Today we launched our final Opinion Tracker analysis for the Mayoral elections.  The results are pretty interesting, with what looks like a final surge of buzz and positive sentiment for Boris.

Check out our latest election opinion research results here

+ you should also check out a piece I've written for the Prospect Magazine blog about the "Tube-stepping" trend we've identified through our Opinion Tracking.  If you're not already acquainted with the tube-stepping, it's kinda like a cross between door-stepping and happy-slapping, and is part of the armory of the modern political activist.

Check out the Prospect magazine article on tube-stepping here

On Friday we published our latest Opinion Tracker analysis of what people are saying around the internet about the Mayoral elections.  To read the full report, check out our internet opinion analysis here.

Quick snippets of insight include:
- Buzz is done across all main candidates
- Sentiment towards Ken is rising - ahead of Boris
- Facebookers and Ken don't get on, with a high number of anti-Ken groups being set up daily

We've launched a nice new shiny product called Opinion Tracker.  Opinion Tracker does what it says on the tin i.e. it monitors what people are thinking and saying around the net.

We track conversations around the net (in forums, communities, blogs and videos) and then analyse these to show what people are thinking and saying about specific issues - whether that's to do with an event like the Mayoral elections, an issue like Climate Change or a business' Corporate Reputation.

It works though a combination of technology and people power.  Our technology allows us to spider the internet (across blogs, forums, social networks) and identify what people are saying about specific clusters of key words.  Once this data is aggregated, our team of analysts then sample this data and process it to provide the end analysis and metrics.

The reason we've developed the product is because we think there's a vast, largely untapped, resource of public opinion out there online. 
The internet is a big social space where people discuss all aspects of the world and their lives.  In a context very different to the controlled environment of focus groups etc, it's possible to find out for real what people are thinking and talking about in their own environment e.g. in their blog, or in a forum.  This means we can find out what 100's or 1000's of people are thinking, rather than 10 or so.

The product's in beta at the moment, or rather its first product iteration, so if anyone's got any ideas of how to improve it, or different ways to use it, do drop us a line.

I'm not sure who made this or what it's for, however it's a v.good pastiche of political campaigning in the US.

I particular like the Apathy Party's campaign slogan of "whatever", the idea of having a "nonifesto" and it's poll on climate change which includes "staying inside more" as a way of helping stop climate change - which is kinda true in an obscure way, and no doubt has seriously been considered by Bush as a policy option . . .

Hmm, I seem to remember writing a post on a very similar theme a little over a year ago!  Back then, we were launching School Councils UK's ambitious venture into the world of online interactivity and collaboration, taking them from a small site of static information to a large site with an emphasis on community, attempting to leverage the great asset they had in their Network of member schools.


Since then, the emphasis has changed somewhat and the site has been revamped to reflect this.  School Councils UK wanted to offer their Network members a whole school resource, an online hub where member schools could manage their information, people and internal communication -- so that's what we gave them (see a taster of the functionality at http://www.schoolcouncils.org/require_login).  This site is based on the previous one, so community features like message boards, opinion boards, polls and messaging are still there, as well as all the invaluable information published by School Councils UK; schools can also choose to share their information with the rest of the Network, making it easier still for members to learn from one another.

As the new homepage puts it:

'School Councils UK have set up this site to provide you with help in three key ways:

• Help managing your own school council - document sharing, case studies, member management etc.
• Help from other schools and people - discussion forums, resource sharing, case studies, reading, about other schools on their profiles etc.
• Help from School Councils UK – the latest news, training and resources.'

The site's also had a makeover to accommodate the extra functionality and hopefully to make the whole thing a bit more clean and tidy.  Have a look at the new site at http://www.schoolcouncils.org/.

 

A few months ago now, I was invited to take part in a two day workshop on 'Designing for Social Justice' run by Futurelab. It was a really enjoyable set of sessions, bringing together a wide mix of people from different sectors, and showed once again the strength of many minds coming from varying perspectives working together.

The results of the workshop has now been excellently written up, and contains lots of useful advice for anyone using the internet or new technologies, i strongly recommend having a read of it.

As the introduction from the workshop webpage says;

This handbook provides guidance on the process of designing a project, product or process that uses technology-enhanced learning to promote social justice.

The handbook is intended to be of use to grassroots practitioners involved in designing new projects and adapting existing ones; to developers designing digital tools and resources; and to funding bodies wanting to ensure robust processes in their supported projects.

