Citizensheep. "Michael Grimes lives in Birmingham (UK). This is his blog about anything that he fancies."

Every so often I find myself in an unexpected and memorable situation. Today, 1 February 2012, I am reminded of the time I met Umar Ghuman.

I was traveling home to Birmingham on a Virgin train – not something I do often – and I sat at a table with a couple of Pakistani men. They were a fair bit apart in age and it turned out that one was the son of the other. They chatted intermittently for a bit while; I gazed out of the window. I think we exchanged pleasantries.

Then, by chance, the younger man and myself looked at our mobile phones at the same time. They were identical models, and we chuckled at this. The ice was broken just enough.

So when the father excused himself to search for the conveniences (not all that convenient as he was gone some time), his son asked – a little sheepishly – if I’d join him for a drink in the buffet car. If I remember correctly, he felt it a little disrespectful to his father to go alone.

So I did. And we chatted. For some reason I mentioned my Quaker connections and he got excited because he knew some Quakers well. We chatted some more and I learned that he was a member of the Pakistani parliament. He had been in London with his father to negotiate a deal with a large American food chain: the purpose of which, I believe, was to help fund a scheme to get affordable health care (possibly even free, I don’t remember) to vulnerable neighbourhoods in Pakistan.

And then I discovered he had apologised on behalf of Pakistan for the murder of Daniel Pearl.

Ten years ago today, American journalist Daniel Pearl was beheaded by Islamic extremists in Pakistan. Umar Ghuman, this understated chap in a standard-class train carriage, drinking with a stranger out of respect for his own father, had been the man who apologised in public to Daniel’s.

Umar Ghuman, I salute you for that.

Ramblings

In one of the UK GovCamp sessions last week we discussed the use of digital tools and third sector organisations in public service delivery.

I recorded most of the session. At some point I will try to write it up, but for now you can listen to the audio and read the transcript.

The transcript is mainly intact, but occasionally I was unable to make sense of a word or two. Therefore it’s in a wiki so that you can correct my errors if you so wish.

I missed the beginning of the discussion so the recording joins it as we address the issues of voluntary groups taking on some aspects of public services. The transcript begins as someone from the police is explaining how they worked with a group of Street Pastors.

Citizenship

I was pretty sure the song’s title was also that of a sitcom starring Geoffrey Palmer and Judi Dench, so I could easily have Googled it. But that felt like admitting early defeat, so I closed my eyes and tried to remember.

A tried and tested trick (by me, at least) is to run through the alphabet, visualising each letter in turn. It’s a bit like scrolling through a list on a screen: although you focus on one letter at a time you can see its neighbours too; but in this case the rest of the alphabet is always there somewhere, at the periphery.

The ‘A’ chimed with me straight away. I let it go for the moment as I still had 25 letters to compare it with. But the ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘G’ also glowed a little. (They don’t actually glow as such, but it’s impossible to describe exactly how they present themselves.)

The rest of the journey through the alphabet was uneventful, until I hit ‘W’. Everything about it lit up, and it was even bold enough to proffer a word: ‘When’. I tried others, like ‘Will’ and ‘With’, but ‘When’ stuck fast. However, the ‘T’ then started throbbing and spat out the word ‘Time’. That posed a problem: do I trust that sudden, apparently random intervention or do I focus on ‘When’, which had been presented so decisively?

I prodded a little more, playing ‘Time’ and ‘When’ off against each other. And then, like the end of a tunnel approaching unexpectedly, the other pieces dropped into place: ‘A’, ‘Time’, ‘G’ and ‘B’ clubbed together to produce ‘As Time Goes By‘.

How the bloody hell does that work?! It feels like I’m doing physical labour, moving pieces around and slotting things together, but in fact I’m lying perfectly still. My hands are doing nothing; to any observer I’m probably asleep; the only muscle I’m using is inside my head.

And where does ‘When’ fit in? The letter ‘W’ doesn’t feature in that song title at all, yet it was instrumental in solving the puzzle.

I’m not trying to fathom the human brain; lots of very clever people are spending their lives doing that. But I am often paralysed by how incredibly unfathomable and sophisticated it is.

Ramblings

Sick of relying on Issu, or other bloated third parties, simply for embedding documents?

Well, it turns out you can embed .pdf and .ppt files via Google Docs using a simple iframe. You don’t even need a Google account.

<iframe src="http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://document.pdf&embedded=true"></iframe>

Simply replace the bold text with your document’s url and style the iframe with css.

This appears not to work very well with actual Google documents though, as it appends a load of navigation detritus. But it seems to work well for regular hosted documents.

HTML

I don’t like the term ‘gamification’. Maybe I’ve missed the point, but if we have to turn something into a game doesn’t that suggest it’s not fit for purpose anyway?

Eight or nine years ago a man from Immersive Education introduced my colleagues and me to Kar2ouche. He explained it was the result of some Oxford University research into why children enjoyed computer games but not educational software. He finished by admitting that the findings stated the bleeding obvious: games are fun because the kids are in control. It was as simple as that.

He didn’t feel the need to call it ‘gamification’. To do so now is to suggest it’s a Cool New Thing: it’s not; it’s just common sense.

We know from the pain of public consultations that there’s little point involving people if they feel they have no stake in it. If the thing I’m expected to do isn’t relevant enough to engage me in the first place, why am I expected to do it at all? Bribing me might elicit some answers but it probably won’t encourage much meaningful engagement from me.

