Moseley BarCamp – Blogging & Psychogeography from bounder on Vimeo.

Audio by the award winning Rhubarb Radio & also available here.

Listen to all the other talks here. A wonderful day, thanks to everyone who either came, spoke or organised (Shona and the lovely guys from Aquila TV especially).

At Moseley Barcamp I gave a presentation about ‘conversational psychogeography‘ and the potential for an explosion in data analysis of emotions and place. It was a very broad overview and I continually admitted that real research needed to be done (I’d love to do it, but might have to find someone to fund it). As part of the talk I mentioned by emotional analysis of Birmingham social media – which outputs at @birminghamuk on Twitter.

During the questions afterwards Tom Watson suggested that my Birmingham UK emotion scraping could be applied to groups of people – Twittering MPs in particular. Technically it certainly can, and so I did. It’s at jonbounds.co.uk/arempshappy and tweets a score each day via @arempshappy on Twitter. It uses exactly the same code as the Birmingham UK system, except that it takes its data from an aggregated feed of the tweets of all MPs produced by Tweetminster.

Using groups of people immediately makes the analysis of the data easier (or at least offers precedent) – there’s already a website offering (limited, automated) analysis of people’s tweets. It’s called tweetpsych and uses established linguistic techniques (eg LIWC) to produce scores for different aspects of personality based on person’s tweets. to extend this to groups of people should be easy.

Although restricting analysis to groups of people opens up possibilities, the groups need to be be large enough to make the sample useful and also static enough to keep the statistics baring comparison. In some respects the group of tweeting MPs is ideal – and interesting enough to be worth analysing.

How useful it is is another matter, it was easy enough to set up – and could be improved upon by someone interested in groups – so let’s watch it and see if it spikes anywhere interestingly.

It was welcome for me to talk to people from all parts of the Council machine, everyone there was enthused about the possibilities of social media — in fact a lot of the talk in the sessions I attended revolved around how to either drive take-up within the organisations or to speed up the process of using it, or to shift perceptions.

Towards the end of the day, the people for whom even an unconference is too structured gathered to have an “un-panel” a session lead by no-one, with no focus. That said, the talk soon turned to the lack from engagement for politicians (or “members” as I now usefully know council officers call them).  There were two local MPs (Tom Watson & Sion Simon) in attendance, and at least one Councillor from Coventry, but despite Birmingham City Council as an organisation being supportive of the event no local Councillors — and that was the starting point for an interesting discussion about how to encourage that. Or to use a slightly less polite term “force” it.

Andy Mabbett pointed out a tool from MySociety that allows gentle pressure on MPs to force them to use email. It’s interesting as it waits until there is a body of people requesting the engagement (50? I’m sure Andy will correct me if I’m wrong) before contacting the MP in question. Could there be a local councillor version of that? What would the threshold have to be? Would it work?

I thought about using Get Satisfaction, a service with which I tried a little experiment for Birmingham City Council as a whole. That didn’t really come off, as I didn’t publicise it at all and the concept was very new. But I’m now thinking that it didn’t come off beacuse of scale.

To expect “the council” to engage with something as potentially monolithic as “people powered customer support”is a little difficult. At a ward level though, there are people in who’s interest it is to engage: Councillors. Now, of course many already do engage in all sorts of different ways, some even electronically on occasion. But to have the comments, questions, complaints and praise out in the open is a huge step forward.

As I said before:

“Of course lots of problems that we have with products or services aren’t really problems (or are well know and documented) – in these instances other users are happy to help (very much like unofficial forums for software). ‘Users’ are also welcome to point out possible solutions to anything – and of course they do … imagine time saved by council[ors]… if knowledgeable citizens helped answer questions, imagine the resources available”

The added bonus here is that the information and questions have people that are elected to help deal with them, Councillors could treat it as part of a “online surgery” to answer residents questions. Or their political opponents could do, much in the same way as all people standing for local council will claim responsibility for anything good happening.

Or maybe, just maybe we’d find that the community could deal with many of the problems itself and we don’t need the councillors quite so much.

So I’ve set one up for Moseley & King’s Heath in Birmingham where I live (as a product of Birmingham City Council, which may or may not be the best way to do it) – and this time I’m going to publicise it & see what happens.

Will we find out that “local” is enough and “local government” isn’t the answer to everything?

Will is at the forefront of work in hyperlocal blogging, so I was interested in his view on how the report talked about local news as a priority worth paying for:

Listen here

There are podcasts of all speaches and panels and more interviews over at Rhubarb Radio.

In the end it didn’t happen, the Minister wanted a break — that’s fair, and to be honest his speech was great in answering a lot of what I might have asked. But there were a few questions I’d lined up that he didn’t cover. Would you like to answer them:

Will digital conversation fundamentally change democracy, how will this report give us the tools to do that?

What will drive uptake by the digitally excluded — access to services or conversation. What’s in the report to drive conversational spaces rather than broadcasting or industry?

Reliance on DAB seems odd given than many businesses are pulling out — why not skip a failing generation of radio infrastructure?

In your speech you seemed disappointed in media coverage. What did you hope that they would cover?

What mechanisms do you think need to ensure impartial news from smaller organisations -    where does regulation come from with so many interests in consortia?

Rhubarb Radio are covering the event live, and I’ll be doing something (not sure what yet) as part of that coverage. So listen live from 10am (speeches start at 10:45).

If there are any burning questions that you come up with after reading the report, feel free to ask me and I’ll get the answers if I can (or at least ask the questions, you know what these political types are like).

While every point isn't transferable to all blogs, I for example love a long an detailed response to any post on sites I run, it's useful to read it and to think about how comments add value to a site — or even possibly detract. If it's a personal blog, it's very much "your gaff, your rules" and if you set them out no-one can argue. [link]

Download audio file (Jon_Bounds_-_Birmingham_It%27s_Not_Shit.mp3)

Download it if you wish.

There are also all of the other talks too, not fair of me to pick one out — you will probably enjoy them all.