Here’s Nick introducing the site and you can feel his pride and enthusiasm bursting from the screen and justifiably so.

Of course nothing comes from a bubble and, while I’ve only been on the periphery of the development of the surgery model, I planted one of the seeds when I sat in a cafe once a week giving free online help in 2008 and called it a “social media surgery”. Nick along with many others has taken it to new levels but I hope you’ll forgive me a soupçon of pride at seeing one of my silly ideas graduate like this.

I’ve been thinking of bringing back the original Pete Ashton Surgery model as a way of generating some income and it does seem to be the best way for me to work with people. More on that if and when it develops but if you’ve like half an hour of my time for a reasonable fee do get in touch.

Given the limited amount of work I can’t take too much credit (or blame!) for what they did with the Facebook page, Tumblr and Twitter but it was good to see them experiment and a surprising number of things I suggested sunk in. The only problem, it seems, was that age old issue of capacity and time. When you’re putting on a massive opera updating the blog isn’t really your priority, especially if it’s not built up a big audience yet.

I’ve really enjoyed being part of the chorus and am seriously thinking of joining in with the next production, whatever it may be. And if I do I’m considering proposing a more coherent online strategy to try and move it away from a ticket sales role (which isn’t really necessary given how each night sold out before the premier) and towards something which complements the reasons why Birmingham Opera put on large-scale performances in disused industrial spaces involving hundreds of volunteers taken from the communities of Birmingham. That would be a pretty interesting project.

And, as Jaki points out, anyone who’s using the term “Interweb” is already half way there.

The makeover took place today and the winner was Alison Smith who runs the Pesky People blog, campaigning about web accessibility issues for disabled people (which, now I think about it, is not strictly a hyperlocal site but let’s not worry about that for now!) Alison had got her blog going through Nick Booth’s Social Media Surgeries and I’d actually helped her with some small things before so this was going to be stage two.

The TAL gang will be reporting on this properly as a resource for others to use but I wanted to just jot down a few thoughts from today’s session.

First off, here’s how her site currently looks at peskypeople.wordpress.com:

Alison came in with a bundle of A3 sheets covered in ideas and maps for how she saw the site working.

As a group we talked through Alison’s long term aims for the site with the full knowledge that we would not be able to achieve most of them during this session. We needed to have an idea of what she wanted to be doing 6 – 12 months down the line so we could put the right stepping stones in place today. Once we had this we transferred the essentials onto the whiteboard to get a better handle on things:

Next we had a look at some sites Alison liked the look and feel of. The main inspiration was Disability Arts Online for the navigation and, in the long term, the ability to change the look of the site along disability lines (something we weren’t able to touch on today). We also looked at some basic accessibility things that were within our capabilities such as adding a “jump to content” link at the top of the page that is invisible to visual readers but shows up on text-to-speech browsers. I then produced one of my trademarked Website Wireframe Diagrams to work from:

(Thanks to @chrisivens for the constructive criticism of this diagram.)

With all this in mind we ploughed through loads of WordPress themes, picked out a few that had three columns (a sidebar on each side of the content) and went through them with Alison. By lunch time we’d chosen AndyBlue as our theme because it was nearly right and had relatively clean code that wasn’t based on a table, thus making it better for text-to-speech readers. (The theme that’s currently running ASH10.com, Atahualpa, is based on a table, I discovered, which was very disappointing as it’s an otherwise great theme. Ah well.)

Next Alison sat down with web developer Pete Scotch Egg and myself to decide on the essential changes to the theme. These were mainly to do with text sizes and navigation and Pete had most of them sorted by the end of the day. Currently the site looks like this:

Pete’s got a few more tweaks to do over the weekend (the left hand navigation duplicates, for example, and we want to have a Scotch Egg illustration in the header) but it’s 90% there.

While this was going on Mike Rawlins, one of the TAL team, was installing BBpress which we’ll be integrating as a forum for the site (chosen because it’s stripped down and simple and ran through the text-to-speech reader fairly well) and sorting out the new peskypeople.com domain we’ll be moving everything on to next week while I talked with Alison about the content she’s going to be writing for the site. Will Perrin and Nicky Getgood were also on hand to help Alison think more clearly about what her aims are and who her intended audience might be.

By the end of the day we’d achieved a fair amount and were tired but happy. Here’s Alison clearly demonstrating the tired/happy thing.

