Tag Archives: social media

Eventalyser: Social Media Event Capture

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“How important are small written ephemera such as notes, especially now that we create an almost incalculable number of them on digital services such as Twitter? Some of the most critical collections of primary sources are ephemera that someone luckily saved for the future.” Dan Cohen The New Everyday, June 2010.”

 

“Mum, what did people think of social media in local government in 2012?”

A while ago, I attended #localgovcampNW. There was a lot of good stuff but I already can’t remember most of it. Now if you Google the hashtag you will find bits and pieces of what happened. A few videos 1, a blog or two, and even a cookie monster.

But it isn’t all of it. It’s the bits that are being remembered 2 and some of it will definitely already be forgotten.

I really think there is a need to save the memory of events and the artifacts generated by them. Even if they appear transitory and ephemeral now there’s nothing to say they wont ever be more than that.

I’m hoping someone will create an eventalyser – something that is a bit of a collation tool for info generated at events which communicate largely via new and social media. I’ve wanted to see something on this for ages and a recent post by Mark Braggins/Sasha Taylor tracking the highlights and lowlights of #lgovsm – really hit home with the mention of need to ‘save’ tweeted content (Unconferences: Good Bad or Ugly) . So It just needs to happen 3. I see two very obvious use cases for this: conferences and hashtag events and both. Here’s a badly drawn concept 4:

Badly drawn collation concept

Badly drawn collation concept – what’s there to bring this altogether

The ultimate aim is to capture all content tweeted, linked to or streamed into a single configurable event portal. Maybe using templates or a bit like the drag and drop style ‘widget’ interface that WordPress uses. Essentially so that the focus is on organisation than editing in the first place.

It would ideally do the majority of this without input using fairly smart content recognition. (Ever noticed how Pinterest links to source sites automatically and also recognises things like the creator or storefront on sites like Etsy – and automatically links to them?)

Following the design of the archive it would then allow some curation of the content e.g. removing spurious tweets or hashtagbombers.

It seems like if tools like Storify, Paper.li can do some of this already we’re surely only a short step away from doing all of it? I think it would make a great hackday/hackweekend project. Long term of course it would also archive the content before bitrot sets in.

“What does this mean for the archiving of digital ephemera such as status updates—those little, seemingly worthless online notes? It means we should continue to expend the majority of resources on those documents and people of most likely future interest, but not to the exclusion of objects and figures that currently seem unimportant 5.” – Dan Cohen The New Everyday, June 2010.

Notes:

  1. Im in that one! ↩
  2. for now ↩
  3. If only it was that simple ↩
  4. which looked much better as a dribbly ball point pen sketch I assure you ↩
  5. And no, I am not assuming govCampers are #unimportant. Before you think so ↩

Social Media, Employment and Avatar Rights

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A little bit of idle wandering around social media, employment and individual rights…

Broadcast Locked? Adaptation of Original work by Nevit Dilmen (Silhouette_Mr_Pipo.svg)

Broadcast Locked?

Here’s a completely imaginary scenario 1:

“It’s Tuesday 14th September 2014 and BOB is typing what appears to be a harmless message on Facebook. It appears to be that because really that is what it is. However, there’s a misinterpretation by a colleague on Facebook who happens to think it’s an inappropriate commentary and decides to act by sending a copy of the text to work. The next day BOB is summoned into the office and given a stern reprimand.”

Is there anything wrong with that? Depending where you stand it’s a complete invasion of BOBs personal world, or a perfectly valid employee management activity. Personal Privacy vs Public Relations perhaps. Is BOBs personal content in part owned by his employer? Did his colleague have the right to replicate the content? Perhaps BOB should be more careful? What is the boundary between work and home when it comes to social media?

I have an issue with this somewhere. I won’t go as far as to say that i’ve come to a set view on what it is yet. There’s a kaleidoscope of issues and the lines blur easily with a simple twist of the looking glass. I could just be waiting for the right picture to emerge even if i’m uncomfortable with the current one.

I still find myself feeling though, that somehow we’re idly wandering into very dangerous territory. As social media platforms become mainstream and employers expect staff to fit their personal and professional presences into an acceptable bubble could we be losing something valuable? Even when ‘off the clock’ are we subject to certain expectations? The danger is that it would be easy for the balance to tip in favor of employers than employees.

Some might say that this is the same problem as “Who owns your public image? 2” – the higher our profiles in a community the more caution we expect people to take in what they do. Celebrities and Politicians fall in and out of grace on the smallest of moral dissapointments. I think in many ways though this is subtly different – my Facebook feed is selective. I have chosen who is on there, I use privacy settings, I’m mostly careful about what I say 3 but that doesn’t mean i’ll never say anything by mistake.

My twitter feed is certainly public 4 but at the same time it relies on people looking for it in some way. Passively watching streams or otherwise. The danger here is that we create a situation where it is impossible to create a truly personal profile without hiding behind a pseudonym and making no connections to people you don’t trust entirely. Essentially meaning our digital selves become what we do rather than who we are.

