An incomplete field-spotters guide to the jungle beasts of the social media enterprise

Herewith in a half-dozen crisp pen-portraits, a description of some of the characters you are sure to meet as a missionary for social media in the curious jungle of social media in the enterprise:

Macaques are fun and infuriating. They love to experiment, grabbing something and leaping away to play with it. They’re sociable types too, but defend their own space. You’ll wonder where that thing of yours went, only to find a cheeky macacque making a rude gesture with it, and then throwing it at you when you turn your back.

Camels are generally miserable, unyielding and obstructive where possible. They do Real Work, have always done it a certain way, and won’t be persuaded that any other way exists. They cast you a look of disdain through their long eyelashes, and give you a sneaky kick if you get too close.

Puppies are endearing (I told you it was a strange old jungle). They crave attention and have seemingly boundless energy. Never too busy to play with a new toy, they gnaw things to shreds, unleash loo rolls throughout the house and run up expectantly for the pat on the head they know they’ll get.

Crocodiles lurk in the shallows and appear at first to be a helpful log to cross the stream. Big mistake: they’ll cost you an arm.

Owls watch and learn. You hardly notice they’re there, as they tentatively edge along the twig towards you. They aren’t afraid of new ideas and do things thoroughly and deliberately. In fact, because they take time to learn and practice, they often end up as the experts.

Bison are herd animals. They do things when others do them, and don’t want to be the first to explore a new domain. They worry that striking off in a new direction will leave them exposed. And they know, rightly, that lions come and go like the seasons, but the herd will always remain.

Photo credits (Flickr): Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton, chotda, Tambako the Jaguar, meantux, Dom Dada and me

The Someday List: 1. Licensing

Seems all the cool kids are doing a series of themed blog posts, so I’ll join the party: over the next few weeks I’m going to cover four topics from my ‘Someday/Maybe’ list of applying social media in government:

• Licensing
• Accessibility
• Guidance
• Evaluation

Let’s start with the one I’m most sketchy about: licensing.

Image credit: Marcin Wichary (licensed under Creative Commons)

A couple of weeks ago, Richard Allen from the Power of Information Taskforce posted a useful set of links for local authorities looking to unlock the power of their information, including some basic information about Click-Use licensing, which I’ve come across but never fully got my head around.

I like all the PoI data reuse stuff - it speaks to me. For a couple of years now, I’ve run a website which tries to get public sector jobs information out to a wider audience (and 20,000 visitors/month seem to want it). Like others (I suspect), I have a soft spot for Neighbourhood Statistics, from my mis-spent time trying in vain to find a way to make it usable. And I love services like UniStats when I come across them at work.

But I’ve got a day job which is mainly about other things. I said in a plaintive comment on the PoI blog:

“This isn’t a whine, but to be honest these issues are just too far down my list to really get the attention they need, and my team is too small for us to really get under the skin of it. I suspect there are many of us in government temperamentally predisposed to open up the information we help to manage, but never quite managing to get it done. Similarly when it comes to building APIs to data.

Could the Taskforce provide some kind of help - boiled down practical guidance, a helpdesk, some priorities, template business cases or model approaches - that we could use to help us move foreward in this area quickly and confidently?”

Contrary to Wired’s provocative nonsense, that comment led to a flurry of activity. Adrian Norman got in touch via this blog, and we met today to chat about markets and precedents in public sector information, marginal cost, FoI, and the problem of incentives for people in government to make their data readily re-usable. He has an ambitious solution of his own: use software to auto-generate Information Asset Registers for public sector organisations, linked to a Europe-wide marketplace where the costs and value of the data can be more transparently assessed and the information more easily traded. If nothing else, he reminded me of the market value of what we hold, and that it’s not necessarily about giving stuff away for free.

Another response to my query came from Carol Tullo, Director of Information Policy and Systems at OPSI who gently suggested I make contact and tap into their help, which I’m doing at a meeting next week.

Which brings me to my point: what would be useful to know, as busy, jobbing webbies - the gatekeepers and enthusiasts for low-cost web publishing - to help us kick start more data syndication, licensing and re-use in our organisations?

