“Press release as blog post” drives me mad

MH at Syniadau says:

I have to admit to not being fond of the way that political parties interact with the media before a general election. Policy tends to get broken down into bite-sized chunks that will fit into a one column story or a two minute video clip on the news. There is no room for any detail.

Clywch, clywch! “Press release as blog post” drives me mad. Several times I’ve wanted to learn more and explore the detail – and been let down. By all the parties.

Boiling a complex issue down to a single press release with few or no links is too simplistic. It’s designed for newspapers, radio and TV, who have limited space. But news is, we have endless space on the web.

It also makes me think we’re stuck in familiar habits. Then just bolting on our digital media strategy.

Although I include party politics, this observation is applicable in many fields. We can do far better than this in Wales.

e.g. how about a manifesto wiki (or some kind of open collaborative platform) with deep levels of detail and relevant outbound links depending on how far you want to go down? People can ask questions, suggest improvements and help make it better and more accurate. It’s not expensive. Nobody in Wales is trying this at the moment.

(I know Hywel Williams AS tried something similar once with Wiki Deddfu, the technology was there but it lacked the investment of time and understanding of the human side. Also, it’s vanished from the web so we can’t learn the lessons and you can’t check if my analysis is correct.)

Corollary: it’s very hard to find a blog written by a PR company in Wales which is actually worth your time. Maybe it’s the curse of feeling you have to be “on message”. Comment if you know differently.

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.

Hacking or faking a wiki history for good purposes

I want to utterly hack the wiki format because I don’t think it’s been fully explored.

I’d like wiki software into which I can manually insert fake edits. I’d like to write the history in arbitrary order and set the dates myself. (Usually the dates are automatic.) I love the history!

Why? The history is a really useful way of representing the progression of a document.

Here’s one application. Lots of documents change and it might be useful to show their development in this fashion. In the UK, bills are discussed in parliament, they are edited then they sometimes become acts which are the basis of law. Very few normal people actually follow the process. A wiki-style history might help their understanding.

There’s a similar process at the Welsh Assembly and we certainly need help understanding what happens there.

There are also famous documents like the USA constitution which might be fun or historically interesting to represent in a wiki fashion. Imagine being able to see prohibition as a literal 18th amendment to the wiki and it being repealed by the 21st amendment.

As well as the democracy stuff, there might be journalistic applications of something like this. Representing important documents in different time-based ways.

This idea strikes me as somewhat “obvious”. (It was inspired by a comment in a video interview with Matt Mullenweg about open source.) Has it been done before?

I might have a go, there are many open source wiki software systems. For instance MediaWiki or DokuWiki could be adapted to do this. There are also document comparison programs, maybe I just need to do it as a set of documents which can be compared.

Maybe this intersects with what Google Wave can do, I haven’t tried it yet.

I use Google Docs every day now and it’s obvious that that has borrowed heavily from wikis. I’d struggle to go back to emailing attachments back and forth.

Google have two products called wiki – SearchWiki and Sidewiki – and neither of them are really wikis! But Google Docs are proper wikis. If you haven’t tried Google Docs, try it.

I’m thinking of other documents that change over time, which could be wikified. Like chessboards and images of your dog’s face.

My own face is a wiki edited by time. My body is a wiki, edited by beer and curry.

The evolving blog: things that resemble blogging

This loosely follows on from the previous post about Twitter being a variant of blogging. Incidentally, normal service on this blog may be resumed at some point or possibly never. Anyway.

Sometimes I think almost EVERY form of publishing in social media can be considered a form of blogging. Is everything here blogging?

On Flickr, for example, you upload images which have dates and tags. YouTube and other video sharing sites let you upload video, again with dates and tags. There are subscription options in these too – you add people on Flickr and you subscribe to channels in YouTube. There are variants on other video sites. These “content services” also have feeds of course. They don’t look exactly like blogs but I’m saying the default view you get is incidental to this concept of them being about blogging. Of course, the default display of a blog is incidental. You could take feeds or content from any blog or set of blogs and display them in aggregate in a multitude of ways. The point is, all are about time-based publishing which is essentially all a blog is.

Facebook is like a huge group blog. The newest thing is at the top. Posting a status or whatever is obviously like doing a blog post, but almost everything else you do is subscription. Clicking Like for something is subscription. Writing a comment on a post is a form of subscription. Becoming a fan of a page is subscription. Responding to an event is subscription. And of course, adding a friend is a subscription. It can only be two-way, symmetrical. I tell people Facebook is weirder than blogging and Twitter because of the privacy stuff. There’s a grey area between private and public, but let’s forget about those aspects for now. Facebook is a huge group blog. The things that are slightly annoying on Facebook are the non-bloggy things, mainly the private inboxes. There’s your inbox for requests and your inbox for direct messages. Another thing, if you don’t respond to an event you are automatically subscribed to receive direct messages about that event. That’s annoying because automatic subscription to anything is not bloggy.

Stretching this even further – and this is highly provisional now – maybe a wiki page can be considered a form of blog. The time-based element is most apparent if you look at the history page. This page shows all the edits that have taken place. It looks like a blog, except that instead of different posts it’s the same post being refined over time by multiple authors. And of course there’s a feed of this history too.

Or, the other way around, maybe a blog can be considered a history for its AUTHOR. The author is a biological wiki changing over time! Changes are occurring in the author’s mind and each post is a snapshot in time. So each blog post is a wiki edit. Or at least an indication of one. (If you comment on my blog, I will read it and you will edit me slightly. And the potental future of the blog will change. Have fun.)

Starting an open content service like Twitter, YouTube or Facebook looks like so much fun. I would do it differently to those guys, natch. If I were starting such a service I would look at blogging in detail for which features I could borrow. This often happens subconciously as people have absorbed the customs and features of blogging. Maybe I could start by adapting an old UNIX command.

I’m abstracting features of software here. When I studied Computer Science, I went to a lecture about “computing in the real world” delivered by a software consultant. He said that he’d been asked to work with a prison for their database of inmates. Should they pay to develop an expensive new database system for the prison, from scratch? In a stroke of inspiration, he suggested they just adapt an existing hotel booking system. A prison is a hotel, except if you’re staying you can’t decide when you’re going to leave. On an abstract level, that’s the only functional difference. Inmates are guests.

That observation has always stuck with me and I’ve always tried to look at problems in a similar way.

Of course, not everything is blogging. Now go and eat your tea.