5-Stars of Open Data Engagement?

[Summary: Notes from a workshop at UKGovCamp that led to sketching a framework to encourage engagement and impact of open data initiatives might contain]

In short

* Be demand driven

* * Provide context

* * * Support conversation

* * * * Build capacity & skills

* * * * * Collaborate with the community

The Context

I’ve spent the last two days at UKGovCamp, an annual open-space gathering of people from inside and around local and national government passionate about using digital technologies for better engagement, policy making and practice. This years event was split over two days: Friday for conversations and short open-space slots; Saturday for more hands-on discussions and action. Suffice to say, there were plenty of sessions on open data on both days – and this afternoon we tried to take forward some of the ideas from Day 1 about open data engagement in a practical form.

There is a general recognition of the gap between putting a dataset online, and seeing data driving real social change. In a session on Day 1 led by @exmosis, we started to dig into different ways to support everyday engagement with data, leading to Antonio from Data.gov.uk suggesting that open data initiatives really needed to have some sort of ‘Charter of engagement’ to outline ways they can get beyond simply publishing datasets, and get to supporting people to use data to create social, economic and administrative change. So, we took that as a challenge for day 2, and in session on ‘designing an engaging open data portal’ a small group of us (including Liz Stevenson, Anthony Zacharzewski, Jon Foster and Jag Goraya) started to sketch what a charter might look like.

You can see the (still developing) charter draft in this Google Doc. However, it was Jag Goraya‘s suggestion that the elements of a charter we were exploring might also be distilled into a ’5 Stars’ that seemed to really make some sense of the challenge of articulating what it means to go beyond publishing datasets to do open data engagement. Of course, 5-star rating scales have their limitations, but I thought it worth sharing the draft that was emerging.

What is Open Data Engagement?

We were thinking about open data engagement as the sorts of things an open data initiative should be doing beyond just publishing datasets. The engagement stars don’t relate to the technical openness or quality of the datasets (there are other scales for that), and are designed to be flexible to be able to apply to a particular dataset, a thematic set of datasets, or an open data initiative as a whole.

We were also thinking about open government data in our workshop; though hopefully the draft has wider applicability. The ‘overarching principles’ drafted for the Charter might also help put the stars in context:

Key principles of open government data: “Government information and data are common resources, managed in trust by government. They provide a platform for public service provision, democratic engagement and accountability, and economic development and innovation. A commitment to open data involves making information and data resources accessible to all without discrimination; and actively engaging to ensure that information and data can be used in a wide range of ways.”

Draft sketch of five stars of Open Data Engagement

The names and explanatory text of these still need a lot of work; you can suggest edits as comments in the Google Doc where they were drafted.

* Be demand driven

Are your choices about the data you release, how it is structured, and the tools and support provided around it based on community needs and demands? Have you got ways of listening to people’s requests for data, and responding with open data?

** Provide good meta-data; and put data in context

Do your data catalogue provide clear meta-data on datasets, including structured information about frequency of updates, data formats and data quality? Do you include qualitative information alongside datasets such as details of how the data was created, or manuals for working with the data? Do you link from data catalogue pages to analysis your organisation, or third-parties, have already carried out with the data, or to third-party tools for working with the data?

Often organisations already have detailed documentation of datasets (e.g. analysis manuals and How To’s) which could be shared openly with minimal edits. It needs to be easy to find these when you find a dataset. It’s also common that governments have published analysis of the datasets (they collected it for a reason), or used it in some product or service, and so linking to these from the dataset (and vice-versa) can help people to engage with it.

*** Support conversation around the data

Can people comment on datasets, or create a structured conversation around data to network with other data users? Do you join the conversations? Are there easy ways to contact the individual ‘data owner’ in your organisation to ask them questions about the data, or to get them to join the conversation? Are there offline opportunities to have conversations that involve your data?

**** Build capacity, skills and networks

Do you provide or link to tools for people to work with your datasets? Do you provide or link to How To guidance on using open data analysis tools, so people can build their capacity and skills to interpret and use data in the ways they want to? Are these links contextual (e.g. pointing people to GeoData tools for a geo dataset, and to statistical tools for a performance monitoring dataset)? Do you go out into the community to run skill-building sessions on using data in particular ways, or using particular datasets? Do you sponsor or engage with community capacity building?

When you give people tools – you help them do one thing. When you give people skills, you open the possibility of them doing many things in future. Skills and networks are more empowering than tools. 

***** Collaborate on data as a common resource

Do you have feedback loops so people can help you improve your datasets? Do you collaborate with the community to create new data resources (e.g. derived datasets)? Do you broker or provide support to people to build and sustain useful tools and services that work with your data?

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It’s important for all the stars that they can be read not just with engaging developers and techies in mind, but also community groups, local councillors, individual non-techie citizens etc. Providing support for collaboration can range from setting up source-code sharing space on GitHub, to hanging out in a community centre with print-outs and post-it notes. Different datasets, and different initiatives will have different audiences and so approaches to the stars – but hopefully there is a rough structure showing how these build to deeper levels of engagement.

