Simon’s Blog (the official one)

If you are looking for the Coca-Cola campaign, the details are here.

OR go straight to the Facebook Group.

Thanks to Alan O’Flaherty for allowing me to publish his graphic here. He produced it to head his article in support of the Coca Cola rehydration campaign. See Will Coca Cola take up this challenge?

I am very pleased about this. Another first for a rural development conference in the UK. This will get the face-to-face networking at this year’s event off to a flying start.

We invite anyone to come and join us on the ruralnet|2008 crowdvine and invite your friends. It only takes a few moments to sign up and you can build your own network of friends, message them or comment on their profile, ask them questions - there’s already a car sharing conversation going on.

Please join us whether you’re coming to the conference or not.

This competition has really got me thinking . . . . here’s another idea.

What is your idea’s name
Neighbourhood Watch Widget
A short description of your idea
Making neighbourhood watch groups more effective by improving communications between members themselves and the police service.
Describe your idea. How does it work and who does it help?
Widgets are small areas on a website or blog which deliver information or services provided by a trusted third party. A good example is the JustGiving Fundraising Widget. This widget is tailored for the particular fundraiser and can be placed on his/her own website. The widget shows a progress bar (amount raised vs target), the comments made by the last 3 donors, information about the charity and a button to donate. See http://ruralnet.typepad.com/pride2007/ for an example

Neighbourhood Watch Groups are very effective at reducing crime, the fear of crime and increasing community cohesion. However they face real communication challenges especially when a large proportion of the community works away from the community (eg in rural areas) or do not have email or who are not online (eg the older members of the community living on their own).

The Neighbourhood Watch widget would deliver the following functionality to every community website, blog or neighbourhood watch website that wanted it. Its availability may even stimulate the creation of new community websites. This is what it would do:

1 - Allow website visitors to log incidents: petty crime, anti-social behaviour and suspicious activity in the neighbourhood
2 - Allow visitors to the website to register to receive notifications of such incidents in the following formats: email; RSS; SMS text to their mobile phone; SMS text-to-voice to their landline phone; via twitter
3 - Allow registered visitors to turn the notification facility off or pause it
3 - Display the last 5 incidents reported in the neighborhood
4 - Have a ‘Get Your Own Widget’ button which would take visitors to the central ‘widget generator’ and allow them to specify their location and get their own widget for their own website
5 - When someone registered an incident the widget would send the details to the Police. To do this the widget would need real-time access to Government data
6 - A beat officer (ha!) or Community Support Officer could also register to receive notifications to their mobile phones when they were on duty in a particular neighbourhood
7 - The widget would also indicate that if they are reporting an emergency they should call 999!

I’ve just submitted an idea into the competition recently announced by the  Power of Information Task Force - ‘Show Us a Better Way‘ - tell us what you’d build with public information and we could help fund your idea! Here’s the idea:

What is your idea’s name
The Widget Factory
A short description of your idea
Getting Governmnet Information and Services closer to citizens through existing websites serving communities of location and interest.
Describe you idea. How does it work and who does it help?
Widgets are small areas on a website or blog which deliver information or services provided by a trusted third party. A good example is the JustGiving Fundraising Widget. This widget is tailored for the particular fundraiser and can be placed on his/her own website. The widget shows a progress bar (amount raised vs target), the comments made by the last 3 donors, information about the charity and a button to donate. See http://ruralnet.typepad.com/pride2007/ for an example.

The Widget factory would demonstrate this approach for two or three Government Services with the objective of getting this idea ‘mainstreamed’ so that all future online Government services had a ‘make your own widget’ facility that could be used on a ’self-serve’ basis by bloggers or those who maintain websites for communities of location or practice.

We would ‘go with the stones that rolled’ and work with the Government Departments that were willing to collaborate but ideally would like to produce two widgets:

1 - ‘Tell Us Once’ about the birth of you child. This widget would be designed to be placed on any website where parents already gather: eg NetMums; Nursery and Schools websites etc
2 - The crime stats widget. We are always told that the fear of crime is higher than is warranted by the statistics. This widget would filter national statistics for a particular geographic area or interest group (eg older people) and display them next to the national average figures. This widget could be used on websites serving a particular geographic community or a particular target group (eg older people).

Let’s see what happens. Comment on this idea on the showusabetterway website.

I was pleased to be invited to the launch of the Commission for Rural Communities’ (CRC’s) 10th Annual ‘State of the Countryside’ report at the RSA on Wednesday.

