One strand of it is people blogging about women who have influenced them and their tech/science/engineering/maths-life. So that’s what I’ll do.

This year, I want to write a little about Nancy Baym – Nancy is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas, with a special personal emphasis on “personal connections in a digital age” (the title of her excellent book) and in the changing relationship between musicians and their fans.

I’ve been reading Nancy’s ‘online fandom’ blog for years, and was drawn in immediately by her scholarly approach to looking at the subject. Almost all the people who write about the changes that the internet has brought about for musicians and music fans do so from a purely anecdotal perspective – me included (albeit somewhat aggregated anecdotes that point to a sea-change in those relationships). Nancy is doing brilliant research and presents that work all over the world at conferences in both the academic and music sectors. Her book is one of -if not THE – key text(s) on connections online.

I’ve been fortunate enough to learn from Nancy and swap ideas with her over the last couple of years. I finally met up with her at a conference in Berlin last year, and have been interviewed by her twice for different books or papers she’s writing. It’s not often that an interview teaches me more than I’m able to impart but not only does talking to Nancy make me up my game just through her not letting me get away with any folksy fluffy BS about the internet being nice for musicians – at least not without backing it up – but her questions are the best questions and her responses reveal her to have the most astute grasp of the whole area of online communication as it relates to musicians of anyone I’ve ever come across.

She’s a brilliant academic, digital ninja, ardent music fan and brilliant analyst of what happens beyond the fluffy shiny stuff of our lives onine. She also wins at Twitter – follow her at @nancybaym – she manages to be funny, sarcastic, erudite and fiercely intelligent in 140 characters. Another rare trait.

There are still a few hours of Ada Lovelace Day to go - who are your digital heroines?

First, there was the case of Paul Chambers, AKA the #twitterjoketrial, where one guy tweets a jokey, hyperbolic, frustrated tweet ostensibly to his friends that follow him, and has now ended up (after appeal even) with a £1000 fine and a criminal record. And has lost his job.

Then there was the case of Sarah Baskerville – @Baskers on Twitter. She’s a Civil Servant, one that clearly cares a great deal about her job and has a whole load of wonderful ideas for making the processes involved in governing the country more transparent through social technology.

However, when Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail decided – without any warning or reasoning – to write an article about her, instead of praising her well-documented forward thinking approach to the role of emergent technology in the CS, and her commitment to improving CS practices, he instead drew attention to a couple of tweets that mention her having a hangover and suggested that she should be sacked for them.

Wow. What a shitbag he is.

Fortunately, Sarah’s bosses seem to realise that this kind of groundless muck-racking is the work of a putrid mind, a festering, morality-free bullying instinct, fostered by a newspaper that neither likes the Civil Service nor understands Social Media. Indeed, one that appears to be positively threatened by both.

That the Independent followed the story not with a critique, but with an expansion on Letts’ ill-founded bullying, is both a sorry indictment on them as a paper, and a wake-up call to just how few people in our national broadcast media really have the faintest clue about social media, how it works and what it means. Thankfully, the Guardian supplied the voice of sanity.

For me and the work I do with Amplified, the implications of this are potentially huge. We work with a lot of public institutions – including the Civil Service. I have explained how social technologies can increase transparency and public engagement, to people at all levels of the Civil Service, via Amplified’s involvement at the CSLive conference last year. We were invited by the COI – a department jam-packed with people who ‘get’ social media, who are passionate about good, effective governance – to demonstrate and explain social media to attendees at the conference, and to use the conference itself to demonstrate what we were talking about. We used Audioboo, blogs, Twitter, Flickr and other places to take the conversations that would otherwise only have happened over coffee and present the wisdom of the Civil Service to anyone who wanted to hear it. We asked questions, we took questions from outside to people inside. We recorded conversations with everyone from low ranking Civil Servants worried that social media usage was in contravention of their terms of contract, through to Gus O’Donnell, head of the Civil Service, and the head of Scotland Yard’s Serious Organised Crime unit.

Beyond that, we’ve worked with the NCVO, The Arts Council, BITC, IBM, Sungard, Reuters, the Citizens Advice Bureau and others, to open up their thinking, their processes and their planning to input from their users, their employees and conference attendees through social media. There have been loads of overwhelmingly positive stories of what this has enabled for the people we’ve worked with.

