A Shiny World

UK Gov camp 2013

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 14:39:00 +0000

Last Saturday I made my annual pilgrimage to UK Gov Camp, or UKGC. This year was only my third, others have been going far longer than I including some of my colleagues though I'd not actually come across any of them before which considering past shyness, is not so surprising.

Anyway.

Had UKGC happened when it should have done, I would have not been in the right headspace for it. Postponement had good side effects for me. A collision of conversations with various people meant that I even had an idea for a session pitch - and stood up and pitched it which was a first for me.

How did the session go? Well, it was in the last slot of the day, none of the people who'd inspired the session idea 'digital mentoring networks' turned up, I walked past someone who commented that 'that sounds scary, I think I'll avoid' and yeah. Not the best start.

However. The best laid plans are sometimes waylaid for good reason and so it turned out. We don't need a digital mentoring network and a digital women network and 3,000 other networks besides. I shouldn't have bothered pitching and should have twigged this. But as it happens, the conversation switched to reflect a discussion which had happened in another session I hadn't attended earlier in the day where Tom Steinberg decided to throw a gauntlet down and ask a room full of digital bods when exactly they were going to step up and think about becoming the Directors and Chief Executives of the future.

ETA: We do need a Women in Digital network. I think. But that's for another post.

This then bled into my session as the discussion turned away from us acquiring mentors who could help us in our careers, to what we could do to pass on our experience and learning onto others. Clare White challenged us to go into local businesses and offer them our expertise as a form of digital volunteering. Jonathan Flowers pointed out that charities and assorted other organisations needed digital guidance and steering and Governors and Boards of Trustees were good ways of getting experience at a higher level of organisations to boot.

Inside this, an idea for a LinkedIn group were people could offer to mentor or ask to be mentored each other was raised. I'm not sure this is the answer. I'm not sure I know of a successful LinkedIn group. They all seem to die - I've yet to find a thriving one where my request to join is accepted within 48 hours. Someone suggested that LinkedIn add a tag or field for people to indicate whether they'd be happy to be approached for mentoring/questions/advice and conversely for those who were looking for a mentor and I think this would be a far more valuable implementation than a group.

So I'm going to go and talk to LinkedIn about that.

But that then leaves the gauntlet Tom threw. And that's a sticky one. Lots of people seem to think that UKGC lacked it's spark and fire and more than a few said 'that's cos GDS is doing it all'.

Well, here's a thing. Tom is right. If there's a Dep Director post in digital going, do you apply, or do you think that that's someone else's job to do? When a Head of Digital Comms job comes up, do you apply, or do you think you've not got the exact skill set, missing some of the essentials and there's just no point?

Are you happy sitting in a room, being brilliant (yes, almost down to the last, you all are) never letting anyone else actually benefit from that brilliance, or are you going to stick your head above the parapet, find out what skills and capabilities Heads of and Deputy Directors need and work on acquiring those? More to the point, are you going to ask for some help in acquiring those, do some research, send some tweets and use your network to get the help you need to lead an organisation, any organisation, into the 21st century, using all the technology, innovation, capability and knowledge that you have at your fingertips?

Because to be honest, talking strategy, vision, channels...that's fine. That's good. We're all growing up and we all should be. In maturity lives wisdom and in wisdom there is the future. But don't lose your fire and your passion. Don't wait for someone else to sort this stuff out. Don't assume someone else has it all wrapped up and you're not allowed to say anything or comment or question or aspire.

Don't let the fire go out. This isn't a game of tame the dragon. It's the long game and 20 years from now, there are at least 20 people within the corridors and rooms of UKGC who I'd be very happy to see in CEX and CEO roles across the public sector.

But that just isn't going to happen unless you use the digital embedded in your DNA to level up and learn some of the skills that leaders and managers of organisations need. I don't know what they are, I may never know what they are. But that's me and this is you and you all have the potential to be phenomenal. So. What are you waiting for?

GO.

Nerd API

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 22:46:00 +0000

Yes I know, a human as an API is going to be a bit challenging and stretching a metaphor slightly. Bear with me.

In my life, I have had the pleasure of both spending a lot of time with geeks/nerds and also managing them (for the purposes of this post, I am going to refer as geeks, to save my weary fingertips). When I say pleasure, I really do mean pleasure as well. In fact, in my experience, managing those who aren't geeks is quite a lot harder. Perhaps the subject matter of the types of escalated problems I'd deal with not being geeky either, perhaps not. Who knows.

What I do know is that very often, in the same way that I tend to act as a tech interpreter for people who know nothing about something technical, I also tend to end up being a people interpreter as well.

So here's some more things. Things I've had to explain and things I've noticed. Things which wind me up and things which make me smile.

Communication

Short, sharp and to the point is a geeks modus operandi. Ranting is never personal, and almost always never directed at the person on the end of the rant. This is usually because geeks tend to rant about big and complicated things and the controller of the big and complicated thing isn't accessible right now. And the right now is a thing here too - geeks tend to want to have a rant, get stuff off their chest and then forget about it. Until either you do the dumb thing you did to wind them up again, or the subject comes up in conversation again.

If it's uncomfortable, note the subject, avoid it, and assure the person that you've listened and heard this one time. If you can, offer to do something about it. If you can't, mentioning you can't might help. At the very least it will reduce the likelihood of you getting an earful again. Someone else can have the ear bashing next time, you've done your time nodding your head like you have a clue.

Most of the time you won't have a clue. Unless it's your actual job to have a clue, don't worry. Just nod your head and if you want to try to engage, ask questions. Just bear in mind that if you do, you might be there a while...

Body language

I'm sorry what? Sometimes, some of us get it. Not all the time. Specially if it's really really subtle. Most of us have learned by pattern matching and most of us do quite well thank you very much by using this system but if you're an exception to general rules, and you know you are, do us a favour and if you're spending more than one interaction with us, tell us.

It might help with the excessive communication thing above. It might help with us knowing when we're okay to bother you and when we're not.

An example of this is a discussion which is often had at GDS about headphones. My wearing headphones generally means it's okay to interrupt me but I'm working on something quite complicated and need to block out background noise so I don't make a mistake. Other people use headphones as a Do not disturb sign and will get very irritated with you if you ignore that signal that they think they're sending loud and clear. If unsure, GChat or DM someone first, and check how long it takes them to respond. If it's not urgent and you don't get a response in 5 minutes, leave them alone. Well alone.

Seating and comfort

Slouching. Shifting around a lot. Going and finding a different place to sit or sprawl or perch. These things are noticeable too. It's not cos people are not working. In actual fact, what it probably means is that once again, so much concentration is needed that that person has had to step out of their normal working environment and go somewhere else because something was blipping.

Or it might mean that they just were't comfortable and needed a change of scenery. This may sound strange when most of the time geeks are doing little else but staring into screens. Don't be fooled. Staring off into space and closing eyes are two often used tactics to remove visual input stimulus for geeks in order to allow them to concentrate. It's also a memory recall technique. Good luck in working out which one of those the person you're watching is currently doing. It could be either or neither. Just leave them alone, generally, to get on with whatever it is they're doing.

Also, meeting space. The opposite of meeting space is alone space. Introverts need quiet. Open plan offices are many things (stimulating, encouraging sharing, encouraging looking sideways at what others are doing, laughter tends to spread) but quiet they are not. Sometimes it's simply a case of something getting on someones nerves or some deep thinking needing to happen and it just not being possible at a desk. You can't pace at a desk. You can't close your eyes and stare into space at a desk (well you can but check the looks you'll get when you sneakily open your eyes a little bit to see), you can't sprawl comfortably sat at a desk.

Sometimes something requires that much thought that removal from desk is necessary. Absence from desk does not indicate absence from work mindset, or indeed an absence of work being generated.

Humour

You're not going to get the jokes. If you pretend to get the jokes there will be strange looks because they're gonna know you didn't really get the joke. Spotted on a desk near me once upon a time, a copy of the Princes Bride. I was unsure if it was intended as a geek primer or not. I am uncomfortable with the idea if so, because it takes more than reading a book to understand the thing behind the Princes Bride which very much makes it a geek thing, but not necessarily an easily understood geek thing.

Music

Nope, it's not obscure cos it's cool. I don't know for sure, but I think we're a wee bit more open minded about musical genres generally. And the crossing over from one to the other thereof. There's a reason Jaguar Skills and Last Knight are my two favourite DJ's ever. Cleverness > predictability every single time. Quality of music is a whole other thing, mind. I've spent more time in Richer Sounds over the years than any woman has any right to. Except of course if she's the one trialling headphones obsessively. Then she belongs there, obviously.

I could go on and on and on.

Ending

Some of these things apply to me. If you've not worked out which ones and you work with or have worked with me, I will be shocked. Not all of them do. Not all of them apply to all geeks all of the time, just some of the geeks some of the time.

But if just one sentence in here helps you understand your colleagues in your current job just a little bit better, I count that as a win.

Oh and...cake. It's important.

N.E.R.D.

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 20:22:00 +0000

In the lift at work:
"Hi, you're @loulouk aren't you? I'm @xxxxxx. I thought I should introduce myself, I keep hearing your name around the people I work with"
"Oh yeah, I'm the dork"
"You're in a room full of them"

Later in the day in Tibits:
"So what are you nerd about then"
"Trains, gadgets, the internet....um everything!"
"Star Wars or Star Trek?"
"Star Trek but only Next Gen"

Yesterday I wore a t-shirt with the word Nerd on it. In big letters. In white on black. I didn't actually give it a second thought, I work somewhere where it's okay to be one, I mean mostly it's full of geeky people with the odd nerd thrown in but I knew it would be okay to wear it and I knew I wasn't scheduled to be in any meetings within anyone outside of work and it'd be fine.

But the reaction of other people has caused a bit of a rethink on that assumption.

I wasn't always a geek. Or perhaps I was. I do know that it was at the point where I first say in front of a box that let me talk to other people in front of other boxes and to read what they thought and did that I discovered I definitely was a geek. Geek is a word. It's just a word. But it used to be an insult and now it's a compliment and there's just no arguing with that when there's geek tours, geek bands, geek chic and geek conferences.

So I tried to think about what geek meant to me and why I wore a tshirt with nerd on the front and why I felt totally comfortable with that. And I think it's something to do with the venn diagram. This one:
I just don't think it works anymore.

If it did Dorkbot wouldn't exist. Which is basically a bunch of people who like doing super creative things with electricity all over the world, gathering together to tell each other about the new super weird and wonderful ways they've found to make electrons dance.

According to that venn, they'd not have the brain cells to rub together to generate electrons, never mind play with them.

Take /dev/fort - a bunch of gathering together, essentially sequestering themselves away, having fun, writing code, eating food and being...social? By choice? With other ? That's their leave they're using up. That's because it's fun. And fun doesn't look like what it used to look like either. By the venn, they're geeks. I'd argue they're not. But even I hesitate to call them nerds because we didn't define it yet, and how can I know whether I'm insulting them or not if they don't have a nice neat little label?

And then there's the other thing. The complicated thing which says that when you're clearly part of a group of people who have historically been on the end of some abuse (and believe me, it was absolutely definitely totally not always cool to know what # was on your keyboard for), it's sort of okay to self label with something that if someone else labelled you with would prompt feelings of...mild irritation.

