Catch Up

Real life has a habit of intruding so no posts for a while. Apart from welcome distractions like preparing to get married (something that tests your project management skills in a good way) Ihave been busy with day job stuff like last week’s first Digital Inclusion conference (see www.dc10plus.net) and preparing for the forthcoming e-Voice conference (see www.evoice-eu.org).

The difference between a real life meeting and online stuff is interesting (at least to me). Perhaps because I’m not as used to cyberspace as others the joy for me of a real life conference is not the presentations but the chats in between – especially the unexpected ones. A polite conversation as you wander round the exhibition area searching for good giveaways can suddenly blossom into an opportunity to develop a new project or enhance an existing one.

You can get some of this online (and following the next generation of links from friends and colleagues social networking sites is quite useful) but that tends to be to make contact with people you are already interested in rather than people you had no idea you wanted to speak to.

Peter Dawe of Pipex once said to me the success of the Cambridge Phenomenon was not the conferences but the coffee breaks. Perhaps we should try and emulate coffee breaks online?

Watching the  rough cut of the Civic Surf video suggests that blogging may be a half way house. You are then putting yourself open to people coming back and contacting you because of their interest in an issue. Our councillor bloggers have certainly found the level of feedback good and unanticipated and made useful contacts on issues they feel strongly about.

Murphy’s Law of techology

Doing some support for members using blogs and as usual the technology plays up. I know a bad workman shouldn’t blame their tools but the joy of ICT is that it never works when you want it to. The worst confcerence I ever organised (or rather the most traumatic – the conference was fine) had the projector die when someone used a new laptop with faster refresh rates which killed it off. We all went back to flip charts and it worked fine.

Synchronicity

I’ve been writing a short story about how ideas spread on the net pulling together ideas from Dawkins (memes) the Tipping Point and an old story by Fritz Leiber (pictured) on the unconscious mind’s reaction to symbols. Just as I was sorting out the ending I listened to Start the Week on the car radio to a discussion on game theory and its impact on the way people make real life decisions that tied in nicely. Tim Harford was discussing his new book with David Willets and citing David Schilling’s work on how ghetto’s form which helped with thinking.

Just the day before I had had a conversation about the Goldenballs  game show which is obviously based on the Game Theory standards of Prisoner’s Dillema and Tit for Tat, which were also discussed by Harford and Willetts.

Charles Fort famously claimed “It steam engines when it is steam engine time”. Perhaps I’ve just picked up on the zeitgeist. 

Back to the Future – Part Two

I started looking at the art of prophesy from the other side after attending an Alpha Course at our local church. The argument of the guy on DVD was that Jesus was the Son of God because he fulfilled more than 200 Old Testament prophesies. Leaving aside issues like the Old Testament having been selected from amongst the far bigger set of Jewish sacred writings by the Christian Church after Jesus’ death, there is the more generic issue of only remembering the hits and not the misses.

You recall the day your horoscope was spot on, but not the 100’s of times it wasn’t. Science Fiction writers who manage to guess at some aspect of the future claim credit out of proportion to the ray guns, anti gravity devices and personal jet packs that never arrived.

That said there are some good SF writer futurists who are worth reading – Cory Doctorow and Bruce Sterling (in the blog roll) being two.  However, I find their fiction much more telling in its predictions than their factual work. This is probably because you see the (near) future from the perspective of well realised characters. The future is a bit like the battle scene in War and Peace where the protagonist walks into it by accident. It is chaotic and confusing unless you can contextualise and establish a point of view.

Sterling’s “The Future Now” is a good book but not as good as Distraction or some of the Bicycle Repairman series short stories in giving a realistic picture of what technology might mean to our lives.

Musings on Machievelli

I was thinking the other day what a bad rep Machievelli had. If you read The Prince with a bit of context you spot Nicollo’s sub text – as a good citizen of the Republic of Venice much of his advice reduces the power of most nobles in favour of the ruler relying on people power. Admittedly incumbent ruling groups are recommended for the chop, but this no more than you see when any new leader replaces an old one and puts his own supporters into positions of power (naming no names).

A more useful book for community activists is Michael Shea’s Influence. Shea – a former royal PRO – has some great tips about dealing with the media and officialdom. You can get it via Amazon. On the other hand the complete Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister will allow you to spot the ways the establishment try and avoid change happening. An even more extreme example – if you can find a copy – is J.S.Cornford’s Microcosmographia Academia – which rigorously shows why nothing should ever happen for then first time and how to avoid it.

There is often concern among politicians about public involvement because there are some very easy ways itg can go wrong.

One is the floodgate issue – when  we held meetings to set up the Community Power Fora in Norwich the first hour was being barraged with every grumble the audience had developed about the City Council in the lastg 10 years. It wasn’t until after that we were able to discuss how we could work together to make things better. Not much you can do about that but endure it and then move on.

