Creating Community Conversations - Gallomanor

TalkFest: more ambition needed

 I can't recall who was speaking when the #GingerNinja struck last night, but I felt sorry as I joined half the room in coughing and laughing at the same time.

#Talkfest was an evening for science bloggers to get together and talk about their blogging.  It was fun, funny and interesting. We had discussions on the Twitterwall about whether scientists had a duty to engage with the public. Discussions in the room about whether bloggers (in particular science bloggers) should be paid to blog - yeah, why not, worrying trend is those paying to blog without due disclosure. Credit to @alicebell, @beck_smith and the Biochemistry Society for putting it together and hosting it. (And kudos to the cake maker.  I'm an expert on cakes and I have to say the ones last night were very good.)

However I came away slightly disappointed, and that feeling hasn't gone away this morning. I felt that despite the eloquence of the community, their wit, their intellect, they were not being very ambitious with what could be achieved with the medium. There was a focus of being heard: by more people, more clearly and in different ways that couldn't be achieved on paper.  Perhaps that was the design of the event or the limitations of the community.

My background is with govt and civil society bloggers. We've seen some incredibly innovative uses of the internet to improve our democracy, to change the way it has been reported on, to hold our politicians and governments to account.

So where in the science world are the equivalents of Guido Fawkes questioning the clsoed shop academic hierarchies.  Where are new uses of twitter? The science equivalents of #uksnow or EyeSpyMP. Who is shining Sunlight on how funding operates or making the data available in an easy to use way? I'm sure there are some examples, but I wasn't hearing them last night. Let's not just think about the web and blogs as a new medium with which to communicate about science, let's think about it as a medium to communicate in radically new ways about science.  Let's use it to make things better.  Unless of course they are already perfect.

BBM - Blackberry Messenger

I finally got along to BathCamp last night. I must admit I was expecting a fairly low key event, but as row after row of seats were filled, and as the distance people had travelled increased from Bradford on Avon to Exeter and Eastleigh, I realised that Mike Ellis and co. have created something good.

We had a couple of talks from mobile developers MobilePie and Kieran Gutteridge before Mark Watt-Jones from Orange which I think is now "Everything, Everywhere" (soon to be E2, which will then merge with O2 to become Vowel Squared) took the stage. Mark is Head of Mobile Product Marketing at that company and gave some great insights into the way smartphones and mobiles are going. 

I was most interested to hear him tell how popular that bastion of enterprise mobility the Blackberry had become with young people and how it was due in large part to BBM or Blackberry Messaging.  The key features it seems of BBM are it's freeness (cf text messenging) and that you can distribute your PIN to provide access to your chats creating instant online cliques. The idea that you can only tap into these great conversations only if you have the secret password (PIN) must be extremely frustrating and gratifying to some young people depending of course if you happen to know the PIN or not.

I love the way that a feature designed to allow hyperbusy important corporate executives to control who has access to them, has been adopted by teens to extend real-life cliques to virtual world.  Plus ca change etc...

[pic credit: Blackberry - no that isn't from Bathcamp. I'm afraid Bathcamp had far more facial hair than your average Blackberry user, judging by their website]

Alliance of Youth Movements - London Summit 2010

There was quite a gathering of new media luminaries in London in early March.  Joe Rospars, Mike Slaby, Sam Graham-Felsen, Jared Cohen, Scott Heiferman from Meet-up, & Ramya Raghaven from YouTube amongst many others.

The Alliance of Youth Movements had invited them to talk about how young people are and can use the internet to diminish violence.  I was invited through the Empowering Voices Online project we are running and because it was a chance to catch up with Sam, who I met as part of the G20Voice project last year.

Some of the highlights for me were:

• Joe Rospars telling the story of his involvement in the Obama'08 and it sounding like an episode from Season Two of the West Wing when Josh convinces Sam to join the Bartlett campaign.  Very reassuring.
• Mike Evans talking about the work he does in some of the hotspots around the world such as Belfast getting young people from opposite sides of a divided community to play basketball together.  He did a presentation with a YouTube video of him making 99 / 100 free shots at the basketball hoop.  He's currently working in the 1,600 murders per year city of Ciudad Juarez.  I hope he is safe.
• Chris Sarette and Ramya Raghaven spoke about using YouTube for promoting the work done by not-for-profits.  Chris from Invisible Children showed a couple of videos including this gem from Davis .  Ramya spoke about the work she does with YouTube and her McNugget of information that YouTube's search facility is the second most used search bar on the internet was surprising.

It was great afterwards to be invited to the US Deputy Ambassador's residence and have a change to catch up with Sam GF.  I've always felt that the BSD guys must be getting a little tired of being known as the Obama New Media team.  Sure it's been the best calling card you could want as a business, but it must take it's toll being lorded about so much.  Sam's now moved on from BSD to join the Alliance of Youth Movements as their Director of Strategy and Communications.  He's got quite a job on his hands transforming the movement from a series of conferences into a year round organisation providing advice and peer support.  I wish him luck.

LocalGovCamp London

Thursday February 25th 2010 in London.

Themes will be relevant to anyone working with local government in the social media/digital engagement space. We are aiming to create spaces for discussion and engagement, the sharing of experiences and creation of new ideas. Conversations are encouraged. We will have lots of parallel sessions and break-out spaces. In the tradition of localgovcamps, you set the agenda in the beginning of the morning and afternoon sessions.

Anke Holst seems to be leading the organisation on this.  I highly recommend you book a space now - use this EventBrite page.  BarCamp offer so much more conversation, discussion and exploration of ideas than traditional conferences.

