GoodGNUs

One of the “watercooler conversations” at Talk About Local (see post below) was the legal action taken by Royal Mail to force ErnestMarples.com to take down its extremely useful site converting postcodes to geographical information.

This service being forced down has had a knock-on effect on all of the voluntary-sector projects that use it, like Job Centre Pro Plus and The Straight Choice (”Live Election Leaflet Monitoring”), removing functionality or disabling them entirely.

Have you paid to use that postcode?

Unless Lord Mandelson’s New Labour get the chamce to sell off Royal Mail before the next election, Royal Mail is a publicly-owned company. It may feel it has a duty to maximise revenue by charging huge sums for access to our postcodes (without which it refuses to deliver our letters), but joined up government thinking would suggest thatgiving free access allows web entrpreneurs to build an infrastructure & eco-system around postcode services that could not only lead to paying customers for more sophisticated premium Royal Mail postal code services, but create more wealth in the economy, and hence more taxes to prop up Royal Mail until it gets better (& less over-compensated) management.

At the very least they could make the data available under a freely-licensed arrangement for not-for-profits. Not ideal, but better than throwing solicitors at good citizens. Indeed, so outrageous is Royal Mail’s behaviour that even a Labour government minister is taking them to task for it, then again Tom Watson is an honourable exception amongst politicians, given his understanding of the digital world.

Oh, and why Ernest Marples? After the postmaster general behind postcodes.

And to see where we could be going with publicly-owned data, look across the Atlantic.

Postscript: There’s a petion up at the No. 10 petition site: “We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Encourage the Royal Mail to offer a free postcode database to non-profit and community websites.” & a Guardian article on the affair. Thanks to Aidan McGuire for pointing out the petition.

Alternatively, route around the problem, and help out at Free The Postcode, the user-genertaed postcode database.

There’s been a lot of coverage of the death of local papers, but does this have to be the end of local reporting? Recently hyperlocal blogs have arisen everywhere from villages to inner-city postcodes to plug the gaps in local coverage.

Sticky notes on the white board describe the session you'd like. Similar sessions are grouped together & given a room & timeslot. Unconference sorted :-)

These aren’t just replacements for local freesheets, but use social media (blogs, & micro-blogs like Twitter) to harness the power of community reporting. Refrigerators dumped on the pavement, dog mess, lack of facilities, secret council decisions - all are aired in public & councils are having to take action. Not all councils are happy about this grassroots-driven transparency, & many are not giving hyperlocal blogs the same access as print journalists.

Against this background comes Talk About Local, an Unconference held last Saturday in Stoke-on-Trent that brought together 88 community bloggers & other hyperlocal activists.

An unconference is built on coffee-break networking

In informal sessions participants shared lessons learned - such as using short interviews & live cameras to get blog posts from those who had much to say but, often thanks to our lamentable education system, were unable to articulate it at the keyboard.
One thread I noted was how online activity drove more meeting & co-operation in the real world, and many successful projects combined these with drop-in centres giving access to computers and training in social media.
I attended not with my community training hat on, but as someone looking at launching a local site this autumn, & went away inspired, and carrying several pages of tips, contacts, & practical suggestions. Best thing about the event? The wonderful diversity of people there - not self-identified social media gurus, but people dedicated to improving their communities by linking up local people and giving them a platform.
Thanks to Will, Nicky, Clare & Mike for organising such a serendipitous event - despite the hiccough with the vegan food, and the train problems, I got so much from the day that I’m still digesting my notes. Watch out for more activity from Talk About Local. If you missed the event but want to get involved, join the mailing list.
Want to see some of these great community blogs? They’re linked from the social bookmarks of the ‘tal09 event (which saves me the invidious task of choosing which to single out). Videos are listed on this YouTube playlist.

