Why Hugh Bayley helped make #debill become the #deact in his own words

Earlier this week I received a letter from the Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for York Central to respond to the concerns I had raised with him about the Digital Economy Bill when it was first mooted. Well, I call him my PPC but despite the letter being dated April 12th Hugh actually referred to himself as an MP and used House of Commons headed paper, I don't really care but I thought once Parliament was dissolved this was frowned upon.

Anyway, here's what he wrote, at least I didn't get the stock letter that's been doing the rounds

The Digital Economy Bill covers a wide range of issues. There is a pressing need for new legislation to stop the UK falling behind other countries in the digital revolution. For example the Bill will require Channel Four to provide public service content, it will provide more flexibility over the licensing of Channel 3 and Channel 5 services and allow Ofcom to appoint providers of regional and local news. It will extend the role of Ofcom to include reporting on communications infrastructure and media content and allow the Secretary of State to intervene in internet domain name registration. It extends the range of video games that are subject to age-related classification and deals with the issue of the digital switchover which affects local radio stations like Minster FM. I am glad that the government agreed last week to amend the controversial provisions on copyright. In doing so it secured cross party agreement to the Bill going through.

I think it is reasonable for the creator of an artistic work to collect royalties. Writers, composers and musicians deserve to be paid for their work. I used to make television films - which cost tens of thousands of pounds to produce. The people who worked for me depended for their wages on our company being paid when our films were shown. Nowadays films and videos are distributed on the internet but the people who create them still need to be paid. I hope you agree that the principle of authors being able to collect royalties from people using copyright material is reasonable.

The point at issue with the Bill was the power to disconnect people from the internet if they repeatedly downloaded copyright material without paying. I agree that you need to protect people who have not broken the rules. I wrote to the Minister, Stephen Timms, about this. Last Wednesday evening in the House of Commons he proposed an amendment to the Bill applying a super affirmative procedure. This means that further legislation will be required, after the general election, before technical measures, such as disconnected, could be introduced. This further legislation will be subject to further consultation, and additional scrutiny and amendments by both the House of Commons and the House of Lords and both Houses will have to vote in favour of the legilsation before it can be brought in. Given these safeguards I voted for the Bill.

I hope you welcome this climb down by the government which secured cross-party support.

So, there you have it. In this constituency where my vote carries the weight of 0.063 the incumbent MP is in a very strong position. Maybe the Digital Economy Bill will be an election changing issue in some parts of the country but in York I doubt this will be the case.

Listening to the interwebs

The other day I saw a tweet that pointed me towards @SavvyCitizens and their Top Ten online resources for getting savvier ahead of the general election. It really is a top list of resources and all but one of them are fully featured, for free.

Council Monitor is the one that you have to pay for to get all its features. Now, for a basic ability to look around the country and see your council's sentiment rating or look at how it compares to others this is excellent. It can give you at a glance that sort of information. However, to find out anything more you need to pay. And, for me, the costs they're suggesting make this a little bit more than just Freemium.

The basic subscription of £99 a month gives you insight into your own organisation and allows you to actually see the mentions being made about you. For an extra £100 a month you can add 5 keywords and for the princely sum of £299 a month you can have up to 10. And they're the special introductory prices.

OK so that's only about £1,200 a year and no more than £4,000 tops, so what's the big deal? After all that's nothing for organisations with budgets in the multi-millions. But it's this seemingly common attitude to the pennies leaves me thinking that it's no wonder we have a problem with the pounds. So, perhaps what will follow is not worth your effort but I end up feeling a bit disappointed that we'd rather end up paying for a service than shaping the tools that are out there ourselves*.

Council Monitor is an aggregator of content that can be found 'out there' but happens to be housed within a shiny package that allows for comparison across the national picture. I have nothing at all against the shiny but what is most important is actually hearing what is being said, listening to it and then responding. It's gratifying to know that ours is the council with the most positive mentions in the country but it's not what's important.

What's important is recognising that people are saying things and we need to hear them because our service delivery can be improved by responding to the comments being offered in cyberspace. Not in a terrifying Big Brotheresque fashion but in the way that we're coming to expect of organisations and companies that are important to us. The way that sees a need and then fills it or hears a criticism and fixes it so that not only are people valued for their contribution but the next person benefits from such a proactive response.

So, on that basis it's content which is key. It's not the overview of sentiment, which can be picked up for free but it's the actual information itself, the stuff that sets you back £99 a month for a single keyword that an organisation wants to hear. Set against Radian6 or one of the other very impressive, and fairly expensive reputation management/social media monitoring services that seems good value.

