I still have a bit of a problem with it, but yesterday it did become clearer to me just how much can be gained by people investigating, reporting on and engaging with the things that happen in and affect their immediate locality.

I was at Talk About Local’s second un-conference, this time held in Leeds. The last one – in Stoke-on-Trent – was full of enthusiastic people wanting to do great things; but it left me a little worried that we (the social media evangelists) were leading them up a garden path, to be disillusioned when their enthusiasm wasn’t met with an audience and thrown unsuspectingly into a pit of libel lawyers.

However, things have moved on very positively. People are finding their feet, a solid sense of purpose and determination has set in, and the enthusiasm to share knowledge and experience is as strong as ever.

I arrived late: partly because we never intended to be early and partly because we couldn’t find the venue. The man in the car park said: “See that concrete building? It’s behind that”. He should have said: “See that concrete building? That’s it”.

So I joined in halfway through the second session, attaching myself to a group discussing the legal dangers of citizen reporting.

I attended three discussions during the course of the day, for which I made notes:

• legal issues;
• finding stories;
• covering the General Election.

• Possibly related posts

  1. Talk About Local unconference 2010: Legal issues discussion
  2. Bookmarks for 8 January 2009 through 15 January 2009
  3. 31 Days to Building a Better Blog

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.)

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?

• Possibly related posts

  1. The Digital Inclusion Champion hasn’t convinced me that she understands what she’s championing
  2. Building Britain’s Digital Future: ‘a chance to reinvent deliberative democracy for the modern age’
  3. New government website aims to draw in digital expertise from outside the sector

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.

• Possibly related posts

  1. Spreading knowledge of research into digital engagement
  2. Tweets from Digital Britain Report event in Birmingham
  3. Digital users are volunteers as well as consumers

“Radio One provides unique high quality content to a young audience. It engages them in important social action campaigns and provides a first class news service, second to none on any other BBC network. That’s before you begin to look at its broad repertoire of underground and new music. The commercial sector cannot begin to emulate it.”

Visit Radio 1 – More than a music station. Don’t privatise it.

• Possibly related posts

  No related posts.

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.

• Possibly related posts

  1. Would you like more digital engagement knowledge-sharing events?
  2. Tweets from Digital Britain Report event in Birmingham
  3. Digital Economy Bill: my email to Lynne Jones MP

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.

• Possibly related posts

  1. Digital Economy Bill: my email to Lynne Jones MP
  2. Twitter flash mob in Birmingham tomorrow
  3. Digital users are volunteers as well as consumers

Oh, and here’s the disgusting cartoon that accompanies Littlejohn’s inflammatory article about gipsies:

Daily Mail cartoon whipping up hatred of 'gipsies'

• Possibly related posts

  No related posts.

In their own words:

“Birmingham, England, was the centre of the world pen trade for more than a century, employing thousands of people, pioneering craftsmanship, manufacturing processes and employment opportunities especially for women [...] Located in a former pen factory, The Pen Room recalls the history of some of the companies involved in the trade”.

Visit The Pen Room

• Possibly related posts

  1. Twitter flash mob in Birmingham tomorrow
  2. Map of wifi in Birmingham
  3. Birmingham Forum

I’m looking for fifty people in Birmingham who are in the public eye but who seem to wield very little power.

I’m doing this in three steps:

1. You give me some names (using the comments form at the end of this post);
2. I put the names to the vote;
3. We discuss why those people are well-known but powerless, whether they should be either, and what needs changing to rectify the situation.

Please note: The point of this is to scrutinise Birmingham power a bit more, not to get personal or belittle people.

• Possibly related posts

  1. Making sense of Birmingham’s creative community
  2. Vote for Created in Birmingham
  3. Whitby commandeers bus in contempt for public consultation

I took the bag, more out of bewilderment than anything else. Lost inside it were a LighterLife chocolate bar and a couple of leaflets telling me how to lose weight.

I object to this on a number of levels, but two things particularly irked me.

Firstly, what an outrageous waste of resources. I don’t need a plastic carrier bag, especially as its contents would have fitted in my pocket. I don’t care that it’s ‘made from 100% recycled material’: presumably it’s not itself recyclable as it would have screamed that at me, and I suspect the majority of people will simply chuck it in the bin.

The other thing is that I hate people telling me that a tempting bar of confectionery is a healthy alternative to lunch. Maybe the bar in question really is better for me than a ham salad sandwich, but it’s still a chocolate bar. No wonder the nation’s health is in trouble if we’re encouraged to view munching chocolate snacks as equivalent to eating well.

Bah.

• Possibly related posts

  No related posts.