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20 Ideas For Local Authorities To Engage With Web 2.0

A week ago I spent a whole day leading a session on behalf of Socitm, the Society of Information Technology Management, where we were exploring the impact new media could have in Local Authorities and other public bodies. Most of those present were from the world of corporate IT and, as someone presenting a variety of tools they were likely to be blocking on their home patch, I was a tad nervous about taking them on this particular learning journey.

I needn't have been. Having explained in broad terms the main drivers of change thanks to this technology, I was able to explore some more specific examples of public sector engagement with the social web, from eduBuzz in the domain of education, to several health-related initiatives of the NHS. We saw how technology is taking politics towards the realm of direct democracy, and explored the potential for some of the mobile, ambient and participative media that citizens are increasingly using in their day-to-day (social) lives.

We worked through the afternoon seeking practical, do-able actions that these IT managers could take forward, without the need for engagement of the senior management teams or specialist outsourced expertise. They relished the task, and came up with some superb ideas they could implement in days, rather than months or years. Some of them have even put them into action already: take a peek at Stratford's homepage, complete with Twitter updates. Here are the rest, coming to a local council near you:
What are the biggest challenges in your organisation?

1. Competitions for art work on Flickr
2. Mental health blog
   1. Teachmeet-style therapy group
   2. Video diary of experiences
3. Flickr/Google Earth mashups
   1. Things to do in the area, events, locations for recycling etc...
   2. Online estate agency for social housing
   3. Statistics in a glance mashup
   4. Graffiti tracking, crowdsourcing for finding the source of the 'tag'
   5. Mashups to reveal extent of disruption during strikes, accidents
4. Crowdsourcing FAQs on a wiki
5. Homeworkers can have real-time advice between 'virtual desks' (RSS feed to mobile)
6. Twitter for mass-collaboration during crises and a blog to quickly publish information and provide an instant feedback loop
7. Longitudinal e-consultation on complex issues
8. Using Flickr to provide stock photography to local press and council workers (like this)
9. Providing digital cameras to council gardeners to share the process and final result with enthusiasts and ciizens.
10. Twitter private groups for quick intranet publishing
11. Watchlist introduction for the PO, PR, Comms team
12. Culture change through a "from-the-top" blog by the CEO
13. Suggestion box for cost-effectiveness

Unleashing The Tribe: small passionate communities

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This is the 25-minute keynote, Unleashing The Tribe, which I delivered at the Tipperary Institute in May this year, a shorter version of the 90 minute marathon I was invited to give at Redbridge Council the same week. It's a "here's where we are now" on what makes communities tick online, on mobile, in face-to-face settings, and why understanding this is so important for learning, borrowing unashamedly from Clay Shirky, danah boyd, a plethora of the hundred or so research reports that have crossed my browser this past 12 months and all the conversations I've had, blog posts written. Not bad for less than half-an-hour of audio and slides.

Quirkology: there is no career path, but there is luck

Last week Bernie Goldbach took me out to dinner with about a dozen of his third year graduating students, all of them working with social media in some way or other (there was also a lovely first year there, who dared to come along to chat with a strange Scotsman and had to go to the trouble of getting a babysitter - much kudos).

The thing that got me: they thought that their careers would be plan-outable, that there was some pre-determinable path on which to travel in order to get their dream job. I tried to pop the bubble gently.

They're not alone. Last year NESTA commissioned Demos to produce the Ready For The Future? report, and it reveals how fair young people reckon the world is. 90% believe that if you work hard at something you'll get what you deserve, and only 30% think that getting on in your life involves any luck.

This is borne out further still. The majority of young people feel that qualifications are the most important factor, by far, in getting a job. In fact, they feel that being hard working is twice as important as being a good communicator and four times more important than being creative. Schools have never done as well, with constantly 'cleverer' kids getting their grades A-C. Parents are over the moon, with certificated 'proof' that their child has really been working as hard as they said they were. But have government policies over the years and around the world on attainment, attainment, attainment "emphasised what's measurable rather than what's important"? Bill, who's currently assessing said attainment, seems to think so.

Yikes - our economy depends on creative, innovative youngsters to thrive, yet they feel they're doing their bit by doing what they think school expects of them - getting good exam results at the cost, if need be, of creativity and communication skills.

No wonder employers complain bitterly about never having the personnel they need.

I want to get back to this idea, though, of having a set path, and that hard work alone will get you through this imaginary path and towards success. Speak to anyone who you might frame as a mentor and the words 'luck' and 'opportune moment' will crop up somewhere. Luck does play a part, serendipity leads to wonderful things and it's only the fact that some take that serendipity and do something with it that makes the difference between those who are 'lucky' and 'unlucky'. I've also started to get the distinct feeling these past few years that the more connected you are to more people, the more these serendipitous moments crop up. It used to be something to meet someone who knew someone you knew. With Facebook, it's not so uncommon to find you're related to them.