Second is the suspicion that lots of public opinion is led and marshalled by those with “political” axes to grind (because of course elected members have no political views to promote). This is, of course, true. It is called politics and there are very few members of the public who don’t have a political axe to grind.

The test is to see whether they are pleased or upset if you offer them a dialogue. If they just want to  hand in their petition with the local paper there, it is a political stunt. If they welcome the opportunity to discuss what can be done to address their issues, it is “real” participation. Of course the Machievellian amongst us will have invited them to present their petition at a high level meeting rather than on the steps of City Hall so they don’t get the photo opportunity and can’t claim we are not listening.

Losing Your Voice

I managed to lose my voice last week – cold + coughing = laryngitis = cross between Barry White and Sooty. This is an interesting experience for someone who spends his life in meetings and on the phone (and Wednesday’s band practice should be fun as well).

The first lesson it taught me was the limitations of electronic media. I spend a lot of time using email, texts, and other ways of communicating via my fingers rather than throat. This meant I could do quite a lot, but there are some things you still need to have a voice for.

There are a few reasons for this. One is that many people have a learning style reliant on their ears rather than their eyes. Another is that many people are easier to get a response from if you get them on the phone than if you send emails.

But a key reason is that the “vocal” range of written communications is more limited – you can only do so much with italics AND CAPITALS. We were part of a project called e-Sign which developed a deaf signing avatar. One of the first lessons was that – contrary to the formal view – the actual hand signs were only a small part of the communication. Facial expression and body position were just as important in conveying people’s meanings.

Even people who write well and can successfully convey their ideas via written text will then have problems persuading people because at least half of persuasion is listening to the other people and watching their body language to see how (and indeed if) they are receiving the message. You then rephrase the message until you find a lever that unlocks it for them. I have tried to do this via an email exchange or forum posts but it is a bit like having a conversation with your hands tied behind your back and a paper bag on your head.

In politics persuasion is a key art which is why blogging will only ever be one tool in the communications armoury and why we will never escape from meetings.

Supporting Innovation

A bit of a follow up from the last post after thinking about the clash between the need to maintain standards and the need to encourage innovation.

I remember a meeting with librarians in the early days of the internet where we were discussing how to help people find info online. The librarians believed they should vet sites and only point people at those which they felt were trustworthy. Others in the room – including me – thought people had enough sense to realise their local council or the BBC was more likely to be accurate than some survivalist cult from the Bible Belt.

Having seen a couple of programmes on  members of religious cults I’m no longer as sure everyone would choose thinking for themselves over the comfort of certainty, but I still think we should give them the option.

In working with communities of space or geography the challenge is to find a set of rules you can  agree on what is acceptable democratic engagement. How much power can politicians pass over and how much responsibility will citizens accept?

Imagining the Future

Guessing what will happen in the future is a hazardous game. We have all laughed at people who should know better guessing wrong about the speed of  change in ICT (forgetting of course that it has not stopped them making millions from their correct guesses).

I recently looked back at the work we did back in 96 and the updates since on what the impact of what we then called telematics would be in Norfolk. (see http://www.norfolkconnect.gov.uk/norfolkconnect-projects/documents/Appendix_G.pdf for the various scenarios). The interesting thing is that most of the technologies now exist and many of them are being used in some places as descibed. However the change in the way local government deploys them to benefit communities has not happened to the same extent.

I don’t think this is just about public vs private sector. In my experience there is as much innovation in public bodies – particularly in local government – as there s in high tech SME’s. The difference is a swamp and alligator issue. We are so busy doing the day job of fiending off the alligators in managing the environment and helping people on social welfare issues that draining the swamp and using ICT to make a difference to the lives of the public and people who serve them is only ever a peripheral interest. We don’t dare stop or change what we are doing now in case we make a life threatenin mistake, so doing different is always an add on.

Central government also tends to add initiative after initiative instead of producing a coherent, consolidate programme for change. Things like the plans in the local government white paper still play around with the edges of what we do instead of a root and branch rethink. Still, as Sir Humphrey would put it, “that would be a brave decision, Minister.”

Web 2.0 and engaging communities

In the middle of a seminar on use of web 2.0 for promoting discussion and development of best practice around digital inclusion. Key things for me are:

• there is an awful lot out there and how do we engage people already discussing this
• but lots of people still don’t engage – partly because they don’t know why it is important or how to find it – so how do we tell them this is worth discussing
• How do we use the tools without duplicating effort too much

There are some great tools out there and more opportunities to use it to pull together and mash up stuff from different sources. Trick is now (a) to think how to save most time and (b) make sure I set time aside to do it.

Timanderson1’s Weblog

Timanderson1’s Weblog

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