So when some tech-phobic journalist with a grudge decides to stalk someone’s Twitter account in order to ‘dish the dirt’ on them completely without context or a shred of honest reflection on the stirling committed work that person does in their role, I – as you might understand – get rather angry. Not least of all because I now need to warn the people we work with that their staff social media usage policy needs to take into account the possibility that some Letts-shaped turd may well be looking for a way to make a couple of hundred quid out of taking ill-informed, unresearched and morally bankrupt pot-shots at their staff for their use of social media. Further more, the #twitterjoketrial case shows that we can’t even rely on the law to understand the conversational nature of social media usage, regardless of any broadcast ‘potential’ that may be latent in the service. Paul Chambers case is an horrific miscarriage of justice and an insane waste of police and court time, presided over by someone with no apparent working knowledge of the internet at all.

These are interesting times we’re in – they are transitional and this new and largely misunderstood technology is highly disruptive and some institutions are proving highly resistant to the kind of adaptation required to take full advantage of their wonderful democratising potential.

But we know – you know, or you wouldn’t be reading this (unless you’re just Quentin Letts doing a vanity search, in which case, you should be ashamed of yourself, but clearly aren’t, or you’d have the decency to refuse to work for the Daily Mail in the first place.) this stuff is changing everything, it’s not going away, however many draconian and ignorant ‘digital economy acts’ are passed, however many dumbass Daily Mail journalists hide behind their pamphlet of hate and fear to peddle lies about hard-working Civil Servants.

See you on Twitter…

It’s a fairly fun Friday ritual, and certain names crop up time and time again and eventually I check ‘em out. But the volume of possible Follow Friday recommendations is so high as to be functionally useless to me.

So I came up with a twist: #Connect4

The idea with Connect4 is that you pick four of your twitter friends that you don’t think are friends already, and suggest that they follow each other – it’s like the twitter equivalent of the fantasy dinner party game, only there’s less pressure cos if people aren’t interested in each other they don’t have to talk.

But it does mean that there’s some context for the recommendation, that if I’m put in a group of four there are three other people hand-picked for me to follow, and if you see someone else recommend two people you know and two people you don’t, the chances are the other two will be interesting to you.

It’s not, I suggest, something that requires hundreds of lists from each of us, and it doesn’t need to happen on a particular day of the week, but does seem like a nice way to add a little more fun, creativity and context to the process of recommending twitter-friends to other friends, and gives us a hashtag to follow (though #connect4 does seem to be used for some other things too – hopefully the distinction will be clear).

Good idea? Thoughts please, and of course, #Connect4 Tweets

Image by Melvinheng on Flickr, shared via a creative commons license.

This is not a post about the things that are wrong with our world. This is a post about how we make them right. Of course it is not exhaustive, and by no means is it intended to be a detailed and flawless solution, in fact it openly admits that fact, because that (you will see) it is the point.

This post is in reaction to many things, but particularly in reaction to the recent #3strikes debate, the actions of Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, and a recently circulated confirmed rumour that suggests the same minister may have his sights set on the leadership of the Labour party. This is not a party political post, and I do not intend to argue why one man’s leadership would be bad for Labour, instead I intend to suggest that what this man represents is an outdated vision of politics, a vision that is bad for our country, and bad for our democracy.

Our society (and although I will talk more generally, ‘our’ here refers to UK society) is governed. We have democratically elected governments who, on the whole, make decisions and enforce laws with the intention of bettering society. I do not believe that anyone gets involved in politics for any other reason but improving the society they live in. This is the desire of the BNP, just as much as it is the desire of mainstream parties, their vision of a ‘better’ society might be opposed to the majority, but that is why they are not in power. Largely speaking, the party in power is supposed to represent the majority vision of what a better society is, and then strive towards it.

I do not believe that is currently so. Leaving aside first past the post reform and candidate selection, we wholly and entirely do not currently live in a democracy. The power is very much not ‘with the people’.

The Story

When Labour came into power in 1997, it was to the tune of a wholly broken opposition. 18 years of Conservative government had systematically deconstructed all that was of society and replaced it with the ethics of individualism. This was very good for a few, and catastrophic for a many. The many had finally realised. Labour won with more than just promises to renew, however, they won with what was for the first time, politics as marketing. It wasn’t just slogans, it was shiny adverts, they weren’t just promoting the values of the party, they were selling the story of New Labour.

