A Shiny World

Click three times

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:01:00 +0000

Summary: Yesterday I handed in my notice in my current job as Digital Engagement Advisor at Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council. In a months time I will be Digital Engagement Lead for the Government Digital Service, reporting to Emer Coleman, Deputy Director of Digital Engagement.

There are some people, some offers, that you just do not turn down. There are logistical nightmares, it's true. I'll make no bones about that. Al's mum is ill, his father is ill and he cannot relocate with me. I simply wouldn't let him. In real terms this will mean a lot of to'ing and fro'ing for some time. It will mean we are not as available at the last minute as we used to be.

But it will also mean many other things too. I will be leaving a team of dedicated, inspirational people who have been endlessly patient, allowing me to find my feet and spread my wings. I will be leaving a Council at what feels like a tipping point in terms of new understandings, new ways of working, new efficiencies but also new opportunities. I will be leaving a desk which I remember feeling to be too big for me 18 months ago and a smaller team who have made me laugh, think and put up with my endless questioning and incessant 'why can't we's'. It will mean not playing a part in the changes and improvements which are happening right under our very feet.

So what could possibly tempt me away? What question was asked which finally made me say yes, yes I will leave a job I love in local government which I also love, yes I will do some ridiculous weekend commuting, yes I will come back to a city which I very much have a love/hate affair with?

A year ago, I met a man briefly in a coffee shop. His name was Chris Chant. He left an impression. Earlier this month I sat with my legs crossed, back against a wall and listened to Mike Bracken. He left an impression. The drip drip drip of tweets from the GDS team in my stream, full of passion and pride. The code on github. The API's. The 0's and 1's. Meeting one of the team in person and listening and understanding the glee of problem solving but also the challenges inherent in the size and scope of the problem. The start up culture. The sheer ridiculousness of the aspiration but the sensibleness of approach and implementation.

But most of all, the delivery. Because words and aspirations aren't enough. You've got to deliver on them. It's not enough to know the path, you have to also be able to walk it, taking the sticks and stones thrown at you along the way.

That unique combination is probably about the only thing that could have tempted me away to be honest.

Some things, you just don't say no to. So I'll be interpreting and translating and educating and informing, networking and connecting and helping some other people to do the same too. I'm excited but I'm also honoured. Let there be no mistake about this, it is an honour to be asked.

This will be the last post in this blog. I'll continue with the other ones as they could never be construed as a conflict of interest but this one must pause, for a while. I take some things very seriously, and the impartiality of a civil servant is one of those things. If I have anything to say relating to work there are more appropriate places to place those words. This will not be one of them.

#'ukgc12 - Some final thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 16:48:00 +0000

So off I went to London to UKGovCamp 2012, an unconference for local and central government types to talk about digital in its many and varied forms across two days at Microsoft HQ in London.

Here are my 20 thoughts, with thanks to Dan Slee for the idea.

The tipping point is when the men in suits start to attend. And seem not the remotest bit phased by people in jeans and trainers discussing random complicated things about their business with as much knowledge and confidence as they have and with as much passion and enthusiasm as they have.
It took a morning for the equilibrium to be reached, but once it had the energy levels were off the scale. There were still a few people who felt it necessary to explain they'd been in government a long time unnecessarily but it was a far less frequent occurrence than I remember it being last year.
Some sessions were so over subscribed as to verge on a health and safety issue. Sitting, standing, wedged in corners, we all still managed to find a space. Wonderful problem to have.
Death by powerpoint is not just restricted to projecting your images. In fact, in some ways its a zillion times worse to know the lone speaking voice in the room is looking at graphs and visualisations that you cannot even see.
The law of two feet is a wonderful thing. You don't have to endure death by powerpoint. And as Lloyd Davis correctly pointed out, the corridors are the connectors of the sessions but they are also where the connections often happen which are of greatest value. This was true for me.
Gonna need a bigger pub.
Mike Bracken is enviably excellent at communicating and is becoming what seems to be a much needed and well respected totem for digital change, excellence and eventual maturity.
Some facilitators are better than others. But you will forgive anything at all of those who have the grace to concede they are struggling and let others gently chip in and suggest things, and then the courtesy to not shut those people down.
There was a lot more talking and not enough doing. But then, what's not enough? If the event hadn't happened, nothing would have happened at all. And I suspect the value of the doing day will not be seen actually on the day but will instead be seen in the days, weeks and months to come in the connections of skillsets which yesterday facilitated.
Security and identity is an issue for everyone. Tell us once does not just apply to births, marriages and deaths but also to security, identity and reassurance.
Government can look impenetrable at times and a long way from local government experience but in some ways central government is way behind local, and in others way in front. I learnt so much yesterday about how to explain digital value to different audiences, so much about evaluation and so much about understanding policy wonks minds.
Some are more open to learning and sharing than others. There are some cliques in central government, in just the same way that there can be in local government. The value of unconferences and digital networks is that it no longer matters. No one person can be a barrier to the evolutionary cycle of an organisation or Department any more. They become lost in the mass of voices speaking sense.
I understand stakeholders better. I understand political influences better. I understand that political motivations can be varying but that ultimately once things are broken down into small outcomes, those outcomes can unite especially when those outcomes will benefit all no matter where the country is in 5 years time.
I spent barely any time in sessions with local government bods I knew and lots of time in sessions with local government people I didn't know and now do. The freshness of perspective was brilliant - 'we are good at this', 'x Council is doing this and found this enormously beneficial' for example. Lots of positive changes being made but we still, even in a digital age, have no official channels for sharing best practice nor best value.
The future of local government CMS's is absolutely definitely totally in one place. Optional or not, there can only be one outcome for the end user, the residents that we serve. Consistency of user experience, consistency of user journey and consistency of outcome. As long as the user experience, journey and outcome are good for those people I can see no problem with this. However, there are questions about innovation which someone else has asked far better than I can. (If you wrote this post, can you comment with a link so I can add it? It was very late last night when I read it).
Char Stamper (paraphrased) 'if we know the potholes page is a top visited page, and we need foster carers, why are we not advertising that we need foster carers on the potholes page'. Well, quite.
Fresh eyes. Business transformation and process refinement cannot happen without them, and in parallel to this an unconference is broken without new blood because there are no fresh eyes. I am past the point of being those fresh eyes and as such am most relieved to see so many new faces over the past two days. Without you, we stagnate, we discuss in circles and we don't move on.
Someone said that Government needed a Government Digital Service was a sign of immaturity. I would argue still that it is the centre of a linear evolution. First, digital is left to everyone out in the wilds to do, because it's not deemed as important and it's impact is misunderstood and it is assumed that staff will acquire skills at the same pace as the general population. Then riots and revolutions happen. And it is realised that there are people out in the general population far more advanced in understanding, capability and implementation than those working in Government. And so Government responds by pulling things in, training and upskilling, employing those from the general population who are ahead and using them to pass on their knowledge by working along side some of those who are from Government. Will the end of the linear be for GDS to dissolve, and all those contained within it to go back out into Departments as critical friends whose role will be to ensure digital is embedded? What happens when the general population has such a breadth of skills? If HE offers literacy and numeracy courses for free, will it also now offer digital literacy courses too?
Unconference is the equivalent of back to back meetings for 6 hours. The lunch break is rarely contains less intense discussion than the sessions themselves. This is tiring. The energy levels on the second day were noticeably different to those on the first and I don't think it would have mattered, as Sarah Lay commented, a jot, if no one had gone to the pub at all.
Women in Tech are a shy old bunch. Without a leader, it all falls apart. This worries me. A lot.

#ukgc12 Day 1

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:32:00 +0000

Summary: Awesomeness

Or; happier, more productive.
Or; I didn't realise we were kind of kicking ass as an organisation.
Or; I didn't know I would end up not having time to talk to people.
Or; What on earth was Paul Clarke doing even getting out of bed.
Or; banking security can teach government security but business can intersect with public sector.
Or; I don't think scripts can hack images or rather more importantly resonant images and I think that's possibly the single most important thing I discussed (with Stef) today.
Or; I can dodge cameras exceedingly well. Good.
Or; I don't believe in no. Or rather, in impossibility. I don't.
Or; Phenomenal energy and talent.
Or; Blistering speed of conversations.
Or; learning. Understand where we are as an org, identifying my part to play in helping change that, and the importance of it.
Or; seeing people who have left happier and more productive.
Or; seeing people who have not happier and more productive.
Or; I don't belong in a box. I just can't do it.
Or; Respect. Admiration. For a man who calmly and quietly states it as it is and as it will be and does so with humour. Mike Bracken is going to need a bigger bus to fit everyone on board.
Or; The loveliness of mischievousness well intentioned.
Or; Death by Powerpoint is not something I am prepared to tolerate any more.
Or; I am too damn gobby for my own good.
Or; At what point do you embrace being a disruptor, understand it's a strength and just go with it? Today.
Or; Work faster at the boring stuff so you can damn well get to the good stuff.
Or; Stop being embarrassed about knowing stuff. Just know share it. It's criminal to not do so, not to do so.
Or; Agile does not fit into PRINCE.
Or; Relinquish control and let the networks do your job for you in communicating your message. If it's a good one, it will get through.
Or; Service users are more agile than us. They consume. Fast. We need to be faster, light footed and leave no trace in our immersion and eventual abandonment of technologies, ideologies, or policies and strategies.
Or; Policy don't need to understand digital. They need to understand outcomes. Evaluation.
Or; Translate and interpret and do it with honesty and integrity.
Or; Be proud of where you work, not ashamed. Be proud of the history, the legacy and the future not seen yet.
Or; Pride and identity is fundamental to a well performing team/organisation/company.
Or; I love my job. I love my job. I love my job.
Or; We are family. Support. Argument and dissention but respectfully and always with good heart.
Or; Leave your issues outside of the room.
Or; Days may start disastrously but can turn around real damn fast.
Or; It's like a day in back to back meetings. Increasingly, the meetings I attend are reflecting in content and weight of outcome at 'work' as they do at 'unconference'.
Or; Awesomeness.

