citycamplondon day three - collaborate

Day three of FutureGov's citycamplondon took us to the stunning work space of Hub King's Cross, just down the road from my usual office King's Place by, er, Kings Cross.

The familiar location meant that getting there for around 9am on a Sunday morning was less than a challenge it might have been and the coffee on arrival helped to set the scene for a busy working day.

The purpose of the day was to take the enthusiasm fired on day one (stimulate) and the ideas generates on day two (participate) to collaborate to produce concrete ideas that could be progressed.

Somehow this morphed in to me giving a rambling pitch for the loosely defined "what can I do?" idea from Saturday that somehow merged with some similar ideas and a group of about six of us looked at user generated information with a geographical context.

The popular service FixMyStreet explains the broad concept. This allows the public to report physical problems (pot holes and the like) to the appropriate authority but what we need to be able to do is to expand the scope of things that people can report (e.g. concerns for neighbours, noise, availability of babysitters, comparative prices in shops, etc.) and the scope of people to pass this information to, most notably to other residents.

What we were looking to do was to define some sort of framework (or infrastructure) that point solutions, like FixMyStreet, could use to build and share information about a neighbourhood.

I still think it's a great idea but it needs more time in the participate stage to add some specific details before moving on to collaboration.

So it was no surprise that our idea was not one of the ones chosen at the end of the day to move on to the next stage.

In fact, all the ideas that were taken forward were brought in to the process almost fully formed by one person with the vision to drive the idea forward. I'm not sure if this means that dictators beat crowds but there is a lesson there for me for the next time I attend a barcamp or unconference.

While I may have been a little disappointed in the structure and output of the day, any negativity there was more than offset by the opportunity to play in Hub King's Cross for a day.

Those of us stuck in offices with sterile rows of bland desks occupied by bland people can only imagine what it's like to work in a funky fun house with a variety of spaces defined by brick and wood in which to dwell, lurk and even work.

The beanbags and see-saw help too.

citycamplondon day three asked us to collaborate to demonstrate practicable solutions which we did but we needed leaders to control the process.

Transition Town Kingston

As a greenie, a talk on Transition Town Kingston was obviously attractive.

The occasion was the monthly Kingston upon Thames Society meeting which continues to serve up good talks on local matters.

Our guide this month was Dr. Martin Birley a consultant in International Public Health who, not surprisingly, focused on the health aspects of climate change and peak oil.

The story we heard was a little back-to-front with the what first followed by the why.

The what was a brisk overview of the activities that Transition Town Kingston is involved in and included the predictable things like cycling, renewable energy and recycling.

I would have liked to have heard more on this as my main reason for going to the meeting was to find out what I could do myself locally to help to address these serious issues.

The bulk of the talk covered why these changes are necessary and was a fairly basic, and somewhat biased, introduction to climate change. I've heard enough of the evidence over the years to accept that climate change is aggregated my our use of fossil fuels (and they are finite anyway) so we need to change our lifestyles.

He was rather preaching to the converted which rather made the preaching unnecessary but there were some good bits in the talk and was never boring.

The Kingston upon Thames society is to be congratulated for tackling such a serious topic.

Ham Amenities Group and Latchmere House

Ham Amenities Group (HAG) works to preserve the character of the area and I am proud to be a member.

They manage the local Ham Fair and other such activities well and so I have not felt the need to get actively involved and am content to do my little bit for the cause by paying my annual membership fee, a very modest £3 to which I add an equally modest £2.

In return for this I get an occasional newsletter that keeps me informed about some of the goings on in Ham, particularly any major planning applications.

I also get invited to their Annual General Meeting which took place this week.

The business part of the AGM passed quickly without controversy and we were soon on to the guest speaker and the reason that I went to the meeting.

A prison officer and a chaplain had come to tell us about the work at Latchmere House, which currently serves as a resettlement prison, one of only three in the country.

We were given an interesting insight in to how the prison works to reintegrate prisoners in to society. They go there at the end of their sentence and while they are locked up overnight during the day they go out to work in real jobs earning real wages.

We heard many positive stories about the prison which were only clouded by the impending Comprehensive Spending Review that was due to hit later that week. With the Prison Service's budget slashed by around 30% it is hard to believe that Latchmere House will keep its innovative remit.

