Young Rewired State at Oxfam

Update: Postponed – we weren’t quite quick off the blocks enough to recruit young people to take part in an Oxfam hack-day during the main Youth Rewired State week: so the Oxfam YRS has been postponed. We’ll hopefully work out a new date / plan in the next few weeks. However, other Young Rewired State centres are still on the go…

What happens when you take 5 or 10 young coders and designers aged between 15 and 18; give them a room at the heart of Oxfam HQ; link them up with designers, campaigners and digital experts; and give them a week to create things with government data?

I’m not sure yet. But in few weeks hopefully we’ll find out.

I’m helping to organise a Young Rewired State event at Oxfam HQ in Oxford to do just that – and right now we’re looking for young people from the local area to apply to take part.

You can download a flyer with lots more information to share with any young people you think might be interested, and a sign-up form is here. Deadline for applications is 25th July – but the sooner applications come in the more chance they have. Young Rewired State events are also taking place across the UK, so if you know young people who might be interested but can’t make it to Oxfam HQ in Oxford every day during the first week of August, point them in the direction of the national Rewired State Website.

Shared Practice Through Video

[Summary: Handy guide to all the stages of creating a video of a youth project; from selecting equipment and sorting out consent; to planning, shooting and editing your film]

The Open University have been working on developing a new space in their  Practice Based Professional Learning (PBPL) environment for youth workers; and I was asked to put together a short guide on how youth practitioners can create video content to share insights into their own practice.

The result is ‘Shared Practice Through Video‘, which, in the spirit of sharing, is under a Creative Commons license and available for download as a PDF here.

You can also browse through it on Scribd over here. The guide won’t win any design awards (in fact, if anyone fancies taking advantage of the Creative Commons nature to remix it into a slightly more stylish design I’ll happily send you all the original material), but it does take you through all the stages of creating a video in the context of a youth project (or other project contexts for that matter).

Pareto Problems for Digital Innovation?

Going for the High Hanging Fruit?

[Summary: Local by Social author Andy Gibson is working on a new paper for NESTA on how digital innovation can save public services, and has asked for reflections on ‘obstacles and their solutions’ to adoption or more social technology. I’ve written on practical barriers to digital technology in government before, but here I’m exploring an economic argument that sets out a potential challenge to many digital-social innovation projects*.]

The Pareto Problem
The Pareto Principle (named after the famous Italian Economist, but often known just as the 80-20 rule) suggests that in many real-world situations 80% of the features required in a project can be gained with just 20% of the effort**.

In software development and much of the business world, focussing on the 80% of features you can build easily makes sense. For each bit of effort put in at the start there is a large marginal return and benefit; but as you get to the trickier bits of a project, the marginal benefit (the number of people who will use a feature; how much benefit each new feature will bring etc.) relative to effort put in falls. The last 20% of features might cost four times as much as the first 80%, and in many cases, implementing them simply isn’t cost effective. So, the rational developer or manager never provides them.

Public Services don’t work like that. The tricky 20% of a service to provide is often the service to the most in need. Into that tricky 20% might fall providing services in remote rural areas; educating children from more challenging backgrounds; providing transports services for the elderly; making sure education classes are accessible to those with additional needs and so-on. When social innovators hold up technology driven innovations – new ways of providing public services – we have to ask: are they just solving the easy 80% and ignoring the tough cases?

Is the promise of more efficient and cheaper digital services simply the result of a slight-of-hand – measuring the costs of a service based on it’s provision in the easy cases and bracketing out the tough cases which would require re-engineering systems and adding significant cost and effort if a digital service were to be a universal service?

Possible Solutions
The Pareto Problem isn’t an argument against digital innovation per se. Innovation can shift where the Pareto Problem kick’s in (e.g. Can we serve 90% of the people on 10% of the cost and make savings that way?) and innovation can help the public sector to challenge the frequent over-design of processes and systems around the tough cases. However, the Pareto Problem is significant. A few possible ways to address it in thinking about digital innovation are addressed below.

• Account for a universal service – any digital innovation needs to show its cost and benefits not just in the easy pilot cases – but also if it were to provide a universal service. Or if it can’t provide a universal service it needs to explain it’s limitations, and allow the public sector to properly cost provision to those the innovation will not work for.
• Take the tough cases into account – Conventional design of services in the public sector often starts with tough cases. Staff have in mind the cases they faced recently where a service user had complex needs – and they design from the tricky cases first – building all sorts of processes and systems to cope with the complexities. Agile developers often start with the easy cases – and far too often the tough cases get ignored. For example, how does your service work for young people who need additional privacy because of a custody battle currently taking place? Or how does your service work for people with learning difficulties and other additional needs? ??Find the balance between over-engineering processes, but having processes that work for those with the greatest needs, is the key challenge for social innovators.
• Design with social justice in mind – digital innovation in the public sector shouldn’t just be about creating ‘better stuff’ and ‘better services’ for individuals to consume: it should be about creating a ‘better society’ – and that involves thinking about the distribution of benefits from innovation as well as the nature of the innovation itself.
• Collaborate and listen – the most important way to make sure social innovations don’t fall into a Pareto Problem trap is to design with the people working at the frontline.