BarcampUKGovweb09

One Saturday in January I jumped on an early morning train from Bath to London to go to a BarCamp.  My expectations weren't enormously high.  I'd heard they were very geeky, get your laptop out and code type affairs and that, quite frankly, is not me.  And it wasn't BarCampUKGovWeb08 either.  And I doubt it will be the case for the 09 event which again is happening in January.

BarCamp was in fact just what I, and many others, want from conferences: expert speakers who know what they are talking about and not selling you something; an interesting and full agenda (made up on the day); and lots and lots of networking with folk you want to meet.

My one complaint from this year's event is that not enough non-techie government types were there.  There were enormous numbers of ideas and some very committed comms and IT related civil servants but not enough policy and service types who inevitably need to buy into Gov2.0 to make it happen.  So I added an action point to the To Do on the BarCamp wiki that we must spread the word to that type of person.

So if you're working in Local Government and have wondered what the hype about Gov2.0 is, but not wanted to get pitches from expensive technology firms; if you understand the realities of trying to get councillors to adapt and engage with communities; if you recognise the value of the information that local government holds but wonder how to use it best; then BarCampUKGovweb09 is where you should be on Saturday 31st January 2009.  Sign up on the Wiki or email me and I'll do that for you.

Others blogging about it include:

Tom Watson, Jeremy Gould, Dave Briggs, Simon Dickson, & Neil Williams

Oxford eDemocracy meet up

Oxford has a gorgeous old town hall complete with an ancient ceremonial mace.  Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture and so you'll have to make do with this one of Steven Clift and Mary Reid who it has to be said were more interesting to talk to than the mace.

I was in Oxford to meet up with Steven and a few people who had been involved in Issues Forums.  We evaluated Issues Forums for ICELE a couple of years ago and found them to an effective technological solution for community forums.  The real benefit of using Issue Forums however is the network of people that all use them for similar reasons and the vast bank of knowledge that has been gathered over the years.

It was great to meet Stephanie Jenkins, who is Forum Manager for the Headington group, Shey Cobley from Oxford City Council and Steven Pearse from Bedminster Neighbourhood Partnership who seem to be doing good things in that part of Bristol.

Discussion focussed around how the technology behind eDemocracy Issues Forums have improved and going to improve and how eDemocracy can build upon the start it has already made in the UK.

From Minnesota to Oxford

Steven Clift, Ashoka Fellow, eDemocracy.org, Local Issues Forum and general eDemocracy Font of Knowledge is passing through the UK on his way back from a conference in Europe.  The meeting is taking place at Oxford Town Hall on Thursday October 2nd.

If you fancy coming to help plot out a direction for Local Issues Forum and eDemocracy in general then email team@edemocracy.org and visit the edemocracy wiki.

eVoice Conference Xtra

A Swedish Councillor, a German Professor, and a Dutch Civil Servant walk into a bar.  No honestly they did, today in Norwich at the eVoice conference.

We've also heard from Cllr Mary Reid, Euan Semple, Stephen Hilton, Cllr Daniel Cox and seen the World Premiere of the CivicSurf film.  Still to come is the launch of the eVoice handbook at 4.45.

And you don't need to miss a minute because we've been recording it all for those who couldn't make it and who want to contribute from a distance.  Visit http://evoice.conferencextra.org or send an email to message@conferencextra.org to tell us what you think.

Citizen Empowerment Symposium - Final Evaluation

The talented folks from Norfolk who ran the X-factor session at the symposium have now posted their evaluation on YouTube.  Well done guys.  You've joined a small group who have actually posted something about their attendance at the symposia.  A group that sadly doesn't include its sponsor the DCLG or ICELE.  The event's own web-site doesn't ask for feedback.

For an event primarily about using the internet the organisers are scarily poor at doing so.  With only a quiet Facebook group it is not surprising that the top Google Search for Empowerment Symposium is this blog rather than the event site.

empowerment symposium - Part III

The reason for me being at the symposium was to take part in the final session on Thursday. Tom Gaskin from NorfolkBlurb forced young people onto the agenda and was asked to organise a session on empowering young people.

A couple of phone calls later and I was going to help Tom put together "Can X-Factor excitement beat bureaucratic boredom?".  Our first groundrules were that young people had to central to the discussion (ie an equal part of the speaking line-up) and that the session had to be participative.  Tom prepared a load of material for discussion as we feared conversation would dry up and the audience wouldn't participate, but in the end the only subject we managed to cover was young people and social networking.  The audience were invited to participate frequently during the session and at anytime by texting their comment or questions to the website that appeared on the large screen on stage.  We also had a simple "thumbs up or down" page voting system.

It worked brilliantly.  The relaxed format meant we got lots out of the young people on stage; the audience told us that it was the first time during the eparticipation symposium that they had been asked to participate; 38 messages were texted to the site - most were serious but towards the end the audience were able to tell us to wind up the session by asking for a drink!

Three interesting things to come out of the session?

• Most people realise social networks are not to blame for the recent suicides in Bridgend despite what the local MP says.  However young people and their parents/carers may lack some online intelligence.  How many people understand Facebook privacy rules?  Who has actually read the rules? Are some people just too naive?
• The MP for Bridgend encouraged young people not to go online, but to seek professional help.  Why aren't the professionals going online to offer their help?  Is it because their employers are banning them from the sites?
• People in our audience felt that a campaign on Facebook is more likely to result in action than an e-petition on the No.10 Downing Street petitions site.  I don't think that is a slight on e-petitions, but is on the trust we have in Government produced e-participation.