Gary Hayes from personalizemedia.com put together this very neat little widget which visualises the hyper-growth in usage of social media.
We live in a world where internet communication is increasingly vital, and this is a serious erosion of free speech.This is what Carter-Ruck did:
The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.
Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.
The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.This feels like another significant turning point for social media.
Trafigura was deleted from trending topics, despite the fact it was obviously the top-trending topic. One minute it was top, the next it had vanished. Twitter’s trend explanations were also absent from any topics relating to Trafigura.[#trafigua has now come back up trending topics]
I don’t blame them, British libel laws are notorious for being swingeing, and Carter-Ruck’s efficacy in the area is well-know.
@carterruck is looking for a new slogan. "Defending the indefensible" #carterrucksloganLibDems have tabled an urgent question.
We want to put the Streisand Effect to work, and make hashtags #carterruck and especially #trafigura the top trending topics on Twitter. Please include these hashtags in your tweets of the next 24 hours.First satirical take: Carter-Ruck successfully preserves Trafigura’s online reputation:
“We at Carter-Ruck are proud to be so effective in protecting such deserving clients, and look forward to working just as effectively for the reputations of similarly environmentally well-behaved companies around the globe,” said Carter-Ruck’s new directors of marketing George Monbiot and Julian Assange.Guardian reports today's legal action by them.
MP, who Guardian is currently prohibited from identifying, said he would ask the Speaker to consider taking action against Carter-Ruck for contempt of parliament.Ungag the Guardian twibbon campaign.
The media lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC said Lord Denning ruled in the 1970s that "whatever comments are made in parliament" can be reported in newspapers without fear of contempt.
He said: "Four rebel MPs asked questions giving the identity of 'Colonel B', granted anonymity by a judge on grounds of 'national security'. The DPP threatened the press might be prosecuted for contempt, but most published."
The right to report parliament was the subject of many struggles in the 18th century, with the MP and journalist John Wilkes fighting every authority – up to the king – over the right to keep the public informed. After Wilkes's battle, wrote the historian Robert Hargreaves, "it gradually became accepted that the public had a constitutional right to know what their elected representatives were up to".
Should there be any restrictions placed on the reporting and analysis of what is said (and written) in the Palace of Westminster? I'd argue not, save perhaps for those rare occasions when national security is truly at risk.
Yet this "sensitive" question appears on the Order Paper and the answer will appear in Hansard.
Gagged? This journalist is gagging at the court's decision.
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to enshrine in law the absolute right of the media to report the proceedings of The House in full at all times.Plus campaign website on same set up:
Tell your MP to stand up for the media’s right to report on politicians in Westminster: e-mail them in two minutes, now.BBC: Guardian claims victory on 'gag' :
Newsnight will report on this case and the prevalence of media laws being used by large companies to restrict information on Tuesday 13 October 2009 at 10.30pm on BBC Two.BBC media correspondent Nick Higham for BBC website, When is a secret not a secret?:
In the anarchic, anything-goes world of the internet, where freedom of speech is a frequently heard rallying cry, injunctions banning publication of anything are unpopular. This one seems to have acted like a red rag to a bull.Rupert Goodwins for ZDNet UK:
There is no doubt that the events of the past day have been profoundly democratic, entirely in keeping with the Bill of Rights' sweeping away of kingly powers and its assertion of the primacy of openness among the governors of the people. In a parallel universe, attempts to muzzle parliament might be seen as treasonable - but while we'll never have libel lawyers hearing the axe being sharpened in the Tower, the end result - a chilling effect on the silencers - is just as welcome, and welcomingly just.Tweet from @wikileaks : Remember the UK press is STILL GAGGED from saying the toxic dumping report is on WikiLeaks HERE: http://bit.ly/v5rDJ
Let’s hope Jack Straw, secretary of state for justice, listens: the trend towards ever-wider gagging orders gives big companies and the rich and powerful yet another way to strangle investigative journalism - as if the overly-restrictive libel and confidentiality laws were not bad enough.Greenpeace blog on Trafigura:
Oil-trading company Trafigura knew that waste dumped in Ivory Coast in 2006 was hazardous.More Greenpeace background.
