I once said I’d blog about this subject but somehow never got round to it. Yep, it’s the whole ‘women at events’ topic. Finally.
The niggle in the back of my mind was intensified last week when I saw the speaker list for the Government 2010 event and a couple of other local govt girl geeks (I hope they don’t mind the label!) @sharonodea and @sarahlay responded to my tweet of irritation in broad agreement. In fairness to the organisers, they apparently tried to contact me to find female speakers but I never received the message. Tech #fail, presumably.
The key point, I think, is that it’s not about women being better qualified to speak on the basis of their gender – no one wants the idiot quota to go up at events. Rather, we want good quality speakers that reflect a diversity of opinion and it’s impossible to get that with only one demographic slice. Women often have a different take on things (not better, not worse, just different) and I like to hear different perspectives. The more demographically mixed an audience is, the better for challenge, difference of opinion, different cultural assumptions, and energy. You can apply this issue to race, gender, sexuality, age, disability and social class (often missed out because it’s too thorny to contemplate).
Yuck, I hate sounding like some New Labour ’social exclusion’ policy wonk and that’s why no one ever talks about this stuff apart from in passive-agressive tweets. For now, I want to focus on women because, well, I am one and it’s better to focus on stuff you know about.
Part of me can’t be bothered to talk about the whys and wherefores of this business – surely it suffices to say that speaker panels, not to mention attendance, remain very white, middle class and male? But trying to understand the problem (yes, problem) might help to figure out some solutions. I see a few things:
There aren’t that many women who are well known in the government-tech-social-media-whateverwe’recallingit-industry
Women aren’t as good at self-promotion as men – i.e. we don’t put ourselves forward
The usual (mostly male) suspects are well-known and easy to contact for lazy event organisers
Women in this field are often do-ers, not pontificators
The people organising events are from the white, middle class, male demographic so it doesn’t occur to them that there is a problem
Women can be underconfident speakers
It would be a bit weird if there was just one solution to this situation, so I’m going to chuck out a few – I don’t even agree with all of them, but maybe a combination approach might make some headway:
If you’re a bloke organising an event, look at the speaker panel and attendee list. Try and think of someone new to fill the spot who you haven’t heard speak recently. Ideally a woman who you think has something useful to add.
Women-only speakers lists. A bit controversial/radical, but might get some awareness/interest going (just out of curiosity I’d be interested to hear whether any women reading this have strong feelings for/against speaking at an event like this)
Meetups for women who are looking for tips on public speaking – maybe some practiced women speakers can give some coaching or advice
A place for events organisers looking for speakers to easily put a shout out for the kind of speaker they’re looking for, and to receive recommendations. Plus, a place for women happy to speak if invited to put their profile and videos etc (is this a bit too centralised?)
If you’re a man (or a woman for that matter) already on a panel and you think it’s going to sound like an echo chamber, suggest a good speaker to the organisers
A ‘plus one’ event, where you can only get in if you bring someone with you who’s new to these kind of events (ideally, but not necessarily, a woman)
Think about the timing of events – if you always have them early in the morning make them a bit later so people who take their kids to school (usually women) can make it too.
If you’re a woman, help other women out – big them up if they deserve it and cite them if they’ve made a good point. We’re not in competition and we generally do better if we work together, just like the web taught us.
I’m sure there’s more that can be done and I’d love to hear more ideas. If anyone wants to work together on any of the things that take a bit of organising (coaching/meetups for women, a speaker search/matching website) then give me a shout.
In the mean time, I thought I’d leave you with a list of women (linked to Twitter profiles) that I’ve heard speak convincingly at various events, either as keynotes or in smaller groups. I have no idea if they’re looking for speaking opportunities or what their rates are, but I think it shows that there are plenty of women out there who have something to contribute:
The women on the list cover a range of subjects and they’re not all government types, but that’s a feature, not a bug
If I’ve left you off the list it’s not even remotely personal – why don’t you stick your name in the comments if you’d be up for speaking at an event? If I’ve put you on the list and you’re mortified then drop me a note and you’ll be removed. If you know someone I’ve missed out then why not big them up in the comments?
