Designing for Civil Society

New interactive digital divide website launched

Hats off to Andy Carvin and colleagues who have just launched an impressive new website for the Digital Divide Network.

DDN now boasts a wide array of interactive tools, encouraging activists to share resources, publish articles, host virtual discussions, establish online communities, and publish their own commercial-free Web journals, popularly known as "blogs." These resources can be used for communication and collaboration between the diverse groups who have a common cause to eliminate the digital divide.

The site is a major technical and networking achievement... and I'm not just saying that because it takes a feed from this blog. It's great when those talking about inclusion issues really use the social technology tools that they rightly say should be widely available. The network and site also helps those of us promoting the virtues of social software to show potential clients and collaborators what is possible. At a price in time and effort, of course.

Flash illuminates the urban tapestry

Giles Lane of Proboscis follows up my earlier item about neighbourhood communications with news that you can now view the results of the Urban Tapestries project through a flashbrowser. Once registered you can see how, during trials, people created text and image items to 'attach' to places in central London and view these by 'pocket', thread, and clickable map.

The Urban Tapestries software platform allows people to author their own virtual annotations of the city, enabling a community’s collective memory to grow organically, allowing ordinary citizens to embed social knowledge in the new wireless landscape of the city. People can add new locations, location content and the ‘threads’ which link individual locations to local contexts, which are accessed via handheld devices such as PDAs and mobile phones.
Urban Tapestries seeks to understand why people would use emerging pervasive technologies, what they could do with them and how we can make this possible. It seeks to enable people as their own authors and agents, not merely as consumers of content provided to them by telecoms and media corporations. The project centres on a fundamental human desire to ‘map’ and 'mark’ territory as part of belonging and of feeling a sense of ownership of our environment.

I understand Giles is planning another project. I think he and his partners are onto something important about the potential for people to use new technology to interact with their environment. You can see a couple of animations that bring this home, linked from here.

Is this the 'dark age' of community communications?

On his Neighbourhoods blog Kevin Harris wonders in The original space of flows whether we may be living in a 'dark age' of community communications...

.... where at the moment we have neither the benefit of dense overlapping networks in our neighbourhoods, nor the potential of an online resource for the accretion of community memory. There's stacks more to go into this, such as the 'isolating impulse' expressed in the use of personal stereos, shaded car windows, a non-conversational cash machine, how we feel about gated communities, and so on.

Presenting to promote conversation

Geoff Mulgan, former head of Tony Blair's strategy unit, this evening provided a striking lesson in how to do a presentation that favours the audience - by chunking the content in a way that stimulates conversations. It was all the more effective because there was no Powerpoint, no exhortation, and no evident ego. Clearly some people can survive a tumble in the No 10 spin machine.
The occasion was a meeting of the Tomorrow Network, a free, loose association of about 2200 people treated by the Tomorrow Project to end-of-the-day meetings every few months, mainly in London. Not all at once, of course.
Tonight's topic was 'The future of the electronic media', which is usually a great temptation to fancy slides and baffling techie references. Instead we got 10 stories that provided different windows into the issues, based around technology, business, geography, power relationships, civil society, mentality, community, children, morality, time. The content was a crisp mix of anecdote, analysis, and hunch, all in 20 minutes. I'll do more later on one or two of them. My point here is that the presentation was - it seemed to me - designed specifically to prompt some conversations (and incidently offer at least 10 neat blog items). It occurs to me you could also take the structure and use the 10 categories for further research... a good jump start to some Spurling perhaps. Or do a mindmap - here's a start.
As it was, after some question and answer, we moved to more traditional knowledge-sharing over a free drinks in the splendid building of the Royal College of Physicians. There was no problem finding something to talk about.
The other speaker, futurist Dr Wendy Schultz, had some great ideas too, but suffered from.... uhhh, electronic media. Her Mac-based Powerpoint didn't fare well on a PC lacking Quicktime, so most slides featured big white spaces telling us about TIFFs, missing compression gizmos and so on. She promised us a multimeg, multimedia download - later. It seemed like a telling metaphor about technology, people and communication, with Wendy triumphing over the limitations of her technical aids.
Geoff is now director of the Institute of Community Studies, which has a 50-year track record of social innovation initiated by its founder Michael Young, who invented the Open University and Consumers Association. Lots more ideas will follow, I'm sure. They may even be accessible too.
Free membership of the Tomorrow Network - details here
Update: Hands up if you are a knowledge activist

