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

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• 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?

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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.

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So today: a bit of a break from the usual applied social media stuff - here’s my quick primer on what some of the main concepts are and how they relate to each other. I won’t even list the caveats: for a start, this only describes a handful of the relevant technologies out there, and I’m no expert in any of them - I’ve tried to be concise rather than accurate.

HTML: how it’s structured
HyperText Markup Language is in the middle of my ’spectrum’ but a good place to start. HTML is the framework of a webpage, containing the content. It describes what the different parts of the page are - this bit’s a heading, this bit’s a list, this phrase is a link to another page etc. The ‘markup’ refers to the fact that it takes plain text and by wrapping certain phrases in tags, demonstrates to a web browser how that bit should be presented.

CSS: what it looks like
If HTML gives the structure, then Cascading Style Sheets describe the appearance. So when I say HTML tags demonstrate how something should be presented, that’s just the starting point. CSS lets you override the defaults and specify things like colours, fonts, borders and backgrounds, as well as radically altering the layout of a page. The fact that the leading web browsers tend to display the same CSS in different ways is both a charming thread in life’s rich tapestry and the reason why a web designer on a deadline should never be approached without body armour.

Javascript: how it behaves
Once loaded, a regular web page made of HTML and CSS will just sit there for you to read. Javascript transforms the page into something which responds in different ways when you click or drag something - like a Google map or a box that expands when you click on its title. Javascript is a ‘proper’ programming language, where the instructions are sent over the internet to your web browser and then run on your computer - also referred to as ‘client-side’. It can also change parts of the page automatically after loading, which makes it handy for things like widgets where you want to insert something from elsewhere into your page (it’s the J in AJAX, but that’s a whole other story). n.b. For extra pub quiz points: Javascript has virtually nothing to do with Java.

XML: what it represents
Extensible Markup Language isn’t a feature of all websites, but’s its increasingly common - RSS feeds are a form of XML. It looks a lot like HTML but it does more than just describe the structure of a page; it describes what the information actually is. So, for example, an RSS feed denotes a list of items, each with a title, a link and a description - which gives enough information for machines elsewhere on the internet to process those items in meaningful ways (aka Semantic Web): displaying them as a list of news stories, for example.

PHP: how it’s processed
PHP (the acronym is meaningless, honestly) is another proper programming language, but unlike Javascript which runs within your web browser, PHP is ’server side’ i.e. it runs on the web server and the results are sent to you over the interweb, normally as HTML. For example: you click a button on a web page, the information you’ve provided is sent to the server, a PHP script processes it (stores it in a database, sorts it in alphabetical order, emails it to somebody, whatever) and then sends you a result (maybe a confirmation page). Lots of other languages do the same thing: ASP.NET, Perl and Ruby on Rails to name a few.

SQL: the relationships between the data
Structured Query Language in flavours such as MySQL are database management tools. At one level, they provide commands for PHP or other script to send information to and from a database, like a user’s profile information or shopping cart contents. More profoundly, the way these databases are designed should reflect the relationships between real world concepts: searching your library’s online catalogue might involve looking in the ‘Authors’ table and returning a list of all the associated items in the ‘Book’ table along with one or more associated ‘Genres’ from another table.

Linux/Apache: the way requests are handled
Worth a mention are the operating systems and software which run the web servers on which the databases and scripts operate. On the open source side, there’s the Linux operating system (various flavours) on which people generally run the Apache web server software - a constantly-running program which handles requests for web pages from browsers, pieces together the appropriate HTML pages including running any scripts if necessary, and sends them back over the internet. The Microsoft equivalents would be Windows/IIS.

Hmmm, feels like I’ve oversimplified and overcomplicated it all in equal measure - there’s more to this technical writing lark than meets the eye. But hopefully if you’re involved in this space but aren’t especially technically minded (like the colleague whose initial query sparked this post), some of that might go some way to showing how it all fits together.

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Tim’s a phenomenal facilitator, motivator and organiser, and I think that’s what really made the unconference model work: having just enough structure and infrastructure to enable the interesting, serendipitous conversations, demonstrations and one-to-one meetings to take place.

It was also the first time I’d played the infamous social media game, in a great session run by Dave Briggs (taking time out from tending to the needy and applying creams and lotions in his Social Media clinic). If you have a group of people interested in using social media tools for engagement but not sure which ones to choose or where to start, it’s a good way of thinking through some of the strategic choices involved.

I learnt a whole bunch of things:

• Examples of how the Facebook MyOffice application is being used as a collaboration platform between youth workers and young people: a great example of going to where the audience is, rather than building a new and unfamiliar platform for them to use
• Sprout, a widget-building application. Probably best for prototyping since there are some question marks over accessibility
• The fascinating work being done in organisations with different but parallel challenges to my own: Oxfam GB, The National Trust and the British Youth Council, amongst others
• The sophistication of youth work on social networking services: for example, the subtle enhancements to privacy in user profiles introduced by the new Facebook
• Ultimately, the value of truly co-designed online projects, especially when it comes to services designed to be used by young people. I’m still too inclined to go it alone, when I think the lesson of youth work generally is to find appropriate ways to put the power to develop solutions in the hands of young people themselves. I wonder what a co-designed online consultation might look like if we were to bring in the stakeholders, scientists, employers, learners and front-line staff that we want to hear from?

