Working Notes 2.0

Just the other day, a bulky envellope arrived on the desk. It was my complimentary copy of the book to which I’ve contributed a chapter, on the topic of talking with children and young people about the processing of their personal information.

Well! So here it was at last!

Warm feelings and thanks to Chris Clark and Janice McGhee (the editors) for all their shepherding of the collective enterprise in general, and their support for me individually, especially as I tended to write ‘bulletins from the Front’ (their words) rather than in the calm more academic style that is generally deployed in this context. Ever so many thanks too to Marina, for passing me the original opportunity, and Tamsyn, for giving me such a good flying start with the actual writing and for a friendly eye on the draft later - a review from a peerless peer at a critical moment.

I’d already launched an earlier draft version of my text down the slipway, to fend for itself once I’d cut the restraining chains, having been aware of the general debate about what constitutes a sensible process for academic publishing in the web 2.0 era.

But what gave a certain piquancy to the pleasure of seeing the finished physical artefact was the background feeling that it’s been a bit like a sort of courtly mediaeval dance, really. Something to be wierded about rather than critical of, of course, but…

 What brought this home was the publication of the Byron Review ‘Safer Children in a Digital World’ that was commissioned, researched, written and published within the span of time it took our various chapters to coalesce from draft into ‘galley proofs’ for final checking. With any writing that ends up ‘fixed’ (aye, there’s the rub) of course other sources are bound to arrive afterwards, that you wished you could have catered for.

But it was the contrast between the overall speed of the two production processes that drove the point home.

A quiet (spear-carrier’s, merely, possibly) welcome for the appointment of Alasdair Bishop’s appointment as Head of Change & Benefits in the SGHD eHealth team. I hadn’t seen him for quite a while until just recently, when we met at a workshop considering the potential scope of the eHealth Improvement Programme - on the basis of what he was forcefully and effectively arguing for there, I think I may have an idea of his views on things like focus, and the setting of priorities…!

However, perhaps some interesting cultural challenges are available? I thought I’d replay an email I drafted following the event.

I began by thinking of the eHIP in terms of a ‘business opportunity’ but came to realise that this needs more nuance.  

There’s a risk as well as an opportunity (as in SWOT, somewhere): if the eHIP is really well integrated with the other health improvement and change initiatives around, e.g. the Improvement Service Team – as it should be – ICT has had a history of being rather cloth-eared about things like culture, the dynamics & demands of change tools like PDSA etc etc….then over the piece, it may drive a wedge through the existing eH community.

I perceive this being broadly comprised of three (stereotype-warning!) groups:

•  Those who work in NHS IT as a branch of the IM&T industry (procurement, machine-running & contract management with ATOS or whoever, keeping the infrastructure going etc etc.) – quite a bloc of staff, and plenty in senior Health Board IM&T mgt;
• Those whose home discipline. is Project/Programme Mgt – could next month be at home helping put in a retail system, say – smaller numbers;
• Those who enjoy working in public service, who aren’t clinicians, and who are too restless or otherwise don’t fancy ‘status quo managementt’, and have found a space in IT project management & learnt about it as they go along – a reasonable number of these, mostly locally

For the Change & Benefits team, maybe some utility in a little quiet sociological analysis (a.k.a. skills audit, or something?) to underpin resource/org’l planning?

When the going gets tough, or arduous over time, then I wonder whether inhabitants of any of these three groups are likely to gravitate to their own home territory (comfort zone)…? At the scoping workshop, quite a few of us tended to default to talking about IT rather then service change, for example.

If we are going to be ruthless and focus down on just a few real priorities (e.g. single sign on) then the going will get tough – apart from anything else, there are fewer places to hide if it’s not going well. Most of us are subject to, but also indulge in, what might be called ‘chronic agenda shuffling’ (I call mine ‘occupational hobbies’ – things I can turn to when the main priorities are delayed, not going well, or when I just fancy a bit of displacement activity). Keeping all these plates spinning is a full-time and absorbing activity, and who can blame us for not making progress with all those Good Ideas listed at the beginning of the Electronic Clinical Communications Initiative, it’s all we can do to keep the plates in the air. There’s also an element of it being more congenial to grumble about something than actually fix it – you know how it is.

All this stuff is normal organisational survival tactics/behaviour. Signing up at a workshop to being radical/focused won’t make normal life go away back at base the day after.

