DiG came from a vague idea I had for a culture-biased blog about the area which I gave to Nicky Getgood who made it a thousand times less vague and drove it to national acclaim, not to mention a drastic career shift with Talk About Local.

More Canals I had nothing to do with directly but it’s blatantly inspired by Created in Birmingham, which was the whole point of CiB back in the day – to say to the arty types “stop relying on expensive centralised websites, go use free tools to do your own.” So to see Annabel successfully use the CiB model to carve out her own niche without futilely trying to cover everything is most gratifying.

I has a proud.

LocalGovCamp was “an unconference for local government”, specifically those who are working with websites and social media tools in relation to local government. As such it should have been really dull and a tedious waste of a Saturday (yes, Saturday. From 10am – 6pm.) But it wasn’t. It was really good.

I went along partly because it was the brainchild of Dave Briggs who I have a degree of respect for outside of his work with government websites and because some of the areas I work in will overlap and at times butt heads with local government in some form. Specifically the local blogging stuff which is all about getting communities to talk amongst themselves in new ways which can involve contacting the council in new ways. If I’m encouraging this I need to know how those on the other side are working and whether they’re ready to deal with it.

Being an unconference run on the BarCamp model there wasn’t a major theme. And while I wasn’t the only one from outside the sector there it was certainly dominated by civil servant types. A few people mentioned it was the first time they’d been with a group where they weren’t seen as weirdos for thinking this social media stuff was important (“Me, him and her are the other people in Somwhereshire who get this” someone told me) so there was a sense of a distributed community gathering. This was interesting and something I’ll try and come back to later. But right now here’s my notes, scavenged from Twitter (these are my tweets tagged #localgovcamp), a Mind Map I was keeping, my notebook and memory. It won’t necessarily make sense as a whole but that’s unconferences for you.

Direct Democracy came up in an early session as an argument against promoting blogs as a way of communicating. The point being they amplify the “nosy, dogooder, unelected, self-interested, fanatical blowhards” who are time rich and motivated by single issues. We assume giving everyone a voice is a good thing but the loud voices will still remain loud. It’s a good point and, as folk like me often argue, social media tools are not going to cure society. All they do is rewire it differently. Two responses then would be 1) the tools help the time poor. You can post something, be it a blog post or comment, in a few minutes. 2) The blowhards are a symptom of the old system of two voices drowning out everyone else. By promoting other ways of expression outside the constraints of public meetings, etc you get a multiplicity of voices which may drown out the idiots or take them to task. An analogy I came up with was the London anti-war March in 2003 where hundreds of thousands of “normal people” drowned out the usual suspects (Furrow-browed CND veterans, Socialist Worker morons, etc). Anyway, that one needs more pondering.

Parish Councils were something of a revelation in that I’d never considered them before. As such I don’t understand the details but the concept of a level of governance beneath the city/county council, especially one for a small local area, is intriguing. If nothing else it’s a way of targeting people at a local level who care about their area and might be interested in adopting new ways of talking about that. Unfortunately it’s kinda theoretical in Birmingham as we don’t seem to have any but for smaller towns and villages in more rural areas it’s a potential go-er. NALC is the national association for such things and I came across them through Justin Griggs who blogs here.

I got talking to Tim Cooper and Paul Cole from Derby. They’d created a massive mindmap of social media presences in the city related to the council and made it public for a few hours during the unconference. It sprawls, especially when you look at Facebook which has groups and personal accounts from all over. Because of these personal accounts they’re keeping it under wraps (some of the senior figures in the council might not realise their personal info is so public so drawing attention to it might not be wise) but are planning to release a version with less links. It was a great graphical representation of the genie being out of the bottle.

Phillip John is a nice chap. He one of the team who runs The Litchfield Blog just outside of Birmingham. Probably worth investigating.

