A doorhandle, yesterday.

It’s in it’s early stages, but go and have a look at Finchlinks and tell me what you think?

The whole idea behind hyperlocality is that you build a web-c0mmunity that can create the kind of energy and momentum that will encourage local voluntary organnisations to talk to local people (and each other) more effectively, to get business networks working well and to improve the quality of local dialogue – something that local councillors get listen in on and improve the way they represent you.

The whole hyperlocal thing is covered in some detail on this community website.

You’ll see that we have a ‘seen elsewhere’ block on the side of this site and it will carry stories of interest from all some of the other local websites that we have listed in our sidebar.

There are some we will link to regularly. There are some that we will either link to very rarely or not at all – not because we’ve got anything against them, but because they don’t have an RSS feed.

This isn’t all about us either. RSS feeds allow those sites to get more readers and allow other sites to carry their content. They’re a sort of magic bullet that increases the reach of those websites dramatically.

I work as a web-consultant to government departments, agencies, businesses, local government, trades unions and the voluntary sector. In many cases, the first thing I look for in their websites is an RSS feed, and if one of my paying clients said to me…..

“If you had a choice between a horrible looking website with an RSS feed or a great looking one without one, which would you chose?”

I’d always pick the horrible-looking one with the RSS feed. There are some consultants who sell their clients what they think they need rather than what they actually need, and this explains why there are so many beautifully designed sites without RSS feeds. Economists explain this phenomenon with the illustration of the ‘market for lemons’, and I’ve mentioned this here before.

Anyway, back to the point about local websites: Here’s a list of the sites we’ve got in the sidebar of that site at the moment. I’ve put an asterisk  next to the ones that don’t have any RSS feeds or any other obvious sort of syndication.

Ironically, this isn’t normally a question of cost. The best, cheapest web-development software has a free set of RSS tools. And it really is important. It’s like building a block of flats and forgetting to add the doorhandles.

Here’s a short video explaining what RSS does:

I’d suggest that – if local community websites had RSS feeds – all kinds of potential to build a lively local community of well-visited websites that reference each other could be realised. The Phoenix Cinema and the ArtsDepot would sell more tickets!

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“Since the 2005 election, we have raced past the tipping point. Facebook has 23 million British users. About half of the eligible voters are social networkers, sharing and seeking recommendations among peers rather than trusting broadcast messages. The real contest is not the three-way blogs/newspapers/politicians fight, but how effectively each can cast its bait into the social networking sites, and who will have the greatest effect.”

So the creation of good viral objects may make a big difference? Apropos of that, yesterday, the people behind MyDavidCameron added a new string to their bows: MyToryTombstone.

Whatever else it does in terms of damaging the Tories (I’m sure the Tories have plans of their own on this front), this comment really sums up how difficult it will be for parties to get their narrative out this year.

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I’ve been very interested in Ty Goddard’s work for a while now – BCSE grew partly out of an idea called School Works – a project intended to promote a more participative approach to the design of schools.

The basic premise is a simple one: The more progressive architects have worked out that it is a sensible thing to do to involve residents in the design of their own neighbourhoods. Long before anyone had ever heard of Clay Shirky, there was ample evidence that the people outside an organisation have more knowledge on a particular subject than the people inside the organisation that – supposedly – have specialist skills.

The benefits of co-designing an environment with the people who are going to live in it are obvious. As the blurb on this booklet on consensus design puts it, …“it can have an influence on social stability, crime-reduction, personal health and building longevity, all of which in turn have monetary and environmental cost implications.” Ty surmised that similar benefits could come from a more participative approach to the design of schools.

Now The Centre for School Design is not only – or even mainly – about consensus design. It is about raising the profile – or as counter-terrorism experts put it, the ‘chatter level‘ around the question of education, design and the built environment.

Ty and Ian from BCSE think that this is an important issue – that it has the potential to game-change the education debate. As long as the whole debate remains in narrow silos – dominated by higher-up civil servants, the think tanks that they commission and the commercial players that have the resources to gatecrash that conversation – then the quality of policymaking is likely to be lower. The dangers of regulatory capture and of budget maximisation are higher.

Think tanks, after all, do almost nothing to market the work that they are commissioned to do. Six or seven-figure research contracts that are handed out result in publications that are not disseminated widely or publicised effectively. They are rarely written to be read by parents, teachers, school governors or local councillors. They are written exclusively for the tiny clique of budget-holders that see the final result before handing a sanitised version to the ministers in question. It results in bad and expensive policymaking.

Jenni Russell in the Guardian summarised this beautifully here:

Clarke appeared to be a rare example of an education secretary who was prepared to entertain the possibility that the government wasn’t always right. He published a document encouraging primaries to be more creative and flexible in their teaching, but he moved on before he could lend political muscle to that instruction.