But back to Alistair. He is the only person I know in this domain who has actually done this focusing, with it’s attendant No Place to Hide risks, with CHI. Maybe there are more lessons to learn from his personal experience. He’ll be in a good position to pass them on.

Good luck Alasdair!

So often, lots of work is devoted to creating tools and making them available, only for there to be a Gaping Void when it comes to the hard graft needed with actually getting people sat down and comfy with what’s practically involved in a virtual community. It really is a more complex version of helping people realise that you don’t need to shout into the phone, ’cause the person you’re conversing with is actually a long way away…

In this point, it’s good to note that there’s good work starting up in Argyll & Bute, with a very dispersed (some of them live & work on islands, literally) group of practitioners working with children with disabilities, centred upon asyncronous(?) online discussion of s eries of complex case scenarios. But first, some structured exercises are being worked through, so as to help participants get at ease with this unfamiliar discourse.

Later on when talking to a colleague at the eLib, about the Communities of Practice Toolkit they have drafted (remember the Stirling workshop last autumn?), she smiled wryly and commented that the Argyll & Bute project ‘has permission’ (to get directly involved in CoP development). Whereas (I think) the eLib don’t, and can only go as far as making the tools available in a supportive way (Shared Space + ‘toolkit’ – which isn’t a toolkit so much as a booklet).

Which, on reflection, I thought leave a gap in the market. Hence the notion of an ‘Academy’ for CoP developers where the collective experience of actually developing a CoP for real could be replayed for the benefit of others…. 

• Might Health be persuaded that they have a need for this – well one can only ask;
• Meantime could the GIRFEC folk be warmed up to the idea – well, again, one can only ask – I think they might be receptive…
• Anyone else? Could the SFC’s current commissioning of KT research lead in this direction? And any prospect from the Improvement Service?

Some interesting conversations and related reading last week triggered a couple of thoughts, which I hoped might be worth sharing. Anyway here goes:

• The train of thought started in a conversation which included a touch upon Social Services Research Registers, which seem hard to enthuse people about and keep up to date, and the reflection ‘why couldn’t the process be more social?’
• Next I was luckily able to obtain a preview of the upcoming ‘My Community Space’ functionality to be launched within the NHS eLibrary this April.  
• Then on the way home I read an interesting piece about the collapse of the traditional production and distribution models for music and film – but there is hope in a much more community-oriented one.

If you pop over to the ‘Hyperpeople’ blog (strapline: ‘what happens after we’re all connected?’) you’ll find a lengthy post, which is, it transpires, the script of a presentation to Irish filmmakers…Anyway, scroll down to part III ‘And the Penny Drops’, and skim-read from there to the end, particularly the last four paragraphs.

The trick is, while doing so, mentally to transpose the discussion of ‘media’ (film, music) into ‘research’. For example there’s a nice bit in the penultimate paragraph about roles – and the need for a new one (a sort of ‘community developer’). Might researchers “be practically autistic when it comes to working with communities”? (Not literally, one would prefer to think, but perhaps, because of the other pressures they are under, maybe there’s a tint of accuracy?).

The message is a clear one I think:

“…the key is to find the communities which will be most interested in the production; this is not always entirely obvious, but the filmmaker should have some idea of the target audience for their film. While in preproduction, these communities need to be wooed and seduced into believing that this film is meant just for them, that it is salient…

…Starting at the earliest stages of pre-production, someone has to sit down with the creatives and the producer and ask the hard questions: “Who is this film intended for?” “What audiences will want to see this film – or see it more than once?” “How do we reach these audiences?” From these first questions, it should be possible to construct a marketing campaign which leverages microaudiences and social networks into ticket receipts and DVD sales and online purchases….”

…Meanwhile, across at the eLibrary, My Community Space is coming*. This involves the opportunity for any Athens user registered with the eLibrary to create a personal profile, along the lines of the ones we are becoming familiar with in all the main Social Networking Systems like Facebook, Ning, Bebo etc. You can register your interest in topics (interest in, or experience of, or both? – anyway, you can register that you have a stake of some sort). You can also tag resources with your own labels (and pick up those used by others?) – resources that you find both within the eLibrary (and associated repositories) and beyond, anywhere on the web. This act also records your ‘stake’ in topic – the resource gained your attention sufficiently for you to tag it with a label. If you agree, these notes of interest are visible above the level of the existing communities (little silos – but in a good way) that the eLibrary supports.So, a researcher, could, within the new production model hinted at above, search for eLibrary users – right across the user population so long as they had created a visible profile – by labels relevant to her project, to seek and thereafter develop collaborative involvement right from the point of hypothesis formation, through project planning, funding proposals, survey construction, editing the products, and considering the findings.