There was a talk about using a social network tool within a council. Most of it was council-specific but I did get a couple of useful things. 1) Make sure part of the training is helping people fill out their profiles and understand why putting in seemingly irrelevant info like hobbies is important. 2) Council’s suffer from a “silo” problem where people are locked in their departments and don’t communicate laterally across the organisation. This reminded me of an idea for schools where teachers don’t regularly contact teachers of their subjects from other schools except at training events and the like. Some kind of ambient, low-commitment network that allowed, say, Maths teachers from across a region to ask questions and share ideas would be really interesting. It’s that whole thing about social media breaking geographic barriers again.

Those are the big ones. The main thing was being in the environment and soaking it up. Thanks again to Dave Briggs and team for running it and for all the people who traveled for coming to our fair city. If you fancy a dig the #localgovcamp search on Twitter will have some gems amongst the chatter and I’m guessing roundups of significant bloggage will appear on the LocalGovCamp blog.

On the blog I roughly define local blogs as:

“blogs (or things that are sort of like blogs in that they publish stuff on the Internet in date order) that cover a specific area and nothing else. If that area were to vanish the blog would have no purpose. Someone who blogs about their local area and fishing and carpentry, they don’t get in. It’s all or nothing.”

It’s a working definition and purely serves to give a bit of focus since there are now hundreds if not thousands of active blogs in the city. I’m keeping it restricted to Birmingham because that’s my patch and if I were to cover the rest of the world it’d be too much to process. I’m also interested in the longer term about how these sites network with each other – where are the overlaps and so on.

This relates to the Shift Time blogging project I’m currently working on in Shrewsbury, Nick Booth’s Social Media Surgeries which have produced a number of eligible sites and, of course, Will Perrin’s Talk About Local project which is about to set up camp in Birmingham. Plus countless other things of course but those are the main ones on my radar right now.

I hope folks find it useful and, more importantly, find some of the sites listed there inspirational.

And, of course, I’m missing loads. I’ll add them as I find them but please let me know in the comments below, on Twitter or via email if you know of a likely candidate.

MySociety are probably the most well known organisation doing this kind of thing with projects like They Work For You gathering evidence of MPs activities from a variety of sources and Fix My Street streamlining the reporting of small but important problems like potholes and graffiti. They don’t gather the data themselves. They effectively build an interface between the public and the civil service which automates the task. In theory their websites just sit there doing the work without any human intervention.

While MySociety is fantastic it’s really just the start and there’s been a fair amount of noise lately about how this can be extended and developed. Which is what National Hack The Government Day was all about:

Government isn’t very good at computers.

They spend millions to produce mediocre websites, hide away really useful public information and generally get it wrong. Which is a shame.

Calling all people who make things. We’re going to show them how it’s done.

This took place at the Guardian’s offices on Saturday where a bunch of folks took various data sources and quickly build services which streamlined, mashed up and essentially used the data in different and interesting ways.

Here’s a list of the projects produced on the day. A theme I noticed is wanting to fix something that has potential but for whatever reasons doesn’t quite work. Take this one, picked at random:

Companies Open House

The government’s www.companieshouse.gov.uk website doesn’t have a permanent URL for each registered company, and is shut between midnight and 7am.

Companies Open House is an app that parses company data and gives you a nice page with the basic details about each company at a permanent URL. From that page, you can get to the company details on the government’s site (provided it’s open) via a link that redirects you one of their temporary session URLs.

Companies Open House is always open 24/7. You can use each company’s permanent URL as an unambigious indicator when making inferences about a company on the Web.

Obviously it’s a prototype but it was built in a few hours presumably using off the shelf free and open source technologies and it’s main purpose is to simply demonstrate what can be done easily if you approach the problem with this mindset. It reminds me of when we started Created in Birmingham where the main aim was to get creative and arts companies and organisations using blogs to distribute their information and connect with each other. Telling them wasn’t enough – we had to show them. So we did. And it pretty much worked.

This is working in the same way. Rather than going to government departments, particularly those staff who control budgets, and bamboozling them with acronyms and jargon they’re showing them in a very simple way “if you make your data available like this, people like me can build stuff like this, and it’s all absurdly affordable.” With support from savvy MPs and funding streams like 4ip you can expect to see a lot more of this sort of thing over the next year or so, and since we’re talking about data that affects all aspects of society I expect it to change for the better the way we approach civic, corporate and organisational websites. Interesting times.

