There was an interesting event at the Channel4 building on Horseferry Road last night organised by Glasshouse. The title of “Making a Difference : Delivering Public Service in the Digital Age” promised much and the panel was a very good line up to match such a weighty title:

• Eric Auchard - Reuters
• Saul Klein - Index Ventures/The Accelerator Group/Seedcamp
• Zenna Atkins - Ofsted
• Tom Loosemore - 4ip
• Ryan Regan - last.fm

I’ll concentrate on just three of the panel, Saul, Zenna and Tom, as at the end of their short talks I had a sense that there could be a movement for change in the room.

Things really got interesting with Saul’s five minute talk, he spoke passionately about open technologies, citing Linux, Wikipedia, Creative Commons, the origins of the internet and CERN’s work on http. He felt that the magic combination for this was tools, policies and assets and I’m with him all the way there, in addition to his love for openness.

This really made me smile, especially as not long ago I’d felt my hackles rise at Future of Web Apps when Mark Zuckerberg suggested that even the best open standards started off closed. (I also wasn’t too keen on his slightly revisionist history of the Microsoft/IBM PC/Mac situation). I feel happy to be working with MySpace with their commitment developing on open standards, even though we’re not there yet and the social graph data isn’t fully open.

I’ve felt that some of my favourite and most successful projects have involved being open. My work on some of the very early Open Access journals which were freeing science publications from subscription models has now born financial fruit finally for that publisher with the sale of the company to Springer Science+Business Media.

Another such project was a charitable foundation enabling work by British sculptors (Cass Sculpture Foundation). Our decision in 2001 to open up every image held by the charity put them on the map with the site being used by art lovers and students on a huge scale every day. It’s also put them on the map offline too, being involved in the initial initiative putting sculpture on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, being invited to put on an exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and now in the most ambitious plan working on commissioning sculpture for the London 2012 programme. 

So open is good and there clearly are monetisation opportunities around the edge of open. It’s been demonstrated of late that lack of openness can be very strange, as in the recent Met Police Crime Maps vs Ordinance Survey debacle. The debate gets very muddied though when entrepreneurial action gets involved on open data paid for by the public as wisely pointed out in a twitter message from Dominic Campbell last night:

“@jaggeree would like to agree but the return on that collective public investment to skewed to the entrepreneur. govt needs roi too.”

He’s spot on with this in my opinion, and my feeling is that if someone is making money out of public data there should be a method for redistribution of the gain. I don’t know the mechanism but I can see how you could flag it. Suggesting up front through a Creative Commons attribution to the data could be a great start: providing data on a not for commercial gain basis. I can’t personally imagine that the Met Police were going to make money on their crime maps, however I could imagine a different scenario of the data was used by estate agents in a mashup reminiscent of Stamen’s work on house prices and travel times in London for MySociety.

Zenna Atkins was superb, pointing out examples of extreme beaurocracy (not civil servants filling in forms in triplicate while skydiving) and wishing passionately for a reinvention where more of the current processes from the commercial sector were applied to public service projects. I’d love to see agile methods implemented at a governmental level personally. I hold both an Agile and a PRINCE2 certification. I can see a vast number of reasons why PRINCE2 needs to exist: where public safety is involved you need tightly controlled processes. However not all situations involve this and we all know that waterfall methods are very likely to deliver systems over budget and late. For example Martine Devos has used SCRUM effectively implementing change programs for the Belgian Government.

Tom Loosemore sagely talked about the changes going on in society, especially in the youth sector, stating that “techonology doesn’t exist for anyone under 15, it’s just normality”. I hope that 4ip can become a force for change that he suggests “turning the public sector inside out, exposing the data and services”. I hope this but I’m unsure of their mechanism at the moment. Ivan Pope and I talked at the end of the session, I’ve known Ivan for a long while and have always respected his thinking and always enjoy conversations with him which go everywhere. Neither of us is quite sure of their methods, they’re not a VC, expecting a return on investment, which means philanthropy from a public service organisatio; a mechanism that I can’t think of an example which works.  The water also seems to be muddied further with partner funding from Regional Development Agencies, NESTA, The Media Trust and The Arts Council. 

