GoodGNUs

I’m at WordCampUK - a conference for WordPress developers and users. There have been great presentations, from Accessibility & HTML5 to WordPress Themes. However the real value of any conference is the corridor time, face-to-face chat with peers, and people doing all sorts of unexpected and fun things with Free Software.

WordCampUK has been a bit short on corridor time, but has made up for it with socials, and lunch-time meetings: today in particular when most of the 3rd sector people got together for a not-for-profits meetup. As promised, below are the details of everyone at that lunch, so that WordPress people working in the voluntary sector can find each other:

Not-for-Profit people working with WordPress

Name/Twitter or Web Link & region or country:

Richard Weltman, NW

Chris Middleton, Notts

Jason King, London & NW

Steve Graham, S/SW

Linda Parkinson-Hardman, SW

Chris Witham, Yorks/Derbys

Daniel Koskinen, Finland

Kristina Krause, Seattle & Kent, UK

Chris Booth, Scotland

Jag Gill, Sheffield

Alex Stuart, Scotland

Chris Murray, Sheffield

Andrew Laughland, Bucks

Richard Smedley, NW

Added in from comments & tweets…

John Adams, Glasgow

Steve Taylor, London

If you’re doing something with WordPress in the not-for-profit sector, please feel free to put your name and link into the comments. I’ve no idea if anything useful will come out of this, along the lines of Plone’s NGO group, or Drupal’s various specialist groups - I just offer this set of links up with a vague hope ;-)

Update

There’s now a mailing list for anyone helping the sector using WordPress - sign up and say hello, everyone welcome.

I’m travelling back from the Connecting 2.0 Communities event held this afternoon and evening at Madlab, in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. An MDDA-sponsored event to give technical and social media advice to community groups. I was arm-twisted into giving a short talk, so rapidly prepared an item on Social Media tactics and strategy culled from our 3hour course.

Firefighting IT problems? Get some IT strategy in your Org!

However the first speaker, Matt Haworth, did such a great job on exactly the same subject, with the wonderful local example of Manchester’s  Lesbian & Gay Foundation’s viral response to US hate adverts, that I mentally ripped up my improvised speech, and settled on the least interesting topic under the sun: IT Strategy. IT Happens, I told the unfortunate audience, it drops from the sky as meteorites of randomly-funded PCs, and volunteer-coded websites, and leaves organisations busy fighting fires as IT fails to do what it should, instead of concentrating on delivering the front-line services for which they have so much enthusiasm.

So, what’s to be done? Organisations with chronic IT problems tend to be those which don’t just lack an IT strategy, but often don’t really realise how essential it is to any modern organisation. These groups usually lack IT expertise not just in staff and volunteers, which is understandable, but in their boards of governance, too. In an age when hardware and software is effectively free, IT funding should first go into bringing in outside help to assess an organisation, and help to draught its strategy; something that would pay for itself in a very short time.

Back in my M6-IT days (and before that at BVSC’s MOST project) we ran courses on IT strategy for decision makers in Voluntary Sector groups. In both cases we relied on carrot and stick from partner organisations to bring in attendees who most needed the courses. What can be done? I’d love to hear ideas for reaching groups (other than springing them on an unsuspecting audience like today ;), otherwise third sector groups will continue to fight fires, instead of using IT to grow and support their organisations.

It's behind you - robot fun at #bcMan2

This weekend saw the 2nd BarCamp Manchester - an unconference that carries on through the night. Like all unconferences, attendance implies participation, and therefore giving a talk. I gave three.

The first, on permaculture, sustainability, & forest gardens, was quite poorly attended - not something one worries about in general at barcamps, as there’s so much going on it’s impossible to be everywhere. However it did lead to some discussions late into the night on the disconnect between the techie community and those working for a more sustainable future (something we tried to address with #SmallSteps, & will return to in the future). Sorry, NO SLIDES, but plenty of info online.

My session with Paul Robinson of Vagueware on collaboration, co-working & virtual boards, entitled Profitable Collaboration for Freelancers, brought together freelancers eager to learn more about co-working, and to build better businesses through smart collaboration rather than taking on more employees. This is something the local tech sector really gets, but those paid by the government to support small businesses don’t seem to understand at all. It also made me realise I should probably get round to joining Fly-the-Coop.

Saturday night’s revels (which didn’t stop at all during the 6 hours I slept) meant Sunday morning started fairly quietly, but still brought a number of people to my third session, on organisation “for those who are really bad at it”. In this I count myself, which is why I have developed systems to allow for that, as well as adopting GTD. Conversations between two of the participants on this were still going on when I left the event an hour later.

