It’s when you type in your password, and instead of “shearer9″ or, if you’re feeling particularly security conscious “p@55w0rd”, but all you see is either •••••••• or ******** depending on what you’re using.

This of course prevents The Hooded Claw from being able to read your password over your shoulder and type it in. Now, I don’t know about you, but I tend not to let people I don’t know come into my house and sit behind me when I’m connecting to online security services. Also, I bet if you compare the number of passwords stolen by machines infected with keyloggers as compared to Sylvester Sneekly looking over your shoulder, I’d suspect keyloggers would win hands down. Besides which, if Sylvester Sneekly is looking over your shoulder, he could always watch the keyboard to see what you press, as opposed to the screen.

That’s not to say that there’s not a place for password masking in some circumstances. In an internet cafe, or a library, or some other form of shared computer. Some computer where you don’t know who is around. Having said that, I’d not trust my online banking to computer which could have anything installed on it, but that’s because I’m security paranoid.

The Grand Usability Guru Jakob Nielsen pointed out the problem with password masking in a recent Alertbox: that because it decreases confidence (you can’t always be 100% sure of what you’ve typed), it actually leads to reduced security:

The more uncertain users feel about typing passwords, the more likely they are to (a) employ overly simple passwords and/or (b) copy-paste passwords from a file on their computer. Both behaviors lead to a true loss of security.Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox: Stop Password Masking

Unfortunately, Jakob has misunderstood what causes password masking, and is blaming it all on the poor web developer again.

Most websites (and many other applications) mask passwords as users type them…Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox: Stop Password Masking [2]

It’s not the websites. It’s your browser.

What your browser does whenever it encounters something in HTML like this <input type="password" name="password"> — an input box with a type of password, is it decides to mask it. Now if you want the website to choose whether or not to mask it, you’d need to set, or unset the input type according to user preferences. You’d need to reload the page (or use javascript to alter it). Whereas if it was a browser preference, the browser could simply change the way it displays it as according to your personal preference.

It’s therefore a thing where the browser manufacturers possibly need to consider whether password masking should be mandatory or optional. Quite a few people have chipped in with their own opinions. Rather than simply offer another voice saying much the same thing, I instead thought it might be useful to draw together some of the opinions on this.

Bruce Schneier agrees with Jakob:

Shoulder surfing isn’t very common, and cleartext passwords greatly reduces errors. It has long annoyed me when I can’t see what I type: in Windows logins, in PGP, and so on.Schneier on Security: The Problem with Password Masking

Graham Cluley from Sophos thinks that password masking should remain, for security reasons, at least in a business environment:

When an IT guy comes to visit my desk, and he needs to log in to fix whatever I’ve broken on my PC – should the system password be visible for the whole world to see? I bet I’m not the only one to be sitting in a completely open plan building – anyone could be passing by and looking over my shoulder.Graham Cluley: Why it’s a **** idea not to mask passwords

Out-law produce quotes from Schneier and Nielsen without adding any new opinions of their own.

So what are the problems?

• Masked text increases errors and reduces confidence
• …which leads to simpler, more hackable passwords (or the same password used in multiple places)
• Password masking might lead people to believe their passwords are safe, whereas masking is no guarantee that they are being sent securely, or that they aren’t being picked up by keyloggers
• …but on the other hand, if you don’t have masked passwords for secure logins, someone could see what you’ve typed and reveal the admin password

Um… well I’m afraid I’ve got to go with Nielsen and Schneier on this one (sorry Graham!). Of course, the best idea as regards Windows masking of login passwords would be for this to be a policy issue. Then companies where certain people have access to an admin password can choose to mask passwords: the rest of us don’t have to worry about it.

As Graham says, in an open plan office you can’t be sure there’s no-one behind you. Unfortunately his thinking would seem to suggest that the organisation can’t trust its own employees. Now in terms of security, this is something that organisations do need to think about. However, if you can’t trust the employees in a given office, then you really need them out of the office when you’re typing in the password, because otherwise they could always just watch to see what keys you press… and if you are going to send them out of the office, then it hardly matters whether or not the password is visible on screen or not.

Graham’s other argument doesn’t really hold water with me either.

Or what happens when I am at a friend’s house and I want to quickly log in to my web email account to forward him something I have been discussing with him? Sure, he’s my friend and I trust that he’s not going to misbehave – but I really don’t think I should be sharing my password with him. Equally I don’t want to be put in the awkward social position of going to the extra effort of ticking a box to obscure my password from him.Graham Cluley: Why it’s a **** idea not to mask passwords [2]

I suspect most people under the circumstance would be happy to very flamboyantly look in a different direction. I don’t see why it should be seen as embarrassing to ask a friend to look away while you type in a password. I mean, I don’t see how it can possibly be seen as a social faux pas not to want to give away your passwords. Unless it’s just maybe that if you work in IT security, you and your friends spend half your time stealing each other’s passwords…

So, despite Nielsen getting the source of the password masking incorrect, I’d be quite happy to see his ticky-box option to hide or not hide passwords introduced by the browser manufacturers…

There are some areas where crime and punishment presents difficulties. Does a father who steals a loaf of bread to feed his starving family deserve to go to prison? No? What if you’re the shopkeeper of the shop he’s stolen from a dozen times. How would you feel then? In either case, I’d reckon clapping him in chains and shipping him off to Australia for the rest of his natural life was perhaps a little harsh, and fortunately we no longer export criminals to Australia.