I’m confused, which is a shame as at one point last night I felt a revolution was about to happen and by the end of the evening I saw a complex and tangled web which as we all know is a great hiding place for complex beurocratic processes to develop. I really hope I’m wrong. If done right it will restore an edgy organisation into Channel4 which in this turbulent but exciting world, where it’s models are being picked apart by the dual forces of changes in user behaviour and financial models, is in need of change as much as newspapers and print media (as Saul sagely pointed out).

Under the hood of my Guardian Hack Day hack was a data importer which pulled data from DabbleDB. I really like DabbleDB, so this isn’t an attempt to make them look bad at all. In fact it’s an attempt to show good customer service (which could in some ways have been great if there had been more information given or the invitation to start a conversation about what the consumer would have liked).

I had a bit of a sense of humour failure about half way through my hack.

I’d given myself the fun job of playing for the first time with JSON or XML import and App Engine. I’d been wanting to find a reason for doing this for a while for other projects I’m tinkering with but just never seemed to find the time. So, a 24 hour hackathon, under a time constraint, seemed like just the perfect time. I’d armed myself with a whole load of links to read in advance and actually seemed to be making some nice progress with a sample chunk of JSON. Hurrah. With this success I went to wire up to DabbleDB feeling invincible. 1 hour later and cursing (myself mostly) and feeling like a complete newbie for not making this work I discovered the problem. It wasn’t me, it was the JSON coming back.

So I twittered in the style of Mr Jones from Dad’s Army. Then went and made some tea as both I and Mr Armitage seemed from our tweets to be in need of some. And it seemed like a very British thing to do under the circumstances.

A bit later the nice people at DabbleDB twittered back, pointing out rightly that their responses weren’t padded (my bad), but they weren’t entirely standard.

It was really nice to feel listened to, but it didn’t solve the problem. I already knew there was some non-standard code around there in the response. I just wanted to know how to switch that off. By this time I’d gone for Plan B and had written the XML importer using their RSS feed. This meant that I’d checked off both of the things I wanted to teach myself, which was nice. Only downside to that is the RSS feed only gives you the first 20 records, something which I discovered with just an hour to go before the hack was due to be used in anger (customisation features on the JSON and RSS output please).

I think the great thing about the experience was that DabbleDB were actively listening and responding, even when the voice they were hearing seemed annoyed and you wouldn’t naturally want to go there and interact.  It relates a lot to the phrase from Obama’s acceptance speech which I feel is a bit of a maxim : I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.

I’ve spoken in the past few weeks to some big brands who either feel they don’t have time to monitor or listen. Furthermore I’d heard from one that there would be no point to listening as it would either take them too long to respond to their audience/fans or that they didn’t want their roadmaps muddied by the wishes of their users. I can’t see the point to either of these arguments. If the tiny team at DabbleDB can listen and respond so can anyone. Moreover if you don’t listen to your consumers your competitors will and if they’re nimble they just might steal your audience. If that happened you’d have no one to blame but yourselves.

I was lucky enough to be at The Guardian’s first ever hack day last Thursday and Friday. I had promised myself that I’d blog from the event but then ended up taking on that most foolish of commitments; a hack that would be used by all participants and also one which another hack relied upon for data. 

It was a really great 2 days, stimulating talk and a scary amount of brain power in the room. There was a real buzz to the event and when I finally left at 10pm Simon Willison was still hard at work on his very cool crowdsourcing app to match electoral constituencies to a map. There were some wonderful hacks, including things like Tom Armitage’s LED swingometer and a really beautiful attention data and Guardian content mashup from Glenn Jones from Madgex. 

My hack was an SMS voting system for everyone to decide the “People’s Choice Award” it was a shame not to be hacking at Guardian data but I’ll hopefully be playing with that quite a lot anyway. It gave us a chance to have an XFactor style phone vote with people texting in a 2 digit code for the hack of choice. 

Just for fun I had it send a return text message thanking for voting (with a custom sender ID) and then also had it posting out the votes to the lovely physical hackday winner Swingometer hack from Mark.