So are we heading into a double life requirement? I don’t think that works well on platforms like twitter or facebook. I might be JP_Worker#3 5 and JonoPatterson 6. Having one of those doesn’t make the other any less me and any less open to accountability Similiarly I could have two Facebook profiles but to me it misses the entire point of being an individual and there are some good reasons not to (<– also an excellent example of the dangers of being too open). I don’t think it affords any more protection to the personal me to have a work me too.

This all vaguely reminds me of an interesting idea by Raph Koster, a game designer who saw problems beggining to emerge in the world of gaming, social worlds and avatar based interactions. ‘Who owns your Avatar?’ If your avatar acquires virtual property who owns that? If you leave the game are you leaving behind an asset which should be protected or just a digital file that should be deleted? Raph’s draft essay (with help from numerous individuals) was the idea of avatar rights, a set of protections given to owners of avatars which would protect them and their digital assets from complete abuse.

User digital person via Wikimedia Commons

Who owns the digital you?

For me the question is a little similiar “who owns your digital self?” I’m not entirely convinced I know whether its me, or whether its me so long as others are happy with the content… could there be a need here for social media rights? A set of protections to prevent a drastic response to flippant remarks?

I want to add finally that I am not talking about blatant critical, obscene, defamatory, racist remarks here. I can see how these damage an employer by association 7. I’m talking about the grey ones in the middle – simple differences of opinion, interpretation and the right to freedom of expression. Where do you draw the lines?

Notes:

  1. IT REALLY IS! JUST BE EXTRA DOUBLY CLEAR: THIS ISNT BASED ON A REAL EVENT! I thought in the spirit of this post I should avoid ambiguity at the get go :) ↩
  2. Not that I have one to own ↩
  3. or at least how I say it ^^ ↩
  4. and often neglected ↩
  5. who would never say anything in disagreement with his employer ↩
  6. who might disagree with his employer personally but not let that interfere with work ↩
  7. though generally I think that these are unacceptable regardless of employment ↩

LocalGovCamp Adventures

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So, as a first post I thought I’d cover the #localgovcampnw event, an unconference in the BarCamp style held for LocalGov bods at the Prescap Arts Centre in Preston. I attended this as a result of following up on an e-mail from work by my colleague exemplar 1 @microwavedrama (L Catherine M) pointing me toward the registration site.

This might seem an odd thing to say but I’m really not very good at social. So attending events like this is always quite a big deal for me. It’s not uncommon for me to sign up to things thinking, “this’ll be great for my personal development / a good networking opportunity,” but finding myself trying afterwards to find any excuse not to go. I keep forcing myself to in the belief that some of my introvertive tendencies might reduce.

After a rushed breakfast the Patterson family 2 all jumped into the van and headed off to Preston despite it feeling like the Sun had gotten bored and abandoned the Earth for a while 3. I found the Arts Centre fairly quickly and was flagged down by Catherine who was already scoping the building out.

Once inside, there was an interesting lift solution which involved riding a cardboard floor to the upper level and then hoping that sheer reverse momentum would open the door before a timer locked it and it had to be released again. I didn’t realise that this lock mechanism existed the first time round, which might later have saved @_garilla (Garry Haywood) from the slightly embarrassing situation of setting the fire alarm off by pressing the ‘wheelchair refuge’ button…

After that I was in. Into a completely different type of conference which was immediately noticeable. No ordered sets of tables. No real sense of social formation even.  Just a bunch of people in  a big room apparently armed with nothing but laptops, ipads, smartphones, curiosity and friendliness. There wasn’t even a sense of leaders / organisers / alphas or experts. It was almost like everyone just decided to go and have a nice sit down in the same building at the same time on the same day. Very refreshing.

Catherine, being an experienced camper, quickly introduced me to @tech_geek_girl (Liz H) and a bit later @TawdryMe (Duncan H) who become my co-conspirators and good company for the day. And a brief chat with @ColetteWeston too which was interesting. For me, meeting a few nice people early on, definitely made it a more comfortable day!! I.e. no introvert wobblers hiding in a corner on facebook / twitter / blogs. (Thanks to you all)

The conference started with a whimper of IceBreakers involving who we were and why we were there in one word. *mumble*JohnPattersonIdeas*mumble*. I hate Ice Breakers but they are a very necessary evil and it did work in warming a few people up before the pitches.

I won’t mention the full itinerary pitched / on offer but as a flavor-of-the-day I ended up at:

  • OpenData and Equalities [@microwavedrama]
  • Digital Inclusion and Learning [@kevupnorth and @kateididntquitegetyourfulltwitteraccountsorry]
  • Wikipedia for Local Gov especially museums and libraries [@pigsonthewing]

OK, I’m being a little selfish now as I would usually go into each of these in depth, but this time I thought I’d jump ahead and sum them up by choosing ten random thoughts that I came out of these LocalGovCampNW sessions with. Actually the real reason is because I er, hadn’t planned to blog 4 about it so took nothing but mental notes.  If you want coverage of what was said, I’d recommend the excellent blog posts #1 and #2 by @markbraggins who covered things in quite a bit more detail.