(The happy was also fueled by the incredible response to her post about being a deaf person at Hello Digital on Wednesday which, while being a great thing, also helped us frame what the potential of the site was.)

For myself I think I learned as much from Alison as she learned from us. It was an incredibly rewarding day and while we still have some work to do polishing it off and showing her how to use everything before it launched properly next week we really did good stuff as a team today. Fantastic stuff.

The basic principle is similar to a doctors surgery where someone with a problem that doesn’t necessarily require hospital admission can come in for a short period of time to get advice and treatment. At a social media surgery people get a short period of consultancy to get questions answered, ideas developed or problems solved, allowing them to go away with a bit of clarity and knowledge for where to go next, if anywhere. There’s also a practical, hands-on aspect where people who had never considered running their own website are given a WordPress.com blog (or similar) and shown how to use it, enabling them to do pretty much everything they need to without paying for professional help. This latter part is particularly important for charities, etc but also serves as a way to “try before you buy” for the businesses.

Rather that attend the talks at Hello Digital this year which, to be fair, were aimed at people who haven’t been using this stuff for years, I took up the offer to work the surgeries during the day. Since most of the people I’ve helped in surgeries have been third sector or arts/culture based I wasn’t sure what to expect from the range of attendees at Hello Digital which I assumed would be more commercial in their approach. Some certainly were but all had problems I could understand and help with.

Some of the issues that came up were:

• How to use social media to promote a boat hire brokerage website. (Answer – blog about the boats if they have interesting stories, find forums for boating fanatics and proactively hang out there.)
• How to socially rate educational resources on and off the web but rate the people who are reviewing them. (Answer – look at how Amazon and others rate reviewers / contributors. Also, look at Shelfari as an example of people connecting through ownership of objects. Finally, make sure users have a reason to share their data – think of Delicious which has immediate personal use and secondary community value.)
• How to use a print publication web presence interestingly without taking value from publication. (Answer – think about tapping into other services, eg use What’s On listings from All Brum or photos from Flickr. Maybe provide a portal to the local web curated along the editorial lines of the magazine.)
• How to promote someone producing postcards of the city with the aim of finding a business partner. (Answer – Blog. Tell story of how photos came to be. Postcards are only part of the story. Also, connect with other photographers through Twitter, etc so they can spread word for you. (Don’t worry, advice was more subtle than that!))
• How to promote paid web content (specialist dictionary) without giving it away? (Answer – give bits away, maybe in blog form. Take expertise into forums and promote from there by giving help and advice.)
• How does Google work? (Answer – Anatomy of page, showed it with styles turned off to understand how Google sees it, think about how you know how bits of a printed report are related (title, subtitle, subheadings, contents, etc) and apply to your site, think about writing for a searching audience by using relevant terms, remember Google penalises those who try and game it. Oh, and get a blog so you always have new content and run it on your domain.)
• How to bring all my activities together without distracting from the one thing that generates income. (Answer – Think about splitting web presences (as I do with peteashton.com and this site) and developing a different voice. Look at which activities are relevant to the paying one and bring those in where appropriate. But don’t forget what makes you unique is the combination of things you do and are interested in.)

The questions and answers were a bit more indepth and the above just give a flavour of what we talked about. Most of it was a discussion rather than a simple question and answer session and success was leaving them with questions in their heads which were more informed than before. Unless they were being polite everyone I helped said it had been useful, which was great. By the end I was pretty much buzzing, partly from having spent 7 hours thinking and talking but also from the sense of having actually done something useful that day (as opposed to sitting though another “Using Twitter for Business” panel – not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with them but I’ve probably had my fill). It was then that I resolved to do more Doing than Talking in future – it’s much more rewarding. (I know my doing often involves talking but I feel I’ve been talking within a bubble a bit too much this year and it’d be good to get out.)

Nick has made running social media surgeries part of the Podnosh business and after yesterday I suspect he’s looking at ways to broaden the market he offers them to. The Third Sectors ones are usually staffed by volunteers so for a more commercial environment folk would need to get paid (as I did yesterday) but I think we proved the value of giving this level of advice to a large number of people. If you’re interested in offering something like this, get in touch with him.