But what if it's not clear you're a member of that group? If you're a girl and you've been on the end of the whole 'you're a girl, you're wearing that Spiderman tshirt cos it's cool not cos you've read all the comics and seen all the films not just the latest ones cos it had some fit bloke in it'. Cos believe me, that happens. And as it happens, no I haven't and yes I have. I hate comics. Bite me.

So for all kinds of ridiculous complicated socially expected reasons we seem to be in need of a revision of labels. Because if watching Big Bang Theory makes you kinda geeky, it's a crowded room I'm in all of a sudden. And I'm reasonably sure spending weekends at sci-fi conventions isn't really considered a mainstream activity (thought when a convention in Wrexham of all places sells so many tickets one year, they've got to double admission the next to the size of the MEN arena I start to wonder) and nor is loving spreadsheets and missing working with them, or thinking up new and interesting ways to draw maps of random things.

So here's the thing. Can someone come up with a way of explaining that social ability doesn't define nerds, geeks sometimes aren't super-intelligent to the level that the name used to imply, dweebs are dressed by their mothers in their twenties and dorks? Who knows. That defining by intelligence presupposes an agreement on what intelligence is, super logical doesn't necessarily imply social aversion, wallflowers can be cool and some people consciously dress in a slightly different way that intends to misstep rather than accidentally doing so? That tribes exist but they're evolving more towards a complicated amalgamation of sub-genres and interests, some combinations of which definitely put you in the dweeb category and some of which firmly sit you in the dork box?

Because I can't. But I do know, in a way I can't really explain, that I am the right person to be wearing that Nerd tee.

Forgive me, for I have sinned

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 18:44:00 +0000

It's been 2 weeks since I have blogged.

Flippant, perhaps?

But it's an issue and I think it's time for some honesty. The following is entirely the fault of Anne McCrossan and Chris Watson, but even I have to admit that it's been a long time coming and it's purely coincidental that two conversations from different angles collided within such a short period of time.

I'd like to think that I don't shy away from difficult subjects on this blog. Read back and there's some pretty honest stuff buried in there. And then I became a Civil Servant. And suddenly it wasn't so easy any more.

My name is Louise, I used to be considered, I think, a 'social media expert' in government circles and I am scared.

I've been too scared to tweet. Too scared to retweet. Too scared to comment and too scared to blog.

Every single time I've sat down to write a blog post, I've ended up writing a paragraph and then exiting the post, leaving it in draft to sit and fester, never to see the light of day. My Twitter presence has dwindled to occasional retweets and banal comments on my working life - the safe bits, in other words. The boring bits. The bits that couldn't possibly be misconstrued.

Take last Thursday for example. I was at an open data event at Imperial College as part of Teacamp which is an event which is not government affiliated nor officially run. It's an event run and managed by Jane O'Loughlin, requires a lot of hard work to keep going and while she is a Civil Servant, and it's run mostly for Civil Servants, it's also open to others as well. Someone from the open data community commented about circumventing private sector data storage such as Nectar Card information by asking people to voluntarily contribute the data themselves to a central gathering point.

I tweeted, in 140 about this, contributing my own little bit of observation to the #teacamp hashtag.

A day later, an old friend said it was an irresponsible attitude for government to take. My heart sank, and I immediately replied back that I had been at a non-government event, had merely been relaying someone else's idea who was not a Civil Servant and this was absolutely not government policy or attitude or opinion or anything else besides.

It's all about context. I've only got 140 to play with. If you read the rest of the #teacamp tag from last Thursday then you'd understand it was actually unlikely that that comment would have been uttered by a Civil Servant (we were in the minority at the event, I think it's fair to say). But that friend didn't and so took my comment out of context and so misinterpreted the comment.

Was it his fault for taking it out of context? Or mine for assuming a hashtag was enough context?

It scares me. It's hard. I am not going to lie - every single time I tweet these days I question what I am tweeting and whether it's breaking the Civil Service Code, the rules which I, as a Civil Servant, must abide by 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Add to this that I am in a politically restricted post, and be impartial takes on another dimension above that laid out in the Code itself. Then there's the fact that people who may hold my future career in my hands may read what I say, that journalists do too (some, in fact most, because I used to write and now don't and they simply haven't unfollowed me, but nevertheless are very there), that our Executive Director too follows me, and the weight that weighs every time I press tweet is not inconsiderable.

And the absolute worst thing? I was the very first person in line, not so long ago, telling people how damn easy all this was, that it was just communication, that it's not scary, just get on with it, the benefits far outweigh the risks.

Well, here's the thing. They do. They really do. I connect people on a weekly basis who can and do help each other. I do it inside government via email as much as I do visibly on Twitter. If someone wants a hand with something, if I don't know the answer, I'll know someone who does. There is nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with maintaining reputation as a trusted source by pointing people at interesting articles and blog posts. There is nothing wrong in taking responsibility for my own learning, and sharing that learning with others who may benefit. There is nothing wrong, even, with talking to MP's or other Civil Servants on Twitter. What would be wrong would be allowing anyone to think they knew my political partiality (which I don't have, and never have had, as I've repeatedly mentioned in this blog) by the volume or sway of the signposting or retweets or conversations.

So it comes down to this.

Yes I should think before I tweet and before I post, in the same way I should consider responses to emails or questions face to face. Yes I should make a conscious effort not to break the Code that I am bound by. But I think that what it comes down to, for me, is that if I can justify my actions, they don't break the Code and, as happened last week, I can explain clearly and quickly if someone has incorrectly taken something out of context, I'm covered.

Because on the flip side of this, there is a 'thing' around people getting to see that Civil Servants are normal people. Just normal people. We read MIT review, Forbes, Boing Boing and El Reg. We disagree with some things that happen in the world, we find science fascinating, we watch in awe as David Attenborough shows us yet more of the wonders of the world, and we get stuck in snow related transport failures. Just like everyone else. We are not faceless, we are not boring, we don't wear bowler hats (well, most of us) and we have opinions.

But we also have rules and legislation which ensures you can't know some of those opinions. Never discuss religion, sex or politics, my father used to say. Words to live by, say I.

RSS - Really Simple Syndication

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 19:30:00 +0000

I tapped out a quick guide to using RSS and using Google Reader during the week.

I thought it might be useful to someone so I've re-hosted it on my personal Google docs area (I didn't want to make a work Google doc public, I'm sure there's no reason why not but just in case...) and made it public so any can view it.

Feel free to reuse and recycle if it's useful.

Sucking eggs

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 21:08:00 +0000

This post may involve teaching most readers to suck eggs. It doesn't name a tool because it can't. I'm a civil servant and we can't do stuff like that. But it might be useful anyway, we'll see. (edited to add: as I've written this, I've realised that this is the way that someone who is a P on the Myers-Briggs test may become more J)

As may be evident from this blog, I think a lot. And I must confess, it's not always ordered thinking. In fact most of the time my head is a mess of ideas and enthusiasm shooting off in different directions with little coherence and even less order.

Switching from an environment where ordered thinking was easy because the edges of where thinking was needed or required were very clear, to one where the exact opposite is true exasperated the problem. Massively.

And lots of good ideas are absolutely pointless if none of them ever get implemented, or more importantly articulated in a way where someone else could maybe pick them up and implement them for you.

So something needed to happen.

Oddly, the answer is a writers most feared nightmare inducing process. A blank page. I was given a project which left me so at a loss that I opened up a Google doc and called it [project name] thinking. Then I wrote everything I knew about the project down. Straight out of my head and onto the page without any order at all, exactly the way it was in my head.

Then I went back and started cutting and pasting sentences out and categorising them. Then broken those sections down into bullet points. And finally, pulled a list of tasks out from them.

From chaos, came order.

From this order then came the need to track the tasks. And since the project was a team effort, and contained many kinds of tasks for different members of the team, we needed to find a way to manage that too. So off I went on a mission to find such things, and lo! I found it. And shared it. And mostly it seems to be working very well though as we approach deadline day I must confess it is being used less and less.

But the deadline is only for the first iteration of the project and so we now have a neat record of all the tasks that require doing, in the second iteration and beyond! all headlined neatly by label type into categories, all tracked and all persistently heading towards the Done pile.

I've never had a Done pile. It's incredibly satisfying to dump things into that pile.

But most of all, I seem to have found a way which allows my very chaotic brain to be chaotic, revel in the chaos, but always to produce coherence that can be consumed without indigestion by everyone else.

This post written in the hope someone else may avoid the year of frustration I have recently experienced. We got there in the end :O)

That was the week that was

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 18:02:00 +0000

Someone asked me to try and explain why this week was so awesome, cos I'd said it would be impossible. So here is my try. Some of this is very vague as I'm working on a project that's in alpha and very not ready quite yet for the world to descend on it but I'll tell you as much as I can. Also bear in mind, other vaguenesses may be resulting, not from hiding things, but for reasons of respect, courtesy and privacy of others.

This week my brain has been doing this:

Image credit: SJPhotography, via Flickr

But it's not a thing about fireworks going off. It's also a thing about the venn diagrams that particular picture displays, and the colour themes running through it.

So what did it involve? Well there's a main project that now all the main protagnonists are finally physically in the same place is moving quite swiftly. This week I've learned a bit about project managing, discovered a magic tool that replicates the walls the dev teams use at GDS to sort their incoming and outgoing workloads but digitally cos we don't have a wall (I'll post about this over the weekend), and realised that as long as we chop the super massive huge thing down into teeny tiny little bits, anything is possible.

I'm really excited about it, because it's useful. It looks like duplication but it's not, it delivers some key points within the Civil Service Reform plan and it doesn't tick boxes. It creates them and then encourages people to throw all the boxes in a big pit and jump up and down on them. Love.

My colleague Chris, who will be referred to by first name only as ironically he does not wish to be above the parapet (and is our teams resident tech geek) is epic. I knew this before but this week I have discovered the sheer joy of watching someone wrestle with a bug, get help with the bug, take the help away and apply it and fix the bug. And then squee about it. Well not squee exactly, he doesn't do that but well...

So in amongst writing a tonne of documentation in a particular tone which welcomes people to the new project but doesn't scare them off either, and explains beta but really simply, and acquiring guinea pigs from all over the Civil Service (and potentially outside of it too, thanks @somazi @mattnavarrauk) to test and break things and generally see if this stuff will work, there was lots of other stuff. So this was the big firework. I told you it wasn't accidental.

Some of the smaller fireworks were thus:


Image credit: Kozu Moriya via Flickr

The lovely team from DCLG who run the Really Useful days came and had a chat and I'm off to North Allerton to share some of the wrong and some of the right about open policy making and digital engagement. More importantly, recommendations for speakers were made. Good to have such an easy job on that side at the moment.

I caught up with everyone I'd not seen since before Xmas and gosh it was good to see everyone looking so very well. Lots of red cheeks and smiles. Lovely.

Teacamp last night was fab, @lesteph and @somazi spoke respectively about UK Gov Camp (for which major scheming is going on on the Google group, go see!) and a social media first aid kit. I am so excited for Gov Camp this year because there's already about 8 sessions I want to go to but I did inhale a little sharply at the idea of no post it notes. No post it notes??? Heresy! As ever with these things though, it was the chat with @hadleybeeman and @pubstrat which was really awesome. There's yet another blog post, I think, in what we discussed but it basically condenses to 'every time someone told you you were either extrovert or introvert, they lied to you' (well me, not necessarily you, I mean you might be nicely neatly boxed, I don't know).

