Snowpocalypse?

I had hoped to be able to blog my experiences at the ‘Social Media for Government’ conference, due to be held in Washington DC this week. Unfortunately the worst bizzard to hit this region in 90 years happened just before the weekend, so while I was able to make it into the city – they made huge efforts to get the main routes open – I can understand why actually it was the local delegates who couldn’t make it in.

Words like snowpocalypse, snowmageddon and snowsaster have been peppering the newsheadlines and twitter streams – and for once I think the news isn’t exaggerating, this region nearly is paralysed. I mentioned that main routes are open – just about, and that is taking an army of snow ploughs, salt lorries, and men with shovels. Even landing at Dulles international, it took 4 hours from touch down to me actually being able to leave the airport – due to frozen airbridges, sliding airplanes, huge queues to find out any information, let alone find transport to the city.  Many roads are still untouched, so people living outside the centre are stuck at home. Government offices remain closed for a second day – although I think this is partly in anticipation of new snow which is forecast for this afternoon. Apparently over 200,000 people are without power – so at least I am lucky in being in a warm hotel, able to walk to local meetings and share snow stories!

Interesting that the very subject of the conference should be something that comes into its own in this sort of situation. The twitter stream was alive last night with locals trying to find out what might happen today. Apparently the main website used for communicating updates had crashed, so many were suggesting those in control should use a range of channels to get the news out to people….. Of course that is little use of you rely on a computer, which has run out of charge, but mobile batteries  tend to have a fairly good life these days.

On a lighter note, social media can also be used to plan fun things – it even made the BBC news that people used twitter to plan a snowball fight about 4 blocks from where I am staying (before I arrived unfortunately!) They thought about 100 people might turn up, but several thousand did – who says no one uses twitter?

I’m here for the week, so am hoping to be able to catch up with people once offices re-open. I hope soon to be able to share some social media experiences and ideas from Washington.

Meanwhile, out again to enjoy the snow

Reflecting pool - transformed to ice rink

 

Photography project

As something to distract me from work I decided to do a photo a day project this year.  I started mine, storing them in a folder in my normal flickr account – then heard via twitter about a flickr group. Joining that, and seeing what other participants choose to publish each day perfectly illustrates to me the joy of flickr. You see things you would never otherwise look for, and get ideas for different approaches and styles.

Early days at the moment – although I’m pleased to have made it to the end of the first month. Besides recording the moment (my favourite  sort of photography), I also have plans for themed weeks. However, to date, the only days I have made plans, I have actually found good images purely by chance.

One of the best pieces of advice I read on a blog (definitely not an original idea, this photo a day thing) : always have your camera with you.

Other photography-related items which have caught my eye around the web recently:

• Britain Loves Wikipedia – an interesting crowd-sourcing project which asks members of the public to visit participating museums and photograph the collections. Photos will then be made available under a free licence on Wikimedia commons
• British Wildlife Photography awards – being promoted by the National Trust. Which reminds me, still have time to go and see the Veolia wildlife photographer of the year exhibition at the Natural History Museum
• Not just photographs, but another interesting crowd sourcing project is Wildlife near you
• Also found another site specifically designed for people doing photo-a-day projects: Blipfoto
• Finally, via flickr, a useful site with various tools to help you do fun things with your photos – I like the look of mosaic maker

 

Haiti – online communities respond

Awful scenes from Haiti, its hard to imagine what people are going through, but this BBC article: Social networks and the web offer a lifeline in Haiti describes well how social media tools can really help co-ordinate response, and in some cases, provide up to the minute information in a way that simply hasn’t been possible in the past. Ushahidi, which provided an amazing service during the riots in Kenya, have sprung into action again.

The DEC – Disasters Emergency Committee has a web page and can provide banners for others to place on their sites – with direct links which make it easy to donate. They are also encouraging people to donate via SMS – with instructions that are simple enough to convey in a 140 character tweet: Text “GIVE” to 70077 to donate £5 to @decappeal for #Haiti. £5 goes to DEC. You pay £5+std. network SMS rate.