As for Hello Digital itself, the surgery took place on a different floor to the rest of the event which meant we were a little isolate with no passing traffic. Since a few people missed their appointments (probably clashed with panels) we could have taken ad-hoc patients if they knew what was going on. We might also have gotten volunteer surgeons for short periods of time to complement the full time ones. The surgery could also have been flagged after each panel as somewhere to find out more.

And personally it’s got me thinking about doing my own surgery again. Maybe when Fazeley Studios gets its cafe I’ll set up in there once a week for an hour or two. It’d be good to get that buzz once a week.

For a start they’ve put 620 photos of the find on Flickr ranging from professional studio photos suitable for print (taken by local photographer David Rowan) to the photographic records used by archivists.

They all have downloading and embedded enabled (like most photos on Flickr) but are also licensed under a pretty liberal Creative Commons license which allows anyone to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work” and to “make derivative works” as long as the creator is credited.

Considering these photos came from a wide variety of sources from academia to local government that’s quite remarkable as it means anyone can do pretty much anything with these photos. You could even take the high-resolution photos and make a book to sell if you wanted to. They’re free for the taking.

I then had a look at the official Staffordshire Hoard website (which is currently a little slow to load due to all the attention) and noticed another Creative Commons license on the sidebar of every page.

This one is an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license which is a little more restrictive but not by much. It simply says that if you use their content it can’t be for commercial gain and what you produce must be released under the same license. Personally I think they should have put the photos under this license but the fact that they’re using Creative Commons and encouraging sharing at all is remarkable.

Or is it?

Archaeology is a niche activity with a lot of amateur enthusiasts. I suspect the academic and amateur worlds blur and cross over a lot, indicated by the chap who found this gold being an unemployed 55 year old man from the Bloxwich Metal Detecting Club who was able to liase with the authorities, presumably through Duncan Slarke at Birmingham Museum, in such a way that everything was kept secret for two months. The authorities understand the community and the community understands the authorities. While I’m sure there are tensions and I have absolutely no personal knowledge, I suspect this sort of interaction between Them and Us is normal.

In short, they’re all a bunch of nerds. Which means Internet rules of sharing and co-operation for the greater good apply.

If I’m right, then this is a lovely example of the sort of culture that fuels Open Source software development and projects like Wikipedia operating in a pretty low-tech environment. And as such when Daniel Pett was building the website in a day (using free software and documenting how he did it) and the photos were being put online I suspect the question of whether they should make everything available in a way that allowed people to share and use it in interesting ways never occurred to them. It’s just what you do.

On the Flickr set they say:

The images contained in this set invite comment. We accept there may be some errors with labelling as this was done in a very short space of time.

The Portable Antiquities Scheme, for whom Duncan Slarke works, states at the top of the front page that it’s…

a voluntary scheme to record archaeological objects found by members of the public in England and Wales.

This hasn’t been heralded as an innovative crowdsourcing project like, say, the Guardian’s MP Expenses project because it’s not innovative. This is how this community has always operated both online and off. It’s second nature to them. Everyone else is just playing catch-up.

And if you’re thinking, well, that’s all well and good but my organisation could never get away with something like this, take a look at the logo-itis at the bottom of every page on the Hoard site:

That’s pretty damn establishment, indicating it’s not about what’s possible, it’s about what the culture of your organisation allows to be possible.

What does your culture allow to be possible?

Preparation

First the practical stuff. With about 36 hours to prepare and zero budget a DIY approach was needed. I had available to me a 9 year old G4 Mac and a hefty CRT monitor, the sort of kit that was cutting edge in 2000 but now struggles with YouTube. On this I installed Seesmic Desktop, a Twitter client that displays information in columns and, most importantly, can have most of the controls hidden away into a pseudo-kiosk mode. I logged in using an unused ghost account to avoid hitting API rate limits on the accounts I was using to monitor stuff. The screen was placed on a stack of boxes and cases and the screen surrounded with explanatory notes stuck on sheets of A3 paper. It looked like this:

On the left I wrote:

Follow @supersonicfest

We’re using Twitter to keep you informed during the festival.

Schedule changes, unexpected goodness, cake shortages, late starts, all that sort of thing.

Follow @supersonicfest in your Twitter for the latest.

On the right I wrote:

We need you to Tweet

The best info comes from the crowd and we’ll be retweeting what we find.