However, one of ours exported himself to Brazil, and that’s the chap that’s inspired this post. Look at Ronnie Biggs; he’s old, he’s frail; he can’t walk, he’s going to die soon probably (*koff* anyone else remember Ernest Saunders’ recovery from incurable dementia?) Why don’t we let him out of prison early?

In 1964, Ronnie Biggs was sentenced for his part in the Great Train Robbery of 1963. Fifteen months into his sentence, he escaped, and after five years or so, he ended up in Brazil, where he could not be extradited back to the UK. After having suffered a series of strokes, he returned to the UK for free medical treatment in 2001.

Here we move into the realm of speculation. Some people would argue that he returned to the UK simply to benefit from the UK’s healthcare. Some people would suggest that he returned to the UK because his money ran out. Some people would suggest that he returned to the UK because he didn’t think in his frail condition that he would be sent back to prison.

His son thinks he should be allowed to live out the rest of his life in peace, insisting that he is no longer a danger, he’s not actually capable of committing any crimes. I do understand the point that his son is making, and can understand that it must be awful for the son to watch his father suffering and moldering in prison but…

…and this is rather my key point. In 1964, Ronald Biggs was sentenced to thirty years in prison. By my reckoning, he has served about nine years of this. On the other hand, had he not escaped from jail, he would probably — assuming good behaviour — have been released between 1984 and 1990. The fact that he’s got to spend the rest of his life rotting in jail is a direct consequence of not only the initial crime he committed, but the second crime he committed in escaping from jail in the first place and going on the run.

It might seem like a lack of compassion, but I cannot find it anywhere in my heart to suggest that a man who escaped from prison should serve anything less than the initial tariff for which he was sentenced. Why should a man who has tried everything to avoid serving his sentence until his health fails him, be allowed to get away with it because his health has failed him?

Also, what message does this send out to others: do your time, keep your nose clean, and you’ll be out in two-thirds of your initial sentence; or you could go on the run until you’re very old and frail, and then you’ll only have to serve one third of it?

It might not be pleasant — or cheap for the taxpayer — to keep an ill, elderly man in prison, but were it not for his own actions, he would have been released from prison before he became that old, elderly man. But I’m not without compassion: once he’s served twenty-nine of the original thirty, I’m quite happy for him to be released just in time to see in his hundredth birthday as a free man.

Block 1 — Managing Large Datasets

First up was John Polak of Imperial College, who, despite a tendency to talk in what I can only term as academese, had some very interesting points. He was talking about how the transport datascape was shifting from low-volume published information (what is the timetable for this route) to much higher volume real time information (where is my train now? what is the status of the problem on the route between Leeds and Garforth?), and that data is now much more cross-sector.

Next up was Margaret Bell from Newcastle University who was talking about the Transport Observatory. This looked at mapping actual traffic data, and air quality/pollution data and modelling what happens to these flows under different conditions. This enables those planning transport to investigate what would happen if certain changes were made (what would happen if you added a bus lane here, what impact on pollution would it have if we changed the order of these traffic lights and so on).

I asked Margaret whether changes in working patterns were (flexi-time, home working etc) were seeing a reduction in pollution, but she suggested that while peak flows were still extremely high, they were perhaps not as high as they used to be — but were now lasting longer. In other words we were seeing a slight stretch of the peak flow times…

The Transport Observatory was a fascinating use of data, and I’m planning to get in touch with Margaret to find out a bit more about this work…

User Generated Content

…was the next session, where Caroline Bartle talked about word of mouth influences — how informal travel information is increasingly shared through social networks, how people are using websites like trip advisor more. She then talked about her cycology project which looked at the experiences of people cycling (and sharing their experiences) in … um .. Bristol, I think it was.

Helen Matthews from Nexus was next up, talking about maintaining a good commercial reputation online. (Tip: don’t get people so hacked off with you that they write a blog post which still appears in the top ten if you search for lothian buses). Or, to use the example supplied in the session, don’t get people so hacked off with you that they create a facebook group called Merseytravel are thieving bastards!

She explained that the internet is increasingly the way that people and businesses are choosing to communicate. Over 1,000 concessionary travel passes were renewed online in the past year, showing that an increasing number of older people are choosing to use the internet also.

The question is what information to deliver. 85% of people want real time information; 23% of people want access to information on their mobiles, and 16% get their public transport information from the web.

I commented about the ‘text a bus stop code’ service used in by the GMPTE, which allows someone to text the code belonging to a bus stop and find out which buses will be next from that stop. This is obviously of greater use if the bus stop does not already have a timetable on it, and would be of greater use still if real-time information could be used (e.g. if your bus is running ten minutes late, it won’t say you’ve already missed it).

Helen indicated that this “sort of thing” was something that Nexus would be introducing in the next “couple of years”. Not entirely sure I’ve ever seen a more vague commitment than that, but it’s a start!

