Tag: twitter

Stuff I've seen June 27th through June 30th

These are my links for June 27th through June 30th:

  • Poynter Online – Youtube Launches Citizen reporter Support – The site has just unveiled a new effort to improve and promote videos that are newsworthy: the Reporters' Center. The Reporters' Center launched Monday with about 35 instructional videos from professional journalists on how to handle a range of reporting challenges, including: understanding privacy issues (and staying out of jail), shooting video with your cell phone, fact-checking assertions, conducting a good interview and covering a humanitarian crisis safely.
  • Building Britain’s Future: the next step to better policy discussion online at Helpful Technology – "a fair crack at how we might present big policy documents online. To me, this is one of the big challenges in digital engagement right now: we have a fair number of tool options for consultations, and are getting better at applying the ‘classic’ social media tools of Twitter, YouTube and Flickr – but the practicalities and small-p politics of presenting large documents in anything more than a downloadable PDF are still daunting. Like Digital Britain or New Opportunities, BBF is not (primarily) a consultation, so has to struggle with the thorny question of what to do with feedback and whether to solicit it at all."
  • http://mypolice.wordpress.com/ – MyPolice.org is a web-based service that fosters constructive, collaborative communication between communities and the police forces which serve them. MyPolice originated at (and won!) Social Innovation Camp, June 2009. Sicamp is a challenge to turn back of the envelope ideas which use the web to tackle 'stuff that matters' into a reality. In just 48 hours.
  • Reuters Editors » Blog Archive » Rethinking rights, accreditation, and journalism itself in the age of Twitter | Blogs | – Reuters understands hat social media can also be journalism: "To a 23 year-old athlete, used to putting out a “news feed” of every detail of her personal life and training on various social media platforms, there simply isn’t a distinction. Her life IS a news feed. Her blog IS a publishing platform. Her Facebook page IS the daily newspaper of her life."
  • The Conservative Party | News | Speeches | David Cameron: Giving power back to the people – "Information is power – because information allows people to hold the powerful to account. This has never been more true than today, in the information age. The internet is an amazing pollinator, spreading ideas and information all over the globe in minutes. It turns lonely fights into mass campaigns; transforms moans into movements; excites the attention of hundreds, thousands, millions of people and stirs them to action. And constantly accelerating technology makes information infinitely more powerful.

Handsworth, Lozells, Twitter and Community Consultation

On Saturday I popped up to Handsworth for a community consultation event.
John Heaven, a council officer, was there live blogging with this wordpress site that he created literally as the event started. John and I also tweeted the event (using different tags – doh) and you can find the streams for the event here and for Handsworth in general here.

If you’re not sure what a hashtag is there is a complicated explication on wikipedia here or put simply its a label than any of us can use on twitter to mark that we are talking about the same subject. When used in a search of twitter the tag then brings together every thing everyone has said about that subject.

It also helps those not in the room watch and join the conversation. So as we twittered about Handsworth from a meeting room in the neighbourhood, observations were added from other parts of the city or country by David Nikkel, Leonardo Morgado, Andy Mabbett, Cyberdoyle and Carrie Bishop.

Carrie even pointed to a new service she has helped create to allow the public to reflect their opinions of police service called MyPolice.org.

So not only has social media been used to creatd a simple and immediate record of the meeting but it has also brought new attention to what is going on and the potential of fresh ideas, input and questioning.

Non of this was planned – John and I just got on with it because we could.

Why was I there? I want to meet some people who could help me set up a very local social media surgery for the area. More on that soon.

I also posted this over at Be Vocal.

Stuff I've seen June 16th through June 19th

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".

Stuff I've seen June 15th through June 16th

These are my links for June 15th through June 16th:

  • Digital Britain – final report – The Digital Britain Final Report is one of the central policy commitments in the Government's Building Britain's Future plan and draft legislative programme.

    Building Britain's Future sets out the practical action we will take to build a stronger, fairer and more prosperous country. It focuses the energy and mission of the government in the year ahead on three clear priorities:

    * Cleaning up politics and reforming our democracy
    * Moving from recession to recovery and planning for a strong economy in the future; and
    * Reforming Britain's public services.

  • Social Innovation Camp | The Young Foundation – Great ideas: Social Chain Gangs Flash-mobbing with a purpose. This tools aims to get a bunch of people together to get something done, whether it's cleaning up a local park, helping your neighbours move in, a quick spot of gardening – fast.

    Now all we need is the people who'd like to help.

  • ASH-10 » Digital Britain needs real Digital Literacy – Pete Ashton: "I’m able to read online news for free because I can hack a URL. Can you?"
  • #iranelection cyberwar guide for beginners – The purpose of this guide is to help you participate constructively in the Iranian election protests through twitter.
  • The Stone Tapes: Feed me! – How my iPod feedreader rendered the latest blog entries from http://podnosh.com/blog/