We Won a Big Society Award – YAY!

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This morning (Thursday) I woke up to a very exciting email from Nick at Podnosh.

The Social Media Surgery movement has won one of the Prime Ministers Big Society Awards. I honestly am struggling to think of a more worthy winner. The easy-access, informal, simple formula is to me what a big society should be all about; giving community groups and active citizens the confidence to use the web in this setting is, I reckon, the only real way to do it. But then again I would say that – I run one.

But running one isn’t the full story with me and Social Media Surgeries. I’ve been a ‘patient’ too. Two years ago I was persuaded to go along to the Edgbaston & Harborne surgery as I was ‘the volunteer who fixed the computers and stuff’. About an hour and a half later my brain was pretty well done for, three main things were causing this particular meltdown:

  1. How exciting was this social media stuff for this kind of thing – look at all the amazing stuff we could do/change/make better. (I was there with The Crossway)
  2. Look at all this other stuff that I can find/do/get excited about through these networks – ‘what on earth is my twitter password?’.
  3. This surgery thing is quite cool. How does it work then? Oh – I see – wow, check that.

Anne, Nick and me at Edgbaston & Harborne Social Media Surgery - photo possibly by Kate Baker(?)

That afternoon was the start of a very exciting journey for me, that (among other things) has led to me running my own surgery, changing what my university would call my ‘ideal career path’, changing my perspective on a few very key things in the world, and most importantly of all – meeting some amazing people who make an amazing difference, and helping where I can.

That doesn’t really do the story-so-far justice, and one day I’ll have time to give it some more detail. But for now – I hope you’ve got a sense of what social media surgeries are to me – bottom line: A great way of helping people, and something that’s done amazing things for me.

If you haven’t already, please read this post on the Podnosh blog – it does a better job of explaining why social media surgeries are so important, and has some fab success stories.

All that remains is for me to thank Nick Booth very, very much. And also everyone who’s been involved in running a surgery – without all of you we simply wouldn’t have this. Thank you.

The Entitlement App – #benefitscamp

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Benefits camp, sounds a little bit like somewhere you get sent when you sign on for the first time, luckily it’s a hackday instead.

Benefits camp was put on last Friday by the wonderful people at FutureGov (who I’ll be working for come the summer), and was to try and hack/fix/change/improve the benefits system, which is of course going through massive changes at the moment.

The main ideas were divided into 6 categories/teams: money saving/sharing; personal data; local impact; better comms/info; collaborative/peer-to-peer support; skills & volunteering; jobs & flexible working; better admin.

I arrived late as usual (fresh from a stats lecture) and joined the better admin group. We had great discussion of the issues in the area, and eventually settled on building a benefits calculator/quick-use entitlement app. At the risk of splitting the group(!) I think there are actually two key ideas that came out of this:

Quick & Easy Entitlement App

With the help of resident experts James and Stefan, we found that we could give a reasonably good idea of which benefits someone might be entitled to with just 5 questions:

  1. Do you have a fixed address?
  2. Do you have a medical condition?
  3. Do you live with a partner?
  4. How many of your children live with you?
  5. How much are you paid for work each week/month/year?

Using the answers to these, we can then give a list of benefits that someone is likely to be entitled to. Clearly it’s not going to produce a definitive list – and results are obviously not a guarantee to entitlement, but I think this could be really useful for, for example, community centres checking to see whether it’s worth referring someone on to a neighbourhood office advisor or whoever.

Brett already has a prototype (not sure of link at the moment) form, and all we really need now is to define the rules to sit behind the app. That does sound like a fairly major job, but it shouldn’t take too long for one of us to sit down with someone in the know and extract their knowledge!

This is largely what came out of our group on Friday.

Full Benefits Calculator

James is working tirelessly it seems on a full-blown online benefits calculator, which will be an amazing thing when it’s done. I think this is still going as a sperate thing to the 5-question model, and I’m sure any help you can offer would be gratefully received – check out cattell.com/james/benefitcalc. And hopefully there’ll be a good bit of tie-in between the two things.