Mike Parker from Orangebus continued the User Generated Content theme, talking about sites like trapster, which shares information on Police speed cameras. A further, unmentioned user-generated content travelly thing is the twitter account @uktrains which is an unofficial resource of all disruption to the UK trains network, with all of the relevant information being supplied as tweets from passengers using the services.

One of the things to note about user generated content is that while people worry that it may be wrong, where it is incorrect, it is generally corrected very quickly by ‘right’ information.

Pedestrian Localisation, Navigation and Tracking

I’ll say one thing for the people behind this conference: while they can organise a bloody good conference at very short notice, they aren’t really so hot on snappy titles for bits of it.

Chris Kray started out by asking whether or not pedestrian navigation was a solved problem.

My experience of this event would suggest not. I hadn’t been to Hoult’s Yard before, but I’d seen the location on a map. I’d noted down the name of various streets. I’d even gone so far as to get on the correct bus. Unfortunately, I didn’t know exactly where I was supposed to get off, so despite getting off the bus at 9:15am, it was forty minutes of solid walking later (mostly walking round in circles) that I found where the venue actually was.

Tip for anyone wanting directions to Hoult’s Yard in future. Find the pub The Free Trade. Walk about 500 yards further east. There you go. Now if someone could have just told me that in the first place…

So no, I didn’t think pedestrian navigation was a solved problem. Not all of us have iPhones or alternatively inbuilt satnav.

But one of the other issues with pedestrian navigation was that pedestrians don’t necessarily have to walk along the edges of roads. Computer algorithms giving directions will lead people alongside the road (or maybe, if they are smart enough, a footpath). However, pedestrians can do other things such as “walking through a shopping centre” or through a public park instead of needing to go all of the way around it.

The problem with this of course is that there is unlikely to be any information as to whether these paths are suitable for pushchairs, are wheelchair friendly etc, so without that sort of information (or indeed an up to date map of the shopping centre), mapping programs are likely to continue to ignore these sorts of routes, despite the fact that they might be the best option for the majority of pedestrians.

Next was Ray Sherrington, talking about Vulnerable User Tracking (from Sunderland’s Digital Challenge). Well, I say he was talking about it, but mostly he was just showing us a video where a parent of a child with ADHD and Asperger’s talked about how worried she had used to be for her 16 year old child, who could get easily distracted, wander off, and end up not knowing where he was, or how to get to where he was supposed to be.

Until of course those nice people from Digital Challenge turned up and sorted them out with some Blackberries that allowed the pair of them to track one another — so if he got lost she could work out where he was and either direct him, or come out and collect him instead of having to drive round looking along random streets. It’s obviously made a massive difference to their lives (and their stress levels), and her son’s independence and confidence has been increased also.

Ah, it’s always nice to end a session on a happy note

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Well, that’s nice to know. If you really support it that much, why not send me a few quid? Or if you want me to promote your fabulous magical weight reducing product, why not… er… give up? If it was genuinely that good, I would imagine it would be being featured in various magazines already. Personally, I find it stretches the boundaries of credibility to suggest that a magnetic ring would have the power of weight loss.

And of course for those with a more puerile outlook, you could also ponder the question of whether or not you wanted your ring to be magnetic… it might cause problems if you have a lot of iron in your diet!

Particular attention has registered a free visit!
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Ah, online dating sites. Still, at least it’s a variation from the more personal email techniques as performed by Kathy Jaunter et al. Unfortunately, and while it may surprise many people to read this, despite working in IT, I am actually capable of finding members of the opposite sex who want to spend time with me. I’m just an all round love machine.

So unfortunately I don’t fancy a free visit to your online dating (and quite possible malware) portal…

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Er… no. Firstly, because I’ve never heard of it… [quick trip to wikipedia] … and secondly because now I know it’s a particular antibiotic, I wouldn’t trust an online source for this sort of thing, even if I did need any.

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Well, that’s obviously true also. Only it would maybe have meant a little more to me if the comment had been placed on one of my articles about social media, the public sector, accessibility or web development, as opposed to one entitled Saturday Joke.

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Er… yes. I believe it is, with ED standing for erectile dysfunction. Why exactly you want to share that with me, I’m not entirely sure. Not that I want people sharing their erections (or dysfunctions thereof) with me in the first place. Although it does remind me of a joke…

I find whenever I check my email inbox, I’ve got about thirty emails telling me where to buy viagra online, twenty six telling me how to get a longer penis, and another fifteen telling me where to order a book that will teach me how to satisfy women. I do wish my wife would stop sending me them…Penile enlargement spam joke

Only I’m not entirely sure how a comment from my big mate Lara Croft Ange ended up in the spam filter…

[blah blah spammy blah]Angelina Jolie Nude

Look, Angelina, I know you like to visit my site, but really, there’s no need to tell everyone your relative state of dress. Simply send me the photograph evidence under plain cover, and I’ll confirm it. And it’s okay, you’re on my list, so not to worry. And if you’ve not yet put me on your list, don’t worry, I’ll not tell Brad [*koff* Majors *koff*].

Unless… does anyone think maybe that it wasn’t really Angelina?