My colleagues at DFID have also been using all the social media channels where we have accounts to make information available : main page on the earthquake. I’ll blog more on the details when we have time to review all the things we have done and analyse how our information was received. Early insights though echo the BBC report – social media tools provide a really powerful way to get information out quickly, to people who are interested to hear it.

More examples of how online communities are reacting:

• Flickr – ideas to raise money described on their blog
• At least 6 groups on Facebook – some with many hundreds of thousands of members
• A search engine: Every click, which I have been following with interest, have a prominent image on their landing page, and a link to their blog, where they list charities who are providing aid

And the last message to leave you with, which I wish could be shared much more widely, as Colum writes with first hand knowledge: Killing relief with kindness – a blog post from one of the DFID bloggers.

Update: I’m not the only one thinking along these lines this evening: blog post from Ari Herzog – Haiti and social media: how they merge goes into more detail – and points out that some of the facebook groups are fake.

 

New year blog, or, why I never tire of this social media stuff

I’m finding it slow going getting back into things post Christmas, but I just read an excellent short post by Euan Semple: Why blogging will (still) change the world and it reminded me why I believe this is an interesting medium to use to communicate.

In fact over the holidays, when I really was trying to take a break from all things web, I still found myself checking feeds, dropping in on twitter etc. The good thing was feeling less guilty for getting sidetracked by items that were completely nothing to do with work – after all, I think some of the best ideas come from seeing what is happening in other sectors, and its great when you get that eureka moment and find something you would never have thought about, but which is a perfect solution.

A selection follows of the sort of things I found interesting over the last week or so, social media and development related:

• Government 2.o and open government – a fascinating and slightly hypnotic visualisation of tweets on this subject
• I started a blog and no one cared – another excellent post from Steve Radick,  this one about how social media can only work when people see the value to themselves and participate
• Eight books on development for the interested generalist – exactly what the title says!
• Social media, complexity science, and an age old information challenge for aid agencies
• Is social media a friend or foe of government – article which illustrates what can happen when you dive in
• Why twitter will endure – article in New York Times

And finally, an amazing set of photographs from a  photojournalist who spent 6 weeks living in the slums of Nairobi, then Jakarta, Caracas and Mumbai: Planet Slum

 

Tis the season to …. make lists

Added to the usual reviews of the year, I’ve even seen one review of the decade, plus forecasts for next year. A pick of lists that have caught my attention follow, first the reviews:

• Guardian list of 100 best websites – interesting that Twitter gets its own sub category now
• The BBC’s portrait of the decade
• CultureLab’s best science books of 2009
• Blog post from Dave Chaffey: Most popular software tools and statistics to help online marketers in 2009 and into 2010
• ReadWriteWeb’s Best products of 2009
• Hitwise review of 2009
• New York Times buzzwords of 2009
• Top web design bookmarks of 2009

And some predictions:

• Blog post – 10 ways social media will change in 2010
• Social media today’s 5 predictions for 2010 plus a post predicting 2010 as the year of social media ROI
• The Government 2.0 Forecast For 2010: 7 Predictions
• Paul Greenberg made his predictions for CRM in 2010 in 2 parts: Part 1 and Part 2

I’m sure there will be many more – please let me know if you find any interesting ones.

Updated 22 December

 

Flavours of the month: data, transparency, and more visualisation

There has been a common theme to much of what I’ve read in catching up since my holiday: DATA.  Lots of articles on visualisation, and what else you can do with it once its available. Plus, more news for the people who want to do exciting things with public sector information, announcements from various governments about their plans.

The White House held a live chat, which they followed up with a blog post answering questions on their Open Government Directive.

