Category: cymru

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A Useful Fiction by Patrick Hannan

Sometimes I feel as if I’m always playing catch-up.

This book “A Useful Fiction“, which came out last year, has just brought me reasonably up-to-date with devolution of the United Kingdom, particularly some of the finer details which I’d missed.

It has many good insights into the idea of Britain and its democracy, or rather democracies. The cover picture is a Union Flag with some serious-looking cracks in it, so you get the general idea.

I like Patrick Hannan’s scattershot style. He doesn’t resist a few cheeky observations about Blair, Brown, other politicians, Prince Charles, etc. He has some fun with the subject, which is pretty important if you’re talking about devolution and suchlike. That said, he’s fairly even-handed and journalistic about it.

Read it before it gets out of date! It’s published by Seren.

It turned out to be Patrick Hannan’s last book. Here’s an obituary of Hannan written by Meic Stephens.

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Can we trust BARB’s viewing figures for Sgorio on S4C?

Yesterday The Telegraph printed a story about S4C viewing figures for the football programme Sgorio:

Sgorio – Welsh for score – turned into a no score draw on the night despite regularly pulling in tens of thousands of viewers on other nights.

It is a regular show on Channel Four in Wales featuring top matches from the German, Spanish and Italian leagues.

Under the TV rating system, any programme with fewer than 2,500 viewers is regarded as “making no impact”.

Today the Western Mail ran a very similar story. Before we get into a discussion about what this might mean, let’s examine the figures. According to The Telegraph:

The figures were compiled by the Broadcasters Audience Research Board.

The body surveys viewing habits of 11,300 viewers in 5,100 British homes, and weights them according to the rest of the population.

How many homes own television sets in the UK? Let’s use BARB’s own figures:

In 2009, 25.9 million homes own at least one television set out of a total of 26.6 million homes in the UK.

Let’s concentrate on television-owning homes. According to this 97% of homes in the UK own a television.

The 5,100 British homes is 0.02% of the homes that own a television. BARB is collecting these figures by sampling one house in every 5000 television-owning houses in the UK, roughly speaking.

That may be adequate for popular programmes but is it enough to gauge the popularity of a minority language programme?

S4C publishes a top 20 chart. It would be good to have figures for other special interest programmes for comparison, but BARB doesn’t publish these figures free of charge. (Subscribe if you want.) Regardless, how meaningful are these figures in light of the sample size? I’m not aware that BARB has more fine-grained techniques for sampling S4C viewing, anyone know?

How many people live in Wales and in the UK? Let’s take the population figures from the Office for National Statistics:

Wales: 2.9 million
United Kingdon: 59.8 million

Let’s now look at sampled viewers. BARB’s sampled viewers make up a proportion of the total number of viewers in the UK. Let’s assume BARB has picked a fair distribution of sampled viewers in Wales. We could then expect the proportion of sampled viewers in Wales to match the proportion of the UK who live in Wales.

As a proportion, Wales makes up 4.8% of the UK population. Therefore we would expect BARB to have sampled approximately 548 viewers in Wales (which is 4.8% of 11,300).

I’m going to make an assumption here. I’m going to assume that out of the 2.9 million people in Wales, 97% have access to a television in their own home. This reflects the 97% of households who own a television in the UK. Therefore we calculate that around 2.8 million people in Wales have a television in their own home. My aim is to get an approximate impression of the scale here – the order of magnitude – to decide how trustworthy the statistics are. The figures may be slightly off, so please let me know if you have more accurate figures.

Therefore, each sampled viewer in Wales represents roughly 5000 of the television-watching population in Wales. This is similar to the figure for households above. I’m also assuming S4C’s heartland is Wales, although it is sometimes available in households outside Wales.

BARB’s threshold is 2,500 viewers for a programme “making an impact”. These are not real viewers, but figures extrapolated from the comparatively tiny sample size.

So according to this analysis, the conclusion that Sgorio made “no impact” rests on just ONE of the sampled viewers in Wales.

Again, is this enough to measure the reach of a programme, in particular one in a minority language?

UPDATE 21/10/2010: Comments are off but trackbacks and pingbacks are on.

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All Wales Convention – Closed!

Remember the recent All Wales Convention? Yesterday they sent me this message via Facebook:

Diolch am ymaelodi a’r Grwp hwn. Gan fod yr Adroddiad wedi ei gyhoeddi bellach, rydym wedi cadw cofnod o gynnwys y Grwp Gweplyfr a’i ddirwyn i ben.

Thanks for joining the Group. Since the Report has now been published, we have kept a record of the Facebook comments and closed the Group.

What?

Closing the Facebook group is probably a mistake.

