads, Facebook and Twitter. It's so much more than that. It's the software my mate's building to allow people to easily self publish. It's sharing your photographs and getting feedback and unexpected praise. It's asking the hive mind what it thinks about x, y and z and getting a quick and sensible answer and it's about philanthropy done on a very small scale but done by people like you and me.

What I'm getting at is, the platform almost doesn't matter any more. The foundation is the web, of course it is, the zeroes and ones that flow beautifully through the system, the packets that fly, the routes that mimic the nodes in the brain. But it's there and it will stay and it will endure. It's what we put on top of it that matters, how we use this and our motivations for doing so to a lesser extent. But to use all this possibility, this massive capability can be boggling and overwhelming.

I owe a confession here. I'm feeling a little overwhelmed too. I'm a geek and I sometimes still struggle to think digitally. I'm not talking about the fact that I still buy papers and books. I'm not talking about my ability to pick up 90% of software programmes and play with them until I understand them......an approach I apply to most of my life these days. What I'm talking about is the ability to incorporate digital communications into everything I do, to weave digital tech into the way I live my life and do my work. It should come naturally to me, and in some ways it does. But in order for you to weave digital into public sector, you first have to understand public sector. And understand it well, from the operations to the politics, from the internal politics to the unions. So, although in some ways I suppose you could say I am a digital citizen (I registered to vote online, I order those books online, I watch and become involve in conferences online, I talk to friends, arrange social activities, get told I've got interviews for jobs online), I am also right back at the beginning in some ways.

So, my conclusion is this. Effective digital engagement and communication has to start with something else the web does well - collaboration and crowd sourcing. Finding the experts in each of your departments who've been there while and know the intricacies, and collaborating with them in order to enable them to make the decision about which channel is the most appropriate to use to give out any specified message. Communications as a Department should be the hub of everything, but the spokes must stretch out into every single other Department, with that communication being two way, otherwise all expertise of one type will sit in the middle, another type at the end of the spoke and never the twain shall meet. Which is pointless, frankly, and does no one any favours.

So. Thinking digitally. Turns out it's not as simple as I first thought. Neither is communicating effectively and efficiently. Turns out, in order to communicate effectively externally, you must first be an absolute master at communicating internally. And that being a perceived 'expert' in one thing can be the most humbling experience of all, because it reveals in glaring technicolour exactly how much you don't know about absolutely everything else. So, this is where I become unpopular. Because I am in public sector and I'm working hard to try to join the dots. How is outsourcing to private sector with no experience of public sector going to work? Maybe the right question is, where are all the private sector consultancies and advisors who have experience of public sector?

And yet. Here is where I lie my hat.

I'm forever blowing bubbles?

In the midst of the mass of data I absorb on a weekly basis, somewhere in the depths has stuck the idea that we social media bods are in a bubble. That noone outside of the bubble cares. My question is, who is blowing the bubbles, exactly?

You see, quite simply, there is no noise without a silence. No solution without a gaping void. No technology without its users and no Twitter without answers to the eternal question: What are you doing? If there is a bubble, then that may very well be the case, but the bubble does not preclude the usefulness of the particles inside the bubble, only it shows the value of introducing more particles into the bubble, to expand the shape, colour and direction of the bubble. Bubbles are not exclusive. And there we leave that analogy, weeping from its abuse, quivering in the gutter.

With apologies to yet another blog writer whose words I consumed voraciously, pondered sub consciously for days and as a result have no memory of the identity of the author, someone else mentioned that 'What are you doing' might as well be 'What do you know that I need to know?'

I don't believe Twitter must be 'something'. I believe Twitter is many things to many different people, just as Facebook is. Some people enjoy immensely the pleasure of dissecting politicians and associated commentators blathering on Question Time. A mass political derision, mostly, but it's commentary nevertheless. To others it is a campaign tool, and after the campaign, a tool to continue to ask questions and receive quick answers on local feelings, contentious issues and relevant input from other politicians. Some use it as an RSS aggregator though some of those people don't know that's the name for what it is their doing. Yet others use it to relentlessly network, no interest in those passing through, only interested in the opportunities new followers can give them.


