GoodGNUs

(It’s more than just blogging)

There’s been a lot of great buzz about hyperlocal sites as the new local press, with added community cohesion. Indeed I posted a couple of months ago about #tal09, the Talk-about-Local unconference for hyperlocal bloggers. Action within and for the local community is essential if we are to fix what the Tories somewhat pessimistically call the Broken Society. Nevertheless there are important issues in the wider world which can also be well addressed locally, so on Day 1 of Copenhagen let’s take a look at “Think Global, Act Local”.

Town in Transition

Last week my eldest two children played with the Lions Youth Brass Band at the Congleton Christmas Lights switch-on. What was different about this switch on was a street full of local stalls, mostly from community groups. One of them was the recently-formed Congleton Sustainability Group (CSG), selling locally-grown apple juice[1] to raise both awareness and funds.

Following this, I spent this morning at CSG’s monthly meeting, and was pleased to see representatives of local businesses and groups, together with a few individuals, getting together to plan practical changes to make their community more sustainable. Hydro power, energy advice, seed swaps, and, closest to my heart, beginning to look at Community Supported Agriculture and local food production.

The aim of the CSG is to prepare for Transition Town status. A refreshing contrast to places that just declare they are transition towns without actually having community buy-in or any practical results - CSG hopes to bring in more local people and organisations, and get real change in motion before declaring Transition Town Congleton.

[1] 450lbs (210kg) of unwanted apples were collected from local trees and
    juiced and bottles at Eddisbury Fruit Farm, producing 106 bottles.
    Next year the group aims to at least quadruple the amount of apples
    it collects.

As the second day of Open09 closes in a (somewhat muted) panel session, what has come out of this?

For me, every session seemed to point towards greater need for collaboration within and across sectors. Creative people, whether artists, coders or web designers, need to let go of the fear of losing control of their ideas, or having them stolen.

There are risks, but the potential benefits for individuals & micro-businesses of sharing ideas, and trying to build on them together are huge.
This is best shown by the success of Free & Open Source software. Projects like Debian GNU/Linux (the foundation on which Ubuntu is built), comes from open sharing with big companies like HP, local governemnts like Extremadura, and small companies and individual programmers.

Network Effect

Techies have the advantage that since the advent of the Internet they’ve collaborated online. Now the whole world’s doing it, so what’s stopping creative people following the Free Software model? No, really, what’s stopping them?

Let me know why you’re not collaborating more. We can only break down the barriers to change if we know where they are.

I don’t normally join this sort of event, but the theme of this year’s Blog Action Day is Climate Change - and that seems a good opportunity to make a confession: I was wrong.

Not about climate change, I’ve been wittering on about the unsustainability of burning fossil fuels since the 1970s, and changed much about my lifestyle (transport, diet) in the 1980s in order to live more lightly on the earth.

No, I was wrong about the potential of popular mass actions focussed on tiny, incremental changes in people’s behaviour. Very specifically I was wrong about 10:10.

A Simple Step

10:10 asks an interesting question:

What if we resolved to cut 10% of our emissions in 2010?

Not a bad start. What if we got everyone we know to do the same? And what if all this made governments sit up and take notice? Maybe this could be the first step towards a brighter future. Time to stop imagining. It’s happening right now. Sign up today and be a part of it.

I had despaired of politicians making a worthwhile change throughout the Major & the Blair/Brown years, but was ready to accept a popular push could create political change. I just didn’t see any popular pushes working.

Happily, I’ve been proved wrong: 10:10 seems to have garnered unexpected support from businesses big & small, numerous individuals, and is pushing the politicians. It has worked because it has taken the vast, overwhelming problem of runaway climate change, and given us all an achievable, practical step we can take with tangible result. I wish it every success, and happily recall the words of 老子 (Lao-Tsu): A thousand mile journey begins with one small step.

In my recent enterprises & projects I’ve tried to spread the work around as widely as possible - bringing in fellow freelancers to help with training, coding, illustration, and all sorts of technical bits & bobs. Sometimes this has been quite successful for all involved. Occasionally things haven’t worked as planned, but lessons are learned and I’ve never failed to gain something from sharing work.

Now I find myself stretched very thinly on a number of projects, mostly at an early stage, with none of the resources I had at M6-IT cic - so I find I would ideally like a shed load of people to work with. The catch? There’s no wage or fee attached to any of these projects. Previously I’ve always paid other freelancers well - up to £1000 a day. This time there’s nothing in the pot, though a number of projects look like they will bring in steady revenue to be shared. Read on for details under the individual projects, as I post details over the next few days…

[...edit...or months; more coming soon (early Spring?)...]

P2P Board

But first, an alternative. Dave Thackeray, at http://wordandmouth.com/2009/09/ultimate-business-advice-free/, suggests setting up a “virtual board” to troubleshoot & share ideas with your peers. Put simply, you find some fellow (social) entrepreneurs, and meet up every month or so to kick round the problems that are bothering you. In a group of 6, 8 or 10, someone is bound to come up with a solution that hadn’t ocurred to you.

