(NHS ) A communicative diversion part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comment only when qualified - Bookstart

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

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

Where does this love of books come from?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

Einstein's eyes

Albert Einstein. Not a man I'd guess you'd be seeing quoted in this blog. No, you haven't wandered unthinking into the wrong one. Unthinking is in fact exactly what I'm not going to be doing. I like thinking, I do. Not alone in this, it seems :O)

It's not my job to think like this. My job is almost entirely irrelevant to this blog. In fact the separation between the two is quite important to me because the temptation to tears strips off people and situations is not something I wish to give in to, and so the separation will remain. Observant people may have noticed a certain displeasure recently. Ask, I'll explain, but not here. No place for negativity here.

And so, back to Einstein. A wonderful man for the quite obvious reasons - someone else might have made the leaps in physics he did, but that he did so at the time he did speaks volumes of a man who saw things differently. So differently, in fact, that the theory of relativity which entirely relies, depending on perspective, on the ability to see things from different angles.

But it's not the physics I'm interested in. Even I can't pull relativity into social media - well okay, I could, but I'm not going to. No, instead I want to examine the particular way of looking at things which Einstein seemed to have and try and focus on the "seeing things differently" aspect.

There are two ways to live your life - one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle.

You're reading my words. I probably only typed this 10 minutes before you read them. Think about it. Instant thought transferal, almost. To thousands of people. 1 person. 1 tiny little person who likes to think a bit. Miracles? Start with seeing the small ones. Now, think about all the massive ones you could perpetuate from where you're sitting right now, imagine your wonder if you were to go back 20 years and look at what you are capable of, right now. Don't tell me miracles can't happen. Nor that something is impossible. Only concede that something is 'a little difficult right now' but it wont always be.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

An insult commonly levelled at academics is that they're incredibly intelligent but have no common sense whatsoever. Well, tell me the value of common sense, if not having it means no prejudices at all? I'll live with no prejudices, thanks. Common sense isn't something I particularly miss. Thinking someone is a bad person because of something they have absolutely no control over? I'm not swapping.

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

Well no. No we can't. We really can't. And so whilst big society is coming in for some abuse at the moment, lets consider the problem. Very few people in this country give a damn about their next door neighbour. Apathy reigns. The cold hard fact is, we're screwed if we don't reverse that trend. I don't think the big society does anything other than identify the antithesis to this, which is that caring is a commodity gone well out of fashion. The issue, the biggest one of all, is that people don't start caring just because central government tell them to. You cannot instruct a human nature. All you can do is change your whole way of thinking, in the centre, and hope that your actions which are informed by that change of thinking can filter outwards on the spiderweb of our humanity.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.

I ask a lot of questions. Lots of us do. It's not that we want to annoy or irritate. It's not that we want to make your working or professional life hell. It's not for the devilment of it though sometimes, lord knows, your reaction tempts us to it. No. Questioning the things which are taken as set in stone means that interesting and innovative ways of doing things can happen. Stepping around the edges. Wriggling under the barriers. Call what you like, asking questions and not accepting that the first answer is always the right one is not troublemaking. It's supposed to make you think too. It's supposed to stop you from running down the same old track.

A lot of things covered in this blog, as already mentioned are not in my day jobs remit. The time I spend on Twitter, in the majority, is nothing to do with my day job either. Instead, the comments I make and the questions I ask are informed by my life experiences, by the things which I have endured, but also the things which I have been lucky enough to enjoy. I don't ask difficult questions or make difficult comments to wind people up. I instead want to challenge the assumption that because authority says something is working, that we should simply accept that it is. Where are the facts, the cold hard evidence, the best practice case studies, to back those statements of a well performing system to back that assumption up? If they're not there, who is accountable, what is the experience of the people on the ground, and what are you going to do to ensure that if peoples experience of your service is negative, what you are you going to do to fix that problem?

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.

If, every single day, every single business man, local government Director and Chief Executive, MP and economist, think tank bod and government advisor woke up and thought 'imagine if we.........' we'd be in a better world., Stop thinking about what you can do in a world with restraints. Start thinking about what you can do in a world without them. Don't follow like sheep along the paths everyone else is walking - your area is different, probably. Different demographics, different geographics, different inputs, throughputs and outputs. Insteasd of looking at what everyone else is doing, think about what is right for where you live, work, represent or champion - ask the questions which mean the walls come down, ask the questions which use the infrastructure that's coming to it's absolute best, ask yourself how you can graps the coming challenges and change them into opportunities.