Where next?

Hopefully Open Data Sheffield will spend some time looking at this framework at a future meeting – and all comments are welcome on the Google doc. Clearly there’s lot to be done to make these more snappy, focussed and neat – but if we do find there’s a fairly settled sense of a five stars of engagement framework (if not yet good language to express it) then it would be interesting to think about whether we have the platforms and processes in place anywhere to support all of this: finding the good practice to share. Of course, there might already be a good engagement framework out there we missed when sketching this all out – so comments to that effect welcome too…

 

Updates:

Ammended 22nd January to properly credit Antonio of Data.gov.uk as originator of the Charter idea

Exploring Open Charity Data with Nominet Trust

[Summary: notes from a pilot one-day working on open data opportunities in third-sector organisations]

On Friday I spent the day with Nominet Trust for the second of a series of charity ‘Open Data Days’ exploring how charities can engage with the rapidly growing and evolving world of open data. The goal of these hands-on workshops is to spend just one working day looking at what open data might have to offer to a particular organisation and, via some hands-on prototyping and skill-sharing, to develop an idea of the opportunities and challenges that the charity needs to explore to engage more with open data.

The results of ten open data days will be presented at a Nominet Trust, NCVO and Big Lottery Fund conference later in the year, but for now, here’s a quick run-down / brain-dump of some of the things explored with the Nominet Trust team.

What is Open Data anyway?

Open data means many different things to different people – so it made sense to start the day looking at different ways of understanding open data, and identifying the ideas of open data that chimed most with Ed and Kieron from the Nominet Trust Team.

The presentation below runs through five different perspectives on open data, from understanding open data as a set of policies and practices, to looking at how open data can be seen as a political movement or a movement to build foundations of collaboration on the web.

Reflecting on the slides with Ed and Kieron highlighted that the best route into exploring open data for Nominet Trust was looking at the idea that ‘open data is what open data does’ which helped us to set the focus for the day on exploring practical ways to use open data in a few different contexts. However, a lot of the uses of open data we went on to explore also chime in with the idea of a technical and cultural change that allows people to perform their own analysis, rather than just taking presentations of statistics and data at face value.

Mapping opportunities for open data

Even in a small charity there are many different places open data could have an impact. With Nominet Trust we looked at a number of areas where data is in use already:

• Informing calls for proposals – Nominet Trust invite grant applications for ideas that use technology for disruptive innovation in a number of thematic areas, with two main thematic areas of focus live at any one time. New thematic areas of focus are informed by ‘State of the Art’ review reports. Looking at one of these it quickly becomes clear these are data-packed resources, but that the data, analysis and presentation are all smushed together.
• Throughout the grant process – Nominet Trust are working not only to fund innovative projects, but also to broker connections between projects and to help knowledge and learning flow between funded projects. Grant applications are made online, and right now, details of successful applicants are published on the Trust’s websites. A database of grant investment is used to keep track of ongoing projects.
• Evaluation - the Trust are currently looking at new approaches to evaluating projects, and identifying ways to make sure evaluation contributes not only to an organisations own reflections on a project, but also to wider learning about effective responses to key social issues.

With these three areas of data focus, we turned to identify three data wishes to guide the rest of the open data day. These were:

• Being able to find the data we need when we need it
  
• Creating actionable tools that can be embedded in different parts of the grant process - and doing this with open platforms that allow the Nominet Trust team to tweak and adapt these tools.
• Improving evaluation – with better data in, and better day out

Pilots, prototypes and playing with data

The next part of our Open Data Day was to roll up our sleeves and to try some rapid experiments with a wide range of different open data tools and platforms. Here are some the experiments we tried:

Searching for data

We imagined a grant application looking at ways to provide support to young people not in education, employment or training in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and set the challenge of finding data that could support the application, or that could support evaluation of it. Using the Open Data Cook Book guide to sourcing data, Ed and Keiron set off to track down relevant datasets, eventually arriving at a series of spreadsheets on education stats in London on the London Skills and Employment Observatory website via the London Datastore portal.  Digging into the spreadsheets allowed the team to put claims that could be made about levels of education and employment exclusion in RBKC in context, looking at the difference interpretations that might be drawn from claims made about trends and percentages, and claims about absolute numbers of young people affected.

Learning: The data is out there; and having access to the raw data makes it possible to fact-check claims that might be made in grant applications. But, the data still needs a lot of interpretation, and much of the ‘open data’ is hidden away in spreadsheets.

Publishing open data

Most websites are essentially databases of content with a template to present them to human readers. However, it’s often possible to make the ‘raw data’ underlying the website available as more structured, standardised open data. The Nominet Trust website runs on Drupal and includes a content type for projects awarded funding which includes details of the project, it’s website address, and the funding awarded.

Using a demonstration Drupal website we explored how the Drupal Views and the Views Bonus Pack open source modules it was easy to create a ‘CSV’ open data download of information in the website.

