Along came the spider

Continuing my intermittent ramble about the potential for a network of environmental bloggers, and what’s already out there that does something similar – now we come to the politicals.

Lib Dem Voice, now as I understand it the Lib Dems have a more empowered grassroots, and a democratic decision making structure, which beggars belief when one considers how much of a pickle they’ve got themselves into. However Lib Dem Voice and LibDem blogs do a reasonable job of connecting together the disparate voices of the party. Interesting things include:

• Ask that each blogger is a Lib Dem member – we could do this, and it’d be interesting but probably too restrictive. Maybe we could offer a bonus badge / widget to such folk. This might be an idea in itself, as an offer to such folk, to use as they choose.
• There’s a more dominant mix of official blog posts, as features, than the blog roll which is kind of a big list. Given my current thinking as to how official blogs are separated from bloggers and from local folk, I think this would be an authoritarian step too far.
• There’s a link to LibDig which I don’t quite get. It looks like a more primitive form of micro-blogging. I should check out this Digg it thing. However there’s a slot here for video, which begs the question should there be a separate space / blog roll for videos and video diaries.

Still compared to Mumsnet there’s not much to learn here.

Labour have a Campaign Engine room, which I first thought looked like a bloggers machine, but instead it looks like a party political version of 38 degrees, inviting people to start campaigns and gather signatures on an e-petition. Well worth remembering the next time a Labour MP, complains about the worthlessness of such devices.

Labour central offers the promise of bringing all such blogs under one roof but fails to do so, and Bloggers4Labour simply doesn’t seem to work, which is kind of disappointing. How is one to pinch their ideas, if they’re broken?

Finally the Tories have conservative home, which looks a bit dull, a slightly better showing than Labour – it at least works but without the sense of community of LibDem Voice.

Just to make sure I had a quick look in at the Green Party blogs which is very dead indeed although there seem to be a fair few active blogs out there. I guess there’s a lesson here about being too reliant on the grassroots to keep such things up to date.

For now, that seems to confirm Mumsnet is where it’s at, so time to have a chat / setup a meeting and see what they have to say. And /or probably have a word with the Argentinians about the idea of a pilot in a 2nd language.

There’s something out there (in the blogosphere)

Following on from the ramble about why I want to encourage, and support, people blogging the question rises has this been down before, and what works. Some research later.

Amnesty, seemed have to tired something similar and failed. At the time of writing their bloggers network seems to be being reworked / rebuilt, and a friendly email to the head of their web team seem to have gone ignore. I guess the format as was, didn’t really inspire people to blog – which is a good cautionary tale, and a shame as there’s some cool 3rd party resources aimed at encouraging people to blog on a similar themes via Global Voices advocacy.

[updated] The Amnesty bloggers network seems to be online again, although it doesn’t seem any different. There are 430 (ish) registered bloggers, of which perhaps 10-15 have blogged in the last month, so perhaps 3%. Of these 4-5 are staff – which is an interesting idea in itself – to what extent should one encourage staff to get involved, or even to oblige them to be involved (pros and cons). Finally there’s also some promoted blogs – ‘storified by Amnesty UK’ – so one wonders how much these have been edited into shape.

Mumsnet, ok I found this by happen chance, and it looks to be about as good as it can get. There’s loads of people involved, which may be more of a reflection of the size of their community / readership, then the degree to which they inspire people to blog. Still I’m jealous. OK things that leap out.

• The directory is helpful, sortable in many different ways (categories, A-Z, recency, random), and searchable which is probably better than we can manage.
• The ask is that the blog sticks to editorial guidelines, and is updated at least once a month – this seems low, but perhaps as a bare minimum.
• Is there a cross fertilisation option here – can we ask bloggers to register at Mumsnet as well? if they have something interesting to say to both audiances - oh and vice versa - asking relevant Mumsnet folk to register with us as well?
• The product review widget is a nice reward / motivator and a clever bit of advertising. Not sure how to pinch this idea.
• There are some big names here, e.g. David Miliband, and is there an option to outreach to some targeted friendly people, and/or some interesting others – Chris Huhne? Trials and tribulations on being on the inside, and why I think environmental campaigners are now a pain the bum
• There’s either a profile for each blogger, or a description widget that includes a default Twitter link. Probably a Facebook page link would be a good idea too.
• I can’t face counting them, but there’s probably 800-1000 blogs listed here, which if they’ve all been updated within the month is dead impressive, and powerful. If Mumsnet has 1.6 million unique monthly users, then pro rate we should be able to manage 80-100 blogs (in addition to local presences?)
• Backing the blog network up, is a lively forum, with 3-4 topics a day and 10-100+ replies to each post. There is a lively self supporting community here. Equally someone’s on the case responding to folk, so there may be reasonable team of community managers at work here.
• There’s another as to have 4-6 blog posts up before you can join, seems like a reasonable idea.
• There’s a separate Facebook page, which again seems like a good idea, although in this case less well used, but a way to promote active members of the community – by making them admins.
• The split header block / carousel into links through to profiled blog, seems stong - and again worth replicating
• Bloggers Twitter stream seems like a must have / makes sense.
• Dual top navigation bar, which moves as you scroll also cool – but probably technically difficult.
• Local pages interesting – especially the local directory, and the associated online interactivity. i.e. folk can contribute listings, freecycle stuff, act as a Tsarina (online community manager)
• Maybe also an idea to crowdsource local issues
• Some good tips on blogging anonymously, from encrypted emails to hiding your IP address

Next up Lib Dem voice, and the Labour campaign engine room

Beginnings of a blog about blogging

So I’ve touched about some embryonic plans to develop a new network of progressive minded bloggers, with environmental tendencies, so I thought I’d ask myself why, and what else is out there.

