Documentally.com» david cameron

Waiting for PM David Cameron #OU_PM

Documentally — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:53:37 +0000

The room has filled up pretty quick here at the Open University. I have a little tech to hand and am waiting for the Prime Minister David Cameron. (That still sounds weird.)

Politics In The Social Media Playground

Documentally — Wed, 12 May 2010 12:33:52 +0000

We may never know the Impact social media had in shaping our new rather bewildering government.

Maybe it reached a lethargic non-voting population and changed their minds. Perhaps it taught the party campaigners to engage with more mobile tools in order to rally their troops. Maybe all it did was introduce other channels of communication to the mix.
All I know is it certainly played a part.

@CraigElder sources David Cameron questions on Twitter to answer at The Open University

Perhaps now with new Natural Language Processing tools for measuring our online sentiment we will finally get an idea of how much of an impact these new media tools are having in the mindset of the general voting public. This is both amazing and scary to me. We seem so desperate to know yet many of us are just having fun. Playing with tech as tools.

It was @Ilicco and Reuters that though it was OK to let the geeks loose with tech in close proximity to the leaders of our parties. And as the security perimeters thinned with each encounter, Brown to Cameron to Clegg.. we would try out more tools and techniques experimenting ways to bring the outside conversations in and to share the conversations we had with everyone. There were times when Ilicco wondered how much trouble we may or may not get into. That said.. I don’t think he ever stopped having fun.

Some of these groundbreaking platforms championed by @Sleepydog lived only during this extreme period of change. His coders would use zero’s and one’s like lego. All the bits are now back in the box. Till next playtime.

We were not too hung up on the quality of anything, be it the video stream or the questions I would slip into whatever conversations we were having. I do remember feeling excited and sharing way too much coffee with friends who’d been given the opportunity to collaborate on projects that excited and inspired.

It was a social media playground like no other. Mobile phones verses the HD stream. Political pundits verses the twitter stream with in many ways the geeks given free rein.

I’m not sure if we will ever again see such a massive change in communication in such a short space of time. Not to the extent that Reuters championed. It was the beach on which the waves of old and new media crashed ..and we all got wet.

Now everyone and their dog is a ‘Social Media Expert’ the air is muggy with hot air and opinion claiming the right and wrong way to engage using real-time web tools.

In the words of Yoda, “Do or do not… There is no try.”

Participation is the key and feeling free enough to play allows you to subconsciously learn from your mistakes.

The people who were both in the rooms and working remotely in these projects are too many to mention. Perhaps they would like to link in or comment their experiences below.

Some names of note were: @Ilicco, @Sizemore, @Sleepydog, @Loudmouthman, @Kate_Day, @SolobassSteve, @benjaminellis, @MarkJones, @CliveFlint, @Sophiebr

The unquantifiable nature of all this will be just a memory next time round. The tools are coming and although I feel we are a long time away from totally understanding the impact from this kind of exchange, we are getting closer all the time.

If I’m honest it’s the metrics that excite me the least. Let the practitioners experiment, explore, dance around new ways. For every ten people willing to show the way, there will be ten thousand wanting to sell you the map.

“When we make music we don’t do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point.” ~ Alan Watts

I am @Documentally on Twitter and mostly blog on http://Documental.ly

P.S Lets remind these guys what they promised the people..

Listen!
PPS, In this last coffee soaked audioboo I meant to say megabits not megabytes..

David Camerwrong

Documentally — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:14:05 +0000

Thanks to @Sizemore for pointing me out in this video mash-up.

Here is the photo i was taking at the time..

..and here is the video.. Don’t blink.. you’ll miss me.

Politics and Social Media.

Documentally — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 00:33:00 +0000

Do politicians really understand how to use social media?

Those of us versed in these new ways of online communication know that any political figure who can truly and completely adopt social media methods would have a formidable secret weapon in their arsenal. A weapon that would have to be adopted across all the battling parties or they would quickly fall by the wayside.

Obama has come the closest at showing the world how to effectively use social and new media in a political campaign with great success.

With podcasts, viral videos, twitter streams and Flickr groups there seemed to be no corner of the Internet where Obama wasn’t being talked about. Who knows how much of this was actually orchestrated by Obama’s people themselves? Does it really matter? The conversations were happening and it seemed Obama’s supporters were the most clued up as to how to keep the ball rolling.

Here in the UK, David Cameron, leader of the Conservative party has been dabbling in social media too. You may have seen ‘Webcameron‘ and his Twitter feed.

He certainly has the people around him capable of pulling this off. Hell, he’s even young enough to make it look like his idea.

Take a look at both parties current web presence though and you will see their pages filled with MySpace style jibes. Social media should be used more for engaging rather than bickering.

I’m intrigued to see whether Reuters‘ forward thinking in getting us in to exercise our social media sinew allows some of our uses of this tech to rub off on others.

After myself and Sizemore documented Gordon Brown’s visit to the Reuters head office in London. Ilicco (Head of Reuters mobile) thought we should take it a step further for a visit by David Cameron.

So, on the morning of the 15th of December at 10 am, a team of UK social media practitioners were in position to document Cameron and the day in more channels than are usually exercised.

This time the team had grown. Behind the scenes we will now had the technical support of two very well known social media mavens, Nik Butler (@Loudmouthman) and Phil Campbell (@PhilCampbell). As Nik used some code he had built to trawl the twittersphere for questions and comments relating to Cameron’s talk, Phil Campbell was at the digital helm of his invention Rezpondr at http://Newsmaker.Rezpondr.com. On the Reuters side of things was @Chris_Parker and @MarkJones manning @Reuters_co_uk

Myself and Mike were on the ground as last time. Taking pix, shooting film, streaming live and using our Mac’s to live blog the mornings event.
We got enough coffee inside us prior to Cameron’s arrival to be able to extract as much as possible from the 60 minutes at our disposal.

I had my N95 for Qiking, my iPhone for tweeting pix, my Kodak Zi6 for HD video blogging, my Nikon D3 for raw pix and new to the arsenal a Nikon D90 equipped with an Eye-Fi SD card streaming photo’s straight into my Eye-Fi flicker account. Obviously it was a bit of a struggle using all these devices at once and some will argue that I could have consolidated some of this kit as certain items are able to multi task. That may well be so, but this was a test. We were once again undertaking an experiment in extreme social media. Here to make mistakes, then, all going well, learn from them.

We had an amazing array of technology at our disposal and some hugely capable minds to tie it all in. All this so as the people excluded from the opportunity to participate could truly be a part of the conversation.

In the future this will be the norm and we will wonder why it took so long for politics and journalism to catch on to this.

Oh.. and in answer to my initial question. No, not really.. but some of their aides will no doubt do it for them.