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Thoughts from the mind of Ben Welby

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Listening to the interwebs

March 19, 2010 / / 0 Comments

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.

 

 

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

March 10, 2010 / / 1 Comment

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.
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

February 27, 2010 / / 0 Comments

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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

February 21, 2010 / / 0 Comments

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

So, what did my fortnight 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

I didn’t talk about jury service very much while I was doing it. As jurors we ‘judge the evidence’ so 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).

Continue reading

Swears

February 9, 2010 / / 2 Comments

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

January 15, 2010 / / 0 Comments

>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.

How to get BBC Travel updates via RSS using Yahoo Pipes

January 10, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Here’s a bit of a departure from my normal blogging content, sporadic though it is.

I’ve just been at university and while I was there I got an email from a colleague asking about good examples of transport content for local government websites. I didn’t throw the query out to Twitter particularly well as the responses I got were about examples of dynamic travel news such as the Highways Agency Clearspring/GovDelivery widget or Godalming’s repurposing of the same content to give geographical proximity.
Yesterday I was looking at how I might get back to York because of the weather. During the afternoon’s lecture, cursing my stupidity at not leaving at lunchtime, I visited the BBC and discovered, to my surprise that their traffic details offer nothing in the way of subscription.
With plenty of time on trains, platforms and coaches to tinker I thought I’d see if I could manage to do something about that. The terms of the BBC’s travel feed are that they are for personal and non-commercial usage so if you want to be able to get the latest information for yourselves then here’s how to do it very simply.

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>Christian Freedoms

November 16, 2009 / / 0 Comments

>Yesterday we prayed for the persecuted church and Songs of Praise featured Open Doors. The figures on the number of Christians who face real, life-threatening persecution are staggering (just browse the Open Doors site). Yet the words of a lady too scared to be identified demonstrated an incredible depth of faith in a personal saviour when asked why she didn’t just deny being a Christian

Life is good but nothing compared to the beauty of Jesus

Her story was one of living under the attack against freedom to worship. A human right, by the way. We are incredibly lucky in the UK not to fear oppression and persecution like hers. However, events like this suggest something different:

“GOSPEL FREEDOM UNDER ATTACK”
Many Christians are concerned at the marginalisation of Christianity which is increasingly being experienced in society today. The case of the Christian nurse disciplined for praying with a patient, the school receptionist disciplined for asking her friends to pray for her daughter told off for sharing her faith with another child, the Equality Bill likely to force churches to accept homosexual youth workers, the hotel owners charged with a crime because they discussed their faith and criticised Islam to a Muslim guest who asked about Christianity – the list goes on.

The things listed there are problematic, that I’m not disputing, but they’re not couched in the person of Jesus. I don’t know all the details, it’s just enough of an outrage to make you gasp and shake your heads. And I don’t suggest we’re immune from threatening behaviour but so are those of other faiths, or lifestyles. Where are the similar concerns about that?

The friction apparent in that list, most of which seem ludicrous rather than threatening, is a consequence of being in the world, but not of it. Gospel Freedom is living life to the full as citizens of heaven. We’re called to model salvation, not to create and enforce Christian states, or Christian societies. So there’s space for conflict.

Pluralism, the space for people to get on with what they believe and living how they wish (within societally agreed boundaries) is Christian freedom writ large. In fact, we really want to take it further because by default we love.

That’s more than tolerating difference. And it isn’t about expecting behaviour to sit within our beliefs or else. We do not get to choose rejection over love. But it’s that freedom – to choose rejection over love – which people believe encapsulates our faith. That’s the sound they hear above the noise.

Perhaps Britain is a Christian nation, it’s probably not, but it definitely is home to people who disagree with our whole belief structure; it’s home to people who think we’re dangerous and deluded; to those who have been hurt by our hypocrisy and home to those bemused by the righteous anger we whip up towards semantics, language and individual lifestyles.

Just google “Christian Institute” to see the opinion of the world. Sadly, the apparent freedoms seen by the outsider aren’t about Jesus. And yet, everything we do should be about Him, and about those out there, not us in here.

If freedoms are under such threat why do we try so hard to keep our cocoon intact? To build Christendom-on-sea where we don’t have to make allowances for people that don’t think like us. When the Church isn’t engaged with the world it’s revelling in sub-culture. When we revel in sub-culture we get sidelined by the world, it’s inevitable. Mind you, if freedom is our passion where’s the problem? If we marginalise ourselves, we vacate the moral high ground, we lose relevance as a spiritual reference point and become complicit with the development of the dreaded secularism.

