Citizensheep » digitalbritain http://citizensheep.com/blog Michael Grimes lives in Birmingham (UK). This is his blog about anything that he fancies. Sun, 05 Feb 2012 23:40:27 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Would you like more digital engagement knowledge-sharing events? http://citizensheep.com/blog/2010/04/27/would-you-like-more-digital-engagement-knowledge-sharing-events/ http://citizensheep.com/blog/2010/04/27/would-you-like-more-digital-engagement-knowledge-sharing-events/#comments Tue, 27 Apr 2010 12:52:16 +0000 Michael http://citizensheep.com/blog/?p=2351

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    • ]]>     Well, the pilot digital engagement discussions are over. Should we do more?

    I only organised three and still haven’t managed to blog about two of them yet. Still, they were good: Simon Whitehouse talked about ‘Policy options for geographic information from Ordnance Survey‘ and Ordnance Survey OpenData, I looked at the Hansard Society’s recent report ‘Digital citizens and democratic engagement‘ and Stuart Harrison discussed SOCITIM’s ‘Better Connected 2010′ report on council websites.

    So would you like me to organise another set of these? There’s been a suggestion that we look at Digital Britain, although it’s more relevant now to discuss it in the context of the new, controversial Digital Economy Act. We could also look at the digital engagement policies of whoever’s in power after the election.

    If I do do more of these I will want to stick firmly to the theme of digital civic engagement, but I’m happy for them to be more focussed on public policy if that’s where people want them to go.

    Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

    ]]>     http://citizensheep.com/blog/2010/04/27/would-you-like-more-digital-engagement-knowledge-sharing-events/feed/ 2     Digital Economy Bill: my email to Lynne Jones MP http://citizensheep.com/blog/2010/03/18/digital-economy-bill-my-email-to-lynne-jones-mp/ http://citizensheep.com/blog/2010/03/18/digital-economy-bill-my-email-to-lynne-jones-mp/#comments Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:55:53 +0000 Michael http://citizensheep.com/blog/?p=2106

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    • ]]>     I’m concerned about the Digital Economy Bill so I’ve just sent one of those standard lobbying emails to my MP.

    I used the online form at 38 Degrees because it was easy, but I made substantial changes to the message (I would have added more but I was in a hurry, hence the convenience of the form in the first place).

    This is the version I sent. You’re welcome to re-use it for your own MP. (Be sure to include as much contact information as you can. They need to be sure you’re a constituent and may well not reply otherwise.)

    Dear Lynne Jones

    I’m concerned that the Government will rush the Digital Economy Bill into law without a full Parliamentary debate. I am concerned because I believe the bill to be draconian, even dangerous.

    Many people think it will damage schools, businesses and innocent people who rely on the internet, as it will allow the Government to disconnect people it suspects of copyright infringement.

    This seems to run counter to rhetoric from the same government around moving to a digital society in which much of our civic engagement is enacted online. Cut people off from the internet and you cut them out of society.

    Industry experts, internet service providers (like Talk Talk and BT) and internet companies such as Google and Yahoo are all opposing the bill, and I urge you to do the same.

    I should very much like to hear your views on the matter. If you would like to discuss it further, I know a few interested folk in the constituency who would be happy to meet for coffee.

    Yours sincerely,

    Michael Grimes

    If you live in the Selly Oak constituency would you be interested in discussing this with Lynne Jones? Or in collaborating on a fuller lobbying statement?

    ]]>     http://citizensheep.com/blog/2010/03/18/digital-economy-bill-my-email-to-lynne-jones-mp/feed/ 0     Digital users are volunteers as well as consumers http://citizensheep.com/blog/2009/06/26/digital-users-are-volunteers-as-well-as-consumers/ http://citizensheep.com/blog/2009/06/26/digital-users-are-volunteers-as-well-as-consumers/#comments Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:35:02 +0000 Michael http://citizensheep.com/blog/?p=1805

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    • ]]>     In his Digital Britain Final Report, Lord Carter sets out his plan to keep Britain “at the forefront of the digital revolution”. But a revolution needs revolutionaries, who are driven by passion and not just economic incentive. Has this report overlooked the importance of people as volunteers, and the impact on their social contributions of commercial ventures?

    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.

    ]]>     http://citizensheep.com/blog/2009/06/26/digital-users-are-volunteers-as-well-as-consumers/feed/ 10     Tweets from Digital Britain Report event in Birmingham http://citizensheep.com/blog/2009/06/23/tweets-from-digital-britain-report-event-in-birmingham/ http://citizensheep.com/blog/2009/06/23/tweets-from-digital-britain-report-event-in-birmingham/#comments Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:52:26 +0000 Michael http://citizensheep.com/blog/?p=1791

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    • ]]>     Last week I went to hear Lord Carter discuss his Digital Britain Final Report in Birmingham. I took a laptop and tweeted a little.

    As a crude record of what I wrote, what follows is my Twitter stream for that event. All I’ve done is take the html from Twitter Search and pasted it here without its stylesheet. The tweets appear in reverse chronological order.

    ]]>     http://citizensheep.com/blog/2009/06/23/tweets-from-digital-britain-report-event-in-birmingham/feed/ 0