Back the Bid! Bringing Wikimania to Bristol

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Wikimania is the annual conference for the Wikimedia Foundation (so basically the Wikipedia conference). This year it is in Washington, D.C. and in previous years it has taken place in Haifa, Gdańsk, Buenos Aires, Alexandria, Taipei, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Frankfurt.

The host city is chosen, not surprisingly, in an open, wiki-like manner by members of the Wikimedia community and bids are invited from cities/communities that are interested in organising the event.

Thanks to some amazing work primarily from Steve Virgin, a board member of Wikimedia UK based locally, Bristol has entered a bid for the event in 2013. There is some stiff competition (including London which I find slightly strange with two bids from the UK..as if anyone needs another event in London!) and the bid from Hong Kong in particular looks very compelling.

That said the Bristol bid stands out in my opinion (no bias there of course!). Steve has pulled together a hugely impressive list of local organisations and companies who have agreed to support the bid and the city has a vibrant Wikipedia community as well as a wonderful potential venue with Bristol Uni supporting the event. Plus god knows we know how to throw a party :)

I think an event like this in the city would be a real opportunity to get alot of new people interested in Wikipedia beyond just a tool to settle the occasional pub argument and as evidenced by the huge success of things like Ignite Bristol people in this city love to learn as long as its a little bit fun as well! Not to mention the support I’m sure the event would get from our friends down the road in Bath who have just delivered an amazing Digital Festival.

I’m hoping to convince organisations like JISC, the Research Councils, Mozilla and Creative Commons where I know they have a commitment to ‘open content’ etc (and where I know the odd person!) to say some supportive things in public as well.

I think the Plone Conference back in 2010 organised by Matt and the guys at Netsight demonstrated Bristol was a great venue for big geeky conferences and bringing Wikimania to the city would be a real win I think and I encourage everyone I know to ‘back the bid’ even if just with the occasional tweet.

The Westeas (a Teacamp for the West)

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I have a feeling that there might be an opportunity to maintain some kind of community off the back of #govwest and while interest is high in public sector digital projects due to things like GOVUK but also as Carl mentioned in his talk the perception that web services might equal cost savings!

One of the enduring spin-offs from the UKGovcamps in London is monthly Teacamps at Cafe Zest on Victoria Street. These informal meetups usually consist of a couple of invited speakers, a group of people sitting around listening and swapping war stories while drinking coffee (or tea!) and then a few hardy souls heading off to the pub after. The timing is also interesting – at 4 til 6 it means people don’t miss much of their working day (so probably easier to convince the powers that be) and also means they don’t get home much later for folk with, you know, lifes outside of work (unlike me!).

I’m thinking we should see if there is any appetite for this sort of thing locally. I can think of plenty of speakers who would give an interesting perspective (especially if we expanded the remit a little to take in more of the .ac.uk & .org.uk worlds as well as .gov.uk) and much as it pains me as I believe Bristol to be the centre of the universe I think Bath is a good place for this sort of thing as its easy to reach from anywhere locally especially by train and if we could find a venue in easy walking distance from the station I think it is worth a punt. Anyone else?

Gov:West thoughts

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So despite promising myself I wouldn’t run any more events I had this nagging idea for a Govcamp inspired mini-conference (I bottled the unconference idea!) consisting of local speakers and the odd guest from the ‘smoke’.

Thanks to some seed funding from the UKGovcamp gang and equally importantly the opportunity of making it a part of the Bath Digital Festival it ended up being hard to resist and so a few DMs were tweeted, a few emails were sent and a few favours were requested and before I knew it I had an event on my hands!

About 35 people came along to the Innovation Centre in Bath to listen to seven invited speakers talking on a wide range of topics with the loose theme of being ‘gov’ related (or in the case of Shane – just interesting!) and watch me fail to keep things run on time :)

I’d like to thank all the speakers as I think everyone did a great job. There was a decent buzz on Twitter throughout the day (despite an awful lof of people going old school with paper and pen!) and in particular Daffydds cookie talk and Carls refreshingly honest talk about ‘content strategy’ (which isn’t what I’d call a content strategy but is a brilliant plan!) really getting peoples attention – but everyone was great and alot of people I spoke to after had enjoyed a whole range of talks and had taken different things from them.

From a personal point of view I got alot out of the day – both with inspiration from a number of the talks but also a real sense of achievement for getting the event to happen. I get **really** stressed when I organise events and each time in the run up I have serious regrets but this is the first time I haven’t also come away promising myself I won’t ever do it again. In fact quite the opposite – I think I want to try and see if there is any appetite for something semi-regular – maybe trying a slightly different format out that Lisa suggested in the bar after.

There are alof of people I would have liked to get to speak and a couple of them were really up for it but circumstances prevented their involvement – maybe GovWestToo would give them an opportunity to come along. I also wonder if there is a better way of me gettng the word out about the event – although we ‘sold out’ 20 people just didn’t show up on the day – always a peril with free events – but I need to think of a way of managing that better.

