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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It’s quite a brilliant idea of Tim’s and I’ve written about it here on the Local Democracy blog. My shorter version of a long post is this:

Often, the minor technical obstacles mask a wider small-p political obstructionism to the promotion of a more interactive form of government.

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Experience designing Russian doll-related websites an advantage

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Marxism Today?

Even after Googling for ten minutes or so, I was unable to work out whether it was Groucho Marx or George Burns who said, “The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” 

That may be true for actors, but one of the hardest lessons that brands, politicians and marketers are learning at the moment.

In a highly preceptive networked society, faking sincerity is a fool’s errand. 

Looking at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s Ethics Code (via Kathryn’s very informative slideshow), I see this:

4. Word of mouth cannot be faked. 
Deception, infiltration, dishonesty, shilling, and other attempts to manipulate consumers or the conversation are bad. Honest marketers do not do this, will not do this, and will get caught if they try. Sleazy behavior will be exposed by the public and backfire horribly on anyone who attempts it. 

This observation presents a huge opportunity for Trades Unions. They have all of the properties that enable an organisation to prosper in a networked world – not only in terms of recruitment, but in terms of improving the way that they leverage their membership as an agency of mutual support.

Where organisations that don’t have the willing mutuality of trades unions (and I’d suggest that this is stronger among the smaller unions), they are obliged to attempt astroturfing. Which – as the WOMMA code tells them, is ultimately doomed to failure. I could add more to this, but if you have a look at Anne McCrossan’s post on reciprocity, you’ll see what an advantage Trades Unions could enjoy here without really having to work too hard at it.

Of course, in order to do the recruitment, Unions need to get the basics right (as I outlined in this post a while ago). But once that’s done, active moves to encourage members to use social media tools to relay the message can have a huge impact.

However, the devil is in the detail of that last paragraph. If you are….

a) A trades unionist

b) One that has read this far

… let me offer you a wager:

I bet that you are a social media user who wishes that your TU colleagues could just start to get the potential that social media offers, and to start using it themselves?

If I’m right, you may find it useful to have a look at this.

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Though there are lots of ways to make a document available for commenting online, I’ve still not seen anything as effective as the use of a slightly hacked blog in allowing the public to get into the detail of a document. A few years ago, the Power Enquiry made it’s findings available in this way.

Last week, after the Digital Britain report was published (and criticised for not having been very consultative in it’s origins, a blogger put it online in a commentable way. The best example I’ve seen in terms of an attractive interface and a useable design also was published in the last week or so – the Power of Information Taskforce report – done by a group of people who have really lived with this way of discussing policy documents for a long time now.

Slugger O’Toole editor Mick Fealty and I had planned to do something about the Eames Bradley report anyway, and when I saw the Power of Information site, I jumped on it. The system is open-source and I’ve had a few conversations with Steph Gray the lead developer about other matters, so I was comfortable about giving it a try. And – with a bit of intervention from Steph – clearing up a few bugs – we got it up and running with all of the content added in a few days, and it’s being launched this morning at 9am.

This is a hugely interesting project for me, for a couple of reasons:

1. All of the examples of comment-blogs that I’ve seen have been done on techie subjects or with very metropolitan focus. This is different. It will be a first step into this kind of deliberation for many of the participants, and the subject is a particularly thorny one. All of the other consultations I’ve mentioned here can expect to be discussed with a fair degree of detachment. But the question of closing the wounds that were opened over thirty years in Northern Ireland is a different matter altogether. Keeping this conversation going in an effective and useful way will take the managers of this site into somewhat unchartered territory. The results will be interesting.
2. Slugger O’Toole is a unique site. It has a huge reach in Northern Ireland that political bloggers elsewhere can barely comprehend. It also has a reputation for civility of a kind that is rare in the political blogosphere. Slugger sometimes erupts, and can often be quite combative – but nothing like as abrasive as Northern Ireland’s politics can be – and significantly more civilised than any other large-volume political blog that I’ve come across elsewhere. Slugger can bring the numbers – and the tone that is needed.

All of the ingredients are there then. If any site can run an effective consultation on a highly controversial issue, Slugger O’Toole will do it. I’m hoping that we can learn a lot from this before applying it elsewhere.

Slugger’s announcement is here.

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Economists have a term for the way that quality is driven out of markets where purchasers don’t have a way of measuring quality. It’s called ‘the market for lemons’

Take web-accessibility for instance: Every governmental body needs to have it. Very few know what it really means – but they put it in their procurement documents as a must-have.

IT project management in highly disrupted organisations is a nightmare at the best of times. Getting the core functionality negotiated and delivered with suppliers who have won the bid on price is hard enough as it is. Management of these projects is often done by people who wouldn’t have the expertise to make a judgment on whether a website is accessible or not.

The rational supplier will, therefore, always say that their sites are accessible and go in with a low-ish bid in order to win the business.

They will then deliver a site that isn’t accessible (because this would require investment in expertise and training – as well as hard-to-find designers who understand WCAG compliance). The customer won’t pull them up on it because they’re to busy scrapping with the supplier to even get the html editor to work in Firefox. And any company that has invested in the expertise needed will lay off the staff that know this stuff because they aren’t earning their keep.

Ask a Sharepoint advocating IT manager if it’s accessible – they will say yes. But it usually isn’t.

Until governmental bodies can procure services in a human way – building relationships with trusted individuals within their supplier chain – this decline in quality will continue unabated.

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Once I’ve done that, the next step is to find an application that can improve the quality of that interaction….

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Projects that failed because the wrong CMS was chosen, because the project management wasn’t up to scratch, because the client didn’t have a clue what they really wanted, that the client thought that they could procure a supplier and go away for six weeks, returning to find a perfect website management system that had a telepathic intuition for what they wanted …. and so on.

I’ve seen some projects really succeed as well though. Here’s a useful set of white papers and video resources for anyone who is planning a new major website project in the near future.

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