Something else very important happened in 1997. The death of Diana. Others have pointed out before me how this marked an important turning point, not in politics, but in the media. This was the media as story, news not as reporting events, but as representing emotions. The papers spoke as though they spoke for us as they ordered the Queen from Balmoral.

Labour was in power without a credible opposition, and suddenly the press felt powerful. They could move the Queen to action. And someone needed opposing. If it was ‘The Sun Wot Won It’, The Sun could also oppose it.

Story is a very hard thing to fight. It is much older than democracy, much older than society.

That was the beginning of the era of Spin. Labour had ridden into power on a narrative, and the mainstream media had assumed the role of opposition using the same. One proposed a story of a better society, the other claimed to represent the stories (wishes) of the people who lived in it.

You notice how neither of these groups are made up of ‘us’?

This is the politics that politicians such as Peter Mandelson, David Cameron and (yes, even) Boris Johnson represent. (Can you think of a better story than the bumbling fool made good?)

An Information Economy.

Spin is all about distribution. Spin is about controlling the narrative of politics; it is about packaging and marketing your version of events. Spin requires complete control of information.

Spin is not working. Our society has grown out of it. Our country has been made undemocratic because of it. Our politicians do not fear the people, they fear the press. The people do not trust their politicians because the press exposes the antiquated attitudes and secrecy within their ranks. However the Press only constructs an oppositional story, it does not deconstruct it. The press is also not run for anything but the benefit of sales. No matter how well standing the broadsheet, how ubiquitous the tabloid. The mainstream media choose their story, and then they spin their readers and politicians into it.

The internet opposes and undermines that.

We live in an information age. For better or worse that is something that must be accepted. There is a rival economy, and it consists of information, it is a world (democratically, one might say) built of a thousand individual narratives. No one claims to speak for others, if someone is championed, it is because one person had the words that echo with others’. In this context the politics of Peter Mandelson et al will not work. He is a clever man, and I hope clever enough to see that one voice, big business, Spin, the politics of ‘push’, are gone. This is the century of pull, this is the century that politics has to become mutual.

Wikipolitics.

Well, everything needs a title doesn’t it? (/a hashtag).

I have blogged before about how I don’t believe in apathy, but I do believe in disengagement. I believe that British politics is due a reformation. I believe that we can demand that. Are you bored of the tone of the Labour government? Do you really believe that a Tory one will be different? Are you looking for a protest vote? A voice? You will not currently find it at the ballots.

What is Wikipolitics?

It is a starting point. It takes the open-source ethic and applies it to government. I don’t propose that we edit policy documents. I do believe that parliament should be opened up, demystified, and the power taken back. How do we do this? We’ve already started, look at projects such as Louder, 38 degrees, look at the Trafigura backlash, the Iran election, the G20 protests.

We now live in a world where we construct our own media consumption, where we pull together, build our own stories. Politics and the mainstream media are clinging on to old methods of distribution and delivery.

Whilst still acknowledging that at least 2/3 of the world does not have access to the internet (the UK figure is something like 30%, with a further 7-8% only having narrowband access – source) and those who do are likely to be from more affluent, developed backgrounds, we also need to be aware that instant publishing and access to our own media channels is incredibly empowering.

We also need to pull ourselves out of the luxury of political disempowerment. It is our responsibility to be involved in politics. If it is not one with which we wish to be involved, then we need to change it.

Reformation, Reclamation.

We need to tell our parties: “Arm your backbenchers with Flips, with Audioboo, with simple wordpress websites. Open up. Work in real-time. And don’t be afraid. We know you are, we know you are worried that you will be criticised, pulled apart, but please remember that although it has not been so before, that is what we mean by democracy. That is the open-source ethic. Let us participate”.

This worked for Obama, he brought the US the highest election turnout in a century. But then he stopped. And that where it’s gone wrong. That’s when Murdoch took back over.

The mainstream media has characterised us as a pack of baying wolves. The politicians have been characterised as lying snakes and fat cats. 2/3 people believe they cannot affect decision making. Trafigura, Jan Moir, proves we can. How about we take that to the rest of politics? How about we build our own wiki-guide to how we want to be engaged with, how we want to ask questions of the policy makers, of the parties? How about we offer a route that bypasses the mainstream media – taking honest debate and mobile video on the campaign trail, introducing them to the modern realities outside the political bubble, having a conversation, rather than being delivered a speech. You may argue that there’s no point in participating in a broken system, but how else are people to know how to fix it?