We did some teamwork on goals and priorities for the next 30 days which has made us all focus more more on sprints and delivery. This is ace, because though we've established stand ups don't work for us, we've sort of changed it around a bit and are having short team meetings and then retrospectives towards the end of the week to share successes and challenges. This has had the added bonus of workloads becoming much more visible and support being offered and help being given every which way within the team. It also resulted in some neat problem solving of a niggling but crunchy problem some of us have been wrestling with. This gave me much joy.

There was discussions on how scary pressing the submit button on a big blog is, some small training on basic blogging, some helping with making Twitter monitoring much easier via Tweetdeck and a big big Wordpress session for the rest of the team from @annkempster. The floor meeting was inspiring and awesome and so was @tomskitomski's internal presentation. @liammax said some things, specifically about the 'art of the possible' and external forces pushed crystallisation of social media use in work time to the fore, resulting in arriving at the conclusion that intent really does matter (probably another blog post in that as well, but not yet).

Board game geekery was resureccted and a venue found which will potentially eventually allow for expansion. Much walking and chatting was done and much drinking of coffee, either incidentally, or as a focus. Salt provided the best, naturally. @adewunmi sat and briefed me patiently on where open policy making was up to from a GDS perspective and in the process managed to explain all the things I didn't know or understand without me even needing to prompt with questions, leading me to believe she may be somewhat psychic and one wonders if that's not entirely accidental given the task ahead of her which is monumental but necessary. As a by product of this we had a brilliant discussion about openness, and about personality traits which dictate comfort zones when it comes to levels of openness and why it comes naturally to some and not others. (Yes, yet another blog post).

@marilyneb was missed but plans where made to meet with @adewunmi and I have no doubt that that right there is going to be one of the highlights of next week or next. @alexschillemore was caught at the right time, or rather I was at my desk when she circled and in 5 minutes managed to leave me grinning with excitement at the amazing things which will be happening in her new role, but also surfacing something which needs resolving which I had dropped but now need to pick up again.

Somewhere in there I ate food and @fatbusinessman arrived to inspire thinking on how our team could be more agile (it was before the bit above about the 30 day priorities discussion but seemed to coincidence not be driven by) but also about teamwork, which was the subject of the previous post. How many are we on now? I've completely lost track. At least as many as there are fireworks exploding in the first picture, I think, unless I'm very much mistaken. Anyway, it was a fine discussion with someone who really really helps me think. And while I may have found an alternative to needing to think out loud (another blog post, but tying in to one of the ones already mentioned above) nothing really replaces the luxury of being allowed to unpick and unravel something verbally.

Finally, I need to say goodbye but not goodbye to someone. @geek_manager is leaving us and her blog explains why. In the floor meeting on Tuesday, @mtbracken alluded to the fact that Meri might be especially ace at allowing people to...flourish, shall we say. I hope I can say I am one of the people that Meri has spent time with, explaining, coaching, mentoring, guiding and oh, did I mention, being exceptionally patient with. The reason that this week has been so damn awesome is down to, in no small part, the work that Meri has put in with both myself and others. I alluded to something similar on Twitter a while ago about someones contribution not always necessarily being visible. A really rather lot of us are going to miss her terribly. Having said that, she's off to some pretty awesome pastures new whichever of the three million epic offers she currently has on the table she decides to take and I understand and respect someone who can decide that no, this is not right, and move on.

Go well lady. But I'm sure you'll still be beating us all stupid at board games ;O)

This week was a 4 day week. Next week looks even more bonkers. :O)

Whoops. I got it wrong again.

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 19:17:00 +0000

Reflective post is reflective. I'd class as self indulgent but that's just me. It feels awkward, I've not done this before.

So. My old team. Me, bod same job title as me, boss with same job title as me but Manager tacked on the end of it. Above him, our Head of Service. I think it's fair to say that when I arrived on the team, morale was er... wobbling. Main aims of the team seemed to be to leave meetings with no actions. It was the standing joke but I knew well enough that if I went to meetings and committed to providing work, I would be the person providing the work.

I am appallingly bad at saying no.

This led to the predictable situation. Not helped, really, by the fact that the other two team members saw social media as nothing special, nothing that needed time devoted to it, and something that had had its box ticked. The rest of the organisation weren't quite on the same page with this and so most of the work fell to me. I did my best, mostly on my own. To be fair, a new CMS procurement and roll out was also taking up much of the rest of the teams time.

This meant that a lot of the time it felt like I was a team of one. It was hard at times and in an effort to make it easier, I became very independent and forgot some rather useful skills. Like er... talking to people about my work. Or rather, talking about my work in terms that allowed others to help with it. Instead of chatting about it in social terms, over coffee in a kind of 'yeah I'm fine, I could do with a bit of help but everything's fine' kind of way.

I wasn't fine. I was having at least 3 meetings every single day for what felt like weeks after the launch of the social media guidelines for government. I'd go home barely able to hold a conversation. And I thought this was normal. I thought I had exactly the same workload as everyone else and I thought I was being pathetic.

I wasn't. But I was being exceptionally stupid.

Teamwork means visibility. It means knowing what everyone else is working on so you can help. It means knowing someone didn't know you could have multiple accounts in Tweetdeck and sorting it out for someone. It means sharing a problem and getting four heads, rather than your own. It surfaces issues quickly when it comes to overload but also when someone is drowning and becoming more and more miserable about workload.

Unfortunately, for those things to happen, you have to communicate. And bunkering down just doesn't work. It cuts you off. It deprives you of others subjective viewpoints and all the good things that come from that.

Like the suggestion that instead of those 15 meetings a week, that perhaps it might have been more productive to run workshops at beginner, intermediate and advanced level, invite all the people who wanted to have meetings and then take individual Q & A's at the end so everyone could benefit from the learning.

All of which would have prevented repetition, been more time efficient and done wonders for my sanity. I don't know about you but there is only so many times I can painstakingly explain that manning Twitter for 5 minutes every day at 9am might mean you miss out on some lovely conversational type stuff. You may laugh, sat there in your smugness. Now stop laughing and have a good long hard think about exactly how obvious it is you can't just do that when you've never seen Twitter before.

Quite.

So. This is my learning and it's taken longer than I'm entirely comfortable with. Without your team, you're nothing. Without input from others, you're nothing. And can I just say, how much I am enjoying working on a small project with a small team with boundless enthusiasm? Can I? Thank you. I'm really rather proper enjoying work at the moment, and hopefully I can tell you a bit more about the lovely small project soon.

Hard won lesson, that one.

I'm sorry, I didn't know who you were

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 17:18:00 +0000

True story time.

Last year, I was honoured to be asked to present and run two workshops at the LGcomms Academy, their newly revamped AGM meeting of minds. For those who don't know, LGcomms stands for Local Government Communications and is national body representing UK Local Authorities in their efforts to better their communication efforts.

It was a brilliant day. But something which was said to me on that day is still resonating over 6 months later and it just wont go away.

I sat, after my 8am presentation, among the other delegates and settled myself to do some learning. I listened to Cormack Smith from Basildon give a very different perspective on the Dale Farm situation to the one I had seen on the news - a behind the scenes view, if you like. I sat between two people who I felt would rather have sat next to each other, a chap to my left who I think was another one of the workshop facilitators and a very well turned out lady to my right.

The gentleman made polite efforts to chat to me. The lady did not. This is normal, some people feel comfortable enough in these situations to strike up a conversation, and some do not.

The time came for the workshops to be run and I noticed the lady who I'd been sat next to stayed in her seat. I rose, went to the front, set up my laptop and gave a very quick abbreviated version of my earlier presentation on the process we went through to write the social media guidelines for the UK government and then I took the mic, sat on the edge of the stage and chatted to people. I asked questions. I pitched a few grenades. I tried to get people thinking...I wanted people to go away and still be thinking about the things we had talked about after the Academy had ended. I wanted to plant seeds. I didn't want to broadcast at people because that is not what social media is about and it would have seemed hypocritical and wrong to do so.

It went well. There were fears shared and discussions had and we didn't agree on solutions but we did hone in on some pretty prickly problems.

After the workshop it was time for another presentation and so I went back to my seat, to sit next to the lady I'd been to the left of before.

She leaned over and said "that was a quite brilliant workshop, thank you. I'm terribly sorry for before, I didn't know who you were".

And I had to bite severely down on my tongue to not reply by asking her quite why it would have mattered.

Months later, of course, I've worked it out. It's about networking. Everything these days is. But it's also about resilience building and knowledge sharing too. It's about pulling people in who know some stuff you don't know so that should you need them in the future they are there. It's about reciprocal sharing, reciprocal curiosities and reciprocal questioning.

And she'd missed an opportunity.

What I still can't quite work out is how she hadn't noticed something quite crucial. So had I.

I have held off blogging this post for a long time to protect the identities of those involved. I don't know their names, I am not deliberately withholding them. However I would like to thank the lady who sat to my right for teaching me one of the most important lessons. Open your mouth and say hello. You'll gain far more than you'll ever lose from doing so.

Instagram: the invisble bit of the story

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Like most of the Western world, I'm a little wooly today. Do bear that in mind.

Inside the 'Instragram story' something very magical happened. Something which I'd never visibly watched happen in realtime before. Some people did a thing and the thing was fast and reactive and it did exactly what it needed to do and no more.

It was quite a brilliant thing. But it was also a slightly unnerving one.

Instagram 'clarified' their user terms and conditions. People didn't like the way those 'new' clarified terms and conditions read. They thought they conditions meant Instagram could reuse any posted photographs to the service in advertisements for products which may or may not have been featured in the photographs. With no payment and no attribution. But it was okay, because they weren't claiming copyright.

Commentary on whether all those people misread the clarified terms and conditions has been done elsewhere. I read them, and carefully, and this is what I too thought they meant. So I installed the coincidentally new shiny Flickr app and simply switched allegiances. Other people didn't. I ended up with a split community connundrum which is going to become more common in the months ahead as this happens more and more. One social network to rule them all no longer applies. As I said in a post at the beginning of the year, people are fracturing.

Anyway.

I watched the fall out from this clarification on Twitter and the most interesting thing of all was not the hundreds of people rolling around in outrage. That's now normal behaviour. No. It was that this little group of three people were being retweeted into my stream by people like @digitalmaverick and others and the group of people were asking about how Instagram did particular things as part of its process. And it became apparent that this group of three people were building, from scratch, a service for other people to use, for free, which ripped out all your Instagram photographs, backed them up, and then deleted your account.

In a day.

Three people.

For free.

I can't remember the name of this programme/web tool (wooly). I do remember commenting at the time that the future was not big, it was small. Because if three people who are not physically in the same place can do all that, cos they think it's a good idea, in a day...

My prediction for 2013 is this. If it doesn't exist, build it. If it doesn't do what you want to do, change it. If it doesn't tell you the things it needs to, ask it then report it. If it doesn't make something clear, redesign it and if it isn't getting hits or getting you the marketing return you think it should, move. If you don't, someone else will. And they'll steall all your customers.

Don't tie everything in to the longview. Some things need the longview. Some things don't. Increasingly, an annual business plan is looking, to me, irrelevant. If you're not looking at marketing return on a digital platform of any kind at least twice yearly, that's too slow.

