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.

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I won’t re-post it here, as I’m sure the BCS would much rather you read it on their blog than mine. Suffice to say I flag up some useful tools for connecting citizens with the state, but suggest that for those involved to be engaging effectively they need to be doing so ‘with a keenness for rigorous, informed and effective debate’.

Read Using the internet for effective citizenship on the BCS Savvy Citizens website.

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A recent YouGov poll for the Citizenship Foundation interviewed almost 4,000 14-25 year-olds about their attitudes to political participation, politicians and power in the United Kingdom.

• The majority of respondents said they would be likely to vote, with 59 per cent seeing voting as the most useful way of participating in local or national politics.
• 32 per cent said they were knowledgeable about “the way that local and national government works”; of those, 71 per cent said the internet was a source of their news.
• 85 per cent had never joined a campaigning group in their local community (fairly consistent across the age ranges), and 50 per cent thought doing so would make no difference to the issues the tackle (also fairly consistent).
• 51 per cent had never joined a campaigning group on a social networking site, but 42 per cent had; however 65 per cent thought doing so would make no difference.
• 54 per cent said they would be more likely to vote if they could do so online.
• Email was seen as the most effective tool for making a political difference online. This doubles at the top end of the age bracket. Twitter scores very low and only increases fractionally with older respondents; although interestingly there is a significant spike among 16 year-olds (almost treble the score of younger age groups).

Further information

This post was originally published on the Citizenship Foundation Webmaster blog. The research was commissioned to mark the Citizenship Foundation’s 20th year.

• Press releases
• Download the survey results summary (pdf)
• Download the full survey results (pdf)

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I had been incensed by a cashpoint in Birmingham’s International Convention Centre. It charged £2.50, which at the time was almost a pound more than other charging cash machines. Yet I knew full well that there was a free cash machine just a few minutes’ walk away. I felt the ICC was taking brazen advantage of people’s ignorance and I wanted somehow to leave a note there giving directions to the free machine; but more than that I wanted a systematic way for anyone to do the same.

There were problems with this:

• how to find quickly the information you want to share;
• how to generate that information if it doesn’t already exist (eg, nearest free cashpoint on a map);
• how to impart that information quickly and accessibly;
• how to leave that information to hand without:
  • causing criminal damage;
  • requiring extra tools (eg Post-It Notes);
  • risking it being removed straight away.

We came up with a solution involving tagged Audioboos & an abstract symbol left nearby, but this had drawbacks:

• as it uses Audioboo an iPhone is required;
• it relies on the chosen tag being unique;
• it relies on digital tools & prior understanding of the system (eg the user must have gps & have enabled browser to broadcast their location);
• (in theory) it detects when someone requests tips for a given location, but doesn’t map the required information;
• it doesn’t solve the problems of finding the information in the first place.

But now we have foursquare. And foursquare works on more mobile devices than just the iPhone.

With foursquare we can add information about a place from the comfort of our living room (I just added a tip about the Brindleyplace cashpoint to the ICC entry) and people can see that in context. For example, if someone is in the ICC their mobile device will tell them there are tips for their location and they can see mine alerting them to the existence of a free cashpoint. Brilliant.

I get the impression that this wasn’t quite the intention of foursquare’s ‘tips’ feature, but I can see that if enough people use it businesses will have to sit up and take notice: they may have to start trying harder to fleece people than simply relying on ignorance.

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(This is a very under-developed thought; I’m only putting it here because it’s too long for Twitter.)

I never buy the Financial Times, but I used to read the website before they started charging for content. So at that point I lost out on that news perspective. When other traditional media outlets start charging for online content I don’t expect I will want to pay for those either.

But Rupert Murdoch isn’t stupid, and I rather suspect that his paid-for news model has legs. Although there are plenty of other places to get content for free, they don’t have the same influence with the public and with policy makers; and, more importantly, they don’t command the same level of recognition and trust.

So does that mean that people who currently see themselves as connected, and to some degree influential, will either find themselves forced to pay for news content or face losing that connection?

Has the free news model given people a place in society that they are in danger of losing?

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Whilst I appreciate that the report is framed as “an active industrial policy” (in the introduction by Lord Mandelson and Ben Bradshaw MP), I do think it has missed the importance of the voluntary aspect of digital engagement.