It was also really encouraging to see the enthusiasm and help I got from facilities colleagues and others in DIUS transforming a run-of-the-mill government building into a really good unconference venue with wifi, pizza and the works in terms of AV equipment, registration desk etc - all on a shoestring budget. I’d really encourage others in government to think about what their central London buildings could help to make possible on a weekend. Thanks are due to DIUS colleagues or alumni Justin Kerr-Stevens (for wifi), Michelle Lyons (for social reporting), Jo Simmons and Kim Worts (my boss and a senior civil servant, hopefully now a convert to unconferences).

I presented some analysis we commissioned from Forrester on how young people are using the internet, social media and social networking services - it led to an interesting discussion about issues of gender, and how we design for the social aspect of using the internet with friends (as opposed to a solitary experience) and recognise the challenge of media fragmentation and continuous partial attention. More to come on that one in a future post, I’m sure. For now, here are the slides:

Thanks again to Tim and everyone who came along for their inspiration and ideas.

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“A letter would come in, and would go to the Registry. There were three sets of files: Policy, Premises and Correspondence. The Registry folk would work out which set of files the letter belonged with, and file it. Then I’d receive the file, together with a note about the letter. All the information about the matter would be kept in the file. Sometimes, if the file related to a school that had been established for decades, the file would be enormous. So they would send me a form asking which portion of the file I needed, and I’d send that back to them in the docket, and then back would come the file. I’d read the letter, maybe telephone a colleague to check something if I needed to - bearing in mind the cost of telephone calls - and then I’d write my response in longhand and give it to the typing pool. It would come back within 24 hours, and I’d check it. If corrections were needed, I’d send it back and have it redone. And then the letter would go out.”

I’m sure in some ways the basic process of civil service work is much the same today - I remember the manila registry files myself from when I started, just five years ago. But it made me stop and think about the scale and pace of change. Twenty years ago, few civil servants would have regularly worked with a computer. Ten years ago, email would have been a novelty for most. Now, we’re wondering why it’s seeming so tough to embed a blogging culture amongst a workforce of whom over 30% (PDF) started work in the 1970s and 64% of whom were filing their first dockets before Tim Berners-Lee’s vague but exciting idea was even conceived.

Douglas Adams was right:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn 35 is incredibly exciting and creative and, given opportunity, you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really

Later in the day, between spells of digital docket-filing, I stumbled across the Civil Service values, namely integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. We live in a performance-driven world, where it seems everyone is judged on results and targets achieved, deadlines and service agreements delivered. The what, not the how. And yet those values describe a different type of organisation: one in which the credibility and trust of the public rest at least as much in the processes it follows as in the results it produces. Rigour, transparency, independence. Curiously, I think social media, with its potential to expose organisations to scrutiny from passionate outsiders can help deliver as much on these process objectives as on the delivery ones. So maybe we shouldn’t just make the case for the adoption of social media by government from the perspective of quicker/faster/cheaper but also argue the potential for greater transparency, scrutiny, reflection and independence.

I think that’s one for the registry file.

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Social media is poop scoop, not turd polish.

Accept that sh*t happens
So much communication today - from the public and private sectors - is predicated on the belief that silence, rebuttal or defensive lines will be enough. It won’t, not these days. Even if it makes the issue die down for a bit in the mainstream media, in the long run it will blow up again or gnaw away at your brand corrosively to make you look foolish, dishonest or even mildly unhinged. Similarly, social media quickly exposes fabrication and humiliates those responsible, so if you have skeletons in the closet then you’re best off coming clean. Try using the tools of social media to polish turds at your peril.

Lesson #1: expect sh*t, and go equipped with the tools to deal with it.

Take responsibility for it, and for clearing it up
Scoopers accept that it’s up to them to clear up the mess, even if there’s nobody looking and even if it’s not easy. It’s not that you couldn’t just leave it - you might get away with that a few times - but eventually it will catch up with you, or you’ll find yourself in a community which is overrun with the stuff. In practical terms, that means it’s your responsibility - as customer service agent, a press officer, a policy official, whatever - to engage in the process of helping put the screw-ups right when you find them. That doesn’t necessarily mean whistleblowing (but there’s a role for that too), but it does mean being prepared to muck in yourself and recognise that you can help to fix it.

I’d love to see more public sector organisations using services like GetSatisfaction to help identify and address problems in service, harnessing the passion and ideas of our customers to help us solve the problem. Social media helps big organisations to turn frustration into solutions, and to spot the holes in customer service or policy more effectively than mystery shopping, market research or even [sharp intake of breath] classic consultation. But it means being seen to stoop and scoop, which we’re often not ready to do.

Lesson #2: own up to mistakes, and use some of the tools out there to help people help you put things right.