All went to plan, the hack worked and the swingometer swung. The winners of the people’s choice built a beautiful GreaseMonkey script to allow you to easily create Guardian keyword combinations… there’s a screencast of it going up, any minute now.

Thanks to Paul Carvill for documenting so well. 

I so enjoyed the event. There was a real chatter and tap of fingers on keyboards throughout the whole 24 hours of the events and the quality of the 37 hacks is a real testament to the very talented team at The Guardian. Really looking forward to hacking on The Guardian data more, now that I know the wonders hiding within their full fat RSS feeds!

It’s been a while since we moved to South London from Crouch End. Astronomical prices and crazy commutes forced us into a migration. I love many things about our new area; wonderful places like Morden Hall Park are a stone’s throw away with the best leaves to kick through. I do miss one thing about Crouch End though which is something I never thought I’d miss… Budgens.

When we first moved to Crouch End in 2002, Budgens was the worst supermarket I’d seen in a while. It was seriously depressing. Then in 2006 something amazing happened. It became a franchise with an enlightened soul called Andrew Thornton taking it on and turning it into something akin to a covered market. The process seemed to be quite agile (in the software sense). After the initial reopening there was a series of smaller reinventions with a constant move towards locally sourced products and organic/English products. Labelling helped dramatically to find only fruit and veg which had travelled less than 100-miles. Even the majority of frozen ready meals was from the Cook range which is renowned for high quality and locally sourced (where possible) ingredients. 

Furthermore each of these small inventions seemed to be very much market lead and involved listening to local shoppers. Crouch End is fairly vocal, as well as being a bit of a place for luvvies (you can barely move without tripping over a former East Ender), with a constant sense of campaigning for causes such as animal rights, global warming and stop the war. So by listening to a vocal local group Andrew and his staff were tuning each iteration of the store’s reimagination in a very agile-software-development-like way. They even had an excellent e-mail newsletter and responded to personal e-mails.

Is the store more profitable than some of the Sainsbury/Tesco style centrally driven behemoths? I don’t know, however it is clearly working well enough for Andrew to have opened a second franchised store in Belsize Park.

Why am I talking about this at the moment. I guess it comes down to my weekend experience with Tooting Sainsbury’s. I’m a massive rhubarb crumble fan. Forced rhubarb is definitely in season. For those of you thinking that spring is the natural time to be eating rhubarb, you’re right, however you can “force” it where it is grown in dark heated sheds. Forced rhubarb requires less sweetening and is a lot brighter pink in colour with much softer thinner stems. It is just the best in my opinion, and although yields are down it’s still doing well for growers who are mainly in Yorkshire. However no rhubarb in sight in Sainsbury’s, whereas even bad old pre-franchise Budgens had it. No one could tell me when it was going to be in again if eve. No one was interested in taking note of the fact that I’d like to buy some so they could keep a tally and if there was a market get some in. I may be a lone voice asking for that particular thing, but there didn’t even seem to be a system or interest in registering my interest. Sainsbury’s purchasing strategy seems top down and waterfall at best.

This really puzzles me, are big supermarkets so tied up in making one size fits all situations that they are forgetting local forces? I know I’m not a majority audience in Tooting for sure, but if there are no channels for communication then there is no way of tuning the product to be most efficient, whatever that may be. Also I just can’t see the justification for the “world of fruit and vegetables” approach which has apples coming from far afield when we have some fantastic varieties which grow here.

I’d love to vote more efficiently with my feet but Sainsbury’s has a monopoly in Tooting apart from two Tesco Metro’s and we gave up our car for eco-reasons. Fascinatingly the monopoly is an identical situation to Budgens in Crouch End which until the arrival of a Tesco Metro next door had no competition at all within The Broadway. The difference between gaining the love of a customer and losing one is clearly listening and providing for what they really need. Guess it’s time to buy a hopefully cool wheelable shopping trolley and go hunting for more locally sourced produce, and hopefully not sound like Victor Meldrew complaining about rhubarb or the lack thereof. 

This was a phrase which really struck me this morning from Obama’s acceptance speech. There were so many beautiful, eloquent phrases in the speech, it felt like a reboot button for the world has been pressed and I amongst many others I know have been very moved by listening to the speech. 