Use a little imagination. Aspire. Inspire. Lead. 

The world through Einsteins eyes is one of infinite possibility, imagination, curiosity and questioning. If he could lay the first brick in the path which eventually led all the way to CERN, what can you do if you tilt your head 45 degrees and apply a different filter in front of your eyes? You're the ones in power, you're the ones with the chance, you're the ones elected and selected to represent us little people. Use it. Don't bough beneath it.

A classless society to be a big society?

We are not a classless society. From where you are sitting, it may look like it is, and I commend you and congratulate you on your luck. I suspect you have been born into a different world to mine and many others. If you are sitting there raising an eyebrow in slight bewilderment about the concept that big society needs to address class issues, then let me try and explain. I am not comfortable with the task of explaining, because it is a complex issue that I will inevitably end up breaking down into a small blog post, but I have to try because annoying trends are emerging.

A while ago I said that I didn't think the big society could work in my street. I acknowledge fully I was wrong. I missed the point. The point, of course, being that the big society is very much alive and well here, but that due to cultural differences, we are welcome, but only when assistance is required for very specific problems. Otherwise, there is a language and cultural barrier which through no fault of anyones seems to be insurmountable at the moment. I believe that in 10 years time this will not be true. I believe this very much.

So after much soul searching, I came to the conclusion that I'd missed the point of big society, and that perhaps being a complete and utter sap, I believed in it more than I'd actually realised, because actually, attending conferences, discussions, joining in with debates online on Twitter, talking to people and trying to change their viewpoint of the world and trying to establish who the people are who can help me change the world a tiny little bit - all of that is the big society. It's about people giving up their time to share, talk, collaborate, inspire, challenge and discuss. It's about sparking epiphanies in others as much as it is about getting something out of it for yourself. Well, for some of us. :O) It's about giving something up for no reward, I think, about sharing with people with no expectation of reward, only a deep seated aspiration to try and change the colours of the world slightly for those who might come after.

My motivations, I suspect, are being questioned in some quarters. It's simple. I might come across as being exceptionally stupid and naive but I am a reasonably good judge of character - and this judging is usually done when people aren't aware they're being watched. I don't mean stalked - I mean people watching - the same people watching that we all do. The small difference might be that I do it consciously - perhaps not, I don't know. But I watch how people deal with others, above them, at the same level as them, below them. Process the data, and make decisions. Decisions about whether someone is the right person to trust. Decisions about whether someones motivations are the same as mine. Decisions about risk taking, rewards or lack of them, being trusted myself and about faith.

I do this for everyone I come into contact with, truth be told. From political leaders to friends, at every level. I can't help the way I am. It's how I roll. I give information freely to people, but it's filtered, always filtered until I trust someone.

Why is this important?

I grew up at the bottom.

Big society requires people to come together. It requires ideas and trust and faith and good intentions. It requires the commitment to give your time, ideas, enthusiasm and passion to some one or something with no hope of return or reward. It's not an easy thing to do. It requires excellent communication skills to convey your ideas. It requires immense confidence to stand up in situations you are terrified of being in and bely no signs of your fear but instead project the concrete absolute projection of believability. You're not fooling anyone. You're not lying. If someone saw how scared you really were, they might think you were, because they would be judging the person in front of them on their own social experience and not the social experience of the person in front of them. But it is necessary to stand in front of these people, these people who are not your people, to ask for money, acquire funding, acquire benefactores and gain support, which creates noise, which results in success.

Some of us are more comfortable than others. Some of us acquired a 'sod it lets see what happens' attitude somewhere along the way and the fear dissipates in the reflection of other peoples questions, curiosity and interest. Some of us are chasing something a little more elusive than job roles, a boyfriend who can pay all the bills or fame and glory. I can't speak for everyone who comes from where I come from, because you know I've not met anyone else yet who comes from where I come from and finds themselves here in this insane world of endless possibilities, or certainly what looks some days like a world of endless possibilities and other days looks like nothing short of an insurmountable obstacle course where I simply don't have the skills, any of the skills, to negotiate it.