The sorts of ‘projects funded’ open data this would make available from Nominet Trust might be of interest to sites like OpenlyLocal.com which are aggregating details of funding to many different organisations.

Learning: You can become an open data publisher very easily, and by hooking into existing places where ‘datasets’ are kept, keeping your open data up-to-date is simple.

Mashing-up datasets

Because open datasets are often provided in standardised forms, and the licenses under which data is published allow flexible re-use of the data, it becomes easy to mash-up different datasets, generating new insights by combining different sources.

We explored a number of mash-up tools. Firstly, we looked at using Google Spreadsheets and Yahoo Pipes to filter a dataset ready to combine it with other data. The Open Data Cook Book has a recipe that involves scraping data with Google Spreadsheets, and a Yahoo Pipes recipe on combing datasets.

Then we turned to the open data powertool that is Google Refine. Whilst Refine runs in a web browser, it is software you install on your own computer, and it keeps the data on your machine until you publish it – making a good tool for a charity to use to experiment with their own data, before deciding whether it will be published as open data or not.

We started by using Google Refine to explore data from OpenCharities.org - taking a list of all the charities with the word ‘Internet’ in their description that had been exported from the site, and using the ‘Facets’ feature (and a Word Facet) in Google Refine to look at the other terms they used in their descriptions. Then we turned to a simple dataset of organisations funded by Nominet Trust, and explored how by using API access to OpenlyLocal.com’s spending dataset we could get Google Refine to fetch details of which Nominet Trust funded organisations had also recieved money from particular local authorities or big funders like Big Lottery Fund and the Arts Council. This got a bit technical, so a step-by-step How To will have to wait – but the result was an interesting indication of some of the organisations that might turn out to be common co-funders of projects with Nominet Trust – a discovery enabled by those funders making their funding information available as open data.

Learning: Mash-ups can generate new insights – although many mash-ups still involve a bit of technical heavy-lifting and it can take some time to really explore all the possibilities.

Open data for evaluation

Open data can be both an input and an output of evaluation. We looked at a simple approach using Google Spreadsheets to help a funder create evaluation online evaluation tools for funded projects.

With a Google Docs account, we looked at creating a new ‘Form’. Google Forms are easy to create, and let you design a set of simple survey elements that a project can fill in online, with the results going directly into an online Google Spreadsheet. In the resulting spreadsheet, we added an extra tab for ‘Baseline Data’, and exploring how the =ImportData() formula in Google Spreadsheet can be used to pull in CSV files of open data from a third party, keeping a sheet of baseline data up-to-date. Finally, we looked at the ‘Publish as a Web Page’ feature of Google Spreadsheets which makes it possible to provide a simple CSV file output from a particular sheet.

In this way, we saw that a funder could create an evaluation form template for projects in a Google Form/Spreadsheet, and with shared access to this spreadsheet, could help funded projects to structure their evaluations in ways that helped cross-project comparison. By using formulae to move a particular sub-set of the data to a new sheet in the Spreadsheet, and then using the ‘Publish as a Web Page’ feature, non-private information could be directly published as open data from here.

Learning: Open data can be both an input to, and an output from, evaluation.

Embeddable tools and widgets

Working with open data allows you to present one interpretation or analysis of some data, but also allow users of your website or resources to dig more deeply into the data and find their own angles, interpretations, or specific facts.

When you add a ‘Gadget’ chart to a Google Spreadsheet of data you can often turn it into a widget to embed in a third party website. Using some of the interactive gadgets allows you to make data available in more engaging ways.

Platforms like IBM’s Many Eyes also let you create interactive graphs that users can explore.

Sometimes, interactive widgets might already be available, as in the case of Interactive Population pyramids from ONS. The Nominet Trust state of the art review on Aging and use of the Internet includes a static image of a population pyramid, but many readers could find the interactive version more useful.

Learning: If you have data in a report, or on a web page, you can make it interactive by publishing it as open data, and then using embeddable widgets.

Looking ahead

The Open Data Day ended with a look at some of the different ways to take forward learning from our pilots and prototypes. The possibilities included:

Sooner

• Quick wins: Making funded project data available as structured open data. As this information is already published online, there are not privacy issues with making it available in a more structured format.
• Developing small prototypes taking the very rough proof-of-concept ideas from the Open Data Day on a stage, and using this to inform plans for future developments. Some of the prototypes might be interactive widgets.
  
• A ‘fact check’ experiment: taking a couple of past grant applications, and using open data resources to fact-check the claims made in those applications. Reflecting on whether this process offers useful insights and how it might form part of future processes.
• Commissioning open data along with research: when Nominet Trust commissions future State of the Art reviews it could include a request for the researcher to prepare a list of relevant open datasets as well, or to publish data for the report as open data.