Summary: Awesomeness.

Today was awesome.

Getting SOPA with it

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:07:00 +0000

Summary: Legislation's what you need if you want to be a internet breaker

In the beginning, the web was the Wild Wild West. And in the end, the web will remain the Wild Wild West.

We could stop there but it would perhaps be a little flippant, and easily dismissed and today I wish to write something which is neither. I will not be pitching on this subject to any Editor and if I did I would not expect to be sanctioned to go ahead, but the simple fact remains that this needs explaining and I've done it before and will continue to do so until I am blue fingered.

The Daily Mail contingent exist. Whether we like it or not they do. But is not just the Daily Mail contingent that requires consideration here as to the best of my knowledge the US does not have the Daily Mail. I am sure that instead, something Heralded or Timesed will step into the breach instead.

But the target audience are there and so they are citizens just like the rest of us and when a collection of people who feel generally the same about generally the same kind of issues there is weight there - political, economical and societal. To ignore this collective power is akin to sticking your fingers in your ears and singing 'la la la' if you are a politician or a Councillor and I believe that SOPA is an acknowledgement of this, albeit a US one. But lets make no bones about it, SOPA is the US equivalent of the Digital Economy Act 2011 and the same mistakes are being repeated across the pond (the only bit of this I must confess to finding unforgivable).

For the rest is forgiveable but not for very much longer. There is only so far accidental ignorance can take you as a plea before the Judge and Jury raise their eyebrows and tell you that the onus was on you to take responsibility for your actions and to find out whether they were encompassed by the law or no. And this is where we are at. I believe we are at the tipping point where a voting generation have arrived en masse who are intelligent enough (and judgemental enough) to base their future voting decisions at least in part on the actions of that particular party when it comes to digital.

Once you have reached that point, and we are not quite there yet, it can only go one of two ways.

We can either:

Continue to issue legislation which is not fit for purpose accidentally
Continue to issue legislation which is not fit for purpose on purpose

There is a subtle difference. I can forgive the former and the latter right now. But there is coming a time when I will not forgive the former and will positively encourage the latter because the latter, believe it or not is the only damn option we have and you had better get used to it.

You see, it is the Wild West out there. And there are people out there who are smarter than me or you and all of 'us' non criminally minded collected together. The best we can hope for, and I do mean the very best, is that groups like Lulzsec or whoever they are this week don't get annoyed at us. That they see us as unchallenging and unworthy of their collective wrath and intelligence. It is not them who are running under the radar on the web, it is us. Try being Sony for a day and find out how it feels. I should imagine not dissimilar to the bottom of your world dropping out and there being nothing you can do about it because you simply can't find anyone smart enough to help you with it that you didn't already nark completely with one of your comments challenging their intellect.

No. The way forward is the latter option and here is how it is going to go.

Someone either side of the Atlantic is going to have to balance keeping the Daily Mail lot (the majority whether you like it or not) happy. And keeping them happy equates to removing the evidence of any kind of wrong doing from their eye line. It means Google being the respectable face of the internet for your mother and your father. It means effort required to acquire anything illegal be that unpaid for music or guidelines on how to build a rocket with explosives. It means the Government visibly and forcefully clamping down on what it knows it can do something about and keeping those people happy who have a vested interest in this happening because this, this is the way the world works people.

But. And it's a but almost as big as mine. In doing this, there must be an acknowledgement that for some cracking things open is an addiction and a thrill. It's a 'cos it's there kind of thing', you know, the reason we're trying to go and land on the moon like it's nothing out of the ordinary at all. Those people are always going to exist and their not the majority and some of them might even come and work for you if you offer them enough caffeine and monitors/shiny gadgets but you can't win. I'm sorry to say this and I dislike saying it intensely because had we had this conversation 5 years ago the odds would have been different but the simple fact is:

You cannot win this battle.

So retreat. Use finesse. Consult the high level geeks on how to be seen to be locking down on piracy as much as is possible but for heavens sake don't break the internet doing it.

Thank you for reading.

I am woman, hear me whimper?

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 19:45:00 +0000

A #weeklyblogpost contribution.

Summary: If you've got something to contribute, DO IT. No excuses.

Last night I had an interesting conversation with Janet Davies and Dominic Campbell. Essentially, we identified that women were hideously unrepresented when it came to Life Peerages but that that merely reflect the gender imbalance within Parliament.

My reaction to Janet pointing this out was this:

@janetedavis @dominiccampbell yeah. No. That's not somewhere I'm prepared to ever go either. Behind. My place is behind.

And then followed swiftly by this:

@janetedavis :@dominiccampbell and also, in that sentence I start to understand why women stay at home. Oh. :/

Janet mentioned that she kept hearing women say they didn't want to stand out or speak or be on TV or in newspapers.

I do too. I am one of them. And it's unforgivable really. Veering towards the pathetic when you think I have no childcare issues to take into (quite correct) consideration. I am not tied to a location and am not afraid to travel and be rootless. I believe fiercely and passionately in certain things and I can be utterly relentless when I get the bit between my teeth about an issue I connect with.

So why don't I want to be an MP, or indeed a Councillor? Well, actually I do. In fact, more accurately, I did until a certain storm over mobile phone hacking happened. Because in order to be able to keep calm and carry on you have to have a certain level of resilience. Now I might come across as kind and fluffy and squee'ing around the edges but believe me I can be fearsomely cross if I believe it is justified. I will always concede if someone subsequently points out I've got the wrong end of the stick but I can more than stand up for myself thank you very much and if I think you're consistently being an arse, I'll just disengage entirely.

No.

It's not that. It's the fear. The fear of spectacularly failing and being crucified for it - see Diane Abbot for recent reference. The fear of being seen to not somehow being a woman because to become an MP is to admit by default you are ambitious and thirst for power - things I don't identify with. I want to change a lot of things and am prepared to follow through on those things but power is merely a tool in order to do that, not something in itself to aspire to have. The fear of being visible is innate I think in a generation of girls brought up by parents to be seen and not heard. The fear of being unfashionable, of being ugly, of not being what people somehow expect of someone passionate and committed sits alongside this - comment on my brain all you like, call me an idiot and ill prepared or ill judged but don't ever comment on how I look - I will wilt. The fear that if I were to become an MP that somehow all the enthusiasm and determination would be sapped by successive and endless arguments, directives and spin, all the reasons I thought I should be there in the first place sucked out from my brain and replaced with drudgery and hopelessness.

And I know not whether I am alone in this but I am not prepared to do that. I am not prepared to risk it. I am not prepared to be crucified and I am not prepared to be mocked nor jeered for my looks or my clothing. I am, instead, drawn to working in places where intelligence is valued, where passion is cherished and enthusiasm wanes momentarily before flaring once again.

That is behind. So while I my voice may have joined the masses of women stepping back and letting them men play out in front, I believe that this is the best decision for me. This is not a path I should ever walk down.

However, I would like to ask every one of my female readers - what are your reasons? Do you really not believe vehemently and relentlessly that you could make a difference? Is it childcare or hours? Spotlights or political complications?

Essentially, I want to know - why are we under represented and can we complain if the answer is 'because we refuse'.

I refuse.

Who am I?

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 11:12:00 +0000

Who am I?

Summary: Web users are evolving and Facebook is no longer king.

So, who am I. You can play along, if you like. Think about your digital footprint, by which I mean all the different websites which you have log ins for. Think about your Pinterest boards and your Tumblrs (yes, that is intentionally plural), your Flickrs and Twitter streams.

All of them are you. Each account has your username attached to it which is for some people consistent across all accounts, your gender or your date of birth perhaps. The essence of you, your identity in the web world, is tied to your username and your user icon, the two things which instantly flag in streams of data that you are present, you are in the room.

Some people make a conscious decision to make their usernames different, the intertwining of professional and personal not uncomfortable, per se, but raising issues around privacy of friends and family, especially when it comes to Flickr or Instagram.

Each of those decisions are conscious decisions which we make in a world where it can feel that we are being forced to make a decision about uniformity across all accounts or having somewhere hidden to go a little bit crazy out of the public eye. And even then we are perhaps being judged by those who do not choose to deal with this weird conundrum in quite the same way.

But I noticed something yesterday when discussing this with a colleague. I noticed that he had evolved. He had gone from being a Facebook 'sharer', posting status updates a few times a day, letting everyone know where he was going, what he was doing, when he was doing it and with who, to using Facebook to simply share the innocuous. The silly video clips and the laugh inducing pictures. In other words, the content contained within Facebook and perhaps the appropriateness for updating certain types of things to Facebook is changing. I keep hearing 'oh I don't use Facebook much any more' and I cannot prove it, I don't have figures to do so but I have the strangest feeling that this group of people linked to my colleague, they are not alone.

So where are they going?

It seems, from a model of one site to put everything, to a model where many sites reflect many facets. And is this not actually naturally who we are? When a friend has a baby, I want to know if its cute, what she's called it, and see a few pictures. I do not want birth details, I do not want hourly updates on shades of poo (you're either laughing in disbelief or understanding right now and I know which camp is bigger) and I do not want to know that you were up every hour breast feeding. Mums.net is the right place for that - if nothing else you'll find thousands of people in the same situation,.all of whom will commiserate with you and all of whom will understand the life stage that you are currently at.

I have friends who are fantastic photographers. I don't want to see their 100 roll set of photographs where the bird moves an inch through each click of the shutter. I do want to see the 10 best shots and I want to make sure that I don't miss them - so I use Flipboard to select the latest shots for me so that I don't miss anything but I don't have to wade through the whole set on Flickr. But he uses Flickr because there is a community there (although I hear tell they're moving to Google+ and other places too) who will critique his photographs, provide advise and support on locations to find certain types of birds, or sell kit or provide kit reviews and thus for my friend Flickr is no longer an album site but a resource which he can access.