Carl is also considering a GovCampSW down in Exeter which I will try to attend and help out with if there is anything I can add – I am thinking I need to speak more at these events in the future and do less organising though!

So again thankyou to the speakers and everyone who came along and extra special thanks to Eduserv for sponsoring the beers after. There were alot less of us taking advantage of it than we expected but I in particular enjoyed it :)

[oh and a special thankyou to SPARKIE award winning Mike Ellis for putting the whole festival together!]

What is inside INSIDE GOVERNMENT? #govuk

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Last night at a little before 9pm the latest ‘launch’ from GDS Towers took place and professionally this was very much the deliverable I had the most interest in.

INSIDE GOVERNMENT (more cap-tastic action!) was formerly known as the ‘Whitehall’ project or occasionally refered to as the ‘corporate publishing platform’ and it is the activity that Neil Williams left his role at BIS to product manage. It is perhaps less ‘glamorous’ than the public facing work that GOV.UK has focused on so far but for those of us working in digital/web teams on the edges of Government it is the project most likely to directly impact us one way or another.

The first thing that is noticeable is that it is *very* beta. Much more so than the previous release but there is more than enough there to get a feel for things and to see the [near] future of departmental websites and potentially many, many more public sector sites.

So what are my immediate takeaways?

i. The design is extremely sparse. Once again readability and clarity are the focus which I like but I think it might be considered a bit stark by alot of people. [That said I like it]

ii. There is even less ‘branding’ to differentiate the Departments than I expected – a prominent title and a single colour (plus there choice of photos for the large ‘homepage’ carousel) is the only difference.

iii. I’m not clear how the navigation structure will cope with any depth or whether it is intended to be that ‘flat’? The way is works in some of the ‘About’ pages seems less than intuitive to me.

iv. The search is again very clever and it is clear that this kind of ‘intelligent auto-complete’ needs to be considered on any new site.

v. The way the structure is output led rather than Department led takes a little getting used to (i.e. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-armed-forces-covenant-interim-report-2011) but I can see the benefit of uncoupling things from Departments that may change or vanish.

My main impression is that it is a major achievement and there is alot more about it I like than don’t and imagine it will go through a number of iterations before it leaves ‘beta’ and will only get better each time.

For me though the real interesting information came in a blogpost from Neil a little after the launch. Anyone who knows me knows I have issues with ‘content management systems’ and have become increasingly frustrated over the years and have high hopes for this project to help resolve some of my frustrations – if only by demonstrating a better way of doing things.

There were a series of quotes in this post that really made me want to peak under the bonnet as soon as possible. Things like;

a custom publishing engine properly tuned to the needs of multiple users and publishers

make the software as simple, flexible and intuitive as possible

and most of all

On average, publishing to GOV.UK was 2.5 minutes faster than WordPress and 11 minutes faster than Directgov.

[though I did hear a rumor that the publishing engine is using Markdown in which case I'd bring those times down big time as I never remember the syntax!].

So congratulations again to Neil, the team from Go Free Range and everyone else who was involved. Look forward to the next installment :)

Gov:West goings on

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Gov|West the mini-conference I am putting together for the Bath Digital Festival has really come together over the last few days. The plan is to have eight or nine 20 minute case study talks from some smart folk doing cool digital stuff either in or for the public sector with most of the speakers being pretty local.

There is a bit of a mix of local & central government, a couple of NDPBs and some local companies who work with the public sector and a strict no pitching policy!

Topics include moving to the cloud, the new cookies legislation, content strategies and the Government single domain project amongst others.

The draft schedule looks something like this with beers sponsored by Eduserv in the Cork after :) I think it will be a really interesting afternoon and look forward to seeing a god crowd (especially as I am not inflicting a talk by me on anyone!)

15.00 – 15.10 Introductions
15.10 – 15.20 TBC
15.20 – 15.30 Matt Johnson, Head of Research & Innovation for Eduserv
15.30 – 15.50 Kate Lin, Head of Digital Communications for BBSRC
15.50 – 16.10 Alex Pitkin, Head of Production at Delib
16.10 – 16.30 Dafydd Vaughan, Developer for GOVUK
16.30 – 17.10 Break
17.10 – 17.30 Carl Haggerty, Digital Communications Manager at Devon County Council
17.30 – 17.50 Shane McCraken, Director of Gallomanor Communications
17.50 – 18.10 Dicky Otlet, Communications Manager at JISC
18.10 – close James Stewart, Technical Lead for GOVUK

Learning from the BBC Sport redesign

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One of the things I have admired for a while about the BBC Internet team(s) and now the GOV.UK (in caps ‘cos they mean business) is just how much of their thinking and processes they share openly on their blogs. In recent months the GOV.UK blog has been a regular source of answers and inspiration and I admire the fact that even amongst the challenging deadlines and rapid iterations so many of the team are encouraged to contribute to the blog.

This post isn’t about the GOV.UK stuff though (for a change!) instead it is about the recent changes to the website I have visited more than any other since the dawn of the world wide web and some of the lessons the BBC team has shared about their decision making and how I am learning from that.