Here’s my starter for ten (eagle-eyed readers will spot that I don’t have the foggiest about any of this, and a seriously non-legal mind):

• We have increasing amounts of content (pictures, video, blog posts, methodology documents etc) which I’d like to share with the world, for others to comment on, adapt and reuse. What’s the best way to do that?
• Can we license stuff under GPL or Creative Commons?
• What if we use open source stuff and build upon it - can we ’share alike’ under the same terms?
• If it’s created by a Civil Servant, I understand it’s probably Crown Copyright, but I’m not sure what that means from a reuse perspective. I know it sometimes get waived anyway. So what’s the deal there?
• I’ve heard dark things about the legal terms imposed by some of the online services out there such as YouTube. What should we be watching out for, if anything?
• What really is ‘Click Use’ and is it the solution to my quest for a simple Creative Commons-style licence I can slap on stuff we create?
• What should I say when talking to data holders in my department about this, and convince them to (i) look for and (ii) store and publish in reusable ways the data they hold?

That’s my list so far: what would you like me to ask about? Or what has your experience been?

Five ways to publish commentable documents online

Imagine the scenario: They Who Must Be Obeyed want feedback on the new report they’re publishing next week. It’s a dozen or so pages long with fairly basic formatting (yes, I do indeed live in a dream world). Let’s assume for now that they genuinely do want feedback, and want it fast and cheap. The question is therefore how best to publish this document online for comment.

Image credit: Matthew Oliphant

The conventional approach would be to turn it into a PDF, upload it to the corporate site linked from a page with some details on how to send in comments by email. Maybe whip together a feedback form or a quick SurveyMonkey questionnaire. In most cases, this is probably a good idea anyway, providing a long term record, a printable version and a baseline of information in accessible form (you tag your PDFs, don’t you?). But with social media tools, we can do better.

An interesting call with Colin McKay got me thinking about some of the different tools available which I thought I’d write up here:

1. Wordpress + Commentpress
Examples: Innovation Nation: Interactive, Open Rights Group internal consultation on legislative options to address illicit P2P file-sharing

When this challenge first arose for me a few months ago, I was inspired by the ORG example above to set up a WordPress installation with the CommentPress theme (also open source). CommentPress takes a normal WordPress installation and with some Javascript cleverness, makes each paragraph of the post into a commentable item in its own right. Click on the speech bubble next to the paragraph, and up pops a comment box, including the ability to reply to specific messages posted previously.

Pros: cheap, can do in-house on your own servers running WordPress, nice functionality
Cons: a big WordPress hack, can be slow on large documents, not fully accessible, can require some CSS fiddling to make it look presentable, hard to ‘close’ commenting

2. Typepad/Wordpress - multiple posts, reverse order
Examples: Ofcom review of Public Sector Broadcasting, DIUS Higher Education Debate blog

A typical blog category page lists all the posts in that category in reverse chronological order, right? And each post has its own comments? So: if you want to make each paragraph or section commentable, just upload it as a post in the appropriate chapter, working backwards from the end of the document. That’s the brilliantly simple approach Ofcom took to their recent consultations, based on the Typepad hosted blogging platform.

Pros: simple, no fancy themes needed, accessible, can do on any blogging platform
Cons: laborious to set up, marginally more effort for readers to leave comments

3. Co-ment
Example: generic text example at Co-ment.net

Co-ment is an interesting open-source and hosted tool which offers an experience more like tracked changes online. Upload your document and set up the preferences, and then readers can select and comment on the exact words and phrases they choose.

Pros: sophisticated, embeddable on your own site
Cons: rather minimalist aesthetic, self-hosted option not for the feint-hearted, not fully accessible

4. Scribd
Example: information risk assessment template

If speed is of the essence, the formatting is complicated and document-level commenting is fine, Scribd offers Slideshare-like functionality, turning a PDF or Office document into a rich Flash box, complete with zoom, search and comments.

