Contemplating twitter

So…not an original topic as everyone interested in social media is currently navel gazing on the same subject but you can’t have a research diary without recording these thoughts…so here we go….current twitter status:  37 tweets in with 49 followers and following 85 people so its early days but my thoughts to date are:

• I like it – I like the sense that you can grab hold of the slipstream of a conversation and join it for as long as you want and then let go – and the fact that it is always there to dip into.  You would drive yourself mad by thinking you can listen to all the tweets but it’s fascintating to be able to tap into the stream on consciousness on demand
• This is a little dangerous as it means that you treat twitter like digital ephemera – but its not – its part of your digital footprint.  Are people not thinking about this or are they taking a ’secuirty through obscruity’ tack on this?  Given how little people think about digital identity generally perhaps its the latter.
• You have to remember that you are only listening to a tiny part of the world – because its fairly ‘loud’ in your digital set-up its easy to think its more important than it is – you need to have a sense of balance
• I know I am dull on the subject but twitter is made for real-time web which means an iPhone (or the like) would really help here….
• It can have a huge effect on blog readership - I have been tweeting new blog posts and there is a clear correlation in terms of readership.  No real sense as yet as to what makes this happen more or less – am currently just grateful that it happens at all!
• I wonder if the new twitter lists will help or hinder – perhaps by organising the ’stream of consciousness’ it becomes just another channel rather than something rather organic that you dip in and out of – but we shall have to see
• That being said – I am very intrigued by the idea of country or county lists – good article on tech crunch on this – as this has massive potential for Local Democracy
• I am following a few councils and the ones which I think work best actually seem to be thinking about what they tweet rather than repurposing existing RSS feeds

Will revisit this as a 100 tweet celebration to see if anything has changed….

 

Displacement activity…

Too much time at the desk results in a new theme for the blog…….an exercise in design based futility…..but I am sure the perfect theme is out there….

 

Easy Barnet – a new relationship with citizens?

I have been meaning to write this post for a couple of weeks – ever since I saw an excellent presentation on the work at Barnet at a session at the SOLACE annual conference.  the workshop was shared between Max Wilde (who in the Barnet lead for the project) and Nicola Millard (who is the excellently titled BT futurologist).  One of the striking things about this combination was the balance between commercial / public sector.  What also leapt out at me was the fact that much of the work at Barnet is highlighting the tension between residents as customers and residents as citizens.

The Local Democracy blog has a good post on this which is worth a read and they also quote at length from the latest Barnet report which you can find here. The folks at Barnet are obviously trying something fairly radical – and as part of that they really do seem to be trying to “create a new relationship with citizens.”  But I guess my interest here is whether they are trying to create ’super-consumers’ who are individually engaged in creating the best services for them as individuals or whether they are able to transcend the customer relationship and start a conversation about community and about shared resources – are they actually engaging in democracy?

The Public Sector clearly has to innovate – radically  – in order both the save money but more importantly to stay relevant to people’s lives.  Local Authorities should be at the forefront of this because local government is the only kind that actually feels relevant to most people’s lives.  However, to connect these innovations entirely with an efficiency agenda is a very bleak prospect.  Sometimes, things we want for our community will cost money.  Community is not just about services – it’s about the connections between people which go beyond services.  If we only seek to innovate and to engage people in talking about these services then we are ignoring the fabric of the community which connects it all together.

There is so much in the work at Barnet that warrants watching and considering.  But I do go back to my underlying belief that design assumptions really matter – and that if you design a space and a process around the idea of cost efficiencies then this will be what you get.  No-one can deny that there is a need to do this – the process of government needs to be cost-effective – but if this your only design assumption then I think that you end up with something colder and less inclusive than the communities which many people want to live in.

I think its very easy to be decieved by the social web – it feels like a place where the individual creates the space and where intellectual freedom is paramount.  However for many people that is something of an illusion – many people really only experience the social web within spaces like Facebook which are entirely engineered in order to support the ad revenues which support the site’s existence.  Now – you can say that this is a fair exchange – free sites with a few adverts – but I really want something better for my democratic spaces.

Not really sure where this post is going – perhaps I read too much Howard Rheingold at a formative point – but I will carry on musing on it……

 

 

Virtual Town Hall – October Project meeting

We had our second VirtualTH project meeting yesterday so this is just a short update on that.  The pilot is now full with Kirklees and Redbridge joining Chorley, Essex CC and North Lincs as pilot sites.  We are also lucky to have Carl Haggerty participate as a ‘critical friend’ on the technology strand which is hugely helpful.  We have got an excellent balance of sites in the pilot now and I will document them in more detail at a later date.  The addition of Kirklees is of particular interest as we are running the VirtualTH alongside their 21st Century Councillor project – which is a great fit.

For th pilot however the focus right now is on two things:

• Technical build – getting the pilot sites up and running
• Recruiting the community ambassadors who are going to actually make these sites work

The technical stuff is moving along well and we had a fairly complete demo – including Ady making good on our claim that you can build a new page in 10 minutes.  More on the sites in a month or so once the team have had chance to get each of the pilots properly set up.

