Cross-posted from Commsblog.→

If you’re using photo’s or other images in a presentation, newsletter, leaflet, or anything else, then it’s  important to make sure you are using images which you’re allowed to use. The photo sharing website Flickr makes it easy for photographers to license their photo’s under something called ‘Creative Commons‘ which allows you to use their photo for free, usually under the condition that you give them attribution. This post will walk you through finding Creative Commons licensed images on Flickr.

1 / Search and filter.
First, go to www.flickr.com and find the search box located at the top right of the page. Enter a search term and hit return, you’ll be then be presented with oodles of thumbnails.

Now, trouble is, not all of these photo’s are licensed under Creative Commons, so we need to filter them.
Next to the search box just above the thumbnails is a link called ‘Advanced Search’, give that a click.

The very last option on that page is about Creative Commons, tick the first option and click Search again to filter your results.

2/ Check the license
Now have a look through the search results and pick a photo you like the look of.
Once you’ve clicked on the photo, on the right-hand-side of the photo page there will be some licensing information. It should look a bit like this:

To find out exactly what you can do with the photo, click on the license symbols.

In this case, I am free to share and remix. So I am able to use the photo for my own purposes (share) and also edit it should I wish to (remix). But I must give attribution to the author and share under the same license if I do remix. And I can’t use it commercially.

If you’re happy with that license, you can click Back to the photo page.

3/ Download
Ok, so now you’re back to the photo page. To download the photo, click ‘Actions’ (top left) and choose ‘View all sizes’ from the menu.

Choose an appropriate size and download!

4/ Use Creatively

Spokeh

5/ Attribute
As a minimum, you’ll nearly always have to attribute the author.
Online use: Photo by rikomatic
Offline use: Photo by rikomatic on Flickr

If your photo has a ‘share alike’ element to its license, you’ll need to include something like this if you’ve edited the photo:
Photo licensed under original Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
(The ‘coded’ license comes from the top of the license page).

6/ Sit back, relax, and feel gooooood
Now, I’ll admit, that did take a little longer than picking something from Google Images. But, you’ve not broken the law; you’ve played fair; you’ve set a good example; you’re not going to land up in a mess when the photographer comes after you; and your comms/PR people will sleep easier knowing they’ve not got a potential disaster around the corner.
Oh, and you probably got a far more interesting picture this way too.

Creative Commons Credits:
Brompton: rikomatic / Flickr
Feel good: Brandon Carpenter / Flickr

The idea of the homeless hack day is to try and fix some of the problems faced by homeless people and the charities supporting them, all through the use of technology. Digital inclusion is, as you can imagine, a significant problem for people who are homeless – problems such as how to apply for a job without a phone number are significant, but only scratch the surface.

By holding a hack day, we hope to bring together those who know about the problems being faced in this area, and those with the ability and desire to help fix them.

Hack day website: www.homelesshack.com

Background/initial idea: Teacamp February 2012

Over the next month or so you will hopefully see some free and open WiFi appear in the main church at St John’s. WiFi provided like this, in this context, is beginning to go out of fashion these days due to the ubiquity of mobile internet – but we’re not introducing WiFi to be useful, we’re introducing it to be welcoming.

Continue reading at commsblog. →

This morning, the Riots, Communities and Victims panel published their report into the causes of last summers riots. I have’t had time to read the report in full yet, and won’t for a while, so these are my thoughts at this stage. This morning I was on BBC Local Radio (WM and Radio Derby) to talk about the identified causes of the riots – so I’ve blogged here my thoughts on each of the main areas that the report identifies.

Schools
There is some amazing stuff already going on in UK schools to work with young people at risk of getting involved in gang culture or rioting. The trouble is, there clearly is not enough of it. Mentoring programs in schools are fantastic – I probably wouldn’t be the same person today if I hadn’t been part of a mentoring program in my secondary school (not to say I was ‘at risk’ of rioting though) – but this isn’t an easy time for schools/local authorities/whoever to be increasing that – they are still having to save millions every year. But this is where the ‘big society’ (you’d forgotten about that, hadn’t you?) really comes into play; youth work charities, community groups, faith groups and more are well positioned to get involved – and you might be surprised how open to this schools are. XLP (who I mentioned on WM) are a great example of this, by the way.