Then there's the public sector. What does the public sector use Twitter for? I had an interesting conversation with a chap from a constabulary the other day. 'We're just not sure' he said. 'We've set up the account and people are following us from the States and Canada, we think they're hoping for some kind of voyeuristic thrill'.

I was rendered almost speechless. Almost, because when talking about social media, my natural reticence seems to disappear into the ether, and there emerges someone whose enthusiasm tends to railroad anyone in its path. Something I must work on, frankly, but anyway. For the moment, points for enthusiasm seem to count for something and for this I am grateful.

This chap didn't get it. I tried. I really did try. He still didn't get it. I don't think he got it at the end of a rather beautifully presented social media presentation by a company I wont mention because you might possibly identify the constabulary and that simply wouldn't be fair. The presentation distilled social medias multiple channels neatly and concisely into easy bite size little chunks. I learnt little but it wasn't aimed at me. I'm rather comfortable in the digital world, as might be evident if you've read through this blog, the presentation wasn't aimed at me, it was aimed at the lady who identified herself as a luddite and then proceeded to get so entirely, piercingly and beautifully to the point she managed to deprive the 'experts' of speech, momentarily. I still grin when I think of that two weeks later.

Anyway, Mr Constabulary. Missed the point of being a geek. Missed the point of what geeks do. In the process applied normal rules to geeks and came up with an altogether incorrect assessment of the motivation of the geek on the other side of the world. I don't follow people because they're local to me. I follow people because, quite simply, they know something I want to know. My motivations for wanting to know are wide ranging. They lurch drunkenly from idle curiosity, to the vain hope that someone behind the account might know the solution to a particularly thorny work problem I'm currently trying to solve. Sometimes I hunt down the wrong person to thank or given positive feedback to, but I figure that's a points for trying scenario too. My follow list scythes from metal and rock music, through public sector, via excessive amount of mountain biking and cycling feeds and......can I admit to this......In Style and Vogue magazine. Is someone at Vogue wondering why a woman who enjoys getting covered in mud and chooses to do it for fun in her spare time is following them? No. No they're not. So, here is my first rule of Twitter and entering the bubble. Normal rules do not apply here. Normal people operate quite happily here but in among those happy shiny people, are people who follow thousands upon thousands of Twitter streams, yours is one of them, and what does it mean?


Absolutely nothing. They thought you were interesting. Someone they follow retweeted you and they thought the stream sounded intriguing and picked you up that way. Twitter doesn't have geographical borders. I don't think it should have geographical borders. I don't want a little UK Twitter bubble, that would be boring, Justin Bieber hate aside. One of the most wonderful things I have ever seen is following the multiple Eurovision Song Contest tags on the big night (because someone didn't publish an official tag, there were many streams, there's another lesson here for another night), and watching French, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Swedish and English scrolling up my screen, all saying the same thing. Well okay, I can guess read all of it bar the Northern European where I become lost, but it was one of the most humbling experiences I've ever had. All these people, all talking about the same thing, all at once, using the same platform. To the best of my knowledge it's never happened before, or certainly if it has, it's not been public, laid bare for all to see and appreciate and lo! behold! contribute to.


Bubbles gather air particles together, no matter who they are, how obsessive they are, how curious, what colour, what gender, how mobile they are. The bubble is growing. It's changing shape and it's becoming the thing whose direction can no longer be predicted, whose use in the future perhaps could not have been predicted in the past. This is the magic of the digital world. You can think you know the rules, you can think you know where things are going, you can think that see all the possibilities and all the outcomes, but really?


The clue is in the word social. People make the social, are the social, and direct the social. Psychology tells us much about group behaviour, but I wonder if perhaps this time the size of the group socialising, chatting, networking and collaborating means that this time, maybe, the rules will be broken and the world will truly be changed.


Not bad for a pointless little bubble which is only relevant to the people within it. I leave with the thought, one I've had repeatedly since my last post and all the fab comments which came in (thank you) - was the telephone a bubble when it was first introduced?

Bar Camping in Blackpool

Yesterday I attended my first ever Bar Camp. The whole experience has left me very pensive, I think because I had no preconceptions about how the day would unfold, so as a result there has been quite a lot of information to process.

