Details of the Digital Mentor programme

As I mentioned briefly here, while I was at the National Digital Inclusion Conference I was able to interview Gavin Sheppard of the Media Trust about the £900,000 government-funded Digital Mentor programme. The full interview is on the digitalengagement blog. The Trust are starting with a research programme, followed by grants and training for local projects, and national support network. Previous posts here.

The delights of social reporting teamwork

I’ve just had an exhausting few days social reporting at the National Digital Inclusion Conference as you can see from this dashboard of activity … except it wasn’t exhausting at all. It was a delight.
That was in part because we had the luxury of a whole team of reporters including Dave Briggs, Clare White, Tim Davies and Michael Grimes, plus People’s Voice Media from Manchester doing interviews, and We Share Stuff from Birmingham running a version of their social media clinic. (read more...)

Social reporting digital inclusion, collaboratively

Next Monday and Tuesday I’m part of the social reporting team at the National Digital Inclusion Conference in London, and thinking I should write a piece on the benefits SR can bring. Fortunately fellow reporter Clare White has done it already, over on the digital engagement network we have linked to the event.
Clare highlights – among other things – supporting more networking, connecting different viewpoints, informal learning, ensuring more voices are heard, and moving ideas to action.
We have benefitted enormously from having UK online centres as our client and champion, with Helen Milner and Anne Faulkner not just instructing but leading through Twitter, our blog and the network. Just to demonstrate the point, Anne has saved me rounding up our plans by posting them here, including ways you can join in online.
If you are in London, but not attending the main event, do come along to the free fringe on Monday evening. That’s organised by Stuart Parker and the team from Birmingham, who will be running a social media surgery at the conference.
All of which demonstrates another aspect of social reporting. Instead of looking for the exclusive, you are delighted when fellow reporters get there first. Or indeed anyone else – so do join us on the network, which will continue after the event as a sociable space for exploring digital engagement. There’s some great posts there, and on the blog … making me wonder what role there will be for “reporters” next year, if people are so good at doing it for themselves. Social editors, maybe. (read more...)

How the G20 London Summit played online

The London G20 Summit earlier this month was an impressive example of Government trying to do digital engagement well and I think succeeding. Now Stephen Hale, Head of Engagement, Digital Diplomacy, at Foreign and Commonwealth Office has produced what seems to me a very honest personal assessment. He wrote about what was planned, asked for ideas,  did it, and then told us what happened. This sort of thing could get government a good name …

Will Perrin goes local

I expect some serious action to promote and support local volunteer-run websites now that Will Perrin has left his job in the Cabinet Office to work on the Talk About Local project. This aims to train activists in 150 locations across the country, with funding from the Channel 4 4IP fund. Meanwhile, still no details of how the Media Trust plans to develop the Government-funded digital mentor programme. More here on Local, and on Digital Mentors.

Much Twittering, little new

The Digital Britain Summit last week benefitted from some very impressive live-blogging on the official site from Dave Briggs, and lots of Twittering. The live feed was flaky, but overall it showed how Government can nicely support some social reporting at official events. Except … where was the story? That old-fashioned reporting notion of news? Donald Clark, in Digital Britain – Drool Brittania, wasn’t impressed.

Making pdf policy accessible through Simply Understand

After the excellent efforts of Adrian Short to make council web sites more useful by providing news feeds, I found another no-cost digital engagement innovation. Again from an individual.

Corinne Pritchard dropped a comment into a piece a wrote which bemoaned the way that a government department puts up pdfs for a consultation exercise instead of pages you can read on screen. Corinne said: I do that at Simply Understand. I looked – and was hooked.

Simply Understand is a unique translation service. Are you fed up with gobblydegook and jargon? Are you frustrated by endless sentences and hundred-page documents?

Simply Understand aim to cut your policy papers, manuals and programmes down to size! When everything is simply readable, you can simply understand.

(read more...)

Give us our news feeds: Adrian’s challenge to councils

Over at digitalengagement.org Adrian Short throws down the gauntlet to 370 councils who still don’t make it easy for citizens to read their websites by providing RSS feeds (what’s RSS? see the Commoncraft video). He wants them to fix it by Christmas. Adrian writes:

Nothing could be more symbolic of large parts of government’s unwillingness to think beyond the confines of their own websites than making it practically impossible to receive basic local council information like news and events except by taking a trip to anytown.gov.uk to do it on the council’s own terms.

(read more...)

Katie’s digital engagement tips: make it simple, fun and really useful

The other day I was doing some social reporting at the World Entrepreneur Society Summit with Paul Henderson – as you can see here – and met up with Katie Ledger, communications coach and TV reporter for BBC Click.

Bearing in mind the work I’m doing on digital engagement I asked Katie what she thought it took to get people interested in technology. She was admirable succinct: keep it simple, make it fun … and focus on the benefits the technology offers. (read more...)

Sources for social technology propositions – please mix your own

The 45 propositions about using social technology for social benefit have generated some discussion on this blog, Andy Gibson’s, and Amy Sample Ward’s – including an interesting visualisation from Rob Allen. That prompted me to head over to Wordle and have a go myself. I’m glad it shows People featuring more strongly than Tools.

The propositions evolved over a couple of months, and were originally linked to sections in a chapter that offers a sort of development route map for a social technology project. I’ve posted an earlier version of the propostions, showing that, in a comment on Amy’s blog and also below. The book – Social by Social: a practical guide to using new technologies to deliver social impact – should be published and distributed by NESTA next month.

I should also give some credit to Roland Harwood, and the rest of the Connect team in another part of NESTA, for their earlier work on principles for open, collaborative innovation. They have no responsiblity for our propositions, but the framework they have evolved helped spark some ideas. (read more...)