Comments by Stuart Glendinning Hall

Update via Twitter on 10 June:

RT @kevinmarks Marc Smith is showing off http://www.codeplex.com/NodeXL - Excel-based Social Network Analysis [hmm, looks nice]

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Interesting post, thanks.

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Hi Dave,

I keep an eye on what you are doing in the public sector space, which is generally very good; but I have to speak up and say that I am really not convinced by an argument that LA’s should have pages and fans on Facebook.

I suppose some Facebook presence is a necessary, probably very small part of an LA’s comms, but it seems very trivial compared to the bigger socialisation challenges they face such as:

* changing their internal comms to be more responsive, less process driven and to promote more individual accountability and responsibility

* supporting staff to allow them to have human-scale conversations with citizens, rather than hide behind pseudo-corporate systems

* opening up data, docs, etc in forms that can make it easier to interact with the council

* listening across the range of channels and responding where appropriate

* engaging citizens through blogging, debate and explaining their mission and actions better

etc

For many people, FB is becoming a personal space, not a place to interact with corporations or local government. And the people who really hang out on Facebook, rather than just have a presence there, are probably the least badly served by LAs already in terms of access to information.

Not saying it’s a bad thing to do at all (and well done to Barnet as you say!) but don’t they have bigger fish to fry?

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Yup. This reminds me of Karl Popper’s concept of falsification, which he put forward in his Logik der Forschung (The Logic of Scientific Discovery) in the early 1930s. Rigorous inquiry should be based on a constant process of attempting to disprove (falsify) theories, rather than attempt to validate them through confirming instances.

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Hi Suw

Compass using social tools to support and find new ideas is good. http://www.howtoliveinthe21stcentury.org.uk/

SiCamp (http://www.sicamp.org/) though only technically using a blog and twitter is a good example. I think the key with SIC is how they approach “new media” holistically as a community rather than a set of specific tools.

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Be interesting to hear what Tim Berners-Lee thinks of this as I recall him muttering darkly about trivial data on blogs in 2007 (http://www.stuart-hall.com/2007/09/21/what-sir-ti...

IOW to ask the big Q how does this all dovetail with the semantic web then?

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Nice perspective Dennis. There’s an interesting debate on the cultural limits of regulation. It’s touched on in Barry Schwartz’s Ted.com talk on practical wisdom (’The real crisis? We stopped being wise’):

http://www.ted.com/index.php/t.....isdom.html

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Hmm, I agree money helps. But is money casual to change? If not then what is? Positive thinking helps. See the positive in everything from the smallest to the largest. Do that until it happens without thinking;-)

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Hi Duane, thanks picked up your Twitter about the Sage director’s shares sell;-)

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Very interesting thanks. Didn’t expect Med’ Marijuana to raise its head.

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Interesting thought thanks. Not suprising I guess that a strategy based on giving members as much as possible for as little in return as possible is a handy rule of thumb, especially as a growth strategy in the outset. Trying it the other way round would be a nice comparison;-)

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Thanks for running a great blog!

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Whilst I don’t want to minimise the good intentions behind the single blog post that currently makes up the Directgov Innovate site, I think you are way off base with this story.

First, Directgov is a signposting portal to existing government services. It is not the same at Change.gov at all. Whilst it would be great to get motivated developers to contribute to its improvement, the difference with Change.gov is that the Obama administration is genuinely trying to engage *citizens* in change, not just developers. As it stands, I don’t think the UK site is “opening up the UK government to more input from citizens,” as your story put it.

Second, despite some superb individuals and groups trying to transform UK government IT from the inside and the outside, at a political level the current administration do not get it *at all* and they are an entire generation behind Obama in understanding the power of ‘we’.

Obama has nothing to learn from the UK right now, sadly. Here’s hoping that changes, and if Directgov can be part of that change in the future, then all the better.

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I strongly second Rick's and Scott's view that people are talking too much about technology and products and not enough about real-world use cases. Simply stating how great RSS is and that it could be very useful won't get you much buy-in, not from management nor most importantly end-users. We need to make the technology relevant to the people, not the other way around. Understand users and use cases, then decide on technology! In two of our projects with large law firms we included an RSS feedreader in the social software mix (among wiki, blogs, social bookmarking).
We introduced it primarily to Knowledge Management Lawyers (KML) that needed to gather a lot of content from various sources. They also use it to subscribe to updates from the wiki and blogs. They appreciate the fact that it is much easier to plow through a stream of updates rather than going from email to email and deleting every one of them. Some of the lawyers picked up that concept, too and started using an feedreader. Others wanted to consume their feeds on their BB or in their Inbox, which was catered for as well.
Have a look at two case studies: Dewey & LeBoeuf and Allen & Overy In another project with a large law firm we took a very close look at the production (and consumption) of current awareness material. Current awareness included for example information on current developments within legal practices, latest court decisions etc. The firm made extensive use of newsletters to disseminate that kind of information. There was a multitude of newsletters available, some of them covering similar grounds. Maintaining email lists was very time-consuming and frustrating. Consumers did not know which newsletter were available. Also, newsletters were not personalised nor very timely, as they had a specific publishing date. We therefore recommended using RSS as delivery format, which would make the process of producing and consuming content more efficient and in the end more cost-effective as shown in a business case. This has been piloted but not been fully rolled out yet. At E20 in Boston last year Attensa showcased another very interesting use case of RSS . It's true RSS has not taken off yet, partially because people don't understand the different concept, but also because we have not fully explored its full potential yet.
Nevertheless, RSS does play a vital role in the 'Social Stack'enabling a free flow of information. Once CRM, DMS, Intranet and other proprietary system vendors thoroughly implement RSS functionality, it will get a big push. And with more and more information floating around via RSS we will need the likes of Newsgator, Attensa or GoogleReader.

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Like the 5 a day meme, thanks.

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