I am a geek and I am a girl. But I should have known when one of the attendees sent out a questionnaire before the event happened and asked are you 1) a coder or 2) a designer or 3) other, that my interest in social media/social networking/social something would not be at the forefront of the talks being delivered. I didn't know what to expect regarding the content of the talks at all, and so reading through the Board as it developed and grew throughout the day was very interesting. I attended two talks on social media, the first was a chap ostensibly marketing his new Tag Walk web interface via an interesting but necessarily short trip around user recommendations, tags and hashtags and their role in social media. I'm not sure he intended for the talk to come across as a pitch, but judging by conversations I heard later, it wasn't just me who felt it was, though the people commenting were doing so directly to the presenter and were deep in conversation about the server loads and future capabilities of the 'application'. I am glad of this, because the talk was delivered incredibly well, and whilst I didn't learn anything new, I still stayed and enjoyed what I knew being delivered to me slightly differently.

The second also suffered, I think, from time restraints but again had a delightful premise. Sociometry and social networking nabbed my attention straight away and I was intrigued. I suppose it might be less evident than I assume it is from this blog, but I have a very strong interest in the social dynamics at play within social media and a lifelong curiosity in psychology and sociology though I've never studied either, and this presentation didn't disappoint. I knew nothing about sociometry, and though timings meant I was left to draw the parellels between the thematic mapping of social interactions of real life interactions in the 60's and how it exactly mirrors how the thematic mapping of social interactioins of online interactions in the new century, draw those parallels I did, and quite happily.

Of course, life is not limited to representations in Powerpoint presentations and the sociometry was clear to see happening in the venue around me. There are leaders, hubs of their social groups, the alphas, and then there are the people who revolve around them. And then, of course, there are the people who are too damn old/independant/world weary/self assured to play such games and go their own way. It was fascinating to look around and see the sociology in action in real time around me.

Having said that, the whole experience was a very positive one. I learnt a lot, saw a lot, discussed and argued a lot and had no small amount of epiphanies. The talk about the future of reading where the speaker seemed to be intimating that the iPad was the future of reading provoked the most muttering under my breath about tools for jobs and not being able to take it to bed to read before I sleep at night, about sunlight rendering any electronic screen unreadable still in this day and age and how no one was going to mug me for my paper copy of Wired but this aside, I did have my kneejerk resistance dissipated somewhat by the demonstration of the Wired app which used neat little applets to demonstrate, for example, the mechanics of constructing a car from the ground up. I agree that this is the future of publishing, but I disagree that the world is quite ready for it yet. One for Generation Z perhaps?

Then there was the talk on genetic crypto analysis in which I discovered exactly how stupid I am. The talk on command line animation which I annoyingly missed because it clashed with sociometry. Or the Sharepoint one, the J Query one, the one on a CMS I can't remember the name of - I ended the day exhausted and I still hadn't managed to catch all the talks I wanted to.

But I did discover the existence of some fantastic tools which I will be using in the next few months. I did learn that Tag Walk might allow the tracking of PR drops, or communications being ramped up. I learnt through Tag Walk that more people interacted directly with the personal account of the organiser of Bar Camp Blackpool using the hash tag for the event than bothered to use the official account set up for that purpose. I'm still wondering if that little fact is the ground breaking and earth shattering revelation for our organisation that I think it might be. I am still trying to work out if I am brave enough to propose the ludicrous system I came up with in 10 minutes yesterday as a result of this revelation to deal with incoming interactions which are not urgent into our organisation through social media.

I learnt that other people want the same tools I do for Twitter. I learnt that some people think Twitter is only for social interaction and conversations and that they feel there is no place for companies, organisations, third sector or community groups. Until I mentioned being able to book a GP appointment  by Twitter, at which point as usual, everything went quiet. I learnt that I'm not quite confident enough to stand up in front of a group of people unprepared but that I wished I had been. I learnt that people can be welcoming and interested even if their appearance says otherwise and they look clique'd and involved in their own circles. I learnt that there's just no talking to some people so fixed are they on the people they already know. And all of this learning, discussing, musing and input didn't cost me a thing, meaning that start ups, small businesses and public sector paupers alike could sit in the air conditioning for a day and worry not about the cost or the implications of being there and simply listen and innovate.