As Christmas approaches and people attempt to avoid offence (Dundee, that would be you) should we not be celebrating that people go out of their way to avoid offence, because of love and respect for others? What happens instead is OUTRAGE and the (deliberate) misconstruing of events to make headlines. Just how insecure are we that we can’t cope with the loss of a word?

The more we build sites like christianchirp.com, hold holy climate events (sorry St Mike’s) that clash with the worldly (Friends of the Earth) and put No-shave-November up against Mo-vember (Edinburgh CU are doing it for Compassion, who are awesome, but still) the more Christian freedom looks like an invitation to an exclusive club, not a relationship that will transform you, your life and your community.

The day we are prevented from living with that freedom is when we can start to identify with our brothers and sisters who face prison, torture, rape and death. That is an affront to freedom, full stop. Surely any distinction of ‘Christian’ freedoms as something distinct is unhelpful anyway. It wasn’t ‘cos God loved Christians, or the church, that he sent Jesus; it was ‘cos he loved the world.

>Hugh Bayley on 10:10

October 30, 2009 / / 0 Comments

>On October 21st the Lib Dems asked their fellow MPs to commit Parliament to reducing its carbon footprint by 10% by the end of 2010, following a huge wave of support that saw almost 10,000 emails in 48 hours and 96% of MPs receiving a phone call asking for them to support the campaign.

In the event Labour stymied the vote with the Noes containing only a solitary DUP member and a sea of Red. I had emailed my MP, Hugh Bayley, asking him in the first instance to personally commit to the campaign and subsequently to support the motion brought before the house.
Sadly Hugh voted with the rest of his party (save for the twelve noble exceptions) in rejecting Simon Hughes’ motion and not committing Parliament to a 10% reduction by the end of next year.
To say I was disappointed was an understatement, particularly from an MP who has been so prominent within International Development (the world’s poorest suffer the most from a changing climate) so it was with interest that I received his response in the post (no postal strike impact here as yet).

On the personal front he’s in.

I shall work to reduce my personal carbon consumption by 10 per cent in 2010 compared with this year. It is important for MPs to practice what they preach, so I will report on how well I do on my website at www.hughbayley.labour.co.uk as 2010 progresses.

However, he did not vote for the motion because

I did not support it because it included an unrealisable commitment for Parliament to cut its emissions by 10 per cent in 2010. I wish the Houses of Parliament were in a position to make and implement such a pledge, but I am afraid we are not.

The House of Commons Commission, a committee of six senior MPs, had discussed 10:10 on the Monday before concluding that it was impossible to speed up or add to the we work of emission cutting to achieve 10 per cent in 2010.
Fair enough, the reason we didn’t see Parliament adopt 10:10 was because they didn’t want to make a promise they couldn’t keep. Given the last 12 months that’s not a stupid decision, in Hugh’s words
the Commission is right not to make a promise it feels it could not keep. If it did so it would increase public cynicism about Parliament and politicians
However, what’s revealing is the letter that Hugh Bayley sent to the Commission. In it he lists 10 things. I’ll let you make your mind up over whether or not these are achievable and leave you to the incredulity that behaviours within Westminster should be so blase…
  • Every kitchen on the estate should be equipped to recycle paper, plastic, glass and cans. Currently, this is not the case
  • Food waste – rotting food waste contributes massively to our greenhouse gas emissions. We could consider ways to start recycling this
  • I have noticed walking around the Parliamentary estate that radiators are turned up to maximum temperature, with the windows open. There should be a cap to ensure the temperature on radiators is only as high as we need, and cannot be turned up.
  • We should have a ‘lights off’ policy and should install more movement-sensitive timers so that lights are not left on when rooms and corridors are not in use
  • We should be encouraging staff to turn their computer monitors and printers off when not in use
  • The monitors around the estate remain on throughout recess, and when the House is not sitting. This is unnecessary and they should be turned off if there is no business to display
  • Most plastic does not biodegrade and this is very damaging to the environment. The House should limit the use of plastic where possible. For example, we could switch to using takeaway wooden cutlery instead of plastic, and encourage people to use their own mugs, or biodegradable cups instead of the plastic filmed paper cups
  • The House of Commons gift shop could adopt a no plastic bag policy, and instead use paper bags
  • We should go back to providing tap water, and not bottled water in meetings
  • We should switch to environmentally friendly cleaning products, which are less polluting than chemical products.
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