The news content is being managed through a Delicious account. When we spot a new item of interest, we tag it with the relevant region; then, when you click a region on the map, we call the relevant RSS feed in. The feeds give us everything we need; the Delicious tagging tools are excellent; and, of course, it also means Delicious users can interact directly with the account, if they so desire.

If you’re interested in how government departments are using social media tools it’s worth keeping tabs on Simon’s blog. He’s doing good work in that area.

Here’s how it works. The user bookmarks a web page and tags it “westmidlands”:

This goes into their Delicious account which is sucked into the Real Help Now website automatically.

And that’s it.

Using the Delicious bookmarking service as a way to collect and publish links is not a new concept – I use it to publish to at least three blogs I run using the Postalicious WordPress plugin – but this implementation, populating and keeping current a normal-looking web page, got me thinking.

The first think is how astoundingly easy it is to put content on the site. As long as the user has the Delicious browser plugin installed all they have to do it hit the “Tag” button, tidy up the Title of the link, add a brief description (usually copied from the page in question), type the relevant region in the Tag box and hit Save. The rest is automatic. No training needed for daunting looking CMS admin pages. Just a 30 second operation.

The second thing is how this system can be applied to pretty much anything, especially on a local level. It’s the map that rings the big bell. In this case it’s divided into large national regions but it strikes me as a great model for geo-locating news on a very local level.

One of the problems with geotagging is the effort, however small, of getting the location data in. At best you need to place the object (a web page, photo, etc) on a map and at worst you need to figure out the longitude and latitude for the object and type it in. GPS can help with this by automatically adding location data to a photo, for example, but it’s not much use for bookmarking web pages.

But if you had a system for recognising specific words as locations and turning that into location data then you could take this simple publishing system and leverage it in some very interesting ways. It wouldn’t need to be accurate to a street level. Just look for the common names for a square-mile radius (for example the B5 postcode in Birmingham would match “Digbeth, Deritend, Custard Factory, Cheapside” and other labels unique that area) and add the coordinates.

That’s just one very simple and slightly kludgy application of the data but what happens to it once it’s in the system is almost irrelevant since we’re not exactly short of people to do interesting things with it (whether you ask then to or not). The big point, I think, is that the entry of the data is incredibly simple. When you enable to add valuable data to stuff without it getting in the way of their work or even without them realising they’re doing it, that’s when things get interesting.

That talk was given at 2gether08 last summer and there’s a nice report from Dave Wilcox chock full of links and commentary.

Will came to Birmingham last week to address a meeting organised by Digital Birmingham to talk about the implications of the Power of Information Taskforce Report which has been generating a fair bit of buzz lately. When Dave Harte will publishes his notes from that meeting (yes, that’s a hint Dave!) I’ll write more about it but the neighbourhood blogging, along with the side effects of that activity, is a key part of illustrating its importance.

The plan for Talk About Local, which Will sumarises here, is to use the network of 6000 UK Online Centres to deliver training and support to local bloggers. I’ve not been partial to the details but the scale of this seems reasonable to me. The basic skills need to get a blog running are pretty simple to get across and in Birmingham we’ve already started down the road of disseminating this information with the Social Media Surgeries we’ve been running for charities voluntary groups. (Here’s Nick’s report from the last one.) One of the revelations from the surgeries is how low the bar to teaching this stuff is. We’ve had people come expecting to get help who’ve been recruited into helping because they know how to set up a blog or use Flickr. Or, more importantly, they’ve got experience in participating in online communities. There’s a sense that this sharing of knowledge can spread like like a virus once the myths have been dispelled and the tools explained. Enabling enablers to enable enablers, and so on.

The biggest trick is putting the tools and knowledge into the most effective hands and that, I feel, is what’s going to require the most work. It’s by no means impossible – I believe there are enough similarities between offline and online community activity that once you spot one you can apply the other to it – but it’s bigger than that which a few dozen bloggers and advocates can achieve. Which is why Will’s strategy of using UK Online is so exciting. Along with support from the 4ip fund this would put a rocket behind the work we’ve been doing. Watch this space.