Trafigura had persistently denied that the waste was harmful but internal e-mails show staff knew it was hazardous.
...
The chemical waste came from a ship called Probo Koala and in August 2006 truckload after truckload of it was illegally fly-tipped at 15 locations around Abidjan, the biggest city in Ivory Coast.
In the weeks that followed the dumping, tens of thousands of people reported a range of similar symptoms, including breathing problems, sickness and diarrhoea.
Victims of alledged toxic waste dumping by Trafigura Co. Its legal firm CarterRuck tried to stop this story: http://bit.ly/3jU0vDIan Douglas for the Telegraph, Context overcomes the law for Trafigura and the Guardian:
A search in Google News for Trafigura yielded the Guardian’s piece reporting the order, despite the word never being mentioned. So many people had linked to it using the name of the company that there was no need for the Guardian to break the order themselves, as the search engines determine the subject of a page by analysing those that link to it as much as the page itself.Tweet from @BristleKRS:
Today's twictionary words: 1: to #CarterRuck up; vb tr, to fail in exponential relationship to invoiced feeTory Politico is reporting that The Independent has removed a story, published on September 17, relating to Trafigura’s dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast. The story is still available through the google cache of the page.
Here you can see how the gagging of the Guardian was rapidly overwhelmed by mentions of Trafigura on Twitter, via Trendistic.
"Wow," said one Twitterer among the deluge of comments. "Never heard of Trafigura before today."
In practice, when compared to, well, almost every other country in the history of the world, Britain's press has flourished. But it has done so without the type of prior right that gives the press in the U.S. its moral force. While the press cannot print anything it wants in either the U.S. or Britain, it is much easier in Britain for an entity to obtain a pre-publication injunction, or for some to win a libel lawsuit, or for parliament to bottle up debate, or for government to prevent journalists from publishing secrets. It is much harder to obtain information from the government. Still, it should be remarked that, believe or not, the Supreme Court of the United States did not formally agree that the government could not prevent the press from revealing "scandalous and defamatory" matter until 1933, in Near v. Minnesota.
It's not so much that an expressed free press right would have resolved this dispute the right way.We're still debating the limits of the bill of rights in this country. And in the U.K., the right to report on what someone says in parliament -- or on the questions submitted to be answered by a minister of government -- is already established in statute. But the existence of a constitutional right would shift the burden away from the interests with relatively less power than the state, the lawyers and the company.
The digital revolution is about to lead to a legal one.
LONDON (AP) — Bloggers and Twitter users thwarted a legal attempt Tuesday to stop Britain's media from reporting the questions posed by a lawmaker in a parliamentary debate, spotlighting the power of new media to influence public policy.
Before everyone gets too self-congratulatory, does any of this brief flirtation with online interest ever actually change anything? True, right now, lots of people who had probably never even heard of Trifigura will now be reading up on the dumping story, but, come tomorrow or next week, how many will still remember much about it? The bloggers will chalk up a victory and in this case the gagging order was actually lifted, but this is still an on-going case and nothing will have actually changed.
Sites like Twitter are excellent for catching a wave and occasionally rallying a large number of people behind a cause, but it’s yet to become the force for social change that it’s being made out to be. Real issues sadly aren’t resolved in an afternoon and a normally more complicated than 140 characters. If social media is really going to make the impact that it could, then we all need to keep an eye on the issues which we find important and persue them, not just jump on while it’s in the news and let it quietly die. Nag your MP, pester the mainstream media and ask the annoying questions, not just when the issue is in the news, but repeatedly. It’s only by proving that we can stay interested in an issue that change happens, otherwise people will just wait till the dust settles and everything will stay the same.
With the traditional media gagged, the new media had kicked in. That created a story which plenty of trad media outlets and blogs outside the UK could not ignore and started reporting on.
In other words, this kind of censorship is over. And I hope that British Libel law will change as a result. It must now move into the 21st Century and reflect new technology. After all, there is now a new defence. Feel libelled? You can defend your case just as much as the other guy online. Except of course if you are dumb enough not to register @carterruck, for instance.
Labour MP Paul Farrelly told the speaker, John Bercow, attempts by lawyers Carter-Ruck to gag the media could be a "potential contempt of parliament".
The Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris said there was a need to "control the habit of law firms" of obtaining secrecy injunctions, and his colleague David Heath told the Commons a "fundamental principle" was being threatened: that MPs should be able to speak freely and have their words reported freely.
On the Conservative side, David Davies criticised the rising use of "super-injunctions", in which the fact of the injunction is itself kept secret. He said courts should not be allowed to grant injunctions forbidding the reporting of parliament.
Twitterers across the world colored their avatars green to show support for the protestors who took to Iran's streets after the country's disputed elections earlier this year. Users of the micro-blogging site might now consider overlaying their avatars with a film of sludge brown as a mark of their spontaneous, collective action to help undermine an attempt by the international oil traders Trafigura to gag a British newspaper reporting on a toxic dumping case.
Jon Snow talked to Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and asked him what had happened after the publication of this morning's paper.
He told Channel 4 News: "The blogosphere went berserk about a story that we published on our front page this morning, in which we said we can’t report a story for reasons we can’t tell you.
"After which there was about 16 hours of mayhem out there in the Twitter-sphere; and about an hour before we were due in court we received a letter from the lawyers saying 'we give in'.
"What has changed was that for the past six weeks we have been faced with an injunction – a so-called super injunction – which not only meant not only could we not tell anyone we had been injuncted, but that we could not mention the company involved either – I think this is a very dangerous phase in English law."
Today marked a watershed moment in which social media stepped in to quash an attempt to gag a newspaper.
Libel lawyers Carter-Ruck and Schillings have proved adept at persuading judges that injunctions should now be granted on privacy grounds. Some tabloid newspapers are being served with "a handful" of such orders each week, according to media lawyers. The Guardian has been served with at least 12 notices of injunctions that could not be reported so far this year, compared with six in the whole of 2006 and five the year before.
The motivation is straightforward, according to Mark Stephens, a partner at law firm Finer Stephens Innocent. "As the libel and privacy capital of the world, people are coming here [to London] to bully the media and NGOs into not reporting on their nefarious activities," he said.
Media lawyers, however, focused on the fact that the rulings of UK courts were not enforceable in the US.
Many of the servers hosting websites such as Facebook and Twitter are based in the US, meaning information cannot be suppressed.
Keith Ashby, head of litigation at Sheridans, said: “The difficulty is that injunctions cannot readily be obtained in the English courts against overseas internet service providers which would prevent them making the information available.”
Mr Ashby added: “If people get a whiff that publication of information has been injuncted in the print media, they are getting more canny about how to find the information on the internet.”
Michael Smyth, head of public policy at Clifford Chance, said: “We should not be surprised that the law finds it difficult to keep pace with technological advance and it is no answer in an era when judges are required to act proportionately to make a blanket order directed at the whole world.
“It is common practice for an injunction obtained against one newspaper to be copied to the whole of Fleet Street so that the market is aware of its terms and also bound by it. That’s the easy bit. What, however, of electronic publishers offshore about whom one knows next to nothing?” he added.
Mark Stephens of Finers Stephens Innocent agreed: “The issue with Twitter and SMS [text messaging] is that injunctions are not enforceable as you can’t stop people talking and in any case the servers which host these websites are in the US and outside the jurisdiction of the English courts.”
He pointed out that the order covering The Guardian was enforceable in England and Wales only, meaning that the Scottish and Irish media could report the parliamentary question.
More broadly, wouldn’t it be a good idea to use this enjoyable moment of consciousness-raising to think about how we might sustain our attention and sort out a few deeper issues out too. Others may have a range of ideas. Here are three modest proposals of my own.
The bellow document is believed to be the secret injunction that would have prevented the Guardian reporting parliamentary proceedings yesterday.
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The latest version of the "Shift happens" videos updated for autumn 2009, developed by XPLANE in partnership with The Economist. This 'Did You Know' video focuses on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology.
There are a lot of these videos out there which throw stats at you, this is the best one I've seen yet.
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Number | % of LAs | ||
48 | 11% | ||
128 | 30% | ||
| YouTube | 63 | 15% | |
| RSS | 122 | 28% | |
| Web dev blogs/feeds | 6 | 1% |
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Work for peanuts team by Julia Chandler
Public Strategy has a great and comprehensive post on Young Rewired State- Dame Emma Mulqueeny's baby held over the weekend at UK Google HQ.