Spurl: super webtool with service too

The online bookmarking tool Spurl reached version 1.0 last week, and looks like a must-use tool for anyone organising and republishing their bookmarks. Spurl enables you, when browsing web sites, save online the location together with a description and other information. Useful enough if you want to access bookmarks from different computers, or research sites with colleagues and create a shared list.
However, the exciting features, for me anyway, are that you can both categorise and tag your sites and create an RSS feed from the list, and also publish your collections of links.
Suppose you manage a web site where you want to show useful resources as lists of links. Usually they get done once and it is a pain to edit and update them. With Spurl you research sites, categorise and tag them, then insert a feed (or a bit of Javascript) into your links page. When you find something on other site, add that to Spurl, and it gets added to your site automatically. If you find a site has changed, edit the information in Spurl and the change ends up on your site.
If you find inserting the feeds tricky, you can publish some or all of your bookmarks...Spurl creates a publicly-viewable page, excluding bookmarks you have marked private. So you could just put a link from your site to that.
One additional treat is that if you have an account with del.icio.us - which also saves your bookmarks online in a different way - the sites you tag in Spurl also end up on del.icio.us, where they go into the growing pool of tagged sites.
Here's another plus: service. I spent some time with Spurl yesterday, and it all seemed fine until I tried to get feeds from categories. Some worked, some didn't. I emailed support, and within a couple of hours had a response from Spurl founder Hjalmar Gislason, doubling up on help desk, saying he had fixed it. "Happy spurling, and spread the word," he said. Glad to.
When I have a bit more time I'll document using Spurl and del.icio.us (the help system is a bit lacking and out of date). Meanwhile I just wanted to get the word out, and maybe pick up some comments or links from others trying the service. Oh, and it's free. Interviews with Hjalmar explaining how here and also here.
Update: I've been back to look at the other major online bookmarking system, Furl. It promotes the ability to save a page when you bookmark it, which is worth doing if you think the item may disappear. Spurl does this too, if you choose an 'advanced' setting. Furl doesn't have tags, but you can do multiple categories (unlike Spurl) and you can configure manually RSS feeds from categories, as the help system explains. Not so easy as Spurl, and you don't get the Javascipt to insert into web pages. Nice to have choice and competition among free services.
Update: comparison of Furl, Spurl and del.icio.us features: download pdf

Proxicommunication - or technology at local level revisited

I sensed two models below the surface of discussion at last night's London launch of Proxicommunication - ICT and the Local Public Realm. One harked back to the US Freenets and community networks of the 1980s and 1990s, when pioneering enthusiasts promoted bulletin boards and later the Internet to help rebuild local community, provide services, promote debate, offer new learning opportunities. The essential components of that model were some planned provision, support and management of content and interactions.
The other model - or perspective - was of the growing use of personal multimedia and social networking online, and a fairly unstructured development of services offered by public agencies and a host of nonprofit intermediaries.
It seemed to me that the report's author Will Davies was looking for some clearer local governance and planning in his analogy of the public park as a way of thinking about the online commons. He was also arguing for a new breed of technology professionals equivalent to the architects, urban designers and civil engineers who have shaped our physical infrastructure.

