Who is loulouk?

A butterflies wings flap. Someone sends a tweet. A government falls and rises again.

But the beauty of Twitter is not in the very great consequences but in the small. Not the detail neither but in the flow and sway of unguarded conversations and chit chat about the weather.

I can't remember where my own journey through the conversations happened. I know it involved the mountain bikers, because most everything started with the mountain bikers. A random conversation about wouldn't it be fun to ride in a straight line for a while ended up with a girl I'd never met before in person stood next to the Leeds Liverpool Canal by Skipton waving a bit of cardboard with 'go go loulouk' written on it.

Those conversations about learning to ride my bike, the blogs which came out of the journeys which I made while in the saddle led to meeting assorted people who published my words in one form or another and in meeting a quiet policeman with a big heart who challenged every assumption I had about operational implementation during protests. They led to cheerleading a start up baking nothing but the best bread. To sitting in Wagamamas shooting the breeze with someone who is turning out to be a bit of an awesome friend in the strange kind of way that very busy people can be, where the intervening months out of contact never happened and there is ease and comfortableness there.

Then there are the questioners and the thinkers. From Futuregov to Urban Forum, from disability activists to people questioning capitalism, random discussions on medical irritations, on challenges at work, on snapping pictures of random things have all linked me to people who have enriched my life, my thinking and my personal development as well as continuously challenging my assumptions on life, the universe and everything.

I've had discussions with 'famous' people but they're not the interactions that are the amazing ones. The amazing ones are the ones which come from tweeting some ridiculous mountain biking video and getting into a discussion with someone else in the civil service about downhill versus cross country. Well I might meet that girl in a meeting somewhere some day and I might not. But if we do, we'll have something to talk about, some commonality that allows to start somewhere differently to everyone else in the room.

I've tried to help people through Twitter but that help is nothing compared to the help I've received.

One day I posted a tweet about having a piece written and wondering if anyone was looking for something similar in their publishing schedules. The next day, an academic who I'd discussed a fancy dress outfit with among many other things, popped into my stream and introduced me to an journalist. An online only journalist but a tech journalist all the same. In turn, he introduced me to an American editor who tucked me under her wing and taught me everything I know about marshalling words into something which approaches sense. It wouldn't have happened if I had not established a rapport with someone I'd never met through talking about something as random as trying to dress up to match my partners Captain Sparrow.

Then there was the thing with the job interview. The one where I discovered there was a job through Twitter, filled out my application form, was told I had an interview on Twitter, attended the interview and then was told I had the job over Twitter.

I didn't exist to the people recruiting for that post anywhere except on Twitter, despite working in the same organisation as them.

But the thing about serendipity is, it can't be forced and it can't be taught. So my parting shot to those who'd like to do a bit of wing flapping?

Be yourself. The magic is in the conversations that are nothing to do with work whatsoever.

Press officers, communications teams, I am told, do not like losing control. So the advent of digital technology could be conceived to be their worst nightmare.

I am going to start blogging again.

These are the rules of engagement.

I will not and nor do I ever intend to, comment directly on anything government is or isn't doing unless it is celebrating success where it is appropriate. I was a cheerleader for my old Council. I see no reason why I may not continue to be a cheerleader for my current employer.
I will be calling on my experience of working within local government to inform comment and discussion in that area.
I will be using my experience of using social media as a user rather than as a professional to tell you how things look from my point of view.
I will not tolerate anyone trying to lead me into a corner and give me a good punching when it comes to my current role.
I am currently in a politically restricted post. Therefore if there is a post which you might think is political or apolitical, I assure you it will have been intentioned as the latter.

All views from this point forward are my own. They are not anyone elses. If someone asks me to post about something I will refuse. I have always been and will remain independent and honest. If I happen to talk about policy it will be because I genuinely believe personally in that policy, not because someone paid me to but chances are there will be no policy comment here at all. By association you can assume the same to be true of my Twitter account.

Summary: Yesterday I handed in my notice in my current job as Digital Engagement Advisor at Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council. In a months time I will be Digital Engagement Lead for the Government Digital Service, reporting to Emer Coleman, Deputy Director of Digital Engagement.

There are some people, some offers, that you just do not turn down. There are logistical nightmares, it's true. I'll make no bones about that. Al's mum is ill, his father is ill and he cannot relocate with me. I simply wouldn't let him. In real terms this will mean a lot of to'ing and fro'ing for some time. It will mean we are not as available at the last minute as we used to be.

But it will also mean many other things too. I will be leaving a team of dedicated, inspirational people who have been endlessly patient, allowing me to find my feet and spread my wings. I will be leaving a Council at what feels like a tipping point in terms of new understandings, new ways of working, new efficiencies but also new opportunities. I will be leaving a desk which I remember feeling to be too big for me 18 months ago and a smaller team who have made me laugh, think and put up with my endless questioning and incessant 'why can't we's'. It will mean not playing a part in the changes and improvements which are happening right under our very feet.

So what could possibly tempt me away? What question was asked which finally made me say yes, yes I will leave a job I love in local government which I also love, yes I will do some ridiculous weekend commuting, yes I will come back to a city which I very much have a love/hate affair with?

A year ago, I met a man briefly in a coffee shop. His name was Chris Chant. He left an impression. Earlier this month I sat with my legs crossed, back against a wall and listened to Mike Bracken. He left an impression. The drip drip drip of tweets from the GDS team in my stream, full of passion and pride. The code on github. The API's. The 0's and 1's. Meeting one of the team in person and listening and understanding the glee of problem solving but also the challenges inherent in the size and scope of the problem. The start up culture. The sheer ridiculousness of the aspiration but the sensibleness of approach and implementation.

But most of all, the delivery. Because words and aspirations aren't enough. You've got to deliver on them. It's not enough to know the path, you have to also be able to walk it, taking the sticks and stones thrown at you along the way.

That unique combination is probably about the only thing that could have tempted me away to be honest.

Some things, you just don't say no to. So I'll be interpreting and translating and educating and informing, networking and connecting and helping some other people to do the same too. I'm excited but I'm also honoured. Let there be no mistake about this, it is an honour to be asked.

This will be the last post in this blog. I'll continue with the other ones as they could never be construed as a conflict of interest but this one must pause, for a while. I take some things very seriously, and the impartiality of a civil servant is one of those things. If I have anything to say relating to work there are more appropriate places to place those words. This will not be one of them.

So off I went to London to UKGovCamp 2012, an unconference for local and central government types to talk about digital in its many and varied forms across two days at Microsoft HQ in London.

Here are my 20 thoughts, with thanks to Dan Slee for the idea.

1. The tipping point is when the men in suits start to attend. And seem not the remotest bit phased by people in jeans and trainers discussing random complicated things about their business with as much knowledge and confidence as they have and with as much passion and enthusiasm as they have.
2. It took a morning for the equilibrium to be reached, but once it had the energy levels were off the scale. There were still a few people who felt it necessary to explain they'd been in government a long time unnecessarily but it was a far less frequent occurrence than I remember it being last year.
3. Some sessions were so over subscribed as to verge on a health and safety issue. Sitting, standing, wedged in corners, we all still managed to find a space. Wonderful problem to have.
4. Death by powerpoint is not just restricted to projecting your images. In fact, in some ways its a zillion times worse to know the lone speaking voice in the room is looking at graphs and visualisations that you cannot even see. 
5. The law of two feet is a wonderful thing. You don't have to endure death by powerpoint. And as Lloyd Davis correctly pointed out, the corridors are the connectors of the sessions but they are also where the connections often happen which are of greatest value. This was true for me.
6. Gonna need a bigger pub.
7. Mike Bracken is enviably excellent at communicating and is becoming what seems to be a much needed and well respected totem for digital change, excellence and eventual maturity.
8. Some facilitators are better than others. But you will forgive anything at all of those who have the grace to concede they are struggling and let others gently chip in and suggest things, and then the courtesy to not shut those people down.
9. There was a lot more talking and not enough doing. But then, what's not enough? If the event hadn't happened, nothing would have happened at all. And I suspect the value of the doing day will not be seen actually on the day but will instead be seen in the days, weeks and months to come in the connections of skillsets which yesterday facilitated.
10. Security and identity is an issue for everyone. Tell us once does not just apply to births, marriages and deaths but also to security, identity and reassurance.
11. Government can look impenetrable at times and a long way from local government experience but in some ways central government is way behind local, and in others way in front. I learnt so much yesterday about how to explain digital value to different audiences, so much about evaluation and so much about understanding policy wonks minds.
12. Some are more open to learning and sharing than others. There are some cliques in central government, in just the same way that there can be in local government. The value of unconferences and digital networks is that it no longer matters. No one person can be a barrier to the evolutionary cycle of an organisation or Department any more. They become lost in the mass of voices speaking sense.
13. I understand stakeholders better. I understand political influences better. I understand that political motivations can be varying but that ultimately once things are broken down into small outcomes, those outcomes can unite especially when those outcomes will benefit all no matter where the country is in 5 years time.
14. I spent barely any time in sessions with local government bods I knew and lots of time in sessions with local government people I didn't know and now do. The freshness of perspective was brilliant - 'we are good at this', 'x Council is doing this and found this enormously beneficial' for example. Lots of positive changes being made but we still, even in a digital age, have no official channels for sharing best practice nor best value.
15. The future of local government CMS's is absolutely definitely totally in one place. Optional or not, there can only be one outcome for the end user, the residents that we serve. Consistency of user experience, consistency of user journey and consistency of outcome. As long as the user experience, journey and outcome are good for those people I can see no problem with this. However, there are questions about innovation which someone else has asked far better than I can. (If you wrote this post, can you comment with a link so I can add it? It was very late last night when I read it).
16. Char Stamper (paraphrased) 'if we know the potholes page is a top visited page, and we need foster carers, why are we not advertising that we need foster carers on the potholes page'. Well, quite.
17. Fresh eyes. Business transformation and process refinement cannot happen without them, and in parallel to this an unconference is broken without new blood because there are no fresh eyes. I am past the point of being those fresh eyes and as such am most relieved to see so many new faces over the past two days. Without you, we stagnate, we discuss in circles and we don't move on.
18. Someone said that Government needed a Government Digital Service was a sign of immaturity. I would argue still that it is the centre of a linear evolution. First, digital is left to everyone out in the wilds to do, because it's not deemed as important and it's impact is misunderstood and it is assumed that staff will acquire skills at the same pace as the general population. Then riots and revolutions happen. And it is realised that there are people out in the general population far more advanced in understanding, capability and implementation than those working in Government. And so Government responds by pulling things in, training and upskilling, employing those from the general population who are ahead and using them to pass on their knowledge by working along side some of those who are from Government. Will the end of the linear be for GDS to dissolve, and all those contained within it to go back out into Departments as critical friends whose role will be to ensure digital is embedded? What happens when the general population has such a breadth of skills? If HE offers literacy and numeracy courses for free, will it also now offer digital literacy courses too?
19. Unconference is the equivalent of back to back meetings for 6 hours. The lunch break is rarely contains less intense discussion than the sessions themselves. This is tiring. The energy levels on the second day were noticeably different to those on the first and I don't think it would have mattered, as Sarah Lay commented, a jot, if no one had gone to the pub at all.
20. Women in Tech are a shy old bunch. Without a leader, it all falls apart. This worries me. A lot.