Two projects leapt out for me:
'Blab to Betty - confidential unpatronising sexual health advice'
Something like this is sorely needed as sex ed is rather notoriously bad in the UK - it's one of the reasons we have such high teenage pregnancy rates. But also for young lesbians and gays sourcing advice and education online isn't good enough because censorware often blocks access via schools and libraries and if you're monitored at home you don't want to be surfing advice, community or sex ed websites. So a text (? post doesn't give details) service could help fill a gap in provision.
'Blog-o-tics taking Bills plus blog search searched for emotive terms to create overall attitude score'
This rang bells for me and then I remembered I'd seen something which sounded similar in the 2008 US Election: Virtual Vantage Points monitoring of blog reaction.
These split the blogosphere into conservatives and liberals and picked up on text mentions in each. The idea from Young Rewired State sounds like taking this further.
I'd pulled out Text clouds from them for March 17 to see reaction to Obama's big speech on race.
Another group it reminded me of was what 6 Consulting (formerly from Cambridge) do in social media monitoring.
Jack Pickard has a great post about policy on council staff blogging, which is sparked by Cambridgeshire making their Social Network and Blogging Policy (below) publicly available.
He notes that it is mercifully brief and written in plain English but points out that the bit which relates back to the council's general policy on how staff behaviour: it is full of hazy statements about 'bring us into disrepute' and 'being libelous'.
There’s a slight difference in implication here. Some [definitions] seem to suggest that any negative statement may be defamation, but it would only become slander or libel under other circumstances (for example, it not being true). I would assume that the Council would be using the term ‘defamation’ meaning ‘untrue and negative remarks’, but this isn’t entirely clear.
After all, if they were simply using it in the ‘negative’ sense only, this would mean that if I was a resident and an employee of a local authority, then I would have less rights to complain about something the Council was doing badly than some other resident would have. And surely that can’t be right.
I agree, it's not right. Council staff do appear to have less rights to voice their opinion of the council than other residents.
As a former journo I well understand that libel can indeed be read many ways and in practice it is the decisions of courts which set precedents.
There was a famous case in Australia where a fat rugby player successfully sued because being called fat would affect his income. I don't know if this precedent was overturned by another Australian court decision (and Australian law has its basis in English law) but we've all seen the rich use 'libel tourism' in English courts to slap the bothersome down.
I also know from my own experience that the vagueness and lack of clear examples of where exactly the council draws the line has a chilling effect - as libel law can - and in practice can mean that council staff become expected to be a-political in their own time, much like civil servants, despite this not being part of the contract they sign up for.
I first became aware of this problem at my previous council job when a manager spoke negatively about my posting comments on a local bulletin board. I was told this had been ‘noticed’ and I ‘had to be careful’. Then I was referred to the ‘code of conduct’ – after I asked what ‘careful’ meant.
This appeared to relate entirely to whether you could complain about the council in a letter to the local newspaper - like most councils I expect they had a neurotic co-dependent relationship with the local newspaper - and could easily be read as saying you couldn’t complain about the state of the flowerbeds.
This had a chilling effect on me because I could see how a manager could use it to threaten anyone who lived in the town as I did and took an interest in local affairs which they didn’t approve of.
In practice a couple of staff I knew were in fact involved in ‘political’ areas locally where clashes with the council happened and their manager’s were OK with it.
I’m certain - I know - that others weren’t either because the policy was so vague, or because it was assumed they shouldn’t get involved. And as almost any civic activity relates to the council in some way I’m sure it would put people off.
I'm sure staff thought of themselves as being policed and regarded in the same way that civil servants are when in fact that's not what the contract is between a council and its workers. I know I did. I simply stopped posting comments on local issues on the bulletin board.
I did point out the problem with managers, the union and even a councilor but none of them understood it as a problem (It probably didn’t help that most staff didn’t actually live in the city) so as far as I know this vague ‘code of conduct’ still exists.