The event was split into four main parts, with a few bits of housekeeping stuff chucked in at the start – an introduction to Hoult’s Yard, a bit of history about it, an introduction to the event and so on, and some welcome stuff from Hannah Bryan. I have to give Hannah a special mention as the conference was arranged in a remarkably short space of time — seemingly about three weeks from basic idea to conference — and it seemed to run without any hitches.

The basic premise was to have an informal event, with the opportunity for people to contribute and joiin in the debate as to how exactly to harness new technologies within the sphere of transport

The first part of event “proper” was entitled Directions of Travel, and, in common with the rest of the event, featured speakers who would speak briefly and then allow the opportunity for questions.

Eric Sampson

…who was chairing this event, kicked off this first session. He looked at the issue of broadband availability per hundred people (note: as differentiated from broadband takeup). He noted that the UK’s broadband availability per hundred people was fourth in the world, with only Denmark, the Netherlands, and South Korea having greater availability of broadband (although I have been unable to find any reference to confirm this).

The question was, how will this increased use of broadband change the way we use transport?

Nick Illsley

…the Chief Executive from Transort Direct was next up, with the plan to tell us how. He started with a history of transport, and how the rail system led to the idea of ‘common time’: it’s no good having a published timetable if different towns think that the current time differs considerable.

He suggested also that transport is a form of communication and therefore depends heavily on information.

Transport Direct’s goal is to join up the various modes of transport — rail, bus, coach, light rail, car, ferry, air, walking, cycling … and seemingly anything else you can think of.

Nick said that:

The complexity of life requires an awareness of location and the ability to travel between placesNick Illsley

…and that what is more important to consider is the fact of your travelling, rather than which particular ‘piece of tin’ you use to travel in.

He indicated that Transport Direct had 350,000 bus stops coded to within 1m accuracy (they had expected 330,000 but when adding the data, discovered that various networks had 20,000 more bus stops than they had realised). This data has now been shared with google maps to enable more mashing.

Here he insisted that the quality of the data is key: if there are 100 billion public transport ‘pairings’ (based on possible starting points and destinations), then 99% accuracy would still result in one billion potential journeys being wrong.

As transport is becoming more localised — initially devolved to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and with the Local Transport Act devolves power and responsibility further to the Local Authority Level.

Nick also raised an interested question for anyone designing a transport planning interface for the end user. Should you consider the end user to be more like Spock or Homer Simpson? The Spock interface would be a complex interface with a lot of options, would require more initial effort by the user but would result in the best possible result. The Homer Simpson interface however would be much, much simpler to operate, and would not necessarily return the best result, but would return a better result than would otherwise have been found.

He suggested that we may need to consider when developing journey planners that the Homer Simpson route may be the most appropriate.

He also compared what he felt the public and private sectors do well in comparison to one another: for example, the public sector can maintain higher data standards, better data collation and audit, and can address issues of market failure. In comparison, he suggested that the private sector was better at customer facing services and revenue generation (and also bizarrely customer care — has he tried a call centre recently?) — with the basic idea being to combine the best of the two in terms of transport.

I have to raise a personal objection here: except possibly in regards to market failure (e.g. there’s no market for telecomms companies to put broadband on the Orkneys), I think it’s simplistic and frequently wrong to simplify this much: it’s a stale argument to assume that in some areas the private sector will always be better than the public sector (and vice versa). If you’re going to make that argument without something to back it up, it sounds simply as though you are trying to reinforce your own prejudices and a priori assumptions.

Anyway, moving on from Nick, next up was…

James Burke

…from Lovle. James, also known as @deburca, wanted us to consider what is likely to happen with the web in the next 20 years.

My somewhat cynical take on this was that the web over the next 20 years will seem to consist of a huge number of acroynms and neologisms (’the new…’, ‘web 2.0′) whereas in actuality it will simply consider evolving as it has done up to now.

One of the key things about the internet is that people don’t need to know how it works in order to create web pages. This is quite key. You get geeks like me who will carefully consider whether they should be using an em element for emphasis, and will deliberately choose which HTML is used to produce their required output, but you have so many people with WYSIWYG editors that anyone can add content to the web, whether or not they know how it works.

Some of the changes that have happened to the way the web is being used recently include the introduction of tagging, categorisation (folksonomy, if you will), databases and the idea of ‘teaching the machine’. James suggests therefore that the key elements to ‘web 2.0′ are collaboration and sharing. As opposed to say, rounded corners…

James talked a little about open source and creative commons licensing — emphasising that this is not the same as dumping something in the public domain — which was probably completely new to half the audience (the ones with a ‘transport’ perspective, or ‘trannies’ as someone called them), and second nature to the technies in the audience.

He also pointed out that despite increasing assumptions of bandwidth consumption, not every great emerging new technology or service needs massive bandwidth: Twitter is one of those runaway success thingies but can run off very low bandwidth. He also made a reference to internet trolls but I was disappointed to see that no discussion of Godwin’s Law emerged.

In his thoughts on the net future, he also considered that more and more household appliances may become internet enabled (so you can maybe switch the washing machine on online so your clothes will be ready when you get home from work). Personally, I’m just after a toaster I can run off a USB jack. At least then I’d be able to make toast on the train.

The final person of the first session was the…

@Twitchhiker

…or @Paul_A_Smith as he is otherwise known. Paul studied astrophysics (so I suppose that makes him a rocket scientist?) before ending up working mostly in radio.