Some bits of the day were more successful than others. Some talks were more successful than others. Some people were more cliquey than others and others more welcoming than cliquey. But on the whole, my first Bar Camp experience was incredibly positive and I would recommend anyone dithering about attending one to bite the bullet and go. Nothing can compare to over 100 other people thinking in different directions and outside of different boxes to you.

Why can't they just....?

I recently attended Download Festival, and am a reasonably active member of their forums.So far, so normal, really, in this day and age. I go to the festival, I comment on the festival, I give feedback, interact with other people with the same musical taste as me, and to a lesser extent provide help where I can on trying to make the festival more environmentally friendly.

So I've been paying particular attention to the feedback form, and one thread in particular entitled Environment Tent Purchase Option. I think it's actually supposed to be Environmentally friendly tent purchase option because that was what was offered by a very nice new company, who saw a niche in the market - tents which could be recycled in their entirety, all in one go, without someone having to wade through the 1000's of tents left behind at festivals each year and seperate them all out into their constituent bits. Believe me when I say, there are literally 1000's of tents left behind at Download. Download is not alone, Leeds, Reading, V, all have the same problem because essentially we live in a throwaway culture and those attending these festivals are predominantly from the generation which have grown up in a throwaway culture.

So, full points to the company for trying. But where does social media come in to all this?

Read this thread - if you're short of time, jump straight to post no 100 in that thread. It says, and I quote: "Why can't they come onto the forums and do this themselves" where this is collect feedback and suggestions on how their service can be improved before the masses at Leeds and Reading tear them limb from limb in a way the Download lot are way too polite to ever do (don't judge rock fans by anything other than the fact that 99% of them are ineffably polite and whilst they will have complained at the festival, they will have been more interested in getting drunk).

I find this fascinating. No longer is there any leeway made for a generation who are not comfortable with computers, never mind creating forum accounts and getting their head around the complexity of social interaction on the web. The next generation expect responses, immediately and on their own terms in their own arenas. They are not forgiving of those who are not comfortable with those arenas. Companies reputations can be damaged irreparably by their inability to operate in those arenas. I suspect the response in that thread would have been very different if the company involved had made the effort to create an account and come and explain themselves, or indeed paid someone else to do it on their behalf.

So it comes down to this. The rules of the business game are changing. Either learn to play by the new rules or pay someone who already understands them, because if you don't you will be left behind in favour of those companies who are comfortable dealing with customers and delivering customer service instantly through web interfaces.

It might be early days, but already the missiles are being fired and are landing.

Firstly, a disclaimer. I've been on the 'web' since 1995 in one form or another. From the early days of the Webchat Broadcasting System and every webpage having a grey background to the current web 2.0 shiny world, I've watched quietly whilst the virtual world changed around me. I didn't leap on web 2.0 immediately, as documented below, for various reasons. A lot has changed in the past year.

Eventually, no matter how shy you are, you come to the point where you realise that knowledge, experience, observations and musings are worth nothing if they remain in your mind. No opinion is wrong in this brave new world. I have no qualifications and no training. All I have is who I am, a geek watching the world change around her and deciding to become a part of that world in all the myriad different ways which are now available, from festival forums to Google Wave, from Twitter to software user feedback groups. Knowledge is worth nothing if it isn't shared. As a result of the new social networked world, next week I will be trying to help a festival organising team make their festival greener. The week after I will be trying to convince a magazine who recently ran a convention for the first time that Twitter is the key to instant information dissemination to geeks who all have mobiles in their pockets. The week after that, who knows?

The following are my musings on the challenges which web 2.0 will present to Councils which I sent, after some very deep breaths, to the Communications Department. I am unaccustomed to popping my head above the parapet at work. I am geek also equates to I am shy.