Digital manifesto launched, very softly

The UK think tank IPPR managed the ultimate soft launch last night with the presentation in London of its Manifesto for Digital Britain. Some folk who hadn't read the invitation carefully enough - me included - thought they would find on their seats a thick tome or link to content covering the importance of the Net for business, education, government etc. OK, we have heard a lot about that before, but IPPR are close to Government, the drinks are free, the Minister will be there, meet some nice people... let's go!
Uuuh...different discovery on arrival. This is not the launch of the manifesto, but the launch of the process of developing the manifesto. It will be available next year. Oh well, settle down, listen to the Minister Stephen Timms (who is one of the politicians who really does know his stuff in this field).
"This is a good opportunity to review the progress that we have made in achieving.... " into standard Ministerial speech " ...not for the few but for the many..." .... now up the league table in the G7 countries in broadband deployment...Then the touch of humanity... how the Minister was on the train and had forgotten his papers and could download them using G3 technology. At least I remembered that bit. Do Orange do that for Macs? When is the new Treo 610 available? Drift into personal techno-dreams.....
Next up was Stephen Coleman, professor of eDemocracy at the Oxford Internet Institute, making some good points, I thought, about the need to translate technology lessons and opportunities into policy, and into public understanding. In doing that, he said, we need to cross the barriers of different disciplines, innovate and integrate, implement and evaluate. That is, do new stuff differently.

Techo-engagement urged on local councils

A report from the New Local Government Network called Invisible Villages - techno-localism and the enabling council promotes social software as a major force in connecting with local communities and developing networks.
"Social software is an increasingly popular tool for the development of voluntary, bottom-up social networks. Already, some social network sites, such as Orkut, have become popular amongst certain niche communities, as ways of building new relationships on the back of existing ones. E-mail and instant messenger are much more common parts of a typical social life. Informal and private socialising is not in itself a sphere where government has a role, but it is worth recognising how beneficial these technologies can be to communities and individuals”.
The report is by Anna Randle of NLGN, with James Crabtree and Will Davies - who worked together at iSociety, and are now moving to to IPPR. I expect we'll hear more at an iSociety event next week launching another of Will's reports, and the IPPR Manifesto for Digital Britain event.
The authors argue that embracing such social software will allow local government to develop its unique role within localities:
“New technologies offer councils a new and exciting opportunity to exercise their new enabling and pluralist community leadership role, in a way which can help them respond to diverse and complex needs, enable communities to find the resources within themselves to articulate and meet these, and to balance conflicts which might otherwise not be recognised."
As I have written before, I'm sceptical about the potential for techno-engagement at local level. The tools can certainly be an important part of the communications and engagement mix, and social networking models are a good way to unpack notions of "the public" or "the community". However, I'm not sure that they are leading edge.
The latest report isn't available online, and I'm not sure I would venture £10. I wonder if this blog qualifies me for a press copy? Worth a try.

Multimedia conference reports - can I do that?

Louise Ferguson provides links to reports from the Dust or Magic conference that use - in the spirit of the event - a mix of media. They were developed by Chris Hawker and fellow postgrad students at Oxford Brookes University. The report of Louise's own presentation on ICTs in the workplace shows the benefits of a Flash version over html for slides and audio. Some reports have video too. I'm intrigued by how easy (or not) it would be to develop off-the-shelf approaches to producing event reports which enable nonprofessionals to put together something usable. I'll be on the look-out for examples.
PS Louise provides a link to a piece in PC Magazine about The New Geek - people comfortably applying technical tools throughout different industries and disciplines. Can I be an old new geek? Louise comments on the article "Geek is a misnomer - geeks are misfits, socially inept. That's precisely the image that isn't reflected in the work being described." So - new name needed for socially-capable techies who do other stuff.... or perhaps non-techies who can do more than most. I want the tee shirt.... and the skills to go with it.

Blogs and vogs may be the new community media

Lee Bryant has pulled together highlights from the blogtalk 2 conference in Vienna, including some fascinating ideas on how text, audio, video blogs (vogs or vlogs?) may evolve into a new form of community media. There are some useful tips and links, but discussion rather confirms my experience that putting together multimedia for a blog is time consuming.
One method is using SMIL - Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language - which is a bit like using html to mark up web pages. There are some Windows editors, but not as far as I can see anything for Mac OSX. I'm attracted by the scope for doing slide shows with added captions and audio, now possible using Flash-based programmes like SWF 'n Slide as something quicker and easier. I can see some events on the horizon where this could be a useful additional reporting method, which seems like a good excuse to spend some time experimenting. More later.
See also Ranting and reporting from WSIS