Read more and download your free copy here.

This has been our for a while now, but I've only just caught it . . . but better late than ever . . .
Queen Rania (Queen of Jordan and general looker) is running (or was running last year) a campaign to try to get people to change their views of the Arab world through dialogue with each other - using the power of YouTube.
Her stereotypes campaign is interesting to us not just because she's using YouTube as a campaign platform, but particularly because she's talking about creating a "global conversation" - using YouTube as the facilitator.

Anyways, it seems that if Queen Rania's talking about creating "conversations" then there's got to be something good going on . . .

Whilst surfing the interweb, I came across this new campaign set up by pig farmers.  I don't know who has masterminded it, but it's an example of internet campaigning at its best - integrating a viral campaign together with an online petition.  Simple but effective.

As part of the campaign, Pig farmers have recorded a new version of Tammy Wynette's 1968 classic Stand by your Man as part of a campaign to save British pig farming.

Stand by your Ham was recorded in a London studio by a group of 30 farmers and includes the lyrics:

      Stand by your ham.
      Sau-sa-ges, Pork And Bacon
      Help us to stay in business
      Because, our pigs, are worth it.

      Stand by your ham.
      Sau-sa-ges, Pork And Bacon
      Keep givin' all the help you can
      Stand by your ham 

Listen to Stand By Your Ham online via the www.pigsareworthit.com website.

Check out the interview and podcast in the Times from Jay Adelson, chief executive of the opinion site Digg, in which he says that the internet has brought down barriers and given a voice to all.

A quick read of the article prompted two (related) reactions from me, both of which I'll hopefully get a chance to blog in more detail soon:

1. the internet is a democratic medium, it is going to democratise organisations and governments whether they (you?) like it or not: will they (you?) really just watch the pitch go by? (I will keep banging this drum -- also, this point ties in with some thoughts from last week's 'e-empowerment symposium' which I need to write up).
2. Why should the VC startups have all the good web projects? Is there really no room for the established centres of democracy to do these kind of internet-democracy experiments (as in, starting from the internet's democratic advantages rather than trying to force traditional processes into new, and often inappropriate, media)? Actually, while I think of it, kudos to the MoJ and their Governance of Britain for at least trying to practice this and maybe set a precedent.

 

I discovered this fascinating local debate site on my Google travels the other day: http://www2.harrogatetoday.co.uk/tesco/tescohome.asp.

There's all kinds of things to examine and weigh up here, far too many to meaningfully comment on briefly now -- the binary nature of the argument, the combination of new and traditional communication methods, the specific features of the site, the central involvement of a media outlet, the matter at hand, the duration of the debate etc etc -- so I thought I'd just flag it up and let you mull it over at your leisure. Anyone fancy conducting a thorough investigation and analysis? We always want to see more measurement and evaluation...

Following Chris's post about English Heritage's 'Your Place or Mine' the other week, we were pointed in the direction of a subsequent English Heritage social media project, the aptly-named 'Our Place'.

'Our Place' describes itself as '...for people who work in broadening access to heritage. It is an online space where you can network with peers, share and be inspired by project case studies, and discuss the challenges facing you today. It also contains news, resources and links – everything you need to know about engaging communities with heritage.'.

I decided it was a bit cheeky to sign up just for a nose-around when I can't really claim to work in 'broadening access to heritage' but the functionality and purpose seem pretty clear: this is an enclosed, common purpose social networking tool, much like those we've worked on for Janet and School Councils UK.

Now I know we've advocated against building from-scratch, proprietary networking systems in the past, suggesting instead a more open, facilitative approach, but for me there's a key distinguisher across all three of the projects mentioned above: namely, that the community wanted to be set apart and have their own, enclosed space. Janet Collaborate grew out of a need for education professionals to have a single place to find content, School Councils UK has a network of paying members to connect and provide with services and English Heritage's Miriam Levin tells us that 'Our Place' 'came about as a direct result of the 'Your Place or Mine?' Conference as delegates told us that they wanted more chances to network'.

It looks to me like, in this, 'Our Place' has a core strength that many other social network initiatives miss: it is a pragmatic solution to a proven need. It's not a vanity project or one done for the sake of it or an attempt to jump on a passing bandwagon; it helps solve people's problems. You can see this pragmatism from the fact that the project was done online purely because it was 'a lot more feasible and sustainable than running another huge conference' (online is found to be the most appropriate medium, not just the most desirable). This commitment to an end rather than a means is paying dividends: Miriam says 'since we launched the site, it has been more successful than we could have imagined. It's got hundreds of members, and there's already plenty of project case studies uploaded where people are sharing good practise, a healthy discussion forum, big events listing and constantly updated News and Resources'.

