Tag: Citizen Journalism

Winding up the BBC blogging experiment

Robin Hamman and Richard Fair’s BBC Manchester Blog has just been officially wound up as an experiment.

When I first wrote about this I and others were arguing that a culture change needs to come too – and that is what Robin is setting our more explicitly in the key things they have learnt:

1 Being part of the community by participating as equals, as opposed to participating as a broadcasting organisation keen for new content but not interested in the community, brings with it many editorial and personal rewards.
2 People don’t necessarily blog or post content about the topics, stories and events that media organisations might hope they would – and, in our experience anyway, rarely post about news and current affairs.
3 As a stand-alone proposition, the amount of staff time and effort spent was high in comparison to the quantity of content generated and size of audience served. But, when we were able to use the contacts and content we found through the blog on-air that equation immediately changed. That is, in resource terms, the blog was costly as just a blog but much more efficient as a driver of radio content.
4 The best way to get noticed online is links and the best way to get links is to give good links yourself. That is, you have to play by the established rules of engagement and, online, that means linking prolifically.

I think a lot of people in the BBC now know this and understand this. The BBC guidelines on staff using social media (here and here on blogging) strike me as realistic and relaxed. Let us hope the new public interest test and governance structures don’t delay those folk making the most of their understanding of the social web.

See also:

Manchizzle “but they did good”.

Does government have ears enough?

EarsIt is becoming downright tricky for the government to get our attention. Not for the old reasons of being mostly boring. Rather because our attention is increasingly elsewhere – immersed more and more in networks and relationships.

What I pay heed to is much more self indulgent now than it was 15 years ago. I want to know what I want to know. So I’m confident that what you, dear reader, might have to say to me is likely to be more interesting (for me) than the third headline on tonight’s 10 O’Clock news.

So what does this mean for how government should make best use of the web? Paul Johnston from Cisco writes at the Connected Republic blog about the Our Kingdom project from OpenDemocracy:

For example, I would be in favour of a mixed online and offline debate to generate the best and most popular ideas on how we can celebrate and reinforce the values of our society; if the debate got traction and generated some good ideas, presumably the government will want to take at least some of them forward or the opposition (or media) can champion then and force the government to adopt them. Similarly, I think online discussions and deliberate panels (on issues such as ID cards or road pricing) could really help shape the national debate – but with no presumption that if lots of representative citizen panels reach the same conclusion, the government must adopt that conclusion. Rather I would see the output of successful online discussions and deliberative panels as shaping media and parliamentary discussions – if these activities were organised in a way that gave them profile and legitimacy, then it would be hard for a government (or an opposition) to fly in their face. The point of the conversations would be to make “public opinion” a more genuine and effective force

I agree with Paul about the web being a great place to generate ideas, but these ideas will come from those who choose to join the debate, they won’t reflect “public opinion”. In truth a wide ranging debate on all areas of public policy can already be found on the web. All the government would need to do is to seed it with some key questions and stay in the conversation, not aloof from it. The art then remains the same, which is how to make sense of the outcome.

The business of journalist and politician talking to the public and then using what they learn to shape what they say, write and how they vote is nothing new. This might be on a slightly different scale and has the added advantage of greater immediacy and greater depth compared with most polling or consultation exercises. However it is not as clear cut as statisticians might like and “public opinion” on the web also tends to be a more global opinion.

Richard Wilson at Involve comments on this post about how he is sceptical about the web as a tool for changing the way people think. He makes this in reference to the points Anthony Barnett made earlier today on Comment is Free:

For me, the most interesting lesson is that the web should not be seen as a vast soup of individuals barking and raving and exposed to manipulation. Some of this happens, of course. But the web is best seen as a network of networks, of associations and communities from blogs to closed groups, of many sizes with their own energies and commitments. For a government to take a debate to the web the advice is: don’t compete with what exists. Rather go to the networks, link to what is, encourage communities to think through your key questions for themselves.

Right. Government (apologies for describing it as an amorphous blob) consults when it wants to, tries to generate a debate when it needs to. That’s no way to get my attention. If my mind is focussed on my own range of what Anthony calls “energies and commitments” then to involve me government would need to join in in some sort of sincere fashion. Stay in the conversation. Talk with us, not at us.

