Horsesmouth chomps at the bit

MT Rainey the founder of Horsesmouth should be stamping her feet (although she’s too well mannered) at the failure of education and learning to pick up her brilliant online advice and mentoring community platform.



I often cite Horsesmouth in my presentations as the best example of a web learning community that thrives without the backing of any learning institution. So it’s nice to meet the face behind it.

MT’s confidential and voluntary mentoring and advice brokering engine has fabulous web 2.0 quality indicators. Average dwell time 8 mins and 15 page views/visit shows this is a place people really want to stay tuned. The lemmings of online help should go green with envy. Average 20 written replies within one day to any “call for help” posting is something Yahoo! answers would die for and those speculative mercenaries at e-how should hang their heads in shame. NHS Online can also eat its heart out. 84% of MT’s pages contain deep links to sources of help, advice and support – and those are provided by the public, not by the public service managers.

Presenting at MPS09, MT (MaryTheresa for connoisseurs of unusual first names) talked about how all the time and investment had gone into the reputation, security, moderating, integrity of the service. To ensure that the transactions are as deep and honest as possible. This is the opposite of the Social Network business model – where you invest everything in expansion and the quality net is the lowest you can get away with.

How do we get resources and partnerships into this fantastic channel ? MT and I brainstormed a few ideas later over the home-made cakes. How about an accredited mentoring activity as an in-service training element for one of the caring professions ?

Later I read that the Government wants to launch a new Royal College of Social Work on the lines of the RCN. Hey, they actually have it already made. Just take some walled space on a hosted segment of Horsesmouth. Most betters would wager they will actually spend half a billion and ten years, so that a minister can cut a ribbon. But if the spirit of this conference prevails, you never know, this might be the place you heard it first from the Horse's Mouth

Direct Action reborn

ThinkPublic did a session at the MPS09 meeting– they are one of the organisers – about their work using the kind of 2-way participative interactions the web has created, to re-design services. It’s not necessarily a question of using the web – just of modelling its kind of conversations. Sometimes you see the principles of web 2.0 projected back into face to face situations.

Their take is that re-design by participation is more powerful than re-design through reports, consultation, analysis, synthesis and any kind of management planning. Looks convincing when you see projects like early-stage Alzheimer patients working with late-stage patients to re-design dementia services. Interesting that in general this kind of participative planning has little place for written word, and works better through video communication or direct action. When they had the brief to redesign hospital waiting areas, they got the patients to do it themselves even down to shifting the chairs around.




The ThinkPublic spin is that this approach not only delivers better service designs, but (more significantly) changes us from consumers of public services to owners. Transactions with a service like Health, in this approach, are not moments when we take goods and deplete the cupboard. They are moments when we share the benefit of our experience and re-invest it. This puts the direct action back into the internet in a more fundamental and creative way than say Carrotmob, which is simply using the web as a better mailing system to trigger real world direct actions.

Real cakes and social media reporters

Two things really engage me about this conference, which massively build its community impact
1. A community approach to catering. There’s a gift economy around cakes and biscuits. Delegates were asked to bake and bring. Some gluten free, super brownies, great to celebrate attendees ability to be creative and have a home hinterland. I felt so caked-out I had to run for 30 minutes to feel normal appetite.
2. Big emphasis on real-time social reporting. I’m also here as a social blogger along with a posse of twitterers, podcasters, video shooters, picture snappers, social bookmarkers. Despite a slow wifi at the Abbey Centre, there’s a useful and genuinely valuable stream of content and reflection emanating out from this event into the cloud. It amplifies the response and gets the process of reflection intensified. Read the collected twitterstream. And then compare it to the BBC's report on the event. I think I know which is more useful if you want to put the conference themes into action

Now this homemade cakes and is social reporting lark is fun, and I hope it’s gonna be a trend in 2010. Watch out for the pioneer who’s making this social reporting a profession - the delightful David Wilcox, part of today’s posse, who turns out film, boos, podcasts, blogs and microblogs all day long.


But the worry about the social reporting is that it might be used to head off the increasingly common scenario of microbloggers operating as an unlicensed fourth estate during events – and often undermining a meeting’s purpose. I’ve heard of many keynote speeches where the real time twitter backchannel is an anarchic and sometimes disfunctional real time ratings system that verges on mob rule. (Example here) Organisers who are worried by this (or who are simply paranoid) should co-opt their audience as social reporters in the way that My Public Services conference showed how. But reporters have to be free to vent contrary and vexatious opinions too. The #MPS09 stream was uniformly positive, engaged and supportive – because the conference was all of these things. But I can’t help worrying that it won’t be long until we see the manipulation of this new form of media coverage by organisers who see its potential to brainwash their audiences.

Public Service and the Web

My Public Services Conference

"Stories can change the world" is the maxim. Check it here.

A one-day London gathering to reimagine public services, especially health, in the light of the web’s abundance of information, contact, choice.

This is a transformationist agenda: they want us to imagine how choosing can help to create change and improvement. Not just give the chooser an advantage for themselves

The premise: the tools now available for managing the interface of consumer and provider are so utterly different from what we have had, that we should re-design the entire system. Don’t copy the old models and just digitise them. We are working with new materials.

This analogy from organiser James Munro:

Ironbridge by Telford the first ever iron construction. It was built using carpentry techniques, jointing and pinioning as for wood. Yet the material allows entirely different possibilities. We need to avoid making this mistake for public service delivery now that the web is here.

Questions for our age in online delivery of Government:

• Why do we have centralised departments (to locate files in)
• Why do we have queues ? (because expertise is concentrated)

Probably none of this is necessary now

Tom Loosemore of 4ip

Tom says that Govt’s first job on the internet is to stop running websites. They are not good enough for the cost. Big public organisations are bad web publishers. BBC.co.uk is poor value for money. When Tom ran all the bbc's community outlets, he shut them down. They weren't listening. The conversations were happening elsewhere, and the BBC wasn't going to be the place they were taking place. In fact, hosting those community conversations was just trouble: defamation etc... When NHS hosts conversations about health services, you know it is going to be following a corrupt editorial policy and not be transparent about it. The fifth estate (the web) has to hold power to account.

Government should be publishing information and keeping it up to date. Other people should be using it to create services and interfaces.