The CRC had taken an interesting approach to the launch by inviting people from outside the rural sector to give short presentations. These were:

• Tony Travers, Director of the London School of Economics
• Joe Saxton, nfpSynergy
• Anthony Walker, CEO, Broadband Stakeholders Group

I know Joe and Anthony and both gave very interesting presentations. But it was Anthony’s remarks about ‘next generation broadband’ that really struck and chord.

He spoke using ‘average statistics’ and indicated that ‘things weren’t too bad’ in rural areas with respect to access to ADSL. And this is true but it’s very unfortunate if you are one of the ‘have nots’ like my Sister-in-Law.

Anthony also mentioned BT’s recent announcement (15/7/08) regarding the ‘UK’s largest ever investment in Super-Fast Broadband‘. Anthony said that he thought that the only hope for rural areas if it is to keep up and not get left behind, is collective community action. I couldn’t agree more.

But we have been here before. In 2002 ruralnet|uk and the Phone Co-op were the joint founders of the ‘Community Broadband Network‘ (CBN) this joined up amazing, community-led initiatives that were taking a DIY approach to internet access. This community action was triggered by the statement from BT at the time that they were not going to upgrade many exchanges in rural areas. CBN was growing fast and was not only providing a broadband service in their communities but also triggering all sorts of other community activity . . . shelters for young people, local history projects, community websites, community TV and so on.

However on 27/4/04 BT announced it was going to enable the majority of rural exchanges after all. Although this was probably good news at the time for most rural residents it completely undermined the community broadband projects. Only the very strongest of them survived. This was a huge loss. The sad thing is that these communities were delivering the broadband of the future (ADSL through telephone exchanges was always a stop-gap measure, a mechanism to keep BT relevant in the broadband market).

Now it looks like the only way rural areas are going to keep up is if they mobilise yet again and help themselves. Many will be reluctant given recent experience.

BT’s announcement of huge investments in Super-Fast Broadband is conditional and I quote: “Plans dependent on regulatory regime and certainty“. Well I think community mobilisation should be conditional too.

We need a clear strategy so that organisations like ruralnet|uk can mobilise and support communities with some certainty that the rug is not going to be pulled from under their feet (again).

Related articles:

The villagers of Vindeln, in remote northern Sweden, are digging up their own roads to lay fiber so that every resident can have broadband access.

Other broadband related articles in this blog.

No time to read the whole white paper? Here are the keywords in the Empowerment White Paper: Communities in Control in a single graphic.

You can download the full White Paper here (PDF, 1809kb, 157 pages).

This was produced using Wordle. The input text was from the core of the White Paper only. It excludes forewards and footnotes. The words ‘will’, ‘can’ and ‘also’ have been removed. Thanks to Steve Dale for drawing Wordle to my attention.

I was alarmed to hear a piece on the Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme this morning. It said that OfCom had reported that broadband uptake in rural areas was now higher than it is in urban areas and that ‘a digital divide’ had been closed. This is so misleading that it beggars belief and will do a lot damage to the efforts of those campaigning for broadband in rural areas.

I think the uptake figures quoted were 59% vs 57%. But, before everyone relaxes and says “job done” – especially those developing policies for Government - I’d like to point out one or two things:

1 Figures are higher in rural areas DESPITE the fact that there are a significant number of people who can’t get it, even though they are desperate for it. I wrote about this earlier – see this true story

2 So DEMAND is a lot higher in rural areas than urban areas but the market cannot supply to all those who want it

3 Why is demand so high? Well, there is a mix of reasons: less of the population is within reach of a public access point; you can’t just walk around the corner to access a service and more and more services (including government ones) are increasingly provided online and, furthermore, realistically, you need broadband to use them.

4 An urban person’s broadband is not the same as a rural person’s broadband. I expect these figures relate to the increasingly inadequate ADSL, telephone-based service. This service will not be considered to be broadband in 2-3 years time. I wonder how the figures would compare if you looked at the higher spec services, the non-ADSL services, the services we’ll all need in the very near future. I can tell you that the rural figure will be near to zero as these services are simply not available.

So please, let’s not take our eye of the rural broadband ball on the basis of a very, very misleading headline from the Today Programme.

Monday, April 28th, 2008
Broadband must be recognised as an essential service

Monday, December 17th, 2007
The trouble with rural broadband

Friday, April 30th, 2004
Rural Broadband - Is BT good for rural communities?

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.

(more…)

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.