BASIC CRAFT

Loving Wordle for fun and for research.

It’s by Jonathan Feinberg, a senior software engineer at IBM Research, and is a tool for generating ‘word clouds’ from texts.

I made this one out my About page.

Just finished reading a column by Andrew Walmsley of i-level in which he holds forth on the ’social revolution’ brought about by online communities. If you are looking for a laugh, this is the article for you. It made me laugh, but it was also diasppointing.

On the basis of stardoll.com (a site where little girls can potter away a few hours making up celebrity wardrobes) and some sweeping statements about Facebook, Walmsley spouts forth a sort of marketing-cum-psuedo-sociological utopian hyperbole that would be more appropriate in the late-Nineties when all this stuff first hit our consciousness.

Walmsley has a narrow understanding of the meaning and manifestation of ‘community’, illustrated by statements like ‘hundreds of millions of people across the globe participate in real communities online… more real and relevant to them than their local ones’. Come on! This suggests that we all lived in a sort of primitive, mundane hunter-gatherer world fluctuating between states of boredom and fear of ‘them next door’ until Mark Zuckerberg came ridin’ in.

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Very clever, very difficult, very gratifying… www.sexypolitics.com.

Digging MoMB lately.

Neat little site that doesn’t swamp the user with content; a lesson in keeping it simple and effective.

I would like to see a feature where users could predict whether the beta will make it to gamma or not.

My ‘favourite’ was SalesTwit.com - not one for the UK :)

On Thursday there’s an event on at the US Embassy where a panel will present their thoughts on the influence of the web on the US election and, laterally, what it all might mean for the UK.

This will be the first of a flurry of online campaigning analysis as minds begin to focus on a general election at some point in the next two years.

Online campaigning is interesting for lots of different reasons: for academics it means data, the media see a rich source of scoops, and the parties see massive PR potential, if not a direct route to voters. No prizes for guessing what new media consultants see. For the electorate, online campaigning should mean having access to a sufficient amount of information on which to base informed decisions.

While all are agreed on the desirability of electioneering online, there is no agreement on what is feasible and what is worth doing. Online campaigning is still a ‘grey area’, which makes it a nightmare for the regulators - and probably the electorate - but while everything is up for grabs it also means that online campaigning is a rich source of innovation in a otherwise pretty mundane area of politics.

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Have been thinking about analogies ahead of a presentation I’m to give on eDemocracy in the UK. And with our domestic football season coming to an end, I’ve been thinking along footballing lines and playing about with this angle…

If we think of the web or politics as having football-like leagues, then taking an interest in eDemocracy is remarkably like following a lower-league team. (more…)

Quite a neat article on ‘Open Innovation’ in the Summer 2008 edition of the Design Council magazine. The author, Jeff Weedman of Procter and Gamble, takes a canter through what open innovation has done for businesses.

He cites Julian Birkinshaw of the London Business School who says there is a spectrum of innovation, with open innovation at one end and closed innovation at the other. Every business, says Birkinshaw, must place itself somewhere on that spectrum but not, he warns, at either extreme.
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I’ve had an opportunity to - properly - go through the World e-Parliament Report, produced by the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament.

As I knew it would be, it is an excellent piece of work. I think that the particular value lies in the fact that it looks at a range of possible applications of ICT and covers as many Parliaments as possible.

For me, the recommendations were also an important inclusion. Everyone knows the state of play and where the problems lie, but very few know how to make decisive steps toward addressing these challenges. The Report’s recommendations are clear and achievable and it will be interesting to watch Parliaments try to enact them.

And this tracking, I think, is crucial. Which Parliaments take up the challenge? Which make the best efforts with the limited resources at their disposal? Which are innovative? Which are conservative and static? Which are lazy and isolationist? I think it would be worth taking this tracking on another level and actually setting up some awards to be given out at the Centre’s annual Conference.

I would also like to suggest:
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How can you keep track of what is going on in the Lords? You can read Hansard, you can watch BBC Parliament, there might be the odd article in the papers.

The Lords has been quite a closed shop, more by accident than design. Yet it is busy, bustling, important and relevant. The challenge is how to get the public to tap into that potential.The answer may be found online through blogging. This is the hypothesis of the ‘Lords of the Blog’ pilot launched by the House of Lords and the Hansard Society at www.lordsoftheblog.net.

At the end of 2007, I made some predictions about political uses of the web over the next 12 months. One was that the House of Lords would turn to blogging to encourage public awareness and participation. Of course, I was dealing on some insider info. Fundraising for ‘Lords of the Blog’ was one of my last duties at the Hansard Society. But finding the funds was no guarantee that the blog would see the light of day. The kudos for that lies with Barry Griffiths, the project coordinator, and Liz Hallam-Smith, the Lords Librarian for having the foresight to see the value in such an experiment. (more…)

They say:

“The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and the Inter-Parliamentary Union launched today the World e-Parliament Report 2008. The Report was prepared as part of the work of the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament.

The  World e-Parliament Report 2008 represents the first effort to establish a baseline of how parliaments are using, or planning to use ICT to help them carry out their representative, lawmaking and oversight responsibilities and to connect to their constituencies. It is also intended to advance a shared knowledge base among the parliaments of the world and to promote international debate on these matters.

The Report is based on the responses and comments provided by 105 assemblies from around the world to a survey on the use of ICT in parliament conducted between July and November 2007. It also draws on experiences exchanged during the World e-Parliament Conference 2007 and relevant publicly available information”.

I say:

“An excellent and very important piece of research. Significant, because it covers all conceivable applications of ICT by parliaments across the world. Well done to Gherardo, Jeffrey and Jane for putting it together”.

The Report is available at www.ictparliament.org.