But I don't want to hear only one conversation. I want to hear everyones voices. I assume the government wants to hear everyones voices, despite someone from the Tory party slapping down some of the disabled Twitter army last night. I'm going to assume her crass ignorance is in the minority. In order to hear everyones voices, please make sure you ask. Everyone. Don't expect everyone to be gobby enough to come to you. Don't expect everyone to be ballsy enough to come to you. Don't expect everyone to have come to the conclusion that there is nothing to lose and only in trying, in asking the difficult questions, in pushing harder and harder and harder is there a chance that a small tiny piece of the world might look different, might come together, might be okay. Not magnificent, but simply okay.

In order for the big society to happen, money is needed. In order to get money for your project, you have to, essentially, pitch. The thought fills me with absolute terror. I'll do anything to avoid it, absolutely anything. I don't think I'll be alone. So what do we do? Who do we go to? Who will advocate on our behalf? Who will be the presentable, eloquent, confident voice for us?

Is that even the answer? Or is the answer to actually teach people how to speak for themselves. Give them the tools. Allow them to practice, hone their speeches and their skills and then go and take their fire, passion, enthusiasm and care to the table and not choke on the words before a sentence has passed.

A conversation has to involve all. Please, will someone work out a way for everyone to have a voice?

Networks & Nudging (cross posted to Mud in my eyes)

Sometimes two opposites collide.

I'm a fat mountain biker and a multi media communications officer. This post is about both these things because, increasingly, those two things are becoming interestingly intertwined as the reason I am fat and still mountain bike become something of a conundrum to be unravelled for central government.

It's nothing to do with me. It's really not. Except that when people start talking about things I have personal experience of, these days I get frustrated enough to want to set the record straight.

Paul Ormerod has written a 'pamphlet', which appears to actually be a report for the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Mannufacturers and Commerce) called N-Squared. It tackles the government on it's recent assertion that nudging is the way to get people to change behaviours. I feel eligible to comment on this as, when I booked a hotel last night, the first thing I checked was whether it had a gym so I could get to ride a bike at least once in the 3 days I was away from my 'real' one. That, right there, is behaviour change for me.

Nudge comes from something called 'behavioural economics'. Don't ask. Instead, read this, which is the thrust of the matter, for me:

This essay argues that to be effective, the policy framework
for the twenty-first century must not only draw on the new
insights that behavioural economics gives us, but also needs to
be underpinned by an understanding between this and how
networks influence our choices and how these change over
time. Indeed, the impact of networks is potentially considerably greater than that of ‘nudge’. This makes creating good policy harder while offering huge potential for change.

My personal experience is that both are true. Except not in the way that these people seem to think. It's the combination of both, where one feeds the other that the thrust of the change is born.
Out there on the web are thousands of communities and they reside in very many places. Sometimes there is crossover. To understand how the web works is to understand how it motivates and supports and this is where the lack of research and understanding is becoming clear in central government and those who swim around it.

I use a forum called Singletrackworld. It collects a lot of like minded mountain bikers into one place. Rides are organised, old kit is sold, random arguments about politics and music are had, but there is very much a sense of community with the same people posting on a day to day basis and then a further circle of people commenting a few times a week on posts that particularly interest them. It's a group like any other, with the interactive dynamics that the Tavistock Institue so well defined, just like any other.

Some of those people are on Twitter. But the thing which Twitter does best is to connect people of people. So, some people from Singletrack are on Twitter. But the friends of the people on Singletrack are not on Singletrack but are on Twitter. And so boyfriends, girlfriends, riding partners, riding groups, sons, daughters, skills guides, DJ's, journalists and editors all collide in one loosely defined group on Twitter. They're in my mtbfabulousness list if you're interested.

They're the people who keep me on the straight and narrow. Actually, let me rephrase that. They're the people who kept me on the straight and narrow at the start, when I needed them. And I did need them. I was fat and horrenously unfit and I'd not ridden a bike in a long time. I didn't know I needed them, it wasn't a conscious decision, it was just that all I talk about for a good portion of the day when not at work is mountain biking and so this amorphous mass of lovely people slowly infiltrated my world. Some found me cos of this blog, Mud in my eyes. Some from seeing their friends chat to me. Some from the odd time here or there where they got added into a mass conversation about forks or flat pedals. Some because ideas of a ride out were being muted and some because of the girly biker community.