Again, no slides, but this poster is more than tangentially related. Also, you can:
buy David Allen’s GTD book [affiliate Amazon link].

"Sleep is ones & zeroes"

Far better than running sessions is going to others’ talks, and hearing about things about which people are really passionate and knowledgable. Also the talks which lead to great discussions, leading you to new areas of familiar topics. Even better, the conversations in the bars & corridors, as BarCamp brings together 200 great people with so much to say.

There’s far to much to list the highlights, so I’ll just mention the very first session I went to on Saturday morning: the Surrealist writing exercise. This involved writing nouns (techie & abstract) & their meanings, then swapping them round with often startling results.

“

End of the first day: catching up on micro-blogging [CC by-nc-sa image from yajamesu

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.

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 :-)

This morning saw the re-launch of Manchester Open Coffee, now pencilled in for the final Thursday of every month, in the café at Urbis.
After some confusion with a b2b event for Co-op Finance sharing the same space (grey men in grey suits), we all had a topic to break the ice.

The Urbis WLAN was down, so everyone concentrated on networking. No bad thing.

The coffee crowd

I met a really great crowd, including Zulf Choudhary, doing things with social banking that parallel my next project (more on this at a later date); Hwa Young Jung & Dave Mee of TANDOT; Ian Moss of Fly-the-Coop; & Asa Calow of ensembli. Ended up staying long after the official finish.
Talk ranged from Ruby internals & the Seaside web framework, through cloud computing, to Low Carbon Computing, and my attempts to bring a hackspace to the North West (more on that in tomorrow’s post).
Lots of other interesting people - sorry not to mention you all by name. Well done to everyone behind this - Manchester obviously needed #OpenCoffee back.

Having had to miss Oekonux, for family commitments – and miss other events due to lack of time, or not being able to be in two places at once, I’m musing on outsourcing.

There’s been a bit of talk about outsourcing lately, especially amongst those who’ve read The 4-hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich. A book (& website) that takes personal outsourcing to its logical extreme.

But what to outsource? Tim Ferriss, the 4-hour Work Week author, has even outsourced dating – but most of us want to live our lives, just with more time for the bits that we like best.

Time crunch

Why mention this here? Well, in a busy couple of weeks I failed to find time to write on any of what kept me busy here. Not good, when I’m busy writing a workshop session on productivity, efficiency, & effectiveness (it’s called Keeping the Activist Active, if you’re interested, and I’m looking at delivering it at any third sector conference, barcamp, or unconference that will have me). No, it’s time to look at outsourcing.

I already have all of the code writing (and much of the systems architecture) from my current projects placed with people far better than me. Bits of sys admin are being examined. Writing? Well, I’m not sure how appropriate a ghost written blog is, so I’ll stick with it for now, and revieew the situation again in a year or so.

What does that leave that takes so much of my time? Networking.

A lot of time is spent by the average social entrepreneur (or any entrepreneur) on networking events, and social networking. Business breakfasts, Open Coffee, Speed networking, Co-working days, unconferences, you name it, there are a thousand opportunities to swap business cards, look someone in the eye, and contemplate a business opportunity in a new relationship.

Social Media

Online we have LinkedIn, FaceBook, Twitter, Identi.ca, FriendFeed, ThirdSectorForums, Ning, IM, IRQ, Groups, Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, good old-fashioned e-mail groups, hours of time at the screen and keyboard building and refining a network of contacts that we hope will enable us to change the world, or at least bring in a small contract to help to pay the bills.

Given the amount of time spent in networking, enjoyable though it is, little wonder that one looks for a way to free some of the time to get actual work done (unless you work in PR or sales, in which case managing your network of contacts is most of your day’s work). Can it be outsourced? I’ve tried it, after a fashion. At previous businesses we’ve divided the conference schedule, and reported back on the contacts that we’ve made – it can work if you’re systematic, and report well – but that’s no use for a one man band, or someone in a small company without colleagues enough to deputise to the role.

Ghost writer

When it comes to social media, there’s a real possibility – get a concierge firm to write your Tweets and blogs to guidelines that you produce, and to reply to comments and tweets for you. It’s easy to review their work, and get reports; it can work – so why doesn’t it feel right? Because Social Media is about personal insight into what contacts are up to. Not gory details, but little snippets of a contact’s life that show you they’re a human being, not a company automaton. You can outsource your information channels, but how much personality can the contractor provide, and can it show any of the authentic you?

Hmm, an overlong post. If I can outsource something else, I’ll get more time to shorten posts. I’d be interested to hear what you’d like to outsource in your life, and what is stopping you from doing it?

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?