This week has been one of those rushed weeks, lots of little things, and very little project work advanced significantly. Nothing to write about, in fact. But last week I attended four events, and had several interesting meetings. I’m never going to get around to reviewing all of them properly so here’s a brief summary:

Monday 16 March 2009

PRActical Design for Social Action: PraDSA’s final event I’ve already mentioned. Please go to the website to read up a little on this project. I introduced the 20:20 concept - 20 slides each put up for 20 seconds. A powerful tool for presenting ideas in bite-sized chunks to audiences of mixed levels of interest in the topic.
It’s a popular format in geek circles - often used at GeekUp meetings, and there were 18 given at O’Reilly’s Ignite-UK North in Leeds a few weeks ago. nevertheless it has yet to gain much traction in academia.
A bonus of the day was, in the company of Andy Dearden, getting to go out for a beer and a meal with Doug Schuler, the author of the inspiring Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution

Tuesday 17 March 2009

Design Patterns for Civic Empowerment, at the London Knowledge Lab
Part of the Planet (Pattern Language for Networking) effort, and linked to the previous day’s PraDSA event. Using storytelling we had a chance to work through a problem, then use patterns from Doug Schuler’s above-mentioned book to apply design patterns for social action. Some pictures here.

At lunchtime I gave an impromptu tutorial on Twitter, other social media, and how to link it up, to Ann from the TUC. Some very interesting people there, including Sabine McNeill of the Forum for Stable Currencies.

Wednesday 18 March 2009

The first of my Small Steps to Sustainability events. 20 people talking about their experience of Open Knowledge / Open Access / Open Source & Free Software. The art gallery location produced an art gallery crowd, which gave great examples of peer-to-peer mentoring, but we must think about how to get a wider community through the door for the other events.

Thursday 19 March 2009

Manchester, and DEP’s Social Enterprise network event at Innospace (and an unfortunate clash with IT innovations in the Community in Shrewsbury - which would have been a great chance to catch up with contacts from the MOST Project’s Shropshire donations). An interesting group of social entrepreneurs, all with an interest in education, working through creative collaboration exercises and having opinions sought for the NWDA’s North West Regional Strategy

Next a quick meeting to discuss practicalities behind efforts to produce Free Software for Credit Unions. A growing field, badly served by current offerings.

Not much time for work, except on rail journeys, meaning the next week was a constant round of catching up. Time to think about out-sourcing something, perhaps?

Earlier today I spoke to Andy Dearden about my contributions to the forthcoming PRADSA (Practical Design for Social Action) event, New Understandings, New Communities, New Practices, on 16 March, at NAVCA in London.

Little GTD

I’m doing a poster (if I can get one out on time), but it was the workshop that needed discussion, as I have two I’m developing that I wanted to try out. Option one is a workshop idea that I’ve had brewing for a while: “Keeping the Activist active: Organisation for hopeless procrastinators, and people who can’t see their desks”. This stems from my re-discovered passion for all things GTD and zero inbox, as well as the de-cluttering ideas that feature so prominently in Tim Ferriss’ works.

The idea is how to declutter your mind, and concentrate on Getting Things Done using various simple techniques. Specific tools are mentioned, but these will be personal preferences for most people, so the emphasis is on techniques and where to go for more information and help with such ways of working.

Keeping active?

The need for such a workshop? I’ve noted that I’m not the only activist who suffers from perennial procrastination, accumulating to-do piles, and information overload. I’ve been working hard on dealing with this over recent months and:

1. Want to share what I’ve learned
2. Want to gain from others’ productivity tips that may be shared in workshops

Meanwhile I note the continuing rise of GTD on mostly word-of-mouth, and take that as some confirmation that it really works for a lot of people.

And what works enables us to segué seemlessly to the other option, based on my forthcoming Social Cafe, Small Steps to Sustainability, at FACT’s Climate for Change exhibition. This uses the 20:20 format - 20 slides each given 15 or 20 seconds of commentary to introduce a topic without boring to distraction on areas of no interest to the audience. Leeds GeekUp often features two or three 20:20s, and recently O’Reilly’s first Ignite to be held in England was held in Leeds with 18 such talks.

