Tim's Blog

If you're looking for a way to run a quick mobile phone based consultation - or you've been wanting to use interactive voting at a conference or participation event - but haven't been able to afford expensive e-voting equipment - then you might want to take a look at SMSPoll.net.

 The service (which I just discovered this evening and have only briefly tested) lets you set up quick polls - which anyone you tell about them can vote on by sending a text message to a UK number. The results are updated in near real-time on the website - meaning you can get an 'ask the audience' style effect if you project the graphs that SNSPoll generates onto a big screen.

It's free for small polls (25 votes or less) and is very cheap for larger polls (from £5 month). 

Thanks to tweets from Dave Briggs and a blog post from Simon over at Puffbox I've just been exploring Steph Gray's quite fantastic innovations over the Science and Society consultation website.

Not only does the site work hard to make a complex consultation more accessible through the use of video introductions and a blog format - but it sets the consultation free, and let's any visitor select questions from the Consultation to make available on their own websites via a custom widget - which feeds information right back into the core consultation.

The Participation Works blogging platform platform may still be a noticeable omission from the Participation Works Network for England offering - but it's good to see a few more comment articles coming through from PW, particularly when they are sharing some great insights.
In this report from the North West Participation Workers conference, PWNE co-ordinator Natalie Jeal shares her reflections from the event, including a pointer to a new research website from Mencap and the OU - and including tips about how to engage young people with learning disabilities in participation work. The tips include:

• Writing minutes and agendas with BIG text and no long words

I've never been entirely convinced that Second Life has a big role to play in campaigning, participation and public sector activity (it seems to fail both on counts of being intuitive and accessible to new users, and in being somewhere with a large existing constituency of people to work with...) although seeing Wheelies on the short list of the UK Catalyst Awards, and with Google's launch of Lively perhaps virtual worlds will have more of a role to play in the future.

I found myself on a commuter train on the way to 2gether08 on Thursday morning.

Literally hundreds of, most probably very bright, people around me were heads down, buried away in Sudoku puzzles or reading the Metro - occaisionally checking their phones or Blackberry's.

What if we could find some way of harnessing that cognitive surplus - and providing volunteering/pro-social crowd-sourcing opportunities that commuters could dip into at five-minutes-to-nine, just before they got stuck into their nine-till-five?

Just a thought...

Photo credit: Rule of thirds by pfig

Wow. If you've ever wondered why government should release it's data for communities to mash-up and turn into useful things, then take a look at this list. An array of many quite fantastic ideas.

Browsing down the ideas already submitted to the Cabinet Office's ShowUsABetterWay.com public-data mash-up competition there are so many ideas which I really want to see turn into realities (amongst the obligatory regular selection off slightly off-the-wall and odd ideas as well of course).

My work in youth participation really got started when the fantastic Bill Badham (Who incidentally is right his moment is somewhere cycling three times up a mountain in France to raise funds for a youth centre in Birmingham. Go sponsor him.) created four part-time jobs in The National Youth Agency Participation Team for 16 - 24 year olds to become co-trainers in equipping local and national government to include young people. Being one of the young members of that training team was a great experience for me - so I'm always delighted to see the model spreading.

[Summary: Can you help us scale up training, process and practice innovations to take us towards Youth Work 2.0]

I’m on the way home from two days of 2gether08 festival. It’s been an intense two days of idea exploration and this afternoon I took advantage of a design clinic session from Think Public to focus down some of the ideas I’ve been exploring with others over the festival into a 3 minute ‘pitch’ to the assembled crowd at the closing plenary. Well, at least, that’s what ended up happening. Here’s a bit of an overview of how it happened:

A diary entry from Thursday 3rd July 2008.

2pm. Standing outside the Think Public shed at 2gether08 festival wondering whether or not to approach them and take up my booked slot exploring Youth Work 2.0.

Today's discussions at 2gether08 brought me back again to a realisation that youth work, and wider informal education, is not on very many people’s radar.

When we talk young people and education, conversations very quickly turn into conversations about schools and colleges - capturing only a small part of young peoples education. Only 9 minutes, in fact, of every hour in young people’s waking day is spent in school (and that’s just for the young people who are actually in school...).

Not all of the remaining 51 minutes of each hour will be spent in informal education, and for many young people, access to supported informal education is really limited (statutory youth services are only resourced to support on average 30% of their local 13 - 19 year old populations) - but, supported and unsupported informal education really mustn’t be forgotten and is something that, in a web 2.0 social media world, we should be paying a lot more attention to.

A few additions to the one page guide series, this time developed for the 2gether festival. Blogger here mainly for people in the Talking Tech session. You can find a range of other guides here.

We've got a new overview of Twitter (PDF)

An experiment with a more image based style for an overview look at tagging (PDF).

And a How To for the CrowdVine conference social network in use at the festival.

You can find the original files for each of these guides (created in iWork Pages on the mac) below - and they are all licenced under Creative Commons so you're free, indeed you are encouraged, to take and adapt these for your needs. (Erm - it's a bit of a slow upload here from the venue WiFi - so I'll post the original files later on...)