But we don't have the budget even for the good value. Dave Briggs flagged up this list of Social Media Monitoring resources which are free and sometimes have similarly shiny interfaces. But we've been thinking about how we make something that we can control and that which can pull a variety of different sources into one place. It is still in a prototype stage but the idea of doing something ourselves, whilst it might seem daunting, may actually be preferable.

But first, 2 caveats, and 3 tools

• These are not pretty solutions


• There is a lot of potential to improve them

• A variety of search engines


• Yahoo Pipes


• Netvibes

There is an impressive array of tools with which to interrogate the internet. We identified the following 15 services as being useful for different reasons but it is by no means exhaustive.

• Backtype


• Bloglines


• Blogsearch


• Boardreader


• Boardtracker


• Digg


• FixMyStreet


• Flickr


• Friendfeed


• Samepoint


• Social Mention


• Twitter


• Wikipedia


• Wordpress


• Youtube

Almost all of these use APIs to enable the interrogation of their results from afar. What this means is that we can enter a search term away from the site in question and get a response directly to us or as part of an RSS feed or into an email or a widget.

In order to do this I use Yahoo Pipes. Now, I've blogged here and here about how to do this for wildly different purposes and I like Yahoo Pipes. It is certainly quite daunting to begin with and it can be quite temperamental but on the whole it is a very clever environment in which to build tools that can search for information, connect it together and then filter it as necessary. We've used it to make pipes for the search engines listed above.

So, using that lovely technology we've put together a pipe that looks at SocialMention, and, crucially, for the point I'm hoping to make, it does return sentiment too. At the moment it is pulling two pipes - the Social Mention search and the Sentiment tracker into one.

If it doesn't work in the page then take a look at one of the following:

SocialMention (all mentions)

SocialMention (sentiment)

SocialMention (mentions and sentiment)We've got pipes for all the search engines we listed above and had wanted to make a single feed from these individual elements but find Pipes cannot cope with this although, if we had there was a recognition of what we could do and a commitment to resourcing it I think we could probably identify some other solutions too. And the beauty of it? Once you have it set up outputting for one search term you can set up more using the same infrastructure (if you want it all lumped together it will accept multiple search terms separated by commas).

We have a dump of all our pipes onto one page. Some of them do not contribute anything to us and will be rooted out; some of them duplicate content and that may mean those two feeds could be merged into one; and being a public page makes tracking and storing activity impossible. In practice this would be a private page accessible to whoever has the responsibility to keep track of the content that had been seen and/or dismissed and that which was still of interest or had not yet been looked at. The Comms & Marketing team are going to be testing it out and exploring how best to use the information and how to process it for the benefit of the organisation.

It is true that we might not be getting the same results as Council Monitor and we might not be able to gauge sentiment elsewhere (although with the right commitment to developing this we could certainly get there). It's also true that we can't get trends but that's just a metric that means nothing if we're not hearing or responding to the people who are talking about, or to, us.

We're exploring how we make this better and more useable. I'm moving placements but I'll look to blog through the technical aspects of making these things happen so that you can make your own sentiment monitoring tools. But, in the meantime, feel free to test ours and see whether they're useful as an alternative to spending money.

:)

*I feel the same about GovDelivery. What they offer is much more technical and would require more effort to duplicate but, nevertheless, it is essentially publishing content in ways that would not be difficult to fashion yourselves. At least that's my take on it.

Crowd Sourced Church

Last week was a bad week at work. The bid process for the fourth and final placement of the graduate scheme did not result in the outcome I had hoped for. And the circumstances surrounding that had left me both depressed and despondent.

On Sunday evening, church turned that on its head.

Earlier in the week there had been a slightly cryptic message sent into the Twitterverse

As Al started the service he said something along these lines and it started to make sense

We don't really have a plan, there are going to be some songs, we'll commission St Barnabas and Ursula will preach but we want to get you contributing to the service. So, tag your tweets #smlb and text your thoughts to this number or just come to the front and share

And what that resulted in was a wonderfully diverse, and rich, stream of contributions flashed up on the screens. There were texts, there were a lot of tweets and from the front there were the voices of those sharing stories without the anonymity and complexity of technology.

A church like ours is full of talented people and is incredibly well resourced in terms of preaching and leadership. That makes for a very polished experience (even when it doesn't finish at 8.30 on the dot) but there is a certain inevitability to our slipping into being consumers and sitting passively, waiting to be entertained and edified.