With some imagination, perhaps the collaborative involvement of others could be framed as a learning activity too (here the Associate Schools Groups (ASGs) model might repay scrutiny) and as such, attract CPD points or whatever.

Could this be made to happen? Not overnight, to be sure, but might it not be worth tinkering with and planning for. What else might need to be developed?

• The model is sort-of available;
• The technology infrastructure is available though not seamlessly joined-up (does it need to be? – not sure that it does)
• Organisational model (have a look at the ASG structure for a start?)
• Learning infrastructure – CPD points etc.

What d’you think?

Over this last year or so, what I would guess I would call my Occupational Hobby has focused on questions around privacy and the way children’s personal information is handled.

But the take I have on it relates to what I see as a disconnection between how those whom I perceive as ‘the usual suspects’ (well-meaning - of course! - officials in Children’s Services) think how this should be handled, and how, increasingly, children and young people themselves handle their own personal information and learn about - an hopefully come to terms with - the implications of this for their privacy.

To put it another way, what is now ContactPoint was thought about and designed well before anyone had ever thought of MySpace, but the disjunction between the frames of reference that the two operate under re privacy is too noticeable not to remark upon it. Hence ‘parallel universes’. Among other triggers for action (well, writing, anyway) was the widely observed capability for nuanced handling of privacy issues by children and young people, which the officials have thus far resolutely seemed blind to.

 So I thought I’d write a bit about this, and did so earlier this year, with the result that’s attached below at the foot of the post. When I finished this draft, I had a strong sense of returning the ideas to the wild from whence they came originally, as I had throughout been able to surf on the ideas that were already publicly available. So, many thanks to all those who went before. It felt like launching it down a slipway - the material would need to fend for itself on the open sea hereafter. Publishing it here follows through on that, a little.

Though pragmatically, I should say that a substantially edited, much shortened, probably tighter and ‘final’ version of this material is intended for traditional publication as a chapter in a Policy Press book, at some point. Accordingly, this version is but a rough draft…

talking-with-children-and-citizens-about-handling-their-personal-information-v8.doc

Everyone’s writing about the ‘Social Graph’ just now - via tracking posts about SNS, identity management, and the read/write web, my feeder is full of the stuff.

But a few things fell into place alongside one another earlier today:

• first, the concern about translating relationships from one setting (or ‘networked public’?)  into another - a variant on not wanting to have to re-input all ones contacts, but equally not wanting them copied across regardless;
• second, the flash of a diagram remembered from a recent look at the Tao of Topic Maps (where everything is connected with everything else) and where the lines representing the relationships between things were themselves objects and could be labelled..
• ..which fed into the memory of a recent post by Stowe Boyd where he said he’d much rather just be able to tag everything, rather than have to remember which silo to file something in (he was being critical of some of the rather 1.0/2.0 transitional apps at the time).

So, what if I could tag the relationship that I have with someone? Like ‘old school chum’ or ‘boss’ or ‘nephew’. Of course they’d need to be able to tag the relationship from their point of view, which might be the same (old school chum) or the other end of some binary link (subordinate/uncle) or none of these but something coming from their perception (old school chum but someone I’d prefer to avoid in RL)-(could you be able to see how the other party saw the relationship? That would be interesting).

Of course, I would want to be able to apply multiple tags.

And I would want to be able to use the grouping capability to portage various elements of my overall social network from one domain to another…

At which point I got off the bus and broke my train of thought. However, surely lots of people muct be thinking of this aspect of the social graph already? Hence the MtS - “must find out more”.

The other day I ran a simple retrieval on the NHS e-library for the term ‘child protection’. It came back with the news that there were 13114  resources. Of course, some of these will appear on more than one list, and it’s likely that a proportion of them will only be of interest to ‘dead men in white coats’ rather than the broader CP community. But it’s still a shed-load of ‘knowledge’ (OK, depending upon how you view knowledge).