But most of all expect fast. Faster than ever before. Where once we looked at hardware updates yearly, we're now looking at digital society behaviour updates at least twice yearly, approaching something which is fluid and evolutionary. Reactive. Facebook is not it any more. You're going to need some imagination.

Here's to the year of the imaginers.

-41C and a cup of tea

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 21:00:00 +0000

I can't remember where I found the video - it might have been on Facebook, I'm not sure. I still haven't worked out the etiquette, actually, of crediting someone on Facebook who's posted something awesome, but only on FB and chosen not to share on Twitter. Am I supposed to respect the fact they've decided not to share on Twitter? Or is it more important to always credit your source out of courtesy? Yes, these are the things I think about.

Anyway.

I found a video. It's this video:

It's just a video of a bloke playing silly tricks with the weather. Right?

But it got me thinking. Up to the point where I watched this video, it had never crossed my mind that it might be -41C in Russia. Well, not in a part of Russia where people lived in apartment blocks in large numbers, anyway. So I learned something new. Then I thought about the things I actually know about Russia, and realised...well actually it's not a lot, you know? Is -41C unusal? I suppose if someone is posting videos about it is.

And then I thought:

I guess pets are right out, unless they're homebound.
If I set my central heating to be 20C during winter to keep warm, but set my air conditioning to 20C during summer to cooldown, then is his central heating set to 20C? How on earth does a heating system even cope with a +60 degree differential?
How do you grab a cup of tea on the way to work? I mean obviously a Starbucks isn't going to last three seconds but is there any tea provider in the world that could insulate a cup of tea that well? Probably not.
Mobile phones say do expose to extreme temperatures. Well I guess that's a testament to Apple engineering right there - or they've got covers made of...what? Sheepskin? What?
Flushing the loo, or turning the taps on. Lagging? What kind of lagging do you put on your pipes in -41C? People live at the North Pole but I've read a book of a girl who trekked to the North Pole - life becomes about survival, about covering skin, about the fundamental things in life. Not about going to work, going to school, visiting your parents for the holidays.
Most of all, I thought, there are companies who create test environments to test their products in temperatures like this. Clothes to go to the Himalayas, for example. And there's a whole bunch of people on the other side of the world who are living in the equivalent of our test environments. To them it's normal. To me, it is monumental.

And then I thought, well hell. Isn't the Internet a truly wonderful thing?

Day after edit to add:

I now know armpits are the best place to store electronics outside. Pipes never go outside buildings, they either go underground or inside a building. Snow gets real dirty when it hangs around for months, especially when coal is burned on fires and then descends again from chimneys. Most importantly, I've been reminded of the existence of the Trans-Siberian railway which a friend travelled on years ago (I remember visas being horrendous to obtain which put me off a bit) and a lovely person is going to show me things which will mean I will probably want to go and ride it even more (photographs).

All of this I learned from people I follow on Twitter.

{spider} webs

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 18:23:00 +0000

In the middle of my day there were 5 minutes and they went a little something like this:

Via Flickr: Michael Holden

@leashless aka Vinay Gupta followed me.

I got an email telling me so

I clicked to see who he was

I read his profile

I clicked on the link in his profile

I read about hexayurts (among many many other things)

I ended up on a page explaining how hexayurts were perfect on the playa (Burning Man - I know about this because a friend has been and came back raving about it)

I clicked in the top left of the page to see what the bigger wiki was I seemed to be in

I ended up on a massive wiki dedicated to " collaborative solutions
in sustainability, appropriate technology and poverty reduction."

I clicked on Knowledge

I went to Information Technology

I read the entry and thought 'I am not the only person who doesn't know this is here and has never visited because I know at least 100 people I follow who could make additions to this wiki if they had the time but more importantly knew about it'

So I tweeted a link

Hopefully at least one of those people will take the time to share their knowledge

That's what serendipity looks like. You can't plan for it, you can't evaluate it, you can't touch it or really quantify it.

It's what the social web runs on and that was 5 minutes. So next time you are about to say 'I don't have time to do social media' think about what you could achieve in 5 minutes. You can't KPI it but if it's only 5 minutes, does that matter?

What if the knock on affect is to save someone a days work further down the line?

Does that only matter if you know you saved someone a days work further down the line?

Do you only ever do things where you can see immediate impact in other areas of your life?

In this particular case, an unforeseen circumstance was @billpublishes tweeting:

Oops. I fell in love with the web again. Thanks @loulouk. appropedia.org/Welcome_to_App… wiki for sustainability, appropriate tech, poverty reduction”
— Bill Pope (@Underbundle) December 20, 2012

Didn't see it coming. Couldn't predict that reaction. Worth of evoking that feeling in someone?

Priceless.

Civic starters for ten

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 17:51:00 +0000

This is a personal blog. You are gently reminded of this. The thinking behind this post was done entirely on a Saturday and in my own time and in my own head, without discussing it with anyone else who might be or is anything to do with work. It's important, that bit. This blog is for my thinking and noodling and reflection.

Kickstarter is coming to the UK. If you're sitting there thinking so far, so meh, that's fine. Hopefully by the end of this post you will be thinking hell yeah lets go change the world to look like how the majority wants it to look. Or something.

Fix my street, a supercool web app that became other kinds of apps written by MySociety, ably steered by Mr Tom Steinberg, it rocks. It allows citizens in civic spaces to go 'oh hai Council, there's something wrong with the street I'm in, please fix it'.

Sometimes the Council has enough time and resources to do one of these things:

fix the problem and tell the customer
fix the problem and not tell the customer
not fix the problem because they don't have the resource
not fix the problem because it's not a priority
not fix the problem cos they've never heard of fix my street

3 to 2 says the problem isn't getting fixed and 1 to 1 says even if it does get fixed you aren't going to know it was fixed by the Council, a somewhat silly missed opportunity for free PR if ever there was one. Anyway, fix my street relies a lot on the Council.

Kickstarter says no one might have to any more. All a civic minded developer has to do is create a map using Ushahidi or some other free resource, publicise it and ask people to contribute to it when they see something that annoys them. That might be anything from:

not enough sole traders in the high street
not enough bins
bins in the wrong places
dropped kerbs in the wrong places
no dropped kerbs at all

Then they need to ask people to vote on the existing flags of issues raised, perhaps on a rolling basis, perhaps within a close timeframe.

And then they need to pick the most popular complaints or ideas for fixes, pitch them back at the residents in the local area and ask them to fund fixing them through Kickstarter.

Behind this is a really big question.

Is the British public prepared to quite literally put its money where its mouth is? And I don't know the answer to that question. And there's this whole issue around people already paid their Council Tax. But if the problems and ideas were things which would never be fixed through the Council or any other service funded by Council Tax then this becomes something else, in reality.

It becomes volunteering.

'But I haven't got time' and other assorted whinings

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 20:22:00 +0000

I'm getting really bored of hearing the 'but we haven't got time to do digital' refrain. So I thought I'd tell a little story of something which happened to me on Sunday which demonstrates the economic impact of not doing digital to a company I assume most of you will have heard of: See tickets.

The players

There are three main protagonists in this tale, but a cast, quite literally, of thousands. The first is e-festivals. You might not have heard of them but in a world where every festival going has a discussion forum of its own, there is one festival which does not have a forum and thus e-festivals fills a customer driven hole. If you want to know anything at all about Glastonbury Festival, you go to the e-festivals forum, not the Glastonbury Festival official website because despite having Twitter streams and Facebook pages, online forums are a space they've decided not to enter for some reason. This may be a choice they're currently regretting.

The second protagonist is Glastonbury Festival itself. For ease of reference we'll use Emily Eavis as the reference person as she was very visible over last weekend in various places and thus self nominates as the face of Glastonbury Festival (she's the founders daughter).

The final player is See tickets. Owned by Vivendi, trading since 2002 in its current for - they're in the same space as Ticketmaster.

Pride before a fall

On Saturday Emily Eavis spoke to NME about the impending yearly disaster that had historically been Glastonbury Festival tickets going on sale. She said:

"We’ve got a new system which we’re trying out, and we’ve had assurance from See Tickets that it is going to work well and be much more efficient. All I can say is that we’ve done all that we can to try and make it as quick as possible and not have people hanging on phone lines for hours."

And we all know where this is going, don't we?

Sunday morning dawned. I, and what estimates mark as 1,999,999 other people hauled ourselves out of bed, consumed a lot of coffee, and tried to connect to glastonbury.seetickets.com which was the link which had been circulated by official sources prior to sales commencing.

Early warning systems

It was immediately quite clear something was wrong. Normally, once you get to the point where you're seeing webpages and entering details and pressing a submit button on a webpage something quite neat has happened behind the scenes of the webpage. You've got what's called a session ID and it tracks you through the process from end to end to ensure that no matter how many other people are trying to connect to the servers in the form of trying to get webpages to load, you will always be able to get to the end of your session once you've started it.

No.

Those lucky enough to get just one of the 20 or more webpage tabs to connect (in our case across two laptops, a phone and an ipad) were finding that entering registration codes and postcodes of those wishing to pay for tickets were clicking on Submit and being thrown back out to the 'page cannot be displayed' error message. At this point I sent a message to @glastofest on Twitter mentioning that their new improved system seemed to actually be worse than the last one. I didn't get a reply but I did get a lot of people replying who were in the same boat.

Eventually I decided to abandon clicking on reload buttons endlessly and popped over to e-festivals. This is where it gets really interesting.

It's not what you know, it's who you know

This comment popped up with quite a baffling message saying that editing your host file with a set of numbers (an IP address), a space and then glastonbury.seetickets.com meant you could get through to See tickets. This comment quite rightly pointed out that the numbers, if you checked the address behind it, landed you up at a Virgin Media private account. Not See tickets.

Note the timestamps on the comments. At this point it's 9:26am. At this point, had you been an employee of See tickets and you'd had your wits about you and done a bit of the old digital stakeholder mapping, the alarm bells would be seriously seriously ringing at this point.

They weren't watching.

And the comments started rolling in from people who'd mysteriously suddenly acquired tickets super quickly, once they'd amended their host file. Lots of comments from lots of people buying lots and lots of tickets on multiple machines, interspersed with a few slightly more cautious people. At 9:58 someone states that the IP number version of the web address (194.168.202.201) was now pointing at glastonbury.seetickets.com and not the private Virgin media account. My other half in the midst of this checked the same IP address and got told it belonged to a school as had someone else.

By this point suspicions were rising as to what had happened and what was causing the problem in a few techies minds. Meanwhile, over on Twitter:

9:39 am

See are experiencing very, very high demand, which is effecting the speed of the booking site. Tickets are being sold. Please keep at it.
— Glastonbury Festival (@GlastoFest) October 7, 2012

followed by this at 10:11 am

See tells us the transaction rate is now speeding up - please keep trying.
— Glastonbury Festival (@GlastoFest) October 7, 2012

Magically, at 10:12 am exactly, my ipad paid for itself by suddenly displaying the registration page, and then immediately the payment page and the the ticket purchase confirmation page, one after the other, in the space of 3 minutes.

So what actually happened that a number version of a web address that variously pointed at Virgin and a school actually seemed to send you straight to the Glastonbury purchase bit of See tickets?