I use Pinterest. It's an amazing site, and suits my blackbird nature perfectly. I can collect wonderful, beautiful, fascinating and inspiring things all in one place without ever needing to buy a thing. I can bookmark the wonderful websites which sell quirky things, but with images and not an ugly url. I can share the things which I find inspiring and others can share their inspiration with me. We are all similar and yet vastly different, those of us who use the sites, from the quirky to the cliched, from cheesecake pin up to crafty creatives. But we all use it as a place to share - just the things which perhaps none of our friends would find cool, or be interested in.

Facebook assumes one fundamental thing. It assumes you want to know everything someone wants to tell you about themselves. So they introduced features such as timelines and groups in order to give you more control over who you shared updates with and whose updates you would see the most of. But we don't want that, where 'we' is this loosely defined web generation we seem to be evolving into. We used to, in the beginning, when Facebook was shiny and new. But we evolved, because evolution is what happened when time passes and external forces such as economics, politics and well...evolution of psychology happens. And make no mistake, the web is changing our brain chemistry. But as an association of that, it is also changing our sense of identity.

We don't want to tell everyone everything any more. We want to tailor, we want to be more considerate. I've been doing this for a few years because I have been here perhaps longer but now, it seems, everyone else is following the same journey and that's a different subject for a different post, about accidentally always being ahead of the curve of web psychology because you've been immersed to this level that now a lot of people seem to be for a lot longer and you were talking about getting off grid 3 years ago, and now everyone is craving that disconnect, that silence..

But Facebook is not who we are any more. We do not all want to be on the same platform, because on some deep seated lever that says to us that we are all the same. We are not all the same. We are individuals and we are choosing, now, who we share what with. We have evolved to understand our digital footprints can be massive, if we want them to be. We can have Tumblrs for weight loss or exercise, for quitting smoking or for sharing cool photographs. We can have Fitocracy profiles to incentivise our exercise. We can choose, but more importantly, we can deliver to those interested, whilst filtering it away from those who are not.

In other words, that information overload problem?

We're taking care of it ourselves. The evolution of the internet just took another big jump and whilst it could be argued, and will be argued that our identity is becoming split and that this is not healthy, I instead believe that we are becoming more thoughtful in our web use, that we are delivering content to those who are interested in places where they have chosen to be, rather than over sharing information with those who are simply not interested.

To thine own self be true - #weeklyblogpost

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 18:25:00 +0000

I've missed the deadline for #weeklyblogpost - it was midday today. But I wanted to tip this into the pot now because I have the strangest feeling there wont be much spare time next week either.

To thine own self be true

My own personal rule for Twitter. I heard someone sounding almost apologetic this morning because they appeared to think showing emotion on Twitter was a bad thing. As it happened, they'd feel passionately and fiercely about something, they made some good points, and they didn't come across to me as being emo or depressed or indeed anything else.

They came across as human. A person with feelings and emotions, just like everyone else. Now, this person tweets under their own name and I appreciate that maybe that's a different ball game. I have the luxury of mostly being able to walk into any room and not owning up to my Twitter account - I look nothing like my icon and there must be a lot of Louise K's in the world. However, most of the people I work with and some of my more tolerant of local government geeking friends still follow me.

I'm quite a fiery person. I'm quite an enthusiastic person. I'm quite er....animated when talking to people and have been known to sending things flying by accident. I don't do half measures in real life - why on earth should I do them online? The things which make me a good person to be around (most of the time) in real life, when I am standing in front of you arguing the hell about something completely random are the things which make me me.

Which is where I come to Diane Abbott. Because I called her on a tweet of hers. But I did it with no expectations of response, nor to censure. I don't expect to have to step on eggshells around anyone, never mind MP's. I expect to be able to call someone on being an idiot, careless or thoughtless, them to apologise if they feel they've genuinely done something wrong and then for us all to move on.

People make mistakes. People are always going to make mistakes. I make them, I own up to them, I apologise. I expect other people to do the same. And I am glad Diane Abbott explained about context and I am glad she was given the opportunity of redress and was not asked to stand down as one request made. I believe that you have the courage of your convictions and state your mind - but I also believe it is not a climbdown to explain context and nor is it a climbdown when someone has genuinely misinterpreted your tone of voice.

To thine own self be true. Say what you mean, love, hate and dream of clearly and succintly. That's what Twitter is for, that's what Twitter absolutely rocks at. Expect to be judged, expect to be laughed at occasionally, but understand this: if you are not true to yourself, you will spend all your time apologising and none learning, sharing, shaping or changing.

So that's my number one Twitter tip for 2012.

What's yours?

My digital heroes of 2012 - no to #pandagate

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 21:21:00 +0000

#pandagate. Sounds ridiculous really. 12 faces of 2011 - the women the title blazed in H1. Bottom right of the photo montage, a panda. Not, by any stretch of the imagination, a woman.

Might not have been an issue had it not followed on the heels of the Sports Personality being completely gender blind. Timing and context, my friends, your two greatest foes in social media reputation land.

But; to happier things. Like my heroes list for 2011, because believe it or not, there are some women in it and believe it or not, there are some men too. Because believe it or not, that's the way the worlds mixed up these days whether you like it or not. It's a personal list, yours will be different. Feel free to add your own in the comments, disagree or post a link to yours in your own blog.

Src: Wikipedia

This is Margaret Atwood. She's on Twitter. She wrote The Handmaids Tale which was on our GCSE syllabus. She also wrote a few other books, the most memorable to me being Cat's Eyes. Which I told her. And which she graced with a response. And so I came to have a conversation with the author of a book which had quite a profound affect on me when I was a teenager. And that conversation has stayed with me, because of the ease and naturalness with which it was conducted, considering the age of the lady it was with and the medium it was across - a medium she uses comfortably and with great effect.
Got a grandmother who's too old for this computer crap? Send her Atwood's way.

Src: Wikipedia

Martha Lane Fox. Apparently she's a 'figurehead'. Not supposed to be taken seriously. Not technical enough, not geeky enough. Just some of the accusations levelled. Which I think is interesting, as I can only assume it was purely accidental she built one of the first .com success stories which didn't go the way of boo.com. Evidently, it's incredibly simple to create a successful internet business, so simple we should all be able to do it. Except...no, wait...where are all these successful businesses? The lady isn't being asked to be technical, she's being asked to be digital. There is a difference, once I believe in passionately because it is, most definitely all about the people. The tech just spins the wheels and passed the packets.

Src: Wikipedia

Ben Hammersley. Flippantly referred to as Editor at Large at Wired (UK) magazine. Stealthily, quietly and ever so determinedly educating the important people on the merits of digital technology. I fell over the transcript of his speech to the Information Assurance Advisory Council. It is simple, powerful and true. I hear tell he's also now appointed to go do something to do with our new silicon roundabout Tech City. I anticipate great things. I assume that he will be accused of similar things to Martha. But figureheads are there for a reason, rallying calls issued by those with integrity and knowledge. In order for something to have direction and traction, it must be led. And leaders are not made.
.

Src: Cyberdoyle's Blog

Meet Cyberdoyle. Aka Chris Condor. As her Twitter bio states, she's a bit familiar with fibre and not the dietary kind. She has a reputation as a campaigner but she isn't. She's a do'er. She is part of B4rn, a social enterprise comprised of herself and a few colleagues who are going to bring super speedy connections to the tippy toppy most cornerish bit of Lancashire where it merges with Cumbria and Yorkshire. Where BT wouldn't go if you paid them, basically. They're selling shares, digging trenches and laying the fibre themselves and making a whole tonne of noise whilst they're doing it. Digital role models? Right up there as a woman just doing what she does best. JFDI.

Src: European Commission

Neelie Kroes. Vice President of the European Commission and increasingly a name I keep coming across in digital and opendata circles. Undeterred by impenetrable cross border digital rules, regulations, terminology (I'm looking at you here France) and expectations she is ploughing a straight path through the lot and organising commitments to digital single markets, interoperability and standards, trust and security, speedy connections, getting everyone skilled up, using tech to solve social problems, opendata and what seem to be a thousand and one other things too. Dutch born, but somehow...very English in her way of doing things. Her direct and determined approach is winning my utmost respect.

Src: Wikipedia

I may not always agree with Facebook but watching Sheryl Sandberg stand up on a TED stage and tell it exactly how it is for women in the working world was a pivotal moment for me in understanding my own mentality up to that point. Don't have an opinion, don't join in, don't contribute, don't stick your head above the parapet. Someone might notice and then what the hell will you do?
Well, you'll have a career is what will happen. One you wont put on hold or take your foot off the throttle from because you might want children (or not), or you might be sort of quite ill (or not), or.....
The magic of digital is that her words kicked my ass into touch and I'll never meet her. Chalk one up.

This could be a picture of Emer or Julie, Andrea or Gladys, Shirley or Chris, Caroline or Jane. It represents an entity without a face or with many faces. Role models and mentors on a person level who have helped and listened, talked and coached, advised and pushed, encouraged and nurtured. Because of them, variously I am; more confident, more assured, more sane, more organised, weigh less, speak more, stand taller and think more. My world has widened and my thinking speeded up - but then it has also slowed down. I have understood what it is to be professional but also what it is to be human from these women and I am grateful to know them. Some of them I call friends. And I am blessed.

This year, I have sat in meetings and spoken about digital technologies all over the Council. From leaving care to foster care, from domestic violence to young parents support, from info governance in health to community meeting co-ordination discussions. To the last I have met professionals with integrity, honesty, and an unabashed acknowledgement in some cases of their own fear of the technology. I have laughed, encouraged and been completely honest in reciprocation. And I've left every meeting smiling. Not bad for local gov.