Gordon Brown made a speech to introduce the Smarter Government proposals. The whole paper can be found online – and the section relating to transparency is 1.3

Finally, a colleague in Ausaid alerted me to recent announcements from the Australian government – lots going on their,

And, did I mention lots of articles? A selection follow:

• Blog post from the IKM Emergent team: Linked Open Data Web (or, Not the Semantic Web
• Something from back in April, but cropped up again: the beauty of animated statistics
• BBC feature: Information goes out to play
• And finally – as an example of visualisation, a site that is curiously hypnotic, even if I can’t really think of its use: Visible Tweets

 

Realtime search update

Just found Socialmention – billed as “realtime social media search and analysis”.  I’m intrigued to find out more about their analysis – which provides 4 figures, covering strength, sentiment, reach and passion.

It lists top keywords, users and hashtags – which for the couple of examples I tried were spot on accurate.

You can set up alerts – and they offer a widget so you can display the buzz on your site or blog.

Update to my earlier post about realtime search.

 

Found interesting around the web recently

Lots of bits and pieces this post, the only common theme is they made me intrigued and read further:

• Good to see the changes made to the Foreign Office website – and read about the thinking behind the changes
• Chain reaction – first found out about this via twitter – sounds like an inspiring day
• The end of poverty ? – blog post introducing the feature length documentary, narrated by Martin Sheen.
• Is twitter sustainable enough to influence politics? – article in the Guardian online
• World Bank data now in google search – mroe exciting uses that can be made of data
• An excellent addition to my earlier post on visualisation – and of course an example of what can be done when you free up data – a blog post from the Open Knowledge Foundation, led to the website: Where does my money go? This is just billed as the prototype, can’t wait to see how they develop it
• And last, can’t remember who brought these to my attention (via twitter) – but thankyou – these images of Mars are stunning!

 

Government information in the Google age

If there was a tag cloud made of the conference presentations today, I’m sure it would have the words “change” and “challenge” written extremely large.  That said, congratulations and thanks to the organisers: cilip’s GLIG (Government Library and Information Group), the British Library and SCOOP (Standing Committee on Official Publications) for putting together an interesting if a little packed programme.

I didn’t have much time to reflect during the event, but am recording notes here with some impressions and things to follow up.

Keynote speaker: Natalie Ceeney, The National Archives

After a quick overview of how much things have changed – even in the 4-5 years since she has been at TNA, Natalie described the broader picture of progress that is being made in the public sector. She was the first of several speakers to mention the prevalent view that “if its not found on Google it doesn’t exist” – following with the comment that only 10% of TNA material has been digitised. One interesting initiative she mentioned is the “Your Archives” project – a wiki where people can add their knowledge to that of the experts, and while it is kept clearly delineated from the main TNA site, an overall search does spider both sites, so overall search results are much richer.
One question from the audience was around if/how these new challenges were leading to ways of people from a range of disciplines working more coherently together across government. Her answer included reference to the GKIM community – which although encouraging as she thinks it is useful, is a shame, as from being open to people involved in knowledge and information work across the public sector, it is about to be moved behind a firewall (in their defence, I don’t think it is  something TNA chose) which will have the effect of stopping the membership of many people who currently find value in it.

Web delivery: 3 sessions

Government website usability – Alistair Allan, University of Sheffield
The only session of the event I didn’t enjoy. The speaker had a ‘cannonade’ style of quick fire delivery, and I found it tricky to actually identify the points he was making. He certainly had found a lot of examples of poorly designed sites, but to me, was less clear on what success should look like. Also, the tool he used to present (which he described as more effective as it allowed him to link to lots of sites) seemed to present problems as he tried to move between his text and the sites (all other presenters stuck with powerpoint, and had no problem linking to live sites). Shame, as I think there was some good stuff there – perhaps I’ll enjoy it more when the slides are published and I can go through his points more slowly.

Web continuity – Amanda Spencer, TNA

A project I was involved in from the early stages – good to hear from Amanda that lots of progress has been made. This project started when it became clear that material published online was becoming increasingly hard to find – specifically, over 50% of Hansard links were broken. There are 2 strands: archiving and redirection. The archiving public sector websites element is now in place, with a partnership between TNA and the European Archives seeing regular snapshots of government sites being captured, and the more complicated redirection component – which means that if material is no longer present on a live site, users are directed to the web archive, is live on around 7 sites (including DFID). Hot off the press news from Amanda, traffic to the archived material has grown hugely this year – up from 800,000 in Jan this year to over 8 million views in October.