To be found include one of the following in your tweet:

#supersonic / @supersonicfest / supersonic festival

(a note about just putting “supersonic’ meaning you’ll be lost with the jet planes and Oasis fans)

And then at the bottom I explained what each of the columns were in hopefully clear terms. Here’s a close-up of those explanations.

The idea was to drive people to their phones to participate rather than have them simply consume the information. I was demonstrating that their messages were being monitored and would be broadcast through the @supersonicfest account if deemed useful or interesting enough. And even if I didn’t they’d still be available to anyone who did the same searches.

The method

So how did I keep on top of all this myself? Bear in mind I was not just running the Twitter. I was also an enthusiastic member of the audience and I was taking photographs of as many acts as possible. This had to be as streamlined and non-disruptive as possible. I needed to spend no more than a minute or two every half hour checking and retweeting.

It was here that I broke a personal rule. I used Tweetdeck on my iPhone. Tweetdeck is the Twitter app for people who spend far too much time on Twitter and the iPhone app doesn’t skimp on features. While I probably exhibit that behaviour I don’t think it should be encouraged – Twitter should be a background thing that compliments whatever you’re doing, offline or on, not something that dominates your life. In my opinion. But, that said, sometimes you need to be monitoring numerous accounts or searches and that’s when the overkill of Tweetdeck makes some sense.

I managed to keep it down to three screens (click for bigger):

The first column is “Mentions” – any messages with @supersonicfest in them. The second is a search for #supersonic or “supersonic festival”. I could have bundled these two together but suspected they’d be subtly different with the former talking to to the festival and the latter talking about it. I’m not sure if this actually happened – research would be needed. The third column was mentions of “supersonic” without the words @supersonicfest #supersonic or festival. In other words the contents of the bucket after the tweets had been filtered. Lots of noise here but worth checking once in a while.

When I found something worth retweeting I’d tap on the message, then tap on the “retweet” button and finally edit it a bit, usually just removing the hashtag or @supersonicfest username so it wouldn’t reappear in the searches. So retweeting the tweet in the top-left of the above image would look like this:

That whole operation takes about 20 seconds. If that.

So that’s the system. What actually happened?

In practice

First off, there was already a fair amount of Twitter activity happening around the festival. I put this down to two main factors – firstly Lisa Meyer of Capsule had been actively running the @supersonicfest account for a good 6 months before the event, building up a good following and a sense that Capsule used this medium in a way worth paying attention to. Plus the name of the account implied it would be used during the event (this isn’t something I would have advised on, by the way, since Capsule could be seen as more than just Supersonic, but in this case it worked well). Secondly the Supersonic audience is, shall we say, somewhat geeky. These tend to be people who are very passionate about very specific sorts of music and relatively obscure bands and the Internet lends itself well to forming communities around niches. While Twitter is certainly more mainstream than it was a year ago the “power users” will tend to be those who have already found a need for it. I’d go out on a limb and say there were more active Twitter users as a percentage of the total audience at Supersonic than at a more mainstream or art-crowd event.

(Evidence for this also comes from the Collective Memories that had been done in 2007 and 2008 which gathered mentions of the festival across the Internet. As I said in my How To Do A Collective Memory post Supersonic really lends itself to this, probably because the audience tends to discuss such things publicly online whereas the attendees of, say, a concert at Symphony Hall might discuss it offline or in private. But that’s a subject for another day.)

Given that it’s the nonsense on Twitter that forms the glue from which serious “useful” stuff can emerge (See Jon Bounds on this) I needed to ensure that should some “news” occur people would feel it worth tweeting which meant my job was not just to monitor what was being said but also to encourage it. This was particularly apparent on the Friday night which has more of a “big gig” vibe than a festival one. People said they’d arrived, said what acts they were watching and enjoying and that they were going home. I simply gauged the general zeitgeist and retweeted accordingly, trying to spread my postings across as many people as possible to get the sense that people were being listened to. “Ooh, I got retweeted. I’ll write more now!”

Thanks to the festival running fairly smoothly there wasn’t too much urgent news to communicate but I did pick up on some minor if useful stuff. A schedule change was the biggest thing but I also sent out news about the merchandise room, live streams from Rhubarb Radio, cake supplies at the tea stall, the relatively cheap cider, cafes in Digbeth for breakfast, what Nisennenmondai means (Y2K bug) and so on.

