Tag: blogging

New small tools for better government, horrid pdf's and the Power of Information Report in Beta

You’ve got two weeks to get your thoughts into the Power of Information Report.  They’ve offered it up on wordpress to allow people to start commenting. Compare this with how the same group were presenting information a year ago.Two chunks from the summary give you a flavour:

The public sector can play a valuable role in adding expert advice to support discussions online as long as it respects the context of the discussion.  This is a culture shift for people who work in public services and for civil servants in particular.  The Taskforce makes recommendations to help this culture shift and make more transparent the public sector’s attempts to engage online, which we think public servants should do as a matter of course.

and

Now is the ideal time for the public sector to acquire new skills and practices required to follow through the innovative approaches the Taskforce recommends.  Early signs from the Obama administration in the USA suggest that digital innovators in the Administration are thinking along about re-use of data along the lines above.  When mainstreaming any innovation, systemic culture and behaviour change is required. The Taskforce makes a range of recommendations to enable and embed those changes.

Tom Watson and  Richard Allan should be proud of where they are at.  Secretly Brum can also be. Why? Because it includes a complimentary reference to the Big City Talk work done by volunteer bloggers here in Birmingham.

The wordpress site has been created by the DIUS Social Media team. Steph Gray’s folk have also made Who Blocks?.  This fab tool is a survey of which social media sites government can and cannot access. The detailed results can be found here whilst the

The key problem areas then seem to be:  Online video, more than a third are unable to view YouTube videos correctly.  Social networking, nearly half are unable to access Facebook. Webmail, two fifths have access to Gmail blocked, perhaps for justifiable security reasons

    Steph has also been working with Harry Metcalfe on a simple site which should make future online consultation easier. It turns a “horrid” pdf into xml and html – which makes it much easier to use these cumbersome documents for much more agile websites. These in turn make consultation much richer and conversational.

    Something we were shown at Saturday’s hugely enjoyable UKGov Barcamp is: innovate.direct.gov.uk/  Think of this as the opening to a playground for people who want to change the way the Directgov site works.  It’s inspired by the BBC Backstage model – to encourage exprimentation and improve the relationship between huge government web projects and smaller more nimble experimenters and rapid developers.

    Rewiredstate is already planning a hack day for government next month.

    Meanwhile Pez from Lichfield District Council has bunged together a useful page for aggregating material on local government api’s (tag localgovapi ) and I’m already in for helping to organise a localgovcamp here in Brum (probably).

    What do bloggers look like?

    [youtube]bEPbtfdIkVY[/youtube]

    This video was a quick one shot at the Social Media Surgery for voluntary groups in Birmingham this evening (should say 2009 – my bad). Despite the leading questions, I hope it gives you a sense of how people from community groups feel about the help they get from volunteer bloggers and social media folk. About 25 “recipients” (real people) plus  the social media surgeons who were in no particular order:

    Jon Bounds, Pete Ashton, Jon Hickman, Joanna Geary, Gavin Wray, Benjamin Brum, Simon Whitehouse (see here), Abby Corfan, Phil Oakley, Watfordgap, Danny Smith, Katie Spragg, Mark Steadman.

    For a more general view please have a look here. Pete shot this and uploaded it there and then to demonstrate embedding. Bless him!

    Birmingham Social Media Surgery for Voluntary and Community Groups III

    The third social media surgery for voluntary and community groups in Birmingham is next Wednesday, January 28th 2009 at BSVC 138 Digbeth, B5 6DR, (map).  Please feel free to drop in anytime between 5.30pm and 7pm where volunteers from the Birmingham bloggers group will show you how you can make best use of social media. It doesn’t matter if you are the head of communications at a major charity or an active citizen in your neighbourhood, if you’re at all curious come along.

    To helps us predict numbers please sign up using the form you will find here:   www.paradisecircus.com/social-media-surgeries/

    Tools like blogs, podcasts, video and social networks can give a real boost to campaigning organisations, often for no or little cost. So these experts are offering you approachable one to one help and support because they believe it can help. You may just want to see what is possible and go away and think about it. You might be itching to set up a blog and start using it, either way you can get help appreciating the best use of the internet for your organisation. If you’ve been before please feel free to come back.

    This surgery is organised as a collaboration between bloggers in Birmingham and the Third Sector Assembly.

    Government cancels Parliamentary vote following internet campaign on MP's expenses

    Early this week My Society urged us to write to our MP’s to insist that the new Freedom of Information Bill should not be used to conceal MP’s expenses.  I sent this to Lynne Jones:

    I was really concerned this week to read reports in both left and right wing biased newspapers that parliament is moving to conceal the receipts for MP’s expenses, not simply from open public scrutiny but also from FOI requests.

    To be confident that MP’s are spending public money fairly we need that process to fully transparent.  I do hope hope you will do everything you can to ensure that’s the case.

    She replied:

    I am not sure exactly what we are going to be asked to vote on as yet but I am opposed to special provisions that would exempt MPs from disclosures that other people in other public sector organisations have to make. So as to be accountable, I will put something on my website next week.

    Today Tom Steinburg of mySociety tells us that their campaign has worked. Clay Sirky describes it as victory for transparency. Let me give you everything Tom says says:

    The vote on concealing MPs’ expenses has been cancelled by the government!

    In other words – we won!

    This is a huge victory not just for transparency, it’s a bellweather for a change in the way politics works. There’s no such thing as a good day to bury bad news any more, the Internet has seen to that.

    Over 7000 people joined a Facebook group, they sent thousands of emails to over 90% of all MPs. Hundreds of thousands of people found out about the story by visiting TheyWorkForYou to find something they wanted to know, reading an email alert, or simply discovered what was going on whilst checking their Facebook or Twitter pages. Almost all of this happened, from nowhere, within 48 hours, putting enough pressure on Parliament to force change.

    Congrats – the internets and the mainstream media work together, plus of course the Conservative Party withdrawing their support for the Bill.