I have a feeling someone else has done a list like this on their blog but I can’t for the life of me remember who it was – if it was you then please link to it in the comments as two lists are better than one!
So I saw something on Twitter about the government’s intention to roll-out the Tell Us Once programme nationally. And then someone asked me what I thought about it…
I think it’s a laudable goal to try to simplify the bureaucracy that citizens experience when dealing with the state in all its guises. However I think TUO is problematic for three reasons:
It’s not addressing the real issue, namely that the state is too bureaucratic. TUO is a work-around because the state isn’t organised around actual people. It’s sticking plaster that gives an artificial sense of coherence to a flawed system. And everyone knows that papering over the cracks is unsustainable.
It’s not giving citizens control over their data. It’s channelling data between bits of government and the scope for error is still huge. Accepting that the hideous bureaucracy isn’t going anywhere any time soon, it would be better to make it clear to people who they need to contact with what information and how. Then I can send one email (or better still an RSS feed)* to all the relevant departments and I can be sure that the data they get is accurate and that they actually get it – it’s my data, after all, and I firmly believe that a state employee does not have a role as an intermediary for my data.
The basic principle of the government sharing data between departments is fraught with problems. At best it’s paternalistic and at worse it’s the stuff of Big Brother nightmares. Sure, our current government might not be organised enough to actually make use of the data shared between departments, but it sets us on a dangerous path in which ultimately any information about me can be shared between departments and quangos – I don’t get a say in who gets what and what they do with it. To some that sounds over-dramatic but there are others who have seen the effects of regimes that do this in their lifetime.
In short, Tell Us Once is a shonky fix for a bigger problem. It does not give individuals control of their own data and it has very scary potential.
*Yes, some people don’t have access to email or RSS (though they are few) but we have to start somewhere.
I should have known this event would be a little puzzling when Google’s idea of a great freebie for local government people was a USB stick. A few of us even joked about the irony of getting a free gift you aren’t technically allowed to use, but what the heck, it was nice of them to give us something and besides, it’s a Google USB stick, so it’s obviously made of magic.
Flag number two came when the first thing anyone said was ‘to be clear this isn’t a barcamp event, it’s for google to talk to you about its offer’. Not that I was expecting a barcamp (the rows of chairs with desk arms was my clue there) but more that I was hoping for a bit of a two-way conversation. That plus the ban on photos (oops) just felt, well, a little un-Google.
A few people muttered that I was a bit harsh on Twitter during the day (check out the hashtag) so I’ll try to keep it balanced here – it was an interesting day, which was generously offered for free at Google’s offices, with great hospitality from the super-fast broadband to the great food.
It was a pretty intense day of presentations by various Googlers about their products, much of which was interesting and applicable to local government, though there wasn’t much talk about local government until the end of the session.
First up was Hamish Nicklin [Update 19/8/09: Link removed, see note at the end of the post], Head of Google’s UK Public Sector and Government team (he could do with some more followers on Twitter if you’re so inclined)[Update 19/8/09: See note at the end], who gave some useful stats on web use:
44m people are online in the UK
90% of people said they must have broadband within a month of moving into a new house
17p in every pound is spent online
80% of internet users compare prices and options
1 in 3 consumers post a comment online a week
15 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute
British people spend 1.2 billion minutes watching videos and movies online in a month
An average user spends 43 mins per week streaming video vs 14.2 hours per week watching TV (so online video is around 5% of the total time people spend on video)
12% of UK housefulds now rely on mobiles rather than landline
490m mobile internet users in 2008 globally (1b by 2011)
There were 74.2 billion searches in June 2008. That’s 11 per person for every person in one month
iphone users search the web 50 times more than those on traditional movible devices.
Jon Cross [Update 19/8/09: Link removed, see note at end], a Google Pulic Sector Senior Account Manager (also in need of some followers)[Update 19/8/09: see note at end] was next, talking about advertising. Google would like councils to advertise on Google, ensuring that they appear at the top of all search results (AdWords). It was agreed that some of this wouldn’t be relevant to local government (the presentation was tailored for businesses with no repurposing for the local government audience) but there’s a useful case study of how Hillingdon council have used AdWords to publicise their ice rink and Christmas market using geographical targetting – Google, rather freakily, can tell where in the country you are using your IP address (a reference number that every computer has, which sort of acts like your address on the internet) and information from your internet service provider (whoever you get your broadband connection from – Virgin Media, BT, whoever).