Inserted for comedic effect. But come on, far funnier than a freaking panda.

This is not a review.

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:54:00 +0000

This is not a review.

This is a commentary on modern life. I am currently on leave for the day. Long drawn out reasons - not Xmas related or shopping related, though I am using it to whip through HMRC related paperwork, tidy the house and generally make room for the tree which rather embarrassingly has not yet made an appearance.

I live in a turn of the century or so stone terrace. None of this new fangled brick here. The walls absorb the cold but once warmed keep us nice and toasty. The house needs a lot doing to it - it's work in progress. The walls are not as thick as you would expect and with families both sides of us and there just being the two of us, sometimes we feel assaulted by the by product noise generated on a day to day basis.

Mostly the sounds that drift through are of Bollywood movies, of calls to prayer, of the kids mimicing the sounds of prayer with little understanding of the shape or meaning of the sounds. Never is there the sound of recorders, Tomy toys or Strictly Come Dancing, nor is there pounding dance music emanating from the teenagers bedrooms.This would be because the teenagers don't have bedrooms of their own - these are two up two downs and the 4 children to my right all share a bedroom. I never hear the daughter, only ever the 3 sons. I have briefly seen the daughter pass through the garden and into the ramshackle wooden building in their back garden - but that was only once. I don't think she goes to school and I don't think she leaves the house. I don't know what she does. Sometimes I question whether she even exists at all.

They are Pakistani and the father is a pillar of the local community or so it seems. Groups of wise and elderly men come and go and the front living room briefly comes alight, showing men seated, arms waving passionately, words and thoughts flying and being meant.

On the other side is another family. I think Arabic though I am not sure. I never hear them speak and I never really here the children either. All I hear, occasionally, is the sound of the mother sobbing, a heart breaking sound. It happened 15 minutes ago and I tweeted about it.

Go round, go knock, take a cup of sugar, everyone suggested.

It's not that easy.

It should be that easy. I am a caring kind of person. Empathic. I feel for people very much and am a self confessed sap when it comes to sad movies. I've had to leave films 2 minutes early to fix my make up on more than one occasion and I don't really mind admitting it either - what's wrong with emotion anyway?

But her emotion is making me feel uncomfortable because I simply do not know what I should do about it. And I have come to the conclusion that I am incapacitated through nothing more than stupidity. I have tried, of course I have, to make eye contact, to say hello. The problem is, in order for a conversation to start, there has to be a response to the hello. There has to be some kind of engagement from the other side. And there just isn't. I can't even get eye contact half the time and if I do it is fleeting.

But that's no excuse for stopping trying. Not speaking English is no excuse for not making a connection. A smile is a connection so instead I'll try smiling and scrap the hello bit - maybe it's just not understood. A smile says a million things that would take hours to speak.

The simple fact is, I am not going next door to offer help because I am unsure how it will be received. I am fearful of imposing and intruding. I am awkward in my lack of understanding of what the right protocols are. I am hurting because I can't stand the idea of someone being in pain emotionally and not having someone to hug and reassure. But I don't know where to begin in trying to work out how to offer the care I would so like to.

As a footnote, in John Lewis on Sunday I saw a woman alone struggling with the contents of a pram and a toddler, the pram having evidently tipped over when the child had climbed out due to the sheer weight of shopping on the back. I did not hesitate for a second in asking if she needed help and was fine with her answer that she did not - it was an easy exchange, unmired as it was by the removal of knowable social mores.

I don't have the rulebook for the interactions that where I live demands of me. It's not as simple as knocking on the door. It should be. But there are language barriers, cultural barriers, gender barriers that I simply do not know how to navigate.

And it seems to me I am not alone in this and it seems to me, we should be focusing a little more on understanding and navigating these situations and a little less on offending people. So if anyone has suggestions on how to navigate such situations as these, please please please comment. I feel about as confident in my own ability to do so as a dead chicken.

Digital dreams

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 21:29:00 +0000

@benjoda mocks me for getting excited about discovering a pdf aggregator which saved me a lot of time and presented things efficiently and effectively.

He's going to hate this post with a passion. Because in it, I am going to indulge something which has been missing for a while - and it is passion. For digital. Because it is what I am, who I am and what I do.

At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, this country experienced an acceleration of thinking, developing, innovation and JFDI arguably never seen before (yes, flinty, hence the slight give). It was distributed equitably in the spoils which emerged, at least geographically - I know this as I have walked beneath key stones from Edinburgh to York, Bristol to Exeter which have born roughly the same dates, leading to great palaces of learning named libraries - the 'giving back' method de jour of any self respecting industrialist.

And so, almost exactly 100 years later and what do we have? I passionately believe, a digital revolution. A monumental shift, not only in the way we conduct business, but also our daily lives, with the potential to shake the very foundations of the world, economically, politically and yes, even perhaps what it actually means to be human. Married with the scientific research discoveries which mean we can control physical objects with a thought, that we can see the unseeable and know the unknowable. As we strip away the layers of mystery between us and the stars, the skies, the sand and the snow, are we turning to a manufactured, invisible and unquantifiable digital space to satisfy what is perhaps a coded embedded behaviour in humans - the need to not know the future, to be uncertain, to see no guarantees?

So what will this digitalists leave? Industrialists took care of their workers, relatively at the time, by providing roofs over heads, opportunities for learning and personal development, and eventually education for the young. In their own sweet way they enabled social mobility, by ensuring that the generation beneath the workers spinning endlessly in factories were educated to a level where basic numeracy and literacy were possible, encouraged even, where it was possible to use education as a way to change their futures and to level up.

Digitalists have a number of options. Hack days, I think, are a shade of this in that it is an opportunity for developers to make contacts yes, and it is an opportunity for developers to make apps with useful data which will no doubt be marketable products, but the fact still remains; free time, free thinking, free bodies. A model which involves an exchange of something where both benefit.

But they are small. And in time, the memory of them will disappear. They are not, in other words, the equivalent of libraries still standing 100 years later.

Which begs the question, what will digitalists leave? What will be their legacy? Will they acknowledge their power and their genius, the collective wisdom collision that seems to happen once every 100 years and decide to collaborate and do something wonderful for no other reason than to further humanities development, or will they be oblivious, wrapped in the push to better the tech, better the tools, and forget entirely that humans use them?

I'd like to think the digital crowd are only just getting started.

How not to win followers & influence people

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 19:04:00 +0000

Call it round 2. Call it an explosion of sheer frustration. Call it what you want. Here's my top 10 things which are irritating the hell out of me this week on social media and Twitter specifically. If you do these things, you'll probably get away with one or two. Do all of them, and either I've already unfollowed you or I'm about to. Am I alone in feeling this way? That's for you to decide.

What goes up must come down. Specifically, nurture your relationships built on social media through thick and thin. Because if you drop someone on your way up, be sure they will have no sympathy, no time, and no retweets for you on your way back down again. Time and attention are precious in the new world order.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be. Or in this case, only the former - the latter is positively encouraged. But don't pretend someone elses tweet is yours, use MT if you've modified the tweet you are retweeting or add your comment after a < or similar. Attribution is the basis of social capital. Don't steal someone elses capital. It makes you look stupid, because I'm assuming you have nothing to say for yourself.

Say thank you. For kind comments on blogs, for retweets on Twitter, for citations in articles. It costs you nothing, no one has any means of knowing if you meant it or not, but if you don't, it's noted. And if you're an organisation on social media, times this by 1,000. Barriers to engagement include ignorance.

Man up if you cock up. If someone tells you auto-correct has failed, thank them. Then, either delete the original tweet and repost a corrected version or apologise, acknowledge the typo/error and then repost a corrected version. Pretending like no one saw the mistake is just dumb. Your cock up has been seen by 100's if not 1000's by the time you've noticed it.

Don't hammer bent nails. If you're getting drawn into an argument, take it to DM. The damage to your reputation, apart from anything else, will be permanent if you don't win, and the risk is just not worth taking. You can't delete the conversation. And meanwhile, everyone who follows you both is watching and reading with mountain horror while vowing never to do business with you again.

Don't ask people to retweet your stuff. Especially, don't ask people to retweet your stuff on email. It makes a mockery of the social capital built on Twitter and for some of us our genuineness is something precious - asking us to compromise that is going to make us deliberately not retweet you even if we do agree with you. Geeks, especially, will respond badly to requests like this.

Don't email/phone/write to anyone in my team offering to train them for £400.00. a) it shows you have done no research whatsoever (a quick trawl of our front page would show futility), b) I have checked your Twitter account and seen how much you 'use social media to maximise your networking and money making potential' c) if you think you only need to spend 10 minutes on Twitter a day you're a numpty. Sorry. Conversations don't have defined time slots. You're broadcasting.

Don't use the word brand. Ever. People are not brands. People are messy, noisy, opinionated, unpredictable mistake prone stupidity in a skin wrapper. We make mistakes. We make inappropriate comments. Just deal with it and stop trying to make social media the digital equivalent of an operating theatre. Engagement doesn't happen with robots.

Smile occasionally. In other words, be light hearted. Crack a joke. Link to a silly video. Tell me your daughter just learnt to count and you're grinning like a loon. This ties into the above but be human. Please. I don't want to follow a bot and some humans are starting to suspiciously resemble bots. Bots get banned. Don't make me ban you.

Play nicely. Play genuinely. Play freely. But most of all, play.

Before a review, a preview

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 08:16:00 +0000

Someone on the #pr tag asked last night what our predictions were for the future.

I said that PR would be going into a tailspin as it realised everyone's attention span was so reduced that they needed to do something really special to stand out.