Twitter is a collision, crossing over point and shaper of new communities and networks. As a result, you find people who are also trying to keep fit and earn cake. As a result, you find other people who talk really quite a lot about mountain biking. As a result, when you don't want to leave the comfort of your sofa, you are constantly reminded of the benefits of doing so as other peoples ride reports flash up your screen. It's a great motivator. As a result, when you're feeling terrible, you can always have a quick moan and get picked up again. As a result, slowly but surely, going out for a ride becomes routine instead of a novelty and slowly but surely, your fitness improves and your world view and behaviour changes.

This is the importance of being inside something to comment on it. This is perhaps the responsibility of being inside something to be in a position to comment on it. If this works for me, would it work for others? I don't know. It seems people are writing successful books on half the story, but misunderstanding the other half because they don't use the mediums of which they speak. N-Squared hits the nail, right on the head.


In my world, my Twitter 'friends' are the people who have kept me going, kept me riding, kept me determined to get better at this ludicrous sport. They've advised, sympathised, calmed and encouraged, cheered and motivated and you know, without them I'm not sure I'd have ridden the route I rode yesterday.

Never underestimate the value of knowing others can. Never underestimate the power of following others. But most of all, understand that the key to behaviour change is a weird mix of technology, digital and sociology and psychology these days and more research badly needs to be done to get to the root of what works and is efficient, and what doesn't and is not.

Carefully stepping

So. @dominiccampbell tweeted a link to this slightly soul destroying story on the Guardians website. Now, for somewhat obvious reasons, I am slightly ferocious on such topics these days. Not because I receive any benefits at all, not because I have ever receive benefits of any kind, but because there but for the grace of god rings more true with some of us than perhaps others.

For the record, I did not avoid claiming benefits for any high faluting reason other than that to set foot in a Job Centre was one of the most soul destroying experiences of my life, that I got a job before any money ever made it into my account, and I vowed never ever to repeat the experience again if there was anything at all I could do to avoid it. The resolve of which led to assorted really rather random temping jobs I really wasn't qualified for, but there you are.

Anyway. After my initial reaction, which was 'oh here we go again, first it was us public sector bods, now it's the other group of people who are hard pushed to defend themselves without sounding whiny, the people in receipt of ESA'. On reflection, actually, at least us public sector bods have a means to express our displeasure, being as how I'd guess most of us have access to a keyboard and connection. Recipients of ESA, I would imagine, are not quite so unilaterally lucky.

So, I'll be gobby on their behalf on the understanding that there is a comment section below, and I fully and wholeheartedly accept that I may be wrong on some of the following assumptions and that I will, quite happily, accept this in the way that I have historically and will continue to do so, because I don't actually know anything at all, only wish to know everything.

One of the reasons, one assumes that a person may end up in receipt of ESA is mobility problems. I'd tell you what criteria there actually are for being in receipt of ESA but all the documentation says refer to DMG 41012 and of course, guess what? Well, you try Googling it.

So I assume some of the people in receipt of ESA have mobility problems. Some of these will be static and some will be degenerative. But surely some of those people, if given broadband connections and adequate training could work from home? Of course, allowing them to work from home would require a seismic shift in employers attitudes to allowing people to work from home, to sorting out secure tokens for them - but all of this should be possible should it not? It is, after all, the 21st century, no?

Except, of course, this is Great Britain. And we are not a Scandinavian country who manage to get it so right, but the country who manages to get it so wrong, and so instead of enabling people to get back to work on their terms, within the parameters of their restrictions, so that those restrictions disappear into the ether of the world wide web, email, telnet and all the other magical little tools which mean you don't actually have to sit behind a desk in an office which is absolutely resolutely not designed to accomodate a wheelchair, you can, instead, contribute to the economy, be proud of yourself, and gain all the benefits we all take for granted of getting up in the morning, driving to work, and coming home (one hopes) feeling vaguely achieved for the day. Because, you see, digital tech means we could. We really could. We could, with a little of that old blue sky thinking which actually should be called green sky thinking in this country for the regularity with which it happens in government, give a large amount of people some connection back. Some worth back? I don't know.

What I think I do know, is that there really must be some people out there who, if given the tech to do it, would run forums for the government, act as moderators, contribute ideas, pass on some innovation, and generally be absolutely fab.