Creating for love not money

Lord Carter’s report does acknowledge that people are using and sharing stuff differently now, and appears to acknowledge the blurring boundaries between creators and consumers of content and services. But, at the same time, it seems unable to comprehend the ‘marketplace’ as anything fuzzier than ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’. The report itself seeks new models for payment and rights, and the strategy document of the Technology Strategy Board (the body charged with implementing the government’s strategy) considers the challenge of “how to identify opportunities for content producers to generate revenue from consumption of their content”.

But, as Jon Bounds pointed out in a discussion group last week, a great many people are creating content, systems and services without requiring any sort of payment. They may do it because they enjoy it, or they see a need for it, or simply because they can.

For example (and I use ones from Birmingham simply because I know of them), Big City Talk is a translation of Birmingham’s development plan into plain English, by a group of friends who thought it needed doing; Matthew Somerville pushed the web accessibility agenda by autonomously producing an accessible version of the National Rail Enquiries website; Nicky Getgood put Digbeth on the social media map with Digbeth is Good because she just liked writing about it.

As a result, people (generally understood by the Report as ‘consumers’) often become as useful to the commercial ‘producers’ as the producers are to them: except they do it for no financial reward. They are benefiting the economy and society, often in spite of the market.

Physical infrastructure needs support, but so does social infrastructure

This is all possible because people can now share easily, widely and instantaneously. Social interactions can be much faster, more productive, more democratic, less financially constrained and less reliant on the market than before.

The tools that enable these interactions become (and indeed are known as) our ‘social networks’.

Twitter, for example, is to the digital infrastructure as train companies are to railway tracks. Although the former relies on the latter, it is the former that makes or breaks the social advantage offered by the latter. Commercial decisions by train companies can have profound effects on society: for example, if they close a rural line because it isn’t financially viable, the community it served is suddenly cut off from the rail network. The companies are providing a service that uses a physical infrastructure, but the service itself is surely part of our social infrastructure. In the same way, Twitter is as important a part of the social infrastructure as the servers that it relies on are part of the physical.

Team DB (as the Digital Britain team were known) has put a lot of energy into thinking about infrastructure, but – as far as I can tell – this is understood simply in terms of pipes and access: what about the systems that provide our new social infrastructures?

When Twitter goes down it can have a profound effect. For example, when the Iranian authorities tried to black out media coverage of its recent election, Twitter was used by the public as a key tool for communicating news to the rest of the world. However, Twitter had planned an hour of downtime right at the point when Iran needed it most, and so took the commercially dangerous decision to postpone it until the next day. A laudable move, but the downtime still happened while the situation in Iran was unstable.

In the Iran example the downtime was due to planned maintenance, but Twitter buckles under the strain quite frequently: it’s not as reliable as we expect it to be. For example, I now rely on Twitter for managing my social life – in much the same way as many people now rely on mobile companies – so when the service fails I am suddenly cut off from my supportive community.

Certainly the digital infrastructure is crucial, and Lord Carter is right to investigate ways of encouraging innovation and investment in order to ensure it reaches everyone. But government also needs to appreciate the importance of supporting the new social infrastructures (such as Twitter) that are enabled by the digital ones, and to ensure that they’re not undermined by commercial imperatives: as we saw to a degree in the example of Twitter and the Iran election.

People are volunteers, not simply consumers

Yes we need to be commercially competitive if we are to survive and thrive in a digital world; but why? For the sake of it? Or, ultimately, for the sake of people? Surely the economy needs to be healthy in order to benefit people, not the other way round?

People are not just producers or consumers, but individuals who operate on far more complex social levels, driven by love, need, interest, recognition (the list goes on): they are, in the broadest sense, volunteers. As such (and as mentioned earlier) they use the new tools not just to consume, but to create, share, and affect change.

For us all to do so effectively, for us to get the most out of the new tools and infrastructures, requires high levels of digital literacy. Simply knowing how to use the tools is not enough; we need a profound understanding of how to maximise the benefit of those tools and how to adapt them for new circumstances.

The role of the formal education sector in developing skills and aptitudes is acknowledged in Lord Carter’s report, but what about the voluntary* sector? That is, the sector which is – by virtue of being relatively out of reach of government control – often best placed to understand people as people and volunteers, rather than as workers and consumers.