The technical bit

Someone mistyped a number. This next bit's technical, you can skip it if you want. When you set up servers, the web has to know how to find them and IP's are those identifiers. They're the digital equivalent of your house no and postcode. Unique, they prevent mix ups. Now you don't ever see those numbers when you go to web pages, and you don't have to remember the numbers of your favourite websites either. You type in words instead. This is because there is a system called DNS which matches the unique numbers to the word versions of the addresses. You type the words, press enter or click on load, your browser disappears off, goes looks at the DNS, and similar to a telephone directory, finds the entry for that word based address, matches it to the correlating numbers and sends the request to the numbers listed next to the word address in the directory.

Someone has to tell the directory which numbers match which addresses specially when registering a new address lots of people are going to be looking for. Like glastonbury.seetickets.com and matching it to 194.168.202.201, and other addresses besides, as because so many people would be visiting that address they decided to send the requests to lots of different numeric addresses to process the requests faster. Except they mistyped one. They registered 192.168.202.201. Which is wrong. It's the equivalent of someone mistyping you're and your however, in that 192.168 usually denotes a home network. That's why it went to a private Virgin Media account.

Damage done

Once fixed, effectively See doubled the amount of requests for webpages they could handle. Unsurprisingly, this tweet appeared shortly after at 10:24 am.

Sorry for any frustration with the booking site this morning. There is incredible demand, but around half of the tickets have now been sold.
— Glastonbury Festival (@GlastoFest) October 7, 2012

Yep, it'd taken a full 84 minutes to get to the point where they'd sold half their 137,000 or so tickets despite the previous tweets about high demand. What's even more telling is how quickly they sold the other half of the 137,000 tickets available. This tweet appeared at 10:44 am:

Tickets for Glastonbury 2013 have now sold out, in 1h 40m (a record). Here's a note from Michael & Emily Eavis... twitter.com/GlastoFest/sta…
— Glastonbury Festival (@GlastoFest) October 7, 2012

68,000 tickets in 20 minutes as opposed to the 80 minutes the other 68,000 had taken.

Look at what you could have won

I'm reasonably sure someone at See tickets has uttered the immortal words 'but I haven't got time' when it comes to monitoring feedback on their services on social media. I'm sure there are days when it must look like a thankless task wading through thousands of tweets moaning about how people didn't get Take That or Kylie Minogue tickets. Lets face it, there's little value in that kind of monitoring, you're not learning anything new. But if you close the door and turn your back, dismissing all the content on social media as irrelevant you can find yourself in a rather unfortunate situation. One where your reputation is in tatters, one person has made a fundamental mistake which is now impacting on your SLA which has been agreed, which the figurehead of the biggest festival in the world has gone on record as trusting in, which has resulted in a well respected public figure ending up with serious egg on their face and which, one expects, might put future years agreements of sole ticket provision with aforementioned festival into serious jeopardy.

I've not got to how the customers feel yet. For a flavour, see their Facebook page where over 2,000 people are expressing their problems. Interestingly, and I haven't read the whole comment thread, but a fair portion of it, the problems with the DNS don't seem to have permeated over to that bit of the internet. So even if See did have a social media monitoring strategy for Twitter and Facebook, they'd still have no warning of something being wrong at their end.

So what's the lesson?

Being outside the conversation, being ignorant of the conversations, it can cost you money. Real cash in terms of missed SLA's or a stupid judgement on direction or trend which could have been avoided instead of needing to be unpicked and unraveled a year later when that decision is shown to be stupid. Real reputational terms in that you can turn around disasters before they become ones using the early warning system which is the social media estate. But perhaps more fundamentally, it can cost you the trust you have with your customers, when you've invested thousands into a new shiny system, convinced your customer that the new shiny system will deliver and then left them with egg on their face when the system not only doesn't perform, but it's clear the customers knew it wasn't performing before you did. That's not a happy situation for anyone to be in.

So next time someone is trying to help you with your social media presence and you feel like uttering those words 'I haven't got time', have a quick think.

What's the risk and economic implications wrapped up with deciding not to make time?

Go ask your mother!

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 20:24:00 +0000

This is a tricky post to write for various reasons. Please bear with me, I think there's something important under here but it's wrapped in a slightly fuzzy layer of emotion by necessity, something which will become evident as we go along. A summary would include the words coaching, mentoring, role models, invisible women and social mobility.

I'm a verbal thinker. And that it was a conversation with two blokes which led to the following post is probably an indicator of how valuable and trusted both those two people are becoming to my thinking but also of how valuable I find both genders in bouncing ideas off, discussing and debating with. This is important because this post involves female role models. But I'd like to make it really clear how much I value the lads in my life. And some of the problem I'm about to try and unravel may be something to do with the fact that there have been no shortage of fantastic male role models in my life thus far.

There's been an absolute dearth of female ones.

I think we've established I'm a bit of a tomboy by now. I'm really comfortable being the only girl in a bunch of male bike riders. I'm really comfortable being the only girl in a pub with a big group of boys. Being slightly 'techy' means you're going to be familiar with single gendered gatherings and ditto having a history of knowing ways around Counterstrike maps intimately.

The problem with being in a series of situations, both in my spare time and work time where I was often the only girl, means there was no one to model my behaviour on, nor my aspirations. This meant for the longest time that I didn't have them because I didn't know I could. The women in my family either didn't work, worked as cleaners or worked as office administrators in car factories. Cousins were nurses, nannies and theatre dressers. There was not a manager or leader in sight.

Now this is where it becomes interesting. Speak to some women and they wonder why on earth this would ever be an issue. I've recently spoken to one woman who could be considered an adventurer, an explorer, an incredibly brave, fearless and boundary pushing person. She cannot understand she is a role model. She cannot understand other women would feel a lack of role model would impede their aspiration. She simply cannot understand. Some of it is modesty. But I suspect a lot of her viewpoint is shaped by her background, where her mother was strong, her sisters are strong, and you learn, study and then achieve. Something. Whether that's in the more traditional within four walls kind of achievement or the being the first woman to do something kind of achievement.

I did not grow up in that environment. I am not smarter than my mother but I am very different. Very much the same, but very different. There have been times in my life when 'go ask your mother!' has been either intimated or said outright and I am always left walking away with my tail between my legs because how do you explain to some hotshot your mother is a cleaner, has one O level and that people can be quite wonderful in a thousand different ways but utterly useless when it comes to helping their daughter climb a career ladder?

So, as you do, you tend to become self reliant, read books, read the web, search out your own role models and chat to them, try and learn from them, whilst trying to never let on how utterly clueless you might feel. Then you get a job. A wonderful job. The kind of job that makes you dance in the morning. Sometimes literally. And suddenly there are lovely women who don't tell you to go ask your mother and have more time than your previous rather fab mentor had to help you sort yourself out. There are networks and visible women everywhere. There's all different kind of leadership types to model yourself on and you realise Margaret Thatcher isn't it, that's not the end of becoming a woman who leads.

But because you've always been self reliant, it takes a while for the words of advice, nay the waterfall of advice from so may quarters to sink in, because it's such a shock that suddenly people have time to help, they have time to listen and they've got the patience, the persistence and tenacity to understand the willing is there, that the determination is there but there's a bit of a lag when it comes to sorting all the advice into three sections:

Process
Act
Refine

So why am I sharing this?

I want women who are leaders to understand how much of a difference they make. I don't know if they know. You don't have to mentor someone, thought it's ace if you do. You don't have to write a blog though god knows I'd be lost without some of the ones I read and it'd be ace if you could. You just have to be visible. There. So that the next generation of wee graduates who are still finding their feet and themselves can see you there, and decide they want to be just like you.

But I think also, I'd like the next generation of wee graduates (or the kids still in school even) to know that if your parents can't give you what you need (through no fault of their own, I hasten to add, hell social mobility as a phrase exists for a reason) there are other people who will. That if you're not sure if the fire in your belly to change something, to be better, can survive going out into the big wide world alone, you're wont be, I promise. If you're prepared to iterate yourself, if you're prepared to put the work in, if you're prepared to listen, be patient, wait for your brain to process the input and act on it, if you're prepared to take some leaps of faith, you can become the person you would like to be.

For those of you wondering what the big deal might be about and as a kind of postscript...

I was a very quiet child and I read a lot. The books I read came from either the library or the charity shop. Sweet Valley High contained blonde women who were either brainy, or attractive. But always waited for a man to tell them what to do, usually their boyfriend, who would come along with some sage bit of advice. Nancy Drew helped but not much, she used her brain but not in a way I could identify with at all. Enid Blyton - well the less said the better hmmm? And Agatha Christie sadly sat in the same mold. I didn't have the internet, I didn't have access to inspiring adventure books containing women climbing mountains or running a long way. That's because the books hadn't been written, because until the 80's women just didn't do things like that. Or if they did they did it quietly.

It's about visibility. If I can't see you, I assume you're not there. These days, things are different. But I'm old, and in my day they weren't different at all. They were always the same and girls wore dresses, went to Mass and didn't say boo to a goose. Just don't ever ask me how many scars I've got from falling off things ;O)

Totally civically cool

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 20:21:00 +0000

The following post contains: swearing, passion, grenade throwing and fire. You have been warned.

Yesterday, while out smoking, someone said 'it doesn't sit well with my civic heart' and thumped their chest. They weren't wearing a suit. As it happens, they were wearing jeans and trainers. But they own a suit. Do a quite a nice line in them as it happens. But yesterday he was wearing a hoody though the day before he was talking to a minister. In jeans. Wasn't a suit wearing occasion.

He's the coolest person I know. He's flipping epic at his job, totally dedicated, when needed pulls hours that would make most cry, has a whole tonne of shit going on no one ever sees or hears about and every single little wriggle he knows to save money, he uses it. He's civil service right down to the bone and he doesn't care who knows it. He's not embarrassed or ashamed of it. He simply is and that is the end of that.

This is going to embarrass him. I don't care. This needs saying.

I am not cool either. I write some words, and I do social media and I work at GDS, possibly the coolest bit of government there ever was or ever will be. I am not cool. I lob grenades at things I think are wrong, I say some challenging stuff, both on Twitter and here - challenging for the people it's aimed at, even if not challenging for the majority of my readership. I am relentless in my determination to make government better because I believe in something.

Police protect and serve the citizens of this country. Nurses fix the breaks in the citizens of this country. Firemen quench the flames for the citizens of this country.

So what the hell do I do? I faint at the sight of blood, am terrified of fire and sharp things and I have a finely honed sense of when a crowd is about to kick off which I use to always be miles away when it finally does. So instead I choose to be government. I choose to work inside machinery I used to find difficult and intimidating. I walk through the doors, and I say good morning to the ex-ghurka on security and I swipe through the gates and wait for the lift.

That spot, in that building, is a million miles from where I grew up and a million miles from the street where my boyfriend still lives. It couldn't be further, quite frankly, unless I lived in a tower block on a tenement estate. So I stand waiting for the lift in a place far from home where I have few friends, not because it's cool. Not because I expect respect for what I do and not because it's cool.

I do it because it is the only way I know how to make a difference, no matter how small. I fiercely, passionately believe that there is a value to the things that I do. That somewhere, in some unforeseen and unknown future, someone will be equipped to speak on behalf of the people I live next to in one of the most deprived Wards in this country because they will have heard their voice. They will have had those conversations and they will have understood the view from that street, from the terrace out of the window on a cold, misty and bleak Northern Monday morning.

