Policybrief aims to help the civic conversation around policy to compete with the often-deafening political debate. We’re building an attractive useable open source web facility to make this happen.

It will enable professional producers and users of high-quality policy-related content to index and promote it. We want to break the beltway monopoly on this conversation and sure that it can add value to policymaking processes.  

Though there are lots of ways to make a document available for commenting online, I’ve still not seen anything as effective as the use of a slightly hacked blog in allowing the public to get into the detail of a document. A few years ago, the Power Enquiry made it’s findings available in this way.

Last week, after the Digital Britain report was published (and criticised for not having been very consultative in it’s origins, a blogger put it online in a commentable way. The best example I’ve seen in terms of an attractive interface and a useable design also was published in the last week or so – the Power of Information Taskforce report – done by a group of people who have really lived with this way of discussing policy documents for a long time now.

Slugger O’Toole editor Mick Fealty and I had planned to do something about the Eames Bradley report anyway, and when I saw the Power of Information site, I jumped on it. The system is open-source and I’ve had a few conversations with Steph Gray the lead developer about other matters, so I was comfortable about giving it a try. And – with a bit of intervention from Steph – clearing up a few bugs – we got it up and running with all of the content added in a few days, and it’s being launched this morning at 9am.

This is a hugely interesting project for me, for a couple of reasons:

1. All of the examples of comment-blogs that I’ve seen have been done on techie subjects or with very metropolitan focus. This is different. It will be a first step into this kind of deliberation for many of the participants, and the subject is a particularly thorny one. All of the other consultations I’ve mentioned here can expect to be discussed with a fair degree of detachment. But the question of closing the wounds that were opened over thirty years in Northern Ireland is a different matter altogether. Keeping this conversation going in an effective and useful way will take the managers of this site into somewhat unchartered territory. The results will be interesting.
2. Slugger O’Toole is a unique site. It has a huge reach in Northern Ireland that political bloggers elsewhere can barely comprehend. It also has a reputation for civility of a kind that is rare in the political blogosphere. Slugger sometimes erupts, and can often be quite combative – but nothing like as abrasive as Northern Ireland’s politics can be – and significantly more civilised than any other large-volume political blog that I’ve come across elsewhere. Slugger can bring the numbers – and the tone that is needed.

All of the ingredients are there then. If any site can run an effective consultation on a highly controversial issue, Slugger O’Toole will do it. I’m hoping that we can learn a lot from this before applying it elsewhere.

Slugger’s announcement is here.

A few months ago, I noticed the Ashoka ‘Changemakers’ competition ‘The Power of Us – Re-imagine media‘- an award scheme looking for ideas.

I tried out an idea that I’ve been nursing for some years – Policybrief. It’s a site that I had built (badly) back in 2001.

It was launched at the ICA by Geoff Mulgan (then of the Peformance and Innovation Unit at the Cabinet Office – now of the Young Foundation) just before the dot-com bubble burst. The sponsors that I confidently expected evaporated into thin air, and it ground to a halt under the weight of clunky technology.

I managed to browbeat some techies into helping me prototype it again last year, but the results were unsatisfactory. It’s 90% finished technically, but I know that the technology that I was forced to develop it in is a bit of a dead-end and I want to do it using open source tools. Talking to a few friends, I’ve been given some fantastic ideas on how the information gathering can be taken to a whole new level.

So: I pitched the idea. Reading it back, I’m sure I could have written the pitch a good deal more coherently than I did, but of the 354 entries received from 48 countries, Policybrief is in the last sixteen. Two of the finalists will split $50,000 if I understand it correctly. I understand that you will be able to rate the entry, but it would be improper of me to urge you to do so in an unconsidered way (what are you waiting for??).

WeMedia are flying my out to Miami later in the month to pitch the idea alongside the other competitors. It looks great – and I think that the attendees at WeMedia will make for a fantastic set of contact for the project either way. If there is one project that I am going to get off the ground, come hell-or-high-water, it’s Policybrief – whatever happens in Miami.

So: Wish me luck please? But – more importantly – I’m going to be talking to everyone I know about how the idea can be optimised, but I’d welcome any ideas / suggestions / feedback. I’ll be flying the flag for Britain out there *sob*….

(Wait for my 75% Irish family to get a load of that…..).

Take web-accessibility for instance: Every governmental body needs to have it. Very few know what it really means – but they put it in their procurement documents as a must-have.