Summary: Awesomeness

Or; happier, more productive.
Or; I didn't realise we were kind of kicking ass as an organisation.
Or; I didn't know I would end up not having time to talk to people.
Or; What on earth was Paul Clarke doing even getting out of bed.
Or; banking security can teach government security but business can intersect with public sector.
Or; I don't think scripts can hack images or rather more importantly resonant images and I think that's possibly the  single most important thing I discussed (with Stef) today.
Or; I can dodge cameras exceedingly well. Good.
Or; I don't believe in no. Or rather, in impossibility. I don't.
Or; Phenomenal energy and talent.
Or; Blistering speed of conversations.
Or; learning. Understand where we are as an org, identifying my part to play in helping change that, and the importance of it.
Or; seeing people who have left happier and more productive.
Or; seeing people who have not happier and more productive.
Or; I don't belong in a box. I just can't do it.
Or; Respect. Admiration. For a man who calmly and quietly states it as it is and as it will be and does so with humour. Mike Bracken is going to need a bigger bus to fit everyone on board.
Or; The loveliness of mischievousness well intentioned.
Or; Death by Powerpoint is not something I am prepared to tolerate any more.
Or; I am too damn gobby for my own good.
Or; At what point do you embrace being a disruptor, understand it's a strength and just go with it? Today.
Or; Work faster at the boring stuff so you can damn well get to the good stuff.
Or; Stop being embarrassed about knowing stuff. Just know share it. It's criminal to not do so, not to do so.
Or; Agile does not fit into PRINCE.
Or; Relinquish control and let the networks do your job for you in communicating your message. If it's a good one, it will get through.
Or; Service users are more agile than us. They consume. Fast. We need to be faster, light footed and leave no trace in our immersion and eventual abandonment of technologies, ideologies, or policies and strategies.
Or; Policy don't need to understand digital. They need to understand outcomes. Evaluation.
Or; Translate and interpret and do it with honesty and integrity.
Or; Be proud of where you work, not ashamed. Be proud of the history, the legacy and the future not seen yet.
Or; Pride and identity is fundamental to a well performing team/organisation/company.
Or; I love my job. I love my job. I love my job.
Or; We are family. Support. Argument and dissention but respectfully and always with good heart.
Or; Leave your issues outside of the room.
Or; Days may start disastrously but can turn around real damn fast.
Or; It's like a day in back to back meetings. Increasingly, the meetings I attend are reflecting in content and weight of outcome at 'work' as they do at 'unconference'.
Or; Awesomeness.

Summary: Awesomeness.

Today was awesome.

Summary: Legislation's what you need if you want to be a internet breaker

A #weeklyblogpost contribution.

@janetedavis @dominiccampbell yeah. No. That's not somewhere I'm prepared to ever go either. Behind. My place is behind.

@janetedavis :@dominiccampbell and also, in that sentence I start to understand why women stay at home. Oh. :/

Who am I?

I've missed the deadline for #weeklyblogpost - it was midday today. But I wanted to tip this into the pot now because I have the strangest feeling there wont be much spare time next week either.

#pandagate. Sounds ridiculous really. 12 faces of 2011 - the women the title blazed in H1. Bottom right of the photo montage, a panda. Not, by any stretch of the imagination, a woman.

Might not have been an issue had it not followed on the heels of the Sports Personality being completely gender blind. Timing and context, my friends, your two greatest foes in social media reputation land.

But; to happier things. Like my heroes list for 2011, because believe it or not, there are some women in it and believe it or not, there are some men too. Because believe it or not, that's the way the worlds mixed up these days whether you like it or not. It's a personal list, yours will be different. Feel free to add your own in the comments, disagree or post a link to yours in your own blog.

This is not a review.

This is a commentary on modern life. I am currently on leave for the day. Long drawn out reasons - not Xmas related or shopping related, though I am using it to whip through HMRC related paperwork, tidy the house and generally make room for the tree which rather embarrassingly has not yet made an appearance.

I live in a turn of the century or so stone terrace. None of this new fangled brick here. The walls absorb the cold but once warmed keep us nice and toasty. The house needs a lot doing to it - it's work in progress. The walls are not as thick as you would expect and with families both sides of us and there just being the two of us, sometimes we feel assaulted by the by product noise generated on a day to day basis.

Mostly the sounds that drift through are of Bollywood movies, of calls to prayer, of the kids mimicing the sounds of prayer with little understanding of the shape or meaning of the sounds. Never is there the sound of recorders, Tomy toys or Strictly Come Dancing, nor is there pounding dance music emanating from the teenagers bedrooms.This would be because the teenagers don't have bedrooms of their own - these are two up two downs and the 4 children to my right all share a bedroom. I never hear the daughter, only ever the 3 sons. I have briefly seen the daughter pass through the garden and into the ramshackle wooden building in their back garden - but that was only once. I don't think she goes to school and I don't think she leaves the house. I don't know what she does. Sometimes I question whether she even exists at all.

They are Pakistani and the father is a pillar of the local community or so it seems. Groups of wise and elderly men come and go and the front living room briefly comes alight, showing men seated, arms waving passionately, words and thoughts flying and being meant.

On the other side is another family. I think Arabic though I am not sure. I never hear them speak and I never really here the children either. All I hear, occasionally, is the sound of the mother sobbing, a heart breaking sound. It happened 15 minutes ago and I tweeted about it.

Go round, go knock, take a cup of sugar, everyone suggested.

It's not that easy.

It should be that easy. I am a caring kind of person. Empathic. I feel for people very much and am a self confessed sap when it comes to sad movies. I've had to leave films 2 minutes early to fix my make up on more than one occasion and I don't really mind admitting it either - what's wrong with emotion anyway?

But her emotion is making me feel uncomfortable because I simply do not know what I should do about it. And I have come to the conclusion that I am incapacitated through nothing more than stupidity. I have tried, of course I have, to make eye contact, to say hello. The problem is, in order for a conversation to start, there has to be a response to the hello. There has to be some kind of engagement from the other side. And there just isn't. I can't even get eye contact half the time and if I do it is fleeting.

But that's no excuse for stopping trying. Not speaking English is no excuse for not making a connection. A smile is a connection so instead I'll try smiling and scrap the hello bit - maybe it's just not understood. A smile says a million things that would take hours to speak.

The simple fact is, I am not going next door to offer help because I am unsure how it will be received. I am fearful of imposing and intruding. I am awkward in my lack of understanding of what the right protocols are. I am hurting because I can't stand the idea of someone being in pain emotionally and not having someone to hug and reassure. But I don't know where to begin in trying to work out how to offer the care I would so like to.

As a footnote, in John Lewis on Sunday I saw a woman alone struggling with the contents of a pram and a toddler, the pram having evidently tipped over when the child had climbed out due to the sheer weight of shopping on the back. I did not hesitate for a second in asking if she needed help and was fine with her answer that she did not - it was an easy exchange, unmired as it was by the removal of knowable social mores.

I don't have the rulebook for the interactions that where I live demands of me. It's not as simple as knocking on the door. It should be. But there are language barriers, cultural barriers, gender barriers that I simply do not know how to navigate.

And it seems to me I am not alone in this and it seems to me, we should be focusing a little more on understanding and navigating these situations and a little less on offending people. So if anyone has suggestions on how to navigate such situations as these, please please please comment. I feel about as confident in my own ability to do so as a dead chicken.

@benjoda mocks me for getting excited about discovering a pdf aggregator which saved me a lot of time and presented things efficiently and effectively.

He's going to hate this post with a passion. Because in it, I am going to indulge something which has been missing for a while - and it is passion. For digital. Because it is what I am, who I am and what I do.

At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, this country experienced an acceleration of thinking, developing, innovation and JFDI arguably never seen before (yes, flinty, hence the slight give). It was distributed equitably in the spoils which emerged, at least geographically - I know this as I have walked beneath key stones from Edinburgh to York, Bristol to Exeter which have born roughly the same dates, leading to great palaces of learning named libraries - the 'giving back' method de jour of any self respecting industrialist.

And so, almost exactly 100 years later and what do we have? I passionately believe, a digital revolution. A monumental shift, not only in the way we conduct business, but also our daily lives, with the potential to shake the very foundations of the world, economically, politically and yes, even perhaps what it actually means to be human. Married with the scientific research discoveries which mean we can control physical objects with a thought, that we can see the unseeable and know the unknowable. As we strip away the layers of mystery between us and the stars, the skies, the sand and the snow, are we turning to a manufactured, invisible and unquantifiable digital space to satisfy what is perhaps a coded embedded behaviour in humans - the need to not know the future, to be uncertain, to see no guarantees?

So what will this digitalists leave? Industrialists took care of their workers, relatively at the time, by providing roofs over heads, opportunities for learning and personal development, and eventually education for the young. In their own sweet way they enabled social mobility, by ensuring that the generation beneath the workers spinning endlessly in factories were educated to a level where basic numeracy and literacy were possible, encouraged even, where it was possible to use education as a way to change their futures and to level up.

Digitalists have a number of options. Hack days, I think, are a shade of this in that it is an opportunity for developers to make contacts yes, and it is an opportunity for developers to make apps with useful data which will no doubt be marketable products, but the fact still remains; free time, free thinking, free bodies. A model which involves an exchange of something where both benefit.

But they are small. And in time, the memory of them will disappear. They are not, in other words, the equivalent of libraries still standing 100 years later.

Which begs the question, what will digitalists leave? What will be their legacy? Will they acknowledge their power and their genius, the collective wisdom collision that seems to happen once every 100 years and decide to collaborate and do something wonderful for no other reason than to further humanities development, or will they be oblivious, wrapped in the push to better the tech, better the tools, and forget entirely that humans use them?

I'd like to think the digital crowd are only just getting started.

Call it round 2. Call it an explosion of sheer frustration. Call it what you want. Here's my top 10 things which are irritating the hell out of me this week on social media and Twitter specifically. If you do these things, you'll probably get away with one or two. Do all of them, and either I've already unfollowed you or I'm about to. Am I alone in feeling this way? That's for you to decide.