Excellent! Here's to more of these appropriate projects and the decline of token or trendy ones.

'Hey Monkeybrain!' is an extension of Squidoo, a site that lets users collect content on a particular topic from all around the web in one place.  We're not particularly enamoured with Squidoo itself (to put it politely) but, having first seen it yesterday, I think 'Hey Monkeybrain!' looks far simpler, cleaner and with a stronger proposition.  The idea is that you set up two opposing ideas, collect the supporting material for each and then let the people decide.  The application to e-democracy is pretty easy to see and I was going to raise the questions of the usefulness of this model/tool... but Ross Ferguson has pretty much beaten me to it, so have a read of his blog on the subject!

Over the last few years, e-Democracy has generally focussed on what 'tools' you have available for your online work, and far too little on how these tools are actually used.

One interesting discussion I've been involved in recently is around the persona that should be adopted when undertaking online activity. It's not an area that's really considered much, if at all, but it could be important.

It's taken as granted that from consultations to electoral registration drives, the work is undertaken in the name of the organisation or authority from which it originates. "Whatchester District Council would like to hear your views on..." is the standard form for these things. The problem from a human communications angle is that, whilst Whatchester District Council doesn't actually exist, even if it did, it would be able to hear you.

A council is not a human entity, and people cannot be expected to interact with it in the same way they would with a real person. How often is the term 'faceless bureaucracy' heard in complaint about a problem, primarily when no-one will take responsibility for something.

So why should online engagement be any different. If you're prepared to take ownership of a project internally, why not take it externally too? Intuitively there are risks to this, but i very much suspect that they can be mitigated, first by making it clear that the 'you' owing this process is you at work, and when you go home, you are no longer in that role. Second, the greater mitigation may well lie in the fact you have given this degree of ownership and openness in the first place.

People respond better to human contact. Remember that advert for the army a few years ago, shot from a soldier's point of view, where some locals stopped shouting at him when he removed his sunglasses and was able to make eye contact with them? In a similar vein, if you go to the samaritans website, you'll see that you are asked to email 'Jo' or write to 'Chris'. Both gender neutral names, and doubtless not the real people who deal with these enquiries, but clearly a powerful tool for people in times of need.

Isn't it time we stopped talking in terms of 'an authority' engaging with the public, and gave pride and ownership over the process to the actual people who do. You should be proud to stand up for the engagement work you're undertaking, and if you're not, then perhaps there's a third benefit of taking this approach.

You should look at why you're not.

I was pleased to read Kablenet's piece on OGC 'open[ing] the door for feedback'.

The government's procurement standards body, the OGC, has launched a supplier feedback service 'invit[ing] suppliers of public sector goods and services to comment on contentious issues and poor practice in public sector procurement, with the aim of helping the government become a better customer'.

Excellent. Putting aside for a moment the fact that the service's online facility (a contact form) is far from brilliant, I'm encouraged that feedback is being advocated as a mechanism for improving services. I'll admit that there's a difference between feedback from suppliers and the general public in that, in a relationship between government and supplier, the supplier is likely to be the expert whereas this is not necessarily the case with the public. However, it's nice to see acknowledgement of the fact that listening to stakeholders/experts/front-line service deliverers will equip you to improve your processes (this ties in with what I was posting the other day about the advantages of e-participation).

Of course, this is one service that may well be of direct benefit to us, being, as we are, 'a supplier of public sector goods and services'. I'm sure we'll have feedback about some of their procurement processes: we could've done a much better job with that form, for starters...

Interesting venture here from the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, promoting their budget cuts and council performance through Youtube in the form of a brief music video. Read the full media release here.

It's not consultation as such, but the comments on the video have been left open, and in this case they don't seem to have been used for genuine debate. Initially, the first comments are very positive, and could possibly risk being construed as 'astroturfing' given their fervour and consistency. However, the view then shifts back in exactly the opposite way and becomes pretty hate filled stuff.