Since then, every education secretary and minister has been distinguished by an almost wilful determination to ignore the mass of research that does not suit their agenda. Politically, that is the easiest choice. They are encouraged in this by their senior civil servants, whose careers have been built around delivering a particular agenda, and who have nothing to gain by seeing it change course. What is truly alarming is that ministers rarely even glimpse the reports they dismiss. Last year I mentioned a particularly critical Ofsted report to one minister. “Oh, my people tell me there’s nothing new in that,” he said, breezily. In fact, it had a great deal that was new, and important, and the individuals who put thousands of man-hours into preparing it were probably writing it for an audience of three – of which the minister who never read it was the most important one.

Increasing the chatter around school design is what The Centre for School Design is all about. The site will make all of their pictures (and they have a vast bank of these) available to journalist under a creative commons licence (eventually – loading up and tagging the pics properly is not a trivial job). Any journo that wants a good quality pic to illustrate a story can use them freely.

Similarly, the C4SD will be paying out the huge bank of case-studies and experience that BCSE have picked up on a daily basis and making it all available under a suitable creative commons licence. The aim is to build up an open, inclusive and growing community that is interested in discussing and explaining the issues around school design to each other. If you want to re-use C4SD content to stoke up the debate, copyright worries won’t get in your way.

In short, I’ve been helping them develop a strategy that pushes their knowledge in an open-handed way to the public. Ty isn’t the classic geek by any means. He’s a highly interactive person as his track-record in promoting participation proves. But, up until now, he’s not used interactive technologies much.

This is the potential that’s going to emerge in the next few years. All of the non-techie-but-very-interactive people are finding these tools are easier and more rewarding to use. Organisations like the C4SD will raise the chatter level and make it harder for narrow cliques to capture and close down public policy discussions in future.

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So people using the Internet for online transactions will only put the time in if it’s worthwhile to them, is this true for people going online to ‘have their say’? If they get some utility out of it (be it lower taxes / regulatory burdens or a sense of self-satisfaction in doing the right thing)? If we apply this to e-participation, the only conclusion that we can draw is that it will tend towards creating an auction house where policy is driven either by self-interest of self-satisfaction. Or, put another way, the dictatorship of the greedy and the smug.

As the analysis of people doing e-transactions with local government, we should surely apply an understanding of utility to all interactions with government. It will happen when people get something out of it. More importantly, they apply the same ‘opportunity cost’ calculation to it as they would to anything else. Do I need to be doing something else with my time?

Of course, this makes a massive case for investment in ‘usability’ (and going beyond usability – almost into seduction) – making the online experience a compelling and pleasurable one. Compelling, not compulsory, as David Barrie puts it here. The ‘Nudge‘ argument, if you like? But it also makes the case for investment of time and energy in ways of getting people to make quick light responses on issues where they care very slightly rather than strongly.

Is there a case for using mobile phones to do surveys – sending people text messages and saying ‘answer our five questions and we’ll refund £2 from your council tax.’ This will incentivise people who….

• don’t have access to a computer, sufficient bandwidth or a local authority that could design a usable interface if their lives depended upon it
• don’t care about specific issues enough to sit through a clunky consultation questionnaire online
• think that saving £2 would make a slight difference to their lives

In other words, exactly the opposite kind of people who normally get involved in consultations in order to provide responses that are unrepresentative (and therefore, often worthless). If – instead of valuing people’s time at £0, we value it at £2 (or whatever figure finds the right equilibrium), we will get a more representative sample of collective wisdom.

I’ve been researching mobile phone multi-question survey platforms and I’d be interested to see if any local authority and government body would consider this approach instead of the usual ‘come to our website and Have Your Say’?

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There is often something of a dialogue of the deaf between those who have spent some time thinking about social media in some depth, and those who are in the day-to-day trenches of local government communications.

Certainly, most of the conversations I’ve had around how the internet will impact upon democracy have been around the use of the council website, the need to capture emails for mailing lists, increase traffic to the council site, how we can get our councillors to tweet or blog or other, understandable immediate questions.

People have a job to do. They are finding that all of these annoying geeks are making it more difficult for them with their FOI requests, their defamatory blogs, and so on. They feel that they’re in an arms race that they can’t win. They want to recruit some of these tools and methods to work in their favour: The most common question is a telling one: “How do we use Twitter to get our message out?”

Social media people, on the other hand, have a slightly different definition of democracy. They talk in abstract terms about the need for open data. The need for net-neutrality and the importance of community building. The potential for crowdsourcing intelligence, the need for creative commons resources and so on. They don’t want to read your website – they want to write it. It’s an interesting twist on the idea that government should do nothing about us without us.

I would suggest that there is a real need for local government policy-makers to engage with this subject a good deal more than they do, and to start to model how it will effect councils and the work they do in the near future. The thing is, doing so may solve all of their problems.

I’ll illustrate this point by looking at the vexed question of local newspapers – the need for them to improve, and the widespread belief that this won’t happen.

As Thomas Jefferson said:

“If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.”