In other words, sugar-coating something might make it taste better but it doesn’t improve the process. For example, by turning voting into a game you might get more people to vote, but that doesn’t mean you’ve improved the democratic process. Those voters might still feel alienated after the election, meaning that next time you just have to be even more creative if you want them to turn out on polling day.

You don’t build a car from a cake recipe and ask someone to rectify it later. No: you make sure the processes and environment are optimum in the first place. Either that or you’ve decided already that you want a cake and not a car.

Ramblings

I’ve not posted on this site for a couple of months, partly because I haven’t had the time or energy and partly because I was experiencing severe technical difficulties with it (and didn’t have the time or energy for those either).

WordPress was playing silly buggers; the front end wasn’t working well and the back end was even more broken. At first it appeared to be a problem with plugins but eventually became apparent that it probably wasn’t. In fact it seems that the latest version of WordPress (and plugins) relies heavily on php5, and my host was still on php4.

It’s taken me since Christmas to discover that was the problem; if you think WordPress is a walk in the park, watch out for the black ice.

Anyway, enough rambling and bad metaphors; I’m off to bed. Good night.

Ramblings

I supported the idea of strategies and policies for Twitter or social media when it was evident that people in managerial positions needed a solid, reassuring case for allowing their communications staff to use those tools. But I hope things have moved on now.

I keep hearing people talking about how they’ve written a ‘set of Twitter protocols’ or ‘a social media policy’. They cover things like what to tweet and what not to tweet, how often to tweet it and the ‘right way’ to use Twitter. (If you think you know the answer to that last one please keep it to yourself.)

Do we really need policies and protocols for every aspect of our job? If so, why are people employing us? Surely we use social media tools only if appropriate, if doing so helps deliver our communications goals and in compliance with our organisation’s existing codes of practice? Just like any other tools for communicating. When was the last time you saw a six-page document detailing how to use a telephone, what not to say on it and how often you should ring people? (Ok, in some lines of work (such as call centres) there will be protocols for using the phone, but you get my drift.)

I tried writing a social media policy myself recently. I started with the intention of providing broad concepts to help people communicate confidently online (such as ‘think about your audience’ rather than ‘don’t tweet more than fourteen times a minute’), and abandoned it when I realised I was simply reiterating what was already in our contracts and organisational policies; and what was, on the whole, common sense borne of experience.

Instead I wrote a guide to blogging and social media that aims to give colleagues some advice but tries to avoid a ‘right way’ of doing it (it is a document of good practice, not a policy). If communicating is part of someone’s job then we should trust them to do it appropriately; if they don’t then there are management protocols already at our disposal for dealing with them.

management,Social media

I’m sorry for the odd and user-unfriendly behaviour of this blog recently. I am aware of it and I will try and sort it out soon.

I upgraded the WordPress installation recently and it seems that a number of the plugins are no longer compatible and are causing havoc with my customised templates. I’ll try and get on top of it soon, but you may need to bear with me for a while.

Ramblings

The UK government wants public sector reform, and a big part of its plan involves transparency. However, some datasets on data.gov.uk are too shoddy to be useful. I suspect if people were managed and treated better they might take more interest in the quality of their work.

(I’ve been blogging about open data on my Open Local Data Blog, but I’m feeling a bit of a fraud so this time I’m writing about it here, where I can do what I like.)

Anyway, I just stumbled across yet another data.gov.uk dataset that has no contextual information:

Spend over £25,000 in the Trust

As you can see, there’s nothing to say where the data’s from or what it relates to. Thankfully the ‘Full description’ link takes us to the ‘Publication of expenditure’ page on the South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust website, so we can probably assume the data belongs to them; that’s just accidental context though: the data could well have been made available from a different website entirely.

Although the dataset itself holds some accidental clues (for example, in the April 2010 dataset words like ‘pharmacy’ and ‘Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames’ appear in some of the cells), there is still nothing that deliberately and explicitly conveys its heritage; I’m still only presuming that it came from South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust.

If people can’t tell what a set data is then there’s no reason for them to use it. Whether or not you’re a proponent of open data, it’s hard to argue that there’s any point publishing something useless.

So why publish?

I can only presume that the people publishing this don’t understand or care about it; that they were simply doing the minimal that they were expected to, because they had been given no reasonable explanation, incentive or power to understand why they were doing it or why they should want to do it.

That can’t be a good way to manage a ‘reformed’ public service.

Open data

I’ve just read on the cover of Metro that the details of Prince William’s wedding ceremony were released ‘exclusively on social networking site Twitter’. Even Clarence House is bypassing traditional news outlets; so are we finally seeing the demise of ‘traditional’ media? No, probably not.

The thing is I didn’t discover this news on Twitter. For a start I don’t follow Clarence House, because frankly I’m not that interested in them (and even if I did follow everyone I found interesting I wouldn’t have time left to breathe).

But I am interested in seeing a variety of news stories; if I read only the news I gather myself then I will only ever see what I want to, and never discover anything particularly new or challenging. Curated news is still king for me, be that online or in print (and I’ve yet to find an online newspaper lying discarded in a train carriage).

Also I need to feel confident that I’ll find at least something of interest, and I want it to be written well. That takes skill in both writing and editing, and at the moment it remains the professional media that instills in me the most confidence in those areas.

Anyway, you’ve probably read far too much hot air on this subject; and so I say goodnight.

Ramblings