Someone on the #pr tag asked last night what our predictions were for the future.

I said that PR would be going into a tailspin as it realised everyone's attention span was so reduced that they needed to do something really special to stand out.

I suddenly realised - more and more people are becoming just like me and my friends have always been. We've always fast forwarded through adverts, seeing them as an intrusion. We've shopped online for Xmas presents since at least 2002, for some long long before. I last remember battling with crowds in Croydon somewhere back then with a streaming cold swearing never again - and thanks to the web there never has been again. I concede that while it was only a small minority of us doing that it was not an issue for British retail, but I'm damned if I'm changing a 10 year habit just because everyone else caught on.

Anyway. I don't click on ads on the web. I don't notice ads in magazines. It's usually tech adverts which leave me open mouthed on the TV - a tradition carried on since the very first Orange advert which I loved to pieces.

Ads need to move me. They need to grab me. Otherwise they just blend in, merged into the noisy background of a life with so much input now that I'm having to sift ruthlessly through it or it will take over.

My trajectory through the web has been a long one, as my massive footprint under various pseudonyms shows. Increasingly I get the feeling that my journey is being replicated by the masses behind me but with a delay of 2 or 3 years. So when I talk about consuming masses of information, maybe I am alone in having the issue even to start with. Maybe when I talk about login fatigue, I am alone in experiencing it.

But I am increasingly becoming aware, as Clay Shirky rightly identified, everybody is coming, and PR, especially PR is going to have quite a challenging job to deal with and manage that.

Of course the biggest issue of all here is what happens when Facebook inevitably fractures as a collector of internet identities - because at the moment, all the people you want to talk to are gathered, pretty much, in one nice, easy to understand and easy to reach place.

If Facebook fractures, I have a suspicion things will not be so easy, that social graphs will fracture, and that instead of being one mother ship, there will be a million pods, all tied together by one login which does not have a physical place to gather, and marketing will once again become a niche targeted thing and not a massive convenient broadcast type thing.

I could be wrong, of course. I hope I am. It's more fun for me that way - who the hell wants to be able to see the future right now when not seeing it and watching it develop is so much more exciting.

I'm fascinated by cities. I lived in Plymouth for 3.5 years and in London (not Essex) for about 5 or so. I loved them both in different ways, though comparing Plymouth to London feels vaguely ridiculous.

Anyway, discussions of definitions of city should be left for another day. I want to think about what makes a city smart. This post was prompted by catching an update on how London cabbies are using social media to update each other and how the network has grown from the 2 cabbies who hatched the plan, to the 400 they currently have registered. As an aside here, this led me via the Twitter account to the website for tweetalondoncab which makes my eyes want an eye bath quick smart but lets not cast aspersions where strengths evidently do not sit. I've got more chance of voluntarily wearing mascara than passing the knowledge.

Park that thought for a moment (ha ha ha, *donk*) and move instead to the the Victorian sewerage tunnels underneath London.  A ready made duct system, which combined with the underground subterranean rivers beneath London, covers hundreds of miles hidden away beneath feet, little thought of, but much relied upon.

Then there's the obvious. The tube. Or rather, the tube and its little brother, the post office railway, the combination of which cover approximately 270 miles of track and are the object of obsession ranging from being able to name the location of every station on the network to photographing every 'ghost' station.

So how is this relevant? From Traffic Wardens to bus drivers, cabbies to sewerage, to me what makes a city smart is not how many networks of varying descriptions a city actually has, but how those are used. Perhaps back in the days of the Industrial Revolution having an asset such as sewers was a sign of a forward thinking city but these days our assessment of a city fit for purpose revolve more around its ability to host an Olympics and how many wi-fi access points it contains.

But these are distractions. In the same way we are all learning to hijack each others networks, to essentially buy our way into the value other peoples networks contain, in which we value the networks people bring to their jobs, we should value a city on its ability to utilise the existing networks within a city.

Take for example, the Highways Agency traffic cameras used to inform networks where traffic incidents were without needing to be on the scene or rely on someone being at the scene taking the initiative to inform someone. What a waste to only have authorised eyes accessing such information - why not distribute not only the access but also the responsibility for monitoring issues on such cameras out to the local people who have to pass by those places monitored by the cameras each morning on their way to work.

Intelligent cities enable dual or even triple use, and they distribute responsibility to the masses.


Then there are those cabbies. Cabbies get everywhere and they get paid to go everywhere more to the point, though if Londoners are to be believed they go everywhere that is North and nowhere that is South (and my personal experience after being evicted from La Scala at 4am and attempting to get to Dulwich bear this out). What do those cabbies see in the process of their journeys across the metropolis? Do they see the patterns above ground that those who traverse the same paths day to day can only see? Do they see the errors in those patterns, the missing person from the always standing there who wasn't supposed to be on holiday this week? Or the phase change, even, in the traffic lights around gyratories which perhaps wasn't planned?

Intelligent cities take advantage of the familiar and predictable and enable error reports to be made instantly and easily.


Sewers. An unfortunate necessity in the ever more clean and surgically detached digital 21st century. We don't like to think about them, we don't like to talk about them. But what could they tell us if we sent nodules down there with sonar capabilities which bounces and bounced and mapped the landscape above them, between the tunnels and the streets, so that engineers would not need to consult ridiculous amounts of land registries and wait for the data to arrive - instead they could communicate this to those who require it, the utility companies, who would never again accidentally slice through, perhaps, the cable that they did not know was there.

Intelligent cities look upwards from beneath as well as downwards from above.


Crime. Cities are crime hot spots - so many people and so much to steal. So many tourist too busy gazing open mouthed to notice the brushing too close and the hasty getaway. Above all cities now, layers of connectivity in the form of 3G, or of free wireless, or as Google has shown, open routers, all keys to the door of location. Reporting crime, or even accident often starts with 'where are you?' for how else will assistance reach you and how many of us are 100% confident that we could fire back an answer immediately, if at all? So no system to hit a button on a mobile and triangulated instantly, transmit that data to the nearest ambulance control centre, to be recorded, linked and assistance despatched while the controller on the other end of the phone deals with the weird intimacy of preventing death before assistance arrives.

Intelligence cities see the invisible networks and hijack those too, in order to be more efficient.


The potential for expanding the IQ of a city does not require any physical expansion. We do not need more houses, greater history, more majors nor faster connectivity in order for our cities more intelligent. Instead we simply need to consume our surroundings differently, look at them differently, understand them to be different and know that if a network is only serving one group of people it is a missed opportunity, a potential calamity, a missed cost saving exercise.

Thinking differently isn't just small. It's huge. My only question is, who is going to step up and take the lead?

This post from Paul Clarke is cited in entirety for bringing the issues I am about  to comment to my attention. It is an excellent piece written from the perspective of a data wrangler, someone who really knows what they're talking about when it comes to open data and transparency of process.

This is my response to the original point addressed, that of Will Perrin, among others, calling for the publication of offenders names in addition to their sentences received and crimes committed.

Currently, some offenders names do end up on the web - as a result of local reporters diligence in attending local Courts, a practice which to me seems archaic but someone must have deemed it necessary and to sell newspapers and who am I to disagree.

But they're not all in one easy to find and search place. Few newspapers even now permalink content. It is as easy for content to drop off the edge of the newspapers website as it used to be for ships to drop off the edge of the world in peoples minds.

If Will and others have their way, the data will never be erased. It will persist for as long as Google retains a cached history and if tweeted will forever remain in the archives of the Library of Congress. Which would be fine, perhaps, if it were not for the fact that we have a little law in this country which says, convictions can be spent. It's called the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, and unlike the majority of legislation, the clue is most definitely in the name. As Next Step ably assist in explaining, most convictions become spent after 5 years.

The internet doesn't purge its memory after 5 years. Nor, more importantly, would I imagine that most offenders have the stomach to even try and attempt to force search engines and social media sites to eliminate all mention of their past misdemeanour's.

So, why is the Rehab of Offenders Act there, I hear you ask? Well, as an ex Probation Service Officer, I feel slightly qualified to comment, though not entirely because I can't find the statistics I know are there. Leaving your past behind is not easy. Often the people who are most successful at turning their lives around, are those who remove themselves entirely from those they associated with when they were carrying out their convictions - burglary, drug offences, shoplifting, taking without consent. All of these are linked to peer behaviour, and are intricately linked, sometimes to place, sometime to people, and sometimes to drug habit. An offender leaves prison having become clean from heroin, returns to the same place, people, life as before he went into prison and the slide backwards is much easier than if he comes out to a town where he has no networks and no temptations.

It's this disassociation with habit which leads to success. But once this has been achieved, imagine applying for a succession of jobs and being turned down for every single one. Imagine not disclosing previous convictions because you are not asked to, working your way up in an organisation, getting to the point where a management promotion is inevitable, a police check is carried out and suddenly you're doubted, all the effort you invested is devalued, because someone is judging you now, not on your behaviour as it has been for the past 3 years, but on the behaviour 10 years before that.

Imagine that you  are 17 and shoplifting to fuel a drug habit. You kick the habit with help. You no longer need to shoplift. But you are refused a job ever after in the retail industry because you cannot be trusted. Imagine that you are 21 and involved in and arrested during the student protests. Imagine that following you around for the rest of your entire life and still affecting peoples perceptions of you when you're 50 and a vastly different person.

To think that a move to publish offenders details will not impact this way on those who initially chose the wrong path but who realised before it was too late it was the wrong path is naive. To compound the challenges faced by offenders to rehabilitate is cruel. To condemn people without faces to a lifetime of persecution and failure, and yes, an assumption of inability to change and turn life around is irresponsible.

I do not believe offenders details should ever be published. Because, quite literally, that's one Pandora's box you will never shut again.

Or at least, if the speakers at the last few traditional conferences on the subject were considered as evidence of gender monopoly.

Imagine this.

You work for a Council. You're on the periphery of a few services, have a job which needs you to learn very quickly how a number of sub sets of services work to see if they're using digital in the most appropriate and cost effective way for them and more importantly their residents and you have a few years background in one particular area which you loved and truth be told, still occasionally miss a teeny tiny bit.

You're not part of Communications in the traditional sense in that you're digital. But you sit next to Communications in an open plan office. You hear the ebb and flow and you occasionally join in with interesting conversations because these days you're less about not disturbing Research behind you and more about random 2 minute bouts of silliness to get it all out of your system so you can get your head down and concentrate properly for the next 2 hours.