Council staff can potentially have all sorts of comments they make online used against them due to the vagueness not of blogging policy but the age-old and undoubtedly identical contractual 'conduct' policies which they refer to.Matt Wardman suggests that the Civil Service Code of Practice, which he has written by Tom Watson but I'd tag Jeremy Gould more as author, be used as a model.
I think it can be scary for many to have employees participate online but there is an even bigger risk of us not being part of the conversation. And as the military analogy goes if they train and trust us with rockets and jets, can't they trust us to blog.Michael Walsh reckons that:
The key here is that the individual cannot represent the organization or disclose legally protected information.I agree and added that:
What I perhaps am not making clear here is the policy has a problem with what's written. It veers off into legalese to cover this area. The policy should provide here some encouragement and it should be possible to give some examples which 'set the stage'. One could be 'yes, you can link back to our website' or another 'yes, you can comment about services as a resident but don't discuss your job'.
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"We believe the desired objectives could be better achieved by giving a same-sex partner special guardianship status rather than by having two females registered as parents, since this is fundamentally incompatible with the heterosexual reality of parentage," they say.Another bunch of mixed messages are on government use of social networks and IT.
"We have 2.26million unemployed people crying out for Government help and Labour are squandering taxpayers' money on Facebook. What people want is for the Civil Service to get on with their jobs and give the taxpayer value for money. What they don't want is people idly wasting their time indulging in meaningless gossip."I can just imagine those other Tories who are using social media to promote the party and who are promoting government use of it, those who 'get it', quietly throwing up their hands at this rent-a-quote ignorant nonsense.
"It has its roots in a false analogy with the private sector, which has indeed used ICT to provide services more efficiently and cheaply. The difference, of course, is that in almost all industries any private sector operator cannot compel us to use its services."Green also criticised the other two main elements of the Transformational Government strategy, describing the aim of designing IT enabled services around the citizen and business as "largely cosmetic", and the campaign to build IT professionalism in government as "largely comic".
"Government can not only compel us to use them, but can change the rules, and the terms and conditions, whenever it suits."
"The cost of running Britain's state run databases over the next 10 years has soared to £34bn. This is presented as being for the convenience of the citizen, when the overwhelming driver is the convenience of the state."Note the use of the scare word 'databases' and I would seriously question what that figure actually means. Nowhere does this Tory talk about efficiency and better service delivery.
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Socitm held its annual 'Building perfect council websites' event this week at Olympia, London. Must have been over 200 people there and a very interesting line-up of contributors.
I took my Flip camera along and managed to grab a couple of people for short interviews.
Kingston upon Thames councillor (and former Mayor) Mary Reid is a real pioneer in use of social networks in the UK. She's had a blog for a long time and driven a lot of development in her council. Here, continuing from a point I'd made in one of her sessions, she talks about whether the development of social media policy is really needed.
Gerry McGovern is an old hero of mine. He's basically a usability guru but he doesn't talk like one. His presentation style is very funny, pointing out the silliness of how much web design looks to an outsider - woods'n'trees stuff.
Here's the website for 'psw09' with links to other posts and presentation slides.
It was also the 'soft launch' for Socitm Web Professionals - of which more later!
This has caused quite a stir. The White House press corps seem mightily upset that some blogger upset 'protocol' and got in a question to Obama.
Only it wasn't just some question, or just some blogger.
Huffington Post's Nico Pitney, who's been doing near 24/7 stellar work aggregating and blogging news from Iran, got a question at the press conference, delivering a query from an Iranian reader about whether Obama would ever now recognize an Ahmadinejad government
As Arianna noted, the press pack hated it. Here's the moment.Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
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Web Companies Develop Common Tag FormatThis is about developing the 'Semantic web', which is about a web which can be more easily read by machines and hence made more useful for humans. The tags would be commonly defined and linked to rich data.
A group of Web companies announced today the development of a new tagging format for Web pages called Common Tag. The companies--AdaptiveBlue, DERI (NUI Galway), Faviki, Freebase, Yahoo!, Zemanta, and Zigtag--offer services that help publishers use semantic tagging to make their content more discoverable, connected, and engaging.
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Expanding on the points made by the head of BBC News, Richard Sambrook, about the issues with sorting through the outpouring of tweets from Iran, Kevin Drum writing for Mother Jones underlines some lessons about the way in which Twitter is best used at a moment like this.