Do what people do in civilised society
Nobody wants to live in a world of polished turds - it makes for a more cynical, frustrated, insular community. Social media can restore some of the sense of community where we give and take, praise and criticise, and earn a reputation based on the contribution we make, not the image we try to manufacture. The civilised organisation, the collaborative state, behaves honestly in the social media ecosystem, whether that’s introducing yourself, crediting the work of others, admitting mistakes or being up front about what you’re doing and why.

Lesson #3: be nice.

I’m so gonna regret writing this when someone picks me up me in the future for polishing a turd of my own. But for now, wish me luck next week as I work with some colleagues to broach one of the hardest topics in social media: scoop, don’t polish.

Image credits (from top): Minor Prophet, Johannal, Robertotostes

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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.

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Today, I had lunch with some proper government techies. This social media stuff is all very well, they said, but what about accessibility, and security, and data protection, and support? To paraphrase their argument, the dabblings of people like me trigger an avalanche of expectation which people like them are then commanded to deliver on. Frustratingly, it’s not that those guys aren’t innovating – just that the incredible stuff they’ve been developing hasn’t managed to see the light of day.

So I’m starting to think this means two things:

• If we want to be creative in how we apply technology to the problems of government, then we need to draw a line under the extent to which we outsource IT. Though they’d beat you to a pulp with one of their white papers for saying it, you’ll never get real innovation in web communication from the big outsourcers. For that, you need a guy in the corner who does this stuff out of pride, not for money and doesn’t need a spec to tell you how it should be built. It comes from leaving just enough breathing space in the day job for the in-house techies to build the stuff they think is cool, and ensuring it gets in front of the right people. It comes from the developers still working on the project their boss told them to stop working on six months ago. Like Spolsky says, we need to treat our good in-house developers like the superstars they are and recognise just how much talent we have sitting within government if only we could - dare I say - unlock it.
• Social media tools lower the barrier to entry, but only so far. Wordpress.com, TypePad, Ning and SurveyMonkey are great. They let people like me take our meagre knowledge a long way. But we have a responsibility to stop others who understand less about these tools than we do from running away with the idea that this means government webbery has fundamentally changed: it hasn’t. More than ever in a converged, transformed, empowered world, we need the enterprise CMSes, the resilient hosting and the focus on making stuff that’s accessible to everyone. A swiss army knife might save you on a camping trip, but it’s not exactly the tool of choice when you’re refitting a kitchen, and quite right too. We need to understand which of our projects are camping trips, and which are kitchen refits, and choose our tools and teams accordingly – making sure the senior decisionmakers understand the distinction too.

To a non-techie, it can feel like your grumpy developers are just being obstructive when they tell you that they can’t just deploy that blog site you wanted overnight when that guy at the conference said that you could do it yourself on Wordpress.com in half an hour. But chances are – if your techies are any good - it’s not obstructiveness at all: it’s professionalism.

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There’s something compelling about film, which is why so many events and launches open with an uplifting compilation to a jaunty soundtrack. They set the scene, tell real people’s stories, bring events to life, make the conceptual personal.

Expectations seem to be changing. In a YouTube world, I think it’s fair to say that the assumption is now that effective government communication online will incorporate video, whether it’s formal, informal or full-blown interactive.

But it’s easier said than done.

A number of recent projects have brought me face to face with the world of video and the practicalities of making it happen:

• You need the gear to record video, or access to people who can do it for you (at a significant cost)
• You need to find a way to look after and manage any in-house gear
• You need people to project manage each shoot, getting the people lined up, the venues arranged etc
• You need release forms and briefings (speeches, bullet points, background notes, whatever)
• You need to manage the expectations of Important People who are used to being interviewed by the BBC with autocues
• You need some way to edit what you shoot
• You need a grasp of aspect ratios and codecs, video formats, frame rates and embeddable code
• You need somewhere to put it and process for getting it OK-ed
• You need rules about what you publish and how you moderate comments
• You need an answer when someone says: “So why exactly are we doing this?” and when someone says: “So how come the YouTube ‘related videos’ show a girl in a G-string?”

All of which can be done. But the hardest bit - and why I have newfound respect for graduates of media studies courses - is that you need to know how you tell a story through video. Talking heads are fine, but often dull. Proper film-makers know about finding interesting locations, putting interviewees at their ease, which bits to keep and which bits to chop, how to do intros, transitions, titles, splicing clips together, fixing the sound and colour balance, storing and converting the footage and lots more. And too often recently for me, it’s just been a cheerful civil servant with a Handycam and an Important Person wondering why the outputs aren’t a bit more polished.

The answer might be to leave this to people who know about video – just brief it out and leave it to the professionals. But I think video is becoming like typing: one day soon, the practical skills to communicate through video are going to be as normal as being able to put together a Powerpoint presentation - you don’t bring in an agency for that. In the same way that bullet point slides look dated these days, fairly soon the smart kids will be making their points with vox pops, Qik streams and mini-documentaries, and we’ll see film-making skills creep into person specifications and CVs for people in communications roles.

I think it’s worth it: the prize will be a much more engaging and authentic way of communicating.

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