I have lobbed grenades. I have used words as weapons, initially accidentally, and progressively more consciously as time has passed, as I have discovered that words have power, knowledge is power, I have it and I want to pass it on.

So what do I do? I just serve. I serve people who are democratically elected by the people who lived next door to me back home. They choose people. I don't care any more what 'colour' those people might politically be. All I see is a service which needs some help and some little places where I might be able to give some of that help. When it's appropriate, when it's asked for, where it's needed most. That is not cool, it's not big, and it's clever.

It's what I choose to do. I work for government. It's about the uncoolest thing you can admit to doing and I don't care. I'm proud of what I do and where I work. I work with some kick ass people. Some of them are in GDS. But not all of them. Some of them wear jeans. But not all of them. Some of them feel as fiercely as I do about serving something, someone. But not all of them.

GDS is hiring right now. But so is the rest of government, in places. So if you want to be part of something that's not cool, go take a look. Stop asking me whether there are jobs in GDS. Instead ask yourself something else.

Do I care about being cool? Do I care about citizens? Do I want to make a difference, one that's not immediately visible, that's not plastered across the front page, but that's real, intrinsic, persistent and bankable?

Answer the question. Answer it honestly. It matters. And I don't care any more that knowing it matters is not cool.

When social media attacks...

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 18:16:00 +0000

A girl walks into a bar. She's quite a successful and 'famous by association' kind of girl. She used to write for a gossip column in a national and now she freelances and she's doing just fine thank you very much.

She walks into the bar and she shouts, nay screams, at the top of her voice 'hey everybody, want to know about the intimate details of the relationships I was in and out of in 2008? Let me tell you in every single gory detail!'

Never gonna happen, right?

Except right now, there is a girl, who could be said to fit this profile, wandering around Facebook and finding out that essentially, this evening, she might as well have. Because Facebook, in what can only be described as a fail whale so big the entire ocean is empty right now, have published every single private inbox message she has ever sent to her timeline.

But it's okay, she's deleted them all.

Except, wait, no. Because the replies to all those relationship related messages are all on other peoples timelines now - the people she sent the messages to. And they're nowhere near a computer cos it's commute home time and they've probably got their head buried in a pint or a newspaper.

So the potentially intimate details of all her relationships from 2008 are stuck there, for all her friends to see.

Unless, of course, they've not locked their privacy down because all the embarrassing stuff is kept to private inbox messages. Then the whole world can see it.

Bit of a reputational disaster really and she's done nothing wrong except to forget one crucial bit of comprehension.

Facebook own you. And you didn't pay them a penny. And there is nothing you can do to undo this mess, nothing you can do to get your reputation back if it is destroyed, nothing you can do to make those messages that should never be seen become unseen. There is no apology that can make this better and no court case which will fix.

Lesson?

Be more damn careful with your data and understand that data doesn't just mean numbers. It means you. Your loves, your lives, your heartaches. All of you

Edited 19:43 - Facebook deny rumours of breach of privacy

Allegories for the modern employee

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 18:19:00 +0000

The word for this post is iteration. We'll loop around to it by the end. So while this may look like a post about mountain bikes, it's actually not.

Outside of work, I spend quite a lot of time on the back of a bike. Sometimes, depending on the trail I'm trying to ride, I spend a lot of time literally hanging off the back of the bike, ruing the stupid idea I had in my head that I didn't need to drop my seatpost because that's what the real bikers do and I'm not a real biker.

Anyway. I ride bikes a lot. And sometimes the reactions it elicits can be really quite amusing - a look of shocked horror as someone looks at the smartly dressed person in front of them, and I assume tries to imagine what on earth that person could ever find appealing about hurtling down the side of a muddy hill at high speeds.

But I learn a lot, riding my bike. And most other people do too, and though their day jobs may be different and the learning may not be so obvious, you can be sure that the person who turns up for work is shaped and honed by the time they spend lovingly trying to avoid breaking something critical.

Because lets not be coy about this. Riding bikes can be dangerous enough on a road with the hazards of other road users. But throw some mud, slippery tree roots, dumped gravel, tree branches at eye level and cunningly positioned tree trunks which appear to move subtly 3 centimetres to the right just when you weren't looking and it becomes a slightly more challenging proposition. And so risk, a word which comes up ever more increasingly in my day job in terms of averse or management or calculation, is something I am really rather familiar with. You may think that when on a bike that the only person directly impacted by your own bad risk assessment is you yourself. Until you factor in mountain rescue, air ambulances and the rather more minor but no less irritating to those around you hanging about waiting for them, the after care, the logistics...suddenly the importance of your getting that risk assessment bob on becomes a little more obvious, no?

And so it is that when it comes to carrying out risk scans at work, I look behind me as well as in front, and always assume for planning purposes that that tree trunk will move 3 centimetres to the right when I'm not looking.

So we move to decision making. Brutally, dither at 15 -20 miles an hour on a descent and you might as well get off the bike and hand it to the mechanics in your local friendly bike shop. Dither and you'll be lucky if you come out of the situation with bruises. Do not dither is the little mantra I whisper when I'm 100% focused on the trail in front, when I see an obstacle coming at me that I don't know how to deal with. I have to make a split second decision, but more importantly I have to commit to it. I don't need to break down how this transfers now, do I? Learning to commit is not an instant thing. Learning to make decisions that fast is not an instant thing. It takes years of practice and crashes and learning from mistakes to realise that more often than not, avoiding making a decision because you don't know the right answer can be fatal.

Then there's the minor point of leading. Accidental leading, more often than not, as a gate appears, the people who know the trail stop to open the gate and suddenly you find yourself without a wheel to chase ( or more importantly follow) and instead find yourself in front. No one else's line to follow. No one else to warn you of upcoming horrors. No. Now you're the one who's got to call clear at road junctions, got to make a decision on route finding, got to embarrassedly back track when the GPS off route beeping echoes around you, who has to fall off to find that the trail surface changed since last you flew down this particular bit.

In other words, you have to take responsibility. And apologise when you get it wrong. And hope getting it wrong doesn't result in anything worse than a small detour around an unfriendly looking herd of cows. And it's scary, the first time it happens, really scary, but the more it happens, the more you are forced to step up and not shy away from it, the more settled you become and the more you get to know the riders around you and what they need warnings on and what they do not. And no doubt the first few times it will be annoying and you'll get it wrong and accidentally insult or patronise. But after a while, you know everyone well enough and it all just falls into place, gently and quietly.

Don't need to draw you any pictures there either, do I?

So what am I saying?

I guess that what I'm saying is that I am constantly learning - not inside of work, but outside of work. Mountain biking, the thing I do in my spare time, accidentally is equipping me with some skills I really need in my day job. That some of that learning is useful right now and some of it might not be but it's all learning. That even when I go home, I am grown up enough and self aware enough to know - just like all of you reading this - that I can't just switch off from trying to become a better person. That I didn't set out to use it to become better in my day job but somehow it just happened. And that I am, as are all of us, constantly under iteration.

Iterate, feedback, listen. Iterate, feedback, listen. Guess messing around on bikes isn't quite as childish as I'd initially thought, then.

All that glitters is not gold

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 17:04:00 +0000

I am as guilty of the following as any other. Or at least I have been. Assorted personal experiences and work conversations have, however, started to restrain my inner 'oooooh shiny' reaction to new technology.

Lets talk about the evolution of the web. In the beginning there were Bulletin Board Systems. You couldn't embed images, you navigated through them with key presses on your keyboard to enter menus, you needed to have a modicum of unix editor experience to not get locked into editing something and a stunning memory to remember the key presses required to get you back to a discussion you added to yesterday. No clicks. No images. Lots and lots of chat, debate, discussion and socialising.

The beginning of digital engagement, I think.

Then came IRC - in fact, here you go, I made a pretty picture:

We naturally end at the other side of the spectrum - the unquenchable thirst for the next big thing. Except that's not quite the right way of putting it either. Because it's no longer about the next big thing. The evolution of digital engagement seems to have paused slightly. Held its breath. There hasn't been a successful new kid on the block for at least 6 months, a hiatus unheard of just 12 months ago.

Yes, yes, we have app.net and other shoots poking up from the now settled soil, but increasingly I am becoming aware that in our haste to look forward we might have been missing something.

Web forums evolved during the late 90's/early 2000's. Homes for the ex BBS users who wanted a little bit more functionality, combined with incredibly niche interests (and via 4 chan, let us not ever forget that often developments in technology are pushed in the places we'd prefer not to look) these forums have persisted and stayed despite staunch challenge from Facebook and Twitter.

Except they offer something neither of those two sites offer. The ability to have a pleasant, rich, multi-user discussion thread spanning days and sometimes months, where sense is often welcomed not derided, layers and layers of rich user experience and knowledge is built and which until recently, absolutely everyone seemed to be oblivious in the social media space.

It's not social media. That's probably the first problem. Or rather, it is, of course, but there isn't one cool company behind the tool. There isn't a brand. There's just some paid for and some open source tools which people can pick up and customise until the basic product is no longer recognisable - and two forums rarely looks the same after the customisation has been applied. Because of this, I think for a long time people did not recognise that perhaps the thing driving the discussion was even called the same thing, but that each of these forums had been built from scratch with different tools.

But it's not about the tools. That's almost irrelevant. What forums are, are collection points. Think of them as locks, pauses in the passage of the thinking, learning, researching, purchasing or discussing process. They invite longer form posts than Twitter or Facebook. They see friendships and support networks develop between who have never, and possibly will never, meet. The subjects they now cover are legion and in some cases there is competition for the same audience.

What means for digital engagement people is effort. It means we have to try a bit to find the people where they are already talking (see what I did there? There's a reason that line is in the social media guidelines for UK government). It means, with some forums appearing in search engine indexing and some not that we have to be a bit imaginative sometimes in trying to ferret where these communities are. Because make no mistake, they are communities, from audio-visual forums who send around remote programmers shared between users, to the Florida community who have an item bin located in the storage area of a Florida self catering resort which users can sign up to use, borrow the contents of for their stay and then return at the end for the next person to use - they are communities. They share, rely, comfort and assure.

And we're not even got to the medical communities yet.

Ignore them at your peril. Insist on thinking it's only mumsnet if you like. But the smart digital engagement money is in going backwards and finding the communities of persistence.

Testing: Branching out

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 10:13:00 +0000

I've been reading a lot about Branch lately so I thought I'd sign up. This is a test Branch I'm using to see how it works, whether embeds are concurrently updated with conversations on Branch.com and whether anyone is actually using it.

A day in the life

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 17:34:00 +0000

I've always worked in very traditional environments where there were either thinkers or do'ers. The do'ers were on the front line and did and the thinkers were behind them, researching, reading, discussing and then issuing strategies and directions which would then be cascaded down to the do'ers.

My current role is a wee bit different and it suits me much better. It involves lots of thinking and it involves lots of doing and very often both in the same day. Like today. There was the bringing together of 2 departments with another involved in the discussion but not present where we established some silo working had been happening and established steps in order to resolve that so that everyone shared thinking and reached a combined place of best practice. Lots of thinking for other people, lots of tying together for me, lots of discussion in the future to make sure this gets ironed out.