Because this is important. As it currently stands it would take as many years to get women equal representation, as it would a snail to crawl the length of the Great Wall of China. As it currently stands we are bickering and buying our way to climate disaster. As it currently stands we live lifestyles of excess and complete unsustainability. And for all our excess, are we happy? Or are we to some degree living the lives and values that are sold to us – other peoples’ stories?

We are facing a hyper-connected, global village era, politics cannot continue to be its own island.

This is not a manifesto, it is a call to arms. And this is where I stop, because this is a story, too. It’s a story about us, but it’s still my version. We need to write an ending together. How can we open up the political process? What do we want to know? Do we think there should be more experts involved in policy making? Do we want to see cabinet meetings taking questions from Twitter? What tools can we offer? Comment. Engage. This is up to all of us. What can we build? (We have the technology). Go.

– Hannah Nicklin is a brightly coloured and basically nocturnal playwright, blogger, academic and geek. She normally lives over at hannahnicklin.com, and is @hannahnicklin on Twitter.

The most recent offender in this field appears to be the 140 Conference – an event first organised in NYC, apparently held in a basement (so very little web access) with inadequate resources, high ticket prices, and most – if not all – the speakers not getting paid to be there.

The news that it was coming to London made me wonder out loud (probably at Tuttle) about the possibility of running a free conference on the same day – doing it Amplified-style where everyone gets to contribute, share their knowledge, people can suggest and lead sessions, and we all gain insight, friendship, support and fun without anyone building some freaky empire and charging £500 a head for the privilege.

At this point, the genius that is Toby Moores (AKA Sleepydog) suggested that it be called the £1.40 Conference - and we all started riffing on the idea of what that could mean -

• charge £1.40,
• pay speakers £1.40,
• beer and sandwiches cost £1.40 (Toby again – he’s so good at this stuff!)…
• Any profits would be donated to a charity.

The idea came together really quickly. A brief chat at that time on twitter suggested that a few more people were interested in the idea too.

Fast forward to yesterday and on a whim I checked to see if the date of the London 140Conference had been announced – it had, Nov 10/11th.

So to coincide with it, I threw out the idea of holding £1.40 conference on the 10th November. Little else is planned as yet, but as we’re not planning on spending a shitload of money, and we already have the Amplified team in place to make events like this work, it’s going to be pretty easy to put it together.

I put a page up about it on the Amp09 wiki, and the ball is rolling. People are signing up – most of the people I’d want to book to speak at a conference like this even if we were charging £500 a ticket are coming along – it’s going to be fab, it’s going to be exciting, and it’s going to be (nearly) free. (if you can’t afford the £1.40, let us know, someone will happily pay it for you, and no-one will ask for stock in your company in exchange.)

I’m sure there are situations where £500-worth of value can be squeezed out of a day-long conference. If such things were measurable, I’m sure I could show that I get that out of Tuttle most Friday mornings, and that’s always free and open to anyone.

I reckon you’ll get at least £450-worth out on Nov 10th, for just £1.40.

So, as of now, it has a wiki page where you can sign up, make suggestions, offer help, ask questions – it’s all happening over there. Head over there to join the £1.40 fun!

For tracking, do you use an RSS reader, like google reader, visit a range of sites every morning to see they’re updated, receive email updates via feedburner, or wait for a message from the author about updates (I’m sure a lot of the people who read my blog who are on twitter don’t bother to subscribe to the feed, knowing that I’ll tweet whenever I post anything new, as I’ve just done with this )

With sharing, I read a stat that said that the most common way for someone to share a weblink is still email – do you do that? do you use friendfeed, delicious, googlebookmarks, all those other things that show up when you click the ‘share this’ button at the bottom of any of the posts over at stevelawson.net?

I’m fascinated!

I’ve got a fairly well-stocked google reader set of feeds, but I’m often so busy reading things that people have tweeted about, that I don’t get round to it – I find twitter to be a remarkably effective filter for news and blogs…

What say you?

It seems to me that it’s just that its usefulness is harder to explain that something that has pictures and video and competitions and widgets… Twitter’s just talking, at its best, and like conversation, some people are engaging and interesting and others are self-absorbed and dull.

So, what’s the best thing about twitter? what are it’s biggest frustrations? Twitter, through the eyes of those who actually use it, please