The idea is that making a specific service more ‘findable’ in Google increases the chances that someone will find the information they need online, rather than having to call or write to the council, which is more expensive to deal with. As with much of the content of the session, I can’t help thinking that Google are rather behind the times when it comes to the public sector, which was a big surprise to me. I think of Google as a forward-thinking bleeding-edge organisation, but somehow they just haven’t grasped the local government agenda. Maybe it’s because their public sector unit was only set up at the start of 2009, and it’s only been concentrating on central government until now.
Local government is a different kettle, though, and while it might be in the business of advertising ice rinks and tourist attractions at the moment, the financial crunch of 2010 is looming large. Local government can’t carry on as a direct service provider, and the days of leisure and culture provision are numbered. The new local authority role will be as a service enabler – the glue that holds a locality together and supports other organisations to provide services that residents need, as well as helping to create the conditions in which residents can meet their own needs – from neighbourhoods getting together to share the cost of green energy through to social startups and local businesses. It’s a new model for local government and a radical adjustment that I just don’t think Google have got their heads around. It feels like the ‘credit crunch’ has hit their business accounts so they’re looking to the steady income of the public sector to make up the difference.
Cynical, I know, but the fact that none of the presentations we heard were tailored to a local government audience in any way seemed borderline rude. It would have been so easy to have a 15 minute discussion at the start of the session to draw out the problems facing local government, find out where the good bits are and then tailor the whole session to the sectoral landscape. What I still don’t know is how a local council can work with Google to make everything about a local area ‘discoverable’ online – maybe the local council isn’t the direct client of Google, but maybe it has an intermediary role to play, making sure that businesses, startups and local groups have well-structured and findable sites that make them perfect Google customers – of course Google would need to share a cut of the income with the council for that service
We’ll never know if Google is up for that kind of conversation because we never found out what their intentions are towards the local government market – are they just happy if a few councils sign up for AdWords, or do they want a long-lasting and sustainable business relationship with a changing sector facing serious challenges?
Anyway, if you’re interested in paying for a sponsored link on Google there’s this handy rap to explain how it works. Fo’ Shizzle.
After Jon (and some much-needed coffee) we heard from Alex Nurnberg, a Google Account Strategist who talked us through Google Analytics and how to make the most of your site to ‘convert’ users. The presentation was completely made for businesses, so the entire thing was about reducing abandoned shopping carts and ecommerce transactions – we’re all intelligent (*ahem*) so we can see how it can be translated to councils’ online transactions like parking and tax payments, but it would have been nice not to have made the mental leap and to feel like Google understood the relevance of its own products to the market they’re trying to enter. Anyway, it was all useful stuff that every web manager should pay attention to, and I posted Google’s top 10 tips for a good website over on the FutureGov Network.
A slightly poorly Paul Canning gave us a SOCITM view of Google Analytics and then Dominic Miller, Corporate Marketing Manager at Nottingham City Council talked to us about the council’s decision to make money off their website (irritatingly referred to as ‘monetizing’ – yuck) by allowing advertising on the site. Poor Nottingham got slated a bit on Twitter for a) thinking people would be remotely interested in a personalisable council home page and b) thinking it’s a good idea to advertise on a council website. I’m in agreement on the former – I really don’t see the point in an igoogle style interface for a council home page, but on the latter I think it’s a decision each council will make for its own reasons. If bringing in money from the web is a way to fund other innovative web development in a council then I’m all for it. Alas in Nottingham’s case I think it might just be used as a way to justify a bigger headcount – they reckon they’ve made £15,000 from advertising on their site in the last 12 months.
