GoodGNUs

To Liverpool Wednesday, for an enjoyable afternoon interviewing Aidan McGuire and Francis Irving of ScraperWiki, then an evening at Liverpool’s Social Media Café event.

ScraperWiki is a code wiki that provides you with a maintained scraper to extract data from any public source on teh InterWebs, for any purpose. A great example is the map showing oil drilling around UK shores at the same depth as the Gulf of Mexico Disaster. Thanks to Aidan and Francis for lots of info about what ScraperWiki is up to, and where it’s going - if I can’t find a publisher for the interview (my usual outlet can’t fit it in), I might post more here.

Talks at #smcLiv were given by Mike Nolan, on coping with social media overload, and Jon Bloor, on Publish & (Don’t) be damned. Social Media & the Law. Mike is certainly tapping a rich vein, given the number of information channels we’re all hooked into, and talk around the tables afterwards ranged from GTD through #inboxZero to using the good old-fashioned telephone to cut down on e-mail.

Social Media Café at Static Liverpool, 25 August 2010, pic by Mike Nolan

There was also a talk given by myself, on Open Social Networks - or what to do about FaceBook being Evil. I’ll be writing here soon about GNU social, Diaspora*, and other ways of taking back control of your social media use, but for now please see the article at LinuxUser magazine - and the extracted interview with Evan Prodromou.

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.