The tale of the twitchhiker is well worth a read in detail, but the basic premise is that Paul decided to see how far he could get — with no money for travel or accomodation — from his starting point, relying on the kindness and generosity of people who contacted him on twitter. I don’t want to give the game away — read the story yourself — but it’s not too much of a spoiler to suggest that if he’d only managed to make it from Newcastle to Cramlington it would hardly have ended up with him on telly in more than one country…

If you get the opportunity to hear Paul speak and relate his twitchhiking adventures, or if he finally gets round to getting it all written up properly and gets the book published, do not miss the opportunity. He’s certainly a good speaker.

Paul, not surprisingly, was talking mostly about the power of twitter, and why it’s suddenly taken off so well in 2009. He puts this mostly down (in the UK at least) to @stephenfry and Jonathan Ross. Stephen for his love of twitter, and his status as The Offical Uncle To The Entire Nation, and Jonathan because during his suspension from the BBC and the associated media witchhunt, the media were determined to get their claws in, so they’d talk about what he’d been saying on twitter, providing more publicity for Twitter in the process…

He also talked about how it has influenced and been used by the news: whilst frequently quoted and dismissed as seemingly banal (the answer of course to people worried about überbanality on twitter is simply don’t follow the boring people), the first pictures of the plane landed in the Hudson were posted on Twitpic by someone on a Hudson ferry.

There was also obviously the coverage and information about the recent Iranian election, where twitter was an essential way for information (and disinformation) to be spread. We’re at a stage now where 1 in every 350 visits to a website are from a link in twitter.

He provided examples of how twitter can be used by various companies for customer care and suggested that as far as councils go, Newcastle Council were leading the way in how to use twitter. Which is of course, entirely true, they’ve been doing a grand job and deserve all the credit coming their way. I’ll just re-iterate this any councils wanting to use twitter should use Newcastle as a model.

And by this point the smell of the cooking food was beginning to cause people to salivate and gnaw upon the table legs, so there was a unilateral declaration of lunch…

Some less generous interpretations have suggested that Parliament have done this deliberately, in order to keep certain things private, but I find it difficult to believe that our MPs would deliberately want to conceal this sort of thing from us.

Anyway, the Telegraph (probably along with every other media source) have put together a searchable database of MPs expenses. However they could maybe do with improving the ‘home’ page for that site, as if you try a cut-down version of the URL, you get this, which is somewhat less useful: other links on the site are also broken, but having been able to work out what they were supposed to be, I have managed to obtain this information without too much difficulty.

Obviously, I therefore felt obliged to look up my MP, one Dave Anderson by name. I was initially surprised to find that he wasn’t listed as an MP after all, before twigging that the official list has him down as ‘David’. Now for Dave, it’s not unreasonable to expect that his expenses would be higher than some MPs nearer Westminster, as he’s up in the North East, and is therefore likely to accrue more legitimate expenses in terms of accomodation and travel.

The fact he’s clocked up almost £10,000 in rail travel is therefore not surprising: although it is nice to see that Dave obviously prefers to travel by rail than air (less than £500 in air travel) as this is certainly better for the environment, and probably cheaper for the taxpayer too.

In terms of a second home allowance, he’s claimed quite a bit — over £20,000 per year — but as his second home is in London (where prices aren’t known for being cheap) and the claim is only for mortgage interest, I don’t really have a problem with this — when your constituency is more than 250 miles from Westminster, I think it’s reasonable to need a place a bit closer.

It’s also interesting — and to Dave’s credit — that the worst the Telegraph could come up with was that he had:

Claimed for furniture, washing machine and microwave. Claimed between £200 and £400 a month in foodTelegraph: Full List of MPs Investigated (Dave Anderson)

I don’t think it’s inappropriate for an MP to be able to wash their clothes, have somewhere to sit, and be able to heat up food in their second homes…

Nor has David Anderson employed any family members (although I don’t actually have a problem with this per se, as long as they actually do the work paid for, and it’s paid at a reasonable rate). Dave has not exactly been a cheap MP, with expenses of over £150,000 (although over £90,000 of this was staffing costs).

Nor can I find any reference to moat cleaning services or duck islands.

Now — entirely out of interest of course — I wonder whether any journalists will allow their expense claims to be subject to the same levels of scrutiny?

This is not exactly through choice; it’s because the recession has led to my employer feeling obliged to give me a month’s notice. After the initial bit of feeling somewhat shell-shocked, and saying things on the phone like “uh-huh. uh-huh” without really making a great deal of sense, I can start to gather my thoughts somewhat.

Firstly, I don’t have any particular axe to grind with my employers. These things happen, the recession isn’t their fault, and I’m sure that same as I would, they would rather things had turned out differently. Such is life.

Secondly, I’m not wallowing in self-pity. I know that some people, when laid off, feel worthless, and it can somewhat hit their self-confidence. Well, I’d like to assure my regular readers that you don’t have to worry about that with me. I am quite happy with my skill set and abilities (not that I wouldn’t be happy to develop new ones, mind you). Indeed, when you find people as brilliant as I am, it’s rare that they are as modest and self-effacing as me.