I will add that these are all my interpretations of qualitative views, albeit from people who know what they are talking about (or at least were effective enough in convincing me that they did). :D

  1. Getting data out there is equally as important as turning it into a discussion / communication / engagement opportunity. Seems like there’s a triumvirate of things to do: a) publish data alongside reports b) publish your interpretation of the data c) engage with people about it. – Engagement being a big theme of the day to be fair.
  2. People will use data / findings in their own ways – making a great website, publishing pretty graphics definitely helps engage but at the end of the day if people want open data they probably don’t want your interpretation. People will take what they need or want from your info and an important part of putting it out there is letting it go.
  3. Microlocal sites are out there and will call you out if you leave them to it. It’s better to be open and engaging about everything so you can debate issues than to sit quietly in a fortress made out of PR press releases and glossy reports.
  4. The culture of an organisation strongly determines opportunities for effectively doing points 1-3 above. It also determines how easy it is to just get on and be innovative. There’s a relationship between how easy it is for: Staff to provide data; Staff to use and share data; Staff to work together; Staff to feel secure, and the level of innovation being observed. I, being a data geek, don’t think about this side of things enough.
  5. Comms strategy/culture (not comms teams per se) can be one of the biggest barriers – there seemed a bit of discussion around how comms culture is often very defensive/reputation orientated, particularly when politics become involved. Transparency and Openness are sometimes better though as they can reduce innate paranoia that councils are hiding things. I suppose that even if findings are uncomfortable they create debate on solutions.
  6. There’s a lot of potential in offloading information to Wikipedia – a) it ranks high in search results so people are more likely to find it than have to ask it ask for it. b) the community can share and reuse it c) in some cases – local history particularly – communities can be stimulated to take over the production and curation of content. From a tourism perspective – QR codes can provide some useful info when used strategically (planted in museums and on public structures). Though @TheBplTower ignored by tweet to place a giant QRpedia code on their shiny new LED heart. Complete side point: Apparently Monmouth is wikipediavizing the entire town!
  7. There was a general debate about digital inclusion / exclusion (heard anything about ‘digital by default’? – I hadn’t) and how to build up community learning  – vaguely relevant but I think what’s interesting from research angles is the engagement and understanding of communities needed to do it effectively.
  8. I got one brief opportunity to mention ‘social network analysis’ in Local Authorities (an idea I blatantly stole from my manager but did credit him with) – it went down quite well as a general idea but it was near lunchtime and no depth was achieved. Maybe i’ll be brave and pitch it as an idea for a session next time.
  9. OpenData formats require strong internal working relations and agreement on processes. E.g. in Catherine’s session someone pointed out that it wasn’t/shouldn’t entirely up to her to do it properly – web people should be involved in making it open formats too.
  10. I found it interesting how the digital inclusion agenda keeps asking the question – “should people opt in to technology?” – the principles of freedom would suggest no but practically it feels like a technological form of poverty not to be digitally literate – it’s a bit like “should all school children have to go to school?”. Being completely new to the debate I’ll admit naivete on this one.

All good stuff. If anything,  the digital inclusion session was a little too big and became stories from the main voices – though this was nice in a way. The session on Wikipedia was fantastic though we did seem to just gawk while @pigsonthewing enlightened us. I also left with homework to actually edit Wikipedia… 5

This was the end of the event for me. I rapidly exited to meet with the rest of the Patterson’s and go home. A big thanks to the organizers who I hope will do it again next year, or perhaps in the summer this time. :D

A Bonus – My Post-Event Reflection.

I think there’s an issue for me around how to mobilize my ten points locally though. Sort of feel that my workplace is the wrong Council to try anything of the above in. {Disclaimer: This isn’t a criticism of my employer – we are simply at a different point of the journey}. At the same time, I also sort of feel it’s the right Council to try it in because the team I work in  should be the team that agitates against the status quo in order to build capacity for dealing with future challenges.

From a personal view what’s interesting is how it got me to consider how I might need to develop myself into being able to take ideas forward.  Maybe this is my question – How do I change my own behaviours to move things in a positive, innovative direction and be comfortable with it within myself, my organisation. Yes I will stop as I’m rambling now but it would make a good unconference session? “openness and transparency: self targeted behaviour change within organizations…”

PS. This is my first ever public blog post – I think I have a lot to learn but I hope in the meantime it was useful or at least mildly distracting.

Notes:

  1. a completely made up title ↩
  2. Why the whole Patterson family? Often and for various reasons, it works out easier to co-ordinate a day trip for my family with a work related event to save on the complexities of arranging transport for a wheelchair user. More on this another time. ↩
  3. hence why I am, very trendily, wearing a coat in all the photos ↩
  4. to be fair I didn’t even have a blog ↩
  5. I did it! I’m thinking Wikipedia should form another blog post though ↩