It’s certainly something I’d love to try. I’ve been doing this informally to some extent I guess at #OpenCoffee events, co-working sessions, and many other places - but a reliably regular version with a good set of people sounds very appealing. Practically speaking, Manchester looks the best bet - but if anyone’s planning this in any other town I regularly get to [North West England, N Wales, W Mids], then please count me in :-)

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.

The NHS pouring £12,000,000,000 into a failed IT system is a powerful reminder of what can go wrong with a project out of control. One to be borne in mind by those of us dealing with far smaller IT projects.
Yesterday I had to face up to my chosen technology solution (Plone) not being, in its current release, up to dealing with the current project in a timely manner. This involved admitting to myself that the slight changes to the project spec were more slight than I had accepted, in my optimistic, “it’ll-all-work-out-fine” frame of mind. It involved consulting with peers, to check that my own revised opinion was right this time at least. It involved consulting to agree on a better solution. Then it involved “the difficult phone call”.
Possibly it’s the thought of such a difficult conversation that prevented anybody in the management chain of projects, like the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT), flagging up the mess that they were dealing with - and thus letting the juggernaut go on, dragging along an increasing budget while failing to reach a satisfactory result (with apologies for such a mixed metaphor).

Transparency

However, as I constantly emphasise in my classes on social media & accessible web for small Orgs, it’s important to face up to mistakes and problems and be open and honest about them. This transparency doesn’t sit easily with people brought up in a culture of public sector risk-aversion, where everything must always be a good result for tax-payers’ money. Nevertheless, in a world of connected webs of blogs, microblogs, and other social networks, transparency about mistakes is the only credible tactic.
So, client was phoned. Problem laid out. Solution suggested, discussed, decided upon - and now the project is back on track in a revised, slightly reduced, but ultimately more strongly achievable form. If only those holding the public purse strings were approached in this way, or even cared enough to keep track of where their projects were going.

This is a short post remembering Richard Rothwell, who died last Friday.

Three years ago I was made redundant from the BVSC’s MOST project, a project doing good things to get Free Software in the hands of voluntary sector organisations. Looking to carry on the good work, I pieced together ideas for a social enterprise to supply Free Software, recycled hardware, & appropriate local support and training. As I cast around for help in this enterprise, it was with great relief that I found a friend, Richard Rothwell, planning something similar, down the M6 in the Black Country. We soon merged our projects and formed M6-IT cic.

Crucial to M6’s early success was the personality of Richard Rothwell. A lateral thinker; a cynic; a warm-hearted & giving man; a contrarian; and a passionate & practical advocate for Free Software, education, & communities.

It was Richard who started the Supported Family Computing programme, diverting specialist schools’ unspent community fund to making a real difference to families on the wrong side of the digital divide, providing computers, software, broadband, support, & training to children otherwise denied such advantages in life. Richard’s no nonesense style & clear-thinking got us through bureaucratic hurdles to win early tenders, and left a deep impression in client meetings (albeit occasionally one of flabbergasted surprise).

As I have spent much of the last year on a sabbatical from M6, working on goodGNUs projects, we had not been in as close contact as previously. The last time I had spoken to him was a quick discussion on VAT matters, with a promise of a proper chat when it was all out of the way. Sadly he took his life days later, for reasons those of us left behind may never truly understand.

From the comments on http://tributestorichardrothwell.net/ he has touched many people’s lives, and will be deeply missed in circles beyond Free Software and the voluntary sector. For those who know only a little of Richard Rothwell’s life and work, take a look at the links to his many published sites and articles on http://tributestorichardrothwell.net/ - an insight into the complex mind of a sadly missed friend and colleague.

Why am I planning to run low-cost courses on website & social media strategy? Because there is a need: not just a need for good websites, and communication strategies for social media, but just getting across the basics of awareness of accessibility.

Local groups

Yesterday I toddled around a hall in the next village, looking at the displays about local community groups. As well as trying to fend off the siren call of joining two of the local choirs (why are the rehearsals always on my busiest evenings?), I got to have some great conversations about the use of technology in local community groups.

Everyone now recognises the importance of having a good web presence, but it’s the next step that causes the problems. Groups that have got a Wordpress account have probably taken one of the simplest routes to having an easy-to-maintain, and reasonably accessible site. A more common route seems to be to buy shrink-wrapped, proprietary, create-your-own-website software. And here the problems start.

WYSIWYG?

Inside these cans-of-worms is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get - a dangerously misleading acronym when it comes to Web MarkUp) interface that churns out spaghetti HTML. Some at least try to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS, the Web Standard way, since 1999, of separating layout from content), but often in a rather perfunctory and inconsistent manner. The real problem comes with the more inaccessible MarkUp.

