#lgovsm - a redux

#lgovsm is a perfect example of why the JFDI approach to life sometimes just doesn't cut it. And I have learnt my lessons well.

Someone once said to me, make a mistake, own up to it, take responsibility for it, learn from it, move on. This is an admission of the first, definitely the second, a step on the path to the third and most definitely the fourth. And this, also, is what blogs are for, because through sharing mistakes, hopefully someone else will learn to, and thus never have to write a similar really rather embarrassing blog post.

The first session involved about 20 people. A similar amount took part in the second session, and it grew a little more by the time the 3rd one came alone. The core attendance tends to stay the same, with people drifting in and out depending on the subject - Councillors and representatives from the voluntary sector have all wondered in and out as well as local government entrepeneurs.

When I first launched it, I anticipated a few people chatting and it take a while to get off the ground. I expected people to be well out of ideas and things to say by the end of the session. I didn't expect journalists and think tank bods to have it on their radar - I wasn't sure anyone would have it on their radar - this is social media and things tend to be unpredictable.

I first realised there was a problem when Ingrid Koehler from the LGID mentioned some people had been pushing for a space to continue discussions generated on #lgovsm throughout the rest of the week. This has now been set up on the Communities of Practice and I am very grateful for this assistance. As an aside, the Communities of Practice is a fantastic resource for local government bods of all disciplines, not just those of us in social media - you will need to sign up for an account to be able to see the content, but I can highly recommend it - it's a brilliant forum to discuss issues and problems but also celebrate successes.

So, last night I did something I should have done right back at the beginning. Firstly, after discussions with @kazwccsocialnet we decided on a topic which should have perhaps been the first one - using social media to support social media evangelists in their organisations'. That right there is going to help enormously, I suspect, because it can be a lonely old place in the face of barrages of 'what exactly do you do for a job again?', blank looks from your mother when you try and explain, glares from colleagues who are facing redundancy, accusations of being peoples pet projects and assorted other rather negative attitudes which it can be difficult to shake off. Add to this that some people are running under the radar of their management in order to even create a Flickr group and the need for this discussion can be plainly seen.

Then between @carlhaggerty, @808kate and @kazwccsocialnet something rather awesome happened. We decided what was wrong with lgovsm, then we decided how to fix it, and then we decided to have lunch on Saturday at UKGovCamp to iron out the details. And suddenly, a bunch of local gov bods have formed a bit of a team, across geographical distances which still boggle me (West Midlands, Devon, Lancashire, London), built entirely over Twitter.

And this is why we bother. This is why I set up lgovsm in the first place. This is what social networking was built for - cross county collaboration between professionals who want to do things better, want to communicate better, want better tools to do better jobs. Twitter is not just a place to chat or network - it's somewhere to sew the seeds of collaboration out in the real world,. which then are applied back again to the digital world. It's where people with similar interests and drives can come together and assist, and build support networks.

If you ask me the value of lgovsm to others, I cannot answer. If you ask me the value of lgovsm to me, I can. It is becoming a professional development learning curve. It is teaching me about the need for planning and for collaboration and learning to stop being independant all the damn time, and to trust in others and ask for help. It's teaching me that geography doesn't matter any more. I am learning about organisation, planning, being agile, moving on swift deadlines and timescales, reacting to problems and solving them, but also on a personal level, I am learning very many things too. Because what we learn on a personal level benefits our professional lives and vice versa. And nowhere is this more true than on social networks.

If the conversations which happened yesterday come to fruition, lgovsm will go from something small and local to something massive and sprawling, but also useful, with interesting outcomes and ideas. There is not necessarily any actions on anyone at the end of these proposed discussions, only greater understanding and little sparks which can be stored to be lit at some future point. Social networking allows us to learn from a very great number of people from all sectors and all interest areas - a great many number of stakeholders.

No matter happens from this point forward, I have learnt, both in the running and hosting as well as in the participation of lgovsm. What makes me more happy than I can say, is that one of the people I originally thought of when setting lgovsm up, is now enabling me to make it more useful, more relevant and of more worth.