So this gives me a chance to be my own boss, work out something else (partnerships or some such) or otherwise find some other form of regular paid work. Possibly “in the middle of a recession” isn’t exactly the best time to be setting out to achieve such a task, but that is when these sorts of things tend to happen.

Obviously, should any of you wish to call upon my services, whether it be writing, web design, accessibility, data migration or whatnot, you can contact me through the usual channels.

And if nothing turns up quickly, I’ll just have to write a series of best selling novels about a boy wizard. Well, if it worked for J. K. Rowling…

I felt somewhat conned therefore when it appeared to be very much a sales pitch for one particular product. It wasn’t a question of whether you should crowdsource, it was taken for granted that you would; it was taken for granted that you would also choose this particular product to do so, with no mention given of alternatives, and we were simply presented with a “hey, it’s this good” sort of a piece.

I was therefore what might be considered the equivalent of a ‘hostile witness’ (although this is entirely their fault for getting the pitch so badly wrong). This plainly wasn’t what I came to LocalGovCamp for and I’d certainly not like to see this sort of presentation again (although I’d be quite happy for a discussion of pros and cons of crowdsourcing and different crowdsourcing methods). In short, they went about their task in completely the wrong way:- if I’d wanted to listen to a supplier flogging their product, I would at least have expected to have known that this was what that session was likely to be about, so I could have attended something else.

So you might consider me hostile, yes. But the point is that despite this, I’m now in a position where I want to go and have a look at the product in a little more detail. I want to find out about it, how it can be used and so on. I’m not necessarily convinced it’s a great thing for local government (which is another reason I didn’t like it — I felt that it was the wrong pitch for a local government crowd), but what I am convinced about is that I’d like to find out more about it personally.

It’s interesting. It’s possibly promising, despite their somewhat unfortunate start. But I’m getting ahead of myself — back to the presentation…

The reasons for crowdsourcing were covered pretty briefly — “there are loads of clever ideas outside government”, “how do you engage and make sense of them?”, “what happens if you do engage and then get 4,000 comments?”, answer is of course, use our product.

The idea behind debate graph is that rather than collating all of the comments individually and requiring each single comment to be answered, people are asked to break their items down into an issue, suggestions, and then a series of statements which either support or run contrary to those suggestions.

Therefore instead of getting the same argument stated multiple times, the desired action will only be stated once, and you will get a handful of arguments in favour (or against) it. Each of the arguments can then be rated by registered users in order to effectively work out what the crowd think are the most important issues, the most persuasive arguments and so on.

Another advantage of having all of the arguments (for and against something) on the same page is that apparently it reduces polarisation because contributing people get to read and understand the views of those on the opposing side, and generally have to be at least relatively polite to them (as dismissive arguments will generally be rated poorly, and so won’t show up as worthy argument).

This sort of mapping of information can also help promote relatively neutral ideas which aren’t favoured by any lobby or pressure group, but might be the least unpleasant compromise which everyone is capable of settling upon. No group would put forward these ideas as their first choice, but in a situation where all groups, all views and all ideas are being compared, the more neutral, centrist views might well score more highly. Of course, the assumption was that this is automatically a good thing, but the flip side of this is that one or other of the extremists might actually be right, and this sort of mapping would tend to push you away from their views…

I asked how they had addressed the issues of participation inequality (to summarise: 99% of the online output is produced by 1% or less of those online) because participation inequality might quickly need to a few active participants skewing the perception of what the public at large actually want, particularly as you need to register to take part, which is another barrier to people joining up.

A great recent example relating to participation inequality is the Daily Mail’s online poll. The Mail Online asked the rather loaded question: “Should the NHS allow gipsies to jump the queue?”. A number of twitterers objected to this and quickly “vote yes, pass it on” type messages were running around twitter.

The UK-based Mail Online was forced to shut down one of its online polls yesterday after a concerted campaign by Twitter users and, Journalism.co.uk can reveal, UK-based psychologists, nearly brought their servers to a halt with an overwhelming ‘yes’ vote.

The poll, which asked the somewhat leading question “Should the NHS allow gipsies to jump the queue”, attracted ridicule from many within the Twitter community leading to, at one point a 96% vote in favour of the proposition.

Journalism.co.uk

I’d guess that the “yes” vote wasn’t actually what most twitterers believed, but that the poll votes were sufficiently low that a reasonable number of people who were high-end active online participators (as twitterers tend to be) taking the time to vote yes and pass on the tweet could seriously skew the poll. Unless you can solve the issue of participation inequality, Debategraph will carry the same sort of risks in terms of ranking (in terms of arguments/statements, each argument/statement exists singly, no matter how many people support it).

The people behind Debategraph had suggested that the very visual nature of the product reduced the participation inequality, which may well be the case, although no figures were provided to back this up. Critically for something about Local Government (I think there was a clue in the name “Local Gov Camp”), no thought had been put into the localisation of the product — there was no way of only accepting responses or rankings from only a specific geographical area, which is where the product might have come in handy for council consultations. Indeed, the guy speaking about it even admitted that they had not yet thought about localisation.

