GoodGNUs

• How Michael Osinski Helped Build the Bomb That Blew Up Wall Street — New York Magazine
  “I wrote the software that turned mortgages into bonds.”
  (tags: economics crash recession depression wallstreet banking banks finance economy programming subprime mortgage crisis history)
• Frankenstory. The writing game where two heads are better than one.
  Frankenstory is super simple to play! You write the first part of a story below and send it on to your friend… the twist is they can only see the last few words you wrote! They write the next part and volley it back to you. Write two parts each and it’s finished. Now you can both read your FrankenStory in it’s full glory!
  (tags: collaborative storytelling creativity microfiction fun story share)
• How to Build a Green Team: The First Step to Sustainability | GreenBiz.com
  (tags: workingfromtheinside green corporation environment business)
• Comparison of Facebook, Ning and Elgg
  V useful feature-comparison of last year’s darling (Facebook); this year’s (Ning); & the do-it-yourself, Free Software social network platform: Elgg.
  Elgg comes off v well.
  (tags: elgg facebook ning socialnetworking socialmedia freesoftware opensource web2.0 social community blog 3rdsector)
• Over 200 MPs get behind planet-friendly farming
  An important campaign to complement bottom-up efforts on local food & sustainability with national & European legislation to end the madness of subsidising high-Carbon, intensive farming, & its consequent rainforest destruction.
  (tags: lowcarbon foodchain fixthefoodchain dairy meat vegan environment farming FoE)
• Writings of Richard Price
  Richard Price - the greatest (unknown) Welsh writer on Liberty
  (tags: welsh politics philosophy liberty)

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.

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?

FACT Gallery’s Climate for Change exhibition runs from 13 March - 31 May, 2009, and explores “how humans can be invested in the change needed to sustain civilization and examining the multiple crises affecting the world: ecological, financial, food, housing. Is society itself becoming unsustainable?”

The idea is to involve local communities, projects, people, and make links, and I’m trying to bring some of the themes of sustainability - particularly where it links up with technology - together in a series of 11 café events.

Small Steps to Sustainability poses the question “Can technology save the world?”, and looks for answers - in the face of crisis - in a more connected world

One step at a time

Each week (on the non-alliterative “Sustainability Wednesday”, at 6pm) we’ll meet in Gallery 1 with beer or coffee. A four minute presentation (in the 20:20 style) introduces the 11 themes, and the rest of the hour is open discussion around that weeks theme.

It’s called Small Steps… as it’s about both small steps we can take to sustainability, and about stepping through the themes to see how all of these things link up in different ways.

What I’d like to do is bring in local groups, individuals, and businesses, involved with social enterprise, sustainability, and the themes mentioned each week, to contribute. Particularly those already a part of Climate for Change.

Social Media

I’ll put up more detail on the workshop (including the slides) next week. At this stage I want to gauge interest in joining in: I’m sure other people have far more ideas to share than I do, so please get involved. Either e-mail me, or talk about it on Twitter (or Identi.ca) - please tag your posts #smallsteps.

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.