I suddenly realised - more and more people are becoming just like me and my friends have always been. We've always fast forwarded through adverts, seeing them as an intrusion. We've shopped online for Xmas presents since at least 2002, for some long long before. I last remember battling with crowds in Croydon somewhere back then with a streaming cold swearing never again - and thanks to the web there never has been again. I concede that while it was only a small minority of us doing that it was not an issue for British retail, but I'm damned if I'm changing a 10 year habit just because everyone else caught on.

Anyway. I don't click on ads on the web. I don't notice ads in magazines. It's usually tech adverts which leave me open mouthed on the TV - a tradition carried on since the very first Orange advert which I loved to pieces.

Ads need to move me. They need to grab me. Otherwise they just blend in, merged into the noisy background of a life with so much input now that I'm having to sift ruthlessly through it or it will take over.

My trajectory through the web has been a long one, as my massive footprint under various pseudonyms shows. Increasingly I get the feeling that my journey is being replicated by the masses behind me but with a delay of 2 or 3 years. So when I talk about consuming masses of information, maybe I am alone in having the issue even to start with. Maybe when I talk about login fatigue, I am alone in experiencing it.

But I am increasingly becoming aware, as Clay Shirky rightly identified, everybody is coming, and PR, especially PR is going to have quite a challenging job to deal with and manage that.

Of course the biggest issue of all here is what happens when Facebook inevitably fractures as a collector of internet identities - because at the moment, all the people you want to talk to are gathered, pretty much, in one nice, easy to understand and easy to reach place.

If Facebook fractures, I have a suspicion things will not be so easy, that social graphs will fracture, and that instead of being one mother ship, there will be a million pods, all tied together by one login which does not have a physical place to gather, and marketing will once again become a niche targeted thing and not a massive convenient broadcast type thing.

I could be wrong, of course. I hope I am. It's more fun for me that way - who the hell wants to be able to see the future right now when not seeing it and watching it develop is so much more exciting.

What IQ gives a city Mensa membership?

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 19:25:00 +0000

I'm fascinated by cities. I lived in Plymouth for 3.5 years and in London (not Essex) for about 5 or so. I loved them both in different ways, though comparing Plymouth to London feels vaguely ridiculous.

Anyway, discussions of definitions of city should be left for another day. I want to think about what makes a city smart. This post was prompted by catching an update on how London cabbies are using social media to update each other and how the network has grown from the 2 cabbies who hatched the plan, to the 400 they currently have registered. As an aside here, this led me via the Twitter account to the website for tweetalondoncab which makes my eyes want an eye bath quick smart but lets not cast aspersions where strengths evidently do not sit. I've got more chance of voluntarily wearing mascara than passing the knowledge.

Park that thought for a moment (ha ha ha, *donk*) and move instead to the the Victorian sewerage tunnels underneath London. A ready made duct system, which combined with the underground subterranean rivers beneath London, covers hundreds of miles hidden away beneath feet, little thought of, but much relied upon.

Then there's the obvious. The tube. Or rather, the tube and its little brother, the post office railway, the combination of which cover approximately 270 miles of track and are the object of obsession ranging from being able to name the location of every station on the network to photographing every 'ghost' station.

So how is this relevant? From Traffic Wardens to bus drivers, cabbies to sewerage, to me what makes a city smart is not how many networks of varying descriptions a city actually has, but how those are used. Perhaps back in the days of the Industrial Revolution having an asset such as sewers was a sign of a forward thinking city but these days our assessment of a city fit for purpose revolve more around its ability to host an Olympics and how many wi-fi access points it contains.

But these are distractions. In the same way we are all learning to hijack each others networks, to essentially buy our way into the value other peoples networks contain, in which we value the networks people bring to their jobs, we should value a city on its ability to utilise the existing networks within a city.

Take for example, the Highways Agency traffic cameras used to inform networks where traffic incidents were without needing to be on the scene or rely on someone being at the scene taking the initiative to inform someone. What a waste to only have authorised eyes accessing such information - why not distribute not only the access but also the responsibility for monitoring issues on such cameras out to the local people who have to pass by those places monitored by the cameras each morning on their way to work.

Intelligent cities enable dual or even triple use, and they distribute responsibility to the masses.

Then there are those cabbies. Cabbies get everywhere and they get paid to go everywhere more to the point, though if Londoners are to be believed they go everywhere that is North and nowhere that is South (and my personal experience after being evicted from La Scala at 4am and attempting to get to Dulwich bear this out). What do those cabbies see in the process of their journeys across the metropolis? Do they see the patterns above ground that those who traverse the same paths day to day can only see? Do they see the errors in those patterns, the missing person from the always standing there who wasn't supposed to be on holiday this week? Or the phase change, even, in the traffic lights around gyratories which perhaps wasn't planned?

Intelligent cities take advantage of the familiar and predictable and enable error reports to be made instantly and easily.

Sewers. An unfortunate necessity in the ever more clean and surgically detached digital 21st century. We don't like to think about them, we don't like to talk about them. But what could they tell us if we sent nodules down there with sonar capabilities which bounces and bounced and mapped the landscape above them, between the tunnels and the streets, so that engineers would not need to consult ridiculous amounts of land registries and wait for the data to arrive - instead they could communicate this to those who require it, the utility companies, who would never again accidentally slice through, perhaps, the cable that they did not know was there.

Intelligent cities look upwards from beneath as well as downwards from above.

Crime. Cities are crime hot spots - so many people and so much to steal. So many tourist too busy gazing open mouthed to notice the brushing too close and the hasty getaway. Above all cities now, layers of connectivity in the form of 3G, or of free wireless, or as Google has shown, open routers, all keys to the door of location. Reporting crime, or even accident often starts with 'where are you?' for how else will assistance reach you and how many of us are 100% confident that we could fire back an answer immediately, if at all? So no system to hit a button on a mobile and triangulated instantly, transmit that data to the nearest ambulance control centre, to be recorded, linked and assistance despatched while the controller on the other end of the phone deals with the weird intimacy of preventing death before assistance arrives.

Intelligence cities see the invisible networks and hijack those too, in order to be more efficient.

The potential for expanding the IQ of a city does not require any physical expansion. We do not need more houses, greater history, more majors nor faster connectivity in order for our cities more intelligent. Instead we simply need to consume our surroundings differently, look at them differently, understand them to be different and know that if a network is only serving one group of people it is a missed opportunity, a potential calamity, a missed cost saving exercise.

Thinking differently isn't just small. It's huge. My only question is, who is going to step up and take the lead?

A moment of insanity, a lifetime of punishment

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 13:56:00 +0000

This post from Paul Clarke is cited in entirety for bringing the issues I am about to comment to my attention. It is an excellent piece written from the perspective of a data wrangler, someone who really knows what they're talking about when it comes to open data and transparency of process.

This is my response to the original point addressed, that of Will Perrin, among others, calling for the publication of offenders names in addition to their sentences received and crimes committed.

Currently, some offenders names do end up on the web - as a result of local reporters diligence in attending local Courts, a practice which to me seems archaic but someone must have deemed it necessary and to sell newspapers and who am I to disagree.

But they're not all in one easy to find and search place. Few newspapers even now permalink content. It is as easy for content to drop off the edge of the newspapers website as it used to be for ships to drop off the edge of the world in peoples minds.

If Will and others have their way, the data will never be erased. It will persist for as long as Google retains a cached history and if tweeted will forever remain in the archives of the Library of Congress. Which would be fine, perhaps, if it were not for the fact that we have a little law in this country which says, convictions can be spent. It's called the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, and unlike the majority of legislation, the clue is most definitely in the name. As Next Step ably assist in explaining, most convictions become spent after 5 years.

The internet doesn't purge its memory after 5 years. Nor, more importantly, would I imagine that most offenders have the stomach to even try and attempt to force search engines and social media sites to eliminate all mention of their past misdemeanour's.

So, why is the Rehab of Offenders Act there, I hear you ask? Well, as an ex Probation Service Officer, I feel slightly qualified to comment, though not entirely because I can't find the statistics I know are there. Leaving your past behind is not easy. Often the people who are most successful at turning their lives around, are those who remove themselves entirely from those they associated with when they were carrying out their convictions - burglary, drug offences, shoplifting, taking without consent. All of these are linked to peer behaviour, and are intricately linked, sometimes to place, sometime to people, and sometimes to drug habit. An offender leaves prison having become clean from heroin, returns to the same place, people, life as before he went into prison and the slide backwards is much easier than if he comes out to a town where he has no networks and no temptations.

It's this disassociation with habit which leads to success. But once this has been achieved, imagine applying for a succession of jobs and being turned down for every single one. Imagine not disclosing previous convictions because you are not asked to, working your way up in an organisation, getting to the point where a management promotion is inevitable, a police check is carried out and suddenly you're doubted, all the effort you invested is devalued, because someone is judging you now, not on your behaviour as it has been for the past 3 years, but on the behaviour 10 years before that.

Imagine that you are 17 and shoplifting to fuel a drug habit. You kick the habit with help. You no longer need to shoplift. But you are refused a job ever after in the retail industry because you cannot be trusted. Imagine that you are 21 and involved in and arrested during the student protests. Imagine that following you around for the rest of your entire life and still affecting peoples perceptions of you when you're 50 and a vastly different person.

To think that a move to publish offenders details will not impact this way on those who initially chose the wrong path but who realised before it was too late it was the wrong path is naive. To compound the challenges faced by offenders to rehabilitate is cruel. To condemn people without faces to a lifetime of persecution and failure, and yes, an assumption of inability to change and turn life around is irresponsible.

I do not believe offenders details should ever be published. Because, quite literally, that's one Pandora's box you will never shut again.

Social media is for boys

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 18:55:00 +0000

Or at least, if the speakers at the last few traditional conferences on the subject were considered as evidence of gender monopoly.