You learn some things, sat in that position. You hear some things too, but this is not what this post is about and it is not my place to talk about those things. Instead, I'd like to explain some harsh realities to those of you who think that 'traditional' communications, a phrase somehow always read by me with a sneering tone to it, is a thing of the past, irrelevant, of no standing in the conversation.

Last week I sat in a meeting room and listened to some very talented and passionate Officers and Managers discuss their Domestic Violence service. It was humbling. It was phenomenal. It was reassuring and hope inducing. They had, in the process of their service design, thought of absolutely everything. Every scenario, every bit of research, every trick in the book was used to ensure that should a woman or a man need to phone and talk to someone, they could do so, at a time convenient to them, in a way which was safe for them, to someone who understood them.

Without Communications, do you think anyone would know that service existed? Yes, social media can help and it will. Facebook ads, QR codes for quick telephone number scans inserting an innocuously named new contact in their phonebook, perhaps? Okay. But what about the demographic of mum who doesn't have a smartphone, doesn't know what the internet is and anyway the kids are always playing the Sims on the PC and the trouble doesn't start until they've gone to bed? What about how to communicate with those for whom English is a second language? Or no language at all?

Are the domestic violence team experts in domestic violence or in how to best communicate with the targets of that domestic violence? Who on either side of the table is more of a 'professional' and who has the more important knowledge?

Neither. I say neither. I say teamwork rules.

3 years ago I was involved in the biggest logistical nightmare I think a Council could have to deal with outside of emergency planning. Yes, you've guessed it. Bins. We switched from fortnightly bin collections to weekly bin collections (but with a smaller capacity bin, important that bit) and from weekly recycling collections to fortnightly (with the same capacity bin - as an aside this worked, ask if you want to know more). The redesign of the routes for the bin collection vehicles was a nightmare. Getting them into a GIS system to record them was a nightmare. But neither of those nightmares were as monstrous as the Communications nightmare. That was a special nightmare all of its own.

You see refuse collection is, whether you like it or not, the only service which, should it go wrong, will be noticed by all your residents. All of them. I don't know the exact figures but suspect inbound calls to the call centre revolve around bins quite a lot on most days of the week. It's a hot topic and it affects everyone.

Do you think that the Manager of the bin crews was in any way the right person to ensure that 59,000 individual households knew on exactly the right day, with exactly the right amount of notice so they didn't forget but knew in time, taking into account ESOL issues, taking into account fly tipping issues and the associated impact on then NI 196 scores, also bearing in mind delivery schedules and availability, print runs at the local printers and what felt like a zillion other tiny little 'have you thought of' moments - do you think he was the right person to think of all of that? Do you think he should be skilled in all those things?

Or, do you think he had enough on his plate calculating how much the change in refuse collection amount would be, the impact on number of vehicles, the number of trips to the tip to empty, factoring in of course that the nearest local landfill site had just closed and a bit more of a journey was needed, but also taking into consideration carbon emissions, the rising cost of diesel, staff who were still working to task and finish, traffic jam hotspots and avoiding them (schools) at certain times of day and the ability of some crew to drive a 10 tonne truck down a lane as wide as the truck itself. For a start.

Because I think, and I respect the man immensely, that no, He was not the right man for that job. The right woman for the job happened to be a colleague of mine. And because she was good at her job, still is good at her job, 59,000 households were all told, across 5 phases, which took 12 months, exactly which days they were changing to on which bit of the fortnight for refuse and ditto for recycling. And nothing went wrong. Okay, 20 houses went wrong, I'll fess up. But to my knowledge, across a year of phased changes, 20 people got the wrong information and to be honest? It was probably my fault and an error with my polygon.

Communications co-ordinated this. Communications made sure everyone knew what was happening, no one was taken by surprise and more importantly, Communications then made sure everyone knew why we were doing it - to save money, to encourage more recycling, to make us more efficient and to provide a better, more efficient service.

Without Communications the inbound call centre would have quit. The sheer amount of calls coming in from confused residents not knowing when on earth to put their bins out would have crashed the whole telephone system. As it was? Barely a whisper.

And this, this my friends is why your ignorance is understandable but nevertheless irritating. Because you only ever notice Communications are useless when something goes wrong. If they're doing it right, you'll forget they're there.

Have you forgotten they're there?

I'm sorry, but we do.

I've hitherto avoided commenting on such things because at work this is not my area, and so it is absolutely inappropriate for me to step on other peoples toes and comment either negatively or positively on something I have no control over and no input into.

But someone has made it my issue. That someone is Looking Local. This morning they emailed me to tell me that they had relaunched their Facebook app which allows content from Council websites to be imported en masse and displayed on Facebook - and pointed me at Bracknell Forest as an example of how it could be used.

It's a pretty Facebook page. Down the left hand side, nice and neatly ordered are all the options from Disabled Guides to maps, virtual tours to Twitter accounts. There are car park maps, polling stations maps and schools maps. Maps galore. A plethora of maps. Click on the car park map and it's been viewed over 8,000 times. The leisure centre map 540,000 times. The play areas map 4,000 times. Not inconsequential for what is, quite clearly also demonstrated by the maps, a relatively small Council covering a relatively small area.

I am impressed. No, really I am. It's a cohesive, justified and obviously well used social media hub in the place where people evidently are (though I'm sure traffic is driven to those maps from elsewhere as well - like the Council website which will appear first in a search engine search).

So I delve a bit deeper. Friend activity reveals a blank - the Council has obviously decided it does not feel it is appropriate for them to 'friend' their residents. A quick scan down the wall reveals that almost every post is 'Liked' but that it is one 'Like' on average and that the comment rate is not as high as those viewing figures of the maps might indicate they should be. And strange to see as it's quite obvious that quite a lot of either staff or consultant time and attention has been lavished on the Facebook account - and yet the return on investment seems to be so small.

However, all soon becomes clear.

Click on the Looking Local option on the left hand side and you discover the reason for much discussion on my Twitter account this morning. What appears to have happened is that the entire contents of the Council's website has been dumped into a self contained app within Facebook. This means that a web 1.0 broadcast only content clump has been unceremoniously dumped into a web 2.0 interactive environment - but that all opportunities for adding interactivity have been firmly removed.

It would perhaps be cruel of me to point out that clicking on Social Media in the top level menu and then selecting Flickr - your images results in an error. Or that a picture of a sign with Byway written on it is perhaps a strange thing to be viewing on a Council Flickr stream without the context which undoubtedly goes with it - as the app doesn't seem to display context. It is a shame that all interactivity has been removed even from Flickr via the app as you cannot either see comments already made on the photographs nor add your own.

So I click on the Contact Us section. Surely this will be better and there will be links to email contacts or Twitter streams?

No. I am told I can walk in to a walk in centre or make a phone call. On Facebook. In an app on Facebook.

The discussion on Twitter revolved around whether:
a) the content being there where the eyeballs were was good enough, no interactivity was required
b) the content being there was a complete waste of time and money and all that content could have been linked to
c) the content wouldn't feed into peoples feeds so no one would ever know if a change had been made so what was the point?
d) Facebook is where the eyeballs are, for some people it is all there is to the internet and we should pander to them and duplicate content there because if we don't we're excluding those people
e) duplicating content to the prima donnas who refuse to go anywhere else costs money - people need to JFGI
f) should local government ethically be encouraging people to use only Facebook with the accompanying potential alleged privacy and data protection issues
g) the irony of putting none interactive content on a platform completely revolving around interactivity killed them

I looked forward to your views. You can probably guess what mine are.

What is part of my job:
Advising 9 Departments and untold sub sections on social media
Writing guidance on social media and digital tech in our org
Training 9 Departments and untold sub sections
Keeping up with new tools and utilities I can help people use that are appropriate in their job
'Being' the Council feed
Keeping an eye on all the other channels everyone else has created to make sure they'r ok
Providing some strategy
Inputting into policy
Inputting into our 2030 vision
Sorting content for 2 intranets and 2 external websites
Keeping an eye on local, national and international stats to make sure we're reacting to trends not imposing on people who don't care
Monitoring and feeding back on KPI's
Inputting into digital bids

What is not part of my job but directly impacts on my ability to do the above:
Attend unconferences, talks and events that are free (and often pay travel and hotel myself)
Reading about 30 blogs/official site feeds to make sure I am telling people the right thing and the most current thing all the time
Scanning 2000 Twitter account inputs to ensure I am informed of the things the above scan misses
Building networks to ensure I am informed and kept in the loop for events which are not advertised using conventional means
Building a reputation by telling people what we do, how we do it and why - but not using conventional means
Spend my evenings either running #lgovsm so I learn from other people smarter than me on both a professional and personal level on all things local government and social media or typing up the learning from #lgovsm so myself and others can take something visible home with us from that hour spent in our evenings given voluntarily
Set up #1515gov so I could get an idea of all the things my local gov colleagues do on a day to day basis to better aid my understanding of local government and its workings
I blog so I can share my learning but also learn from others in the comments

All of the above I am not paid to do. I do it anyway because it informs the first section and makes me a better employee, because I do not see the end to being an employee as being 5pm and because I don't mind giving up evenings and occasionally weekends to be a better employee.

I don't expect to be paid for it. I do expect it to be recognised. And I thank from the bottom of my heart those that do.

You are stars and you keep me sane.

In the midst of a meeting with one of our sections yesterday I had an interesting conversation.

The meeting consisted of some people who work with service users. I wont tell you which one, it's not relevant and it's not fair. But in this meeting there were two very digitally literate people and two not so digitally literate people - and I think if you picked any four random public sector workers today and asked a question or two, I believe that's the balance you would find everywhere.

So I was trying to explain to these two gentlemen that the implications of social media were far bigger than the riots, which is the only thing that had brought social media into their sphere. They had, as a result of the riots formed an idea on what social networking was and how it connected people. But they had done no research past asking a couple of young people who they used it.

So, myself and the two digitally literate bods opposite the table from me proceeded to explain and I used something as an example, which I'd like to share.

A girl walks into a shoe shop with a friend. In the process of walking back out again with a pair of shoes she will: take pictures of the selection of shoes and ask her friends which one they like. Narrow it down to two pairs and ask her friends via text which one's she should pick after also sending photographs of herself wearing aforementioned shoes. Then, once she has crowdsourced the decision, she will buy the pair of shoes, and then tweet a picture of her leaving with them.

Once home, she will film a 'haul' video and post it on YouTube. She will share with her friends the outfit she wears that evening along with the pair of shoes and while she is out she will be constantly taking pictures and sharing them, asking questions about where to go next, where the party is.

