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….

 

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

 

Hoping for the iPlayer effect with social media?

Interesting article today from the Guardian – talking about the fact the BBC are planning a major website re-write with social media at the heart of things.  You can read the article here.

At Public-i where we do a lot of work using video for democratic projects we really saw a huge boost from the iPlayer – it seemed to take the use of video mainstream in a way that YouTube didn’t.  I know that YouTube created the social network but it was still something your children would do not you – iPlayer is used far more widely demographically speaking.  This is of course an impression – I will dig about in the Ofcom numbers next year to see what they say on this.

Anyway – if the BBC are making social media a central tenet of their new site then this could be the signal for all those councils and government agencies to start using new technologies far more systematically and with more confidence – lets wait and see shall we?

 

Facebook sign up Sport England….

Busy week as we had the kick off meeting for the Virtual Town Hall pilot as well as getting EU funding bids finalised. Both went well! I also met Liz Azyan who, part from being a huge source of knowledge about what people are doing online via her blog has the dubious honour of having actually persuaded me to try twitter – new widget on the side bar to celebrate!!

But this post is really about an intriguing article I read this weekend – I actually found it in The Times but couldn’t find a link – so here it is from marketing week.  But if you don’t fancy clicking on the link I can tell you that Sport England have signed a partnership deal with Facebook to create a sport hub on the platform to try and increase the number of people actually taking part in sport. Now, lots of things about this are interesting:

• Its the first major deal I have come across between Facebook and a government agency
• Its shows a lot of faith in the connection between the online and offline world – we’re not talking about getting people onto wii fit here – this is actual running around
• The article talks about the idea of a ‘hub’ – which seems to be a new kind of facebook furniture – but this is not yet clear

The quote from Facebook in the article talks about “using our social tool as a tool for social change” and this is perhaps the most interesting part of the whole thing.

Now – I have huge doubts about the integrity of an environment like Facebook when discussed in terms of social change. I think that underlying design assumptions are enormously important and I think that Facebook is based on the idea of selling advertising and not on the idea of helping people get away from their computers. However – like it or not Facebook is currently one of our largest networked publics (good article on this here) and as such we need to pay attention to this first foray by government into actually using it to effect social change.

PS  I couldn’t find an ‘official’ press release but will keep an eye out

PPS As you can see its a new look for the blog – I think theme browsing on WordPress may have been developed as the perfect time waster. Please feel free to let me know what you think of it!

 

Nothing better than a good debate…..

I had the excellent pleasure of someone not only having read my post on life leaks but then having them point out that I was contradicting myself at the very moment we were discussing it – it was such a good point that I didn’t even mind not having made it myself!!

We were talking about the fact that we plan to use OpenID as the login option on the platform being built for the Virtual Town Hall – and the fact that this will actually encourage life leak rather than helping control it. Good point!! But then I thought about it some more….

Personal Identity Management is exactly what it says – personal. It is your own responsibility and something which everyone will want to manage differently. OpenID is a tool for bringing your identities together into a single login which you can then control far more easily (just one password change and not dozens when you lose your laptop) but it doesn’t allow for much subtlety as yet as it really only deals with the registration part of things – it doesn’t allow you to present different part of your core data to different people and places which is what you really need to avoid the life leak problem.

Is this a reason not to use it? Absolutely not – it is an excellent development and a natural step in the evolution of proper identity management. But we should be very careful to make sure that people are away of the implications of using such a system and I think it throws more responsibility on us as architects of a new system to help people understand those implications.

 

Life leak – its a nasty business

I have always been rather careful about letting different parts of my life interact with other parts. My parents had limited contact with my friends, I still keep two mobile numbers (work/personal in case you wonder), I fret about how to categorise people on instant messenger and I never email friends from my work email address except in dire circumstances. To start with I am not sure why I was so structured about this but as time goes on I am increasingly relieved that I set things up like this as it means I have some choices when it comes to how I present myself online. With email addresses being the usual unique identifier that sends social networking and other apps rifling through your PC I find it really useful to choose consciously which address to use. So – I use my work email for my Facebook account – something that I consider to be a necessary evil as I am researching this stuff -and I keep it quarantined from my personal email. This should be enough to stop regrettable life leak and avoid friends and colleagues colliding but unfortunately this discipline is increasingly difficult to maintain as there is something rather brutal in rejecting someone’s ‘friend‘ request in Facebook land just because they don’t meet your zoning criteria and I now find the odd friend (or relative – they are even harder to ignore) on my Facebook page.