Later

• Explore open data standards such as the International Aid Transparency Initiative Standard for publishing project data in a more detailed form.
• Building our own widgets and tools: for example, tools to help applicants find relevant open data to support their application, or tools to give trustees detailed information on applicant organisations to help their decision making.
• Building generalisable tools and contributing to the growth of a common resource of software and tools for working with open data, as well as just building things for direct organisational use.

Where next?

This was just the second of a series of Open Data Days supported by Nominet Trust. I’m facilitating one more next month, and there are a team of other consultants working with varied other charities over the coming weeks. So far I’ve been getting a sense of the wide range of possible areas open data can fit into charity work (it feels quite like exploring the ways social media could work for charities did back in 2007/8…), but there’s also much work to be done identifying some of the challenges that charities might face, and sustainable ways to overcome them. Lots more to learn….

Reclaiming reflective space

[Summary: Reflecting on reflecting.]

I’ve been blogging far less that I’d like to here over recent months. I’ve been thinking about why that is:

Firstly, the focus of my interests and work since I started writing here regularly have been on quite a journey. I started out with a focus writing on participation and youth engagement; I’ve written a lot on digital media and youth engagement; on fair trade and social issue campaigning; on social reporting and digital dimensions of local democracy; and over the last 18-months on open government data. Right now I’m spending most of my working time exploring open data and linked data in the world of international development, although I’m still involved in projects on all the other themes above. For me, there are connections between all these different issues – reasons I’m spending time exploring them – yet, to most people, I’m sure they don’t really make up a coherent set. So I’ve been self-editing before starting to write posts – worrying that they won’t be of relevance to people still signed up to get e-mail alerts whenever I post anything here.

Secondly, things have been busy. Really busy. Time spent writing reflective blog posts can feel like a luxury. It used to be something I could see as part of a mornings work, but a lot of the project I’ve been working on recently have been based on a set number of days, rather than on tasks, which changes the decision about spending an hour in the morning or afternoon on reflective writing.

Thirdly, I have been writing, just elsewhere and project-specific. I’ve been blogging for the Making a Difference with Data Blog, and on my Open Data Impacts blog. I’ve been trying to contribute to the Youth Work Online shared blog regularly, and I’ve been working on a number of papers that may become blog posts at some point in the future. But for some reason I’ve not been blogging here.

Fourth, I’ve been tweeting. Twitter provides a great space to capture and share insights and ideas day-to-day – and I’ve certainly been benefiting from the ideas, links and resources others share. But it does lack the sort of reflective canvas that blogging can provide, and tweets exist in a stream of context – whereas a blog post can capture and archive more complete thoughts, albeit often provisional ones.

Fifth, I’m aware that when I post something here, Feedburner kicks in and e-mails it to around 100 people who subscribe to this blog by e-mail, and a number of other people get alerts about posts via Twitter or through RSS readers. That can make posting something a little daunting, both for reflective posts like this and for quick announcements of things – as it’s never my intention to clog up your inboxes (particularly as I know my posts get a bit verbose and ponderous on times…).

Sixth, I’ve been frustrated with the design of this blog. I’ve tried a number of routes to a better design – but not found anything that works for me. I’ve been a bit ashamed of how the blog itself looks.

Ok. I think I understand a bit more of why I’ve not been blogging here so much. I’m hoping that taking the time to write down those reasons, and reflecting on them, will help me to reclaim blogging as essential reflective practice.

Rather than having too much on to find time to blog, there’s too much going on not to. In the past I’ve found blogging to be an essential part of making sense of what I’m working on – and I’m in need of that sense-making on a few projects right now. Rather than worrying that the different topics I’m exploring make for a disjointed feed of posts, personal blogging provides a space to reflect on those different threads, to explore them as distinct interests, and to explore where they come together. For all the things that don’t fit into any of the other spaces I’m writing in, or that I want to archive as part of my thinking, this blog can provide a space to put things. Readers always have the option to unsubscribe. The design: well, I’ll just have to put up with it.

So:

• I’m going to try and return to keeping this blog as a space for reflective practice. There will still be announcements of things, and content that I want to share somewhere, but I make no promises as to the relevance of things posted here to topics that have gone before.
• If you subscribe by RSS or e-mail, I won’t be offended if you don’t want to anymore. I know there are a lot of people interested in participation and youth-work on the e-mail subscribers list who might find reflections on the intricacies of linked data somewhat outside their area of interest, and vice-versa.
• I’d off to spend some time reflective writing on topics other than reflection…

Does a Facebook focus do us any favours?

 

(Image Credit – Webtreat ICONS Etc)

Reflections: Blended facilitation at Commonwealth Young Professionals Forum

[Summary: Reflective learning from an experience of blended facilitation at Commonwealth Local Government Young Professionals Forum]

I spent two fascinating days yesterday and Sunday with the Commonwealth Local Government Young Professionals Forum. It’s the first time that an event focussed on engaging under 35s (youth in Commonwealth contexts has a slightly broader definition than most contexts I’m used to working in…) has been organized alongside the main Commwealth Local Government Forum, which brings together 100s of delegates from local politics and government administrations. The main focus of the smaller (about 60 of us) Young Professionals Forum (#cypf11 on Twitter) was to draw out from discussions a series of recommendations to make to the main forum, sharing a young adult voice on issues of local economic development and on youth participation.