Pros: sophisticated, quick, embeddable on your own site, can deal with tricky document layouts
Cons: not fully accessible, externally hosted

5. Wiki or Google Docs
Example Google Doc, GovHack wiki

Finally, of course you could post the text so it is not only commentable but editable too. Probably only suitable for certain documents, your wiki may allow you to lock the original text but allow discussion of it within the ‘Comment’ or ‘Discuss’ tab which sits behind the editable page itself. Google Docs allows you and your invited collaborators to add Word-style yellow comments to the document, giving you some of the benefits of Tracked Changes but without the multiple versions headaches.

Pros: potentially cheap, flexible, good for a trusted group, possibly embeddable on your own site
Cons: harder for readers to use, may require logins, if the text is editable then becomes harder to moderate and manage

What other ways can you think of for making documents commentable online? Let me know in the comments.

Why I love social bookmarking

Sadly, I missed Jenny Bee’s session titled ‘Why I love Twitter’ at the UKGovWeb Barcamp back in January, but if I were ever to run one, I’d have to call it ‘Why I love Social Bookmarking’.

Let me count the ways:

1. It frees your favourites. I have a computer at home, and a computer at work. I find interesting websites using both machines. Previously, I had separate, messy bookmarks on each machine. Now, I have access to my favourites from wherever I am, using my toolbar buttons. (n.b. IT won’t let you install toolbar buttons at work? Set yourself up a bookmarklet instead)
2. It lets you multicode, with tags. Previously, I had folders of favourites. A website was either ‘funnies’ OR it was ‘web design inspiration’. Now it can be both, and easily searchable.
3. It lets you send interesting stuff to other people. Find something interesting, copy the URL, email it to your friend with a quick comment. So last century. Now, I just tag it as a social bookmark for:username and it will pop up in my friend’s list of bookmarks to review as and when they want, keeping their email inbox uncluttered. (In the real world, this only works with real social bookmarking geeks but I live in hope).
4. It can generate the most relevant RSS feeds you’ll ever read. My latest approach to the challenge of tracking the comments I’ve left elsewhere, is to bookmark the comments section of those posts with a specific tag. I can then pipe the RSS for that tag into my blog sidebar to bring together all the blurb I’ve been saying, whether it’s on my blog or someone else’s. At work too, we’re using a similar technique to keep track of useful content on specific subjects and pipe this into Netvibes-based dashboards as a sort of ‘Editor’s Picks’ from the web.
5. It generates content, all by itself. A list of links and short descriptions that you’ve compiled might be of interest to other people. NESTA’s research group use social bookmarking to collate and share links as a team, and then simply publish them as an email newsletter digest each fortnight. Or you can track interesting online debates and feature them on your site. Or you could just publish your interesting finds as a daily blog post (I pick up all kinds of interesting stuff from Dom that way)

And I don’t even use it the way it was intended to be used: to discover interesting things others have tagged in similar ways.

So, if you aren’t doing it already already, kick start your reflection of the web: start social bookmarking.

Innovating in small steps

There’s social media which constitutes a great leap forward, and then there’s social media which, while only arguably social, is still better than what went before.

It’s been quite a frantic week, partly driven by the launch of the new Work Skills command paper online which falls squarely into the second camp. When the team’s busy, and a document needs to be turned round quickly, it’s natural to take the easy route when it comes to publishing online - create a PDF and stick it on the website along with the press notice.

The brief for Work Skills was to create something more engaging, showing the progress being made on integrating the employment and skills systems across the country. A great team from DIUS, DWP, and LSC supported by design agency Bell and several video production firms managed to pull together an online document which - while by no means cutting edge - helps to tell some engaging stories through video case studies of people who have benefited from policy changes.

I dreamed about using CoverItLive, Twitter, Qik and more to cover the launch, but frankly didn’t have the manpower or rationale to justify them. We could have tried something with Google Maps and YouTube, but the simple Flash player which was built just seemed like the easier and more reliable option. I’m proud of the simple and good value site we’ve ended up with: something that focuses on the stories rather than technology, makes a real effort at accessibility, and toes the line of Transformational Government. Command Paper 1.5 maybe. A step forward for online communication of a policy document. I think it’s through this kind of everyday innovation - slightly different, slightly better that we’ll make real progress over time.

And of course, you can download the PDF if you want to