There were lots of audience concerns about inappropriate adverts appearing on a site (e.g. an advert for fast food on a page about local sports facilities) and the answer is that you can block certain adverts by keyword and by category, and you can pick which pages have advertising on them and which don’t. The bottom line is, though, that if an inappropriate advert appears, you can only block it after it’s appeared, by which time the ‘damage’ will already have been done. I do think there’s a bit of an over-reaction to exactly how much ‘damage’ could actually be done – web managers are flattering themselves if they think enough people view council websites to cause borough-wide outrage. Plus stuff like that is par for the course for the web – it’s how you deal with it that matters. Curiously that’s not something that Dominic Miller grasped when he later asked why Google wouldn’t ban a comment criticising one of Nottingham City’s Surestart facilities, which appears on a Google Maps search.
Crashing on, the exotically named Xen Lategan [Update 19/8/09: Link removed, see note at end] talked us through Google Enterprise – the ability to use things like Gmail and Google Docs in your organisation instead of Microsoft Outlook and Word/Excel. It’s pretty nifty and you can do all sorts of cool collaborative things like having a video call in the same screen as the document you’re collaboratively editing so you can all see the changes as they happen. Alas, no amount of nifty is going to convince the head of IT that the whole council (or even part of it) should ditch Microsoft overnight – the talk would have been much better if we could have had a group discussion about some of the barriers to adopting Google Enterprise technology and how we can overcome them in the long term. Just on the off-chance that you happen to be an enlightened IT manager, you should check out Google Enterprise – there are no Data Protection Act issues as all the data stays within the EU and we’re told it even works in Internet Explorer 6.
A welcome boost of energy came in a human form – Matthew ‘Chewy’ Trewhella [Update 19/8/09: Link removed, see note at end], a Google Customer Solutions Engineer (whatever that means) talked about all the cool, creative things you can do with YouTube, and even though a lot of it was business-based, there were some examples of some public sector creativity – check out this video made by the police where you get to pick the direction of the story at various intervals.
There are plenty of local authorities using YouTube (Westminster, Hillingdon, and Barnet to name a few) but the take-home message from this talk was ‘it’s the content, stupid’. If you make a boring, over-produced, corporate-looking video, no one will want to watch it and if you don’t link to it and make it easy for people to find it then they definitely won’t watch it. I.e. if you just embed a video on your homepage you’re not really getting it out there. If you’re making a video to post online then ask yourself if you would actually watch the same thing from your own council. If the answer’s a big fat no, then press delete and go back to the drawing board.
We had a whistle-stop look at Google’s mobile platform, Android (I turned out to be the only one in the room with a Google G1 phone, apart from the Googlers), which has the second-largest number of users of all mobile platforms. Sounds impressive until you realise that the iphone has the largest number at 65% and that Android has only 8% – still the second-largest but somehow that seems like less of an achievement when you see the numbers.
Since few people were really familiar with Android attention started to drift until Open Social and Friend Connect came up. The former lets you access your contacts and friends data across different social networks. As Adriana Lukas has pointed out in the past there are limitations – Open Social still doesn’t allow me to export that data and own it myself, it just opens doors between my various social networks. Friend Connect is an application that works with Open Social that lets you see your friends’ comments when you are on other websites, for example you could see what your friends think of a particular council service while they are on the web page of that service. It doesn’t sound immediately relevant to local government but I could see an example in which some environmental services pages use Open Social and Friend Connect to let you see your friends’ ‘carbon footprint’ and compare it to your own.
A final talk on Google Maps was where the disconnect with the local government audience really started to show outside of the Tweet stream. There was no mention of the role of Geographic Information System teams or tools (presumably due to a lack of research into local government) and the elephant in the room was the relationship with Ordnance Survey or lack thereof. When probed, it turned out that yes, it is in fact illegal for councils to use Google Maps as their mapping software due to a clause in Google’s terms and conditions that the Ordnance Survey takes issue with. I don’t know the details so I’m not going to try to reproduce them here, but there’s a very long discussion on the Google Maps API forum if you’re geeky enough to read through it all. It turns out you can use the paid-for Google Maps ‘Premier’ API, which is intended for companies that use maps as a core part of their business or use them on their intranet. Westminster Council uses the Premier version and they reckon it costs them £7700 per year, which is a tiered licence fee, base on predicted traffic.
Heads weary and batteries running low (metaphorically and practically speaking) the session ended and we were invited to hang around for some much-needed pizza and beer. There was lots of good chat and plenty of connecting and Dave Briggs is doing a good job of rounding-up the post-event write-ups (writes-up?)