The leaders of this service have a difficult task in striking the right balance and on Sunday the crowd sourced approach really worked. It did mean that things were unpredictable but it gave God the opportunity to use a variety of channels and a number of different people to be his mouthpiece.

The whole God speaking thing is one of those things that makes Christians sound mental. The kind of suggestion that gets us thrown funny looks and underlines the delusional nature of our very existence. But nevertheless, bear with me (if you're still reading), Sunday was a wonderful example of knowing that it's more than just coincidence. It was one of those evenings where seemingly random activity looked, and felt, very much like the well orchestrated action of a loving saviour.

The very nature of the service - built up round a sermon on forgiveness (Ursula Simpson on top form) - addressed the stuff I had gone through last week. Dealt with it and moved on. From beginning to end the service could not have been better designed if I had sat down and thought about what I needed to hear. And it wasn't in individual songs, or words, or music, or tweets but it was in the presence of God and the answers to prayer that was evident as a product of the whole.

(Mind you, I don't actually think that faith is a prerequisite for enjoying the content of the tweets which you can find here on What The Hashtag.)

The service came together from the contributions of the people in the pews but there was no mistaking a common thread running through it, a singular inspiration working through more than just those labelled 'leader'.

We believe in a priesthood of all believers but often it's hard to get people out of the pews. Did Sunday see the first shoots of something significant? It was certainly a great experience of being, not just doing, church.

I hope this isn't just a random experiment but is something that can become a really important source of encouragement, praise and worship from day to day, not just on a Sunday. I think there's a lot of mileage in exploring how some of the emerging trends in communication can work in a church context. It will be interesting to see if that's true.

Football League Referee Appointment Checker

As you may know I am the editor of Vital Bradford and produce content for it (with appalling infrequency). One of the things I like to do is a little penpic of whoever will be in charge of the game.

The Football League launched a shiny, and fancy website at the start of the season called Refworld. It's a good place to find all sorts of information about the men in black. And it provides a feed of latest news stories.

However, if I'm honest, all I care about is the person who could be ruining my afternoon. I want to know who will be in charge of my fixtures. And I want to know as soon as possible when it's announced.

And there's no way of doing that. There's no way of seeing all upcoming fixtures for your club, or all past appointments. In a nice, easy fashion.

Yahoo Pipes is an excellent tool. I shared with you previously about how I put together something providing travel alerts from the BBC. And it's a similar principal behind the Football League Referee Appointment Checker.

Basically tell it which club you're interested in, or the referee who is notoriously dodgy and voila, you'll have the upcoming fixtures and the referee, his two assistants and the 4th official.

Subscribe to the RSS feed it generates, add an iGoogle widget, a Yahoo Pipes 'badge' or subscribe to it by email. In theory, it should update whenever the football league announce new officials.

It will be interesting whether or not it does but I hope that someone finds this useful. Even if you don't, I will.

Jury Service

On Thursday I finished my stint as a juror. It was a very interesting experience and one that I would happily repeat. I was lucky, I had as action-packed a fortnight as is possible; many others go on Jury Service to find that they sit around twiddling their thumbs, reading books or doing jigsaws.

So, what did that involve?

• 1 book
• 2 completed jigsaws
• 3 cases
• 2 court rooms
• 3 judges
• 6 barristers
• 13 live witnesses
• 34 jurors
• over 8 hours of deliberation
• 2 guilty verdicts, 1 'yes' verdict

Whilst in the middle of jury service I didn't talk about it very much. As jurors we 'judge the evidence', talking about the intricacies of a case with anyone else, no matter how briefly, could lead to us being influenced by people who haven't sat in the jury box and committed to truthfully carrying out our duties.

Now it's over, our verdicts are in and those involved in the cases are waiting on their fate I thought I'd sum up my impressions of the experience (and hopefully not find myself getting into trouble for doing so).

The first day of Jury Service was quite frustrating as we waited for court to spring into life.

We, the new jurors (9 of us - 8 men and 1 woman) were briefed and then left to our own devices. Eventually 6 names were called and they were taken away. I was one of the 3 who remained and after another pause we were taken next door to be combined with 11 of those who had started their jury service in the previous week. At about 3pm we were called for and a jury was chosen. Mine was the last name to be called and so my life as a juror began. What happened to the other 6, or the 2 who didn't make it I don't know but their Monday must have been very disappointing.

In the first case the defendant was unable to enter a plea because he suffered from an as yet undiagnosed mental illness. As a result we were not asked to come to a verdict of guilty, or not guilty but establish whether or not he was the individual responsible for committing the acts as they were alleged. The case spilled over onto Tuesday but once the Crown made its case we quickly reached a unanimous verdict to find that the defendant would be held on remand because no beds were available for him to be assessed at a secure hospital.