Except they can't, because the digital framework that is needed for them to do so is nothing so much as a pipe dream and so instead we take money from them, instead of enabling them to earn more. If someone could enlighten me as to how that is not in any way short sighted, ludicrous, a complete misdirection of public savings and an insult of discrimination to boot, because I am struggling and I'd like someone to come along and explain this to me in words of 1 syllable. What am I missing here?

A governments disassociation with reality

This isn't a political blog. I will be honest, my interest in politics is a fledgling thing, the vestiges of ignorance of which I sometimes passionately wish I could reclaim.

Frankly, the whole thing winds me up. But this wraps into social media and so please bear with me. We get there in the end. Via some irritation at the Big Society. You have been warned.

So. The Big Society speech happened this morning. I've read the speech. Sounds great - well reads great. Just the right amount of pregnant pauses (ellipses) and impassioned pleas for the coming together of a nation.

Well if we were all white and middle class, it would work. Don't look at me like that, it would. The dream of Mr Cameron's is one I have no doubt that a large amount of you share. I do too. I'm young(ish), idealistic, and full of passion, enthusiasm and belief that the world can be changed if someone just comes up with the right idea in the right place with the right people listening. I'm white, and much to my occasional embarrassment thoroughly middle class. If someone is having trouble, I offer to help. If I see someone doing something suspicious or blatantly wrong, I'll report it to the relevant people. I carry a little fireproof pouch to put my cigarette butts in when out walking or biking and I smile and greet everyone in my street. I read Exec Board meeting minutes for fun, Prime Ministers speeches for fun. I want to know, I want to be involved, I want to give time for free, hell despite my better judgement I've volunteered for the Olympics and will eventually be marshalling at a local mountain bike race series.

My neighbours are very different. But before we discuss that, so that you understand the direction this is coming from, let me tell you a story.

Someone ploughed into our lovely company car last year. It was a stolen car, we now know driven by some local Asian kids. The race is relevant, I think, bear with me on this. They ploughed into it at such speed and ferocity that the entire front engine of a VW Passatt was left hanging off, almost entirely detached from the main chassis of the car. It was a write off. I was a bit upset. My other half was pretty shocked too as was our guest who we'd been playing Rock Band with and as a result hadn't heard a thing, not the impact, and not the lovely locals who'd knocked on our door to tell us. So those lovely locals? They know my other halves mother lives 15 doors up, went and knocked on the door and told her and asked her if she could phone us. So she did.

They didn't have to bother, you know? Our street is half Asian, half white. Old traditional ingrained white Lancashire. The people doing the running around that day were Asian. The kids handed themselves in eventually, we suspect entirely down to community pressure from families who recognised the kids as they ran away. They didn't tell the police a thing, something I was monumentally irritated about at the time. Instead they went behind the scenes, called mothers of uncles of friends and got them to hand themselves in. I have an immense amount of respect for those kids for doing that and any animosity I held against them dissipated in the understanding that perhaps they'd paid their dues to their community in ways I didn't know of.

The Big Lunch still couldn't happen here.

No, it really couldn't. Here's the reason why I told you the story above first. The wives wont look me in the eye. They wont greet me, wont talk to me, wont acknowledge me, never mind pass the time of day with me. I had the strangest moment while smoking a cigarette the other day in our back yard where I saw our next door neighbours face for the first time in 4 years of living here and I don't know who was more startled, me or her.

Me, possibly. It just floored me. I have become so accustomed to the way things are here, so inured to the traditions and respectful of the flow of life that someone stepping outside of that just broke my head a bit.

This is why the Big Society wont work. For a Society to be Big, all must be involved. Until there is more understanding of the psychological make up of all those who share the ground of the British Isles, how on earth are we going to work together? We've got to start having the Big Conversation first! We must learn to co-exist side by side, respecting the flow of other lives is different to ours, their priorities the same, but that the systems to ensure those priorities upheld a mystery to us too. We must be transparent in our behaviour and motivations and open with our smiles and greetings relentlessly and without thanks in order to attempt to engage with someone - anyone - who does not have the same skin colour as us.

That works both ways.

Sometimes, I still feel alienated here. I clumsily and entirely accidentally offend, I trip over words, I don't know who to make eye contact with, I confuse people here because I ride bikes and come home covered in mud even more than perhaps I would in an entirely white street. Yet I notice that the kids a few doors up have scooters now and one of the older girls has a bike and we smile at each other, and is there a shared acknowledgement of wanting to explore, to be free, to fly? Who knows? Neither of us say a word, both of us trapped in our confusion of the social rules of the others worlds. She doesn't know if I want to speak to her and I don't know if I am allowed, whether I would be offending someone, at what age it is okay to continue to smile and encourage and past which point it becomes offensive and wrong to do so.