Funny how the world turns, isn't it?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Geek <=> cool?

Somewhere along the line, something has gone wrong. Or, rather, I'm not sure something actually has gone wrong but I am not entirely sure I am comfortable with it. Or, perhaps it is that it is what it is and I am reluctant to step up to the plate but I know that I must, in the same way that we all must if the big society is to work, and those of us who are dreamers, idealists and wishers, we all want the big society to work.

I know some things. I know these things through being inside something. It's as natural to me as breathing, a framework where I instinctively operate. It's not got a name and it doesn't need a special name. It's not cute and fluffy and it's not going to change the world. Except, that was 3 years ago. Now I know some things for the same reasons but I feel somehow responsible for making those things cute and fluffy and accessible. I feel responsible for passing it in, for teaching people, for explaining in plain English to those far smarter than me. Sometimes I find myself in such ridiculous situations, explaining something which to me seems so damn simple, to someone who could intellectually eat me for breakfast.

I am confused. Bewildered. There is a new world order, why yes there is, but instead of being at the bottom of the pile, suddenly I seem to be in the middle somewhere. Have the geeks inherited the earth?

Well yes. Yes they have. But with inheriting something, as in reality with heirlooms, there comes a certain responsibility if you are a certain kind of a person. I suppose I am a certain kind of a person. I don't believe it's someone elses job. I don't believe someone else should pick up the baton. I wont leave well alone. Some of my friends, who are geeks, think I am ridiculous for getting involved. They think I am talking pipedreams. Others don't understand the need for translation, others sneer at those who need translation, instead wanting to keep the knowledge and thus the power to themselves.

Lets get this straight, right now. I am not cool. I am a geek. Being a geek is not cool. If it is going to become cool to be a geek, and increasingly it seems that this might be the case, then I am not entirely sure I am comfortable with that. I love digital. I love technology. I love burying my head in a book. I want to know everything, all of it, all of the time and right now. I do not want to be cool. Cool is frivolous, cool is unquantifiable, cool does not come in black and white and cool is out of my control. Someone else decides whether I am cool or not and I am simply not interested in that. I'm too old, too grumpy, dress too differently, and frankly, am just too uncool.

But I am a geek. A big geek with a big heart. It used to be that that bemused people. Confused them. I would speak, the words would come out of my mouth, and there would be confusion in the listeners eyes. What is this you speak of? Why are you telling me these things? Why are you so enthusiastic about something as stupid as talking  in text? We talk to each other, there is no space or time for your weird ideas here.

Now the world has flipped and I am catching up. And I am the one who is confused and bewildered. I perpetually feel like I am supposed to be doing something where I am not entirely sure what something is. I have ideas, hundreds of them. I sit and listen to other people talking and 90% of the time ideas spark and pinwheel off in my brain and I reach for a pad and I scribble and scribble and scribble some more. Ideas, imaginings, what if's, why can't we's, how about we do it that way, or try it that way.....a constant processing of input and generation of output. That's not cool. That's being a geek. An acknowledgement of a brain which works like a computer, which needs rebooting each night, defragging occasionally, but when running at optimum can crunch masses of data and come to conclusions easily and smoothly at the end of the crunching.

I have spent a long time hiding this. I have spent a long time only letting similar people see.

Slowly but surely, the decision to just see what happens is creeping up on me. To jump, take a risk, do something, do something. But that's not cool and the last thing on earth I want to be is cool. The technology is cool. The digital capability is cool. Faster broadband, smaller chips, more efficient processing, crowdsourcing, village pumps , virtual noticeboards, unconferences and bar camps - they are all cool.

I am not.

Information overloads

A number of blogs have been linked to in the past few weeks which have, in effect, been about information overload.

It's made me think about how I use social media, and how I use my iPhone specifically. It's also made me realise that for some people, social media is becoming an albatross around their neck. It shouldn't be this way.

