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MySociety have launched their latest project – ‘Neighbourhood Fix-It'. Launched in partnership with the Young Foundation , and supported by the Innovations Fund, the project tests an online mapping tool that makes it easy for people to talk to their local authority and other local people about broken civic infrastructure in their neighbourhood. Check it out at www.neighbourhoodfixit.com
Live blogging from Social Tools for Business use
Combining Wikis and the Semantic web: moving toward Web 3:0 - Nick Kings, Next Generation Web Research
This is brain sprawl, no apologies it's a very escoteric presentation....
The Semantic Web - The coding of web pages has changed from describing form to descibing content, from HTML to XML. So for example we get RSS, my computer can now tell if there's something new on my favourite web site but it cares less what colour the page is.
With more data this can go further, we can add tags to data allowing computers to know more and more about that data and hence deliver it to us and link us to it in more and more intelligent ways.
This also allows new ways of modelling, searching and using the internet.
Imagine a search engine that could answer more complex questions and give a cogent answer not a million search results.
Imagine this applied to people, in a company of thousands of people how do you know who'd be interested, what meta-information is required to make a piece of knowledge findable to those people?
'People are the content, they make sites sticky' people go back to sites because they've engaged with others there... people are content with spontanaety and unpredictablilty.
90% of people on social sites are lurkers... so if you have 10 regular posters then you probably have 100 readers.
Knowledge Manglement
Questions to ask:
This leaves the question are knowledge and information the same thing?.... can knowledge exist outside our heads?
Apply these questions to your project and to the Muppett wiki??
Other Resources - Sheffield, Gate Ontoworld sekt project last fm
Live blogging from Social Tools for Business use
How technology is changing business and law, Justin Patter from Human Law
Legal issues:
Defamation - E-mail is more dangerous as a form than the Blog, there is an illusion of privacy with e-mails which isn't present with Blogs. Hence people are more careful with what they write in Blogs. Companies have been stung for what employees have written in personal blogs.
The Court of PR - Blogging has given individuals more scope to attack brands e.g. linking to negative stories. Bad press for the company Baker McKenzie dominates Google search results after they got into a fight with the influencial blog Boing Boing
Ruth Ward , Allen and Overy - Entries on Wikipedia are just as important as results on Google, it's seen as a source of expert knowledge.
Legal resources - Dennis Kennedy Human Law
Today and tomorrow I'm attending a conference 'Social tools for Business Use: Web 2.0'. The speakers today included many ground breaking figures who've worked and continue to work to use on-line technologies and approaches innovatively in their field. These include Euan Semple who developed the use of social tools internally in the BBC and Lee Bryant who co-founded Headshift who work with Demos, Involve, the Power Enquiry and Patient Opinion among others.
There was much of interest, and I'll blog more fully on the individual speakers tomorrow. The discussion included a good balance of the practical (particular tools, specific approaches), the theoretical/big picture (what is web/enterprise/management 2.0) and case studies (that IBM are having business meeting in Second Life was the least impressive thing I learnt about the social tools they're using to work together).
Perhaps one problem I've had so far is around scaling. Most of the presentations came from people working for corporates and the message that social tools 'are those which unlike traditional tools improve as more people use them' was strong. I was struggling at times to translate this back to the view from an SME. Clearly IBM need a good tool which tells you who you're video conferencing with in any given meeting, what they look like and what time zone they're in with real time translation from English to Japanese but I can just shout at my collegues if I need their attention. Badgering each speaker about it in the Q&A helped broaden the discussion out of the corporate sector.
For more detail on the individual speakers check Roo Reynolds, he's a 'Metaverse Evangelist' at IBM, which if nothing else is a very cool job title. He gave a talk about virtual worlds, I was quite taken with it but was brought sharply to earth when I got home logged onto to Second Life thinking I could go and check out the IBM innovation center and the viewer promptly ate all my system resources and (briefly) killed my laptop. He's also live blogging from the conference.
More tomorrow...
Having suffered in the polls from recent criticism for not having any detailed ideas, French Presidential hopeful Segolene Royal came out fighting yesterday with a list of 100 policies.
They have been developed following a substantial public consultation using a wide range of communication and engagement tools.
Amongst her proposals were ones for regular citizen's juries and for up to 10% of public spending to be determined by public referendum.
Some of the media has reported this as populist rhetoric. However, the fact that a major French Presidential candidate is emphasising community engagement, not just for the way they develop policies but also for some of the policies themselves, is a major departure from the centralised French republican tradition.
With her principal opponent stressing views on this too, the political choice the public face is likely to thrust community engagement into the centre of mainstream political debate in the coming months, which can only be a welcome development.
1, http://www.barackobama.com/
For a good example of a political web site which is taking full use of social networking check out Barack Obama's site. Both Obama and Hillary Clinton announced their candidacy for the Democratic nomination on their websites which is perhaps a small land mark in the mainstreaming of the internet as a communication platform.
