Last Friday, I spent most of the day at this NAVCA ICT event in Taunton. (There’s another similar one in York this Friday if you’re interested.) The event was a sandwich, with a Steve Bridger social media session as the filling between workshop halves.
Conference
I went to the workshop for support workers. I’m not sure whether it was quite the right label, but the others were for managers/trustees and for accidental technical supporters, which definitely weren’t. There seemed to be at least three other ICT specialists there, so I wasn’t the only one.
The best thing about the workshop was the mix of specialists and generalists. I was really interested in what the generalists had to say, but sadly the workshop was more of a lecture and I don’t feel I got as much out as I could. I’d be interested to know if that was the same for other participants.
I’m not sure what I thought of Steve Bridger’s session. It was a difficult one: the strange mix of an audience was all together, the room felt pretty warm and it stood between us and lunch. I had trouble concentrating but posted a few updates to identi.ca about it.
The worst thing was all the needless promotion of certain companies’ products. They didn’t talk about blogging and syndication, they talked about Blogger and Google Reader; they didn’t talk about photo-sharing, they talked about Flickr; they didn’t talk about spreadsheets, they talked about Excel.
Nevertheless, I left the event feeling really positive about other ICT specialists, with some hope that the generalists were “getting it” and quite impressed by the people I met from the other tracks. It was pretty good to help someone towards the autosuspend setting on their GNOME-based netbook within ten minutes of arriving, too. I’ve just updated software.coop with Richard Stallman’s explanation of why proprietary software is a social problem, to see if that helps put the community-based view across.
I’ll look again at some of the grant-funded resources mentioned and see if we can improve them, but I’d welcome any comments from the voluntary and community sector about how best to do that.
Good to meet you in Taunton on Friday.
I mentioned WordPress, not Blogger. I mentioned Google Reader & Bloglines as examples of feed readers. I did talk about Flickr, but do not take any money from them, which is why I call myself an “evangelist”. I mentioned Twitter a lot, yes. I encourage people to go and try these things out for themselves. Some people in the room seemed to suggest that as a consultant, it is in my interests to talk this stuff up. Guilty, your honour… although I never ever think of it that way. I do lots for free, believe me. I do not own shares.
Frankly, you seem to be equally – if not more – zealous in pushing people into thinking a certain way than I am.
Did you enjoy the lunch? Probably not.
Hi Steve. Good to meet you too.
The comments about the Product Promotion Problem weren’t all about your presentation, but as you note, you did speak about WordPress instead of blogging, Twitter rather than microblogging and Flickr instead of photo-sharing in general. I know there were a lot of audience questions, but by the time you were getting to the interesting stuff about mashups and social media reporting instead of annual reports, you seemed to be a bit pushed for time.
I know you don’t own shares in those product owners, so I’m mystified as to why you only talk about particular products instead of the transferable skills underlying them. It seems like a Web 2.0 version of the stereotypical Apple goatee+beret effect. Should I expand more on this in another post?
Am I as zealous? Maybe, but I’m zealous for openness, cooperation and making the most of these wonderful computing tools that we have, and very very keen to avoid the mistakes of the past. I’m fairly young, but I’ve already almost completely relearned my computing skills at least three times (Acorn, DOS, Windows, GNU) – a lot of people won’t do that. Is being zealous for avoiding the past mistakes and making the most of our opportunities a bad thing?
Sometimes when I’m asking what I think are fairly basic requests for sustainability, established experts look at me like I just landed from Mars or I’m asking something completely insane. For example, “can we have a non-Skype VoIP number for you?”, “is that USB stick casing eco-plastic?” and “can the videos be an open format with a download link so it’s easy to view them on a TV set, please?”
The lunch was not quite as good as the Albemarle usually does but still enjoyable, thanks 😉
Good to meet you, MJ, and your comments reflect my own feelings about the event. I’m new to the Voluntary and Community Sector and had expected to find a warmer reception for non-proprietary products. I thought the web links in the workshop and literature on the pen drives were useful reference material.
Regarding Steve’s talk, the audience was too broad and he did what he could to enthuse them – I thought the underlying message was that flash mobs can help good causes, and it was understood by all.
I too would lke us to learn from the mistakes of the past and avoid repeating them, but most people just want a simple do-this do-that recipe to get something done, and groupthink simplifies life. That’s a cue for analogies across the political spectrum!
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Good to meet you MJ – my thoughts were similar to those outlined above.
I couldn’t help thinking of ITDG and some of their policies about working with communities to develop appropriate technologies:
http://practicalaction.org/?id=technology_democracy
The idea of working with communities to “find out what people do and help them do it better” I think is fundamental – not just for the developing world, but a principle that should be applied to all communities.
The highlight of the lunch by the way was the apple pie.
Thanks for the helpful discussion about the workshop, as the organiser of these it’s good to hear this so we can adapt for the future. (I certainally don’t have all the answers or get it right every time!) Not sure about that picture of “conference” you have there – paints a picture of a very “corporate” event – not at all what we are about!
The three “tracks” have been run previously as separate day workshops. We brought them together into a single event to show that wherever you are in an organisation technology plays a vital part and if you are setting the budget, helping a growing group or in charge of the network you need to think the same way to move your organisation ahead.
We absolutely don’t want to promote one software solution over another and agree that people should understand the concepts first before being shown the vendors. I hope the workshops did to some extent get this message across – however there comes a point in practical terms where we needed to demonstrate the concept and chose WordPress, Flickr, Twitter (or whatever) as these are generally the platforms of choice. I agree we could have used OO Calc instead of MS Excel but in that case we were demonstrating a method of calculating a technology budget and had to show in on something.
The VCS/3rdSector is still woefully behind in its use and understanding of technology and we find that people can listen more to their peers than to a social media consultant or a champion for ICT. Sadly there peers often unwittingly promote the non open source route because they don’t know different. We are attempting to be impartial, lay a balanced view of all solutions out on the table but then find support for organisations in whatever decisions they make.
I hope the USB drives had a spread of resources and software to help you in your organisation or when working with small groups.
Finally a question for you … are you happy with the messages conveyed by the banner ads on this site ?
The picture is from a GOSW event. I didn’t take pictures at this event because there seemed to be cameras everywhere, but I didn’t find pictures at the time of writing.
Maybe you don’t want to promote one software solution over another, but that is what happens. Things like “Microsoft Office” are written into the budget templates as supplied. Specific tools like Twitter are introduced not just as a way to demonstrate the concept, but before the concept is introduced.
No, the banner ads aren’t great and will probably be going away soon, one way or another. They were an attempt to make this site pay for itself and they haven’t really worked out. Unlike some people, TTLLP doesn’t get given a grant to blog, so if it isn’t sustainable, it has to get cut back.
I don’t think red letter days or mobile phone recycling (which is what I’m currently seeing) are too bad, though. What unsavoury messages are others seeing?