Posts Tagged ‘Help Me Investigate’

Stuff I've seen June 16th through June 19th

Posted on 19th June 2009 by

These are my links for June 16th through June 19th:

  • Helpful Technology – New Ministry new website – From idea to live site took less than 72 hours, including signoffs – a thoroughly enjoyable collaboration between former DIUS and BERR people, led by Neil.
  • The Guardian’s tool to crowdsource MPs’ expenses data: time to play | Online Journalism Blog – So here’s The Guardian’s crowdsourcing tool for MPs’ expenses. If you’ve not already, you should have a play: it’s a dream. There are over 77,000 documents to get through – and in less than 24 hours users have gone through over 50,000 of those. You wonder how long it took The Telegraph to get that far.
  • Birmingham Social Media Cafe – Flick to page 29 of this month’s copy of Wired UK and you’ll see we got a mention as part of an article looking at free-form workplaces. Which was very nice of them.

    The next meet-up is on 10am to midday, Friday 26 June downstairs at the Coffee Lounge. Feel free to just turn up on the day but it’d be nice if you could sign up on one/all of:

  • Councils of the country unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! « Policy and Performance – The essence is that councils challenge and help each other to help them get out of difficulties or ideally prevent it before it happens. We do a lot of that already through peer challenge and review, mentoring and ‘loaning’ staff to authorities in trouble. However, taking this to the next level where it’s not just a ‘nice to do’ but the whole of local government is committed to it, is a major challenge.
  • BBC – The Editors: Social media in Iran – What really stands out is the range of sources, voices and angles to be looked into. There's no hierarchy: everything's on merit, and there is of course a new set of challenges for our staff – chiefly editorial challenges, as well as a kind of chase as social media services appear and disappear in what The Times' Judith Evans describes as "an electronic game of cat and mouse".

Interesting things including Quiet Riots and Social Network Analysis in Journalism

Posted on 11th May 2009 by
  • Community Consultancy « Sociability – there’s far more to Twitter (and Facebook) than brand awareness and self-promotion. In engaging with a community of peers, I gain not just a media channel but an educational resource too. Much like a guild or professional association, Twitter allows me to build my own network of specialists with whom I share knowledge and swap industry insights. It allows me to build my own personal “guild” directed entirely to the skills and industries that interest me. They can teach me how to do my job better, whatever my job happens to be today.
  • Online Citizenship for young people – e-safety project ideas : Tim’s Blog – Brent LSCB have long been leaders in the drive to encourage every local authority to have an e-safety group within their Local Safeguarding Children Boards – and in encouraging organisations working with young people to have e-safety co-ordinators. Refreshingly their focus has not just been on a narrow definition of e-safety and safeguarding – but they have pro-actively recognised the importance of supporting young people to thrive online and be active online citizens as a means to promote online safety. And they have been very kind in letting me share the project and strategy ideas we developed.So – here is Citizenship for Young People: promoting e-safety through promoting opportunity – proposals for positive project as a PDF download.
  • Regeneration – Cities and regions – Communities and Local Government – A clear definition of regeneration – ‘Reversing economic, social, and physical decline in areas where market forces will not do this without support from government’.
  • www.quietriots.com – With the technology we have at our fingertips there are new ways to organise ourselves to get change to happen. Being “Mad as hell” is often where it all starts. Quiet Riots is in development
  • Uncloaking Economic Terrorists: a Slumlord Empire – A small, not-for-profit, economic justice organization [EJO] used social network analysis [SNA] to assist their city attorney in convicting a group of “slumlords” of various housing violations that they had been side-stepping for years. The housing violations, in multiple buildings, included:1. raw sewage leaks
    2. multiple tenant children with high lead levels
    3. eviction of complaining tenants
    4. utility lines of six figures

    The EJO had been working with local tenants in run-down properties and soon started to notice some patterns. The EJO began to collect public data on the properties with the most violations.

Stuff I've seen March 29th through March 31st

Posted on 31st March 2009 by

These are my links for March 29th through March 31st:

  • The fundamental media bias | The Democratic Society – " “narrative bias” – the fact that newspapers favour reportage that create narratives over stories that are factual. The strong narrative line is that we’re in a uniformly disastrous situation, and the PM, or Obama, or whoever, can personally shift the global economy for good or ill. The weak narrative line – as ever – is that it’s very complicated and hard to read the signs "
  • The power of serendipitous findability and the end of bullshit – "Why am I more optimistic now than at any time in my life? Because I think we’ve never had such good small-group making tools or such good information-connecting tools. We’re developing a global social nervous system. As a result, I think bull-shit is in trouble.
    And it’s all because of serendipitous findability—the odds that you will fortuitously connect with someone you don’t know but share an interest with, or the odds that you will learn something timely or surprising or valuable to you."
  • Matt Lock Commissioning for Attention Part 1 – Read Me! « TEST – "‘commissioning for attention’, a phrase I’ve been using for a while to describe what I do at Channel 4 Education. I hate phrases like ‘360 content’ or ‘multiplatform’, as these encourage people to get hung up on technology or to have a box-ticking mentality to where ideas can exist, rather than really focusing on users and understanding what they’re doing."
  • Wirearchy · Hierarchy is a Prosthesis for Trust … – Just to quite: :We are increasingly using attraction and negotiation to arrive at what needs doing, by whom, for when and with what. Many (but certainly not all) areas of economic and societal activity still operate with traditional hierarchy, and more and more often the trust it offered or symbolised is being betrayed in order to serve the interests of those who hold the power. History suggests that 1) it has ever been thus, but / and that 2) when practiced to excess, dire consequences eventuate."
  • Ten Tips For Creating a 21st–Century Classroom Experience – Tessy Britton writes about David Barrie's ideas on what would create a great classroom experience, including:

    "2. Create from relevance. Engage kids in ways that have relevance to them, and you’ll capture their attention and imagination. Allow them to experience the concepts you’re teaching firsthand, and then discuss them (or, better yet, work to address them!) instead of relying on explanation alone.
    3. Stop calling them “soft” skills. Talents such as creativity, collaboration, communication, empathy, and adaptability are not just nice to have; they’re the core capabilities of a 21st-century global economy facing complex challenges.""

    Great read