I've been on the web for 15 years now. The rules have changed, the speed of communication has changed, the general feeling among 'geeks' has not, and nor has their sociology. I dislike the word, but essentially, some of the most powerful tweeters with the most followers are self confessed geeks, people like Stephen Fry, Neil Gaimain (author), Wil Wheaton (ex Star Trek: The Next Generation actor, now pro blogger), Jonathon Ross. As Twitter grows their influence will wane, as celebrity culture takes over and the demographics of Twitter change.

At the current moment in time, however, the following facts seem true:

• Twitter attracts, at the moment, a certain group of people. Whether they fit into Acorn or not (I suspect they do), they have certain general traits. Middle class, educated, eloquent, not afraid to express their opinion, access to all forms of the web, well read in the blogosphere, personal connections through 2nd and 3rd parties to influential people. Whilst take up rates of broadband connection within our area may not be as high as in some other areas of the country, schoolchildren still have access at school and on their phones, likewise college students. By using Twitter we are disseminating information to a very specific group of people, those who do have 'always-on' internet access, and those who are aware of Twitters existence. However, these are people who perhaps don't read paper media any more, don't read the local newspaper, don't read Councils paper based communications. For them, the internet is the way they learn about everything, to the exclusion of other more traditional forms of media. You cannot carry a paper in your pocket.

• The borders between famous/celebrity/talented/important and us 'normal' people are breaking down. I can send messages to the editor of SFX magazine or any other numbers of magazines, the organisers of my favourite music festival, my favourite authors, bands, blog writers, and I can get a response. Sometimes instantly, sometimes not. But this would never have happened before Twitter, you would have needed a personal email address. That would have been perceived as an intrusion, akin to phoning someone on their direct line. Now those barriers are not in place and peoples connections with others are multiplying. Some are more accesable than others, but the nature of access has changed. This will directly affect us. If people ask questions of our twitter feed, are those contacts being logged, is there a facility to attribute it to social media, are we measured on this in NI's, how do we judge an avoidable contact, what kind of reply are people being given? Are they being told to telephone instead of someone interacting with them directly? Does the twitter feed need to be manned during office hours with a live human being who can find answers for people and reply? Is this another face of our call centre? How busy is the person covering the feed likely to be? Are we an information push, or do we intend to be interactive. If we are not being interactive, are we defeating the point of Twitter itself, which seems to have become 'to interact'. Will this affect how we are perceived and therefore limit those who take our messages seriously or follow us? (I'll come to public perception later, it's a big one)

• Peoples interests, hobbies, day to day curiosities are being catalogued. I can search, using Twibes, for people who are interested in exactly the same thing as me. Or, indeed, search for people who know something about a subject I don't, but want to. Hashtags catalogue in the same way, collating groups of disparate people together who would never have spoken before Twitter by a common goal or interest. Is there a way we can encourage community spirit in the virtual world in a way we seem to have lost in reality, turning things full circle and encouraging communities to come together in reality to make changes to their environment through discussion on social media?

• Goals, objectives, agendas, firestorms. Last week Paperchase learnt a bitter lesson in failed PR, pathetically unprofessional email responses, what happens when you come to a battleground too late, and how peoples perceptions of you as a company matter. http://econsultancy.com/blog/5425-paperchase-social-media-and-crisis-management-speed-versus-substance#blog_comment_22313 tells the story well, but it examines only half the issue. On the one side, yes, the public and private sector have been taken by surprise in the speed with which Twitter can be utilised to get a clear and concise message across. And yes, perhaps the depth of feeling aimed against them was a little of a shock to the system. But that shock expressed only shows how little they understand the demographic of Twitter users. Social conscience and ethics, hitherto, have been words on a strategy report or year end report. A brief nod, and move on.

Part of being a group who are no longer seeing barriers to discussion, commentary, instant information sharing and access to people that was impossible before, is the dropping of self moderation and inhibition. People are no longer hesitant about expressing opinions. The retweet function means that something can go viral in 15 minutes if the influential geek tweeters pick up on it. And on a really fundamental level, people from Korea to the US saw a big corporation being a bully and reacted, by calling the corporation out on it and emailing Paperchase to complain about their plaguerism. Paperchases initial response to those first emails was 'Do not always believe everything you read.......' - unprofessional, unhelpful, defensive and most definitely not a professional press release cleared with internal PR. Their second response was a post on their webpage explaining that the offending artwork had been purchased from a studio who had assured them of the above board origins of the artwork. The third update finally named the studio and explained the artist had been contacted. It transpires the contact was in December and denied all culpability. It also now appears that Paperchase are refusing to talk to the artist by email, and will only communicate by telephone. Cynics would suggest deniability is coming into play here somewhere and someone has finally spoken to their Legal Department.