I’ll try and update this as soon as I know the link for our prototype, but for now – here are our post-its and scribbles:

And finally – big thanks to FutureGov for organising, Hub Westminster for hosting, and all the others in the better admin group – sorry I can’t remember exactly who you are (shout in the comments and I’ll make a list :) ).

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Just remembered: There was also a lot of chat about how this could integrate with and generally link to the new gov.uk site – particularly their API approach to things. We were lucky enough to have @nicepaul in the group to talk about this, he’s leading on transactions for the single domain.

TeaCamp 2nd February 2012 : Mobiles for homeless people

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Last Thursday I went to another excellent #TeaCamp – these are like little mini GovCamp’s, and are well worth going to if you’re into GovCamp type stuff. This particular one was one of the best I’ve been to, and I think deserves a write-up.

Irene McWilliams was speaking about her job as ‘Partnership Development Office’ at Westminster City Council – this basically means that she is in an amazing position of being able to use corporate partnerships to do great stuff like the Community Computers project.

 

#teacamp at Cafe Zest in the House of Fraser Victoria St. - photo by Mary McKenna.

Ben Richardson and Chris Andrew also spoke about their work at The Connection centre for homeless people. They’ve got some great digital-related projects going on, but particularly talked about a project they’re running around the use of mobile phones and communicating with their clients through SMS. I personally found this fascinating – my experience of working with homeless people is only that off doing a soup run in Birmingham for 4 years, but nevertheless, I can really see the potential in this and how it would help. We all had a fantastic discussion about the project, and below are a few of the key points that I particularly remember:

  • There is real potential to use smart phones instead of the standard ones used now.
  • These could be offered as an incentive for someone who has managed to successfully look after a standard phone for a period of time. (I’m reading Poor Economics at the moment which talks about similar issues to this in relation to subsidising things like mosquito nets in developing countries – well worth a read)
  •  The potential of smartphones is huge for opening access to other services.
  • Some people just don’t like the idea of a phone because it means people will know how to get in touch with them.
  • The street-value of whatever devices needs to be considered for obvious reasons. My (un-arranged, partially formed) thoughts on this one are: Unibody device preventing SIM changes? Actual body of phone clearly branded by provider/sponsor? Very low price smart phones?
  • This needs automation – but not entirely straightforwardly – e.g. weather forecasts need to be automated, but delivered in a personal. friendly manner.
  • There is great potential in Irene’s corporate contacts for procuring devices.
  • The biggest need as far as The Connection project is concerned is tech help.

I think nearly everyone there saw the huge potential of the project, and there are plans afoot to organise a homeless hackday to tackle some of the issues and get things moving a bit. As far as I know the people to chat to if you want to get involved are Irene and Adam.

I’m really quite excited by this and looking forward to getting involved in some projects.

GovCamp 2012

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This Friday and Saturday I’ve been to the wonderful UK Gov Camp again, it was a great weekend and I think everyone had a great time, me included.

As the brilliant Dan Slee suggested I’ve made this years GovCamp post a list of 20. These are things I’ve learnt, thought, remembered and been reminded of.

Photo by #ashroplad CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

one | To talk to everyone I wanted/planned to, GovCamp would need to be at least a month long.

two | If we carry on adding a day every 5 years, we should get to this stage by 2152.

three | Dave & Steph should be knighted at the Queens earliest convenience.

four | It would be awesome if councils/departments etc published their open data with reference to the open data engagement charter.

five | It’d also be great if their sites & portals were something like the one Harry will be showing off at some point.

six | There are some amazing people in government – we should treat them better.

seven | If you want to be around the next day, don’t go drinking with Ann & Sharon ;)

eight | I’ve now joined the group of “people who can’t explain to their mothers what it is they actually do” [Tim Davies]

nine | Si Whitehouse is going freelance. You should probably hire him.