Below are some brief reflections on two parts of the process I was involved in working on…

1) Social media orientation & encouraging social reporting

On the Sunday afternoon at the start of the forum we ran a short session introducing the Ning network set up for the event, and offering people quick opportunities to think about different social media tools that could be used for social reporting the event. I ran through posting blog posts and photos to the online network; gave an overview of how twitter could be used at events; and talked about vox-pop style video interviews. Everyone was encouraged to use their own equipment for social reporting; although as not everyone had devices available in the session we had a few practice/interactive activities that didn’t need technology there.

The first, asking people to think about the headline of a blog post they might write during or after the forum, generated some really good ideas – and the suggested headlines that delegates shared revealed a lot about their interests and aims for the event (e.g. ‘Best practices in youth entrepreneurship’, or imagining the post they would like to write after the forum ‘Local Government Forum accepts youth recommendations’).

The second activity, inviting people to practice vox-pop style interviewing of a partner sitting with them, also got people talking and sharing ideas for the event (and felt very similar to a standard ice-breaker, albeit with the addition of getting people’s permission to record them, and trying to manage a camera whilst talking).

On reflection:

• A number of delegates commented on the usefulness of a social media introduction. Whilst almost all the young professionals taking part were familiar with blogging, and many had twitter accounts etc., many had not considered how to use these effectively in a conference context (for example, the use of tagging or hash-tags on Twitter was new to a number of people). Given digital communication and sharing messages online can be a key advocacy tool for the messages coming from the forum, a half-hour spent pointing to how digital tools could be used seemed to be useful investment of time.
• Even with a good introduction, social reporting still needs facilitating. I switched my attention to the real-time collaboration, and running an afternoon workshop on open data in the commonwealth, and hadn’t formed a dedicated social reporting team. As delegates also got more involved in recommendations drafting, social media activity started to drop off and potentially a lot of stories and case studies that would have been useful to digitally share may have been missed.
• My main take-away is to explore how the social media introduction could be integrated with ice-breakers and introductions. The blog post activity could be combined effectively with an expectation or aim-setting activity; and the vox-pop practice with an ice-breaker. Sometime to try next time…

2) Real-time collaboration for statement drafting

The process of drafting a text (statements or recommendations) from an international youth fora is an interesting one. Delegates vary in their experience of political processes, in the backgrounds they come from, and in the degree to which they are present representing a specific group or constituency – either by virtue of a formal mandate (e.g. elected youth representatives; leaders of organizations or networks), or informally adopting a representative role – or to which they solely represent and feed their own views into the process. Bringing together diverse views and voices into a text which can potentially influence policy making, and be used as an advocacy tool, is practically challenging.

There are all sorts of general process issues to be addressed in statement drafting (for example, the way in which processes generally start with a blank sheet of paper, rather than seeking to build on past statements), but one practical one we tried to address at CLGF was the process of typing up the statement itself. I’ve sat in a youth hostel late into the night before along with about 20 other people crowded round a laptop quibbling over phrases and wordings, all whilst one person: the person at the keyboard, acts as facilitator and gatekeeper of the document. At CLGF, instead of typing into documents on individual laptops, we took advantage of Cardiff City Hall’s free Wifi to get everyone typing into Google Documents – made public for anyone to edit – but with a rapporteur in each working group taking main responsibility for typing up their notes. As we moved from individual thematic working groups generating ideas, to the process of drafting a final statement, we moved into one single shared document to edit.

It might be a bit premature to assess how the process has worked, as I’m writing this as the second day of CYPF is starting (alas I’ve had to leave early) and there is still work to be done on the statement – but the process raised a number of interesting learning points.

Some reflections:

• From one laptop the facilitation team were able to get an overview of the points emerging from different groups by looking at all the different docs, and to point out overlaps – either adding notes into the Google documents – or going to talk to specific groups (spread out in different parts of the room / different rooms) to suggest making connections with another group on a particular point.
• We could use that access to the developing drafts to visualise emerging themes. For example, at lunchtime I put together Wordles of the drafts which a number of delegates noted were useful in getting a sense of the discussions and record being generated. http://network.cyec.org.uk/profiles/blogs/drafting-recommendations
  