In the bad old days TABLES, a way of laying out data in tabular form, started being used to layout designs in precise ways for webpages. Given similarly-sized screens they do this layout job, but not only can they fail quite badly on mobile devices, they are a disaster for screenreaders. A sighted user can quickly scan a page by sections and headings, and a blind user can do the same with well-structured webpages. Inaccessible designs don’t allow the user to skip from section to section, and leave the screen-reader user bogged down in the site, having to read every word to get at the information.

The user story

With one group that had taken such an approach I gave a 10-minute impromptu workshop on the user experience of visually- & mobility-impaired users as they navigate websites that do and don’t conform to Web Accessibility guidelines, and accessibility design beyond simple box-ticking. It was very well received, and made me realise the need to reach ever smaller groups with basic information.

I had been planning a simple introduction to communication with websites & social media for local Start-Ups, social enterprises, and small charities. Now I’ve pared down the costs to reach the smallest groups, and, naturally, accessibility is at the heart of all of the information - not a bolted-on afterthought.

Courses are being planned in Manchester and Cheshire, but I’m happy to bring it to anyone in the region. See the courses page for more information.

Most days I’m either sat at the keyboard, or I’m out and about and meet a handful of people. Few enough that I can usually remember who they are, as I file away business cards & write short follow-up e-mails the next day. Some days are different.

At networking events (OpenCoffee, Social Enterprise events,Unconferences, etc.) you can easily talk to a dozen interesting people in a morning, or twice that in a day, with whom you find a common interest, and think you may be collaboratig with at some point. How do you keep track of these conversations until you have a chance to follow up? How do they?

Tick the Boxes

Time for a bit of DIY. I printed off a form with tick boxes for all the likely areas of conversation (relating to projects with which I’m involved), and for follow-up action or contact. After a conversation you add the contact’s name, & tick the relevant boxes, as well as making a copy and handing it out to them.

Here’s one I did for the Ubuntu Launch party last month, at BBC Manchester:

Aide Memoire    Fri 24 April 2009

Tonight, at the Ubuntu Jaunty Release party at BBC Manchester,
I talked to @RichardSmedley about:

• Third Sector IT
• Cloud computing
• Hackspace NorthWest
• “Small Steps to Sustainability”
• Permaculture
• Co-working
• Credit Unions
• A new website
• Consultancy work

__________________

I will be:

• Commenting on http://goodGNUs.org/
• e-mailing rs@m6-it.org
• phoning +44 (0)77 94 56 07 14
• following twitter.com/RichardSmedley
• following Identica.com/RichardSmedley
• connecting to http://www.linkedin.com/in/richardsmedley

Notes

So, there you go. A bit Heath-Robinson? It’s a simple, low-tech solution to an organisational problem. If it works for you, please feel free to copy and pass on. If you think it’s a daft idea, feel free to laugh, laughter is healthy :-)

I was reading Cory Docotorow’s short article on the psychology of making gaming pay in The Guardian, earlier this afternoon: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/14/technology-2009-14-apr-cory-doctorow-gaming

As it neared its conclusion, it drew a parallel between the Free Software business model (the most common one that is: download our software for free, but pay us if you want help), and arbitrage between time-poor & cash-poor game players, exchanging in-game items in fantasy worlds for real money.

Whether attained by coercion, social engineering, generosity or guilt, this arbitrage of the cash-rich and the time-rich is at the centre of many of the new business models emerging on the net. It’s damned close to the GNU/Linux business model – get the OS for free, pay us (or some other group of geeks) if you can’t be arsed to figure out how to make it work.

All very interesting, of course, but something that stuck out in the article is the final paragraph.

This business model has a certain attractive stability to it, in that it relies on technology being in a constant, perpetual state of semi-brokenness, which is a fundamental characteristic of the information age, where constant change ensures constant chaos.

Now we’re back in Cult-of-Done territory. We’re in a time of change, and that means what worked yesterday, may not work tomorrow. It’s easy to see why some people don’t find such a world very easy to adapt to, and some decide that the whole thing is not relevant to them – but for knowledge workers (see Clay Shirky’s much talked-about post on the Death of Newspapers), this is the territory we’re in.

Looking for Quality

The problem now becomes not “How do we work with technology being in a constant, perpetual state of semi-brokenness,” but “How can we adapt this changing, semi-broken mess into something not just useful, but something of quality”?

In my case, it’s by being the interface between various great (but not necessarily complete) bits of Free Software, and some Voluntary Sector organisations that just want to get things done, and not worry about technology.

More specifically it’s with some very exciting new Social Enterprise start-ups that’ll be blogged about here in the next few weeks & months.

Down the garden path

However embracing this chaos has meant me letting go of cherished ideas of over-engineering, and instead building robustness from flexibility & quick response to change.

No wonder it’s such a pleasure to leave all this behind for a bit of gardening now and then - a time-tested source of predictability & chaos, with quality in the eye of the beholder. :)