This is part of some initial thinking I’m doing on trying to make the general e-library resources more available and nearby, to the Child Protection Shared Space and its various inhabitants. One simple approach would be to provide some topic lists that would drive ‘canned queries’ to retrieve pre-defined lists of material. Here’s an example, from palliative care.

But, what topics to use, and equally important, how to develop them? I remember being fearfully impressed with the card-sorting approach used by Sarah Curier in the early days of Stor Curam (now the Learning Exchange) where she did some pilot f2f work with a small number of Social Work academics, on the social care terms they used, then had one of her colleagues (Ivanna Fernandez) create a nifty Flash widget so that the other 100 or so HEI staff could all have a go on the web. She arranged for some statistical software to be connected behind the scenes, and ran the analysis. It was the democratic aspect that this introduced that seemed new and intriguing, quite apart from the sensible suitability of card-sorting, to this problem. [memo to self, must see if Sarah's notes/article on the process are available, even as grey lit.]

Then again this morning, discussions included what to do about a set of Child Protection Committee (CPC) terms for topics that the West of Scotland network would like to sort by. Once more, the process of devising and agreeing these seems just as, if not more, important than the list that emerges.

Now, there’s the risk of lurching into the whole tags, tagging, and folksonomies thing - which I hope not to do (as it’s been really, really well rehearsed elsewhere…all over the place…one item among many). But two key questions remain:

• how to avoid locking down the taxonomy that one agrees originally - so of course one needs to incorporate a ‘tag cloud widget’ or something similar into ones app.;

• how to promote the sharing of knowledge, insights, impressions, ways of looking at the world, that you can so easily get from supporting a folksonomy by tagging, and perhaps even annotation too.

Maybe a Knowledge4Practice thing?? I feel an event coming on….

It’s interesting how a couple of different approaches have emerged in the immediately (and perhaps not-so-immediately) relevant world in response to external change and general turbulence/uncertainty.

A colleague and friend in the health inequalities chunk of The Department tells me that their bit is taking a very flexible approach to teams, units, and what would otherwise be organisational silos. It’s plain, and acknowledged, that health inequalities is a very ‘cross-cutting’ topic that inter-acts with all sorts of other bits of health policy locally. So, to be able to respond to this, and the uncertainty that’s necessarily involved with the development of joinedy-up responses to the various aspects of health inequalities when linked to other issues and initiatives, the overall team will form, reform, and form afresh around what needs doing, rather than around and in more-or-less predefined teams.

 Now across in the eHealth setting, it seems that a different approach is being taken, where existing & (maybe later) new participants will be going for posts/roles in defined teams - there are four sub-components within the current configuration, with a number of roles within each.

Now there’s probably as much uncertainty in this latter domain as in health inequalities, where things gradually need to be clarified more or less in parallel rtaher than serially. And there’s at least as much of a cross-cutting element.  Taking a rather ‘organisational chart’ rather than ‘project team’ approach has some immediate effects.

Take - just as an example - the question of whether the ‘Design Authority’ is to have a severely technical remit, or is to have a broader one. Opinions differ on the preferred scope, of course, depending on whom you talk to, but what seems more certain is that the organisational chart approach surely tends to force the pace on the decision on the scope, whereas some might see that a more evolutionary approach might be advantageous. At another level, it does seem to run contrary to the flexible deployment of folk (within a geeric team) that has been one of the characteristics of our national IM&T Programme work thus far.

What is interesting is the different apparent reactions to more or less the same level of environmental turbulence. What is also interesting is that it is the Civil Service that is taking the more flexible, project team-oriented line, while it seems to be the consultants who are working from the organisational chart. Who’d have thought it?

Well, I hope to use this space to jot down whatever ideas I’m in the middle of thinking about, as soon as they coalesce enough to put words to.

Why? I’ve always gained very much from a peek at or listening to the half-formed ideas of people I’m working and talking with. It would be nice to return the favour. Or at least, have a try.

As someone said a few years back when talking about Directories of Good Practice (much in vogue at the time) “what we really need is a Directory of Half-baked Practice”. Not ‘half-baked’ as in half-baked, but as in ‘not fully baked’, since once something’s attained the status of Good Practice, it’s more than likely to be pretty much past its sell-by date. This was said well before the advent of internet-time, by the way.

The time to engage with new ideas is when they’re half-formed. That’s when they’re interesting, and when you can contribute something too.