Firstly he actually quotes me, unwittingly:
One of Andrew Sullivan's readers writes:Ahmadinejad's and Khamenei's websites were taken down yesterday — I saw the latter go down within a couple of minutes because of a DDOS attack organised via Twitter. @StopAhmadi is a good source for tweets on this. The other important use of Twitter has been distribution of proxy addresses via Twitter. This would be how most video and pictures of today's rally have gotten out.
That was Andrew quoting from my email (but no credit). It was late GMT Sunday and @stopahmadi linked to an auto-refresh address for Khamenei's website. Literally within a minute of his tweet the site was showing an error.
There was just too much of it; it was nearly impossible to know who to trust; and the overwhelming surge of intensely local and intensely personal views made it far too easy to get caught up in events and see things happening that just weren't there.I kindof agree with Drum but as I pointed out yesterday this was if you just followed the hashtag(s) and hadn't sifted out the best sources (like @stopamadi). I have had a big lot of new followers, I assume because I'm retweeting news and tweeting links on the situation and people have spotted this in the hashtag stream.
The small number of traditional news outlets that do still have foreign bureaus and real expertise. The New York Times. The BBC. Al Jazeera. A few others.The Times did have a good newsblog up by Sunday, However, on Sunday the BBC's reporting and The Guardian's was terrible because, I assume, it was a Sunday and maybe because the reporters on the ground couldn't get stories past weekend editors. It was very noticeable that the latter launched a 'liveblog' on Monday and the first few hours were spent with the blogger catching up.
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If you are on Twitter and want to help Iranians then this is a MUST READ: #iranelection cyberwar guide for beginners by Esko Reinikaine.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
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Head of BBC News, Richard Sambrook, has blogged about the issues with sorting through the outpouring of tweets from Iran.
He cites a list of rumours which I've also seen flowing around. None are yet confirmed but many have the ring of truth (or past practice) behind them.
Interestingly, he doesn't use the rumours to damn Twitter, saying:
If you had a reasonable understanding of social media, how to set up and assess feeds, how to compare and contrast information, if you had a reasonable understanding of news flows, a developed sense of scepticism, and an above average understanding of the political situation in Iran, you would have emerged much better informed than the lay viewer relying on TV or Radio news. The information online ran significantly ahead of the news organisations (who hopefully were taking time to check what they could) but it came at a high noise to signal ratio....(at one point I measured almost 2500 updates in a minute - though usually it was closer to 200)There are at least two other uses which I have watched Twitter be put to.
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Cartoon by Nikahang Kosar
First they came for the newspapers, like they always do. Then they went after the opposition's leaders, like they always do. Then they shut down the TV, like they always do. Then they cut the telephone lines including the mobile networks. Then they slowed down the internet and tried to block youtube and social networks, like they now have to.
This left Twitter as the last channel of opposition organisation standing.
And after midnight in Tehran this led to:
@pauloCanning #iran thousands on Tehran rooftops chanting 'Allah O Akbar' http://twitzap.com/u/wC8 sound 'deafening'This was the update which did it:
ALL internet & mobile networks are cut. We ask everyone in Tehran to go onto their rooftops and shout ALAHO AKBAR in protest #IranElectionFollowed by:
0:05 PM ET -- Twitter goes dark? I noted earlier that Twitter was the only major social network still operating in Iran. Now something has changed. All of the Iran-based Twitter users I've been reading haven't posted for at least 30 minutes or so. The reasons are unclear. Some on Twitter are claiming there is a complete electricity shut-down in Tehran. One Iran-based Twitter user, @tehranelection, last posted an hour ago: "I have to shut down for a bit, the police are looking for satellites." Will update as soon as I hear more.It is coming to something if in order to completely silence opposition you have to shut off the electricity.
John Kelly and Bruce Etling have produced some very interesting maps.
The first one maps total mentions of the elections across the blogosphere. The second one shows the proportion of bloggers from which sector are linking to the candidates' sites.
They say:
Based on our monitoring of the Iranian blogosphere on election eve, it looks like Mousavi has broader support in the online blog community than Ahmadinejad.This site has been covering the Iranian election online, where video has played a key role. See this post by Hamid Tehrani as well as various posts by Andrew Sullivan.