In summary (!) the session with Google was a mixture of delight and puzzlement – they were kind enough to invite a bunch of local government geeks to their offices and give us a great insight into some excellent tools and technologies, but a little bit of research or more of a two-way conversation would have made it a constructive session that benefitted both Google and the local government sector. I understand there’s an intention to strike up more of a conversation in the wake of this session, which I hope I’ll be able to join once more details are known.
Phew – a whopper of a post, which will hopefully make up for my lack of blogging during July!
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Update 19/8/09:
Jon Cross from the Google Public Sector UK team has contacted me and asked if I would remove the link to Google staff Twitter accounts as they are ‘personal and not intended for business use’. I’ve deleted the links (although I see that Hamish Nicklin has deleted his Twitter account altogether). I wasn’t asked to remove any other links (e.g. to Xen Lategan’s LinkedIn profile), but I’ve done so for consistency. Jon would prefer people to link to the Google Public Sector UK team’s Twitter account, which you can find above.
When I last posted we were frantically trying to develop the site and pull together a presentation on our ideas, and fewer than 24 hours later it was all over and Mypolice.org was declared the winning idea at Social Innovation Camp 2009.
There’s a sort of overview available on the blog we’ve set up and if you want to be kept updated on how the project progresses over the next few months you can sign up on the website. Oh, and it’s @mypolice on Twitter. Notwithstanding some technical hitches on the day, our presentation was ace as we had some video clips from some actual real Glaswegians talking about their attitudes towards the police. When they’re ready I’ll link to them as they’re really worth a look/laugh.
The prize is some money, plus some free developer days, plus some business mentoring and a strong network of people who are in the know. The idea is quite simple so I don’t think it will take huge amounts of energy to get it up and running nicely, it’s just the inevitable struggle of getting the police to dabble with the site that will need all our patience/tenacity. Let me know if you know any friendly bobbys who might be interested in having a chat about it.
The limits of geography are annoying me – most of the others on the team are based in Glasgow so being down in London while meetings are going on is a bit frustrating. Hopefully I’ll stay involved, perhaps working with the police down here as I get the impression that the Met is a whole other kettle of coppers…
I’m working on MyPolice.org – a website where people can tell each other about their experiences of the police. The idea is that public feedback will help the police to give a better service. Although the idea isn’t exactly social innovation (something similar has worked for PatientOpinion and the NHS) it’s still a really nifty idea that’s fairly simple but potentially powerful.
So far we’ve gone nuts with the flipchart, post-its and whiteboard:
The group I’m in totally rocks – no egos and everyone working well together. Yes, really. The team (8 of us) is really strong on the design side, with about 4 service designers in our midst, so the site has been designed and mocked-up already. It’s being coded as I type, though I’m not sure how much we’ll be able to show at tomorrow’s presentation.
The main thing is going to be showing how we’ll work with the police to help them use the site to improve services. No one thinks the police are going to jump at the idea, but maybe we’ll find a few coppers who are willing to give it a try and get involved. If that does happen it will probably at a local level (Police Community Support Officers etc), though we have chatted it through with Nick Keane from the National Police Improvement Agency.
I’ll post here if we win, but even if we don’t I think the idea is still totally viable. Wish us luck!
I have this addiction to trying to change things, as you can gather from this blog, and it’s a bane theme of my life that I find myself dissatisfied with The World and feel compelled to do something about it. By ‘The World’ I probably mean social injustice. Why can’t I be one of those people who just mind their own business?
Anyway, as part of this quest to make some sort of impact I went along to The School of Life’s event How to Make a Difference last week with Dominic Campbell. He tweeted from the event so you can check out some of his tweets here, here and here.
I wasn’t sure what to expect but the whole thing was brilliant. I came away with a step-by-step practical guide on how to change the world, complete with theory and case studies. Amazing.
Maurice Glasman spoke about the Alinsky approach to community organising and showed how slavishly following the 12 rules Alinsky set out can actually work. How does he know? because that’s exactly what Obama did. And whatever you think of Obama, you can’t deny that his campaign worked. Glasman also gave us some personal examples of how it works from his experience of working with the London Living Wage campaign.