Poor Parenting
By far the easiest direction to point the riot-blame finger in, while clearly parenting does play a part, we need to be careful and not get carried away. Apart from anything else, if you’re a rioters mum and the world starts slagging you off even more than we have already it’s hardly going to help the family situation. However – I do think this is a good time to talk about the lack of male role models. There are a number of reports (which I don’t have time to find I’m afraid – but this is a rough overview) which highlight the high proportion of single-parent families where the father isn’t present. Combine this with the lack of good male role models in society and schools – and you’ve got a problem for our ‘riot-age’ blokes. Again I want to highlight the value of mentoring programs and the involvement of civil society in addressing this.

Materialism
Materialism is one of those words that can cover so much and become an excuse for an awful lot of things. In this case, taking it purely to mean the emphasis on following trends in material possessions, I don’t think it caused the riots. It may, however, have helped them spread. It’s often the way in civil disorder like this that it is the minority who are out to make a point, and the rest are there just because there’s a riot on and they want to get involved. I’m not saying the extent to which this was the case last summer, but I’m sure it was an element. Stuff = Status, and when some people were presented with the opportunity of getting that stuff for nothing, they took it. This additional volume of rioters may have given  the edge in helping them spread across the country.

Lack of Confidence in the Police
I happen to think the Met do a brilliant job. They have a hugely challenging job, and in light of those unique challenges, I think they do remarkably well. But a lack of confidence in the police is not good, and one thing I think is partly responsible for this is the culture of police automatically being the enemy in so many films and TV shows. We also need to not be cutting neighbourhood policing. Despite what you might think, talking to a friend who works with young people who were actually involved in the riots, it seems community police are relatively popular with young people, and are good at building relationships. It’s a massive challenge to maintain these soft and relational aspects of policing when so much pressure is put on maintaining front line services during cuts. But, ultimately, policing another set of riots will be a hell of a lot more expensive than increasing the number of community officers working with the young people involved, and we would be stupid to ignore that.

So I think my key point is that now, more than ever, is the time for civil society to get involved with young people at risk of becoming next summers rioters. There are a heck of a lot of good people out there, who would make fantastic role models – we just* need to get them into contact with young people through mentoring, community projects, and other initiatives. The report identifies that young people who statistically should have been rioting but weren’t, weren’t because they felt they had something to loose – a stake in their community, and we need to help those who did riot find their stake and get hold of it.

*I’m not suggesting we simply pick people up throw them into mentoring roles by the way, but there are plenty of charities who will happily have you as a volunteer and train you for it.

Yesterday I had a really interesting conversation with someone that reminded me how important it is that what we achieve on the day itself doesn’t get left and forgotten about once everyone’s gone home.

One of the most commonly quoted (at me anyway) problems with hack days is that there is no ongoing support for the projects developed. In my experience this is becoming a far less common problem – and the majority of events I’ve come across recently all, in some way or another, assist the best or winning projects after the day has finished. But it’s still something we need to pay close attention to.

We’ll be encouraging the organisations who are presenting issues at the start of the day to pick-up and help projects they think they could work with when they’re presented at the end of the day. This could mean anything, from providing some funding to get the project moving, to providing some space for future meetings, or helping to run a pilot project with what’s been developed.

We’ll also be on the look-out to put teams in contact with the resources and expertise of our sponsors, as well as other people in our networks.

And lastly, we’ll keep in touch with all the teams who continue working on their projects after the hack day itself, and post updates on the blog so everyone can stay up to date with what’s happening.

Find out more about the Homeless Hack Day at homelesshack.com

We need to start with a bit of back story: Quite a few years ago, while I was at doing my a-levels at a 6th form in south Birmingham, I was involved in running a community project supported by the school. One of the things which that project did was put on a Christmas party for local elderly people (lunch, ballroom dancing, presents from santa, that sort of thing), and that was my main area of involvement. This required funding, and the place we went for funding was our local councillors’ Community Chest fund, which we had access to with the help of a ward support officer.