As a case study for how not to deal with a bomb going off in your face, Paperchase have performed admirably. Of all the things we needs to worry about in its use of social media, this is it. By entering the social media arena, we have agreed by inference to play by social medias rules. Paperchase did not have a social media presence until last night. They entered the battleground late and lost all credibility in doing so. Credibility is key here, because without it, peoples perceptions of you as an organisation will plummet. The idea that what happens in Twitterverse stays there no longer washes either, both the Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/7215124/Paperchase-forced-to-deny-it-plagiarised-British-artists-work-after-Twitter-campaign.html and the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/feb/11/paperchase-design-hidden-eloise picked up on the story within hours. Instantaneous mob rule appears to have arrived. And yet, if this were the case, surely there would be more firestorms, more hauling over the coals?

The fundamental lesson to learn here is not that Twitter will crucify you if you make a mistake. It will crucify you if you make a mistake and then fail to compensate, apologise, respond professionally or contact your PR department before opening your mouth. These are lessons which we need to learn. The importance of never responding to anything on any social media site ever without first checking it with PR, when it relates in any way whatsoever with your work area, or BWDBC in general cannot be emphasised enough. It needs to be a discplinary offence to do so and it needs to be included in the acceptable use policy. Your own opinion is your own opinion, absolutely, but as someone who is tweeting who is identifiable as working for a particular organisation, you are a representative of that organisation whether you like it or not. The same is true for blogging, for Facebook, for any social media. What you say is instantly quotable, undeletable, and can be retweeted in 2 seconds into the streams of thousands of other people, including the local newspapers. I strongly believe the adage 'if you've nothing positive to say, don't say anything at all'. We're not restricting peoples free speech, we're asking them to be responsible ambassadors for us out in the social media world. The issue with the social media world, is that you still work for the Council in that world, whether you are sitting at your desk or not. There is nothing so simple as removing your badge or branded fleece to denote the end of your involvement. If you enter the arena of social media, these are the sacrifices you make.

Public perception is important. Whilst being professional is important, corporations like Paperchase who sign up to things like Twitter for no other reason than to defend themselves are given short shrift. Twitter is about interaction as is all social media. It's about being able to ask the most esoteric question regarding some random piece of software and receiving a reply from some bloke in Chicago who you've never met, giving you the answer. Or at least it is for me. It's not about coming across as cool. It's not about trying to be young and cool and hip. It's about being honest and upfront if you have failed and directing focus back onto what you're doing to fix the problem. The Xmas period tweets were a perfect example of this. People moaned about gritting or lack of it, we switched to a stream of information about what was being gritted, when, and how often. Managing public perception is something which can be done easily through social media and I strongly believe that we are on the right track. We are communicating our successes, acknowledging our failures, but also redirecting focus from our failures to our measures to address those failures. We are being what Paperchase were not, honest, up front, clear, concise, not changing our story and ensuring that the public know what they need to know. I believe continueing to do this will stand us in good stead.

• Personal versus professional logins for social media sites. This is tricky for me. I have an online presence which spans many communities, forums, old BBS's, blogsites, Google Wave and Twitter. I appreciate I am not er, 'normal' in this respect. So putting that aside, how do you address the issue of someone saying their work accounts can be held accountable if not portraying us in a positive light, but that their private ones can't? The London Ambulance Service were one of the first employers to have this problem, thanks to the popularity of the Random Acts of Reality blog, written by an Emergency Medical Technician working for the LAS. The author wrote an interesting summary of how not to lose your job if you're publically blogging about your employers here: http://randomreality.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2005/3/17/443453.html - despite trying, I've yet to find a public comment on this blog from the LAS but this quote "This is one of the reasons, he suggests, that his colleagues and managers at the London Ambulance Service Trust, (who Reynolds concedes could have stopped him in his tracks if they wanted to) have embraced the blog." from http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2006/aug/30/health.healthandwellbeing is the closest I've got to finding that his employers, despite his honesty, are fine with the blog and wont be pursueing him to stop writing it any time soon. It's an interesting take, and it's offered as evidence that complete lockdown is not always the way forward. However, a complete restriction on blogging etc is far easier to manage than opening up the floodgates and then having to address the issues each individual blog raises as more and more people decide they have a view and they're expressing it come what may. It's definitely something we need a statement on though because eventually it will become an issue.

