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".
These are my links for June 9th through June 13th:
Local Works | Campaigning to implement the Sustainable Communities Act – You can only use the radical new bottom-up powers in the Sustainable Communities Act if your councils (district/borough/city and county) choose to use it too! See the map and list below for those who have. If your councils have not already done so please write to them (and urge others to write too!), this sample letter will help you.
The Open Rights Group – But with Lord Carter departing, there is a serious question as to whether the government will push the Digital Britain agenda forward at all. Who will pick up the brief; will they support and desire the completion of its recommendations; will they be able to build up the political will to see any proposals through Parliament, especially as its mood darkens?
I smell a government rat in my news | Online Journalism Blog – To help you measure the amount of government-funded journalism, Nicolas Kayser-Bril built this little app, I smell a government rat in my news. Just type in any query and you’ll see the share of articles produced with state funds.
Peregrine Falcons – Worcester Webcam – Great work from Worcester City Council to engage public interest and establish broader positive relations with folk.
Developing the infrastructure, skills and take-up to enable the widespread online delivery of public services and business interface with Government.
An overview of the entire mornings conversation is here, but I wanted to share my thoughts.
This objective, “to develop the infrastructure skills and take up to enable the widsespread online delivery of public services and business interface with government” appears to almost entirely about refining ane ecnouraging online transactions. It suggests that the ambition is to use the net to govern more efficiently. That is unquestionably important but itignores how the web can and will shift our democratic relationships, allowing self organising citizens to ignore, short circuit, or improve how we govern or self govern. Core to this is ensuring that we all are able to effectively publish (rather than simply consume) online, should we wish to do so. This democratic shift is also being accelerated by the problems being faced by the big cultural and media organisations which Digital Britain as a report appears to be attempting to save.
Digital Britain says very little that seems relevant to this democratic shift. A couple of things that it mentions which are tangental are:
1 Safety: “We want to make the UK the safest place to do business online”. Who’s going to argue with that? It will make us more likely to use the web to relate to government and take part in civic activity, won’t it?
Well it may not. The safest place to do business online could also be the most controlled and closed down. If that is the route we go then democracy baby and democracy bathwater will be scootling down the drain together. (Byron Report )
The report also appears to cling to a shadow of the unworkable idea of a film classification type service (” clear and effective labelling to help people avoid material likely to be harmful or offensive”) and adds “There should be a clearer role for trusted brands that provide a guarantee of the nature of the content that may be accessed through their product (e.g. the approach Apple has taken to making available applications that run on iPhone).” Apple do this because they have found a funding stream around applications. Which “trusted brands” can make that happen with public content?
2 National Digital Literacy Plan. This is the other directly relevant bit: “We will only reap the benefits of becoming a digital nation if we ensure that everyone has access to the right education, skills and digital media literacy programmes to ensure that being digital is within the grasp of everyone.”
Yes is the simple answer to that. Please though don’t make this a digital media literacy national curriculum which will date before it’s finished. For this to work you have to find a mature balance between digital media literacy, learning and safety.
So I found two things in the report relevant to the issue of the net and democracy. This led me, by way of starting a conversation, to raise these additional points:
1 Should we stop existing IT projects which could stifle digital media literacy. Anything which is overly safe and overly cautious is likely to hamper our progress as a digitally literate nation. For example learning portals for schools etc – are they going to help or hinder? Do they really encourage rich informal learning and the sort of free flowing collaborations skills which will give us an economic advantage? (answers to this below please!)
2 Transparency isn’t mentioned. Transparent appears only once. Transparency will be the core media virtue in the future, replacing others such as impartiality. Transparency is how we hold publishers and politicians to account. What does transparency mean? Could there be principles to describe transparency which can then form the basis for a new set of standards against which online activity can be measured?
3 Talk to the folks next door. Whilst I was ranting on about how the people who wrote Digital britain didn’t seem to have read the Power of Information stuff Dave Harte did a quick search of the document to find no mention of the Power of Information Taskforce. Unh.
My twoppenorth as an opener. An overview of the entire mornings conversation is here with recordings of it all from the marvellous Rhubarb Radio. Aggregations of national conversation on twitter at #dbuc09. Thanks to Nat and Julia at www.aquila-tv.com for organising and BillT for the original idea. Notes form the Manchester Event are here. BTW Recasting the Net looks like another postive contribution to this conversation.
Journalism.co.uk :: CN Group to trial revenue share with ‘community correspondents’ – The correspondents will receive 25 per cent of any revenue generated by the sites, which varies between properties. Sites carrying at least five adverts will pay around £80 a month, Nick Turner, CN Group’s head of digital content development, told the Digital Editors Network meeting yesterday.
Carnegie UK Trust – Democracy & Civil Society – Civil Society Commission – The distinctive roles that civil society associations play in creating safe spaces for meaningful deliberation where difference can be articulated and acknowledged.
The relationships between civil society associations and media.
The marginalisation of dissent – with a focus on relationships between UK and global civil society.
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