Part of the reason for using social media to get people’s opinions SHOULD be open access to the original stuff. The Convention achieved that during their work – to an extent – but what now?

Where can we read the opinions that were submitted via Facebook? (I’ve replied to ask and will blog the response, if any. But I suspect they’re filed in a dusty box somewhere.)

It’s not only about reading them – but quoting them, scrutinising them and linking to them. The group now has the text: “The work of the All Wales Convention is now complete”. That’s correct, but its recommendations and conclusions will affect Wales for a long time to come.

There are lots of UNKNOWN reasons why you’d keep something live on the web, and preferably with its own unique URL. Who knows what future purpose it might serve? It’s cheap, so why not? Incidentally here’s: the URL to the blog post you’re reading.

Real time web is exciting but it doesn’t diminish the value of persistence. And if all this is undesirable for someone, they have the option of writing you a letter or email instead.

Weirdly, for some reason, there are only three members in the group now and most of the submissions have already vanished. As for the discussion forum on the All Wales Convention main site, it’s being closed for comments – but kept live for future reference. Does this mean your comments via Facebook are worth less than comments on the main website? I hope not.

For me this brings to mind major weaknesses in Facebook as a tool for political engagement. Sure, it’s fashionable right now and it does offer access to large numbers of people. I’m not saying Facebook should never be used for this sort of project. But it’s very difficult to export your data for archival purposes like this. It’s also impossible to deep link to a specific comment. Facebook itself makes no guarantees about the persistence of your data either.

UPDATE 11/12/09: The group has gone, along with everyone’s comments. I received a short reply saying they only had a paper copy and would get back to me about how it could be accessed. I hope future government projects emulate the good parts of this example (attempting to engage with people, mainly) and leave out the bad. Lots of potential blog posts there…

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Vote for Twitter to be translated into Welsh

At the moment Twitter’s web interface is only available in four languages – English, Japanese, French and Spanish. Also on the way now are Italian and German.

So Twitter Inc have decided to increase support for the world’s languages, which is an excellent move. They’ll be asking users to collaborate on translating the interface, which again is good. The language community, made up of fluent users and some professional translators, knows best. Then everyone wins.

Twitter Inc haven’t said exactly how they’ll choose the next languages. But we can ask for Welsh. Here’s how.

  1. Go to http://twitter.com/translate
  2. Click the link “Sign up with your username and language”.
  3. Type your Twitter username.
  4. Select “Welsh” from the list.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a Welsh speaker or not. Welsh can belong to everyone!

I’m calling it a “vote”. You might as well use your vote for a language you’d like to see supported, even if you’re not a speaker.

Let’s not wait months and months for Welsh to get support – we can ask now. If they receive a high number of requests, it may spur them into offering Welsh.

Facebook made a similar move a while back. The whole thing was a game, with scores and a leaderboard for contributions. This resulted in a very rapid translation, completed in around three or four weeks as I recall. Twitter will be even quicker, I think we’ll do it in mere days.

In fact, Welsh was among the first languages to be supported by Facebook. This was mainly because there was a lot of demand expressed noisily, via a group.

“The squeaky hinge gets the grease.”

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Thoughts for Wales’ new Cross-Party Digital Group at the National Assembly

I went to a public meeting at the Assembly buildings in Cardiff last night, which was a chance to meet Wales’ new Cross-Party Digital Group and have a discussion to answer the question:

“How can we make better use of new media and digital technology to engage with the people of Wales?”.

The members of the group are the Assembly members Alun Cairns, Peter Black, Alun Davies and Bethan Jenkins. Not all of them could actually make it but as an intro conversation with q&a it was worth attending.

Foomandoonian has blogged last night’s line-up (with representatives from Google UK, Oxfam GB, MessageSpace and chaired by Rory Cellan-Jones). He’s also blogged some of his highlights of what the guests said.

Below are some of my thoughts. I did raise my hand and ask a question about monitoring blogs and other social media. I also filled in a feedback form (on good old paper). Maybe I can explain/expand on them here. I’m offering them from my perspective and as someone who works with the web and is interested in seeing Wales do well.

Getting attendees at the meetings. I get the impression there will be more of these meetings. “Engagement” is a popular word to drop in, how can we actually do this? Well, for what it’s worth I only heard about the meeting because a friend emailed the details to me. Otherwise I would have missed it. So next time please put a page on the Assembly site about this meeting. Then it can be found by Google and we can send it around by email, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and all the other various networks. Whatever existing publicity there was worked well because there were about 80 people in attendance, give or take. This was described as a good “turn-out”. It seemed that most of these people were middle-aged white men in suits. It’s just an observation, there were exceptions of course and it’s actually a good start. But not to have an open page (none that I could find anyway) on the web about a digital Wales meeting is missing a trick. Get a bigger room next time because we’ll be spreading the word!