I'm also reading a bit of Richard Wiseman's Quirkology, where research showed that those who feel lucky generally are better off than those who feel unlucky. It's something I notice the minute I land to start working in the USA: people are incredibly confident in their ability to pull off something really good, regardless of how much or how little preparation, fundraising or graft they've done. It's often referred to as an "enterprising attitude" or "self belief". I think it's just that the people in the USA who I've been fortunate to work with feel that they've been lucky in life, and it rubs off on the amazing work they have done (of course, there's also plenty of hyperbole of mediocrity in good measure). People in Scotland have long held the belief that we are crap at everything, especially football (we're historically on the same level as the USA, did you know, and currently doing a lot better).

So, the message for those sitting their exams at the moment or about to set out on that non-existent yellow brick road of employment: do all the revision you can, work as hard as you can this summer in the real world and, of course, start feeling lucky.

Or, as the late design legend Paul Arden put it in the title of his superb book on creativity:

It's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be
(The world's best-selling book by Paul Arden)

A comma's omission can make all the difference, eh? But it made me buy the book. And it is good.

Pic: Yellow Brick Road

Steven Spielberg hits Seesmic nearly now video conf.

Who says social media doesn't bring people closer, and even allow to you to connect with seriously famous and cool people those non-digiratis could only dream of?

Jemima was amongst many posing questions directly to Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford on Seesmic, the video discussion site from long-time ScotEduBlogger friend Loic Lemeur, ahead of the launch of the new Indiana Jones film. You can see some of the Q&A on the Guardian's PDA blog.

Nearly now video conferencing is something that I'll be experimenting with inside Glow, the national schools intranet here in Scotland, with some exciting names already booked up for live debates and nearly live explorations around the world. Hopefully you'll be up for experimenting, too, whether you're 'in' Glow or sitting outside it.

Whether LTS get Spielberg, though, is another matter. We've ended up having a different force with us.

Social media and ambient intimacy for software engineers

When you're designing a new piece of kit, a platform for the web or a nifty widget for Bebo, it's vital that you have an audience in mind, an understanding of what might be possible, and the ability to change your plans frequently without sacrificing the integrity of your project. That was the main message at my lecture to the BScs and BEngs at Napier University, Edinburgh, today.

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Why the 'users' are different

The generation of 21st Century 'users' would not appreciate the title. They are contributors, creators, co-creators, participants... 90% of 15-25 year olds have visited their social network in the past month, vast numbers of these Bebo Boomers using the platform in ways the platform engineers hadn't dreamt of.

Expertise comes in different forms from before. It won't be long before PhDs will be submitted on YouTube. Wine buffs don't need to wear particular clothes and visit stuffy vineyards; you can be an expert on your own blog, or have your passion facilitated and encouraged by the platform itself. You don't have to visit a pub to feel like you're a regular. You can join its Facebook group or take a peek at what's going on through its Flickr photo pool.

The main global shifts affecting innovation

With technology providing a means for consumers, users, participators to take part in the co-creation of products, services and knowledge (think Dell's community, Seesmic's relationship around product development with its users (as many follow it as it follows; its users are fanatical) and educationalists around the world, or Wikipedia, even), it means that competition in the space to have your voice heard and your service used has never been greater.

Daniel Pink notices what technology has allowed to happen, and sums it up with the three 'A's.

Asia

What happens in Asia won't take long to happen elsewhere. At the moment if it's mobile, it's happening, yet so few software engineers start out by thinking how they'll make a mobile app usable on the web. Instead, we see companies struggle to make mobile products from the web. The one exception to this: Twitter. Asia's not only a growing market but a global one: China will soon be the number one English-speaking country in the world, its top 5% of graduates numbering more than the whole population of the UK. They have more gifted and talented students than we have students. Change is on the cards, with tomorrow's teens facing over 29 jobs in their lifetime, which means long-term planning and big budget developments risk more failure for software engineers than small-scale, agile, flexible development.

Abundance

The need for being mobile has never been greater. What's this? Or this? Try this then. With 426,000 mobiles being chucked out every year in the States alone, the signal is this: mobile telephony and internet access is not only burgeoning, but consumers are becoming fans, and want to engage with the latest, most powerful kit. They need apps that push their devices and they will be ready to chuck the device before they chuck the web service that makes their mobile tick (think iPhone).

Automation

Automation of search has probably been the one most important automation to have taken place since the net was born. Everyone has become a cataloguer, but people still need help understanding the stories large amounts of data can tell. To prevent information overload, we need computer designers and engineers to come up with ever more ingenius ways to find and present information to the 'user'/co-creator. Jonathan Harris is getting there, showing us some degree of geography in the way we feel (the web's never been great at location or time) or time and pace in a photograph.