However interesting the technology is (and it really is if you like that kind of stuff) it is, in my view, clear that this is not the difficult part of the project.  The real issue is of course in the social stuff.  We are approaching this as follows:

1. Carrying out a ‘social web’ audit so that we can get a picture of what is going on already.  We’re breaking activity into News / Council content  / Blogs & social reporters / Social networking.  This exercise has clearly shown which sites already have relationships with the social web presence in their area and where we need to start making those connections
2. Once we have this in place then we need to identify the community ambassadors – real people who are going to be involved in spreading the word about the project using social tools as well as moderating some of the content.
3. We then need to get a draft social web policy in place for use with citizens, officers and members

We are now planning workshops at each of the sites which will help bring internal and external teams together as well as briefing members and generally getting people ready to use the sites.

There were a number of interesting debates during the day but the one which really struck me was around the social web policy.  Firstly, we have decided to have the same document for use by the external content providers as for officers and members.  I think this is an important change as it points towards the sense of co-creation which we are trying to achieve but by combining the internal and external audiences we highlight the issue as to how possible it is for officers to participate as citizens.  When we asked whether people felt that they could express their personal opinions online there was, I felt, a real sense that whatever the policy said about officers being free to express their opinions if they did it in the appropriate way that no-one thought that it would ‘work’ to take a position which was, however constructively, in opposition to council policy.  And this is a huge problem – officers are amongst the most community minded and engaged individuals in the community and if they are effectively silenced online then not only is that not democratic it is also missing a big opportunity to encourage and increase democratic activity.  I think this is an issue which we will return to as we tease out what the idea of virtual civic space really means.

Finally, we all agreed that part of the ‘education’ process that we need to undertake is around digital identity management – it’s about helping people grow a civic persona and make some choices as to how they do that.  A more sophisticated approach on this will mitigate the officer/citizen dilemma as well as help allay concerns which also emerge around the customer/citizen axis.

Thanks again to all who took part – am looking forward to the workshops and also the promise of sausages and mulled wine at our next meeting!!

 

Smart phones by Christmas…..

Ok then – this is not just a continuation of my “I need an iphone” lament but here is a quick article on the BBC site talking about the growth of the smart phone market.

The striking quote is about the fact that mobile internet is poised for the kind of growth we saw for the internet as a whole in the late ’90s.  Mobile web means realtime practical applications which deliver data and service at the time and place of your choosing.  This is not just the rather rubbish read only world of WAP – it’s a potential entry point to augmented reality applications which are HUGELY interesting.  Imagine being able to get directions which are overlaid on the scene you are seeing – that’s augmented reality and it’s not a million miles away.  In my world – imagine being able to turn on a feed of local information that gives people the chance to connect to their local community.

Now – I don’t want to get all sci-fi on you but its worth looking at some of the work of William Gibson (hes the Neuromancer guy who coined the term cyberspace).  He’s been playing around with ideas around real/virtual world intersections for a while – check out Pattern Recognition for one.  Given that we now use one of his phrases as an everyday piece of language then its worth seeing what he thinks.  And if this is all a bit much then just try searching for augmented reality on the Wired website.

It’s easy to say that all this is far too much in the future and we need to concentrate of connecting more people the internet as it is and figuring out what it all means.  But we may not have the time to do this.  Mobile web has the possibility of overtaking PC/Mac web in terms of penetration into hard to reach groups (think of third world infrastructures that leapfrogged tradditional comms and moved straight to mobile) so we really need to think about democratic and social applications of these technologies now if we want to be at least on the curve.

Thats all a bit much for a Monday morning…time for a cup of tea I think……

 

Social Web Framework: Version 0.5

This post is really about trying to explain the mental framework by which I ‘organise’ the social web into different categories of behaviour and types of technologies. This is very much my own view but builds on frameworks and analysis by others which I referenced. I have written it as a glossary – please shout if you think it should have extra words or if you disagree / want to refine any definitions.

• I use Social Web rather web 2.0 or social networking sites as I think it best describes the collection of services and technologies which are used in order to connect people to each other and to provide social content. I think web 2.0 is too technical a term and social networking is restrictive as a site can be social without connecting people together into a network (take YouTube for example).

• Networked publics: This is a relatively new term which is being used to describe shared online spaces like facebook which can be see as shared communal spaces which are built around individual profiles rather than around specific interests. Danah Boyd has done lots of work on this and it is worth reading “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life”.
• And these are as distinct from Online communities which bring people together around specific topics or interests. Sites such as Ning support online community creation as the aim is to create membership based spaces which require a greater degree of commitment / involvement from the participants than a networked public.
• Blogs are a slightly different tool as they have more limited takeup and require far more effort than other social tools. Where they excel is in providing a simple to use yet rich online ‘home’ for social web users and you will often find that avid social web aficionados are also dedicated bloggers.
• Video and audio sharing sites are different again as these are in fact very transactional with the main social interaction being around commenting and rating content.

