Simon’s Blog (the official one)

During my secondment for CLG it would be so easy to get engulfed by the government machine and become invisible to the very people that I need to help me from both inside and outside government.

So I intend to use the internet as my workbench, or should I say, our workbench. Subject, of course, to not embarassing anyone or breaking the Official Secrets Act (more of a challenge) which I signed today.

My colleague, Paul Henderson, has been building the vice for the workbench - no pun intended - a nice little Drupal installation, a la ‘Open Innovation Exchange‘, where I will be keeping a diary, begging for insights, case studies, opinions etc. I’ll also be aggregating anything tagged web24gov (#web24gov for Twitter users) so please start tagging now! I want everything, del.icio.us bookmarks, blog posts, podcasts, video, tweets, the lot. Nick Booth, Steve Bridger, Ed Mitchell, David Wilcox, Tom Steinberg, Dave Briggs, Ben Whitnall, Paul Webster et al are you listening? Please get tagging! The vice will in place very shortly.

I’m trying to go into this without any preconceptions, except one, and that is that anything the government does should build on what’s already there . . . existing initiatives, services, ideas, opinions, knowledge and people doing good things. Starting next Tuesday. Looking forward to it!

The Tweeters amongst you will already know that I have been offered (and accepted) a secondment to Communities and Local Government (the Department of) as ‘Policy adviser: new technologies & online tools’ in the Community Empowerment Directorate. Grateful thanks go to Jonathan Adams who emailed me 6 hours before the application deadline saying:

Dear Simon
I saw this and thought of RuralNet. You may well know of this, but I
would not want it to pass by unnoticed.
Very short notice, but I have seen it only this evening.
Yours,
Jonathan

I’m very excited about this as it is a real opportunity to influence government policy with a White Paper due in the summer.

I’ll be using all the trusted open innovation principles on this one. I’d be a bit daunted if I didn’t know that my ‘pop-up’ support network will do just that once I get started. The job description follows. More at the beginning of next week.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I met up with David Wilcox (designingforcivilsociety and socialreporter) last week he spoke enthusiastically about his work programme this week which included providing a live and online dimension to face to face events. He coined the phrase ‘the online plugin for events’ which I thought was a neat way of summing it up.

So yesterday, David teamed up with Dave Briggs and they added the live and online dimension to the Digital Inclusion conference and they sum up the experience here:

Dave has documented the process here.

It’s great that they used our new Networks Online technologies and techniques as a foundation for this and integrated Twitter Feeds using Hashtags, live Video using Qik and more. As one of the people who couldn’t be there, it was great to catch the mood of the event and hear people talking about Experts Online (and seeing the banners in place). It was also good to see old friends like Dave Carter of Manchester City Council. See the whole plugin here: dc10plus.socialreporter.net.  This is what Peter Farell and Julie Mitchell of UK online centres said about their work (note the Experts Online mention).

Today David is providing a ‘plugin’ for Innovation Exchange event. And again it’s on Networks Online here: inex.socialreporter.net.

My sister-in-law lives in what must be one of the remotest spots in England. When we visit we leave our car on a grassy knoll and switch to a very old 4×4 for the last couple of miles of the journey which takes about 20 minutes.

Life for her is hard. She has a telephone thanks to the ‘Universal Service Obligation‘ but when this goes wrong it’s often out of order for several weeks. There is no mobile phone signal. TV comes in by satellite.

Internet access is over the dodgy telephone line. She can only get dial-up access so it’s slow and the telephone line is (obviously) engaged when she is online.

My sister-in-law visited us last week and I helped her setup a new laptop. The one she has is more that 6 years old and was beginning to struggle a bit. We got the laptop home and started to set it up. It came with Windows Vista. The first thing you realise is that, to set up a laptop these days, you need an internet connection. We have broadband. The first thing to do was to install virus protection. This involved dowloading an update to the program supplied and the latest data files. Once this was done, Vista needed updating too: 37 updates were required - nearly 100 Mbytes.

This whole process would have been practically impossible over a dial-up connection.