• Whilst allowing multiple editors changes the power dynamic associated with one person at a keyboard – by allowing anyone with an Internet access device in a group to directly clarify and update notes – one delegate pointed out that it can lead to (a) some people being left out, as screens become personal again rather than shared; (b) people making edits direct without discussing them – missing on opportunities for dialogue across the table (this matches my experience of sitting in silence at IGF10 drafting a statement in etherpad with a number of other delegates – all the interaction taking place in chat and on the text directly).One practice way to address some of this may be to try and project each document up on a shared screen as well – and to think about having different ‘editing policies’ (possibly enforced with the document sharing settings) for different stages of the process (e.g. during initial idea creation anyone can add anything; during refining thematic papers edits should be discussed; during final changes to a statement, all changes should be approved by the group before being made to the text).
• The documents we were using were set so that anyone in theory could access, read and edit them – even if not at the forum. This was mainly for ease (no need to get people’s e-mail addresses to share the document with them), but also seems to me to be a good thing – potentially enabling more enhanced participation and allowing expertise and ideas to be brought in from across the world – regardless of people’s ability to travel to the conference. We didn’t exploit this possibility – and how it could fit into the general processes of statement drafting would need more thought – but it’s an exciting one.
• The cost (or lack of) Internet access in hotels is still a big barrier to this process. I was able to set up a MiFi to allow a couple of people back at the hotel to carry on working on the draft, but a lack of affordable WiFi suddenly limited the breadth of possible collaboration.

Seeing how quickly and easily delegates adopted real-time collaborative documents for drafting in a general conference (I was wondering if the YCIG experience was unique to a technology conference), I’m keen to spend more time looking at effective and empowering facilitation techniques in this space – and to see how the process could be developed more.

Diplomacy labs

We’ve only scratched the surface of how digital tools can transform youth fora, and other international gatherings. However, the ingredients of a transformed way of doing business are coming together: remote (or enhanced) participation; understanding the digital record as a fundamental vehicle for driving outcomes of an event and real-time collaboration tools. I certainly hope institutions like CLGF, CYPG and the upcoming Commonwealth Youth Forum in Australia in October take up the challenge of innovating and living out the common conference platform claim that “we need to change the way politics is done”.

 

Update: Photo Credit to Dan from A-Leap (fab participation, youth and learning people in Wales) for the picture in this post.

Expectations and Evidence: youth participation and open data

[Summary: Exploring ways to use data as part of a youth participation process.]

Over the last year and a bit I’ve been doing less work on youth engagement and civic engagement processes than I would ideally like. I’m fascinated by processes of participation, and how to design activities and frameworks within which people can actively influence change on issues that affect them – getting beyond simply asking different groups the question ‘what do you want?’ and then struggling to reconcile conflicting answers (or, oftentimes, simple ignoring this input), to create spaces in which the different factors and views affecting a decision are materialised and in which those affected by decisions get to engage with the real decision making process. I’ve had varying levels of successes doing that – but the more time I’ve been spending with public data – the more I’ve been struggling to work out how to bring it into participative discussions in ways that are accessible and empowering to participants.

Generally data is about aggregates: about trends and patterns rather than the specific details of individual cases. Yet in participation, the goal is often to allow people to bring their own specific experience into discussions and to engage with issues and decisions based upon their unique perspectives. How can open datasets complement that process?

The approach I started to explore in a workshop this evening was linking ‘expectations and evidence’ – asking a group to draw upon their experience to write down a list of expectations, based on the questions that had been asked in a survey they had carried out amongst their peers – and then helping them to use IBM Many Eyes to visualise and explore the survey evidence that might support or challenge their expectations (I’ve written up the process of using the free Many Eyes tool over in the Open Data Cook Book). It was a short session, and not all of the group were familiar with the survey questions, so I would be pushed to call it a great success, but it did generate some useful learning about introducing data into participation processes.

1) Stats are scary (and/or boring; and/or confusing)
Even using a fairly interactive data visualisation tool like IBM Many Eyes statistics and data are, for many people, pretty alien things. The idea of multi-variate analysis (looking at more than one variable at once and the relationship between variables) is not something most people spend much time on in school or college – and trying to introduce three-variable analysis in a short youth participation workshop is tricky without leading to quite a bit of confusion.

One participant in this evenings working made the suggestion that “It would be useful to have a reminder of how to read all these charts. What does all this mean?”. Next time I run a similar session (as I’m keen to develop the idea further) I’ll look into finding/preparing a cheat-sheet for reading any data visualisations that get created…

2) ‘Expectations and Evidence’ can provide a good framework to start engaging with data
In this evenings workshop after looking at data we turned to talk about interview questions the group might ask delegates at an upcoming conference. A number of the question ideas threw up new ideas for ‘expectations’ the group had (for example, that youth services were being cut in different ways in different places across the country), which there might be ‘evidence’ available to support or challenge. Whilst we didn’t have time to then go and seek out the relevant data there was potential here to try and then go and search data catalogues and use a range of visualisation and exploration approaches to test those bigger expectations more (our first expectations work focussed on some fairly localised survey data).