Tea Dance - from Natalie Wilson on Flickr: CC BY

We applied for the funding we needed, and were approved soon after. All was well. As the event approached we got round to inviting some extra guests, a headteacher from down the road, community centre manager, the councillors, that sort of thing. We also invited the local MP. We invited the local MP because they were nice, friendly, and a popular ‘local figure’ regardless of politics – they would have been a popular ‘special guest’ with the people attending.

The ward support officer found out that we were planning to invite the local MP (I presume they just saw it on a CC’d email or it came up in conversation, nothing malicious). During a planning meeting with the ward support officer, they brought this invitation up – the message was essentially this:

You cannot invite the MP. The councillors do not get on with the MP. If the MP is attending then the councillors will not attend and you will not receive the Community Chest funding.

I can’t remember exactly what was said – and I’m pretty sure the bit about funding withdrawal wasn’t said outright, but that was the message that came over loud and clear.

This was only about 4 weeks before the event, and luckily the invitation was still in my bag (for posting that afternoon), so we accepted it, binned the invite, and carried on.

If this happened today, as you can probably imagine, I wouldn’t let it rest. But that wasn’t really me at the time. But that’s not to say it didn’t annoy me – I (and my colleagues) were seriously pissed off. More at the cheek of the councillors and the lack of choice we had – there was no way we could have got money from anywhere else in four weeks.

From Ell Brown on Flickr: CC BY.

On the day itself our three councillors turned up and (un-announced) brought their colleague from a neighbouring ward – who – it turned out was going to stand as the parliamentary candidate at the next general election. While our three councillors were pretty mediocre party guests, their guest saw the situation as a fantastic opportunity to canvas votes for an election that hadn’t even been set yet. Great.

So all this, along with a few other little niceties they exhibited on the day, left me pretty pee-d off with the whole idea of government and politics-y stuff on a local level. I think I said several times that was the absolute end of me and local government.

Luckily however, last January, I found myself at UKGovcamp, and then at LocalGovcamp in June. I wasn’t really expecting it, but these sort of woke me up to a few things:

• My experience was certainly not representative of council officers the country over, especially in Birmingham.
• There is hope. There’s tonnes of ridiculously crazy innovation and change going on in local government – things can and should be changed.
• There is more to local councils than what I had come across (and written off). This is the most important thing I think, I’d experienced such a tiny bit and used it as an excuse to write off anything related to the word ‘council’.

I now know that local government rocks. I get excited about the innovation and change happening in local councils, and am (ironically) now often found defending them & their services during arguments. I’ve even met a few councillors who seem to understand the point of their job and care about it – and heard of a lot more.

#localgovcamp 2011 - from 1gl on Flickr: CC BY-NC-ND

This turn-around didn’t really happen overnight, after one magic revelation – I just slowly started discovering more and more good stuff that was going on – and realised how blinkered I’d been to just my own experience.

There tonnes of things that showed me how cool localgov is – but here’s just a few people, who’s blogs I’ve been reading for a while, who are inspiring through their innovation and determination to do things better – and they deserve a quick thank you: Dan Slee, James Cattell, Carl Haggerty, Simon Gray and Lou Kidney. That’s quite a comms-heavy list, but that’s only because that’s one of my big interests at the moment, there’s plenty of this stuff elsewhere too.

Annoyingly I can’t remember who most of the councillors I’ve met at these events are, and I haven’t managed to find any good blogging ones yet – but it’s fairly safe to say that this lot are good eggs and represent something special.

———

Govcamp has the power to change opinions that are pretty set in. That’s powerful. And it’s one of the reasons I have so much admiration for the event and the people who embody the community around it.

Aside from the obvious, I think I’ve also learnt a valuable lesson about letting small experiences influence my viewpoint on something much wider. It’s dangerously easy to let it happen.

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.

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 ).

–

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.

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.

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.