There are a few hang-ups I have to get over before I can totally make this approach work – for one I’m rubbish at conflict and have a tendency to want everyone to play nicely. This is completely unrealistic but undoubtedly a product of my upbringing. I can think of worse hang-ups to have, but the fact is that social change requires conflict. So from now on I’ll be saying: Suck it up, Nerd.
As long as you can get over the discomfort of conflict and accept that there needs to be a leader, I think these 12 rules will do very nicely. Alinsky is my new hero:
The Rulez
Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have
Never go outside the expertise of your people
Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of your enemy
Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules
Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon
A good tactic is one your people enjoy
A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag
Keep the pressure on. Never let up.
The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself
If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive
The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative
Pick the target, freeze it, personalise it and polarise it
Lots of these need more explanation than I’ve got space to give, but happily Alynski wrote a book called Rules for Radicals, which I’ve already ordered Social change: sorted.
I’ve chucked in a couple of ideas for Social Innovation Camp next month, which takes place in Scotland. I’ll be going there regardless of whether my ideas get picked but I figured in for a penny, in for a pound. Here they are:
I spoke at VRM Hub this week about the implications of VRM on the public sector. If you’re new to the idea of VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) then you should check out this nifty explanation by Adriana Lukas.
I thought it would probably be best to start with trying to figure out what I mean by ‘the state’, since we could be talking about a variety of bits of the spaghetti of government. In fact, the full list of all the different bits are on the Direct Gov website. There’s a prize if you can find the weirdest bit of government. I’m also thinking that in some cases charities or voluntary sector organisations could count as ‘the state’ since they are often grant funded by the government and therefore do their bidding.
The big question is why VRM matters for the state – there’s lots of good stuff about how it can help us transact with companies better but not much out there on how it can help us improve the balance in our relationship with government institutions. I think it’s crucial. For a start off, interaction with the state is complex and you can’t take control. We have little choice over how our data is used or kept safe (missing memory stick, anyone?) and we never have a complete picture of all our interactions.
We can be residents, citizens, customers, clients, patients, victims, criminals, volunteers and donors to name just a few, and we can be all of those things simultaneously. In some cases, lives are at stake. If we could understand more about our interactions with the state then we’d become better citizens – more informed people can take better decisions and maybe even provide for themselves, easing pressure on an already burdened system.
I nearly typed ‘broken system’ then because just the thought of introducing the idea of VRM to the public sector is not for the fainthearted. There are lots of hurdles, from the extreme risk aversion (AKA ‘blame aversion’) of officials (‘what if no one shares their data with us????!!’) through to worries about digital inclusion (‘we shouldn’t adopt new ways of engaging digitally when there are still some poor/old/disabled people who don’t have computers or broadband’).
There is also the difficulty of going too fast. I know – fast isn’t usually the problem with government. But I’m very nervous about the rush to ’scale’ VRM before any tools have been properly built or adopted. We had some debate at the VRM Hub session about how you could authenticate your bits and bobs like your passport, birth certificate, driving licence and soforth in order to make it easier to transact with the government.
While it’s obvious we will need a way to do this, I think it’s too soon to start trying to invent those ways now. I’m more interested in people being able to tell their local council their preferences, ideas, suggestions, needs and views and for the council to really listen to what people are saying and then design services accordingly. Maybe once the state is used to interacting with citizens on their own terms we will start to see entirely new ways of transacting, and only then will we be ready to design solutions to help this more balanced relationship to scale.
While there are undoubtedly challenges to bringing VRM tools to bear on the state, there are also some open doors. I think VRM will save state institutions money – possibly through having less of a need to store data (since we will be the source of our data); probably through deleting many of the pointless consultation teams that exist throughout local authorities and departments; but definitely through more accurate service design.
Another opportunity is the increasing acceptance that the government might actually need to have a relationship of sorts with its citizens – most recently expressed through the delightful ‘duty to involve‘ placed upon councils, which makes talking to people a legal requirement. I tend to think that if you have to rely on a law to make that happen then you’ve already lost the battle, but at least it’s bringing questions of how best to talk to people to the fore – make way for social media and of course, VRM. And with faith in political institutions at an all time low, there’s never been a better opportunity to introduce a radical re-think of the relationship between people and state.