A metaphorical summary
I started writing this post a while back under the title ‘What happens when we’ve picked all the low hanging fruit?’. Many digital innovations come showing as basket full of the low hanging fruit and explain how easy it was to pick. The key is asking – how are you also planning to get the stuff from the top of the tree as well?

** Pareto’s original observations concerned the distribution of wealth in Italy, but the principle has been applied much more widely since. The actual numbers don’t matter here. The 80-20 ratio is simply used because Pareto observed it as a ratio that applied in many real-world situation. Take any ratio in the region of 70-30 towards 99-1 and you will see the argument above still broadly holds.

Guest post: Using data to highlight poverty and social justice issues in the World Cup

Today brings two firsts for this blog. The first ever guest post on the blog. And the first (and possibly only) instance of a post here dedicated to football. So, please welcome Pontus Westerberg from the World Development Movement, introducing this summer’s most essential data driven website…

Who are you going to cheer for in the World Cup? Most people in the UK will probably support England, but what if you’re from Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland and your team didn’t qualify?

Even if your team did qualify, who do you cheer for when they’re not playing? Perhaps a team that plays attractive football, like Brazil or a team that contains players from the club team that you support.

At the World Development Movement we wanted to take this idea a bit further and get people to discuss issues of social injustice, poverty and unfairness that we care a lot about.

The result is the site www.whoshouldicheerfor.com which ranks the countries playing in the World Cup based on a range of development and social justice indicators such as maternal maternity rate, carbon emissions per capita and income inequality.

The statistics for the indicators have mostly been taken from the UN’s Human Development Report and place Ghana as the most supportable team. To get the ‘league table’ we ranked each team for each indicator, then worked out a mean position for each one.

We’ve had some questions about the rankings. ‘Why is Nigeria so high up?’, has been a common one. The answer is that Nigeria has comparatively low carbon emissions and military spending, but also that it is the poorest country playing in the world cup.

That’s right – to highlight the gross inequalities that exist in the world we’ve ranked teams with low GDP per capita higher than teams with high GDP per capita. In our view, the underdogs – teams such as Cote d’Ivoire and Nigeria – from the poorest countries in the World Cup deserve our support more than richer countries.

Of course, the ranking does not represent the official view of WDM on the countries themselves. It’s meant to be a fun and interested way to think hard about serious issues. How come Nigeria is the poorest country in the World Cup, yet has one of the world’s largest oil reserves? Why does the United States – the richest country – give so little money in aid?

So, go ahead, get involved. Who are you going to cheer for?

Comment on government: How should I be interacting?

I’ve just been reading the commentable version of  the Coalition: our programme for government document, and, given some of the content, I couldn’t help but head for the comment box to drop in some reflections on different aspects of the proposed policies.

However, as I started to type in a comment or two, I quickly found I wasn’t certain what sort of interaction was being invited. The front page of the site states “This website gives you the opportunity to enter public discussion on the programme. We’ll take all your comments and suggestions on board and publish the Government’s response to those policy areas receiving the most feedback”, but it goes no further to explain who will be reading the comments, what sort of feedback to expect, and whether the goal is discussion between members of the public, or dialogue between the public and government.

Which makes writing a comment difficult.

Should I be constructively unpicking policy and pointing to useful resources that, in the hands of a Minister or policy official would be useful? Should I be replying to other posters, engaging in debate with them on the strengths or weakness of their argument? If so, are they getting e-mail updates about my replies, or can threaded discussions emerge? Should I be gaming the system and getting as many people to post on the topics I feel post passionate about, given the statement that only the “policy areas receiving the most feedback” are to get a response from the Government? Will track-backs to posts (so I can write a more considered comment on policy areas on this blog) be picked up and fed into the dialogue?

All these things affect the sort of dialogue that can take place – and the nature of relationship between citizen and government that can be established. Whilst it’s positive that the new government have opted for opening up comments on the coalition plan, and Simon Dickson’s work to turnaround a basic site for such comments in a short space of time is impressive, comment boxes alone do not a dialogue make. There are bit techno-social challenges to be solved to effective online participation, and we all need to get a lot smarter in solving them.