When you add to this the fact that more and more essential public services are only available online you start to feel very uncomfortable (or at least you should) that a significant cohort of the UK’s population, mostly rural, do not yet have broadband access.

While she was with us, I also set my sister-in-law up with an account on Twitter. Which she seems to appreciate (see image). At least there are still some services that work over a dodgy dial-up connection.

After experimenting with blogging for some months now, I am convinced of its value and I am moving to the next stage. I’ve split private stuff from professional and this is the professional one. “The CEO’s Blog”.

So what does a CEO’s blog need? Well, it needs more than the odd blog post with my view on something in it. My work colleagues need to know what I’m up to not just what I think. I need a mini-blog, to complement the core content, for short snippets of information.

This is how my mini-blog works. I have a Twitter account where my ID is @51m0n. On Twitter I signed up to ‘follow’ @hashtags. Over at the #Hashtags website I checked and found that nobody was using the hashtag #51m0n. This means that whenever I put these characters: #51m0n in a Twitter item (a tweet) it appears here: hashtags.org/tag/51m0n/ and, yes, you’ve guessed it, this page has an RSS feed on it. The feed is: hashtags.org/feeds/tag/51m0n/.

I then came to this, my lovely ruralnet|online Wordpress MU blog and I added an RSS widget to the sidebar and told it to keep an eye on the 51m0n feed from Hashtags.

So, now if I want to place a item in my mini-blog I simply type a tweet in Twitter and include the characters #51m0n. Brilliant!

An extra refinement is that I use Quickeys on my PC and Mac and I’ve set things up, in Quickeys, so that pressing <Windows Key><Alt>£ automatically types  #51m0n and adds the time and date.

Ah, the beauty of Web 2.0.

collaborate|2008 had a real buzz about it but it’s still reassuring to see some sort of official analysis. Here is the data. Thanks to everyone who took part. We’ll be doing it again next year. Next year we will be asking people to contribute to the venue costs . . . unless we can find a sponsor.

All the insights gathered in the co-design exercise that we have conducted here - www.ruralnetonline.org.uk - have been pulled together to produce a prototype for ruralnet|online 2.0. This prototype is a fully working system for the Rural Community Carbon Network and is live here: www.communitycarbon.net. It was launched at collaborate|2008 on 10/4/08. Click on the image above to view an annotated screenshot which describes each area of the ‘root’ page.

The Community Carbon Network is truly innovative and draws on the ideas expressed here over the last 3 months. The key factors that guided this implementation are:

1. - a recognition that in any interest area (such as rural development) there is already lots of activity going on that is being carried out by individuals and organisations;
2. one cannot expect the online elements of this activity to stop or move to another online place;
3. there has always been a lack of ‘joining up’ within any interest area but Web 2.0 technology provides new opportunities to greatly improve this situation;
4. As well as linking existing activity up, we have a role, a duty even, to provide the ‘means of production’ to anyone or any organisation who wishes to contribute to an interest area that we support. The means of production include the technical tools and online space but also the awareness and skills to participate effectively;
5. Web 2.0 technology empowers the individual and small organisation. It is very accessible, easy to learn and disentangles content from the way that content can be used and delivered to users. Joining with others into groups or coalitions is no longer a pre-requisite to taking effective action. Increasingly there is trend for groups to form in an ad hoc fashion based on the ability, that Web 2.0 provides, to identify and aggregate people, ideas, services and information based on what individuals and small organisations are actually _doing_ at any particular moment in time.
6. Providing web space and the essential tools to those who need them now costs very little once systems are in place to largely automate the whole user registration process. So we should continue to focus on:

• the delivery of online services not online systems (such as Experts Online, xPRESS Digest, Active Brokerage etc)
• the empowerment of individuals, groups and organisations so that they can participate in the new online world through awareness raising, training and ‘as required’ support services

So, what does the Community Carbon Network (CCN) look like and what does it do?

We have pulled together various bits of technology and techniques to create the CCN. This same set of technology and techniques will form the basis of ruralnet|online 2.0 and we are able to replicate this for any other network. Each network will have its own domain name and branding and will share the services and other resources. This continues the ‘Networks Online‘ philosophy established in 1998.