Like this ...
Sample Twitter reaction 'IT ROCKS!'
I am reminded of the Mac o/s interface though :] (which, woods'n'trees, apparently hadn't crossed their minds).
Immediately appealing, the just redesigned utah.gov site has very strong usability - this was the central aim of the redesign. Behind the scenes it makes use of - I think unusually - a wiki as a platform for adding and maintaining new content.
It aggregates 27 blogs, over 100 Twitter accounts (separately, they are building a Twitter aggregator), a Flickr group and more than 120 online videos. It has a successful 24/7 chat feature which was launched last year and this success has already resulted in the closure of state offices on Friday due to web redundancy.
The state of 2.7m inhabitants outsources it's web work. Utah.gov is managed and operated without tax funds through a public-private partnership between the state and Utah Interactive, the Salt Lake City-based official eGovernment partner for the state of Utah. Utah Interactive is a subsidiary of eGovernment firm NIC, Inc.
The new site has a full tool set, including, I was very pleased to see, widgets such as ones for the latest sales available online from the State Surplus Property Program and air quality measurements. The widgets are built using the Sprout tool.
See www.utah.gov/connect — and www.utah.gov/data for the data resources they make available and www.transparent.utah.gov, a transparency portal which aims to be "the most detailed transparency site around". The latter has massively grown as legislators add more and more legal requirements for information to be made available online.
About the data portal, they say "by allowing public access to this raw data, Utah.gov is encouraging citizens to utilize and merge it in new and innovative ways – giving citizens the ability to participate in making government services more effective, accessible, and transparent."
It also has integration of emerging geographical detection technology to estimate the location of the user and display relevant location-specific information, including local meetings, local government Web sites, local school and library information, local park information, and available local online services. The site is optimised for mobile - see this presentation by Rashmi Sinha for more about that.
After tweeting about it a question came in to me about accessibility, so I asked their Chief Technology Architect Bob Woolley and he told me that apart from a few minor browser issues, "the site is engineered for low speed connections, and non-flash users, many accessible choices." Here's their policy on accessibility.
It makes great use of Flash - the State looks stunning from the animated photo choices - which followed from the finding that 97% of users had it installed. Looking at tweets about the flash banner it has succeeded in branding Utah as both a beautiful place to live and as a tech leader.
The site has enormous legislator buy-in and engagement (but, nevertheless, technology investment has suffered budget cuts).
David Fletcher, Utah CTO, has been measuring and says "the impacts of Utah's egovernment efforts .. amount to at least tens of millions of dollars in savings to the state, its businesses, and its citizens. It has also had a large impact in lowering unemployment, improving the business climate, and promoting entrepreneurship."
"There are some challenges in quantifying this impact, but even for some individual online services, the numbers are surprising." They have some services being provided nearly 100% online.
On doing all they have despite budget cuts he says (something UK egov could perhaps identify with) "like always, we [had] to get more creative and find ways to get what we need done for less."
Utah.gov is like every egov person's dream come true and, very interestingly, the site has been noted as way in advance of other US states — perhaps in part because, as Fletcher notes, some of the ideas driving it have come from the UK!
Here's their video about the new site:
HT: Ari Herzog
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Original writing on this blog is made available for reuse under a Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons license. Just tell me you're doing it as that's the right thing to do :]
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Unfortunately for employees, disciplinary procedures are & always will be deliberately vague - it’s absolutely impossible to even imagine some of the incidents that do arise as a disciplinary matter.
The ACAS Code of Practice (employers are expected to take this into account when forming & going through a disciplinary process) makes clear that policies should give an idea of the types of conduct that may be minor, serious, or gross misconduct. The final assessment will always rest with managers, but if the employee could not reasonably recognise that their conduct was inappropriate, a warning & necessary training should follow.
“…unless a lot more work is done most council staff simply won’t feel free to express themselves online let alone talk freely about their work lives.” Unfortunately, this work will be in the form of disciplinary action - the policy will evolve as it is called upon, but until the first few cases arise & set precedent on what the treatment is (employers need to act consistently in these processes) the employees will have to venture into blogging unclear about the rules.