The why?
1) With or without a theory of digital memes, the blogosphere remains important as a tool to reach both the mainstream media, and digital audiences. Ideas and stories that get passed around do well on Google (do people still use other search engines – for better or worse?), and magnify the voice of the progressive agenda. Those stories and ideas eventually recruit others into a wider movement, and influence the behaviour of decision makers – through the perception of noise out there.

If there isn’t an organisation goal (campaign or comms) that this serves, then we should write one.

2) This feels like the right thing to do, and is perhaps even morally correct – which is either something Ghandi or Confucius touched upon. Giving people the tools to make their voices heard online, is a mirror of the work I’ve been doing to enable people to influence, and have a voice, within the political system by lobbying their local MP – and/or significant other local decision makers.

On a broader level society and the state, could be tasked to give everyone this power. Being a bear of limited means, I’ll start with the folk who broadly share the same world view as I.

3) If we want to engage digitally minded people in a sustained way, then there needs to be something constructive for them to do, in between short term campaign projects. This is a perennial problem offline, and here we have an open ended invite to involve people in an ongoing way, using their own initative and creativity, to contribute organically to a changing digital consciousness.

As an engagement option, this sits well of a digital ladder, or as a rock within the streams of engagement – for those who dislike ladders.

Or in one line, this is a useful thing to do, the right thing to do and the pragmatic thing to do.

To be continued

Observations in the pub

I stumbled upon this; Don't dump on me: the 4 behaviours of the social web, in an old fashioned way i.e. using Google as opposed to a clever digital tool. The theory behind it appealed, although I suspect it’s too clever to be actually true, and it got me to thinking.

Back in the day, when we were campaigning for the UK climate change law, we had at our disposal lots of energy, resources and youthful talent (myself excepted). We had a free hand to try many things, and my love of pubs, extensive research (drinking), a random Futerra lecture about engaging new audiences lots of pub conversations led me to push the idea of environmentally themed pub quizzes.

The theory went like this. Folk develop and shape their ideas in pub conversations – and the British spend a lot of time in the pubs. After a few pints, pub conversations evolve into a boasting competition – think the skalds of Viking sagas but without the weapons. The essence of a boasting completion is to impress your friends (and the opposite sex) with some innovative quip, or a delicate morsel of information – the Fact (capitalisation intended). Well performing Facts get remembered and recycled into the next pub conversation making one seem witty and urbane.

So the question is how to introduce such Facts into the conversation? We’d done beer mats – albeit badly, and whereas in hindsight there are probably a dozen other tools available (posters on toilet doors remain interesting to me), we ended up with pub quizzes. The idea would be to make them fun, focused on those nuggets- which people remember, and we’d build support for change, one pint at a time.

Then of course I asked a campaigner to write some questions (I was more naïve back them) and the quiz degenerated into a dull quagmire of climate geekery [pdf], and terrifying factoids to keep one up at night. So much for something light-hearted to reach new audiences and to sneak ideas into popular debate, but still the idea is sound.

So back to social behaviour; the essence is that in the digital world there are droplets (or content generator) who create ideas, or information. Then these ideas / information are distributed by sharers, tofolk (polishers) who then reflect, comment on and polish those ideas before republishing them. Again they are shared and polished again, until over time the waves of internet tides slowly shape those ideas into new pearls, ideas that have been refined, and passed around until they become the new memes of how things should be, or always have been.

As a theory, no one I know has seen it to be true, but again the idea seems sound, it feels like a series of pub conversation, and more how debate used to be, before the passivity of relying on Television to tell you what you think (Before TV).

100 years ago debate and the fundamentals of politics happened in church halls, working men’s clubs and public meetings and attracted large amounts of people to get involved / attend. Whereas a bit old skool but useful (I’ve organised a lot of public meetings), this remains how people discuss and decide what to think about an issue or a candidate. So where are those online spaces, the digital interactive challenges to spoon fed media? And how to create and nurture them?

New ideas do appear, and they are powerful when they do. Once upon a time, killing whales was completely acceptable, cutting down the rainforests was the sensible thing to do, burning fossil fuels was never going to affect humanity, but somehow the meme changed, and the abstract became something people care passionately about. So how to feed and propagate such ideas and memes in the digital sphere?

The theory of droplets, distributors, polishers and pearls is too academic for a pragmatist, but perhaps if I engineer the structures to create the conversation, to allow like-minded people to generate content, to discuss and to pass the content around – then maybe I can model a new theory, but based on an observable reality that matches the digital pathways we carve.