Disruptive Proactivity

After my last offhand comments about visualisation, a friend got in touch about some work I was involved in a few years ago. They’ve done the huge amount of work to get where they wanted to be, and can now do some things with it.

Wordle is a service where you give it a load of text, and it pulls out the words used a lot and displays them graphically. The area covered by the words denotes the relative import of the word in question – bigger area, more important.

I’ve replaced the two biggest words (which give away which group did the work) with LGB and Mormon – mirroring the recent california election Event, since both issues talk about elections. While the letters have been replaced, the areas are the same. I’ve also fuzzed one other word that’s very small:

While that’s resaved to smaller size, but the 900 pixel wide version really hits you – it’s a little over a quarter of the area. We knew that the 3 letter issue was significant, but that visualisation shows just how significant – more than expected.

“The internet doesn’t go to meetings. The internet doesn’t write letters. The internet doesn’t stand outside a building with a sign and shout at people as they come in and out. And the reality is, in the 19th century political system that we have, you still need to do those things. What the internet does, or can do, is help spread the information that was exchanged in the meeting to those who weren’t at the meeting, as they had kids to look after or whatever; or they were at work; or they have 2 or 3 jobs as they try and keep ends together. The internet can help people act more accurately, and more precisely, and it can also reduce the huge information barrier that people find to action. It can make it much less time expensive for people to act than otherwise, but it’s still about physical action. And I often think that people who think that they can just campaign on the web, good luck to them, and eventually that might work, but for now, in the majority of cases, you still have to get up and go to a meeting, no matter how tiresome that is”
Will Perrin at OpenTech 2009 (audio)

One of the things that was getting talked about at OpenTech was helping out with other groups. Which is great, as that’s something that we really wanted to happen, and we started a bit of. But it didn’t really work all that well.

As Fran and Will said in that session, “we see a lot of serendipity” from “bumping into people on the street”. But “they don’t really know what a blog is”, The most powerful thing you can do is not necessarily use your skils to build a really complicated tool for someone, but to show them how to use a simple tool”. Don’t ever underestimate the power of a one page memo, written with the right background, to the right person, at the right time, to destroy an industry or change the world for better.

Over the last year and a bit, I’ve been looking for other projects to work on outside of the pure tech scene. Building perl each night so that it’ll continue to exist in the morning ( cf Clay Shirky http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1TZaElTAs ) is great, and I’m very very glad people do. But my aim was to spend less time in front of a keyboard, or at least, different time in front of a keyboard, and do stuff that actually helps people.

I was talking with a friend recently about a project I was involved in at bits of last year. While the work I did was useful, and gave them the chance to see why certain things helped, the biggest benefit wasn’t anything direct. It’s not that the spreadsheets I worked on did lots of stuff; it was that they existed at all. And the fact that a database existed was had the effect to “scare the shit out of” those whose negative activities had to be reduced. Not in any way a technical victory, but a significant beneficial impact on the community and the area (unfortunately, it was all too temporary). Similarly, consider the ability to produce a statistic about numbers of activities; on one hand, mySociety produces maps http://mapumental.channel4.com ; they manually put different sized red dots on a picture; and the latter achieves their aims. The right solution for them is a selection of handily sized dots.

WIth strong tech, you can mash up job centre job posting information with unemployment locations and track the ability to use public transport between the two). That’s be uniquely useful mashup (and give JCPP another compelling feature on top of simply email alerts). Being able to find somewhere nice to go on holiday is one thing; being able to find a job is much more of a civic benefit.

But the vast majority of this isn’t advanced technology; it’s what those in the tech-savvy group (as Bill Thompson describes them http://vimeo.com/5471283 ) consider relatively simple, and which those outside that group can’t distinguish from magic. Helping someone setup a wordpress site that they can edit themselves, and that they can learn how to edit themselves, is fine, and better because then they will actually do so. But knowing that’s what they want, is not easy.

There was some random chatter about the creation of a board where groups could post what skills they’re looking for, and geeks could go and find groups who needed those skills. Unfortunately, that’s a short term and limited solution, unlikely to get persistent traction. As much as people in those groups don’t know OpenTech exists, and wouldn’t know why they should go even if they did, a website would have similar issues, with a much harder solution – it would require significant ongoing overhead of publicity, and still have neglible impact. The e-campaigning forum already does some of this for campaigning organisations, and similar areas exist for others.