Yesterday I went to a conference for the voluntary sector on tech and social media. The audience was an even split, in fact possibly more weighted towards female attendees. The scheduled speakers for the first half of the day? Entirely male. The leaders of the sessions in the afternoon which were unconference style? An almost even mix, taking into account the workshop sessions.

Now, there were what felt to be subtle intimations that I should not be complaining if I were not prepared to stand up at the front myself. There was equally, I think, some assumptions that I was in some way upset to not be asked.

I'm nothing to do with the voluntary sector right now and I am not a social media expert. I am not famous for anything. I have nothing to speak about and I didn't see the call for speakers, more importantly. Had I had something to say, and seen the call for speakers, I absolutely would have offered. I'm not much scared of a room full of people any more.

The fact still remains that the other women in the room weren't at the front either. And as I commented at the time, this was not an accusation, the conference yesterday was no more guilty than every single other conference or unconference I have been to, though unconferences tend to be slightly better, especially govcamps for some reason.

I'm really bored of it.

But most of all, very most of all, I'm still boggling at the irony of one of the female organisers asking an entirely male panel why they thought there weren't more female speakers.

So, I'm going to ask you, because I know there are many women who read this. Why don't you offer to speak at conferences? What is it that holds you back from running unconference sessions? Why are we massively unrepresented at the front and yet have plenty to say online and across social media?

Communications is not a swear word (& neither is PR)

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 19:17:00 +0000

Imagine this.

You work for a Council. You're on the periphery of a few services, have a job which needs you to learn very quickly how a number of sub sets of services work to see if they're using digital in the most appropriate and cost effective way for them and more importantly their residents and you have a few years background in one particular area which you loved and truth be told, still occasionally miss a teeny tiny bit.

You're not part of Communications in the traditional sense in that you're digital. But you sit next to Communications in an open plan office. You hear the ebb and flow and you occasionally join in with interesting conversations because these days you're less about not disturbing Research behind you and more about random 2 minute bouts of silliness to get it all out of your system so you can get your head down and concentrate properly for the next 2 hours.

You learn some things, sat in that position. You hear some things too, but this is not what this post is about and it is not my place to talk about those things. Instead, I'd like to explain some harsh realities to those of you who think that 'traditional' communications, a phrase somehow always read by me with a sneering tone to it, is a thing of the past, irrelevant, of no standing in the conversation.

Last week I sat in a meeting room and listened to some very talented and passionate Officers and Managers discuss their Domestic Violence service. It was humbling. It was phenomenal. It was reassuring and hope inducing. They had, in the process of their service design, thought of absolutely everything. Every scenario, every bit of research, every trick in the book was used to ensure that should a woman or a man need to phone and talk to someone, they could do so, at a time convenient to them, in a way which was safe for them, to someone who understood them.

Without Communications, do you think anyone would know that service existed? Yes, social media can help and it will. Facebook ads, QR codes for quick telephone number scans inserting an innocuously named new contact in their phonebook, perhaps? Okay. But what about the demographic of mum who doesn't have a smartphone, doesn't know what the internet is and anyway the kids are always playing the Sims on the PC and the trouble doesn't start until they've gone to bed? What about how to communicate with those for whom English is a second language? Or no language at all?

Are the domestic violence team experts in domestic violence or in how to best communicate with the targets of that domestic violence? Who on either side of the table is more of a 'professional' and who has the more important knowledge?

Neither. I say neither. I say teamwork rules.

3 years ago I was involved in the biggest logistical nightmare I think a Council could have to deal with outside of emergency planning. Yes, you've guessed it. Bins. We switched from fortnightly bin collections to weekly bin collections (but with a smaller capacity bin, important that bit) and from weekly recycling collections to fortnightly (with the same capacity bin - as an aside this worked, ask if you want to know more). The redesign of the routes for the bin collection vehicles was a nightmare. Getting them into a GIS system to record them was a nightmare. But neither of those nightmares were as monstrous as the Communications nightmare. That was a special nightmare all of its own.

You see refuse collection is, whether you like it or not, the only service which, should it go wrong, will be noticed by all your residents. All of them. I don't know the exact figures but suspect inbound calls to the call centre revolve around bins quite a lot on most days of the week. It's a hot topic and it affects everyone.

Do you think that the Manager of the bin crews was in any way the right person to ensure that 59,000 individual households knew on exactly the right day, with exactly the right amount of notice so they didn't forget but knew in time, taking into account ESOL issues, taking into account fly tipping issues and the associated impact on then NI 196 scores, also bearing in mind delivery schedules and availability, print runs at the local printers and what felt like a zillion other tiny little 'have you thought of' moments - do you think he was the right person to think of all of that? Do you think he should be skilled in all those things?

Or, do you think he had enough on his plate calculating how much the change in refuse collection amount would be, the impact on number of vehicles, the number of trips to the tip to empty, factoring in of course that the nearest local landfill site had just closed and a bit more of a journey was needed, but also taking into consideration carbon emissions, the rising cost of diesel, staff who were still working to task and finish, traffic jam hotspots and avoiding them (schools) at certain times of day and the ability of some crew to drive a 10 tonne truck down a lane as wide as the truck itself. For a start.

Because I think, and I respect the man immensely, that no, He was not the right man for that job. The right woman for the job happened to be a colleague of mine. And because she was good at her job, still is good at her job, 59,000 households were all told, across 5 phases, which took 12 months, exactly which days they were changing to on which bit of the fortnight for refuse and ditto for recycling. And nothing went wrong. Okay, 20 houses went wrong, I'll fess up. But to my knowledge, across a year of phased changes, 20 people got the wrong information and to be honest? It was probably my fault and an error with my polygon.

Communications co-ordinated this. Communications made sure everyone knew what was happening, no one was taken by surprise and more importantly, Communications then made sure everyone knew why we were doing it - to save money, to encourage more recycling, to make us more efficient and to provide a better, more efficient service.

Without Communications the inbound call centre would have quit. The sheer amount of calls coming in from confused residents not knowing when on earth to put their bins out would have crashed the whole telephone system. As it was? Barely a whisper.

And this, this my friends is why your ignorance is understandable but nevertheless irritating. Because you only ever notice Communications are useless when something goes wrong. If they're doing it right, you'll forget they're there.

Have you forgotten they're there?

We need to talk about content

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:43:00 +0000

I'm sorry, but we do.

I've hitherto avoided commenting on such things because at work this is not my area, and so it is absolutely inappropriate for me to step on other peoples toes and comment either negatively or positively on something I have no control over and no input into.

But someone has made it my issue. That someone is Looking Local. This morning they emailed me to tell me that they had relaunched their Facebook app which allows content from Council websites to be imported en masse and displayed on Facebook - and pointed me at Bracknell Forest as an example of how it could be used.

It's a pretty Facebook page. Down the left hand side, nice and neatly ordered are all the options from Disabled Guides to maps, virtual tours to Twitter accounts. There are car park maps, polling stations maps and schools maps. Maps galore. A plethora of maps. Click on the car park map and it's been viewed over 8,000 times. The leisure centre map 540,000 times. The play areas map 4,000 times. Not inconsequential for what is, quite clearly also demonstrated by the maps, a relatively small Council covering a relatively small area.

I am impressed. No, really I am. It's a cohesive, justified and obviously well used social media hub in the place where people evidently are (though I'm sure traffic is driven to those maps from elsewhere as well - like the Council website which will appear first in a search engine search).

So I delve a bit deeper. Friend activity reveals a blank - the Council has obviously decided it does not feel it is appropriate for them to 'friend' their residents. A quick scan down the wall reveals that almost every post is 'Liked' but that it is one 'Like' on average and that the comment rate is not as high as those viewing figures of the maps might indicate they should be. And strange to see as it's quite obvious that quite a lot of either staff or consultant time and attention has been lavished on the Facebook account - and yet the return on investment seems to be so small.

However, all soon becomes clear.

Click on the Looking Local option on the left hand side and you discover the reason for much discussion on my Twitter account this morning. What appears to have happened is that the entire contents of the Council's website has been dumped into a self contained app within Facebook. This means that a web 1.0 broadcast only content clump has been unceremoniously dumped into a web 2.0 interactive environment - but that all opportunities for adding interactivity have been firmly removed.

It would perhaps be cruel of me to point out that clicking on Social Media in the top level menu and then selecting Flickr - your images results in an error. Or that a picture of a sign with Byway written on it is perhaps a strange thing to be viewing on a Council Flickr stream without the context which undoubtedly goes with it - as the app doesn't seem to display context. It is a shame that all interactivity has been removed even from Flickr via the app as you cannot either see comments already made on the photographs nor add your own.

So I click on the Contact Us section. Surely this will be better and there will be links to email contacts or Twitter streams?

No. I am told I can walk in to a walk in centre or make a phone call. On Facebook. In an app on Facebook.

The discussion on Twitter revolved around whether:
a) the content being there where the eyeballs were was good enough, no interactivity was required
b) the content being there was a complete waste of time and money and all that content could have been linked to
c) the content wouldn't feed into peoples feeds so no one would ever know if a change had been made so what was the point?
d) Facebook is where the eyeballs are, for some people it is all there is to the internet and we should pander to them and duplicate content there because if we don't we're excluding those people
e) duplicating content to the prima donnas who refuse to go anywhere else costs money - people need to JFGI
f) should local government ethically be encouraging people to use only Facebook with the accompanying potential alleged privacy and data protection issues
g) the irony of putting none interactive content on a platform completely revolving around interactivity killed them

I looked forward to your views. You can probably guess what mine are.