The success of HAG suggests that there might be some hope for the Big Society but the average age of the people there (I was probably the youngest person) shows that there is still a lot to do to get everybody involved.

Information theory meets writing

Somehow the Royal Society's programme of talks fails to inspire me and so my recent visit there was only my second. The last was two years ago to hear a discussion on Telling stories with numbers, telling stories with words.

The carrot this time was Information Theory laced with Writing, which last combined at a Gurteen event early last year.

Professor David MacKay's talk was well structured, content-rich and well delivered, revealing the speaker to be very comfortable with his subject area.

He opened with some basics of Information Theory which more-or-less comes to effective versus efficient. To make information efficient we reduce redundancy, e.g. "Mry hd a litl lmb", but to make it effective we add redundancy (check digits and the like) to improve its readability over poor quality communications.

The talk then went on to describe some of the obvious weaknesses with keyboards where we use our very flexible fingers to press keys that are either on or off.

This led us in to a demonstration of Dasher, which Professor MacKay described as a walk through a library containing every conceivable book.

Dasher guides the writer through text showing, at each stage, the letter (or punctuation mark) that is most likely to follow what has gone before.

Here we can see that "writ" has been selected and the most likely options are "e", "ing" and "ten". In this case the finger has scrolled down to select "ten".

The idea is simple and has its obvious attractions, particularly for those of us used to writing with one finger while standing up on the train or tube.

And it's a free iPhone App so it's easy to try for yourself.

I did so and found it harder than I expected (not that I tried it for that long, to be honest). Part of this is that I am not very comfortable with the alphabet and I found letters whizzing past me before I could find them. A touch of Dyslexia perhaps.

But my biggest problem with Dasher is it does not address the problem that we talked about at the start of the talk, the inherent redundancy in the English language. A (possibly) better input system does nothing to solve the issues of inconsistent spelling and words inflated in length well beyond their phonetic requirement.

The problem it does help to solve is to help people who do not have the flexible fingers that I mentioned earlier and the talk gave several examples of where new technologies have enabled even the very immobile to communicate.

The talk did not quite do what I expected but I did learn a lot and I am grateful for that.

citycamplondon day two - participate

Day two of FutureGov's citycamplondon took us to the former Truman Brewery in Brick Lane and the stunning offices of LBi (Lost Boys international).

The harsh early Saturday start (9:00am!) was softened with coffee and bagels. The coffee I hit straight away but I resisted the bagels for several minutes before the cream cheese won me over.

The networking started immediately and I took the opportunity to catch-up with local e-democracy champion, and former Lib. Dem. councillor, Mary Reid.

The purpose of the day was to play around with some ideas that had been suggested on the citycamplondon website beforehand. These were grouped in to topics and were run is four sets of four parallel workshops, i.e. sixteen workshops altogether and we each chose which four to go to.

I went for sessions on skills, local democracy, collaboration and Big Society.

The sessions were a little mixed and some of the more negative aspects of an unconference came through in some of them when the lack of a leader, or any specific objective, meant that the session was slow to get going. But get going they all did and we had some very lively and constructive discussions.
Some themes emerged during the day, partially inspired by the day before.

Web2.0 lets people collaborate and communicate to help themselves and this involves taking power away from elected officials who do not realise that this is happening.

Councils have organisational advantages over the public in that they have resources, like planners, architects, engineers and teachers, that they can drawn on easily.

Big Society is competing against Government and both sides need to recognise this.

There is a lot of really good work going on out there, such as FixMyStreet, but we need something to pull these all together to make it easier for people to find services and to find opportunities to contribute.

The day had its ups and downs but it ended on a serious high.

We decamped back to the main room (pictured) where beer and wine was waiting for us.

An hour or so later it was joined by a lot of curry,  we were in Brick Lane after all.

Around the beer and curry was woven a lot more networking made the easier by having mixed with different people in smaller groups all day.

Constructive conversations were had. business cards were exchanged and, more often, twitter ids were swapped. Indeed most of us had adopted the idea of including our twitter ids on our name badges, much more meaningful than a job title or the name of an organisation.

citycamplondon day two asked us to participate and that we did with gusto and purpose.