I have to be critical therefore: I think it was a poor, ill-judged pitch of a product which is not yet ideally suited for local government use. But … and this is a fair important but … I think it’s an interesting product, one I’d certainly like to see and use more of, and I’d love to revisit this idea in twelve or eighteen months to be saying that the product is now perfect for the local government market and I’d like people to take a look at it.

The maps are designed to be easy to find, easy to explore, easy to extend, and critically easy to embed across the web using an iframe (though I’d rather the more traditional embed/object methods).

If anyone is involved in using it, any pilots, any knowledge or experience of it, I’d love to hear about it, because despite my misgivings about the way it was presented — and the fact that I’m not convinced it’s ready for local government — it does look to be a very interesting, very powerful, and potentially very useful tool. It’s certainly one which I would urge people to keep an eye out for… I will certainly be keen to watch as it develops…

So I went to have a look. And it reminded me somewhat of my Marouane Chamakh Wikipedia Adventure, where I traced the entertaining history of edits to Marouane Chamakh’s Wikipedia entry.

So I thought I’d treat you to the same sort of thing for the village of Mossblown. Let’s start with the initial appearance of the article, in November 2007.

Mossblown is a village in South Ayrshire, Scotland, a little bigger than neighbouring Annbank.

INTERESTING FACTS: Life expectancy: 51 – Average salary: How much is a giro these days? – Currency: Ginger bottles – Local Drink: Buckfast – Favourite dish: Ferret soup

Wikipedia: Mossblown (26 November 2007)

By March 2008, the information relating to the local neds was building up and was becoming quite comprehensive, as well as providing information about the footballing loyalties of Mossblowners:

The local neds are known as the DSC (Drumley Soccer Casuals). They enjoy hanging around the local Spar and diet mainly on sausage rolls, sunny-delight and scampi fries. They stalk the streets wearing their usual attire: Kappa trackies, baseball cap, Berghaus jaicket and a pair ‘o gutties.

[...]Everyone in Mossblown supports AC Milan Football Club.

Wikipedia: Mossblown (3 March 2008)

It would appear though that Mossblowners are not particularly loyal football fans, as only a short while later…

Everyone in Mossblown supports Arsenal Football Club.Wikipedia: Mossblown (15 March 2008)

Unfortunately, by April it had become infested with an outbreak of block capitals:

THERE IS ALSO A HEALTH CLINIC FOR ALL THE WEE DIRTYS TAE GET CHECKED OUT :L THERE IS ANNBANK PRIM

Wikipedia: Mossblown (16 April 2008)

In July, the tourist virtues of Mossblown were extolled:

Mossblown is well known as a tourist hub – attracting literally some tourists every decade.

Wikipedia: Mossblown (29 July 2008)

But sadly, by October, some Wikipedians were disputing how useful and accurate the Mossblown piece actually was:

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia’s quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (September 2008)

This article may not meet the general notability guideline. Please help to establish notability by adding reliable, secondary sources about the topic. If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged or deleted.

This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Wikipedia: Mossblown (12 October 2008)

By March 2009, information was starting to be added about some of the residents, although as no references or sources were cited for this, it should probably be treated with a certain degree of skepticism.

Lenny Cuthbert is a poofter.Wikipedia: Mossblown (5 March 2009)

By May 2009, significantly more information had been added about Mossblown and its residents (although the information on Lenny Cuthbert had by then been removed). Unfortunately, this updated and detailed information did seem to have been put together by someone with only a vague grasp of spelling and punctuation, although a nice, light conversational tone…

Speaking of the spar shop here is a list of the other local amenitys, first there are two pubs The Fourways and The Drumley which through the day keep the unemployed off the streets, you will find an array of characters in these premises most weekends…

Wikipedia: Mossblown (27 May 2009)

The article does not, as yet, appear to be marked for deletion, but I have a sneaking suspicion that sooner or later, someone will spot that it doesn’t quite meet Wikipedia’s quality standards…

It was also nice to see former cabinet minister Tom Watson (@tom_watson) taking part, although the consensus amongst the people I spoke to seemed to suggest they felt the word “former” was an awful shame and a big loss for the digital agenda.

Unlike the other sessions, for this one my notes were made directly onto the laptop. This was done as an experiment — I wanted to try twittering some of the stuff ‘live’ — but this ultimately proved a bit of a distraction as I ended up reading a few other tweets, which I thought was probably a bit rude to Ingrid — I am sorry, Ingrid, terribly rude of me, won’t do it again, promise — so ended up minimising my browser and just using notepad to take my notes. Well, at least notepad has an appropriate name, hasn’t it?

Anyway, this started with the issues surrounding social media: there’s the fear of saying something stupid and getting into trouble (we can presumably all think of equivalent examples), and there was the idea that social media is sometimes perceived as a threat (not sure whether this is because it’s outside the council’s control, or for some other reason, but we came back to a related issue later on).

Ingrid then proceeded to ask us:

What have councils or councillors done that have been successful and have worked?

Martin Black of Camden (whom I had earlier discovered as twitterfriend @martinxo [waves to Martin]) indicated that some of their councillors have started tweeting.

As an aside: if we talk about taking up the gauntlet of twitter, would this be the #twauntlet?