Our society is a minefield and the current discussion with France banning the veil does nothing to calm the seas. I don't want to live in a white middle class society, I want to live in a truly Big Society, one in which everyone has a voice. Until it is possible for that to happen, I think we're floating in the clouds.

So where does social media come in?

I don't know anything about you except the value of your words on blogs and on Twitter. The social complications are removed, I can't accidentally offend by reading or responding to the wrong thing. There are no minefields, just conversation. A Big Conversation. The web is a great leveller, removing, in some cases, your job title, your doctorate, your Honourable status and many other things besides. It means I'll talk to many people who I would probably feel a bit too intimidated to engage with off those platforms, though a tentative interaction on those platforms make things very much easier for me when a face to face meeting happens. By that point, I know the jump off points, no matter who you are and where you are from. I know the subjects to avoid, I know the subjects which make you glow with enthusiasm, I sometimes know your political direction and will never hold that against you.

What concerns me, increasingly, is the demographic of social media channels. I have a growing suspicion that they are not representative of the wider demographic certainly, of our local Boroughs. Whether that's an issue or not, something to be messed with and changed or not, I'm still quietly arguing with myself over. What I do know is that perhaps the responsibility is on us to find out where all our target audiences are communicating and discussing and to try and engage with people in their own virtual worlds. But I think perhaps someone wiser than me needs to chase that one down, because I honestly don't know where to start. And that's something I am hugely embarrassed about too.

The responsibility of communicating

Lets talk about digital exclusion. Or conversely digital inclusion because the two are the opposite sides of what is, essentially, the same argument. It's merely a matter of tilting ones head to see either side of the fence and relatively easy to see which side someones sitting on the great digital divide.

The divide isn't only about infrastructure. Don't get me wrong, I acknowledge fully and completely that when someone arrives at a social media presentation with the gambit that a third of her Councils area doesn't even have mobile phone coverage, I am going to mentally calculate which century we are in and feel something very close to complete despair at the size of the challenge ahead of us if we want everyone to have the same digital opportunities. We have some challenges ahead which are going to require massive investment and some inspiring technical innovation to enable everyone to have the same platform to start from.

But this post is not about infrastructure. This post is about a sense that the government is rushing faster and faster towards a digital economy, digital communication streams and digital consultation without any comprehension of the exclusion they that are creating.

Think about the adverts that you see on TV. Think of how many quote web addresses or suggest you enter 'a phrase' into a 'search engine' for more information. Think of the government adverts which do the same. Think of all the competitions which you can enter for free online but have to pay for if you telephone or write. Think about communicating with government bodies. Applications for passports, driving licences etc, can all be done digitally. The alternative is entering into a two way conversation with a government body via post and we all know how that goes. Think of the segments on morning tv shows which quote web addresses for more information, where the information is not offered any other way. Think about the increasing habits of schools to publish timetables and events diaries on the web. Think about all the information and knowledge which is available on the web for free, which if you did not have access to the web, you would need to pay for, either by subscribing to journals or buying expensive books. Think of all the newspaper articles where comments come thick and fast and the media can form ideas on the mood and feel of the populace on the subject those comments are on.

Now think about not being able to do any of those things. Not because you can't, but because you simply don't want to. Or maybe that you can't afford to. That there is a nice pipe running past your door but you don't have the money to pay £28 a month for broadband because that's part of the food budget. Or perhaps that you have the money, but you just don't care enough to go through all the complications and learning at a later stage in your life. That your exposure to the web has only ever been through the TV and all you can see are configurations of words with dots in them and they mean nothing to you. Where your understanding only comes from what's said on screen and it seems that there is a mass of information out there but you can't access it, and you could access it, if you wanted to, but there just isn't the urge there once was to take on new ideas.