Does government have enough ears and eyes to stay routinely in the conversation? I think it does (certainly within the civil service) but major culture change will need to happen to allow people the authority to get involved. Just how significant is illustrated by David Wilcox. I’ll quote at length…

“…Tom Steinberg, who runs the hugely successful mySociety organisation (Pledgebank, FixMyStreet, No 10 e-petitions) spells out their philosophy in launching Free our Bills, a new initiative focussed around getting Parliament to publish bills properly. It boils down to – don’t expect Government to change except in very small ways, whatever you say.

Bill3In a post to the UK and Ireland E-Democracy Exchange, Tom says:

mySociety has traditionally worked on the assumption that it’s basically impossible to ever get any part of any government to do anything of any real significance in the field of edemocracy, or in the wider field of greater access to data.
As a result we’ve always tried to pick projects that work as well as possible for the citizen without requiring government to do anything it didn’t do before (think FixMyStreet, or WriteToThem). Picking a project that requires a bit of government to move a single inch in order for your project to work at all is a sadly proven path to failure. Unfortunately, our need to campaign today is a validation of this highly pessimistic approach. It is absurd that this campaign is even necessary, given that we tried so hard to do it the ‘nice way’ with meetings, gentle encouragement and nicely written word documents in Whitehall-speak explaining why it was useful and cheap and non-threatening. But where it counted the unelected officials who hold the relevent power here just weren’t persuadable for reasons that we’re having to FOI to find out.

Tom suggests a new approach to evaluating e-democracy. Instead of looking at what e-democracy projects don’t achieve in terms of mass engagement, it is better to look at “pressure points, chinks in the armour where improvements might be possible, whether with the consent of government or not”. He concludes:

Anyway, if this seems like a counsel of despair, it isn’t supposed to be. I’m just saying that being realistic about the nature of actual progress in our field (tiny, incremental, currently peaking with things like TheyWorkForYou and Stemwijzer.nl ) makes for more interesting, useful discussions than comparing everything to the Holy Grail of True, Mass Scale Deliberative Democracy.”

So if government wants a wider and deeper conversation with ‘us’ (As Michael Wills says they do) asking us to do it at purely at government convenience will fail simply because it is getting harder to get our attention. Keep the lines of communication open though and I know I’m more likely to help.

Is Tom Watson MP stealing or reading? The Tories think the former.

I received an e-mail today from the office of George Osbourne the Shadow Chancellor. Thanks to Rohan Silva for getting in touch.

They wanted to point out similarities between the speech Tom Watson made yesterday on The Power of Information and previous speeches and announcements made by the Conservative Party. The body of the e-mail is below, but I’d just like to reflect on this old media reflex in a new media world.

Rohan wants me to see “for yourself just how much of it has been purloined from Conservative Party announcements.”

Rohan: I’ve read and can find a whole range of already public sources for these ideas.  Books, websites, blogs, reports commissioned by government and others, these ideas are out there and both parties are getting to grips with them and talking about them. I would have to be something of a moron to believe that all the government is doing is nicking ideas from you when it is much more credible to believe that you are all reading about and experiencing the same radical shift in how we communicate and collaborate.

To accuse the other party of stealing ideas simply because you are making the same argument is very tired Government 1.0. If you really believe in the power of collaboration then get involved in a conversation online with Tom, recognise your common understanding and ambitions and get on with improving the way we are governed, not disapproving of the fact that you agree.

By the way Tom Watson has put up his thinking on how the problem of the civilserf blogger (nice creation Simon) might be avoided in the future. It’s good to see public thoughts on this – who would like to join the conversation and help improve what Tom is suggesting – George? Rohan?

Another post that relates to this is here.

Update: Mick Fealty at the Telegraph.

Dave Briggs.

Ministry Of Truth in rattled cage.

Anyway thanks for the e-mail and please keep them coming. The body of the e-mail in full:

Hi there

I thought you might be interested in how Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson‘s speech yesterday on new technologies and the internet “mashed up” Conservative Party policies, speeches and ideas from the past 18 months. (Comically, the link to Tom’s speech isn’t actually working at the moment: http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/?p=1899 – and it’s not been published on the Cabinet Office website…)

It’s well worth reading Tom’s entire speech alongside our previous key speeches on this subject, and seeing for yourself just how much of it has been purloined from Conservative Party announcements. But for those of you who don’t have time to do that, here’s a selection of some of the most obvious thefts in Tom’s speech, along with some suggestions about other Conservative Party internet related policies that he may want to borrow for his next one.