To summarise then:

• She has made no decisions on her own
• She has told the entirety of her network and probably her networks network where she was during the day but also in the evening
• She has posted a picture of her face
• She has posted to YouTube the things she has bought
• She has had feedback at almost every stage of her life she has lived that day, be it negative or positive - but more importantly she has asked for it
• She has not had a single moment 'to herself'
• She has been connected to the web in one form or another the entire time
• She has been reachable by the entirety of her network the entire time
• She has crowd sourced her taste in shoes and not made a decision for herself

Every day, for the next month, maybe two depending on how annoyed my followers become, I'm going to do something a bit bizarre.

I'm going to tell everyone what I'm doing.

I think you should too, if you work in local government and here's why.

I read a comment by @ermintrude2 (she's a social worker, doesn't want to use her real name) on this lovely post by @welovelocalgov explaining the things she knows local gov does - but that maybe the general public don't.

I didn't either.

That's wrong.

So in order to fix the wrong and turn it into a positive right, if you'd like to join me, feel free. If you're in Australia, or the United States, tweet at your own 15:15 (3:15pm) in your own time zone but use the same tag #1515gov. I promise to read every single one. At the end of the month if I'm not the only person doing this then I promise to somehow collate every single one into some kind of document and upload it to this blog.

I want to know what you do. I want to see a snapshot of your life, every single day for the next month. I want to know how you serve, how you clean, how you care, how you protect and how you support.

But most of all, I want to paint a picture in a thousand words of why local government is a many wonderful thing. I can't do that alone.

So please join me. Thank you.

This is going to look like an attack on one person no matter how I pen it. I apologise for this, it is not meant to be. It is simply the culmination and articulation of months of frustration and annoyance.

I'm going to follow true DIBB (Disney with a British Accent Boards) tradition and do an attempt at a trip report of our trip to Florida over there which I'll link here when completed (which could be months judging by how long it takes everyone else to get around to it) but I wanted to chuck something here.

Before we went, I have to say, this was a trip for my other half. It's his 40th this year. When I asked him 'left or right?' he knew I meant US or Australia and he picked left. I wanted him to pick right. I don't think he knows that - he does now but it's okay to say it now. I am not a fan of humidity, I am not a fan of tat, I am not a fan of flying and I was not a fan of Americans particularly either with some very notable exceptions (yes, Ann, Hadley et al I am looking at you).  Go me with my tarring etc.

So I bought him a hol to Florida for his 40th. He picked the parks, we got Universal 14 day 2 park tickets for free included with the hol, bought 3 park Busch, Aquatica and Seaworld 14 day ticket and then finally added Kennedy Space Centre on top. Compared to most Brits on tour this is a small haul of tickets, trust me.

I spent the next year planning. Tripit filled up, Advance Dining Reservations were made (the one bit that was solely for me and selfish, I confess - my other half is a vegetarian who is allergic to cheese, food as a leisure activity is an alien concept for obvious reasons) - and I read other peoples trip reports, asked some dumbass questions of my own to contribute to the mass of dumbass questions on the DIBB (it's the nicest forum I know - peoples patience never seems to run out and its appreciated so much), and generally tried to keep the little aspie bit of me quiet by knowing exactly what was going to happen and when so there were no nasty surprises and I wouldn't end up in any stupid situations which would be difficult if it could be avoided.

As a result, I wasn't excited about going until the day before. At all. It looked complicated, difficult, challenging and the weather forecast was scaring me. Work hadn't exactly been a wind down the week before, I was finding it exceptionally difficult to switch off and was, honestly, a wee bit stressed truth be told.

Staying at the Radisson Blu at Manchester Airport the night before helped. Dinner at Nandos and a film (Avengers!) in the afternoon also helped as did booking the V-Room which is an oasis of calm in a sea of airport madness. Who the hell designed airports anyway? Cold, clinical, hospital like with all the bad associations which come with that, combined with sucky heating, crap loos, old lifts, crap signage and hard seats. To be fair, Manchester beats the hell out of Luton, Gatwick, Stansted and Liverpool (I've never flown from the same airport twice yet, bar Liverpool, don't ask).

After Virgin Atlantic delivered us onto the runway safely (lets just say it was the most scary rollercoaster of the whole trip, landings aren't supposed to involve more down than forward motion, I'm sure you're not supposed to turn right to taxi straight after coming to a screaming stop which threw us all forward in our seats really quite hard actually and the clapping was absolutely deserved for the pilot who I think was possibly right on the edge of what the plane brakes could do) it finally hit me. Bit weepy. Walking into holiday brochure moment for a girl who used to cut out images from Virgin brochures to make scrapbooks of all the Florida adventures she'd one day go on (ha ha ha didn't believe I'd ever go for a second when I was a kid). Serious 'moment'.

Orlando International is a beautiful airport. Our car was fricking awesome - we got a free upgrade cos we used the Brit Guide discount code and it was automatic this and really clever that with tonnes of storage and we only got it cos we were dithering so long over colours of cars in the lot and then 'our' one turned up and we practically snatched it out of the car hire delivery ladies hand.

Hotel was...what we paid for. Most people going to Orlando seem to end up staying in quite nice hotels. We stayed I think it what I would call a functional one. T'other half was lovely and went back to reception to ask for a view of Universal which they gave us which was really sweet of them. The clientele was this really odd mix of businessman, conference goer, local reveller and tourist. It made for some awkward lift moments. Brekkie was nice, pool was small, it wasn't somewhere we felt we wanted to hang around? I don't know, I wouldn't recommend it I don't think, but nor was it a disaster.

And what followed was two weeks of utter wonderment, bewilderment, confusion, gawping, magic, smiles, tears, fireworks, fantastic customer service, appalling customer service ridiculous amounts of food and a dalliance with Disney magic which we're hoping to fully immerse ourselves in next time we go back.

Yeah, there's going to be a next time. ;O))

The one thing I've taken away from our holiday apart from a tan and some freckles?

If imagination is not mentioned anywhere in your company or organisations mission statement, company report or vision, or whatever the hell you want to call it, you are not going to survive. Innovation is nothing, absolutely nothing without imagination to fuel it first. So don't go recruiting innovators, go recruit  some imagineers - for without them, nothing new would ever happen, no idea would ever be had, and no kid would ever stand on Main Street, on Universals lot or across from a launch pad and believe that absolutely anything was possible. For two weeks, I believed anything was possible.  Considering my job and where I would like my job to take me, I intend to hold onto that belief with absolutely everything I have.

I don't agree with that statement. I don't agree with it at all. And here's why.

If there is no I in Team, then there is no Team. What constitutes a Team? A complex and fabulous mix of assorted talents, egos, sense of humour, backgrounds, loves, dislikes, musical tastes, passions and expressions - or not.

Each of those things, each of those little foibles are valuable to the Team. They contribute something fundamental to the 'dynamics' of the team - I hate the word dynamics but I can't think of a better one. So what is a dynamic? The thing that makes a team a Team. It's the way you fit together, the way you contribute together in order to achieve an objective, the way you are frictionless or frictionful, the way you trust and the way you hesitate.

If there is no I in Team, how do you know what someone will bring to your team life? How do you know when that person is likely to be sad and when they are likely to be happy? How do you know it's sunny so today is a good day to load Jo with some extra work because she'll be finished by 3pm and twiddling her thumbs and she doesn't like doing that much? How do you know that last night Sam went to a gig he has been looking forward to for weeks and this morning might not be the best time to tell him his workload for next week just doubled as a deadline shifted forward 5 days? How do you know that Ella went to a funeral on flexi time this morning and it might be best that everyone just left her alone for a while until she made it clear herself she was ready to join in again in her usual joke throwing pithy comment lobbing way?

There are multiple I's in team. Multiple personalities and multiple external influences. Lots of wrongs and lots of rights. Lots of conflicting pulls on time and thought and energy. Lots of fabulous energy which if harnessed at the right time can do simply amazing things. But simply amazing things are not achieved by one person alone - simply amazing things are achieved by pulling together, leaving the differences between I's at home and putting Team first.

But that does not mean there is no I in Team.

Sarah Lay wrote this and it's brilliant. It's brilliant because it's true. All of it, from beginning to end.

My move to GDS has been greeted by a number of different reactions and comments. Some have been cutting and have hurt. Some have left me almost breathless with their kindness and belief in me. Some have been uncalled for, some have misunderstood entirely what my job role will be and who my stakeholders will be also.

I have found it very interesting. I have found that in the main, it is women who have been breathtakingly kind, positive, and fierce in their congratulations and vicarious excitement. This may be because I do not have as many male friends as I am used to having, I don't know. It may be because there is a perception among some men that I have stepped outside of the normal promotional path and somehow 'jumped the queue'. It may even be a complete lack of understanding of what I do, how I do it, where I do it and how well I do it - I couldn't possibly comment.

But there is a marked difference.

We are sold on the fallacy that women are evil to each other in the workplace. We are fed tales of horrendous female bosses who are cutting, sarcastic, box people in, never praise, lock the talented in a box and take all their credit. Just like the word ambition, there are so many negative connotations, stories and 'legends' which swirl and grow.

In my experience, they are not true. I would not describe any of the women I know as lonely, unfulfilled, without children or husband or family, as isolated or unhappy. Instead, I see a group of women who mentor when the men wont do it, who pick up the slightly knocked about and shine them up a bit, polish them, listen and send them on their way. I see women who listen, make time to nurture, who balance the requirements of being part of a family (they don't run them the same way they run organisations, or Departments or Sections), with the needs of the slightly nervous and timid, balanced with having a whole hell of a lot of fun for themselves.

I look at them, and I see women who are not ruthless. Not negative. Not soft. Not alone. I see empowered, in control, magicians with time who balance all the needs of everyone around them and manage, most of the time to do the impossible - be happy. Not all the time, not all the people, not all the requirements and needs, but most of the time.

I don't know any man who is happy all of the time, do you? So why do we expect women to be? We do more, are more, have more than we have ever had before, and slowly but surely more of us are accepting that it is okay.

But believe me when I say, none of us are going to be getting anywhere on our own, without help, support, nurturing and mentoring. Say the word nurture to a man in a work context and I suspect you'll get a slightly panicked response. Say it to a woman and there will be no blinks.

That's not to say, women are better than men. They're just different. But in my very short experience in life I have had as many awesome female mentors as male and they have brought very different things to the table.

But the women, to the last, have never tried to undermine me, cut me down, mocked me, ignored me, patronised me, pushed my buttons or locked me in a box. I am sad to say those accolades all sit in the laps of the men I have reported to in whatever capacity over the past 10 years. I may have been lucky and I may be about to be forced to eat my words in the next 10 but if today is stupid assumptions about women dispelling day then that's my contribution.

It's late. I'm tired. But this needs writing.

JFDI died a little when some people decided it wasn't the way to do things - too much rushing in, not enough evaluation of impact. Then we tried to work out how to evaluate impact and it all went quiet.