Prior to that I built a new Google site to try and bring a big group of people across big geographical spaces together in one place to share best practice - more silo dissolving but also learning, sharing best practice and resilience building. So lots of rolling my sleeves up and getting my hands dirty. Somewhere in there was a discussion and some verbal thinking about internal comms mixed with sharing some fab articles I'd found online in various blogs and before that I sat and spent time with a particularly intelligent and fascinating ex-local government colleague in digital strategy who reassured me I was going in the right direction, joined some dots for me, but also reminded me heavily that we must not work in silos inside GDS either, and that the sheer breadth of skills and knowledge hidden inside peoples heads, not only in the wider civil service but also inside the heads of GDS bods is quite staggering.

There was some other stuff mixed in. Phone calls, emails, discussions and blog content stuff. All the usual stuff. But essentially, that was my 7 hours day today (I went home a wee bit early cos I've got a cold). That's a pretty normal day for me at GDS. It involved doing things slowly and quickly. It involved nailing big thorny issues swiftly, and leisurely dissecting others over coffee. It involved reflecting behaviours but also leading them. It involved some learning and some.... not teaching, never that, but some leading questions certainly.

Essentially, if you examined today on an outcome and output level I hope you'd pop it into the success box. But it's not that, oddly, that gives me an enormous sense of wellbeing. It's the fact that in a world where I thought I'd always be put in a box which had 'thinker' or 'do'er' written on them, I've found somewhere where it's actually okay to be both.

Of course you could argue I'm managing to be productive because of that very attitude which allows me to operate this way.

I'll leave you to have a think about that one.

The opendata confessional for localgov

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 16:46:00 +0000

We don't have a water cooler you can gather around at GDS (though we do have drinking water on tap) because you'd be massively in the way if you did but if we did this post would be tagged watercooler.

I think best when I think aloud. I don't have anyone to think aloud to, which is why this blog is so brilliantly useful, so if you'll excuse me, I'm going to use it to think aloud about opendata in local government and how and why you need to make the argument that opendata is good for local government, not 10,000 disastrous news stories waiting to happen.

Eyebrows

But I suppose before that I should remind people of the eyebrow test. A central government press officer mentioned she wasn't an opendata specialist the other day. I'm not either, I'll be completely honest. I'm not a specialist in anything, it's what I do best. But I am a citizen, and I am a user of output from central and local government. Most of this country is - we all get our bins collected. So we can all read through data and see the same things a journalist will - the glaring zero in the wrong place or the travel fare amount so ludicrous it cannot possibly be correct. You will see those things and you will raise an eyebrow and if you do, so will a journalist. It's that simple. If it isn't a mistake, do your research and be ready for the questions, you will see them coming, deal with them, and move on.

On to the actual data and why local government should bother.

Policy

Policy gets eaten by culture, just like strategy. It's like some weird game of paper, scissors, stone. But policy also need to do an awful lot of research and sometimes a little bit of benchmarking as well. They seem to be where relationships sit with a lot of external stakeholders but internal ones too.

Wouldn't it be nice if someone else could do all the research for you and you could simply consume a report which told you what everyone else was doing on a particular subject so you could decide whether a policy change would work in your area or not?

Opendata is not just spreadsheets full of numbers. Sharing your policy decision and the thinking behind them, all of you, would mean someone could compile a searchable database for 436 Councils which would tell you with a quick keyword search what someone with a similar demographic to you did when considering renewing seating layout in their town centre. Or whether someone needed to change gritting policies as a result of the recent bad winters, just like you. Imagine never having to save everything you come across just in case you might need it in future every again.

Finance

Imagine, if you will, a world where you'd be able to know with 60% certainty the outcome of a financial decision, be that supplier, resourcing or a change in allocation of staffing to a different resource. And I've plucked that number out of the air - it could be and probably would be higher. A world where you fire up a web browser, put your Council name in, what you're trying to do and it spits out the details of someone else who's done exactly the same thing with price tags attached. Purchasing a cleaning product for the next 5 years? Sourcing diesel suppliers? Doesn't matter. Because every Council has popped all their spending data online, combined with their supplier lists and what they use them for. And someone else who wants to make a little bit of money (proportionately massively less money than potentially you will spend making the wrong decision on suppliers) will take all that information, cross reference it with population, demographic and other census data as well as map information to find a Council similar to you who has made the same budgeting decision or who has looked for and found the same solution.

Performance

With the removal of National Indicator sets and the retention of PAM's and internal reporting requirements mean that performance statistics are still important. And you know that eventually someone is going to want to know how they're performing compared to the next village/town/county over. Which then results in endless phone calls, lots of relationship building, a little bit of grovelling and a lot of research depending on your Council's relationship with aforementioned village/town/county.

There's an easier way. Every Council chucks their performance data they report on onto the web. An enterprising data cruncher comes along, normalises the data, makes a few phone calls, gets everyone publishing in the same format. Creates a tool which allows you to find the performance outcomes for every Council at the click of a button. So you don't need to stick to your local village/town/county to benchmark, you can measure your success or failure against any comparative Council within the country. And if you discover you're falling short, you can phone that Council up and ask them to come and tell you how they're succeeding.

Environment

Bins. My old friend bins. The single biggest daily repetitive operation that local government carries out. Do you have nightmares trying to make your bin collections as efficient and cost effective as possible? Do you lie awake at night trying to work out if you've missed something crucial, a saving concealed in the mire of back alleys, ginnels, alleyways and secret shortcuts only the locals know?

You might well be missing something. And if all Councils published their bin round maps online, it'd be a damn sight easier for everyone to share what they do and how efficient it is. Timings, number of staff, number of vehicles, number of rounds. Map showing what gets done when and how often. Find a local Council with a high density of the type of housing you're looking for (if you're not sure, ask Keep Britain Tidy, thanks to LEQS they know where all kinds of types of housing are across the UK). Look at their maps and schedules. Differ massively from yours? Phone them up and ask them why they've done what they've done and how much it's cost them. You might find you can save a few £100,000 by picking someone else's brains.

Don't get sidelined by the stories in the data for others

I could go on and on and on. A blog post is not the place for a document which outlined by section and department through an entire Council structure how opendata could benefit. Suffice to say I hope that the above examples demonstrate why opendata is not just about spending figures. Why operating in isolation is potentially costing you money. Why sharing doesn't just mean with journalists, but also with each other. Why having other Councils knocking on your door asking you how you're doing what you're doing looks pretty good come Award time.

The long and short of it is, opendata could be saving you a huge amount of time, effort and money, resource you could free up to reallocate internally to doing something better instead. Yes, resource will be needed to produce, collate and publish all this data - but are you really not already producing it as a by-product of your day to day job anyway?

Don't get sidelined by the stories in the data for others. Focus instead on the stories in other peoples data for you.

'Ambition is contagious'

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 19:20:00 +0000

A university in London, one I can't remember the name of, is running an advertising campaign at the moment called 'Ambition is contagious'.

It wont stop resonating. From listening to Mary Rand talk about her winning the gold medal in the long jump in 1964 igniting the aspirations and expanding the expectations of the rest of the Olympic team to listening to Euro 2012 commentators talk about the England team as a family, this statement wraps itself around and inside many situations. Work being the obvious one. If you are sat inside the collective expectation of changing public services forever, the expectation of success, whether you like it or not, is probably tied quite closely to the collective expectation of success. GDS aspires to deliver and change. It could be argued, I suppose that entering that environment means the expectation is contagious.

But it is something far more personal inside me which has attached itself to this statement and become a ringing little bell in the back of my mind.

I am accidental. Or, rather, my education is accidental. And I believe, very fiercely indeed, that that is quite... wrong at the lowest level and perhaps concerning at the highest. So in order to explain I am afraid I must go backwards in order to go forwards. And as usual I might be accidentally brutal, and as usual I expect no sympathy, no sentences with the word 'poor' within to be aimed at me, but instead I expect you to pay particular attention to the very last paragraph. You can jump there, but you may not understand the visceral irritation which has led to that point.

We were poor. Poverty line, quite literally penny left in the purse at the end of the week, needing sometimes to buy bread on credit at the local corner shop poor. Our house was not falling down. We had an inside toilet. The door locked. Damp did not run down the walls. But by contrast to most of the people I have mixed with since the age of 18, it was difficult, harsh and sometimes painful. To this day I cannot bear to be hungry. I panic if I have no food in the house. I dread receiving letters because of what they may contain and I fear unexpected phone calls even though I know I owe no one a thing. I own little because you cannot repossess something I do not own, and I spend a lot more lightly than most other women my age. I wear clothes until they are broken, shoes until they simply cannot be reheeled any more.

I spend money on experiences because experiences are beautiful and you cannot remove them from me. They are mine. And perhaps when you have had nothing new, no new clothes, no new books, no new games, when Xmas presents have been returned to shops and not replaced, when Xmas trees have been wheeled from the loft way past their best, when joy has not been brought from things but instead from escape, you are wary of becoming attached to things, and perhaps never learned to see the point of doing so.

In retrospect, perhaps, the cold I remember is not as cold as perhaps I felt it was, but Reynauds means cold is not skin deep, but literally blood deep and the gnawing insistence of your body craving warm on a morning with icicles formed inside the windows is something I will never forget.

It is hard to aspire to anything within this. It was not accidental that Maslow's hierarchy of needs resonated deeply with me on being taken through it in my HR module at university. If basic needs are not satisfied, it is very hard to concentrate, never mind aspire. You can't see anything to aspire to. You can't see a way out. You can't perceive of a life which is not as it is right now when you are young, because all there is is today, and tomorrow may as well be next year for all you can comprehend. I did my homework in the way one does a su-doku puzzle. Methodically, quickly, efficiently, and with a complete lack of emotion, except the simple pleasure of completing something.

I was 'young and gifted'. For everyone else this meant books and learning aids and being stretched as far as possible. There was no room for this in our house for a number of reasons and money was perhaps the least of them but that is the easiest thing to focus on. People can understand a lack of money, it is simple. You cannot have things. You cannot have more than 1 pen, 1 pencil, 1 rubber and 1 ruler. You cannot grow out of things, either physically or mentally. There is no space to.

So school gave up. Especially when mum stopped attending the meetings that they called in the evening which she could not get to because there were no buses and we had no car. Buses in rural Somerset did not run in the evenings, back then. Taxi? Yes, of course, the family would go out with food for a night in lieu. School was a 30 mile round trip away.

And so we come to the point, the reason for painting a somewhat bleak picture which misses out peoples capacity for endurance and for finding the light inside the small things, of watching caterpillars and bees, of knowing the seasons as they turned and passed, of the brief conversations with intellectual equals and the quiet joy of racking up the A's.

My mother didn't know what on earth to do with me. Her family were not educated, my mother left school at 15 with one O Level in English. I didn't know what to do with me either. My GCSE predicted grades were so far off the mark of what I actually got that even college was looking unlikely and the Sixth Form washed their hands of me, making it very clear I was not A level material. As it turned out I did okay, considering a parental split 1 week before my first exam but as it happens: 'ambition is contagious'.

At this point, due to parental splits, we moved, from a village of 300 people where in the evenings there was exactly zero other female children in the same year as me, to a town which contained my best friend. And perhaps, no disrespect to Hannah who was a life saver in more ways than perhaps even she will ever realise, her parents.

