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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Someday List: 1. Licensing

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

• Licensing
• Accessibility
• Guidance
• Evaluation

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

Image credit: Marcin Wichary (licensed under Creative Commons)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five ways to publish commentable documents online

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

Image credit: Matthew Oliphant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Scribd
Example: information risk assessment template

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

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

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

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

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

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

From server to surfer: anatomy of a website

You don’t need to understand technology to grok understand social media, but frankly, it sometimes helps. Or at least a basic grounding in how AJAX is different from PHP, and why CSS won’t sort out your SQL will help you to follow what a developer is on about and whether they are likely to be telling the truth when they blame X for screwing up your website.

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.

The power of unconference

I think it was clear it was going to be a good day during the introductions. Around fifty youth workers, technologists and others with an interest in youth participation from as far away as Lancashire, Devon, Norfolk and Wiltshire had gathered at DIUS on a Saturday morning for UKYouthOnline, organised by Tim Davies. With that much enthusiasm and experience in the room, Tim’s gamble on the open space conference methodology was sure to pay off - even if only about a third of the participants had ever attended an unconference before.

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.