Rohan

CRIME MAPPING
Tom Watson – 10 March 2008:
“Just imagine if every incident of crime could be geographically tagged? It could transform community policing.”

David Cameron – speech at the Google Zeitgeist Conference, October 12 2007:
“Crime mapping is a great example [of the power of open information]. At one and the same time it enables you to hold your police force to account, get the government to spend money in the right places, and even to help choose where to live.”

STANDARDISED INFORMATION ACROSS GOVERNMENT BODIES
Tom Watson – 10 March 2008:
“Embedding data mash-up into thinking across all of government not just the early adopters within departments.”

David Cameron – CCA speech on setting government information free, 29 February 2008:
“We will require local authorities to publish information online and in a standardised format. That way, it can be collected and used by the public and third party groups…Setting local information free really is the future.”

OPEN SOURCE POLITICS
Tom Watson – 10 March 2008:
“There are three rules of open source: One, nobody owns it. Two, everybody uses it. And three, anyone can improve it. Our future thinking must view government more like a giant open source community. So far government ticks boxes one and two, no one person owns it and everybody uses it.”

George Osborne – speech to the Royal Society of the Arts on ‘Open Source Politics’, 8 March 2007:
“Open source politics means rejecting the old monolithic top-down approach to decision-making. It means throwing open the doors and listening to new ideas and new contributors. It means harnessing the power of mass collaboration. And rather than relying on the input of a few trusted experts, it means drawing on the skills and expertise of millions.”

———————————-

CONSERVATIVE PARTY IDEAS FOR THE NEXT TOM WATSON SPEECH?

Along with policy commitments to standardise government information, introduce crime mapping and embed open collaboration in policymaking, the Conservative Party has a slew of other policies on harnessing new technologies to improve public services, which Tom Watson may want to borrow for his next speech.

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD FOR OPEN SOURCE IT WITHIN GOVERNMENT
On 8 March 2007, George Osborne committed a Conservative government to introducing a level playing field for open source IT within government procurement contracts .

Our research showed that most central government departments make no use of open source IT whatsoever, and not a single open source company is included in Catalyst, the government’s list of approved IT suppliers.

Taking into account the experience of companies and public sector bodies, it is estimated that overhauling this system and opening up procurement to open source IT could result in savings to the taxpayer of over £600m per year.

“GOOGLE YOUR TAX MONEY”
In 2006, the Conservative Party introduced legislation in Parliament, modelled on the successful Barack Obama-Tom Coburn bill that enabled Americans to “Google Their Tax Money”.

The legislation will require all public bodies to publish, in a standardised and systemised online format, every item of government expenditure over £25,000.

This will massively improve public scrutiny over government spending, and empower the public to put pressure on the government to justify exactly how it spends our money.

Unfortunately, Gordon Brown opposes the legislation, and is trying hard to kill off this bill.

BANNING PRINTED PUBLIC SECTOR JOB ADVERTS
On 4 December 2006, George Osborne announced that under a Conservative government, public bodies would be banned from using expensive paid-for printed adverts to publicise job vacancies.

This means that all recruitment advertising will be online, except where there are justifiable concerns about ensuring fair access for a specific vacancy.

According to Reed Personnel Services, £800m of taxpayers’ money is being spent each year on public sector job adverts, compared to £390m in the private sector, despite the fact that the private sector employs four fifths of the workforce.

The potential saving of around £700m from using online adverts is enough to pay for 35,000 new nurses, 30,000 new teachers, 25,000 new policemen or 30,000 new soldiers.

——————–

Links to relevant Conservative Party speeches:

November 2006 – George Osborne speech on ‘Politics and Media in the Internet Age’
http://80.69.4.211/tile.do?def=news.story.page&obj_id=133558&speeches=1

March 2007 – George Osborne speech to the RSA on open source politics
http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=news.story.page&obj_id=135408

October 2007 – David Cameron speech to the Google Zeigeist Conference
http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=news.story.page&obj_id=139711

February 2008 – David Cameron speech on setting local government information free
http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=news.story.page&obj_id=142659&speeches=1