Government information – which search engine? – Jane Secker, LSE

Interesting insights from someone who works not just with undergraduates, but also PhD students: general digital literacy seems very low, with few going beyond the basic google search when looking for information.

Information re-use: 2 sessions

Re-use of public sector information – opportunity or threat? – Jim Wretham, TNA

Clear definitions and good examples of what re-use means.  Noted I must remind myself  how the ‘click-use’ licence works.

The role of the Government publisher – Alan Pawsey, TNA

Overview of how HMSO has evolved, and interesting updates as to their plans for the merger of the Statute Law Database and the OPSI (office of Public Sector Information) set of core legislation.

Wider world of information: 2 sessions

Archiving Scottish Government on the web – Jan Usher and Paul Cunnea, National Library of Scotland

The speakers are pleased that the NLS now has an agreement to collect, preserve and make accessible publications of the Scottish government, but I’m not sure that for non UK audiences it would be clear why you find some UK material via The National Archives, and some via a National Library. Perhaps there are plans to cross reference?

EU information policy in the digital age – Ian Thompson, European Documentation Centre, Cardiff University

Very interesting and reference-packed presentation. The speaker started by saying he wasn’t sure originally how much there would be of relevance in his presentation, but he was encouraged as virtually every earlier speaker had made similar points to his own. I made notes to take a closer look at the European Transparency Initiative – which has many echoes to IATI – the International Aid Transparency Initiative, in its aim to track where funds are spent; also the PressEurop site, which translates news stories from around Europe into the other languages.

New developments in official publishing: 2 sessions

Official statistics on the web – Paul Auckbarally and Callum Foster, Office for National Statistics

Overview of the current UK national statistics publication hub and a preview of plans for the new ONS website – which as Callum explained, will be as much of a challenge to change the culture of the organisation in the way material has to be produced, as it will be to produce the technical platform. Sounds as though ONS have fully bought into the ‘Making Public Data Public initiative – all their stats will be available as charts, but also as data.

Official publications in the internet age – Rachel Craven, TSO

3 case studies from TSO, including an exercise to produce a bill and its explanatory notes in XML, so that each could be interwoven – probably all will be done this way in the future. Also working on an API to present all Command and House papers in XML, so that content can be available for re-use.

And all that in one day!

 

Realtime search

Warning – realtime search can be addictive! An article in Information World Review added a couple of new tools to my list – and reminded me to revisit a couple of others:

• Collecta I’ve looked at before – includes tweets and blog posts. Interesting 3 column layout which gives results in the middle, with the first couple of lines of the most recent, or selected item in full on the right. I think I surprised one blogger who I discovered via this tool on Blog Action Day – posting a comment I guess seconds after she had published
• Icerocket - whose Big Buzz search is interesting – displaying search results for blogs, videos, news and images all on one page.  The article claims Big Buzz includes twitter – but it didn’t when I looked – you had to click another tab
• OneRiot is the star of the article, as far as I can tell because of the huge amounts of investment capital it has attracted, but I was puzzled by the short results lists it returned – more testing needed
• Scoopler – good range of results, and I liked the ‘peek’ option, which brought up the item in a new window
• Itpints is listed as ‘a small player’ and one article I saw claims it includes twitter, friendfeed, technorati and youtube, but most of  the searches I did were overwhelmingly filled with twitter results – plus a few results with mysterious identifying icons – only one of which I recognised – as flickr
• I’ve mentioned Surchur before, and still find their real time dashboard intriguing
• Not forgetting the accurately named Addictomatic which I still love for the clever way it displays results from 18 different sources,  including videos, blogs, newsfeeds and others

Finally, for people who really like to explore different search engines, Phil Bradley has put together a huge list.