The social networking opportunities are I'd imagine particularly important to Obama given he's an outsider without the big money and institutional support of Clinton. Web 2.0 sites such a YouTube, Flickr and FaceBook all of which he links to from his site provide ready made infra-structure for at least the networking part of grassroots movements and campaigns. They also provide access to young people only 24% of whom voted in 2004 (and that was a good year). I hope he gets the nomination if only because I can't see Hillary mobilising a huge youth vote.
2, http://www.tom-carden.co.uk/p5/tube_map_travel_times/applet/
A re-imagining of the Tube map with travel time factored in. Quite practically useful and made me think that the about the possibilites for personalising maps and route finders are offered by computerisation are still immense. Multimap, google maps and sat navs are surely only the beginning.
3, http://www.thankyoutony.com/index.html
I'm having difficult working out whether this is real or final and unequivocal proof that Americans have a subtle sense of irony which has been cruelly denied by the rest of the world.
I took part in my first Open Space (OS) conference last week, at the first ever South East regional Participation Workers Network event. In fact, before the event there wasn't officially a SE regional network – ‘Open Space Technology’ was used to find out if indeed their was a demand for a SE network, and if there was, what it should look like; what it should do; how it should work, etc etc. I have to admit that I was a little sceptical about the idea of OS to begin with. As the facilitator gathered us in a circle (everyone is equal in OS) and asked us to close out eyes as she explained the principles behind it, I did wonder whether I should take the opportunity to scarper there and then and save myself from this hippy nonsense.The main principle is the 'Law of Two Feet', i.e. if you're neither contributing nor getting value where you are, use your two feet and go somewhere where you can. From this law flow the four principles of:
· Whoever comes is the right people
· Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
· Whenever it starts is the right time
· When it's over it's over
My conscience got the better of me though and I decided to try to be Open Minded about Open Space. I listened, learned, participated, and found that it was actually rather interesting…
In an OS a facilitator explains the process and participants are then invited to co-create the agenda and host their own discussion groups. Discussions are held in breakout spaces with participants free to move amongst them. Each group records the discussionsand at the end of the day the full group reconvenes for comments and reflection.
Open Space basically provides a simple means to self-organise.The idea is that people who attend have chosen to be there and are willing to contribute, so people who care about the subject will come together to discuss it. Lots more info and examples can be found at www.openspaceworld.org
A couple of months ago I blogged about the renewal of community justice in Bolivia, where local community groups decide the fate of the offender. (see Justicia comunitaria - a lesson from Bolivia?) It now seems that a similar scheme is being piloted in South London.
Community groups will now have the opportunity to tell courts about the impact of crime in their areas, in an attempt to bolster confidence in the judicial system. This scheme was announced by Harriet Harman, who is also introducing a 'community payback' scheme to give local residents the chance to decide what projects should be carried out by offenders.
To read the article in full go to 'Community groups have their say in court along side victims'
‘Global Cool’, a new 10 year environmental initiative was officially launched earlier this week. The idea of the campaign, says its founder Dan Morrell, is that:
‘Over the next 10 years the solutions-based campaign of Global Cool will be launching a series of educational and entertaining programmes, and inspirational and upbeat global events, aimed at empowering individuals to make a difference.’
The campaign is backed by a host of celebs who plan to ‘bring entertainment to the environment, put on shows and make programmes and send you playful texts and generally sing to you and tell you stories and tease you until you care.’ The website’s quite fun – particularly like the ‘CoolTube’ video section.
As part of it's on
going relationship with Connexions South Yorkshire, The Campaign
Company recently worked to organise a reception for the public and
non-profit sector in South Yorkshire called 'Getting ready for V'.
The purpose of the
event was to introduce organisations to V, the new charity which is
replacing Millennium Volunteers as the national framework for youth
volunteering. Vs goal is to work in partnership with the public and
private sector and with voluntary and community sector organisations
to develop and share best practice in and increase opportunities for
youth volunteering, particularly in deprived communities. The charity
is launched with £50 million of funding to help organisations
build new volunteering projects and extend existing ones.
David Miliband MP, the
Minister for the Third Sector was the key note speaker at the event,
in his address he commented that:
'Youth volunteering is
a huge part of the solution to many of the problems in our society,
it builds bridges between generations'
and
'V represents a huge
opportunity to build up our communities'.
Rod Aldridge the chair
of V commented that:
'V will be trying to
change the attitudes of young people to volunteering and to rebuild
communities'
Philip Udah a young
trustee of V also outlined the 'youth fund', a section of funding
specifically available to young people to set up their own projects.
Through involving young people continually in the development of the
charity and it's on-going management as well as through initiatives
such as the 'youth fund' V is striving to be youth led and
innovative.
V represents a new and substantial injection of money, energy and political impetus into youth volunteering nationally. The only question left to those of us working in public or private organisations around the country is do we rise to this challenge and make use of this great opportunity?
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