Many charities and community groups are already supporting people in using and understanding digital technologies: how they can be harnessed for personal development, personal wellbeing, civic engagement and social change; all the stuff that people do voluntarily, without expecting any sort of payment.

Add to those voluntary bodies all the loose groupings of individuals who give their time simply because they care (for example Birmingham’s Social Media Surgeries, the recent LocalGovCamp, Rhubarb Radio, numerous bloggers such as Nicky Getgood and Charlie Pinder), and it becomes apparent that a whole swathe of useful talent has been overlooked by Lord Carter’s report.

That talent doesn’t just use tools that are made available by commercial outfits (such as Twitter), it relies on them; more than that: although Twitter (for example) is a commercial venture, it is the users who are shaping its social significance.

For Digital Britain to be a success, there needs – I feel – to be an acknowledgement of the hold that commercial bodies have over our social infrastructures, and a mechanism for managing and regulating that.

In case I’m talking rubbish…

I’m neither an academic nor a researcher, so these thoughts are based alone on my experience and limited reading. Therefore read everything here with critical objectivity (which, to be honest, you should do with everything you read). I had intended to blog this elsewhere, but I’m posting it here first in order to test its credibility.

* In this instance the word ‘voluntary’ is used specifically as part of the label ‘voluntary sector’, which is an umbrella term for charities, community groups and other not-for-profit organisations.

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For my test page I wanted: paragraphs with transparent coloured backgrounds layered over images; each image to be different; the boxes to have rounded corners; the position of the paragraphs to alternate; the last paragraph to have no background image; the text of the heading at the top of the page to have a glow effect.

But I also wanted the html to be as clean and raw as possible, leaving the styling completely up to the css. I wanted to do without divs, classes and id tags, to see if I could get it to work without adding hooks into the markup. The html is simply an unordered list with a paragraph tag in each list item (I tried reproducing it here, but even using the ‘code’ feature WordPress tries to render it: so I gave up).

My test page worked perfectly in Safari, gracefully in Firefox and Opera, and at the bare minimum in Internet Explorer 7.

Transparent backgrounds

For this I used the alpha transparency of RGBa; not opacity because, as I discovered before, that would apply to the text as well as the background. RGBa is supported in the latest versions of Safari and Firefox (and in Opera 10, which is currently in beta). I had to include a hack to tell IE7 to add a background colour, otherwise the text was unreadable.

Different images

I wanted to keep these out of the html and include them as background images in the css. Of course I could have added a class to each list item, but that would have cluttered the html. I chose to use the ‘+‘ selector to define the image for each subsequent list item. This works in each of Safari, Opera and Firefox. It doesn’t work in IE7, so the same image appears in each list item.

Rounded corners

I used the proprietary -moz-border-radius and -webkit-border-radius styles (for Firefox and Safari respectively), because it’s a nice enhancement but doesn’t matter if they’re not there.

Alternate positions

I wanted the paragraphs of text to alternate between appearing on the left of the image and on the right. For this I used nth-child to style every other paragraph. This works in Safari and Opera.

Styling the last paragraph

I simply used last-child to style the last list item differently. This worked in Safari, Opera and Firefox; not in IE7.

Text shadow

I used text-shadow for this, setting the x and y positions to zero (ie directly behind the text) so that it appears to glow around the edges. Text shadow is supprted in Safari and Opera.

Note

I built this page as an em-based layout, so it’s scalable. However I was lazy with the images, so these are large and pulled directly from my Flickr account. Therefore they don’t scale; and they’re not optimised to load quickly, so they don’t.

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Law lords yesterday ruled that detainees of British soldiers abroad are bound by the Act, which prohibits torture and degrading treatment.

However, this does not apply to civilians shot dead while ‘merely present in a part of Iraq which was under British control’ (as The Guardian put it).

Doesn’t this make a nonsense of the Act, which sets a bottom line for how our society treats human life? Arguing that the Act has no jurisdiction on foreign soil seems to defeat the object. Surely anyone working on behalf of the UK (soldiers operating in the British army, for example) ought to be bound by the Human Rights Act wherever they are?

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