This post was inspired by a real person. She exists. There are hundreds of thousands just like her. She's the gran of my physiotherapist. She wants to receive letters through the post. She wants to pick up a telephone and talk to her bank - well actually she'd rather walk into the branch but movement isn't so easy for her these days so a telephone and hitting 0 repeatedly until she gets a human voice has to suffice. She's lived a long time and she's seen the world change and she is becoming sick of the machines everywhere. She wants to talk to people, they're the only contact she has some days with the outside world, with the sound of someones voice that doesn't emit from the television. She wants to chat to the checkout girl. She wants to chat to the bod at the bank. She wants contact - and she doesn't want it digitally. The time is past, in her mind, for learning the complications, she watches her granddaughter on the computer and her granddaughter has been kind and tried to show her how it all works, but it's too much information, and it's too impenetrable, and what on earth is the point to all the information any way? Why can't someone still bother to communicate with her in a way she understands? Why is everyone so determined to get rid of bits of paper, they've done well enough so far, why is everyone so totally focussed on publishing web addresses everywhere and not telling her anything any more?

There is a responsibility in communicating. There is a responsibility in holding a message or information which others need to know. That responsibility is to communicate so that all who need to receive it do so. In a world where floods, freak weather and all kinds of disasters can occur, for example, what danger is there in deciding that to cut costs, we will only communicate with those who provide us with a mobile phone number or who subscribe to our Twitter account? Are we going to enter a world eventually where you can only have your shopping if you suffer the swipe lottery; will it or wont it go through without the embarrassing supervisor call emitting from the depths of the machine? Are we going to cut communication costs so viciously that we cannot afford to communicate with the people on the edges, the older generation who didn't get taught how to use a PC at school, a skill which is becoming as necessary now as numeracy and literacy? Are we going to isolate an already vulnerable segment of our community in the rush to create communities online, thus creating a divide and barrier at a time when we must unify to try and deal with financial, environmental, moral, criminal and cohesive problems?

No has to be the answer. They're not up for negotiation, these questions. Like it or not, enthusiastic or not, some people do not want to be digital. They want to be analogue, they're quite happy being analogue and frankly, I think we're insulting them a little in our assertion that they should want to be digital.

Digital inclusion is necessary. It is. Digital is cheaper, auditable, time rich, convenient, indexed and dynamic. But there is a place for both. There is a place for a newspaper online as well as offline. There is a place for community offline as well as online too. The danger is the assumption that the voices, opinion, crowd sourcing and data obtained online is a clear and current representation of all voices and opinions which exist, and that all sectors of our society are adequately represented in the digital world. They're not. They never will be. The responsibility is entirely on us to ensure that they are not excluded as a result of that, that we continue to include them in the national conversation, that we check in with them, that we send them bits of paper, that we print a photograph in all it's stunning glory and continue to give joy to people who do not have the luxury of a screen to see it on.

Inclusion means including everyone.

Hitting the excluded where it hurts

This isn't about social media. This is about Councils, cuts, and efficiencies. This is written, not as an employee of a Local Authority, but as a reasonably intelligent woman who didn't have the best start in life, and got here anyway, where here is with enough money to buy books, ride a mountain bike (and by association choose the kind of exercise I take), afford fresh fruit and veg and have an always on broadband connection.

Life wasn't always like this.

This is not a whine. This is a very personal plea which I know will fall on deaf ears, but I will write anyway in the vain hope that someone will read and understand the potential implications of the cuts which are undoubtedly coming our way in towns and villages across this country. This is about exclusion breeding exclusion, about cuts hitting people who have nothing even harder, about social mobility and the need for stabilisers. It is about me, and my experience of life.

I grew up in a very small village (pop. 400) in a rural area of Somerset, before Somerset was associated with 4 x 4's, Daily Mail columnists and Glastonbury Festival. We had no money - both my parents were on benefits for assorted reasons. I assumed, as I grew up, that everyone's first school class had 10 children in it. I assumed that everyone had a 10 mile round trip to middle school. I assumed that everyone had a 30 mile round trip to Secondary school - in the way that children do who grow up in a small little place with no access to newspapers, who weren't interested in watching the news, who didn't have access to the internet. We had no car and no telephone. There are still people in this country now, who do not.

There was no money for books, swimming lessons, gym memberships, piano or singing lessons, ballet lessons or educational visits at weekends. There was no money for educational toys to teach us how to spell, we learnt to count using dominoes and to spell using my fathers old printing press letters.

This is not unusual. Except, perhaps, that my mother bothered to teach us to spell and count before we attended our first school, but she came from a middle class background and despite leaving school at 15 to earn a wage to look after her elderly parents, understood the worth of an education.