Well. I've come to my own conclusion and it's working out okay, I think. It's this. JFDI has its place. It really does. Experimentation leads to people using LinkedIn for slightly offball reasons which yield some excellent revenue results. When someone came to me and asked if I thought it was a good idea, I told her it was kickass. I didn't _know_ it was kickass but it made my tummy do that little jump of excitement it does when someone says something awesome - so off she went and it worked.

I could have said no. I couldn't set pre-emptive performance indicators on her actions. I could have decided that it was time ill spent and asked her to focus on the already not inconsiderable successes in social media she'd achieved. But that's not what this is about.

JFDI is not rushing blind. It's using all the informed knowledge you have amassed and at any given moment someone suggesting something and you using all that knowledge and experience to say yes or no. You might be wrong. Part of that momentary decision needs to be a risk analysis on that. Time invested, money invested, users time wasted. But, still, I believe there is a place for saying yes, go for it, lets see what happens.

On the flip of this, evaluation is necessary. Not as necessary as JFDI but still nearing vital. How do I know the experiment on LinkedIn worked? I can't tell you because it's not something as ridiculously simple as advertising a job post there and I'd have to be pretty dumb to not know how to pre-emptively set evaluation of success for that.

No. Someone decided to bend the rules slightly. And why does evaluation have to be positive anyway? I can say before actioning something with surety that it will be either a success, not a success, or a bit meh. If it's a bit meh, examine what went wrong, see what could be improved, re-implement, come back in 3 months time. If a success, yattah! If not, bin it. Lessons learned, move on. But without any measurement of outcome, how do I get to the lessons learned bit? If I never learn any lessons then what on earth is the point of doing anything? No one gets it right 100% first time.

Ah. But then we are talking about local government and public money. Not getting it right first time can result in job loss, public ridicule and all kinds of such mayhem. So we must temper all our innovation, our testing, our ideas and our curiosity. We have a responsibility to do so to the people we serve. And yes, we do serve them, they pay our wages.

So that momentary decision? Which needs to be momentary or else you're taking way too long and the digital world has moved on without you? Bit more tricky. Suddenly a lot more tricky. But if you made that decision in seconds, I'd argue it was too fast, and if you made it in days you were too slow. You've got hours and minutes to assess all the risks, dangers, opportunities and potential successes before you say go on a new idea.

Be quick or be:
dead
called
asked
avoidably contacted
ridiculed
evaluated?

No. If you can't evaluate fast enough, change something. Change your idea of evaluation, talk to your performance team. Because if you're flying on the seat of your pants without your performance team, my friend, you are doing it wrong. They need to be the JFDI'ers best friend. But you're going to have to explain to them why the evaluation matrix which didn't include blog evaluation 6 months ago needs to do so now and to do that, you kind of need to a) know where they sit b) know how to talk to them and c) understand they know more about evaluation than you could ever hope to.

JFDI > evaluation != lack of innovation.

Just be quick.

While I was growing up, neither of my parents worked. Various reasons. 

I've got dragged into a conversation which is not suitable for 140 so here it is in long form.

Pinterest was, until last week, something I'd been banging on about for a year. I'd also been using it - to plan group holidays, to find weight loss inspiration and clothes to fit in when I'm smaller, to collect wise words and bits for my bike I adore.

Last week, the entire world suddenly went - 'Pinterest is awesome!'.

I had a conversation with a male friend last week which amounted to 'I had a dabble but it's 'too fluffy' for geeks like me'.

The inferences there are many. a) I am not a geek like him. b) it's for girls.

So when I saw the instagram floating around as linked to in the previous post I was annoyed. No, pinning is not just for girls, no it's not just about recipes and no it's not fluffy either. It's a useful resource for sharing and collaborating on design influences whether you're a web designer or trying to do an interior design for someone and want to share colour swatches with them from pinning paint swatches.

It's a brilliant way of sharing inspiration and smiles, of sharing with the world your hopes and dreams or keeping them private if you want to. It's very visual, something you'd have thought would appeal to boys as we are famously told boys do pictures and girls do words when it comes to certain things.

But no, What feels to be a predominantly female userbase find a social network all to themselves and it's dismissed in two words - fluffy or recipes.

Forgive me if the thought that now the world knows about it it will be covered in adverts and spam depresses me - but I'd rather be misunderstood and left to enjoy a lovely creative shiny space than have it descended on by idiots who can only ever see social media as a 'tool' and not something to be played with and enjoyed. Points are given, of course, for the ability to do both and not annoy the hell out of me.

My antidote to the donut meme doing the rounds:

Twitter - I am eating a donut. Or is it doughnut? Whatever, I'm eating it.
Facebook - I'm eating a doughnut LOL I'm covered in sugar but my boyfriend says I musn't lick my lips. LOL.
Foursquare - Serve the best doughnuts evah.
Instagram - There's something slightly weird about this doughnut - look!
Youtube - This is my cat. Chasing doughnuts on a string. So cute.
LinkedIn - I sell doughnuts. I can sell doughnuts to anyone you ask me to (they've probably never even eaten a doughnut)
Pinterest - I want to make doughnuts that look just like this, look at the way the light falls on the crystallised sugar.
Last FM - I'm listening to something by a band who've cited The Doughnuts as an influence. They're crap.
Spotify - I'm listening to The Doughnuts and they absolutely rock.
G+ - I'm going to talk about doughnuts. I'm not sure what the point of writing here about doughnuts is cos I'm so confused by whose circle I'm not in but that whom I've got within mine I can't work out who I'm telling about doughnuts in the first place.

I tend to remember in snapshots so this is a collection, if you like, or windows into my SFX weekend. Quick explanation: I'm a geek but a tech/digital geek, my other half is the sci-fi/fantasy fan boy of the two of us. However, after this weekend, I'm not so sure that's still the case.

Brian Blessed


I have never seen Flash Gordon, I didn't see his Everest programme. But somehow, this loud proud Yorkshire man managed to keep my undivided attention for an hour which involved Pavarotti impressions, the expected Gordon's ALIVE echoing through the 'shed' and the massive laugh. In fact the laugh and the voice and the singing are so voluminous that you get a sense he's larger than he is so when he said he'd climbed Everest I sort of boggled a bit. Turns out, he's all beard - he's quite skinny under there. And so he should be because as he explained in his Q & A masterfully unguided by poor old Jordan Filey (who eventually simply gave up trying to stem the stream of consciousness emitting from Brian's mouth and just let him get on with it), he's 1st reserve to go up on the ISS.

Yeah.

'Sick of this getting old thing, you're only as old as you are' he says. Well, quite. Had to leave early due to snow warnings and needing to get back to 3,000 waif and stray animals and for a centrifuge training session this morning. He left us with words echoing in our ears which I have to paraphrase as I can't remember the exact words 'you are all unique and you all have one thing which you are brilliant at, excel at. Find that thing and live the adventure and don't let the bastards get you down'.

Did we win?


A panel ably hosted by Paul Cornell (I think) about whether sci-fi/fantasy is now so mainstream we don't need to push any more for its acceptance in the UK.

The discussion was fascinating but I wanted to say something to the panel but failed on the bravery roll so here it is. Yes Dr Who contributed to it though I also agree it is now a 'family' show rather than being terrifying. Yes I agree Russell T Davies is a genius and he did the right thing in almost introducing sci-fi by stealth. But that's not where the tipping point came from, I don't think. I think it came from a period of time where almost every single person on a carriage back in the early 2000's had a certain hardback book open. Where almost everyone I knew had read or was reading Harry Potter and where for the first time in as long as I can remember, people queued at midnight for a book. Just a book. A bit of paper with some words printed on it.

That tube carriage reflected the demographic of this weekend. All ages, predominantly white but not all, and equal gender split. I believe the most important demographic swing of recent years when it comes to sci-fi/fantasy is the gender shift. I remember a time when it was seen as a predominantly bloke thing to read sci-fi/fantasy or to watch sci-fi/fantasy films. Not any more. The viewing figures for Being Human are what they are, the viewing figures for Dr Who are what they are, the success of the X Files was what it was because of it's fundamental  ability to appeal to both genders. We're half the population, we're half the income and you finally gave us something we could believe in, becomes fans of, love and adore.

You gave us New Who. And it was the gateway drug for me and a whole tonne of other girls too. So thank you, for that, but please understand this too. Don't ignore us. Ask us on to panels, ask us to contribute. And finally, read this lovely post from my friend Julie and understand this: how much money has that one woman spent on sci-fi and fantasy in her life? Keep all of us new girls and you're coffers will indeed be bulging. It's worth it in the long run because keep us engaged, keep us interested and give us something to talk about and spend money on and we'll be with you for a long old time.

Eve Myles


Funny, inspiring, humble and gives good interview - such a lovely lovely lady. Well okay pints of wine indicate perhaps not a lady but you know...

Just a minute


Involved verbal sparring of such epic proportions between China Meiville and Joe Abercrombie that half of us got left behind and the other half just sat open jawed. Paul Cornell coralled with aplomb and much humour and...I don't laugh much. I have a slightly silly but also leftfield since of humour and I was eye leaking at some points from laughing so damn much. It was childish, intellectual, silly and random and summed the weekend up perfectly. Simply epic.

The other bits


Pontins. Well, it's Pontins. If you're expecting luxury, you're in the wrong place, go stay in a static caravan or a cottage. You can't beat it for staggering distance back from the fun though and once we'd worked out how the heating worked, we were dry and warm if not a bit sore from the sofabed. Yes, it smelt for a while but once it had dried out it got better, and the logistics of checking in and the signing queues aside, the space worked really well. There were bottlenecks on the Friday but that seemed to reduce on the Saturday. There weren't enough seats but there simply wasn't enough space to add more. Pat Sharpe can't DJ for toffee but can for pretty girls which was a bit uncomfortable in places. I think dancing girls might need to cross with increased female attendance in future - the complaints and mutterings where more this year than last.

The food was dire, the queue for it more so. There really weren't enough staff and all of this I lay at the door of Pontins themselves and not the SFX team because they also host Hard Rock Hell there who eat and drink the same amount as us geeks do and it was nowhere near this bad when we went to that event.

The maps discussion was circular and badly moderated but turned out okay in the end. We didn't get a single autograph all weekend but we didn't much mind. We sucked at the Blastermind quiz but enjoyed it immensely anyway and the Awards ceremony excelled past years for the brilliant acceptance videos (but I also think that surely next year more stars are going to have to make the effort and actually turn up because it's actually getting insulting now that people wont). The production from the SFX lot is getting better every year and as per every other year their responses to tweets and questions were patient and helpful.