Social Café

I sugested to FACT a “Small Steps to Sustainability” exhibition, highlighting 11 areas linking technology and environmentalism, over the 11 weeks of their Climate for Change exhibition, in an “11:20″ format, and highlighting one area in each week to showcase with other activists. They took the idea and ran with it until it became an after-work Social Café with beer at 6pm on what I non-alliteratively refer to as Sustainability Wednesdays. If you’re in Liverpool come along - more on this nearer the time.

Meanwhile, PRADSA: A workshop slot at New Understandings, New Communities, New Practices, suggested an opportunity to rehearse this workshop and, ideal for PRADSA’s aims, to discuss the 20:20 format, and other technology-driven trends in presentations.

Will talk for beer

So, two workshops in progress, one of which will be developed and delivered throughout spring. The question: does anyone want to book one of them for any third sector events? We also have the ever-eager Speak to a Geek panel looking for opportunities to help at such events, with answers to a volley of IT, web & social media enquiries. Call us ;-)

Following a discussion on the GeekUp mailing list, Guy Dickinson took it on himself to get a bunch of geeks together in a panel to help out third sector groups with their problems. MDDA was the venue, last Friday afternoon.
Straight on to social networking, with the announcement of a FaceBook group to take the idea beyond a single event, and expand the conversation. Then conversation on one of the recurring themes of the day. how do you build a community online, a bulletin board for example that will be populated by active citizens, rather than the sound of tumbleweed blowing through?
One comment per hundred reads was given as a good ratio for blogs, and talk centred on existing, organically-arising groups, and how to get them into a charity’s site - begging the question, is the site the right place? Google groups were mentioned as a good “in” - most are comfortable with e-mail.

Personality

One panelist (Tom?) mentioned personality, and the need to engage with your constituency, not simply publish at them. Something to which I returned a number of times over the afternoon. Particularly later, when we went further into social media. Obviously this included twitter [# link], and Paul Webster in the audience, as well as others, were twittering throughout.

At M6-IT we’ve long worked to get improved IT knowledge, and an understanding of IT strategy into the sector. Something re-iterated as many groups present spoke of their negative experiences with poor websites, reluctantly updated by contracted techies who were holding their data and domain nams to ransome. For larger groups I suggested getting a consultant to draw up a spec doc for any IT project, and being clear on the desired outcome. For small groups there are answers, and we should pick up on this through the FB group.

Resources

With a number of organisation geeks on the panel, GTD soon came up, along with Inbox Zero, in answer to concerns about drowning in e-mails, and having no time to consider Twitter. Project management resources were discussed, and the Getting Real PDF from 37 Signals was recommended.
Google Apps was given as the answer to many a question, including Google Analytics for monitoring and analysing visitors to a charity’s website. Google apps can be used to manage a domain, pointing to wherever you move the hosting, providing online spreadsheets, and spam-filtering e-mail.

Technology was pitched at an appropriate level, with Paul Robinson kicking off a round of praising paper-based communication and notes.

Quo vadis?

A lot was packed into two hours, and there is little doubt about the appetite of parts of the third sector to get the best out of Social Media, and the latest IT tools. Indeed the gathering contained a disproportionately high number of Social Media users. Next task, perhaps, is to reach the orgs which wouldn’t self-select to attend a techie event, possibly by piggy-backing on a non-techie 3rd sector event, such as something from VA Manchester or GMCVO?

After the event, Paul Webster came up and mentioned the Social Media Surgeries with which he’d been involved in Birmingham. Another avenue to explore - if you are interested, please sign up to the FaceBook group, and join in.

Special thanks to Guy, not just for getting things of the ground, but for the excellent meal at Red Chilli afterwards, where a Chinese couple at the next table helped me explain veganism to the waiters and managers, as I’d left my Vegan Passport behind.