I was what one might consider a bright child. I liked learning. I skipped Roger Red Hat et al and went straight to the books with pages full of text. Without a library to borrow books from, I would have been lost. Without a bus route funded by the local Council, I could not have reached the library. When there was no money for a trip on the bus to the library, I would use the mobile library service. It didn't help with homework, too limited a selection, but it did help my need to read absolutely everything and anything. When I was older, I cycled to the nearest library, 5 miles away and got my books that way, lugging the educational books for my homework back with me. I thought nothing of doing this, that's not the point.

Without the Council funded bus route, the Council funded library, the Council funded mobile library, where would I be now? How would I have learnt? School textbooks teach you much, but they can't teach you everything. Teachers, certainly more so now than then, do not have the time or patience to sit and listen to 20 questions on todays lesson. There is no time. So how, exactly, would I have learnt that the world is massive, intricate and beautiful, that the stars are things of wonder, that Istanbul was full of history and war or that China was only a recent addition to world politics or that math was used in the real world and there was a point to paying attention in class? Both my parents left school with no qualifications, the only place to learn was between the covers of a book.

Without input, minds grow stagnant. As has been proved by research, the value of keeping an active brain active cannot be underestimated, Alzheimers can be warded from by such a thing as simply thinking. If a young brain has nothing to challenge and expand, it will wither, interest will be lost, and eventually crime will be turned to - I know, I supervised one such lad when I was a Probation Service Officer.

Then there were the Council funded music lessons, and the Council funded loan of a flute. As a result of these, I learnt a lifelong appreciation and love of music, not just the music piped through the radio chosen by someone else. I learnt about having a hobby, something new to me. I learnt about practising at something, repeatedly, in order to get my body to physically do something it wasn't naturally inclined to do. I learnt about using something other than my brain to produce something worthwhile. It would have been impossible without that Council funded teacher.

Then there were school trips. There was no money for holidays for our family, never mind spare for school trips. But thanks to Council contributions, I managed to learn that there was a world outside our little bit of Somerset, I learnt about being part of a team who needed to clean and cook and wash together in order to produce food and a good living environment, I learnt to play well with others. I learnt skills which people assume everyone is taught at home, but perhaps are not for very many reasons. I learnt about set timetables and not being left to my own devices, but the need to have a structured day which integrated with everyone elses structured day. I learnt discipline but in the kindest and most fun of ways. I climbed, I walked, I laughed and I relaxed in a space which was entirely safe. It was a godsend on a number of levels and it couldn't have happened without Council money.

Oh, that 30 mile round trip to Secondary school? Council funded. Not sure how I would have managed to get to school without it - we had no car.

As a result of a lot of Council money, spent to enable those who happened to be born into less fortunate circumstances, I learnt, I grew and I give back. I have worked in every job going to ensure that I contribute something in order to pay something back to a system without which education would have ended at 16 and dead end jobs would have probably been the norm. Without that money being spent in those places, I would not be the educated, well read, enquiring, enthusiastic, passionate and hard working person I am today. I can say that without a shadow of a doubt.

In the midst of the cuts and the spending freezes, the removal of grants and the efficiencies, the biggest thing which is breaking my heart is that somewhere there is a little girl just like me. And every single one of the branches which I held on to to ensure that I got an education, an outlet for my brain and a passion for thinking and changing things are about to be removed. I don't know for sure, but I think that mobile library services, rural libraries, leisure centres, free swimming lessons, free music lessons and loan of equipment, bus services to rural areas - all of things will be in the firing line. And all of those things are the opportunities and assistance which those who fall into the sector of society who need them most are about to have removed.

We are, in effect, about to rob the poor to pay the rich - or rather rob the poor to ensure the rich remain able to pay themselves massive Xmas bonuses. One of those bonuses could probably keep a mobile library service running for a year. What price the disappearing opportunity of education and mind expansion of the geographically and financially excluded?

Too high, it seems.

So I suppose this is a marker. A nod. A plea to spare a thought, over the coming months, for making the public sector the target of your ire. As the leisure centres close, as the libraries shut down, as the hot school meals are withdrawn, as the budget for school books is reduced, spare a thought for the little girl somewhere out there who's opportunities to get out are being reduced, one by one. And she's done absolutely nothing wrong.