These are my links for December 1st through December 3rd:
Thinking Big – the cabinet office use Bebo to harness ideas. – “In total we received over 12,000 votes across all polls in reply to questions on how to improve schools, concepts of identity and whether Britain ought to have a death penalty.”The polls, in turn, drove young people to want to contribute more on a serious debatable topic. Rather than giving a simple yes or no answer they commented to explain their opinions and provide new ideas. In total the Bebo profile page had 6,798 comments while the Big Think teaser video that was added to the Bebo homepage was viewed 1,592,643 times.
Delib’s Local Authority Audit | Delib Blog – “Here is a general report on our findings with an overview of online consultation pages in local authorities and top tips we have formulated from our research . Individual authorities have been sent their own audits – which we hope will prove useful in finding opportunities to improve their online public consultation and engagement.”
Talk About Local » Government data on the ground, making a difference – The challenge for John Denham’s Department is to get local authority held data published and then stimulate creativity in truly local applications of national and local data sets. There are some simple and cheap ways – a competition with small prizes for good ideas, run a hack day with say the LGA or Dave Briggs.
www.north-wales.police.uk/balanceyourbobbies is a really simple way that people living in North Wales can help their police force set local priorities for neighbourhood policing. You are given a choice of priorities (set by the public) and then able to assign resources to them. The priority that averages the greatest amount of support where you live gets turned into a job for the local police.
It’s an extension of the idea of Neighbourhood Tasking, where police and public meet to set priorities.
Ian Davies – the Programme Director for Citizens Focus in the force – explains how it works and how he hopes it will help.
I have to say I am very proud of how open West Midland’s Police is embracing the possibilities of social media. They have been ahead of many forces with early use of podcasting in the form of Plodcast, getting officers using Facebook, widespread us of Youtube and Twitter. More importantly they are impatient to learn and, I think, willing to accept mistakes along the way.
Assistant Chief Constable Gordon Scobbie was keen to stress that different forces should learn from each other as quickly as possible. I think he was hinting at a competitive between forces which would be best set aside, instead collaborating to make good use of social media.
The web itself sets the example for this. Why sit in a darkened room invesnt a who new governance policy about social media (should you need such a thing) when others have already shared there’s: www.socialmediagovernance.com.
He also recognises the potential culture clash between an organisation structure around control and the problem that the web can’t be controlled in the same sense.
Chief Inspector Mark Payne and I first met properly when we both spoke at an Association of Police Press Officers event in June. Last week his first blog post threw a challenge out to all the forces in the country:
Nobody is going to be confident in an organisation who they don’t hear from, and who they can’t engage with.
Why then are many police forces so reticent to engage in social media? I have spoken to people involved in policing up and down the country, and I am genuinely amazed at the real fear that there seems to be around blogs, Twitter and Facebook. We are still in the position where the majority of Forces do not have a meaningful web presence.
I have a theory that people have become a little bit seduced and scared by the technology involved in social media. In my experience though, there are no dark secrets associated to the web, IT IS JUST ANOTHER FORM OF COMMUNICATION!
One of the other people there was PC Ed Rogerson of North Yorkshire Police. He tweets his job:
For him it’s a simple way of raising his visibility – people can see he’s working even though they can’t see him. It is all start on what might turn out to be a powerful new way of police relating to communities.
Sarah Lay » Blog Archive » Social networking for councils – "Carl Haggerty of Devon County Council had re-branded social networking as business networking in order to get chief officers to look past what they thought they knew toward the potential of such a system."
Changing the acoustics for citizens’ voices – Neighbourhoods – initiatives imply significant changes to the acoustics for citizens' voices. Organised community action – in meetings around the town as in Castleford or (especially) online as in some of William's examples – is starting to bring about a far more audible articulation of local people's views and experience than we have had before. And don't be fooled by the rhetoric from above, which to use Alison's phrase tends to mean 'big people not listening': much of it is in spite of, not because of, official action.
A Manifesto for the Social Organization | The Idea Hive – "We are entering the era of the social organization, because, like a school of fish, or a swarm of bees, a social organization fluidly dances with the ever changing music that engulfs it, rather than trying to control it. For, as shown by the story of King Canute trying to hold back the tide, attempted control over elemental forces is ultimately futile. Change is on the way."
Ordnance Survey maps to go free online | Technology | guardian.co.uk – "Brown's announcement comes after Ordnance Survey said, earlier this year, that moving to a free model would cost between £500m and £1bn over the next five years. But a separate study, by a team at Cambridge University, commissioned by the Treasury, found that making all OS data free would cost the government £12m and bring a net gain of £156m."
Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing? — Times Labs Blog – "This is the graph the record industry doesn’t want you to see. It shows the fate of the three main pillars of music industry revenue – recorded music, live music, and PRS revenues (royalties collected on behalf of artists when their music is played in public) over the last 5 years."
Start | AWMist – Advantage West Midlands uses open street map to bring together different businesses. "AWMist has information about several thousand ICT and electronics businesses, research institutions, and other organisations in the West Midlands. It fosters collaboration by helping businesses to find partners in the area."
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