Tag: empowerment

Stuff I've seen July 17th through July 22nd

These are my links for July 17th through July 22nd:

  • Liam Byrne on how innovators from around the world can teach the UK valuable lessons | Society | The Guardian – The UK government wants to offer up performance data so we have an "open book government". This from Liam Byrne: "online performance information is used to allow people to hold services to account and contribute to the way they develop. Take the US federal government website, Data.gov, which offers a wide range of information, from spending by different government agencies to levels of pollution. People can download and analyse the data themselves."

    Such open-book government is generating pressure for both better services and greater value for money. US cities, such as New York, Washington and Baltimore, which have been pioneering these approaches, have demonstrated improvements in policing and healthcare, as well as saving hundreds of millions of dollars.

  • CDI Europe Doers VII: We Share Stuff, Podnosh and Talk About Local – Iris lapinski cam to Birmingham from and organisation called CDI Europe and talked to some (not all) of the cities "doers". It's good to get a perspective from outside the city. CDO Europe sprang from South America and as srtong aims: "Our mission is to transform lives and strengthen low-income communities by empowering people with information and communication technology. We use technology as a medium to fight poverty, stimulate entrepreneurship and create a new generation of changemakers."
    Thanks for coming Iris, come back soon!
  • LGC on social media – "Now tweet this…" | Simon Wakeman – public sector communications, marketing and public relations – One of the key things I’d pick out of the LGC piece is that social media is only part of a communications strategy – it’s not a communications strategy in itself. How appropriate social media is compared to other tools depends on the campaign objectives, target audiences, key messages and a whole lot more.
  • Curating conversations | The Guardian Open Platform | guardian.co.uk – "Twitter is becoming an ever present backchannel at conferences and events. However sometimes it needs curating and moderating, especially if it's to be displayed large as a part of the event. Here we talk about an app built in a few hours and open sourced today which we used for this purpose for The Guardian's Activate Summit"
  • Technology Strategy Board | Creative Industries Strategy 09 – "Our three-year strategy for 2008-2011 is to drive innovation by connecting and catalysing. To achieve this we are focusing on three themes: challengeled innovation, technology-inspired innovation and the innovation climate. For more information on the overall strategy see www.innovateuk.org."

Impact Direct and social media training for former drug addicts in South Africa

It’s been quite an eye-opener meeting Marlon Parker.  He’s visiting the UK from Cape town in South Africa and has come over here to share some of his work at the charity Impact Direct.  He was here with Jon Hickman.

Below is a quick interview with him, where he explains how he began using social media to help gang members and drug addicts tell their stories, initially as a means of educating the wider community about what to expect.

Marlon Parker talks to Nick Booth about Impact Direct in South Africa from Podnosh on Vimeo.

On the face of it this is very similar to the social media surgeries we run here in brum, but just bolder. More like the work that wesharestuff does with young people who’ve recently been in prison.

But Reconstructed (Marlon’s original project name) blossomed from simply helping a few people to a network of people who are using mobile phones and instant messaging to mentor individual and families with a huge range of problems – from drugs addiction to HIV/Aids.  Here’s a scrappy bit of video of Marlon showing Chris Unitt how the mobile phone stuff works, using an application put together by the original groups of social media trainees. It’s interesting:

Angel service for Drug Addicts in South Africa from Podnosh on Vimeo.

The whole project is built on the some of the core principles that makes social media more than a means of connecting online, but as a means to gain or regain control:

  • Just get on with.  Marlon doesn’t wait for funders to OK something, he gets on with it and hopes the world will catch up.
  • Concentrate on the useful.  When encouraging people to use social media find something that’s useful for them
  • Get people teaching as much as they learn: the beauty of social media is it’s simplicity. It’s good to get those you are teaching to teach others, that strengthens the network and relationships.
  • Don’t wait for the kit, use available technology.  Instant messaging and mobile phones work in South Africa because that’s what the people Marlon want to reach have.

In the end none of the work that Marlon does, we do or loads of the rest of you do with social media is to do with specific tools or bits of technology.  It is essentially about helping people get to know each other well enough to be able to achive things together.  To do that it pays to  use whatever it takes to connect folk.

Data, crown copyright, archives, listening to communities and the "empowerment heist".

I’m rootling through my feed reader catching up.

On Thursday Tom Watson announced that Crown Copyright was to be revised so those wanting to data mash with information from the Office of Public Sector Information will now be automatically granted a license. With a rather neat turn of phrase “They say information is power, but only distributed information is truly empowering” he went on to say:

the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) has looked again at the restrictions of Crown Copyright, and now a licence will automatically be granted to anyone wanting to use the information rather than having to apply beforehand.  OPSI has also shown how Government can publish in a ‘web-friendly’ way rather than just as PDFs, and I want to see this approach rolled out across Government.  Today I’m pleased to announce that COI is launching new standards on quality to make Government sites as effective and easy to use as possible.”

The COI site on web site clarity was first mention on the Power of Information Blog and is   http://usability.coi.gov.uk/

The Guardian has been continuing it’s Free Our Data reporting, with Charles Arthur a little underwhelmed by the announcements above:

Umm. It’s not quite the revolution that some of us were hoping for. It doesn’t even yet seem to legitimise the re-use and repurposing by sites such as theyworkforyou.com of the contents of Hansard – which is Crown copyright. That’s the trouble with tectonic shifts, though. Nothing seems to happen for a very long time, and then sometimes it happens all at once.

I don’t agree, (and neither does Tim Davies) the shift won’t be seismic in the sense of some sort of overnight social media sensation.  The last 5 years has seen steady change and the groundwork is still going on at government level.  The COI’s social media guidance document (a pdf – tut) says civil servants should:

Help non-governmental bodies to build new services by structuring information so that they can combine public data with private data.  Avoid replicating what is already being undertaken by non-governmental bodies.

Wednesday saw the launch of a 12 week consultation called Archives for the 21st Century, again data, how we capture and share it will be at the heart of this.  The press information mentions one wonderful example of a data set created from digitising the log books of ships going back to the 17th century.  Hour after hour mariners from Britain, Holland, France and Spain would log the time, their position and the weather.  The CLIWOC project is now a database for Climate Change Study.  Another example they use is Birmingham Stories.

Also on Wednesday Downing Street restored the e-mail the Prime Minister service and Hazel Blears announced that one way for councils to save £600 million a year was by listening to their communities.  This riled Julian Dobson who called it an “empowerment heist”:

‘Involving communities are key to unlocking greater savings – when it comes to finding efficiencies, empowering local people is part of the solution, not part of the problem,’ she said.

There is of course some truth in this – councils that listen to local people and provide services that are valued will achieve more for their money. But the crude equation of ’empowerment’ with savings is dangerous nonsense: there’s no rationale for turning what may be a fortunate by-product in some circumstances into the raison d’etre.  Yesterday’s speech might have been excusable were it not for the ten years of rhetoric that had preceded it.

Ofqual’s new Chief Officers report has been made comment-able and Spaghettitesting listed the Government winners of the Webby’s including a non-governmental site from the transparency movement  GovernmentDocs.org.

Birmingham Passions two – a new podcast on the Grassroots Channel

As 2006 ends & 2007 begins the Grassroots Channel offers up some shorts. Six pithy episodes which simply outline the different passions of people involved with the Birmingham Community Empowerment Network.

Birmingham Passions 2: Dave Tyler, of Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Trust PPI Forum, Dawn Manning of Ladywood Aston Nechels Soho network rep for b:cen, Aisha Mohammed of the Saheli Women’s Group.