Sharing immediately

On Saturday morning I brought up the search pages on Twitter for #supersonic, @supersonicfest and “supersonic festival” from 8pm to 3am and printed them out on 6 sheets of paper which I stuck next to the monitor with the title “What you said on Friday”. It was raw and uncensored and included a few criticisms but that was important. This had to be genuine in order to get people to be genuine. To run something like “tell us what you loved and we’ll stick your tweet on the wall” would have been pointless. And, to be honest, they weren’t telling “us” what they loved. They were telling their friends. We were just picking up on it.

Some of the tweets during Sunn O)))’s set on Friday

I did the same thing for Saturday (you can see both in the photo at the start of this post) which, since it ran from 4pm and was a lot more social, had a lot more messages. This time I copied the text into a document and edited out the cruft (“half a minute ago from web · Reply · View Tweet”) so I could fit them all into a manageable 11 pages. While I did spend a fair amount of time figuring out how best to do this once the system was in place it would probably only take an hour to do, if that.

The effect of this on the Sunday was quite striking. Along with the 40 or so real-time tweets shown on the monitor there was a record of not just what had happened on the previous two days but what what it had been like. The festival had been reviewed by the festival go-ers and published immediately, analogous to those daily newspapers that get published at large trade events or conventions. Because it was posted in the Rhubarb Radio studio which was constantly occupied I found out people were constantly checking it out, both for current and yesterday’s news. Some of this was people finding their own names but there was definitely interest in this. And as such it became a meeting point and a place for striking up conversations with strangers. People gravitate towards information that is relevant to them and talk around it and that this happens offline as much as online.

So during the event we’d provided a space, both online and off, for people to socialise. I’m under no illusions as to the importance of this – it’s a tiny part of a large whole – but it fits nicely with the cafe, food court and bars and hopefully helped people meet both online and face to face. It satisfied my requirement that social media adds value with the minimum of disruption and without getting in the way of the important stuff – in this case the acts on stage.

The data

After the event we were left with a whole load of data. I did a bit of analysis here and Neil took it a bit further. While one should always be careful with statistics some of the visualisations are at least interesting. Take this Steamgraph taken directly from the Twitter search results:

Here you can see in red the conversation about Goblin simmering over the weekend in anticipation of their performance on Sunday night. That’s not too surprising since they were a headliner and the same goes for Sunn and Thorr’s Hammer about whom buzz is expected. But it’s interesting to see Tartufi and zZz getting some action.

The steamgraph hints at another use of this data. It’s in real time. Whereas reviews on blogs and in magazines are written after the event and photographs are calmly selected and processed before being uploaded, this is raw reaction to the festival as it happened. We can slice through this and see what people thought about the festival at 10pm on Saturday when they were at the festival at 10pm on Saturday.

Here’s a very simple web page with all the tweets divided up by hour. If I find the time I’d like to divide this into web pages for each hour and include photos, videos and excerpts from reviews from the collective memory. Maybe it’d work better as a book – the crowdsourced report on Supersonic 2009. There’d be copyright issues for sure but that doesn’t stop it being an interested idea.

But the surface has only been scratched here. Because this information is fairly structured we can play with it and see patterns. But we should also be aware that this is only a small sample of the audience. 146 individuals contributed to the pool of data including some of those listening online. The attendance at Supersonic is roughly 1500. That’s less that 10%. Which, actually, is pretty good. Before I looked that up I was expecting it to be much lower. Hmm. But it’s still a minority and conclusions should be drawn with that in mind.

Conclusion

So, was this worth doing? I think so. The act of visibly listening encouraged more feedback which has value and it added a new facet to the community Supersonic attendees. While there wasn’t a conversation happening between Capsule and the audience per se (Lisa was busy, y’know, running the festival and I can’t speak for her) the liberal re-tweeting did communicate the fact that they were listening. And the uncensored public nature of the medium did encourage honesty which at least one person picked up on.

ZpoonZ wasn’t too happy with the scheduling

That’s not buried away in the survey or in a private email. That’s in public for everyone who’s searching for it to see. Now in context that’s just one person and its importance should be judged alongside the rest of the tweets. But this sort of transparency should only be attempted if you’re prepared to deal with all the feedback being public. If he’d sent the above on Saturday afternoon it would have been on the wall on Sunday (and in the interest of balance I did re-tweet this one). I believe Capsule have the confidence and self-belief to take that on the chin, or at least see it for what it is (complaints about scheduling at festivals are nothing new). Would you?