As the Government team behind this online document, and, hopefully future online documents, iterate the development of such spaces, it would be good to see a lot more attention paid to the forms of interaction between citizen and state that are to be facilitated. Personally, I’d like to see a clear statement about exactly who will be reading and summarising the comments; how that will take place; and who the summary will be shared with. And it would be good to have something more nuanced than simply a numbers game for knowing what will get considered.

What would you like to see to encourage effective dialogue on government hosted spaces around documents like the coalition agreement?

P.S. There’s one more big problem with the current commentable coalition agreement: the moderation policy suggests wants 16s to have parental consent before posting. There is no legal basis for this and its outrageous age discrimination. By all means encourage young people to discuss issues with parents before posting – but to exclude young people who are  from posting without parental consent cannot be justified.

More online gig listings

I’m still trying to solve the problem of online gig listings, and I’m using the new Little Fish site as a guinea pig. The problem isn’t that the listings are bad, it’s that there are lots of them, and musicians don’t want to spend much time filling in forms on the web.

I’m going with ArtistData, which promises a solution to exactly this problem, but I have to say it’s not running quite as smoothly as planned. I need to get decent gig listings up onto these sites:

• Myspace
• Facebook
• Last.fm
• littlefishmusic.com

The idea is that I put the gig info into ArtistData once, and it spews it out to the rest. Turns out it’s not so easy…

Facebook

Let’s start with the good news. It works for Facebook. The listing isn’t fancy but it uses the image I uploaded and gets the date right, which is fine for now.

Myspace

Myspace/ArtistData sync is not working at the moment, because Myspace just updated their event system. This is annoying but understandable. What’s more annoying is that Myspace’s new event editing interface is a fucking nightmare. They’ve managed to improve bits of it while making the rest impossible. Imagine having mandatory address and postcode fields and a picky band name autocomplete on a sluggish form and trying to enter data for ten gigs in a row. Not fun. At all. Can’t wait for ArtistData to catch up on this one…

Last.fm

Last.fm syncing died sometime last year and hasn’t been reinstated. A quick glance at the API suggests that it doesn’t support adding events, and it seems that the issue has been dropped on ArtistData’s end.

littlefishmusic.com

ArtistData supplies an <iframe>-based gig calendar widget to embed on your site. You can change some colours, but ultimately the layout is ugly. And it’s an <iframe>. So I’ve stumped up the extra $3.99/month for XML access to the listings (this also includes RSS feeds for gigs, blogs and news but I’m not planning on using them). When I get round to it I’ll be able to pull in the XML and display it on the site how I like. I’ll probably do it in straight Javascript to start with, then implement some sort of cache later so it’s not relying on the ArtistData site being up (they had some serious downtime today).

So far, so mediocre

At the moment, ArtistData is saving me precisely zero keystrokes. I know some of it the crap is temporary, and they do generally seem like nice people. But I do seem to be paying for very little at the moment.

I’m going to stick it out for a few months while the Myspace thing gets sorted and I get the Tumblr site working well. Hopefully I’ll be able to feed into the process at ArtistData and let them know how it feels from the ground. I’ve been signed up since beta, so I guess it’s time I gave them some useful feedback, eh?

I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, I’m thankful for all the downtime in the van. There’s nothing like a bit of rock’n’roll data entry to liven up a 5 hour drive.

Virgin Media and easyJet respond to my Twitter critiques

Yesterday I blogged about corporate Twitter accounts. I followed it up by tweeting @virginmedia and @easyJetCare with my criticisms. Here are my tweets and their responses:

@virginmedia Are you aware that your feeds are hidden in the sidebar of your Twitter background? Screenshots here: http://bit.ly/8YF37R
12:59 AM Apr 28th via TweetDeck

@domeheid There’s a lot of information we need to put on there, will pass on your feedback all the same so thanks =) BMc
about 13 hours ago via TweetDeck in reply to domeheid

@easyJetCare Are you aware that your Twitter background is pixellated? Screenshots here: http://bit.ly/8YF37R
1:00 AM Apr 28th via TweetDeck

@domeheid Thanks for your comments. We will have this checked. ^DB
about 15 hours ago via CoTweet in reply to domeheid

It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes them to actually fix the glitches – if they even intend to. Watch this space. Or better still, follow me on Twitter!

What makes a good corporate Twitter account?