All in all I enjoyed this weekender much more than last. There was more 'intellectual' discussion perhaps, more passion and fire, more entertaining interviewees? I don't know. I loved that the chalet locations meant we didn't hear thumping music until 3am. I loved that the sunrise was beautiful. I loved the costumes and the friendliness. I loved being invisible to a lot of people, I loved the random acts of kindness. I loved the feeling of being able to just be silly and geeky and childish and it not being remotely frowned on.

My only complaint, really seriously only complaint?

Wi-fi. Seriously, really seriously, can you lot sort a wi-fi booster or something for next year or bring your own?

The law on smacking is there to protect those who are parented by people who don't understand too far. Don't understand the fine line between loving parenting and a quite correct intent to teach a child who is struggling with right and wrong via verbal channels and subduing and damaging. Who don't understand that leaving a red mark (or worse bruising) can leave damage years after the bruise has faded.

The law is there to protect the vulnerable.

If you remove that law, you remove protection and the line which has been drawn in the blurry murky water of what is 'acceptable to society' as punishment and what is 'acceptable within a family' as punishment.

I do not believe that the State should legislate against all eventualities when it comes to parenting. I do believe in protection for those unfortunate enough to be born to the wrong people.

We should be looking to teach those struggling with errant children and violent teenagers how to deal with them better, how to be better parents, without resorting to smacking. I believe there was a time when smacking was an acceptable form of teaching right from wrong. I do not believe we exist in that time any more.

I believe we should be offering parents who are honest and brave enough some form of assistance. We should be examining why social constructs collapsed and continue to collapse.

We should tackle the root of the problem. Not 'slap' a sticking plaster over the top of the bruising and hoping it all goes away.

I consider myself a modern feminist, generally. What does that mean?
Well, it means I'm probably going to get shouted at for this post, but here goes nothing.

A modern feminist, to me, is:
Someone who recognises it is possible to be a feminist whether you are a mother or not
Someone who recognises that not being a mother is not dysfunctional or weird or strange; but that being a mother is not either.
Someone who understands that women are, on average paid less, but that there are contributory factors to this which need to be addressed as well as landing all of this in the laps of the 'patriarchy' including literacy and numeracy levels, combined with likely genders of carers of parents/grandparents mixed with part time working mixed with....you get the picture.
Someone who understands bras are nothing to do with it.
Someone who recognises that women at the top (and at the bottom and the middle too) leads to a more balanced workforce with mixed outlooks, backgrounds and life experiences.
Someone who understands that sex can and is frequently used as a weapon, that situations that are not intimidating for men can be for women for this reason and that suggesting visiting a lap dancing club as part of business entertainment is so massively inappropriate it is not funny.

I deliberately didn't specify gender. Anyone can be a feminist. Anyone can have an opinion. We're all in this together, right?

Except then I come to read Helen Lewis Hasteley and Zoe Stavri discussing Steven Moffat and intimating quite strongly that he has a problem with women and I despair.

Of all the people to attack, for a start, for their attitude to women. Surely there must be better targets to devote ones time to in calling out on their attitude. Then there's the treatment of Irene Adler.

Irene Adler is redepicted in Steven Moffat's version of Sherlock as a dominatrix. Now, this profession comes in for some stick normally anyway, being as how half the feminists I know think dominatrices are a betrayal to the gender and the other half think they're taking power back and using it to have some fun and make some money while they're doing it. Lets not even get into a discussion about whether a dominatrix who is paid can ever enjoy her job - I'm simply not going there.

Where I do want to go is the assumption that switching Adler into this role took power away from her somehow. Did I imagine the scene where she beat Sherlock to the ground? Did I imagine the at least hour long sparring of minds as each tried to get the better of the other? Perhaps I misinterpreted the scene of execution as one where an agent who had failed was paying for her failure in exactly the same way as a male agent would be expected to do in that country. Was I not supposed to laugh at the changed ring tone which paid hommage to a certain film, was I not supposed to recognise the power struggle between two fiercely intelligent people, both striving continuously for the upper hand and both finding it amusing and satisfying both to be winner and runner up because neither is actually failure at all?

I don't think I have misread this episode. I have had, as evidently the two ladies discussing Moffat in the article have not, had the pleasure of adding Baskerville to my viewing arsenal when assessing Moffats attitude to women - is it accidental that the female main lead aside from the psychologist is yes, the one who is a mother and accidentally mixed up her glow in the dark rabbits but also, as it happens, is involved in unravelling the final solution to the tricky conundrum?

No. I don't think Moffat has an issue with women. I think Moffat actually understands women all too well. He paints them in variety, just as we are, as mothers, as smarter than some and less smart than others, as dominant women but also as biologists and psychologists.

What I believe requires more acknowledgement is that there is a very obviously Aspergers character on our screen being beautifully and eloquently depicted by someone who isn't, and who is being given lines and situations which highlight wonderfully the confusion, frustration and recognition of being 'other'.

I think that Sherlock is something to be celebrated, not berated.

I'm going to call you Jamie because I know the Jamie I used to know would have been right in the middle of the crowd in Hackney. Because you were always in the middle of everything, weren't you? Had to try everything, push every boundary. No authority figures button was unpressed either and that included me - you were a handful and no mistake. The only person you'd ever listen to was your advocate but you wore her down so much her relationship with her boyfriend started to suffer. And then you discovered she was self conscious about her weight, went on the attack verbally one day because you had to see how far you could push her and you found out. She quit advocacy altogether.

People like you, I can understand. I don't condone your actions. I don't agree with the way you live your life, I think you're wasting an obviously bright mind - if you applied half the energy you devote to stealing to fund your drug habit to running an advocacy service, a social enterprise to try and stop more kids ending up like you, then you'd be a very very very successful man.

Instead, you walk into a pharmacy every morning at the same time and collect your methadone script. It doesn't stop the clucking when you run out of the real stuff but it at least makes it vaguely tolerable. And that's all you expect of life, really, that it's tolerable. Occasionally your mum emerges from her drunken stupor to enquire from the prison service, the probation service, the social workers if you're ok, but not often. Not often at all. She still lives in the flat where you were raised. Water runs down the bare plaster on the walls, there's graffiti scrawled on the walls, the carpets are threadbare and the door is hanging on for dear life - just like it's owner.

I'd say it was inevitable, how you now live your life, but I know it's not. You chose. We all choose. And as a result of your small part in the recent chaos, suddenly everyone is interested in why you chose. When you chose. How you chose. Who made you choose?

Your mother was invisible. Unless she wasn't and then it was painful. Your teachers gave up and social services lost you because you simply gave everybody the slip and your mother never noticed if you were there or not when she was really drunk. You got free rides wherever you wanted on the DLR because the conductors were too scared to challenge your big group you travel everywhere with - there's safety in numbers. You had social workers but they left, went off sick, moved. The only structure, routine, cohesion and predictability in your life has come from the inevitable flow of police-court-prison that your life revolves around.

To me, it is inevitable that some people from your background will end up the way you did. You don't have friends, you have a pack. You don't have the luxury of security or ever letting your guard down - your mother can't hurt you any more but other people can and with far more lethal things than fists. Your life is wrapped in fear, crack smoke, needles, dead friends.

I never once heard you laugh.
I never once saw you enjoy something simply for what it was.
I saw you let your guard down occasionally with your advocate, but not very often.
I very rarely saw you smile.
I never saw you do something for someone simply because you could or should unless there was something in it for you.

I understand. But I don't have the answer. Because the answer lies with your mother and how do we break the circle and the cycle? How do we intervene? Were the social workers any help? Did you get any advice from youth workers or school? Did you ever feel safe anywhere? Did you ever go somewhere where you felt safe enough to smile and laugh and let your guard down?

We need to talk to you Jamie.

But you know, deep down I know you're dead from an overdose, from an infected needle, from one fight too many, from a bad batch of heroin, from someone who you gave too much lip to who was carrying more than a knife.

And that too, feels inevitable.

I made a promise inside a tube which banged loudly and was horrifically claustrophobic. I made it last year. I made it because I thought briefly I was skating on the edge of bad diagnoses of bad things, bad things with bad futures and bad pain and bad everything.

I promised I would do what made me happy.

That might sound selfish. It might sound self indulgent. It might sound plain impossible.

I thought I was going to die. The dye ran around my brain and in the end what they thought they'd seen was not. I was lucky. There might be a next time. I might not be quite so lucky next time. I do not want to get to 80 and regret anything. I do not want to waste a second. This week we have been on holiday and people ask when we're going to stop.

The answer is, when I'm 80. That's when I'll stop. When I can't ride or climb or dance or run or hike or scramble or slide or swim or wriggle or marvel or aspire or inspire or dream, anymore.

Everyone says life's too short. Some know it is, to some they're just words to be thrown away, lip service. People laugh at me for this attitude, laugh at the determination to experience absolutely everything, absolutely right now. They think nothing bad will ever happen. That the 1 in 4 will always be someone else. That running the Race for Life will always be for someone else.

I made a promise. Don't waste it, don't get blasé, don't assume, don't turn your back, don't ignore, don't laugh. Both hands, fingernails, fingertips. Hold on as tight as you can, for as long as you can, see everything, fear nothing, breath deeply and laugh.

So I'm asking a pretty big question this week. I've been asking it for a long long time. Am I good enough? Am I any good at all? Should I just give up and go home?

Because there's got to be a question, and the answer has to be yes. Yes, I am happy.

Death is always pointless, isn't it. No one gains, except if the person dying was in pain before and then, perhaps. 

So, attached is an afternoons research on the line up of Camp Bestival. Every performer currently listed under the Performer line up on the official Camp Bestival website is on there. The comments and views are mine, but I figured the framework might be useful to someone else.

If nothing else, delete my comments, add yours, and make your own decisions about whether you want to see people or not. I hate reggae (sorry, there aren't many genres I can say that about) so anything that sits firmly there is off my list.

Camp Bestival 2011 Performers Cribs List

So. 

Everyone loves where they grew up, don't they? Don't they?

I did. I didn't when I finally reached the age where cinemas and nightclubs required driving and crashing on floors but before that mini-watershed, that major irritation which led me all the way to the heady heights of....Plymouth, well I loved it. I still do.

I understand the way nostalgia works. I know it casts a filter (tilt-shift?) across all your memories. Except on this I am confused because my childhood was....complicated, and so there is no reason for me to remember through glowing eyes, instead only for everything to be cast in grey. And yet. And so. A siren call for a man also entwined within my memories, but here lies only the good.