A useful history of these things can be found in another Boyd article “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. In particular I would draw attention to this quote which describes the move from online community to Social networks to networked publics:

“The rise of SNSs indicates a shift in the organization of online communities. While websites dedicated to communities of interest still exist and prosper, SNSs are primarily organized around people, not interests. Early public online communities such as Usenet and public discussion forums were structured by topics or according to topical hierarchies, but social network sites are structured as personal (or “egocentric”) networks, with the individual at the center of their own community. This more accurately mirrors unmediated social structures, where “the world is composed of networks, not groups” (Wellman, 1988, p. 37). The introduction of SNS features has introduced a new organizational framework for online communities, and with it, a vibrant new research context.”

More recently we have seen the rise of Real Time web services such as twitter or yammer which focus around the idea of the status update (Facebook was so concerned about this as to update their interface to embed the status update more centrally). These behave in a social way but have a far flatter structure than the networked publics and online community sites as you have two social choices – follow or not follow – rather than the more complex opportunities to create your online identity which are offered by other tools. The increased dominance of the iPhone and iPhone imitators are increasingly meaning that these real time social sites are being accessed rather ‘apps’ as well as through the PC which realises their earlier design goal which was linked to the 140 character limit of SMS.

In terms of how you might think of the social web as describing a ‘public sphere‘ you need to consider the difference between closed spaces which are seeking to be an online home for the users and the open networked spaces and real time services which are encouraging a free flow of information and debate between different groups rather than supporting the tendeancy to homegeneity within online communities. That being said, once action needs to be taken (for example democratic decision making) the greater social capital of the online community can be an important element in facilitating complex processes.

Ok then – that’s my view – please do say if you disagree……

 

Social contracts for social websites

Though I am getting very excited about the technology for the virtual town hall (sad I know) the real challenges are I think in the social elements of creating a permanent civic space – a local public sphere (yes – lots of Habermas read this weekend).   There are three main social challenges in my view:

• The need to involve community ambassadors and all the challenges that working with volunteers and community activists brings (as well as the challenges for them of working with government!)
• The need to find a way to unlock the dual roles of the council officer /  citizen and to help them to find a voice and a role in these new spaces
• The need to put in place a social contract that will let the civic space include unmoderated comments from external sites without compromising the quality or effectiveness of these spaces – and without becoming an unmanageable risk for government

This last one is the issue that I am focusing on most at the moment as we are currently finishing the social web audits for each pilot site and this means that we are starting to get a picture of the social web activity at each location.  With that in mind we can now start to approach community groups and individuals to ask them if they want to be involved and have their content connected to the Virtual Town Hall (VTH) – at the same time as accepting a ‘democracy widget’ for their site.

Now – I think it is critical that this content is not moderated in any way by the host (in this case the local council) as it is essential that the VTH space is co-created and not ‘owned’ by government.  All of the pilots agree this but there are still issues of risk and appropriateness to be managed as it is naive to think that the council can host this without some kind of  process in place to managed to type of content.  It’s all about balance.

Our solution will be in social web contracts which will be agreed with each of the sites which have a presence on the VTH.  The main elements of these contracts will be:

• A common code of conduct in terms of language and behaviour – all the usual stuff about not swearing , being constructive and not getting personal
• Something about the degree to which party politics should be involved – clearly these sites are political but one of the biggest concerns that we are hearing is the idea that the sites will fall into the trap of party political point scoring – and this is a legitimate risk that needs to be managed in some way
• An indication of what the social contract will achieve – what the council is offering in return.  This will be in the way of confirming access to politicians, assistance with process or perhaps just better feedback and information.  I think this element is one of the most important but will need a discussion on a site by site basis.
• A clear process for what happens if the contract is breached
• Some due diligence about IP and copyright etc

We will be basing some of this work on the existing social networking policies which are already in place (see post below) but obviously this is all fairly new and any views would be very welcome!

 

Social networking policies

I’m trying to get a list together of published social networking policies – or at least published drafts).  At the moment I have:

• Warwickshire
• Devon

I am sure I have more of these lurking in my inbox but would really appreciate hearing from anyone else who can add to this list.  Many thanks

 

#tal09 – good piece in the guardian

Good piece in the guradian about the Talk about Local unconference – you can read about it here.

Perhaps its my reaction to reading the Coleman book this weekend but I think this hyperlocalism is very important and very much the approach we are taking with the virtual town hall pilot.  You can read about the organisers here.

 

Literature Review of new Coleman / Blumler book: The Internet and Democratic Citizenship

I’ve just finished reading “The Internet and Democratic Citizenship; Theory, Practice and Policy (by Stephen Coleman and Jay Blumler) so this my research note for my literature review so there are some observations and then a wrap up from me….this is a long one so you may just want the highlights:

• The analysis of the problem of democratic deficit and political disengagement is excellent

• The authors are proposing a civic commons which is run by an arms length government organisation – something I am profoundly uncomfortable with

• There is a lack of sophisticated interpretation of the social web and the implications of the social connections between individuals – they are still talking about websites as destinations rather than feeds and individual control

• The idea of co-creation is not explored to the extent which I think it warrants.

For those of you with more interest in this here are the notes – or you can just jump to my conclusions.