If I were to do this again I’d…

• Get more people to contribute. Since it’s a very low-impact activity I’d try and get volunteers or sound engineers based at each stage to tweet what was happening in their area with one other roaming around monitoring the searches. Given the lead time I didn’t have a chance to integrate the project into the workings of the festival and while this wasn’t a problem it would have made it more interesting and useful to get a “back-stage” view.
• Have a bigger screen. Not necessarily a projection (they’re hard to read) but certainly something that more than one person can read at any time. Maybe four screens, each with a different search on it.
• Have more Twitter stations. This brings in costs and potential security issues, no to mention greater potential for things to go wrong, but it would have been nice to have a monitor in the cafe and the food court and at the entrance to each stage. 90% of the audience weren’t on Twitter, it seems, so how can we bring that information to them more effectively.
• Get the print-outs up quicker. Set up a system that scrapes and cleans up the Twitter search so it can be printed out on-site and posted up ever couple of hours.

But ultimately it would depend on the event. I understand the Moseley Folk Festival are looking to do something with Twitter this year (which is why I’m writing this up now). That’s a very different style of event with a different audience so a number of the nuances of Twitter at Supersonic won’t apply. But hopefully the general stuff will.

I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface on this but at 2500 words I’d better stop.

Any questions?

The Twitter experiment at the Supersonic Festival went pretty well, I think. I’ll be playing around with the data and writing a full report soon but in the meanwhile here’s some very rough and ready stats for you. (All these are subject to me getting the numbers horribly wrong – I’m not a data-cruncher by any definition so caveat emptor, etc.)

Excluding those posted by me to the @supersonicfest account and a few irrelevant posts I spotted and removed (more cleanup will be needed) there were 789 messages sent to Twitter between 8pm on Friday and 2am on Monday containing one of the following:

• @supersonicfest
• #supersonic
• supersonic festival

Be aware we’re not counting mentions of just “supersonic” as many of these were not related to the festival (jet planes, Oasis fans, Queen lyrics, etc). Sifting of the “supersonic” search for relevant tweets would pick up a fair few (I was watching it over the weekend) but I don’t have time to do that.

Those 789 tweets were sent by 146 individuals. We could take this as a percentage of those attending but be aware a number of Twitter users were listening to the live audio stream so it can’t be assumed they were all on site. They were all part of the audience in some form though.

The distribution of tweets per users looks like this:

Click for bigger

The mean average tweets per users was 5.5
60 people (41%) sent one tweet over the whole weekend.
24 people (16%) sent more than 10 tweets.
8 people (5%) send more that 20 tweets and accounted for 275 or 34% of all messages sent.

Looking at these it seems like a very few dominated the Twitter feed, but this chart showing the number of tweets per user made me think twice:

click for legend

More than half the feed was made up of people not sending much at all and Flowdeep’s torrent of tweets don’t look quite so dominating.

Anyway, much more on this to come. If you’d like to play with the data here’s the base transcript I’ve been playing with or you can grab them yourself from this search. I’d really welcome some proper analysis by people who know what they’re doing with this.

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.

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.

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.

In the morning there were a number of talks. Some were good, some were not so good but the best was from Gail Durbin of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The videos appeared on the C:Cubed website a while back but, annoyingly, were not set up for sharing so I did a naughty thing and made a copy of Gail’s talk, uploaded it to Viddler and annotated it with links to the items Gail mentions as she talks. It’s about 10 minutes long and well worth watching.

As I watched Gail talk I grinned and grinned and grinned. She absolutely got it 100%. Everything she said was textbook social media gold. And she’s demonstrably not a web nerd. Her jargon might be a little off but she approaches this stuff with exactly the right spirit for success. Here’s a quick checklist of the things she’s doing right:

• You don’t have to have lots of money to do it. Technologically speaking the V&A’s website is pretty shonky but that’s not stopped them. The blogs use WordPress (free) and most of the projects seem to be based on email, a social media tool we often forget about because it’s so ubiquitous.
• Web 2.0 is about task, not technology. Couldn’t have said it better myself. In fact I think I’ll be using this in my talks.
• You have to seed these sites [or else] nobody will contribute to them. Spot on. The notion of “build it and they will come” is wrong. You have to show people what you want them to do by doing it yourself. The point about using your full name is also important. People are more likely to interact and share with other people than they are an institution. Use the tools as you would have others use them. Flickr does this very well where all visible staff members are also active users of the site.
• You don’t always get lots of contributions and this is not a problem. The pattern of interaction in a social space is often like this with, say, 5 really active users, 50 occasionally active users and 500+ lurkers who might pop a comment in or rate something occasionally.
• It’s not for us to determine how people do these things. I think this is an important attitude for an institution such as the V&A to have. Many cultural organisations will have an idea, implicit or explicit, of what is “good” or “right” which is fine but doesn’t always enable engagement and people feel they might be getting it wrong and not contribute. That’s not to say you don’t need some filtering system but by giving people the leeway to curate the space themselves you allow interesting things to bubble through, often things you’d never considered.
• Sometimes you get more creative things if you limit what you’re asking them to do. “Limitations are possibilities” someone once said. Give people a challenge and make them work within certain perameters. Don’t make it too limiting, just enough to get them thinking. The problem with a lot of social media tools is you can do anything you want with them, which is great in theory but daunting in practice. This is one of the reasons Twitter works. It’s blogging but you’re limited to 140 characters so you have to get creative. Or to take a more traditional example, haiku.
• We accept everything (except offensive, irrelevant and half-finished, which is fair). The subsequent rating system is key to this, allowing users to easily promote the good stuff up the list. Digg.com is the classic example of user rating but here it’s being used on a much smaller scale.
• Sue Lawty’s blog. I love this example for obvious reasons. Sue Lawty was their artist in residence and was “deeply hostile to technology” but agreed to have a go at blogging. After a while she started getting feedback from people who had been inspired by her work to do their own and from this The Beach Project evolved. This is a great illustration of how this isn’t about technology, it’s about communication and sometimes the best people to use this stuff are the people who have the most averse reaction to it. (I’m thinking of you, Yarker!)
• 400 contributions from all over the world with no promotion. The World Beach Project has spread through word of mouth. Here’s a Google Blogsearch for it but that’s just scratching the surface. This sort of project is a classic “social object”, something that people want to tell other people about and, more critically, can have a go at themselves. You don’t need to promote something like this. If the idea is good enough you just need to seed it and have patience.
• Be prepared to fail and move on. The list of projects on the Things To Do page is very long and I’d imagine most of them have had a takeup between poor and reasonable. But because the set-up and management costs for these things is so cheap it doesn’t matter. I’d imagine people working at the V&A have ideas for projects involving the public every time they walk through a gallery. Previously they’d have had to go through a long winded process of planning and budgeting to see them in action. Now they can get them up and running in a few days and, if they work, develop them further.

I could go on and on but I think you get the message. Concentrate on the ideas rather than the implementation. Keep it small and manageable – you can grow if it works. Fail often and learn. Technological solutions are good but you can do a lot with email and a shonky website. And above all treat the people you want to engage with as people.

Did you find this as inspirational as I did? Anything you’d like to add?

The notion was raised (on Twitter, naturally) about a week ago and in that time we, marshaled by the mighty Nick Booth, had gathered about 10 experts and spread the word through the voluntary sector networks. We had a room, food and drinks, a bunch of laptops and awaited the crowds.

Two hours later we were exhausted and buzzing. The event was a tremendous success with all of us kept busy throughout. Most inspiring for me was explaining the social internet to the lady tasked with running The Carers Network (site currently under review, hence her coming) which she completely got. Carers are by definition a distributed community of people often working alone with shared aims and needs yet marshaling the information they need and orchestrating the communication networks is a mammoth task. We talked about setting up web tools that become part of the process and enable stuff to get done rather than hinder it but more interestingly about how giving the carers the ability to create the web resource themselves could be achieved through giving them a sense of ownership and leading by examples. I talked through how Wikipedia worked and how that theory could be applied to a carers resource and also how mentoring on how to use the site could be devolved through the community. Most pleasing to me was how everything I talked about could be compared to how things work in the “real world” for her, reinforcing my belief that all this crazy online stuff is really just about people interacting as people do.

But I’m knackered now. It was a great evening and we really must do it again, which of course we will. Thanks to Nick, my fellow surgeons and everyone behind the scenes who brought our patients to us. Onwards!