#lgovsm, #1515gov & a whole lot of care

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 18:34:00 +0000

What is part of my job:
Advising 9 Departments and untold sub sections on social media
Writing guidance on social media and digital tech in our org
Training 9 Departments and untold sub sections
Keeping up with new tools and utilities I can help people use that are appropriate in their job
'Being' the Council feed
Keeping an eye on all the other channels everyone else has created to make sure they'r ok
Providing some strategy
Inputting into policy
Inputting into our 2030 vision
Sorting content for 2 intranets and 2 external websites
Keeping an eye on local, national and international stats to make sure we're reacting to trends not imposing on people who don't care
Monitoring and feeding back on KPI's
Inputting into digital bids

What is not part of my job but directly impacts on my ability to do the above:
Attend unconferences, talks and events that are free (and often pay travel and hotel myself)
Reading about 30 blogs/official site feeds to make sure I am telling people the right thing and the most current thing all the time
Scanning 2000 Twitter account inputs to ensure I am informed of the things the above scan misses
Building networks to ensure I am informed and kept in the loop for events which are not advertised using conventional means
Building a reputation by telling people what we do, how we do it and why - but not using conventional means
Spend my evenings either running #lgovsm so I learn from other people smarter than me on both a professional and personal level on all things local government and social media or typing up the learning from #lgovsm so myself and others can take something visible home with us from that hour spent in our evenings given voluntarily
Set up #1515gov so I could get an idea of all the things my local gov colleagues do on a day to day basis to better aid my understanding of local government and its workings
I blog so I can share my learning but also learn from others in the comments

All of the above I am not paid to do. I do it anyway because it informs the first section and makes me a better employee, because I do not see the end to being an employee as being 5pm and because I don't mind giving up evenings and occasionally weekends to be a better employee.

I don't expect to be paid for it. I do expect it to be recognised. And I thank from the bottom of my heart those that do.

You are stars and you keep me sane.

A girl walks into a shop....

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:58:00 +0000

In the midst of a meeting with one of our sections yesterday I had an interesting conversation.

The meeting consisted of some people who work with service users. I wont tell you which one, it's not relevant and it's not fair. But in this meeting there were two very digitally literate people and two not so digitally literate people - and I think if you picked any four random public sector workers today and asked a question or two, I believe that's the balance you would find everywhere.

So I was trying to explain to these two gentlemen that the implications of social media were far bigger than the riots, which is the only thing that had brought social media into their sphere. They had, as a result of the riots formed an idea on what social networking was and how it connected people. But they had done no research past asking a couple of young people who they used it.

So, myself and the two digitally literate bods opposite the table from me proceeded to explain and I used something as an example, which I'd like to share.

A girl walks into a shoe shop with a friend. In the process of walking back out again with a pair of shoes she will: take pictures of the selection of shoes and ask her friends which one they like. Narrow it down to two pairs and ask her friends via text which one's she should pick after also sending photographs of herself wearing aforementioned shoes. Then, once she has crowdsourced the decision, she will buy the pair of shoes, and then tweet a picture of her leaving with them.

Once home, she will film a 'haul' video and post it on YouTube. She will share with her friends the outfit she wears that evening along with the pair of shoes and while she is out she will be constantly taking pictures and sharing them, asking questions about where to go next, where the party is.

To summarise then:

She has made no decisions on her own
She has told the entirety of her network and probably her networks network where she was during the day but also in the evening
She has posted a picture of her face
She has posted to YouTube the things she has bought
She has had feedback at almost every stage of her life she has lived that day, be it negative or positive - but more importantly she has asked for it
She has not had a single moment 'to herself'
She has been connected to the web in one form or another the entire time
She has been reachable by the entirety of her network the entire time
She has crowd sourced her taste in shoes and not made a decision for herself

This is a made up scenario. You may think it is not true. I can't prove to you it is, but I have very strong suspicions.

It's too late to change this. It's too late to censor the web. It's too late to prevent people organising civil unrest via the web and it's too late to wind back before we put all our secure information in vulnerable situations. It's too late to think any cryptography can be generated that cannot be, eventually, cracked and it's too late to remove mobile phones from young hands.

So what, my learned friends, are we going to do about it? How are we going to encourage young people to think for themselves, be themselves, find themselves? How are we going to remind them of the glee of sliding down the side of a steep hill on your ass? How are we going to remind them of the independence and empowerment gained from going off into the unknown and forging your own path? How are we going to teach them about security and seriousness, about risk and revenge attacks without receiving the knee jerk reaction of 'what the hell do you know?'

I'll tell you. By knowing. By proving we know. By passing it on. By educating ourselves and each other. So while it might be easy to sneer at the two digitally illiterate men in the meeting yesterday, I actually have the utmost respect for them.

They've started their journey. Have you?

#1515gov

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:44:00 +0000

Every day, for the next month, maybe two depending on how annoyed my followers become, I'm going to do something a bit bizarre.

I'm going to tell everyone what I'm doing.

I think you should too, if you work in local government and here's why.

I read a comment by @ermintrude2 (she's a social worker, doesn't want to use her real name) on this lovely post by @welovelocalgov explaining the things she knows local gov does - but that maybe the general public don't.

I didn't either.

That's wrong.

So in order to fix the wrong and turn it into a positive right, if you'd like to join me, feel free. If you're in Australia, or the United States, tweet at your own 15:15 (3:15pm) in your own time zone but use the same tag #1515gov. I promise to read every single one. At the end of the month if I'm not the only person doing this then I promise to somehow collate every single one into some kind of document and upload it to this blog.

I want to know what you do. I want to see a snapshot of your life, every single day for the next month. I want to know how you serve, how you clean, how you care, how you protect and how you support.

But most of all, I want to paint a picture in a thousand words of why local government is a many wonderful thing. I can't do that alone.

So please join me. Thank you.

Kicks for free

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 18:28:00 +0000

This is going to look like an attack on one person no matter how I pen it. I apologise for this, it is not meant to be. It is simply the culmination and articulation of months of frustration and annoyance.

When I first joined social media, it was much discussed that it was all about sharing. It was about talking and discussing and sharing best practice. As a result, and believing the hype, I set up #lgovsm, a weekly chat to talk about things and share knowledge. Contributing to the chat were a lovely balance of people working inside local government and those who wished to sell services to them. As long as no one blatantly pedalled their own services or products in lieu of contributing anything useful, I felt this was acceptable and I'm not a great one for over moderation anyway.

I got some stick, when after resurrecting the chat last week, albeit jokingly (?), for stating that I'd like assistance with running it and asking that the volunteers worked within local government.

I'm going to tell you why I made that request. It's possibly going to sound arrogant and it very probably will get a lot of peoples backs up, but here it is:

We don't have any money.

I sometimes wonder if some people think we're lying about this. That the 33 million quid we found was a magical number plucked out of the air, or that I am somehow lying about the colleagues who aren't any more. That I imagine the slight showings of strain on the faces f friends working within VCS locally, or that we have no training budget and I pay my way as much as I possibly can while still being able to have the opportunity to learn something - anything.

We don't have any money.

We know you've got bills to pay. We know you've got children to feed and mortgages to sustain. Thousands upon thousands of people relied on local government for their pay cheques. I know this because I am getting war dialled on a daily basis by companies I made the mistake of expressing a vague interest once upon a time. Just a quick tip - phoning me every day is going to make me hate you, not want to do business with you. The bare faced aggression I have encountered has been unpleasant at best, and bordering on harassment at worst. There is no excuse for this, I'm not trying to lie to you when I say:

We don't have any money.

We just don't.

But my real irritation is reserved for the people looking for new and innovative ways to resell something back to people, underneath the whole ethos of which was 'free'.

Like the recent discussion on Twitter about the localgovcamp which someone is charging to attend. No. Localgovcamp's, as an ethos, are free. Camps are free. Unconferences are free. They're based on a cultural evolution and not a money making scheme. They should be free. I do not understand exactly which bit of this is difficult except it seems to someone it is.

But it is, sadly, just one example of an increasingly common theme - taking advantage of local government. Want to be innovative? Pay a consultant to tell you how! Want to learn how to map things? Pay a consultant to tell you how! Want to work out who has the ideas in your organisation? Pay a consultant! Want to win an award through doing something really cool and different? Pay a consultant!

Never mind that the ideas and innovators are already sat inside your organisation getting bored and, frankly, pissed off. Never mind that they are like helium balloons, constantly bumping their head on the ceiling of bureaucracy and hierarchies. Never mind that they'll suck up all the learning they can get for free, self teach themselves everything and take charge themselves of keeping up with industry advancements.

These people are left to fester and quietly die. Or quit.

Because for some reason, paying a consultant with a badge on their fleece is listened to. Believed. Respected.

We do not have any money.

Time to ask some questions internally, now, don't you think?

NB: BWDBC has asked this question. It's finding some rather fabulous answers and fixing some things along the way. If you want to know more, shout, I'll tell you.

For free.

24 hours

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 21:10:00 +0000

In conclusion in the interim: there is absolutely no point in worrying about what might or might not be. I might be out of a job at some point in the next 12 months. I might not. Some of the fear and insecurity is being generated by an unfortunate mix of incredible stress at home (the fall out of the previously blogged about NHS shenanigans on the 'friend' and his mother continue to be horrid and understandably so) combined with a complete bolt out of the blue discussion with a doctor resulting in some 'interesting' tests which I'm rather hoping are negative (nothing life threatening but er....yes).

There's other stuff I wont bore you with. Why is this here? I am human. I am struggling with the constant ever shifting landscape of local government, the 'industry' I work in right now. I think to pretend I were not would be pathetic and cowardly and so I'm not going to.

So how do you deal with this? Well you can either let it pull you down or cheer the hell up, frankly. Batten down the hatches, head down and determinedly get as much damn well done as possible before the spreadsheet says no and you're gone.

