ukgc20 – Terence Edenโ€™s Blog https://shkspr.mobi/blog Regular nonsense about tech and its effects ๐Ÿ™ƒ Mon, 26 Aug 2024 10:51:53 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/cropped-avatar-32x32.jpeg ukgc20 – Terence Edenโ€™s Blog https://shkspr.mobi/blog 32 32 <![CDATA[Notes from GovCamp 2020]]> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/01/govcamp-2020/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/01/govcamp-2020/#respond Wed, 22 Jan 2020 12:15:14 +0000 https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=33970 I've been to a fair few GovCamps - the (mostly) annual gathering of Civil Servants who want to explore new ways of working.

For a flavour of what they're like, see scripti electronici passim:

It was great to see old friends (and how old we've become) but even greater to hear so many pitches start with "This is my first time at GovCamp!"

Movements like this only survive if we can convince new people to join. Otherwise we're just talking to ourselves.

I do worry about the lack of senior leaders. There were some, and some of us are on track to go pretty high up. But my fear is that the event is just us letting off steam and no one in a position of power takes it seriously.

We must, through our actions, model the values of openness and collaboration in our work lives. We have to be the change we want to see. I'm not even sorry if that sounds too self-aggrandising.

I've already written about How to Archive a GovCamp, so the rest of this post focuses on the session I facilitated.

NHSX

Along with Hadley, my boss, and my colleague Colin we talked about NHSX. I started the session with 3 ground rules:

  1. Share but don't attribute. Tweet about the interesting things in the session, but don't attribute to any specific person.
  2. Stories but not personal health. We wanted to hear stories of crap IT, but we didn't want to know people's detailed medical history.
  3. Optimism not cynicism. It's really easy to say "that's impossible" - we're here to say "let's make that happen".

We came out with a bunch of useful information, and hopefully some eager recruits for new jobs.

Giant post it notes stuck to a wall.

The session was packed - and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves.

UKGC20-Flickr-549

Key points (for me) were:

  • Clinicians lean new medical knowledge all the time - they can learn new software
  • Patients expect these things to just work
  • Having jobs outside London is seen as a positive continuation
  • Clinicians are endlessly inventive and want to co-design software

Read the full session notes.

Thanks

Massive thanks to everyone who made the camp happen, and all the lovely people who blogged.

Perhaps it's time to move the next GovCamp far out of London. Perhaps a weekend somewhere rural, with no WiFi?

]]> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/01/govcamp-2020/feed/ 0 <![CDATA[What Happens at #GovCamp Stays at GovCamp?]]> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/01/what-happens-at-govcamp-stays-at-govcamp/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/01/what-happens-at-govcamp-stays-at-govcamp/#comments Sun, 19 Jan 2020 11:32:17 +0000 https://shkspr.mobi/blog/?p=33894 How do you archive a conference? A decade ago, I blogged about how to archive a BarCamp - I don't think anyone took up my suggestions. I tried to put it into practice, but in this post about 2009's BarCampBrighton4, half the links have rotted away, cool media-hosting startups have gone bust and eaten the video.

Websites die, tweets get deleted, media codecs become obsolete.

BarCamps, GovCamps, and other unconferences are part of our digital heritage. We should be proud of what we create and ensure that it is available for posterity. For GovCamps, this is especially true.

Anyone capturing a twitter archive of #ukgc12 ?

Richard Akerman

The GovCamp Community has radically changed the way government services are delivered. But we are unaccountable (?) and no one is looking at how we make decisions (?). Someone, perhaps in the future, will want to understand what we did and why we did it.

The National Archives want to preserve the content of all GovCamps. Technically this is quite easy. Grab all the Tweets that have a hashtag, find the linked blog posts, crawl Flickr and YouTube, check the content is accurate, then dump in the archives. Bread and butter stuff.

Legally, they can do that. Section 19 of the Data Protection Act allows for archiving in the public interest, in line with Article 89(1) of the GDPR.

And they can also preserve non-official records. Your Tweets and Blogs are fair game. How does that make you feel?

Did you expect those messages to be archived?

Were you expecting them to be ephemeral?

Are your Tweets from an anonymous account which, in 5 years time, will be unmasked?

Do advances in facial and voice recognition mean that your offhand comment at a conference can be instantly matched to you?

If a session is audio recorded, and then published, does your conversation become less free?

Here's our audio recording from the session:

We hand out special coloured lanyards for people who don't want their photo taken. Do people respect that? Does social pressure force people to wear a lanyard they don't want to wear?

Notes are taken - read the session notes on Google Docs - but they're usually only sketches of the conversation, and not attributed to any one speaker.

The National Archives don't have to make all this content available for anyone to see. They can keep it under lock-and-key, or only allow access to trusted researcher, or publish it only after we're all dead.

If we came to any conclusion, it was this...

  1. The National Archives have the skill and resources to do this well.
  2. They also have the legal right to do so.
  3. It's important for preserving the record of our culture.
  4. We should get Community Consent for this activity.
  5. Participants should be informed / warned that their social media will be archived.
  6. We'll have to accept that it may suppress some conversations.

Here are the broken archives of some previous GovCamps

Video archive is now up from #GovCamp http://ow.ly/5hLQA Gotta carve out some time to watch a few... #opendata

Marco Campana

Matthey Murray's GovCampQLD archive from 2012 is full of broken links.

(OK, using Pinterest to archive posts was just a weird decision!)

And, for luck, the late lamented David having the final word:

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