IT project management in highly disrupted organisations is a nightmare at the best of times. Getting the core functionality negotiated and delivered with suppliers who have won the bid on price is hard enough as it is. Management of these projects is often done by people who wouldn’t have the expertise to make a judgment on whether a website is accessible or not.

The rational supplier will, therefore, always say that their sites are accessible and go in with a low-ish bid in order to win the business.

They will then deliver a site that isn’t accessible (because this would require investment in expertise and training – as well as hard-to-find designers who understand WCAG compliance). The customer won’t pull them up on it because they’re to busy scrapping with the supplier to even get the html editor to work in Firefox. And any company that has invested in the expertise needed will lay off the staff that know this stuff because they aren’t earning their keep.

Ask a Sharepoint advocating IT manager if it’s accessible – they will say yes. But it usually isn’t.

Until governmental bodies can procure services in a human way – building relationships with trusted individuals within their supplier chain – this decline in quality will continue unabated.

Once I’ve done that, the next step is to find an application that can improve the quality of that interaction….

Projects that failed because the wrong CMS was chosen, because the project management wasn’t up to scratch, because the client didn’t have a clue what they really wanted, that the client thought that they could procure a supplier and go away for six weeks, returning to find a perfect website management system that had a telepathic intuition for what they wanted …. and so on.

I’ve seen some projects really succeed as well though. Here’s a useful set of white papers and video resources for anyone who is planning a new major website project in the near future.

Here’s what I said (roughly):I’ve already added one post here today about the ‘cornerstone’ technologies for membership organistions. But the main thing I spoke about was….

Crowdsourcing evidence: The one area where unions could have a huge influence is in providing the tools to people in work to offer evidence about their lives. Have a look at http://www.accesscity.co.uk/ – showing how hard it is to get around London with a buggy or in a wheelchair. Unions could be facilitating and co-ordinating projects whereby people are encourged to load up their own evidence about workplace issues.

It doesn’t all need to be grievances either – get people to load up data about their working lives. Single mothers daily routine, people moving from benefit into work talking about their taxation and benefits and their negative pay rates. It would be worth considering getting activists out interviewing people and generating content – add to the noise.

Getting value out of content: Unions have researchers, and they have the ability to generate a bit of data, and access a lot more. Most of it resides in silos and isn’t being shared properly. It is all controlled by people. This has often been seen as a bad thing that needs to be fixed with a clever document management system. Document management sysems are – in my view – over-rated. They are usually clunky, inconsistantly maintained and they don’t always improve the flow of information around an organisation that much.

I’d argue that having information controlled by people is a good thing – as long as those people are behaving in an interactive way.

If those people make their information available easily, then others can blog it. It is worth encouraging Union researchers, subject-area specialists and campaigns / comms people to go to some lengths to make sure that they are in the peripheral vision of as wide a group as possible. By making it easier for people to find other people with relevant information, the value of that information multiplies. Unions could run a pro-active programme to encourage their research and campaigns people to use social media energetically.

Blogs, Facebook, and Twitter are must-haves at the moment. You can follow my own Twitter feed – here.

• Interactive individuals multiply the value of their work.
• The best search engine is still a carbon-based life-form.

Unions could run a Twitter-feed from their key people on their website homepage – simply by using RSS. If you are unfamiliar with RSS, have a look at this video:

And here’s a quick guide to Twitter:

Recruit unpaid campaigners: If Unions can make their evidence and their evidence-holders easily available, thousands of volunteers will pick up their evidence, mash it around and use it.

The Norwegian government did a report on Web2.0 and it’s potential. Translated into English, it’s title was ‘the ordinary citizen as a supplier of public sector information.‘ Similarly, the research and the campaigning messages of trade unions – pushed out properly – could be being distributed and adapted to thousands of different causes.

Treat bloggers with the courtesy that you would treat journalists: The logic of the long-tail means that bloggers collectively have influence that is – in some ways – comparable to large media organisations.

Crowdsource criticism of journalists and anti-union pressure groups: Anti-union pressure groups do this very effectively in return. Target journalists that are persistently anti-union. Fisk them. Develop free-to-use tools: Show marginal tax rates – build a site that will calculate when everyone’s tax-freedom day is. They have the potential to go viral. Don’t try to own them. Find good geeks and pay them to do this for you – see Clifford Singer’s ‘Other Taxpayers Alliance’.

Ignore politics and politicians: Focus on policy. Share it. Aim to get more people within your union talking about policy and less time talking about politics. I have a scheme to help with this – let me know if you’d be interested in getting involved?