3) The questions and processes matter
When I started to think about how data and participation might fit together I sketched out different sorts of questions that participation processes might work with. Different questions link to different processes of decision making…

• (a) What was your experience of…? (share your story…we’ll analyse)
• (b) What do you think of…? (give your opinion … we’ll decide what to do with it)
• (c) What should we do about…? (give us your proposals…)
• (d) Share this decision with us… (we need to work from shared understanding…)

To introduce data into (a) and (b) is tricky. If the ‘trend’ contradicts an individuals own view or experience, it can be very demanding to ask them to reconcile that contradiction. Of course, creating opportunities for people with experience of a situtation to reconcile tensions between stats and stories is better than leaving it up to distant decision makers to choose whether to trust what the data says, or what people are saying, when it seems they don’t concur – but finding empowering participative processes for this seems tough.

It seems that data can feature in participation more easily when we shift from opinion gathering to decision sharing; but building shared understanding around narratives and around data is not something that can happen quickly in short sessions.

I’m not sure this post gets me towards any great answers on how to link data into participative processes. But, in interests of thinking aloud (and in an effort to reclaim my blogging as reflective practice, getting away from the ways it’s been rather news and reporting driven of late) I’ll let it make it onto the blog, with all reflections/comments very much welcomed…

Digital Futures – Trends in Technology, Youth and Policy

[Summary: What technologies will affect services for young people in 2011? Presentation, worksheet and reflections on a workshop]

I’ve read a lot of blog posts and watched a lot of presentations about technology trends, and future technologies that everyone needs to be aware of – but they can often feel pretty distant from the reality of frontline public services trying to make sense of how new technologies affect their work. So when I was offered the opportunity to run a workshop on ‘digital futures’ at the children’s services conference of a national children’s charity, right at the start of 2011, I thought it would provide an interesting opportunity to explore different ways of talking about and making sense of technology trends.

Read more

Reflections on Oxford Open Data Day

[Summary: creations and learning from Oxford Open Data Day]

Yesterday around 30 people got together in Oxford to take part in the first international Open Data Day, an initiative sparked off by David Eaves to get groups around the world exploring what they could create with public data. For many of the assembled Oxford crowd it was their first experience of both exploring public data, and taking part in a hack-day event, so, having started at 10am, it was fantastic that by 4.30pm we:

• Knew a lot more about where Arts Council Funding was spent across the Country, and specifically in the South East.
• Had learnt at lot about the availability (or lack thereof) of good data on taxation, and had created visualisations of variation in income across the UK, as well as creating the framework for a rather funky visualisation of what a tax on bankers bonuses could raise.
• Understood a whole lot more about the CKAN API and the meta-data available on data.gov.uk (which is turns out is pretty ropey right now, and could perhaps do with some data-librarian’s attention…)
• Discovered, via analysing the sentiment of Twitter messages that Margate appears to be happier than Oxford; or at least it’s Twitterati are;
• Had a working day of a fantastically useful live bus map for Oxford.
• And had a fantastic new Blue Plaque generator that will return interesting facts about nearby famous people wherever you are in the world using data from Wikipedia.

Thanks to everyone who took part in the day, and particularly to Ed, Kevin, Ed & Dave at White October for hosting the event, and to Incuna for sponsoring the lunch. Many thanks also to Sywia for blogging the event: you can find photos and video clips sharing the story here.

Quick Learning Notes

Skill building: I also took advantage of the Open Data Day to start exploring some of the ideas that might go into an Open Data Cook Book of ‘recipes’ for creating and working with open data. There are big challenges when it comes to building the capacity of both technical developers and non-developers alike to discover and then work with open data.

I’ve been reflecting on the discovery and design processes we could make use of at the start of any open data focussed workshops – whether with developers, civil servants, community groups or campaigners to provide the right level of context on what open data is, the potential and limitations of different datasets, and to provide a general awareness of where data can be discovered. At Open Data Day in Oxford we perhaps struggled to generate ideas for projects in the first half of the day – but understandably so given it takes a while to get familiar with the datasets available.

I wonder if for hack-day style events with people new to open data, some sort of training & team-building exercises for the first hour might be useful?

Data-led or problem-led: Most of the groups working were broadly data-led. They found some data of interest, and then explored what could be done with it. One group (the visualisations of impacts of tax changes for the Robin Hood Tax campaign) was more ‘problem led’ – starting with an issue to explore and then seeking data to work with. Both have their challenges: with the first, projects can struggle to find a focus; with the latter, it’s easy to get stuck because the data you imagine might be available turns out not to be. Finding the data you need isn’t available can provide a good spark for more open data campaigning (why, for example, are the details of prices in the Retail Price Index basket of goods not being published, and FOI requests for them being turned down on the basis of ‘personal information’ exemptions?), but when you can’t get that campaigning to produce results during the course of a single day, it can be pretty frustrating as well.

On the day or in advance?:
We held a pre-meeting for the Oxford Open Data Day – and it was useful in getting people to know each other and to discover some ideas and sources of data – but we perhaps didn’t carry through the ideas from that meeting into the hack-day very strongly. Encouraging a few more people to act as project leaders in advance may have been useful to for enabling those who came wanting to help on projects rather than create their own to get involved.