I am sat right now, where I am sat, typing this, because of my best friends parents. Mum was a supply teacher at local primaries and had, in fact, taught me at my primary school for a few weeks many years before. Dad was a police officer in the local child protection unit. It was entirely an accident, a twist of fate that we moved when we did to where we did and yet what followed was two years of utter and complete life shaping, aspiration changing fun.

You see, there was never any conversation between us about whether I would go to university. No. There was just the assumption that I would, in the same way that there was the assumption that their son and daughter would. Because that is what everyone in their family did. They succeeded. At whatever they decided that they wanted to do, they succeeded. They simply worked hard, paid attention, found something they believed in, that they did because they loved and they succeeded. And you know what? It rubs off, that attitude. It sinks in. Not straight away - in parallel to this I was acing every single module in my National Diploma in Business and discovering that I was doing so because my brain worked differently and came up with different solutions to everyone else, not despite it. Yes, I got marked down in English Lit for having the audacity to have an emotion evoked by Shakespeare that was not mentioned in the Cliff notes. Quelle surprise.

So the year I was 16 was the year I accidentally got ambition. I got aspiration. Like someone popping a blue pill in front of me, slowly but surely I decided it might be worth taking. That life could be different, that being smart was okay, reading books was fine, teaching myself everything was also fine and catching on quick was a positive luxury in life. I got a part-time job in a local supermarket stacking shelves, worked 12 hour days quite happily, threw 6 packs of 2 litre bottles of soft drink around all through a very hot summer and discovered I could play well with others and I also could work very very very hard indeed.

But it was accidental. And it makes me angry. Not for me. I'd have noodled my way 'here' eventually, where here is mostly happy, mostly succeeding, mostly confident and mostly intensely curious about just about bloody everything that exists in the entire world. I'm fine.

But somewhere, out there, are a couple of thousand kids who are not. Who can't see past tomorrow and don't know life could be different. Who can't see the point of using their brain because they don't understand that a) it's okay to get ahead by using your smarts and b) yeah it's not cool now but later, much later, it will be about the coolest thing on the entire earth to just 'get it'. They're being bullied and getting miserable. They're becoming detached from the education system because it doesn't understand them (or their parents) and their apparent lack of interest (or their parents). They can't flex the system to make it better, because you can't hack the school system to make it work better for you. They can't afford books and it's not cool to go to the library. They don't have internet access in the evening so they can't learn the entire world all at once and see the potential that might be out there.

They're locked. In a box. And I can't stand the idea that the only thing which will get them out of that box is the accidental confluence of coincidences which might mean they cross paths with someone for whom the box simply isn't there.

Ambition is contagious. But I do not believe that ambition should be accidental. So, I think I'd like to spend some time thinking about how I can tip the scales, how I can rewire the paths, how I can intercede into inevitability, how I can reroute and how I can break those boxes.

I abhor the idea that social mobility, which is what I am talking about, is accidental. I abhor even more the idea of social engineering. But in order for those people who are smart and young and smart, to not end up with convictions due to boredom, or worse, I believe it is worth devoting some time and attention to. So, if you're reading this, expect me to come calling in a few years time. Expect me to come asking some difficult questions. Because as time passes I become more determined to quit talking and get doing.

You can't repossess my memories

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 20:18:00 +0000

Standing around outside our office chatting the other day I was explaining about not owning many things.

Now I didn't mean that in the sense of clothes, shoes or handbags. I am a girl. No. I meant it in terms of the fact that moving house was a simple affair, being as how it involved the back of a Mondeo with the seats down and not a van as has been the case when moving house with groups of friends.

I don't own many things. In fact the things I own apart from the aforementioned clothes, shoes and handbags fall into two categories. Bikes and related stuff and gadgets.

But both of those groups of things are interesting because they are merely tools - tools through which I can experience things.

And so it came to be that I realised that I have nothing in my life which is not either necessary or a tool which allows me to experience something else - the exploration of the mind and the digital world, and the exploration of the body and the physical world.

I strongly believe there is a group of people who could be referred to as 'digital explorers'. They are not the people who create the digital landscape - we leave this to the entrepreneurs. Instead we are the people who poke and prod the creations of the digital builders. We sign up to hundreds of new shiny services which promise us the equivalent of digital wealth - either time or information management, and our inboxes are littered with nudges to go back to long forgotten failed ventures. We curate content we have discovered in many different ways in a desperate effort to remember the names of all the services we have come across that weren't useful when we found them but might, just might be useful in the future.

We push the edges of things. We use Google fu to make sure we never need to the second page of results - we know it's there but to need it is to fail. We know every mammoth database on the web from IMDB and Wikipedia to the lesser know Urban Dictionary and Encyclopedia Dramatica. We know which sources are to be trusted and which are not and if we're not sure we know exactly which websites will verify for us first.

But it's not just about being connected. It's about not being passive. We don't wait for the information to come to us, we go and look for it. We take joy in finding new people to follow on Twitter because we hate echo chambers and every now and again we like to go off wondering across the spiderweb of who knows who knows who knows who to see where we might end up - or who we might end up talking to, learning from or challenging.

It's the digital equivalent of riding my bike, but I am not the only person who is like this, this behaviour is displayed by very many people. We don't want to create the corridors of power, we don't want to control the internet. We simply want to be free to roam those same corridors, maybe nudging a picture so it is displayed perfectly horizontally as we walk past, perhaps doing a little dusting as we walk through, but nevertheless simply taking it all on, absorbing it all, seeing the patterns, feeling the networks move and swirl around us and using that sub-consciously absorbed information to inform decisions we make on a conscious level.

Some of us even have the audacity to believe that if we look far enough, if we read enough, if we search enough, there truly is nothing, any more, that we cannot learn, cannot teach ourselves, cannot open the doors to nor enjoy the benefits of.

As long as I've got my bike and my laptop/pad/phone, I know life will never be boring. So maybe that's the biggest gift the 21st century can give to you. That your life need never be boring again.

Panic, panic, there's a panic going on!

noreply@blogger.com (loulouk) — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 21:04:00 +0000

It's about emergency planning and civil contingencies before you ask. I'm afraid however, this is not going to be a 'read in 5 minutes' blog post. I'm going to try, instead, to take you with me on my mind meanderings. Be patient. Grab a cup of coffee and a biscuit (just don't bring the biscuit near me). Get comfy. Because I think this is important and hopefully in a few minutes you will too.

Sorry about that. Bit shocking isn't it. The video we were shown on Tuesday was even more shocking than that but I didn't think it was fair. So I thought I'd punch you gently in the stomach rather than full in the face.

So why did you just watch a completely shell shocked geek wandering around his familiar street rendered unrecognisable by a massive for of nature muttering oh my god under his breath repeatedly?

Well, this is the future of civil contingencies I'm afraid, whether you like it or not. In fact, it could be worse in terms of civil emergency management - he could have been livestreaming this mere seconds after the first earthquake happened. Makes it a bit hard to control the messages going out, doesn't it? Renders discussions about 'gushing' and 'trickling' when describing water flowing into an underground station a little irrelevant. Cos now, Joe Public can simply live stream that the water is gushing and if they did, and you say it's trickling, you look like a complete numpty. But more to the point you destroy any trust anyone might have ever had in you to tell the truth. And lets be honest, in this new world, you'd better tell the truth when it comes to emergencies or you will look an idiot and people will call you on it. In public. In full view of a pack of journalists just waiting to make the drama llama put his little party hat on.

Lets rewind a little bit.

On Tuesday I was invited to attend a DCLG run workshop on Social Media. The attendees were cross sector/group/government but most had one thing in common - membership of a Local Resilience Forum, the creation of which is an obligation of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. The workshop was, I think, a consultation exercise in actual fact, but the roundtable was preceded by some fantastic presentations from a helpfully wide breadth of presenters all coming at social media and civil contingencies from different angles. BBC news reporter, academic theoretician (who's I suspect got a few more heads I've missed), a lady from the Civil Contingencies Directorate inside DCLG - my head was sore from nodding in agreement by the end of the morning. There was a presentation I zoned out from and vehemently disagreed with mid section but someone rather more able than I called the presenter on his assertion that being yourself on social media lost you followers.

I refrained from relating personal experience.

A lot, and I do mean a lot of thought was generated from the session. About the speed of light of our communications world now. I doodled the diagram below then redid it so it was fit for human eyes:

Click for larger version

Gold command fit in here somewhere. I need to find out where. But in the roundtable I asked someone who was explaining how they'd dealt with social media in a real incident whether having to get sign off on messages to put out from gold command was an issue. She said it was.

Lets think about Christchurch and the sound of hissing gas. How quickly are you going to map, using Ushahidi all the leaking gas pipes and broken water mains on your own? How quickly are you going to ask for help from all the people wondering the streets with connections in their hands and gps enabled to tap a button on a screen when they see a fountain of water emerging from something other than a fountain?

Quick quick slow.

No use having a quick as light comms team, emergency digital engagement team, if the messages coming through are an hour too old by the time you're allowed to send them out.

Another diagram for you:

Click for larger version

Yeah not great. My first Whiteboard HD attempt - but you get the picture. Emergency planning emitting their own (out of date) messages on the left hand side and the rest of us, the unaffected by the emergency and the affected too (see Queensland flood case studies for how the affected kept on tweeting and facebooking right the way through) on the right hand side, swapping information, discussing, reacting, commentating, curating using Storify or Storyful. In the middle is the truth, the consensus between those affected and those unaffected, the real time social reporters and the media who source from them. But around the outside are the rumours and the buzz, the noise and chitter chatter.

By being on the left and only broadcasting, you do not see what is happening on the right. And if you do not see what is happening on the right, you cannot intervene when someone starts saying something really stupid, really untrue and potentially really life threatening.

You see, as emergency planners, you no longer just have to worry about the panic you yourself might accidentally instigate if you don't check all your carefully planned key messages with gold command. Someone else with no authority at all might be merrily creating panic for you and if you're in la-la-la can't hear you broadcast mode, you wont see it. Until it's too late and the effect of that panic are seen on the ground and suddenly someone pays attention.

You could prevent it. You could intervene. But to do that you have to be in the conversation.

And so we come to the final doodle. How do you get ready for the conversations a lot of us are now telling you that you're going to have to have that as a civil contingency specialist you've never had to deal with before? Well, there's two options. As I told a lady opposite me in the roundtable, you could snaffle someone like me. Just an admin, who's a bit gobby on Twitter. Got an opinion. Got a lot of skills. Valuable skills. Snaffle them. Speak to their manager first, mind, but snaffle them. Give them an opportunity to show you if they understand not only social media but the implications of how that will interact with emergency planning. If they do, consider asking for some of their time. Get bartering and get borrowing. You might never need them. But you might, and if you do and there's a gap, an empty chair where they should be sitting, you'll be kicking yourself.

So, a little chart which is aimed at policy bods and is very draft (very) but I think shows most peoples journey on Twitter:

Click for larger version

It is actually that simple. This process can take anywhere from 6 months to a year. I tell you this not to strike fear but rather to explain that we're all learning, there's actually no end to the learning, that every incident which happens will improve our understanding and remove the mystery and no one is expecting you to be an expert in Twitter. Instead, think of it as an expectation that you'll talk - just a bit quicker and a bit more immediately than you're used to. There's the potential for making mistakes by being in the conversation but I strongly believe that there are more risks in not being in the conversation.