So. I am involved with a sudden emergent movement to bring local gov camps to the North West of England and am super excited about it. I am possibly actually really going to set up a social enterprise, quietly, simply, with no complications and simply JFDI and get out there and share what I know for free. With passion and enthusiasm. I spent this morning talking to our Speech and Language team about parent driven digital support networks and information feeds as well as breaking down barriers to entry to their services by being 'more human' and this afternoon yet again discussing the lack of agility in local government but responding with solutions.

In actual fact, I spent the afternoon identifying where we are now in a number of different areas relating to young people, identifying challenges and gaps and then identifying solutions. And everything I identified as a problem or challenge or gap I also identified a deliverable solution for.

Deliverable with resource, that is.

Me. Or someone like me.

So I suppose you might say, I spent the afternoon talking myself into a job. Except I didn't see it like that at the time and those who know me, really know me, will know that that's the truth. And someone else could very well come and deliver those needs I identified.

But answer me this. If someone is good enough to identify the problems, and then immediately list all the solutions, should they not then be good enough to actually deliver the solutions?

Am I good enough? Am I performing? Am I running at full speed? Have I taken the brakes off?

I can't answer that - it's not appropriate to. But I do know I came home feeling achieved. Like I'd contributed. Like I'd made a difference somehow.

It felt good.

Disruptive networking

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 17:49:00 +0000

I think there always were disruptive networks. In the same way that tech has enhanced so many things, proliferated and amplified them, networks are the same. The difference is perhaps the organisations the networks are in - because I am of course speaking for the public sector here.

4,000 people struggle to keep in touch. Silos appear, because they have to - you simply cannot keep everyone in the loop of day to day decisions and so silos develop and inevitably sub cultures. Different identities, different paperwork, different evolutionary systems of recognition, praise and promotion.

Tech is pulling those silos back together again. And in the process of doing so, new discoveries are made of the different eco-systems. It would be easy to focus on the negative comparators - instead I believe to do so would be a missed opportunity.

Yammer is not it. Yammer should not be the sticking plaster that we slap on to these disparate ideals and goals within our organisations. Yammer simply proliferates the myth of one organisation using one system. We are a multi department, multi section organisation, not one. One would hope we are united in our goals, yes, but that of course still requires the acknowledgement that goals are vague hand wavy things to some people, people who are far more focused on hard and fast outcomes - x number of people fostered, y number of peoples BMI's dropped. But Yammer does not acknowledge these disparities, I feel, it merely compounds the differences instead of encouraging the people who rarely speak to have a voice. Our front line staff are not in front of a PC. Our front line staff should not be expected to log on from home - home for them is often a refuge from horrific tales and difficult case studies and reviews. No.

Instead we need to understand the duality of engagement with our own staff and understand that no one answer fits all in organisations where one's working life involves needle disposal and the other confidential document disposal. We need to not leave our staff behind internally, upskill them first, perhaps before we rush to upskill our residents - or at the very least run these programmes in parallel. And even then this training must not just focus on the value of technological networking. I believe that connections are valuable, that support is something money cannot buy and that the fine art of sitting and simply listening and letting someone vent are just as important. I cannot vent by tapping words into a computer. It just doesn't work like that. We are human beings and we want to splurge, release, vent. And then, most of us want to move onto the bit where we fix the cause of our dismay.

Connection and networks allow us to do that without repeatedly burdening the same people. Without always getting the same persons point of view, or more to the point obtaining a variety of views from the selection of different agendas, understandings, informed backgrounds and insightful wise words. They allow us to subvert - to run under the radar, discussing the difficult things, the hard things, the severely challenging and fear inducing things with people who feel no impetus to 'do something about it', but simply to listen and understand. They allow conversations to happen and decisions to be made which should be made, with the added value of input form the people who need to be involved because of their expertise, not just because of their job title. They escape hierarchies. The go around the back of barriers. They break down silos.

But most of all, they are unofficial, undocumented, unnoticed by most and uncontrollable. They are a risk and they are breaking the rules. But they are also a source of solace, of hope, of support and listening ears.

Yammer is one side of the coin. For some it's a yet another neat little visible box to park staff in so that no one wanders off and does something silly or unpredictable or uncontrollable. For others it is an opportunity - and used well it should always be so. But never underestimate the value of face to face meetings, of passing it on, of coffee shop meetings and clandestine under the radar discussions off the record. They are the places where the little people scheme, where the indicators are never mentioned, where outcomes are focused and refocussed on and where ceilings don't exist to bounce off. And don't for a second think your job title excludes you from this. It most certainly does not. But to join this little club, all you have to want to do is change things. Make things better. And most important of all, know that no matter what your job title you have something to contribute, are allowed to think and put the world to rights and that one day, some day, your time will come.

Still a grain of sand. But a slightly more positive one.

I also met the author of Powerlines today. She's awesome. Utterly. But you know what - I can be too.

Cored

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 19:03:00 +0000

It feels a little like Apple has just been cored.

This morning, I don't think I was alone in shedding a tear. The difference between a geek, a nerd, and everyone else, was probably actually how you felt this morning. Because you see, for the nerds among us, he was more than a genius, an innovator, a visceral businessman and a cunning media manipulator.

He was a nerd.

One of us. One of me.

I picked up a book about the History of Computing on Charing Cross Road many years ago. It had zeroes and ones on the front. I've never studied computing, I've never studied anything to do with them. Never. But I know how binary looks and I know I love computers so I wanted to know how come I suddenly landed in this magic world where I can tap and you can see and there's nothing but a Submit button between us.

I read about machine cards, punch cards. I read about stealing time on these machines by teenagers with big ideas and a gaming habit to feed. I read about sneaking time, and heat and a dot in the wrong place meaning hours of re-feeding card. I read about electronics stores like Maplins now, with bits of kit, soldering irons, metal, boards and bauds. I read about personality clashes and ethics, disagreements and disappointments and I understood a little better why among nerd friends, Microsoft were the dark side and unix was the source and Apple were the cute little quirky kids on the block trying to break peoples heads.

Apple always tried to break peoples heads.

I first surfed the web on a Mac. I taught myself how to use it. I then moved onto Unix (x-term) and then onto Microsoft then iOS. But I remember the clack of the keyboard. But then I remember the clack of every keyboard. I have had good keyboards and bad.

What Steve Jobs did was remove the sound. He took away the barrier between me and you. He removed the physical keyboard and gave me touch and tap and tactile. Swipes and smiles. Apps and aspirations.

I felt like I'd made it as a geek, the day I brought my iPad 2 home. It is, to this day, my most prized possession. I adore it, more than any pair of shoes or handbag. Almost as much as my bike. Almost.

But it's easy to forget that the beauty for a lot of other people, the magic for a lot of other people, is surface. It is cool. It is consumer. It is brand. It is Apple. It is keeping up with the Jones for a whole new generation.

For me, it's about being a nerd. It will always be about being a nerd. And my nerd hero has died. The propellers spin no more. The machinery will no longer compute.

Apple has been cored.

Running a Council Twitter stream

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 17:36:00 +0000

It's terrifying. There. I said it.
Judge all you like, if you've ever run one yourself. Have you? Or have you just sat there in your comfortable ergonomic chair in your comfortable study in your comfortable house sniping at everyone else getting it wrong?

Because I hold my hand up freely - I was in that camp for the last 18 months. And then redundancies meant I inherited our Twitter stream and well, gosh, it's not as easy as it looks.

I've sort of found my groove a little bit - it's only been a few weeks. I've messed up already and I will no doubt mess up again. I don't mind admitting I was embarrassed about messing up all things considered, but I figured learning curves are called curves for a reason and I will learn.

So what's the issue?

Pick your voice. I didn't really think about this before, but the tone of voice I use on my own Twitter account is absolutely not appropriate on the Council's stream. No awesomes. No yays. No smileys.
I lied about the smileys. I personally think smileys are absolutely the only way to indicate in text that I'm joking, using irony, being sarcastic or any one of a hundred other things lost in text translation. If you think that's unprofessional, that's cool. I don't.
I'm a digital native. I breath this stuff. Apparently. Except I am used to speaking as me, not as an organisation. And as I have alluded to before, do the public want us to speak to them as human beings, or do they want us to retain the aura of authority and organisationalism (?) that you historically have associated with Councils. Are residents ready yet for chatty reps from the Council turning up on their Twitter feed? Well, I kind of think about it like this - the tone and demeanour of a social worker is entirely different to a Communications Officer is entirely different to a Teacher. My tone on the official stream is appropriate for the environment it finds itself in, which is Twitter. It is not appropriate for an official press release imparting information on a serious case review. For example. Right communication for the right audience for the right channel for the right words.
Spelling. Oh god I have agonised over whether it's okay to use pls or whether someone will come and hunt me down and lynch me for grammatical abuses. In the end I just figured, I couldn't fit the message into 1 tweet if I didn't use pls and so pls it was.
Not knowing the answer. What the hell am I going to do if I don't know the answer? Well, as it turns out, I'll reply with the digital equivalent of a please hold message and then spend hours finding the answer and doing the best I can to assist the person requesting the help. I will obtain email addresses on DM, I will keep in touch and ask for updates on progress and in the process I will something about the organisation and the people in it that I did not previously know, improving my own networking ability in the process. Win:Win.
What if I have to delete a tweet cos it's wrong? Or I say the wrong thing? Well. I already did that. Lesson learnt. Move on, keep going, remember the lesson, don't screw up again.
Slowly but surely, I am becoming more comfortable about tweeting and less 'hung up'. It takes a bit to relax into it but once you do it's fine. As with everything on Twitter, it's better to retweet other peoples content to and be useful to people - like if most of your residents are suddenly experiencing a water outage - than chatter and other inanities.
Some people are watching your stream very closely and that's likely to be the local media too. Don't be surprised if you tweet something and your team receive a phone call shortly afterwards asking for more details.
Be careful. People are watching your stream very closely and if you mistweet something it's going to be really really really difficult to pull it back.

No pressure then?

No pressure then.