• Social media in worktime. I use Twitter for a number of things. Out of work hours I'll post interesting links, pics of where I am and what I'm doing, and chat about sci fi and geekery. In work hours, I use it as a way of asking for help from a massive pool of people who have a lot of different experience levels in a number of different technical areas. There's a bloke in Colarado who helps me with GIS, a girl from Pitney Bowes who I send suggestions to about Map Info's usability, friends who are better at Excel and Visual Basic who I can ask about formula construction - and I get these answers and feedback instantly. If I were to wait for ICT, as I have done in the past, I would wait a month. With Twitter, the help is instant. That's invaluable to me. I also work as the lone geek in Environmental Services off site. I can't pop my head around someones door on a different floor and ask for help or to bounce ideas off someone. Twitter and social media allows me access to a think tank of people who I can bounce ideas of. I am no longer restricted by my physical geography. However, Twitter is a different bunni to most social media. I can't chat for hours on there, the character limit restricts me. There are no games, no groups, no distractions. I read other peoples feeds in a quick glance. It doesn't time suck. Other social media such as Facebook does. Therefore someone is going to need to examine the payoff between allowing Facebook to be accessed through the Councils network to allow different Departments to engage with their target audiences - I am specifically thinking of Childrens Services and Social Services here - against the very real possibility of numerous employees spending most of their working day lost in the chat and games available there.

• Mentioning something you don't want to mention. There is a very real possibility that in mentioning social media and developing a policy at all, it will bring to the notice of people hitherto unaware of such things the possibility of causing trouble with blogs, or sinking worktime into Facebook. Therefore there needs to be some kind of statement included on how access and usage will be monitored and who it will be fed back to and what the outcome is likely to be if you are found to have accessed these sites inside work hours if you do not have a good reason to do so i.e. running a Connexions group or the suchlike. In this vein, perhaps going down the route of social media ambassadors may be an option - a nominated person (or people) within each Section who is responsible for representing that particular section in social media circles. They would be put on an access list for Twitter, Facebook et al and everyone else who wanted to access those sites and post something in work time would need to go through those people. I don't know if this is practical from a ICT point of view, it should just be a case of putting facebook, twitter et all on everyones ban list and adding it to the exception list for all the other people who have been nominated.

I am aware that some of these suggestions will not be popular. I am aware that restricting access to anything comes with its own problems. I am also aware that at the end of the day, I am paid by my employers to come into the office and do some work. In the new shiny world, I do believe there is a massive space for social media, an opportunity to engage groups of people hitherto disengaged with the concept of community, a way of interacting with people who would never normally speak to their Council or see any need to. I believe that contacts regarding basic questions can be avoided by efficient communication, and efficient communication no longer involves delivering a leaflet to every door in the Borough.

I put mine straight in the recycling bin. I read The Guardian on my iphone and I pay for it. I watch freeview in realtime on my iphone. Yet I still read books in bed. I am not alone in this because I talk to very many people who do exactly the same thing. I am, perhaps, not the majority, but I am a minority with a new voice who wants to vote but who doesn't know who to vote for because no one is telling me their policies in arenas I pay attention to. I am the minority but I want to be part of the community, contributing to shaping the future of our world, but I am finding new ways to do it in an arena which I understand the rules of. I don't attend community groups. I don't go to church. I do check certain forums, blogs, twitter feeds and webpages on a daily basis. I have a social conscience, I care about the environment, I recycle, I am reasonably well educated. I believe social media and the rules of communication are changing. I am proud and relieved to work for a Council which acknowledges that.