ten | Some people are unbelievably generous. Unbelievably.

eleven | There were an awful lot of GDSers about. (Thats a good thing).

twelve | Perhaps central government departments should be largely invisible to the public. (This is a blog post in itself and the result of a fascinating conversation with David. Please don’t think I’m suggesting we sack all the comms people :p )

thirteen | If they teach us project planning and management tools like PERT and other traditional stuff, why aren’t we being taught about agile approaches to projects?

fourteen | So I plan on finding out why not, and asking them to start. I’m paying enough after all.

fifteen | The Microsoft WiFi was a heck of a lot better than last year.

sixteen | Govcamp has helped me hugely on a personal level – last year feels like a million miles away.

seventeen | 2012 is gonna be pretty awesome. (May be the understatement of the year).

eighteen | Somehow I missed the benefits system hacking/calculator-making sessions on both days that @carriebish and @jacattell ran. Which is really annoying. How did I manage that?

nineteen | If I didn’t speak to you, I probably wanted to. Sorry. Another time.

twenty | Microsoft Access is more popular than I thought it was.

twenty one | Apparently they don’t have (proper) Smarties in America.

twenty two | I should blog more often. I say that every time I do blog.

Beyond the five minute install – wp-config

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This is the 1st of a few posts I’m hoping to write as a result of Steve Taylor’s ”Beyond the 5 minute install” session at Wordcamp UK this year. Some of this stuff is straight out of Steve’s presentation, and some it I’ve learnt since.

So – the wp-config.php file is usually (by me atleast) pretty well ignored apart from inserting the the database details and security keys right at the beginning. You can even create a wp-config.php through the WP install interface thing if you want to. Here I’ve picked out a few of the extra things you can do with the wp-config files – if you want all the gory details, check out the codex page.

Table Prefix

We’ll start easy. I use this one already if I’m running a few little test sites or sandboxes off one database. By default, all WordPress’ tables start with wp_ – you can change this to anything you like, e.g. mywpsite_. It’s probably a good idea to keep an underscore on the end, but I don’t think you have to. By changing the table prefix you can run multiple WordPress installs from one database. Codex

Site and Blog URL

All these two do is override those specified in the Settings section of the WordPress admin area, and hide the options there. Codex

Autosave Interval

We’re can adjust the number of seconds between autosaves of a post made by WordPress. The default is every minute, but you can define it as shown below to guarantee you never lose anything or to help solve performance issues. Codex

define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 160 ); // seconds

Post Revisions

You can change the number of post revisions that WordPress keeps a hold of. We had a chat in the session about how many we think the default is, but none of us were really sure. A bit of Googling suggests there is no limit, and one of my sites has a post with 289 revisions saved, so I would presume that’s the case. Depending on how your site’s run, this could be a very useful thing, and not something I’d think of if my database was swelling without an obvious reason! I think Steve said his standard was 3 post revisions, which sounds alright to me, but obviously it depends on the site. You can also completely disable post revisions if you’re feeling particularly harsh :) Codex

Error Logging

You can get WordPress to log it’s errors by adding a few lines to wp-config – does what it says on the tin really. Codex

FTP Log-ins

I’ve been wondering about this for a while, so this definitely a welcome discovery for me. If your host’s configured in such a way that WP needs you to manually enter your FTP details when updating or installing a plug-in, you can just enter the setting in wp-config, and you’ll never have to worry about it again. Just what I need now I’m moving my stuff over to the wonderful CatN. Codex

Permanent Deletion Time Limit

In a similar vain to the post revisions option – you can set the number of days before WordPress permanently removes something from the trash. Or just disable trash altogether. Codex

Turn the in-admin Plug-in & Theme Editors OFF

Do this, or I promise, one day, someone will go fiddle and then miss off a ; and break the whole site ;) Codex