The meeting itself needs to be more open. The meeting is already somewhat open because people are blogging about it and some people were using Twitter with the hashtag #digitalwales. Please record it next time. Just the audio will probably be fine, with a roving mic for questions. Document the whole thing. That is engagement because you can upload it somewhere and make the best use of public money. It’s a public meeting, so make it as public as possible! There’s no reason why time and space should prevent people from at least hearing meetings anymore. Someone in Pen Llŷn will thank you. I recently wrote about recording meetings on my Native blog.

Bill it as open. This is a public meeting. If people want a private discussion with the AMs involved, there are already lots of ways (email, phone, face-to-face). So just make it clear to attendees that things will be recorded and for the benefit of everyone in Wales.

Let’s have a discussion about open data in general. The USA house their open public data at data.gov and the UK are not too far behind with data.gov.uk (not launched yet but currently on a developer preview). On the feedback form I suggested mySociety as guests for a future meeting because they’re probably the UK’s leading experts on making tools that use political and other data to benefit the public. Good to see that this is what they’re planning. There are almost definitely opportunities for Wales in open public data. By that I mean business opportunities that create employment and projects which help communities – as well as ways to understand the viewpoints, hold politicians to account and run a proper democracy.

But we would like Assembly data in standardised formats please. The online transcriptions of AM speeches are a bit disorganised at the moment. If the Assembly exists to serve Wales, then one way to achieve that is to make them machine-readable. Ideally this would be XML format, but it doesn’t actually matter as long as it’s consistent all the way and the original language and translation are clearly indicated (English and Cymraeg). Then all kinds of things become possible. A good example is the volunteer project They Work For You, which has a search engine for parliamentary discussions and related functions. It has UK parliament, the Scottish Parliament and the Northern Ireland Assembly – but it’s missing the Welsh Assembly. I’ve written about the need for They Work For You to index Welsh Assembly discussions before. It’s been discussed on a mySociety mailing list and we welcome all coders! But the main point is NOT to raise the specific issue of They Work For You because it’s a volunteer project and only one of many possible applications. The point is making it as easy as possible for citizens to use the data.

Good broadband access. There was some discussion of this last night. I don’t know much about the situation elsewhere in Wales, other than that it’s important. Broadband is infrastructure, like railways. In the past, the railways moved coal and steel. Now we also move information, at much higher speeds. As with any infrastructure, it requires good usage – there is no magical transformation. But it does increase the possible ways people can communicate, learn and work.

Let us see the political process. So much of the discussion at the Assembly and the Assembly Government is private and it doesn’t need to be. I suspect it’s private because people tend to rely too much on email and waste opportunities to “engage”. The question for ministers and staff should always be: does this NEED to be private? If yes, then use a private method like email. If no (could even be the majority of cases) then quickly upload/publish it somehow (blog or wiki or some other tool). Now email the link to people. Thanks, you just opened up the political process! Don’t spin or polish the posts. We’ll vote for you if you’re honest and you communicate.

Some quick notes on tools. Posterous is a good tool because you blog by sending it an email. It’s not the only one with this feature but it’s quick, easy and free of charge. Facebook is OK here but be careful. By default your personal profile is not open – it’s halfway between private and public. My suggestion here would be upload/publish on an open platform (blog etc.) then post a link to Facebook for your friends and supporters.

I could have emailed my thoughts here to somebody. But I blogged them instead. Now anyone can email the link to anyone – or link from anywhere. It doesn’t mean they will but it allows it. People can also find it via search. I’d like to see this model in action.

Your blog posts don’t have to be as long as mine! Preferably they would have a name and a face next to them, not a logo.

Search is key. An AM should probably monitor (or have someone monitor) mentions of their name and issues they care about. Google Alerts are OK, but RSS is probably better. It’s not “ego searching” to look for your name. It’s… that engagement we keep talking about.

Thanks for reading, comments are open.

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Blogging about Welsh politics

I’m going to be writing more about politics on this blog.

My interest is how politics might relate to technology, business and “ordinary” people in the UK – with a particular emphasis on Wales.

As a personal rule I try and stay away from the various personalities and day-to-day machinations, allegiances, squabblings, who wore what clothes and so on.

More generally, I’m not even a party political blogger.

Some of those things can be important (and entertaining), but they’re not what I specialise in. If you want to read that stuff it is available online.

I’ll carry on writing about the stuff I otherwise write about. Quixotic Quisling is deliberately an “anti-brand” which can contain anything I want for the next x years. Sometimes things converge into sense as you go along, if you know what I mean.