The thing which struck me about this phrase the most is that it’s a great maxim for so many occasions; some personal and some professional. Most pertinently for anyone thinking about involving their brand in social media it has to be at least one of your governing principles. 

Why would you engage with an audience only wanting to hear good things or neutral things. If you want to build better products, deliver better services, build a long term sustainable business you have to listen to the bad things. Furthermore, talk to the people who bring them to your attention either about fixing them or explain why things are the way they are. 

I’ve been following a really interesting example of this of late involving someone I’ve admired for years: Tim O’Reilly. Tim recently endorsed Barack Obama. I’m sure I wasn’t alone by not being surprised about this. I was however surprised when it created a small storm of protest where some people were saying it was inappropriate for a technology publisher to be publishing on political issues.

First and foremost, I can’t see why this is the case. Technology and issues are deeply intertwined, both in causing and helping issues. Energy consumption of idle server farms and devices on standby, complex financial instruments which can only be algorithmically traded, suppression by governmental surveillance are all places where there needs to be political thought leadership accompanied by a tech industry thought leadership. This is one reason why for the longest time I’ve read Tim’s blog. Furthermore O’Reilly as a publisher has always had an interest in where technology and life meet; politics is merely a part of this interface.

The wonderful part of this “issue” for me was to see Tim’s response. He wasn’t hiding from the issue, he was listening to the people who disagreed and he was stating why he felt justified to doing it. He also made public that he was changing the one thing which he felt was wrong. They called the area of the site it was highlighted in “news” which they were renaming to “news and commentary”.

“My conversation with fleab started on this blog. I recognized the issue he raised with the link to it on oreilly.com.

At the time I wrote my second response, I didn’t realize that it was categorized as news. Last night, I did notice that, and asked the folks running the site to rename the category News and Opinion.

Guess what: most of the other stuff that appears there isn’t news either; it’s opinion. Not sure why an opinion about the possible importance of some technology didn’t raise ire about its past miscategorization as news, but in any event, we’ve renamed the category News and Commentary.

So this was in fact a good general catch about the labeling of that particular widget on the main oreilly.com site, because most of the blogs featured there are in fact commentary rather than news per se.”

For me this was a great example of how a “brand” can engage with an audience who feel they’ve been wronged or slighted, no matter whether you felt the audience or the brand was in the right. 

One commenter on Tim’s response made a point which I’m not sure I agree with at all

“Plain and simple Tim, I think it’s fine to endorse a canditate, but you will lose business. You comment back and you’ll lose more”

I think this is true if Tim had been rude or disrespectful, he hadn’t been either of those. He may have been firm or forthright, but he had listened and he had also shown that he’d listened by engaging. I personally think by commenting back he may have shown those who disagree with his political views that he is human and these were personal comments, not those of his imprint and most of all, he is listening.

Just attempted to have lunch and a catch up with John Squire from Coremetrics, carrying on a series of lunches with a Japanese scheme. Sadly a very smokey fire somewhere in their building curtailed that one… I would upload an iPhone picture but obviously the camera on the iPhone wasn’t up to it. Why would it be? Obviously a smokey basement resembling a Pink Floyd gig with a roadie who’s overdone the stage smoke isn’t something you’d want to photograph. Well not as much as say an overlit sunny summer’s day in Cupertino which the camera is clearly tuned for. 

Fortunately London now has so many dim sum places you can hit a Ping Pong with a ball of the same name almost anywhere in the West End so we had the great jasmine tea with the flower which opens in the glass and a large number of dim sum. Not quite as posh but much less smokey. 

John is one of my judging panel for the MySpace competition so it was really great to catch up with him as he’s not often over this side of the pond. It’s always an interesting discussion I seem to have with him. Yesterday’s clearly began and ended with the economy in some way shape or form. Analytics firms are probably in a very good place to see consumer confidence and although their business is good, they seem to very much be in the place that Tim Bray was advocating at FOWA - batten down for stormy times ahead. However they’re also in a good place to be able to spot and monetize emerging trends, which is why I wanted John to be on the panel as it clearly shows that without analysing data on your users you can’t spot trends which will make your app survive or fail.