Take the social out of social media for a second, and what have you got? Media. Communication. Data. News. Information. The social side is almost irrelevant when you think of it in these terms - you are the end receptor of a massive amount of information on Facebook, Twitter et al and it really can be as simple as that. You can sit and watch, you can sit and read, there is no necessity to sit and interact. It could be argued that perhaps you are only getting half the intended outcome if you only watch and read and never respond, but the choice is ultimately yours.

If the weight of expected interaction is weighing you down, then perhaps you need to step back from things for a bit and become an observer. Watch the data streams scrolling down, learn from them whatever you can, and leave it at that. Step away. Take the information, use it, budget with it, plan with it, use it to inform your decisions, but don't respond, don't get involved and don't become drained. Social media is not supposed to be a problem. It is supposed to be a tool in a box, among many other tools.

I come at things from a slightly different angle. I am a geek. I suspect quite a large amount of Twitters userbase, for example, are. And so because we are geeks, there is a very large liklihood that we have been using what has now been niftily coined as social media for years. Very many years. Somewhere in the region of 20 years for some of us, though I was a late starter and only started communicating with random people on the internet about 15 years ago. But it is as much an intrinsic part of my life as picking up the phone to communicate with someone. In fact I must confess, I am far more likely to communicate via text than telephone and there are a number of reasons for that.

The biggest one, ironically, is information overload. If I call you on the telephone, there is an expectation that if you are in you will answer it. It might be something important, afterall, and once you have answered the phone, it is very difficult to then explain you're tired and only answered in case it was important. It's a socially awkward situation imposed on someone else, putting the other person on the other end of the phone in the position of 'answer and carry on speaking' or 'ignore and possibly miss really quite important news'.

Dropping an email in an inbox is different. There is no expectation on turnaround time. There is no awkwardness. There is just a little marker in someones inbox which says 'Hi, could use some interaction/date for an event sorting/just to say hi/nothing important' and it can be left to a time when the receiver has a spare moment in their day when it is appropriate for them to answer. There is no forced expectation.

Now take that concept a little further. Imagine a world where everyone operated on their own timescales if something wasn't 'important'. Imagine a world, for example, where you could email your GP and explain you needed an appointment for something not urgent. A refill of a prescription which needs an appointment perhaps, or a vaccination for a trip abroad, or just for some advice on a non urgent twinge in your arm. No hanging on the phone for 30 minutes listening to the endless 'you are now x in the queue'. No tired over worked harassed receptionist. Just a marker in someones inbox which says 'Hi, I need some help when you've got a bit of time'.

The sender is free to wander off and do something else. Like look after their new born child, or look after their elderly relative, or indeed even go off to work. Meanwhile, the marker sits in the inbox, waiting for someone else to finish with the early morning rush when things are mad, to grab a brew, and to sit down and wade through all those markers, firing off replies and updating the appointment database at their leisure. It doesn't matter if a crisis happens and they get interupted and have to dash off - the marker remains until it's dealt with. No one is put on hold, no one is charged any money for wanting to use a free service, everyone wins. They win in time, energy, patience and the ability to not be tied physically to the end of a phone.

The same usage works right the way across using social media as a communication tool. The onus is not on you to respond immediately. Just because someone can send a Tweet in real time does not mean you must respond in real time. As long as you have clearly stated turnaround times and manage peoples expectations, why exactly does it have to be instant? Yes there may be communications coming into you which do need an immediate response - fine. Scan down the list every hour and farm the important ones off, deal with them, forward them to the right person, retweet them to the right account and you've spent 10 seconds dealing with something urgent.

Data doesn't have to be drowned in. It doesn't have to be an albatross. If managed properly, with the right frameworks set up, data is merely another asset to be managed, something to be learned from, and ultimately something to be won with. Knowledge is power. Negative or positive, it is still power.

It's time to stop talking about social media, and to start using social media, media, communication, data, whatever you want to call it, to make peoples lives easier, gentler, less stressful and more centred around the increasingly time poor way people live their lives. It can be done.