Don’t hold me to ANY of these things either. Any or all of them might change at some point. It’s my blog.

Now I’ve got the disclaimers out the way, on with the next post!

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Welsh Assembly Government bundles of RSS feeds

The Welsh Assembly Government generates a lot of its own news.

The news is available as separate RSS feeds for 22 different topics, which is good. Actually, double that because there are 22 in English and the same 22 in Cymraeg.

This week I wanted to subscribe to a complete feed of everything, but I couldn’t find one listed on the site, in either language – which is not so good. So I made two feeds myself with Yahoo Pipes.

Welsh Assembly Government RSS feed, every topic (English)

Llywodraeth Cynulliad Cymru porthiant RSS, pob pwnc (Cymraeg)

Let me know if you do anything with these feeds. Anything at all. Even if it’s just a word cloud or something.

Unfortunately, on that note, they’re not complete feeds just headlines with a one-line description. (That’s all I’m getting from the 22 original feeds.) That’s fine for subscribing in your feed reader, it’s just an extra click per item to reach the full web page. But if you want to do anything else it’s restrictive.

You could probably make a more advanced pair of feeds which included the full page data from the site. Clone and modify my English pipe source and Cymraeg pipe source if you want.

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The origins of words, with Sioned Stryd-Cludydd

Mostly, what comes from the mouth of Janet Street-Porter is total bum gravy. This is no exception.

“We had a Welsh-speaking budgie. My mother missed Wales very much. I don’t feel Welsh at all. There’s no Welsh words for anything modern.”

Street-Porter is one of those people who enjoys a level of media coverage disproportionate to her level of ability or insight. (Incidentally people like this are certainly not worth protesting against, don’t waste your time. Maybe a quick throwaway blog post though…)

It did make me think how someone can really struggle if they attempt to pass comment on things they know very little about. And I figured, it’s at least a good chance for me to learn more Welsh words.

So if you have any good modern words, feel free to comment. And together let’s make a page on the INTERNET!

Modern means anything of, relating to, or characteristic of the present or the immediate past. But no use being ultra-strict about it.

Here are some modern Welsh words, each with an English translation.

ailgoedwigo (reafforestation)
ailgylchu (recycling)
amser real (real time)
biohinsoddeg (bioclimatology)
blogiwr (blogger)
chwyddo mewn (zoom in)
cludadwyedd data (data portability)
cnewyllyn (kernel)
cronfa ddata (database)
cyfalaf menter (venture capital)
cyfieithu peirianyddol (machine translation)
cywasgu data (data compression)
datganoli (devolution)
diagram Venn (Venn diagram)
dirwasgiad (recession)
gallu i ryngweithredu (interoperability)
gwefan (website)
meddalwedd (software)
porthiant RSS (RSS feed)
rhesymeg Boole (Boolean logic)
sebon dogfennol (docusoap)
siocled (chocolate)
system weithredu (operating system)
teledu (television)
tewdra (obesity)
troseddwr rhyfel (war criminal)
unben ffasgaidd (fascist dictator)
weldiad bôn (butt weld)

You might sometimes notice the Latin root of some words. Welsh has incorporated words from Latin for many, many centuries, just as English has done with Latin, Greek and French. Seemingly “civilised” Welsh words, particularly certain legal concepts which might be assumed to derive from Latin, can often date from pre-Roman times. Read John Davies A History Of Wales!

Globalisation can sometimes result in many different languages all adopting the same, or a similar, word for something. I’m thinking of “chocolate” in different languages, as well as “blog”, “wiki” and so on.

I heard that teledu was the result of a magazine competition to find a suitable word when it was a new technology (is this true?). It’s based on darlledu (broadcast). Of course, the English word “television” was mocked when it emerged for being half-Greek and half-Latin. And I now mock modern attempts to coin English words like “staycation“, which just catch on anyway.

New Welsh words are frequently invented of course, just as English ones are.

Language is, in the words of George Orwell, “an instrument which we shape for our own purposes”.

Sources: Geiriadur BBC, Geiriadur Llanbedr, Termiadur

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What is Hacio’r Iaith?

Hacio’r Iaith is a new and exciting event where we will explore how technology applies to, around and through the Welsh language. That means idea sharing, APIs, mash-ups, localisation, machine translation and so on. The event will be part hack day and part BarCamp (both are well established templates for events worldwide). There will be stuff for beginners as well as geeks. Our pencilled date for Hacio’r Iaith is Saturday 30th January 2010 in Aberystwyth, which is to be confirmed. (I’ll update this post if that changes.) Entry will be very cheap. In Welsh, “yr iaith” means “the language” and “Hacio’r Iaith” means “hack the language”.