This was the first time that I came face to face with what was, for me, the most disquieting aspect of jury service - the aftermath. This young man needed care as well as punishment but due to a lack of space at the relevant place he was having to be held in an unsatisfactory environment. The judge made sure that he would not be left languishing in prison by placing his case under review in 2 weeks' time. That's this coming week. Hopefully a bed will have been found and a proper medical assessment can be carried out.

So, by Tuesday afternoon I was a seasoned juror and we very quickly started another case. This was a bit more involved and saw us given document bundles over 200 pages long (we were lucky, the judge's was about twice that). The Scarborough Evening News reported on this case so if you want to know the finer points you can follow this link. This was a complex case involving six different counts so when we started our deliberations on Thursday afternoon we knew it would take some time to reach our verdict and were unable to reach a unanimous verdict on all counts by the end of the day. At some point on the Thursday I was elected foreman and the following morning after we reconvened we reached unanimous verdicts and I had to stand up and tell the judge our decision.

Again the repercussions of that couldn't be part of our thinking. The defendant in this case had four children and one of the outcomes of our verdict we discovered was a custodial sentence having thought that unlikely when sat in the jury room. She will be sentenced in a fortnight.

Monday began with waiting but it was much shorter than the previous week (there wasn't enough time to complete a jigsaw). In fact we were set up and ready to go before lunch. This was the most difficult of the three cases and evidenced by the fact we spent over 5 hours deliberating from Wednesday afternoon to Thursday morning. At some point on Thursday the judge called us in to say that he would accept a majority verdict but didn't really want to hear from us unless it was unanimous, which, in the end, it was.

His sentencing won't take place for another 4 weeks during which time his life has to be dismantled. The defendant's barrister outlined the consequences of our decision to the judge who had been all set to immediately take him into custody. While you know that these are consequences of what he has done it's difficult because ultimately those other people will suffer because of the decision we made coupled to the crime he committed.

What happened in the jury room is not for public consumption but it definitely made me believe in the jury system as a tool of delivering justice. When you sit in that jury box you are one of 12 people asked to make a judgement on evidence that has the potential to alter the future of whoever is sat in the dock, and those who are dependant on them. None of my juries decided they wanted to make the evidence fit a particular version of events. None of my juries pre-judged the verdicts after one or two sessions. All of my juries carefully considered the issues, pieced together the evidence, understood the law as the judge directed and came to verdicts that were, for us, beyond doubt.

It's hard because in two of the cases that absence of doubt has consequences far beyond just the individual represented there whether it's for family members, employees or customers. The human cost of a crime isn't just counted by the direct victim(s).

It's hard because that can mean we have more compassion for those affected by the activity of court than for those affected by the original crime (although I imagine that depends largely on the nature of the case).

It's hard because we weren't present when decisions were made, actions taken and words written. We know that someone who has taken to the stand has got the wrong end of the stick either maliciously or accidentally - not everyone has told us the true version of events.

It's hard because there are legal professionals who sit in robes and wigs making the case for the prosecution, defending the accused and judging the law. They go through masses of preparation and sit in court all year round. They will see similar cases and will expect a particular verdict. After all, not only are they as capable of judging the evidence as us, they actually know the ins and outs of law and crime.

Being a juror is not easy. It shouldn't be. Being a juror ought to be difficult, it ought to keep you thinking about justice, criminality and perception because then you're not just treating it flippantly. It has been suggested that we should have professional juries but the idea of being tried by 'a jury of your peers' means that real men and women sit round a table and hammer out a decision.

Across the two weeks people brought papers into the jury rooms. We had Guardians, and Suns; Mails and Mirrors and we discussed the nature of justice. There was a lot of reflection in those rooms about the ease with which we jump to conclusions, the way in which the media portray the decisions reached by jurors and the wider perception of how judges respond (generally with too much leniency). Whilst people might not reconsider their response to crime, or the way they treat former offenders the act of serving on a jury clearly affords the opportunity to ponder what justice and truth look like for ourselves because we can't refer to anyone else.

Those waiting to be sentenced probably don't think that they're very lucky at the moment. Having been on the inside of the jury room I think they were. I think all involved with those three cases were because the 34 people charged with considering the evidence did so even-handedly, carefully and fairly.

I would have loved to be writing this saying that I sat on three cases and found three people innocent, to have cleared the names of the accused. Sadly, unanimously, the evidence in front of us did not let us do that. If our minds were even 1% doubtful then we could not have returned the verdicts we did. Perhaps that surprised our judges, our lawyers and those who stood accused. I hope it didn't.