My first homework assignment for the IAB social media practitioner programme is to write a blog post critiquing two corporate Twitter accounts: one who gets it and one who doesn’t get it. Examples that Henry Elliss gave in his talk at the first session included @twelpforce (25,542 followers), @easyJetCare (6,048 followers), and @virginmedia (10,775 followers). All three of these companies use Twitter for customer service – a brave choice. The nice thing about this is that they are able to respond quickly to their customers. Virgin Media and easyJet initial their tweets to that you can trace them back to a particular employee.

One thing I noticed about Virgin Media was that their background image is too large so that some of the information is hidden unless you view the page fullscreen.

Whereas easyJet’s design has no such problems:

Although there is a bit of pixellation (meh):

Don’t quite get it
The Highways Agency (@HighwaysAgency) uses Twitter like an RSS feed. I’m not sure this is a good thing. Are you supposed to read through all their tweets in case you spot any roads that might affect your journey? It might be more useful in a mash-up or if you set up a custom search to find all tweets referring to specific roads, e.g. A34 or M40. But then you might as well just go to their website; unless you’re on the move and accessing Twitter through your phone. Maybe it isn’t so bad then. But then again, only 196 followers. This is an indictment that they don’t interact at all with their followers. We are after all talking about social media, which implies that you should have a two-way conversation, not a lecture.

Whilst the Highways Agency is guilty of over-tweeting, the Midcounties Coop (@MidcountiesCoop) has only tweeted three times in 2010 so far and has no sort of branding whatsoever. They haven’t even uploaded a profile picture. No wonder they only have 41 followers. Maybe they just figured “if you don’t have anything nice to say then don’t say anything at all.”

Gets it
Quidco (@quidco), “The UK’s no.1 cashback & voucher site”, has a nice balance between highlighting their best deals and sharing consumers’ feedback by retweeting their success stories. They also use it as a quick way to respond to customers’ concerns and refer them on to their support team. 3,105 followers prove it’s at least more popular than the Highways Agency and the Coop. These figures are quite good compared to big corporations like Virgin Media and easyJet.

One thing to note about Twitter accounts that are used for customer service is that followers may only stick around while they have a specific query. Once their issue is solved, they may stop following (I know I would). If my brother is anything to go by, Quidco users are quite loyal and always on the prowl for a bargain.

What have I learned?

1. Don’t over-tweet.
2. Respond directly to followers.
3. Get your branding right.

I’m interested to know what corporate Twitter accounts my fellow Rising Voices in social media are blogging about. Let’s get these pingbacks going!

Note: The company I work for, Torchbox (and in particular Rob Salmon, Director of Digital Marketing), encouraged Jonny Grum and me to attend this course at the IAB in London so we could develop our social media skills. By the end of the course, I will be a certified Rising Voice in social media!

Oxford Twestival today

Just a quick post to say that Oxford Twestival 2010 starts today at 7pm at the Living Room. A night of music and general merry making, all in aid of a good cause!

Barcamp Transparency is helping out as a sponsor, and it’s looking like it’s going to be a fantastic event.

There are still tickets available, so I hope to see you there.

Also today, I’m going to be on a panel session from 2pm talking about social media and internet technology in education and the 3rd sector.

Busy day!

New site – devbytes

If you used to like the more tutorial based posts on slightlymore then this website might be for you. I will be posting snippets of code which will be highly tagged to try to create a personal delicious-esque code library. This is taken from the (quickly and badly written!) about page (or go straight to devbytes now!):

Welcome to devbytes. I want to build up a personal collection of useful code snippets, programming sayings, paradigms and ‘gotcha!’ moments (like when you first understand the JavaScript closure) for future reference. A bit like an ever evolving personal textbook, library, reference and cook-book.

I decided to put it into blog format because I know how useful it is to stumble across that page which has the solution to my problem on it. Now I’m not imagining for a moment that this will be anywhere near as good as many of the resources out there – but if it helps one person solve one problem then being a public blog rather than a private notebook then it’s all worth it.

Plus, at the end of the day, a blog is far more searchable than paper ;) For this reason, I intend to over-tag each of the posts too (it helps me search through delicious because I super-tag everything on there) but keep the categories relatively tight to separate the posts into things such as thoughts, design patterns, programming philosophy and other distinct types. But I guess I’m not really doing anything groundbreaking there, am I? It’s just that I use the categories in such a ridiculous way in all of my other blogs!

Anyway, I believe that I’ve waffled enough for now – I present to you devbytes.

As mentioned – this is designed as a personal reference – but if you find it useful or interesting too – then all the better! Naturally, it has a twitter account which will auto post when a new byte is posted (@devbytes) or you could subscribe to the RSS feed if that’s more your cup of tea.

Go to devbytes →