I grew up 'down the road' from Glastonbury. But I also grew up down the road from Lyme Regis. From Bridport. From Minehead and Weston Super Mare. From Exmoor and Dartmoor, Exeter and Bristol. I grew up in the middle of quite the most beautiful, remote, peaceful, heavenly place. Flat, mind. Something I never understood my mother banging on about, you know. Not until I moved back to the county where I was born and left before I knew it and understood the siren call of hills and mountains and being on a level with the top of everything and then suddenly I understood.

I've run up Glastonbury Tor and reached the top a little out of breath. I have climbed painfully to the top, dying quietly on the way up, cursing the lunatics who thought putting a hill in that configuration was a good idea. I've sat with my eyes closed as the sun set, I've sat with my eyes open watching the sun rise, the resonating notes of a didgeridoo accompanying both. I've walked up it following the paths and I've walked up it following the paths.

But it's not just that. I've walked down country lanes in silence. Utter and complete silence. No planes, no cars, no people, no bikes, no helicopters (you live in Somerset? You know that's relevant), no microlights. I say in silence, but of course it never is, because the corn rustles in the breeze, the birds call to each other, the beez buzz and the sun shines. It shines on and on and on, in my memories but also in my photographs. The lanes are lined with foxgloves and cow parsley, after the passage of the poppies and cornflowers which were preceded by the primroses and snowdrops. The rhythm of the year is measured and marked, harvest festivals, easter fetes, may days with may poles and ribbons and learning the steps and always forgetting them again. I country danced in front of the cathedral at Wells. I walked for miles in the cold which felt terrible causing chilblains and white fingers, icicles inside the window but actually were no cold at all compared to how cold it is here. We cycled for miles in the sunshine, crashing out whenever we needed to, snatching sneaky cigarettes in the corners of farmers fields, on the wall at the bottom of the car park, or up the tree at the back of the local park. We spent hours on that wall, come rain or shine, occasionally with chips and curry sauce to warm us up from the Chinese (the only Chinese in a 15 mile radius) around the corner.

I've watched endless carnivals. Not many people know about Somerset's insane obsession with decorating flatbed trucks with a metric tonne of lights, festooned with people dancing (tied on to their perilous perches with hidden climbing harnsesses). Or the fair which rivals Nottingham's. I only went once to the Bridgwater fair but I'll never forget it. I've driven and ridden past endless neon cardboard arrows pinned to signposts and road names, and finally found out what they were for one night when we followed them into somewhere North of Taunton and the tunes and DJ's and people from school who didn't expect to see me there all came together and suddenly the pitch shifted every so slightly.

I might have been born in Lancashire and I love Lancashire, so I do. My mother is from here and it seems appropriate that circles close. But I am a hippy at heart, a child allowed to run free for less than charitable reasons but free nevertheless and my heart belongs to Nag Champa and patchwork, to treadles and spinning, to picking fruit and actually making jam and pies with it (endless pies, endless jams), to folkish music and common land used well and properly, to horses used well and properly, to chocolate box covers the tourists haven't discovered yet, to rope swings and splashes, to jam jars full of minnows, to climbing trees and learning to map read, to eyes full of wonder and mist and hope and endless beauty.

Somerset is endless beauty. Summer land. Sun sets. Split heart.

I'm pining for a home that is no more, right now. I grew up in Somerset. My family are still in Somerset. Most of my childhood friends never left. I'm the one who's roamed and wandered and explored as much of the country as possible.

I haven't been back since I visited my mum after after her operation 3 years ago. We haven't visited since because my mother has not, in the 16 years since I left home at 18 ever come to visit me and I lost my patience, finally.

Recent events at this end of the country, where I moved because of a boy, have served a reminder that home is where the heart is and I miss Somerset and my mum really rather a lot.

Unfortunately, it seems I will need to make the journey back alone. But I think it's time to make it no matter how hard it might be. She's not the same after a head lamp post interface - maybe that's why she never calls, never emails, never speaks. I don't know. Maybe she forgets I exist. I don't know that either. But even if my mother doesn't care much, I care about a random sequence of fields which I grew up in, roamed across, fell over in and cycled through.

Yep, it's Glastonbury time. And every year it hurts. It's as much a part of Somerset as the Lord Majors show is part of London. It's a rollicking spread of imagination let loose. It's no edges and no limits. It's sunsets watched slowly while getting quietly drunk. It's dreams made real in crazy sculptures and suits relinquished in favour of tutus and mankinis. It's 4.5 miles of utter insanity and I want to go back because it's tied to me, because it epitomises a lost Somerset which has disintegrated beneath the wheels of a 4 x 4, because you can try and make Glastonbury as refined as you like but it will always always always be about the hippies and the politics and the right to disagree, to me.

I remember how it used to be, I experienced, very briefly, how it used to be and by the sounds of it, Michael Eavis is slowly realising there were merits in how it used to be. It used to be a temporary town called freedom and it needs to be reborn.

I've disappeared a little into analogue recently - I've become absolutely obsessed with typography and magazines. It started with Stack Magazines - a subscription service where you get sent a different magazine every month on rotation from a group of 'independent' magazines that are slightly quirky - so Wire, Little White Lies, Oh Comely, to name but a few. It's hit and miss but I really love the ethos.

Then I did some research on bike magazines to further feed my obsession and discovered The Ride, Rouleur, Privateer and Boneshaker, among many many others (though those are the ones which I think will persist when the whole fixie frenzy has died down).

From there, it's been a wonderful and rewarding journey via Frankie, Make, Fire and Knives, Sew, Monocle....resulting in subscriptions to not only Stack, but Singletrack and Wired UK.

By now, you're probably thinking 'how can one person read all of those magazines'. Well, I have a confession to make. Quite easily. I finished reading Frankie 70 minutes after opening the cover on the bus journey into Manchester this morning. I can read half of Boneshaker in bed before I go to sleep. My RSS feed would probably terrify a lot of people - it doesn't really keep me occupied. I was consuming masses of information that was work related but due to various factors, not least feeling entirely burnt out and watching my motivation disappearing quickly down the pan, there is a space where the work reading once was and instead of local government I instead read about beautiful fabrics, beautiful dresses, beautiful journeys and beautiful bikes, perhaps in the hope that some of the beauty will rub off on me. All of these magazines are beautifully designed, all are beautifully laid out. All are full of elegant and precise words and prose, accompanied by excellent illustrations.

And perhaps that's the attraction. The web is not. Whether we like it or not, the nods to accessibility and IE6 in local government mean that I spend my day looking at websites which are, at best, functional, and most of the time not even that. They're minimal and workmanlike. They're completely focussed on delivering information and transactions as quickly and as painlessly as possible - they are not designed to intrigue, nor to warm, to elicit laughter nor pique curiosity.

My magazines are a defence against the utilitarian necessity of simplicity. They are a rebellion.

There will always be a place for analogue in my life.

I'm getting a little tired of this, I thought, as I read an article explaining that Facebook had rolled out yet another change to their service without notifying anyone, and one which has potentially massive consequences some well paid advisor seems to have completely overlooked.

I'm referring, of course, to the automatic facial recognition and subsequent tagging technology which Facebook has just rolled out and been forced to apologise for. But lets start at the beginning because the beginning isn't here. The beginning of this story is with this article on Cnet among other sites which quoted Facebook Vice President of Product as saying "Once you know that, you can remove the tag, or you can promote it to your friends, or you can write the person and say, 'I'm not that psyched about this photo.'"


We'll come back to the utter stupidity of that statement in a moment.


Meanwhile, there is the calm before the storm in this article which explains that the 'feature' has launched. The key word in the entire article, I think, is the word quietly. I didn't know this was coming and I read quite a bit and try and least nod my head in the direction of keeping up with social media developments. One questions exactly why a company, who 6 months ago was singing the praises of a technological development they'd achieved, suddenly decided to go ahead with the launch but ever so quietly. Surely if you had reservations about the launch, that you needed to be tippy toey about it, you'd not launch it at all?


I'm guessing the words 'floating' and 'stocks we haven't even officially sold yet' are playing a part here. And that's worrying, because this is peoples privacy which is being sacrificed at the alter of corporate stakeholder satisfaction. This is not selling a product. This is, I think, about ultimately selling data. And then there's that slightly unfortunate issue with Google - not great for your share price you don't have yet either. 


So what's my problem?

How stupid do you have to be to not learn from the first time you made a mistake and set something to opt out instead of opt in? How stupid do you have to be to not understand that there is only so much damage your brand can take before users abandon you? Has no one learnt how fickle users can be on the internet yet? Has no one over in silicon valley been reading the slightly nervous sounding and increasingly frequent editorials about bubbles bursting yet again?

But that's not the thing really baking my noodle right now. No. Lets go back to the quote from the VP at Facebook:
"Once you know that, you can remove the tag, or you can promote it to your friends, or you can write the person and say, 'I'm not that psyched about this photo."

Or, and this is just another scenario off the top of my head, you can write the person and say 'I'm not that psyched about this photo' and they can turn around and say 'sorry sister, but you ran off with my boyfriend, no way am I deleting this photo of you which makes you look like a complete idiot and in the process ruin any chance of anyone ever employing you ever again'

Or, maybe you can write them and say 'I'm not that psyched about this photo because my psycho father who I have moved to another State to get away from, via a refuge and a few intervening years doesn't know what I look like and I have been incredibly careful about which Facebook photos get tagged with me and all my friends knew it was quite important not to tag me in Facebook photos but thanks to this new facial recognition software, and me not noticing, every photo I've ever been in but not been tagged on can now be seen by the entire world, because even if my privacy settings are locked down tight, I am now completely and utterly at the mercy of every other person in the entire worlds privacy settings who has a photo on their profile which I happen to be in - even if it's waaaaay in the background and I happened to be walking by accidentally'

You think I'm reaching?

Okay, how about the one where a 10 year marriage breaks up because someone is caught in a photo in the background passing by - caught somewhere where they shouldn't be.

The implications are endless. And that's before you've taken the vindictive and frankly sometimes downright nasty environment of high schools and secondary schools into account.

I may be forced to use Facebook as part of my job, I may have to have an account for testing purposes and because all social invites are placed there these days, but don't expect me to have anything but scorn for a company and a system which is free, oh yes it is, but is taking advantage of peoples unfamiliarity with tech at every turn and doing the equivalent of what banks were doing in the 80's with small print - intentionally confusing and overwhelming people so they didn't bother to read anything and just signed on the dotted line.

I have taken the Guardian Oxbridge bashing with a pinch of salt, until last week when it seemed to blow up from the odd tweets here and there into something far more loud and obnoxious.

New journalist does not equal old journalist. But you can be both. You can respect both. And while you do, you can be questioning the nature, repeatedly, of what it is to be a journalist in this modern age.