2009 July

NESTA Reboot Britain – digital citizenship and democracy

A few thoughts on the much-social-media-covered Reboot Britain conference hosted by NESTA, July 6th, London. Overall an interesting event bringing together leaders in policy, politics, social enterprise the media and digital technologies – mainly the high-brow high-impact types, and it was a bit more talking ‘at yer’ than the talking ‘with ya’ I hoped it may be. Thankfully the Twitter Stream and AudioBoo capture from those social chaps at Amplified helped the conversation to flow.

NESTA CEO Jonathan Kestenbaum talked about a ‘perfect storm’ as social technologies move from the margins to the mainstream and can enrich us – either rejuvinating our bankrupted economy or yielding social capital.

Jeremy Hunt, Shadow Culture Secretary proved more clued up than the left with his view of ‘wikinomics’ shaping government action and knowledge institutes – as Wikipedia contains less errors than Encylopaedia Britannia and Hurricane Katrina’s online response was a rapid, user-designed mash-up of emergency services. Conversely, Steph Gray from whatever-the-DTI-is-called-today talked about how it can be difficult to get meaningful influence on policy through digital tools – but commentable wikis of policy drafts, video responses and blogs of those developing policies are a start. He warns the number of active users is very small and not always representative of the policy’s end users.

Educational technologies legend Derek Robertson talked about his projects in Scotland to create immersive learning using Nintendo consoles with 5 to 14 year olds, dispelling the ‘folk devil’ view of games as draining energy and intelligence, actually showing that the pilot Nintendo students had better and fasters responses to mental arithmetic.

I enjoyed a session by my long-time cohort Antonio Gould and Matt Mesh focusing on user-centred design, though to me this was as much about functions and content as purely design, thinking about the needs of the audience not creating online services and apps that are worthy but un-engaging, or creating a glut of ‘me too’ services for white, educated 30-somethings (largely us – the digital service commissioners). We need to develop public services that are useful for all. Don’t just involves users at the end in an artificial focus group, involve them all along the way in attraction, entry, services and exit stages.

Jeff Saperstein, founder of the Travelling Geeks (who were on tour at Reboot) and author of Creating Wealth in the Innovation Economy believes in centuries past we defined ourselves by religion, then by nationality, now regions are important in defining identity – and regions may have more in common inter-continentally than across national borders. Success is dependent on the enterprise’s flexibility to adapt and capacity to work with those from other cultures.

Too many sessions to get more than a snap shot of it all really. Other assorted interesting ideas and stuff:

Lee Bryant (Headshift) on e-democracy – there’s a fear of mob rule, but this is just the evolution of democracy, a ‘coalition of the willing’.

I passed through the launch of Social By Social – launch of the new book helping people to use digital and social tools for social impact and played the game – scenario planning of a major urban regeneration project using an allocation of resources cards, looking at what resources we could be using online and what the impact and cost would be which was useful in getting people thinking about what, how and why.

A big zen-like thanks to Digital Health Service with a free session on productivity which got me thinking about whether I really need (or could stomach) a ‘media fast’ switching off, and how I should be thinking about asking users what they already think or know rather than being too prescriptive in short-format consultancy.

Overall an interesting and packed day, but really left feeling politicians et al are somewhat leaping on social media as the latest bandwagon, as I’ve blogged before digital technologies and tools including social media just help shorten the gaps between people and opportunities – but the gaps – digital divides, call them what you will – are still there.

How social media shortens the gap of opportunity

A few weeks back, I was the guest speaker at the inaugural launch of Nottingham Girl Geek Dinners, part of a worldwide network of local events bringing together women technologists for chat, networking and – importantly – dinner. As a general rule I don’t like segregation in networks but in the high tech sector there’s definitely a need to provide alternative places and spaces for discussion as invariably there’s usually one one women or two in the room. I found the Nottingham Girl Geek group – a dozen or so working in broad fields including web design, PR, programming, usability, open source and education – to be friendly and overall welcoming – really diverse chats I don’t usually have at networks focused on sharing, learning and even occasionally knitting.

My presentation was about social media for business – a similar theme to some recent speaking gigs for DMEX in the North West but this time with a bit of girl geek and historic slant. Here’s the presentation.

I don’t really see myself as a social media evangelist – I’ve been too long in the web industries for that kind of bandwagon-jumping, back since the first dotcom wave and my days in the music biz when the rage was guerrilla marketing, us record exec minions seeded chatrooms, assuming aliases of teen skateboarders, tweenies and rock dads to sell the latest CD (yes kids, people still bought CDs then).

Rather I see social media as a new name for an old thing – like chat boards, newsgroups or forums – it’s just a newer more technologically sophisticated means of using digital tools to communicate – socially or for business. Online video and audio – as eulogised by @documentally et al – is yet another exciting means of creating many direct one-to-one and one-to-many interactions. Although the technology may not save the world itself, the accelerated serendipity and increase in openness to communication (as much a society as technology phenomena)helps us all to address our own personal, social and business goals. This is perhaps as closely related to the rise in the mobile phone as much as the growth in broadband. This can include political campaigning (like the MPs expenses Facebook campaign), creating your own news radar and bypassing corporation (see the decline in newspapers) and marketing a local micro-brand internationally.

But the interesting dinner discussion we ladies had was about how social media hasn’t so much changed everything as speeded it up. In the old days contacting A meant knowing B. Email made finding out who and where was easy (eliciting a response though, now, harder than ever). Social media means those who choose are open to conversations and ideas more readily and easily than before. Twitter and Facebook create small interaction which are less formal than a direct business contact by phone, letter or email. If you play it right, this small talk can more readily lead to medium talk (then to business). But don’t mistake small-talk for actual business or social networking replacing marketing (or even work).

Creating your own support network is quick and easy; seeking answers to questions, finding a supplier or partner more rapid and robust than ever. Social media shortens and accelerates the gaps between people and links up opportunities. Sometimes it fills the gaps to with meaningless twitter and chat, so we need mechanisms for filter this out (not an information overload but a filter failure) which is the next big challenge.

Girl Geeks dinner nottingham

Thanks to Elsa Bartley (find her on Twitter as @marmaladegirl) for organising it all. Here’s a photo from the night c/o PaintedGhost – see the Nottingham Girl Geeks Dinners website for more photos and details of next event on 3^rd August. See you there!

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