A much better solution for geeks looking to give, is simply to step away from the keyboard, into the big blue room with the yellow thing, and start to look in the local community outside your front door. The UK has charities, NGOs and community groups doing huge amounts of impressive work, all over the country, in many different ways, in many different places, at many different times. Go out into your community, and find a group that needs some help. Whether it’s volunteering with Bike Recycling, Queer Arts, asylum seekers or a community newspaper, there are a range of groups who need a variety of inputs (and I currently help out groups in 3 of those 4). Some of what they need will be somewhat technical – setting up a mailing list, help with posting video to youtube – but most would never think to ask, let alone using audioboo to interview councillors before a meeting, and then writing up the . The issue most of the time is that there’s a lack of understanding of the possible, which makes asking for what they want hard because while they may have a rough idea, it may not have a good idea, and they don’t have the knowledge to tell the difference, or take the gem of an idea out of some wooly prose. If you know what recursion is, you can use it to help people who don’t, and don’t even comprehend what becomes simple and possible using it.

By those with skills to offer going out to their communities and volunteering on a topic in which you’re interested, or even possibly interested. You don’t have to commit, you don’t have to necessarily go to more than one meeting if you decide that’s not actually what you want. All you need to start to help is to find others working on whatever you’re interested in.

Good luck with that.

Here’s a wiki version of this post, so where it’s wrong or needs to be better, you can add links and make suggestions, or rewrite vast chunks if you choose. if you’re not sure what a wiki is, just email me S@mSmith.net

Roughly once a year, I’ve tried to take a couple of weeks away from the keyboard outside of work. But for about the last 2 and a half years, for a variety of reasons, I didn’t do so. And then I went a bit crazy as a result. Oops. OpenTech was great fun, but a lot of work; coupled with also running this year’s EuroBSDcon (you should come), and my wide variety of other projects, the workload built up; and the break that was desperately needed just didn’t happen.

You might have noticed that this blog has got busier over the last few weeks – that’s what coming back from time away has helped with. The stuff that’s actually important, rather than the bits that only look it while being swamped and buried.

A week after opentech, I stepped away from pretty much everything for a fortnight (it ended up only being 10 days).

But that was vital. I came back refreshed and more focussed.

On my ipod, I have a playlist called “listen again” which includes a load of recordings that I try to listen to for various reasons. The one relevant to this post is by Van Jones, which contains a stronger argument for taking a break than I can. He’s now moved on.

One of the most potentially amazingly powerful projects from 4iP has sneaked out a bit – Newspaper club (Disclosure: they sponsored opentech earlier this year, but NC wasn’t discussed as far as I’m aware).

One of the projects locally that i’ve started doing a bit of work with is a Manchester volunteer newspaper (the MULE). They look at a variety of things that aren’t getting covered in other media – in terms of local newspapers, the only thing really left focussing inside the M60 is the Manchester Evening News), and that’s extremely cosy with the council.
They’d never think of looking at something like this: Closed doors at the council.

The main issue with printing anything is that the first copies are very expensive, and soon after that the cost can come down to roughly the cost of the paper it’s printed on. But doing 2 editions of 5000 copies is nearly double the cost of 1 edition of 10,000.

Now, in the MULE’s single paper edition (latest PDF here that story is buried on page 5, but what would happen if MULE could upload a custom PDF with that story on page 1, and get a small run printed cheaply, and then distribute that version at the door to the town hall on the evening of a council meeting. What impact would that have on the council and it’s level of belief in democracy and transparency (and quite frankly, there’s only one way that it can easily go). And if that doesn’t work, what happens if it gets handed out on the street in the contested wards in the week before an election.

Or what happens if it is possible to have the story about Beetham Tower using illegal wood on the front page of the version that went in every post box in that building, and the (numerous) other big buildings owned by the same company? Both those that have been built (the people who pay rent), and those that are under planning discussions (when small spanners can jam up works pretty easily). it only takes one person to have read the article and raise it, to start a process of change.

Newspapers became popular for a reason; and large parts of that reason haven’t changed. The business models have; the methods of distribution have. But that’s an opportunity, as well as a threat.

There are many local papers like MULE out there, the internet has let them publish online for a long time, but the big problem with hyperlocal is getting people to find out about it. Newspapers have been solving that problem for a long time by putting it through people’s front doors on a regular basis with something worth reading. Mixing the two will have dramatic impact.

Online is of course vital, but offline can get people there, and get people to make things better.