Automation of copy and paste has also meant that we have the potential to be more creative - or a lot less creative. It might be down to software engineers to design interfaces that make it more fun to be original than to be a copy cat. Adidas seem to  be having some success on Jumpcut with their sneaker remizes.

We also talked about the role of the engineer in adoption strategy, especially when such a strategy feeds back into the development of further fuctionality, and how privacy issues, which can sometimes be the death of a project, can lend itself to structuring social media projects for particular groups of potential participants. Case in point: ARGs and Voluntary Computing.

Ultimately, as we started, we saw that the potent power of the net is not in code, but in people. If we can code to bring people together, the right people at just the right time, then we release the potential. It's hard to do this, with most software engineers working in groups where the ideas and direction may come from mere mortals like myself ;-) Communication, therefore, remains a key skill, and one that is often underdeveloped until the engineer is summoned to Demo and given a course by Shel. I love the way some developers express themselves in presentations at the likes of Demo or BarCamp, or in YouTube videos: this SecondLife development is more beautiful in its development than in the final product, I'd argue.

The easiest way to communicate with potential clients, employers or programming peers? A blog. In this case, if you're developing software for the web, for the social web at that, there's no excuse to be towards the end of a university career with no means to market yourself and build contacts in the slightly less cossetted world out there.

Software developers need to jump on every bandwagon going, to see if it's headed anywhere (thanks, Mike). They need to make sure that, using the tools of the ambiently intimate, they are at the front of the minds of everyone who matters to them now and into the future.

Public service web: moving towards civic innovation and participation

I've been working with a group of web service people from all over the public service in the UK, from education to Local Authorities, health boards to city facilities services. The main message: citizens need to be able to participate more in their online civic world.

The message ties in with work at the RSA, LTS and other public sector projects. Civic innovation needs to flourish, but with our current attitudes to information gatekeeping and fear of handing the speaking stick to citizens this will not happen any time soon in the front garden of the public service organisations themselves. Even where appearances would seem to indicate a desire from our most senior civic leaders to participate in discussion with the citizen, we can see from the lack of linkage between one blog post and another, and the lack of conversation in those 182 pages of comments, that we are seeing a real Meatball Sundae - the cream's on top, but nothing has changed underneath. The result? The number of us wanting to participate in a discussion online with our leaders is diminishing. Fast. Instead, we will have to be savvy webusers who know of the existence of those other ways into the halls of power. Give me Bill Marriott's real leader's communication any day.

I try to show where our citizens have come to in recent years, from the simple act of uploading a 'silly video' to YouTube, to participating in the coverage of a concert or an event, to being highly creative in remixing content for different purposes and using the social web to coordinate smart democracy mobs. I showed how volunteer computing and the world of Alternate Reality Games had changed the nature of participation, from 'press the red button' to something much more profound, where 'consumers' really were the ones in charge of the TV show (think, I Love Bees). It's not just for entertainment or play: scientists are harnessing group thinking power and computer power to channel scientific data, find extra terrestrial life and make the world a better place.

Key to this, for the public sector, is working out where they stand in relation to their 'secret' information and the public/private relationships they have with their citizens.

Hopefully a few seeds have been sown in the minds of these web pros, from this enthusiastic amateur. I am, after all, first and foremost a citizen that wants to participate more in his civic (online) life, but who currently can't.

Naace08 Keynote: Our future, our lives, our technology, our learning

A vague title so that I could get away with pretty much anything that I wanted to at last night's killer slot, 8pm, after dinner and before the next time Naace delegates could get to the bar. They did pretty well to make it through to the end and have some energy to talk about the issues I ended up raising. John, Ian, David and the Naace livebloggers managed to capture elements of what I cobbled together.

I could have done something zingy around the whizzbang technology that really is engaging our kids (and offer delegates the chance to view that presentation in full now that they've done the serious thinking). In the end, I took the strands of thought that have been hurtling around my head this past week (community, participation, tipping point or not, and a bit of the "We're adopting" talk) and wove them together with one common message:

The people who will make the difference in the classroom will not be the national organisations, the regulators or the civil servants. It will not be the QCA, Becta or various exam boards in England (though I think the leaner Learning and Teaching Scotland has potential to offer an extension of expectations that our counterparts on the border have failed to yet deliver). It will be the teacher, the one actually working with the child, who will make the difference.

Community-building - fine, but why should I?