Data not just for developers:
My mantra. Yet still hard to plan for and make work. Perhaps trying to include a greater training element into a hack day would help here, or encouraging some technically-inclined folk to take on a role of data-facilitators – helping non-developers get the data into a shape they need for working with it in non-technical ways. Hopefully some of the open data cook book recipes might be useful here.

Sharing learning rather than simply products:
David Eaves set out three shared goals for the Open Data Day events:

1. Have fun

2. Help foster local supportive and diverse communities of people who advocate for open data

3. Help raise awareness of open data, why it matters, by building sites and applications

emphasising the importance of producing tangible things to demonstrate the potential of open data. This is definitely important – but I think we probably missed a trick by focussing on the products of the hack-day in presentations at the end of the day, rather than the learning and new skills people had picked up and could tell others about.

“Why should someone profit from me not living with my family?”

[Summary: More thoughts from the CROA conference on the details of a changing state]

“Why should someone profit from me not living with my family?”

That was the powerful question put by a young woman from member of Manchester’s Care to Change Council to Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children and Families Tim Loughton at the CROA Conference last week, questioning the role of private providers building and running children’s homes.

As she explains in this video after the panel discussion where the question was put (approx 1m 30s in), Tim Loughton suggested the government was not concerned with who runs children’s homes, as long as the quality of care is good. However, the discussion did get me thinking about how, regardless of the quality of the service, some services, such as providing a caring environment for someone to grow up in when they can’t live with their family, could be (or feel to be) intrinsically different when provided through the private sector rather than the public sector.

How does moving into the market do more than just change the incentive structures for efficiency around specific public services?

Content analysis, tagging, linked data and digital objectivities

I’ve tried to keep musings on research methodology & epistemology mostly off this blog (they are mostly to be found over on my just-out-of-stealth-mode ‘Open Data Impacts’ research blog), however, for want of somewhere better to park the following brief(ish) reflections:

• Content Analysis is a social science method that takes ‘texts’ and seeks to analyze them: usually involving ‘coding’ topics, people, places or other elements of interest in the texts, and seeking to identify themes that are emerging from them.
• One of the challenges of any content analysis is developing a coding structure, and defending that coding structure as reasonable.In most cases, the coding structure will be driven by the research interest, and codes applied on the basis of subjective judgements by the researcher. In research based within more ‘objective’ epistemic frameworks, or at least trying to establish conclusions as valid independently of the particular researcher – multiple people may be asked to code a text, and then tests of ‘inter-coder reliability‘ (how much the coders agreed or disagreed) may be applied.
• With the rise of social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, and the growth of conventions of tagging and folksonomy, much online content already has at least some set of ‘codes’ attached.For example, here you can see the tags people have applied to this blog on Delicious.
• Looking up any tags that have been applied to an element of digital content could be useful for researchers as part of their reflective practice to ensure they have understood an element of content from a wide range of angles – beyond that which is primarily driving their research.
• (With many caveats) It could also support some form of ‘extra-coder reliability’ providing a check of coding against ‘folk’ assessments of content’s meaning.
• The growth of the semantic web also means that many of the objects which codes refer to (e.g. people, organizations, concepts) have referenceable URIs, and if not, the researcher can easily create them.Services such as Open Calais, and Open Amplify also draw on vast ‘knowledge bases’ to machine-classify and code elements of text – identifying, with re-usable concept labels, people, places, organizations and even emotions. (The implications of machine classification for content analysis are not, however, the primary topic of this point or post).
• Researchers could chose to code their content using semantic web URIs and conventions – contributing their meta-data annotations of texts to either local, or global, hypertexts.For example, if I’m coding a paragraph of text about the launch of data.gov.uk, instead of just adding my own arbitrary tags to it, I could mark-up the paragraph based on some convention (RDFa?), and reference shared concepts.From a brief search of Subj3ct for ‘data’, I quickly find I have to make some fairly specific choices about which concepts of data I might be coding against, although hopefully if they have suitable relationships attached, I may be able to query my coded data in more flexible ways in the future.

• All of this raises a mass of interesting epistemic issues, none of which I can do justice to in these brief notes, but which include:
  • Changing the relationship of the researcher to concept-creation – and encouraging both the re-use of concepts, and the shaping of shared semantic web concepts in line with the research;
  • The appropriateness, or not, of using concepts from the semantic web in social scientific research, where the relatively objectivist and context free framing of most current semantic web projects runs counter to often subjectivist and interpretivist  leanings within social science;
  • The role of key elements of the current web of concepts on the semantic web (for many social scientific concepts, primarily Wikipedia via the dbpedia project) where the choice of what concepts are easily referenceable or not depends on a complex social context involving both crowd-sourcing and centralised control (ref the policies of Wikipedia or other taxonomy / knowledge base providers).
• The actual use of existing online tagging, and semantic web URIs as part of the content analysis coding process (or any other social scientific coding process for that matter) may remain, at present, both methodologically challenging, and impractical given the available tools – but is worth further reflection and exploration.

Reflections; points to literatures that are already exploring this; questions etc. all welcome…

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