At the heart of CCN is Wordpress Multi-User (WPMU) running on servers we manage and backup. Each network has a ‘root’ site at: www.owndomainname. Then you can set up as many sub-sites/blogs at userid.owndomainname as you need (up to 20,000).

At the time of writing the CCN has: www.communitycarbon.net as the ‘root’ site:

and we have one sub-site configured as an individual’s blog at: lowcarbondiary.communitycarbon.net

and one sub-site configured as website: rccn.communitycarbon.net

All sub-sites operate in their own right and the owners have complete control of all aspects of them. They are likely to be marketed using their own sub-domain name url. Sub-sites will also be abl;e to incorporate shared services eg direct feeds from xPRESS Digest or access and/or registration for the Experts Online service.

A Green Bar helps tie all the sites within the network together. This contains a link to the ‘root’ site; a drop down lists all the sub-sites and a link to the latest posting over the whole of the network in contained in the Green Bar.

The ‘root’ site is controlled by the network manager. It is an ‘aggregator’. It is setup to pull together the latest activity from all the sub-sites (blogs and websites). It also pulls in other relevant activity going on elsewhere. For example, Twitter users can place insights, thoughts, hints and tips straight on to the aggregator page from ‘within’ Twitter. The aggregator page for CCN also pulls in relevant news from xPRESS Digest and answers from Experts Online.

Root pages for any network will morph and evolve organically according to network needs and the success (or not) of specific external feeds. The external feeds used and the filters applied will be modified as the network grows.

Finally, the root page includes a custom search. At present this is based on the Google Custom Search which is configured to search all of the sub-sites/blogs associated with the network, Experts Online, xPRESS Digest and selected, key external sites. Again the scope of this search will modified according to the needs of the specific network.

For more details on how the system works or to explore how this methodology could be applied to your network please contact Rob Mannion on 0845 1300 411 or r[dot]mannion[at]ruralnet.org.uk

Thanks to everyone who has contributed so generously to this co-design process. We have invented something new that wasn’t there before!

This mp3 file (ruralnetonline.mp3) is the audio to the Powerpoint presentation I gave with Paul Henederson at collaborate|2008. This will be published as a slidecast on Slideshare shortly.

Additional information:
The slidecast is now available here.

I am still very much on a learning curve when it comes to Web 2.0. But when I was further down the curve and struggling for ways to track and aggregate things I wrote this post: Call Sign - Blog Sign?. The suggestion was that each blogger should have a unique-ish ‘tag’ and  then scan the internet (= set up RSS feeds) to aggregate everything using this tag. This way if Blogger A wanted to call his or her post to the attention of Blogger B, Blogger A would attach Blogger B’s tag to the post. I still think this is neat idea.

But anyway, the #hashtags initiative by the Downtown Cartel does something similar for groups of people using Twitter. This is how it works:

1. Think of a tag - eg ‘ruralnet’
2. Let everyone in the ruralnet group know you are using this tag for items that may be of interest to them
3. Get these people to ‘follow’ #hashtags on Twitter
4. As a ‘member’ of the ‘ruralnet’ group you can now include: #ruralnet in a Twitter item and it will pop up here: http://hashtags.org/tag/ruralnet/ together with all other Twitter items (irrespective of who posts them) containing the characters: #ruralnet

You can also take an RSS feed from http://hashtags.org/tag/ruralnet/ and pull this into your community website.

With all this in place the whole ‘ruralnet’ community can post interesting items to the ruralnet community website via Twitter. Cool.

See the #hashtags website for interesting ways in which this has been used to help coordinate disaster relief.

Here is my presentation of the new version of ruralnet|online delivered at collaborate|2008 on 10/4/08. Sorry that the audio is a but stuttery . . . I need more practice. but anyway I think it is still helpful.

[Addendum: at one point I say we had 40,000 users. I should have said 4,000 users and this is the number on the slide.]

If the slide transitions don’t work automatically for you, you will have to advance them yourself. Or, you can go to slideshare and watch it there.

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