I guess the lesson as ever is that it's not the technology you use as much as how you use it. For a simple message like this, with no intention to collect views, it may have been better to have turned comments off altogether. If the comments at the start are by sock puppets, and they may not be, then that should never have been done. A judicious moderation policy on the comments, with terms and conditions set out next to the video would have been an idea from the start too.

Big American corporations get a lot of stick for their old school approach to business and communications.  The commonly held perception (which is 99% true) is that corporations are still stuck in the broadcast model of communications, where multi-million pound media budgets force messages home.  The "don't talk back" school of communications.

And one of the biggest offenders in the past has been Coca-Cola.  So it's nice to see a key offender going through a period of re-hab, and setting up a new two-way communications channel in the form of the Coca-Cola Conversations site.

OK, so Coca-Cola conversations isn't as innovative as it should be (given the 100's of millions of pounds it spends on advertising), however it's a good start.

I'd be interested to see how this idea expands into the future, and whether Coca-Cola will be so bold as to let other parts of the brand converse with the world, rather than Phil Mooney - the host of the Coca-Cola Conversation and apparently Coca-Cola historian.

+ a final note: I just noticed that the latest post on the blog is entitled "Coke and Charlie Brown" - make up your own mind as to what that's about . . .

There's a lot to spark interest and further discussion in this Kable summary of the New Local Government Network's paper 21st Century Democracy: e-petitioning and local government.

Leaving aside the debate about e-petitioning as a method in itself, I thought there were two general points made in the paper that were worthy of further consideration...

Firstly, that 'the paper identifies four key advantages for councils to introduce e-petitioning:

• Widening participation to include those who appear to be more disengaged - the young and the those who are less well-off;
• Enabling people to voice their opinions with methods accessible to them and to see the impact it has;
• Ensuring accountability and direct dialogue with representatives;
• Making information readily available and accessible.'

I hope this doesn't sound too cynical but, being totally honest, how many of those are seen as 'advantages for councils'... by councils themselves? Whilst each authority is different, I have to say we haven't come across too many that consider 'enabling people to voice their opinions with methods accessible to them and to see the impact it has' advantageous to them as a council -- and even 'making information readily available and accessible' is probably only seen as beneficial in the light of the Freedom of Information Act in the majority of cases.

I'm more than happy to be proved wrong on that one, though, and sincerely hope that local authorities are seeing the advantage, and not just the obligation, in e-participation initiatives!

Secondly, that 'the paper also calls on the Audit Commission to reward councils who show commitment and innovation to e-petitioning through the new Comprehensive Area Assessment and for councils to use their own websites to encourage greater e-participation'. While, of course, there are particular nuanced pros and cons of implementing anything through such a formalised reward/threat mechanism, the principle of making e-participation a success criteria and trying to encourage an e-participatory culture is certainly laudable (and the cynical person from the paragraph above suspects it might be the most effective way to stir local authorities into life on this one).

If you feel I'm being overly harsh or if you're similarly frustrated, feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think (we really are trying to get comments enabled soon).

We may not have given $30 billion away to charity, however Delib and Microsoft have more in common than meets the eye.  Yesterday, Bill Gates was in London giving a speech to the Institute of Directors about the internet, and how it has democratised the world - with things like blogs empowering individuals and helping give people a voice.

It so happened that at the exact same time, I was pretty much giving the same speech in Windsor to a big corporation, telling them how they need to have their eyes and ears open to the conversations happening around the fringes of the internet, and if they fail to listen and join these conversations, they could well get badly burnt as people power can't be ignored in the age of the internet.

So there you go, sage words of wisdom from two of the leading technology thinkers of our time (tongue firmly placed in cheek, as I bow to Gates'superior brain-size and pocket-depth).

As we've mentioned before, one of the biggest concerns for clients looking to take their work online is whether doing so is exclusionary to some groups. To a degree this misses the point, that if we believe we currently have a democratic deficit in the UK, then current methods are likely to be being exclusionary themselves. But more important than that, anecdotal evidence has suggested that amongst disability groups, the internet is actually a more inclusionary form of participation, for a whole host of reasons.

So was pleased today to learn from a friend that Leonard Cheshire Disability's most recent survey of disabled people found;

"90% of respondents said that they had access to the internet at home and they use it for a wide range of activities including paying bills; accessing chat rooms; finding out information and emailing friends and family."

Compared with the current UK average, 90% is huge, and whilst there is still a range of issues that need careful consideration, using the internet need not be exclusionary for disability groups in and of itself. If anything the situation is quite the contrary.