Yet councils are often in a position where they believe that they may have to choose the former. Many are beginning to despair of ever having responsible local reporters to bounce off, they are – in the short term – increasing their communications budgets and beginning to print their own. On the one hand, they can deal with overworked / lazy (delete as applicable) local journalists who aren’t capable of portraying local issues in a way that is of any use to local people or politicians.

On the other hand, they have to tread a fine line where they have to present the work of the council in a way that doesn’t compromise their obligation not to spend public money promoting incumbent councillors. They have to get further into this constipated argument the hamstrings so much local government communications (none of this is a new theme here). And its all a problem caused by the perfect storm of declining print-profits and competition from the Internet.

But will this always be the case? Journalistic doyenne, Tina Brown thinks not. She believes that the Internet is about to deliver a golden age in journalism – one that she is hoping to mine with her Daily Beast.

Is this true? Well, firstly, the lack of a business model for The Beast does slightly undermine this claim, but – like Brown – I’m inclined to the view that high-quality news coverage may be facing the death knell that the music industry thought I was looking at when it saw the first Rio Diamond MP3 player in the mid-1990s. I suspect that new ways of financing content may create profits that dwarf those that were enjoyed by print-media in its heyday, and a glance at the rubber newspaper may offer a clue here?

The two big questions for me are these:

1. Will this result in a greater degree of centralisation? Will the big media groups that have the muscle to invest in freemium services rapidly steal a march by focussing on high-traffic offerings (International football instead of Accrington Stanley) – thereby concentrating on the very profitable at the expense of the slightly profitable local coverage?
2. Will this benefit the current local media monopolies? Will it create new revenues that will largely fund shareholders dividends without halting the decline that these (very profitable) businesses have already allowed journalism to decline to?

It’s a hunch, but I’d answer no to both of these questions. But to fully explain the reasons behind this, I’d need to write an essay on net neutrality, open source software, open data, creative commons resources and the crowdsourcing of intelligence.

But as a stop-gap, I’d urge anyone working in local government communications to think about the emerging local information hubs such as those promoted by Talk about Local or Nick Booth’s Help Me Investigate - I suspect that they are far more important than they appear to be at the moment.

It’s been around for a while, but here’s Will Perrin’s pitch here – well worth a look:

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Following the PICamp event at Reboot Britain in July, a number of disputes have been bubbling away around the question of whether local authorities should be producing their own newspapers or not. Here are a few dips into the debate over on The Local Democracy Blog:

• Is it time for local authorities to enable many individuals to break the monopoly that their own staff have on describing their services?
• Are councils only doing this because local newspapers are letting us all down in the first place?
• If local government officers can’t be relied upon to offer a politically balanced portrait of their services, are journalists any more reliable?
• Journalists often claim to offer the required level of scepticism. Do they, instead offer a more corrosive cynicism?

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1. We want to write your website – not read it So: It’s now official. Local authorities are going to be...

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These have been fleshed out a good deal on my Local Democracy blog, but in summary, there are two key observations that I’d make following the PICamp sessions at NESTA’s Reboot Britain conference last week:

1. The changes being brought about by the technology are not politically neutral ones. While there is a commonplace observation that they empower some social groups, the corrollary that they disempower others is being explored less widely. When the Labour Representation Committee was established in the late 19th Century, it was launched to address the problems that were created by a democratic franchise that had been extended to include working men, but one that working men were not inclined to use because of structural barriers.
2. Many of the potential benefits that social media can bring to organisations are blocked because of a lack of political leadership. Increasing the degree to which organisations consult and include people is a political question – one that a lot of politicians and senior managers are not keen on. It may take the sort of campaigning action that we have traditionally associated with politics to change this. Thus the Interactive Charter.

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We had some great coverage from the BBC’s Hearts & Minds programme – Nothern Ireland’s Thursday evening political slot.

Steve Lawson liveblogged the whole day heroically here including some audioclips that can be listened to continuously here. Alan also covered the day very well here.If that’s not enought, you can see the day’s tweets on the picamp twitter search.

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I’m working with the Slugger O’Toole weblog and Amplified ’09 in doing this, and we’re hoping to have sixteen sessions (that’s how many we have time and space for) – each one initiated by attendees.

The most exciting thing about this is that it will have an urgent and collaborative feel to it. Unlike other political conferences, there will be nothing at stake. We won’t be hammering out any composite motions or resolutions. We won’t be agreeing a set of demands that we are going to put to MPs or to the leadership of any political party.

Instead, we’ll be putting the onus on each other to come up with ideas that can change the game – and in Northern Ireland, there are plenty of games that have gone every far into extra time. There is no reward here for unrealistic idealism or sloppy thinking.

It’s about bringing people together – many of whom have never met before – and getting them talking to each other about how they can co-operate and collaborate. It’s the first event of it’s kind, and one that we’d like to roll out elsewhere – if it works in Belfast.

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