There was a Councillor Allan Andrews of Coventry Council who set up the I Love Earlsdon page on Facebook (his ward area) which has over 800 fans — which if you consider the number of fans compared to the number of people in the ward, and then compare that ratio to the percentage of people the council will usually engage with, has got to be impressive. This also illustrated a point about Councils on Facebook.

No-one (or not many normal people) will declare themselves to be a fan of their Council as a whole. They may be much happier declaring their support for a ward, for a particular event, project, or place. I’m happy to be a fan of the Laing Art Gallery: as much as I like and respect what Newcastle City Council and in particular a few of them are doing online (you know who you are), I’m not going to declare myself a fan of the council.

I then praised @jamescousins as an examplar of councillors using social media. Not only is he a very active twitterer, but he’s behind CllrTweeps, which lists twittering councillors and councils, and he’s an active blogger too. He’s also a Conservative, but you can’t have everything.

Oh, and he snores.

Anyway, at this point there was then a voice from behind me who started talking about a project called councillor.info from 2001, where the intention was to get local councillors to use the internet a bit more (to both read and write on it) as many of them weren’t even reading stuff on it very much. The voice then suggested that he felt that if Local Authority officers have the will to encourage Councillors to use the internet, they will, but his experience was that there seemed to be a lot of veto groups in the council, describing the classic veto group as ‘legal stuff’.

Even where initiatives did get off the ground, he continued, some press releases would not say who was behind the initiative, nor provide any direct quotes from them, but would simply state that “the Council have…” in order not to be seen to be promoting a particular councillor (and hence that councillor’s party).

It was seen as vital to always start the use of any social media with the professional values and value basis of the council and councillors, and ask how social media fits in with that, as opposed to asking those enthusiastic about social media, who might be going down a “whee! look at all the cool things you can do with this” route, which isn’t necessarily appropriate for all circumstances.

Buy in from senior levels was seen as vital also: and the higher the better. If the Chief Executive, Leader and senior Cabinet members all see it as a good idea, people tended to find that all the problems raised by other people seem to get downshifted from major to minor issues. Providing a set of rough guidelines for councillors to use — as well as providing appropriate support for them — is important, because this guidance will help councillors over the initial ‘lack of confidence’ hurdle, plus it might prevent obvious mistakes!

The issue of strange council dictats (what councillors should do, what officers should do etc) was raised, along with this strikingly bizarre requirement relating to email use:

emails to council staff must only have clickable links if they are to internal websites. Links to external sites must not be clickable

Not directly related to councillor social media use, but worth mentioning because of the striking WTF? reaction it produced.

Tom Watson added that leadership was definitely needed, but in order to achieve embedded cultural change (as opposed to an initiative which lasts for a few months and fizzles out), Councils not only need a decision from the Chief Exec, the Leader, but they also need high-profile early adopters to provide a model for others.

One potential issue raised about the reluctance for Councillors to engage in social media is the bizarre left hand/right hand thing many councils do with it. Left hand says to councillor “we’ve blocked access to Facebook through our corporate firewall to stop employees wasting time; we’ve produced these blogging policies so we can keep a close eye on employee bloggers and discipline them if they step out of line.”. Whereas of course the right hand is saying “don’t you want to engage with residents on Facebook? Or have a blog?”. (See also Session 2)

A more extreme example of this can be seen at Plymouth City Council, who seem to show a complete lack of understanding about Twitter:

…as a result of these problems, I have asked for an immediate and urgent review of our policies and procedures on use of information technology and social networking sites

In the meantime, I have decided to limit access to the ‘Twitter’ site, which is one of the communication channels about which I have received complaints, to our Corporate Communications Team

Barry Keel, Chief Exec Plymouth City Council

As a soundbite, it might be effective. As a means to stop people using twitter, it’s next to useless. I’d guess that considerably less than 5% of the tweets I post to twitter are from Twitter.com. And even if you can switch off communication to all of the APIs, you’re not going to be able to prevent people updating twitter unless you can jam all of the mobile phones in the area too. So it just makes Plymouth look knee-jerky and stupid (and plenty of people, including opposition councillors, have already pointed this out). But I’ve got sidetracked a little here…

For councillors contributing online, one of the key things they want to know is who is looking at it, what are the metrics for their particular ward and so on. It was suggested that when looking at how many people are reached by a particular channel, you cannot expect a high proportion of ward residents are actually that interested in politics or what the council is up to — a suggested comparison was to compare “percentage of ward residents who have seen Councillor’s social media thingy” with “percentage of ward residents who watch Newsnight”.

Finally, I have to close with one of the things that didn’t get mentioned. I spoke to Ingrid after the session, and asked her whether she had come across Councillor Jack Brody. She said that while the name was familiar, she wasn’t entirely sure. I explained that Councillor Jack Brody was a spoof (apologies Councillor Brody: I keep saying you’re a spoof, you keep insisting that you aren’t — hopefully we can agree to differ), it was an entertaining spoof, and in this case might be one you would present to the Councillors as “we’d really rather that you didn’t engage in social media in this way”.

Anyway, without any further ado, let me please introduce you to Rochdale’s finest: the pocket-lining, junket-loving … and not exactly inoffensive … Councillor Jack Brody. Don’t say you haven’t been warned