Swears

I'm doing jury service at the moment. And the courts are full of spiritual connotations. If it's not bowing in reverence, or calling judges 'Lord' or 'Worship' it's the very presence of an advocate interceding on behalf of someone else. Mind you, it's hardly a surprise that an environment built to house truth and justice should remind me of God.

However, what's most striking is the spiritual barometer of trustworthiness, the swearing of an oath on the Bible.

'I swear by Almighty God that I will faithfully try the defendant(s) and give a true verdict (true verdicts) according to the evidence.’

All those on my jury chose to do this. I didn't.

And you may think that's quite strange given that I am a Christian, that I believe in a personal relationship with God and that the Bible is a phenomenal tool for equipping us to live to our potential (actually irrespective of whether you have faith or not).

I don't know whether the 11 people who swore on the Bible would describe themselves as Christians. If they wouldn't then it seems a little strange to start court proceedings with what amounts to a falsehood (not that this is an accusation of perjury!).

It might make the Daily Mail weep but I just don't understand the reason for having a spiritual barometer of trustworthiness. And the reason for that is because Jesus tells his followers that oath taking, that swearing by heaven or by God isn't necessary.

The Sermon on the Mount is one of the most well-known chunks of Jesus' ministry (and another one of those moments in the Life of Brian where the two figures are demarcated). In amongst the Beatitudes and a warning about our thoughts rather than just our acts Jesus talks about oaths.

Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.' But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God's throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. (Matthew 5:33-36)

And why shouldn't, as followers of Jesus, we take oaths? Because Christians should 'let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' 'No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one'.

Part of being a Christian is being trustworthy, of having integrity, of being credible and living a life that reflects the person of Jesus (or tries to). This is what Jesus is saying. He's saying if you follow my teachings then you don't need to swear oaths to make a promise. If you promise to do something, why would you do anything other than keep it?

When I said I was affirming there was slight confusion about what that meant. Someone said it was "for those who aren't religious". Obviously, for me, it was actually for completely the opposite reason.

If the court system was to lose the spiritual barometer for trustworthiness there would be OUTRAGE and it would be further evidence of a creeping secularism. Would it? Wouldn't it actually be Christians recognising that it's in conflict with what we believe and for those that don't have a relationship with God, or even any faith in Him, creates a situation that may actually ring hollow?

4 Cs for #cnvrstns in 2010

This week has seen the 2010 restart to our church, Conversations, and another new venue. Vodka Revolution might be a surprising venue for god-bothering, it might not be an obvious place for people to worship God and enjoy fellowship with one another but on the basis of this week it's going to be a great location. There was an air of excited expectancy amongst those of us who were there on Wednesday evening and a real buzz around the venue and its public that had been lacking in some of the other places we've been.

One of the things that's integral to the way we 'do church' as Conversations is not to leave our relationships at face value in services but to be active in supporting, praying, encouraging and seeing each other during the week. One of the ways we do that is through cell groups. That's not cell in its negative connotations but in the organic sense - following the imagery of the Body of the Christ and recognising that we hope to grow and eventually multiply from one to more.

Thursday nights are cell night and it was great to have fellowship with each other over food wonderfully prepared by Mrs Wellers. As we digested we chatted about what the coming year might look like. The upshot of this, in a delayed New Year Resolution styleee, was commitments around 4 Cs (only because Christians need alliterative groups of cheesy words, not because we're sticklers for grammatical accuracy):

• Our Celves (I did warn you)
• Our Cell
• Our Church
• Our City

One of the amazing things about cell is the space it allows us for accountability, relationships and confidentiality so I'm not going to blog about those except to say that together we're going to support each other in continuing the commitments we wanted to make for ourCelves and revisit them as the year progresses.

We've committed to making our cell work, to ensuring that we meet for cell but beyond that we are a community, not just people that meet up once a week.

We're committed to our church, to supporting the work it does in prayer and by turning up but also in making sure that the welcome we've had is true of the experience for anyone else who visits on a Wednesday night.

And in doing this we're committed to York, to our city, to loving it and supporting it and encouraging it. By more prayer, through the work of Besom and Street Angels and in being a credible and relevant example of Jesus to those around us.

If you're around us hold us up to those standards, help us to get the balance right between being part of Conversations, part of our cell and part of our city and challenge us if we're falling short of these standards.

I have a funny feeling that 2010 is going to be a good year. Exciting.