As I talk to people in Councils about social networking one of the first things I suggest is that they actually look for the people who are already doing it – after all officers are citizens as well and they should be your best advocate in the community. And this is not just good advice for Council’s – recent Useit research says the same thing for the commercial sector. 

But this suggestion throws the life leak problem into sharp relief and though I think it is very dangerous ground if people’s jobs are dictating what they can and can’t say in the personal life I think it becomes increasingly important that both sides of the equation – citizen/officer and council – are able to agree on some kind of social networking contract which will ensure that officers have enough latitude to be able to act as citizens on the wider social web but also understand what is appropriate from the Councils’ point of view. Now, in return for this the Council should get a huge increase in the number of people who are putting their message out on the social web but there are of course risks which I wasn’t going to elucidate here as you can probably list them yourself.

What I want to highlight is the fact that part of this social networking contract may have to be focused on talking about digital identity and talking people through the thought process of why you might want to keep a personal email address and what it means it talk about your council job on your Facebook page that uses your personal email as distinct from a work one. The best one of these I have seen so far is Carl’s draft from Devon CC but I still think this needs to go further.

Do you think I am worrying too much?

I think its essential that we release the huge potential around the use of social networks and freeing up officers to take a more direct role in their community conversations where they are also citizens is one way to do this. In fact – in the future – not doing this could be a limitation of their democratic rights. But if we don’t also support a more sophisticated view of digital identity this could get very messy indeed. If one of the necessary tasks of building a social web strategy is in bringing together a single relationship with the citizen in the same way as services have been focused around a single customer relationship then we need to think carefully if we want to make it possible, and perhaps desirable, for us to accommodate multiple identities within the system. It could be perfectly reasonable for a client of social services not to want to use the same identity for their citizen activities and the same could be true for officers / citizens.

I am not sure what the answer is here – and I think the technology is still evolving – but I do think the questions of identity and the associated life leak needs to be part of the debate around social web for Local Government.

 

Actual research results on this empowerment business

I went to an interesting seminar today at the CLG where Prof. Lawrence Pratchett and Dr Catherine Durose from De Montfort University talked about a recent systematic review they have carried out of a number of different empowerment tools.  You can find the full report on the CLG site and its excellent to see someone looking at stuff that has already happened rather than running around trying to start something new the whole time.

The research picks up 6 tools but the 3 of these I am interested in specifically are:

• Participatory budgeting
• Petitions
• eParticipation

I think in the research and discussion it was clear that the first two of these are far more tangible and as such can more clearly be evaluated.  eParticipation was not defined well enough for my liking and seemed to talk too much about eForums which is such a small part of the potential.  Where things did get interesting however was in talking about the link between empowerment and co-design – which is a connection I see very strongly.  Co-design seems to be a necessary part of empowerment but this brings a few problems that need addressing:

• Does Local Goverment really want to share power?
• Do the citizens really want to be shared with?
• What’s the role of the representative
• Is it sustainable

These are very much in common with the problems that I want to address within the virtual town hall approach – and this makes sense as the project is in some way a response to the empowerment agenda.

The seminar also made it clear to me how inadequate a tool based approach to empowerment is – you need a clear idea of what you want to create and a strategic vision for achieving this that goes beyond the tactical.  This worries me because we are not even starting to have the debate around this with decision makers even though those of us thinking about these issues knows its essential.  However much we prefer to do this by stealth we need to lobby and educate on a far wider basis if we are going to make these changes happen and I am not sure who is doing this or how it will happen – answers on the proverbial postcard please!!!!

PS  The other tools were Citizen Governance, Redress and Asset Transfer – also all very interesting but I do try and stay on topic when I can!!