John Connell puts forward some sound reasonings behind why a national intranet like Glow is still needed in 2008, even with the permeation of free, accessible collaborative or community tools such as Skype. In his closing comment on the post he points out that, for him, the safety aspect of having everyone authenticated as a bona fide student or teacher plays second fiddle to the potential for kick-starting more collaborative work:

For me, however, the central function of the authentication system within Glow is nothing to do with security and everything to do with the collaborative power it generates. We need to see past the ’safety’ aspects of authentication to the more important capabilities for community building that it infers on the overall system.

But here's the question that's been bugging me for the past few years with Glow, VLEs and online community projects in general: why should I put the effort into building a community at all?

I discovered the joys of having a burgeoning online community almost (OK, completely) by accident, having started blogging with students on foreign trips to keep the parents back home reassured. The community we tapped into through this was a happy accident, not the intended outcome but a welcome one nevertheless. At that point, we started to worry about how to cope with tens of thousands of visitors per week to our school blog and podcast, how to cope with hundreds of comments each week.

Being in a community doesn't mean you're part of it
The same is true of the face-to-face communities we live in through meatspace. Some communities are burgeoning, others are dormant. We are either born into or move into villages, towns and cities for reasons completely unconnected to the wonderful-or-otherwise communities that can be found there: employment, to get away from/move closer to family, the proximity to places of work, we can afford it... Only after we have entered the community do we experience the real reasons for 'joining' the community - or sitting psychologically outside it.

An example: In my own community of Leith, in Edinburgh, I am limited to the psychological community of three restaurants, two pubs and my stairwell. I do things for me and my family, not for the community at large. That's just the way I feel about things. In London, even though I don't live there, I feel part of a burgeoning, exciting community of like-minded individuals with a common aim, for whom I am ready to give up my own time and effort for the greater good.

The problem with large-scale education 'community' projects and even television programmes, as Matt Locke was saying over a drink on the Parliament terrace last week (had to get that in), is that those proposing, creating or running online communities spend months or years worrying about scaling participation without every considering how they're going to get people there in the first place.

A virtual community can be close to work, cheap and contain all the conveniences we need to get through our day, but so can some pretty dead meatspace suburbs, where there is no inclination to declare 'community spirit'. Glow, like many 'VLE' online filing cabinets of content before it, could become like this, though I hope and believe it will not. Likewise, some of broadbandless villages in Scotland, where nothing seems to work properly on a windy day and the 'conveniences' work on a timetable all of their own end up having some of the most enviable community building I've ever seen. For me, this type of village is the socially connected, rather messy world I inhabit online, made up of people living in blogs (houses), wikis (bothies) or Twitter (village notices).

So, what is it that a national intranet offers teachers that they don't or can't already have with existing web technologies? Is it a convenient but boring suburb for the 21st Century or an exciting village for the future, with its gossips, town halls and bothies? And how are you going to explain this to someone who's never gone beyond the BBC homepage?

Pic: Bothy near The Cullin, Skye

From Watching Spaces to Participation Spaces

I'm preparing some ideas for our Chief Executive on what today's kids are about, based on various 'serious' reports as well as countless interviews and chats with youf over the past month. However, the one bit of media which sums up the expectations of young people hit me this morning on the music channel Box, just as I was getting ready to head out.

Now, it's been a while since I've been to a proper rock or pop concert, especially since this one came along. I think the last biggy was U2 in Murrayfield, back in 2005. Back then I didn't notice what I saw this morning in a clip of Take That performing live at the O2 Dome, for New Year 2007/8. I first thought the audience were holding up glowsticks or cigarette lighters (highly unlikely now that a) smoking is banned in public spaces and b) cigarette lighters probably constitute a terrorist risk for our ever-paranoid spooks).

Of course, the young and not-so-young Take That fans are all holding up and pointing, disciple-like, their digital cameras and mobile phones to record the performance. There was a day when, if you walked into a concert with a video camera it would be confiscated. I wonder now that digital video recording devices are wallet- or pen-sized they've just given up and, even, see the YouTubing of the performance as more free advertising and buzz. Given that the official videographer gives a few good closeups camera-on-camera makes me think that music promoters, if not all educators, have understood that they can't stop what used to be the 'audience' becoming the 'co-producers'.

Generation Y isn't interested in watching any more. They want to participate, too. When you're teaching, running a meeting or training session today why not keep a tally of how much 'performing' you're doing compared to how much participating your 'audience' are. If Take That can manage 100% and 100% on both accounts, surely we can.

Online Communities: Conversational design

I'm really struggling with the overwhelming desire to sleep after a copious serving of carbs at lunch and more jetlag kicking in. Thankfully, I don't feel under too much pressure to report back on this superb rundown of what features make online communities tick. If you run, facilitate or are thinking of creating an online community then Pedro's two-part presentation is essential viewing. I've popped it in here for you:

Update: Pedro's got his updated presentation, available on Slideshare and in PDF, on his blog.

Part 1:

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Part 2

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