If you’re interested in VRM and want to find out more, you should totally come along to the next VRM Hub meeting in June. They usually happen on the last Thursday of the month in central London, and you will find details and sign-up here nearer the time.
I like this thing. It’s an unofficial place where people can tell the government’s new Digital Engagement Director what they would like his task list to look like.
There’s lots on the list about freeing up data and getting government to be more open – I’d love to say DUH, because I think that’s kind of obvious, but alas we still need to say it. We need to free up the data sets so developers can use them creatively and make sites people will actually use.
If only we could go further, though. I want to see the data that the government has about me – from my medical records through to my CRM record with Camden Council, my Congestion Charge journeys as well as my tube and bus journeys, every image of me on CCTV, even. I could benefit from this information. I could learn stuff about my travel habits, for example, and start to move around the city more efficiently. I could cross refer my medical records with my dietary and exercise information to manage my health. I could find out when and why I have contacted the council over the last few years and start to become a better informed resident, perhaps even pre-empting when the lids of my recycling boxes get stolen to be used as a makeshift sledge during snowy weather so I don’t have to order new ones every year.
Ever hopeful (?!) I’ve stuck my wish on the Digital Engagment Director’s list of Things To Do. Give it a few votes if you fancy.
The session focused on how ‘the future’ will change civil society organisations and what the impact will be on their use of social media. I found it a bit of a mind-bending vortex because it was about trying to predict the future, which made me wish for a Delorean car from Back to the Future
In fact, our group found it much easier to think about what doesn’t change, rather than what will. We talked about human nature and how contexts may change but patterns of behaviour endure. That especially struck me because I’m reading a book about the 1920s at the moment, which makes clear the striking similarities between that era and our own.
What I really liked about the Carnegie UK Trust’s research is that they have identified three ‘fault lines’ that cut across the inquiry. They are:
The isolation of some groups
The erosion of areas for public debate
The marginalisation of dissent
The last of these is particularly important because we’re increasingly seeing the criminalisation of forms of protest (e.g. the ridiculous bureaucracy of protesting on Parliament Square) and the erosion of free speech (e.g. the use of the pejorative label ‘climate change denier‘ for anyone who expresses doubt about the evidence or plans for addressing global warming). Regardless of the views expressed, freedom to express them is so important but increasingly disregarded.
The last thing we discussed in the session was what civil society organisations can do to prepare for the future. My thoughts are that they can’t prepare for anything specific (after all, no one is Marty Mcfly)
but they can change their models to become more agile and adaptable, so that they’re ready for anything. Alas it’s easier said than done because the current funding models are constraining and often force charities to become mirrors of the lacklustre institutions that fund them. Finding a way to be self-sustaining with less of a dependency on grants is one way to adapt (though a good point was made by Nathalie McDermott that there are dangers in charities trying to ‘productize’ their work) and there was an interesting suggestion of adopting a mutual model from Andy Gibson.
We were also asked what the government can do from a policy or legal perspective to allow civil society organisations to adapt, which leads me to the title of this post. The legal landscape around civil society organisations is so ridiculously complex that it’s not really worth bothering. The structures and requirements are from a time gone by and to try to unpick the spaghetti of legislation and governnace would be futile. Instead, let’s just get on with doing what we need to do to make these organisations adaptable – twizzle a fork in the spaghetti so to speak – if anyone challenges our actions then we can use it as an opportunity to have a public debate about the need to modernise. If we start with that debate we’ll never get anything done.
There was plenty more discussion and it was a good mix of people (astonishingly more women than men in the room – not sure what cosmic forces were at play there). Suw Charman-Anderson facilitated the session and has done an overview here; David Wilcox has blogged his thoughts here; and you can see some tweets from the day here. I’m looking forward to reading the final report.
Man next to me on the plane - would you like a tissue before we take off? Or do you intend to sniff like that the entire flight? 2 days ago
RT @rich_w: @2pallas: Another "yr local bloodbank is short of blood" ad on Spotify. If u let gay pple donate u might have less of a problem. 2 days ago
Alas I have no one to blame but myself. I suck. 2 days ago