BBC Sport is a site I have relied on for years. I have never switched my allegiance to Johnny come lately sites like Sky Sports News :) It is one of the pinned pages in my Chrome browser and I check in on it throughout the day – everyday.

It turns out it had been nine years since the Sports pages had been redesigned – and to be honest they were starting to show their age a bit. This became even more obvious when the News section went through its own redesign a while ago. The thing is that despite it looking a bit old school and having less than optimal navigation it was a site that many of us could use blindfolded so long had we used it and as such any changes were bound to attract comment.

On of my major personal netiquette rules is that I don’t rush to complain when sites redesign. This can be difficult with some companies [Facebook I'm looking at you] but in general I try and extend some semi-professional courtesy and give the sites a chance to grow on me.

So when the BBC announced they were planning on doing a major revamp of the Sport site I was prepared to bite my lip and bide my time.

When the site launched I had the initial bit of vertigo at the shock of the new but found myself with two contrasting opinions on the site. I found the actual content pages much improved. The layout and extra space give to the words really helps and the ‘related links’ are more obvious. That said I found (and find) the new homepage difficult and cluttered. There is just too much going on for me to cope with and I find myself avoiding this page now (which probably means I miss some stories I’d be interested in on more minority sports.)

Reading the series of posts that the Sports web team wrote though was very enlightening. It is clear that ‘live’ is very much the driving factor of the site and that is what their (considerable) user research has led them to. I think this is probably where I fall somewhat into the minority use case on perhaps that is why it doesn’t seem to work for me at the top level but improves when I drill down.

I have *very* little interest in getting live sports coverage from the BBC – I find all the ‘real time’ stuff distracting and a little irritating and nothing pisses me off more on the web than auto-playing video (though this has stopped thankfully!). I use the site to check results, occasionally read match reports, catch up on the big news but mainly to read the editorial comment pieces whether they be on the blogs or within the main structure. The Comment & Analysis section is still featured on the homepage but – to me at least – it seems a little buried and a particular victim of the ‘clutter’ I mentioned earlier.

So to resolve this I subscribed to the RSS of all my favourite BBC Sports bloggers for the first time and will in future just use the site for results, the occasional match report and whatever breaking news Twitter flags for me. Seems a decent compromise.

The main thing I was interested in from a work point of view was how they coped with the switch to horizontal navigation. This is something I am keen to do but as they acknowledge it does limit your options compared to the traditional left hand side vertical nav. They addressed this by making some tough choices;

“In order to make the navigation easy to use, we wanted to limit the number of items in the primary navigation to less than nine”

Given the amount of sports the BBC covers a list of nine (with one of them being ‘more Sports‘) was probably challenging but it does give me hope as that wouldn’t be a difficult list for us – however I would have been interested to read about how they decided to structure the navigation on the next level down.

That said the thought processes they have been through (and shared) about navigation and using ‘related links’ to promote content elsewhere in a Google driven world have been extremely helpful and their use of personas is going to force me to revisit that concept (although I remain unconvinced). Also the steps they took to validate the design are interesting with the levels of user involvement – plus I like the look of Axure very much so that is going into my next software shopping list!

So anyway I am very thankful to the Beeb for being so open – especially given the level of grief they get in the comments!

Then again – got to say I do hate the yellow!

Making sense from chaos

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Let me put this out there straight away. I am not an organised person. Far from it. Unlike many friends and colleagues I was spared the compulsive list making gene and things like GTD or worrying about ‘inbox zero‘ are about as far from my day to day concerns as it is possible to get.

While I have tended to agree with Cory Doctorow when it comes to dealing with ‘filter failure’ and ‘information overload’ one of the things I have always wished I was better at though is managing to keep a track of my bookmarking online.

I never clicked with Delicious or things like Magnolia really and my use of browser bookmarks has been pretty useless to say the least. I had some success with Google Reader for a while using the ‘sharing’ function but recent ‘improvements’ have pretty much ruined that service for me. Basically I have tended to get by due to a pretty good memory and a capacity to reproduce previously successful searches. It has started to become clear recently though that this isn’t a sustainable solution :)

So based on various things I have seen people trying via Twitter I am trying out a couple of things to see how it goes.

The cornerstone of my plan is Pinboard. I paid my six quid and set up an account based on multiple recommendations. One of the big selling points for me was how easy it was to sync my Twitter favourites which contained links with the service. I have found myself doing this more and more lately – especially as I have started using Twitter on my phone alot again.

I have also used IFTTT to suck my Google +1 feed in from Plus as [for my sins] I find myself using that more and more – especially with what is left of my Google Reader account [which maybe I should move elsewhere but broken as Reader is these days I still haven't found anything else that suits me.]

I have also synced my Gimmebar account – which is an amazing tool for grabbing screenshots/images from the web and one that I am just starting to use properly – to Pinboard.

So between all of that and a Chrome extension taking pride of place next to Ghostery I think I am pretty well set up – hopefully this time it will stick a little better than in the past :)