danielheaf.com

AudioBoo: the story so far

It's been just over two weeks since AudioBoo launched in the Apple App Store and ever since I've been trying to find a moment to pen some thoughts on how it's being used and progress to date. Now, with the rest of the team in Scotland, I've finally found a minute or two to blog rather than keep my nose to the contract-a-thon.

How it's doing

As an early 4iP project there's no doubt that AudioBoo has been an incredible success. Thanks to appearances on the front page of the App Store AudioBoo averaging about 1,200 downloads a day and it's now available on over 7,000 devices. Awareness has undoubtedly been raised by coverage from The Guardian, BBC and most importantly other bloggers like TechCrunch, Neville Hobson, Journalism.co.uk and Podcasting News. Some of my favorite quotes have been:

"AudioBoo may herald a new audio revolution online" Rory Cellan-Jones on dot.life

"Here’s the coolest iPhone application I’ve found so far this year – Audioboo...I’ve been playing with Audioboo for the past few days and, frankly, I’m addicted" - Neville Hobson

"Knocking about the AudioBoo.fm site, you can learn about White Day in Japan, listen to a German practising his guitar chords or any number of ‘boos’ that are the AudioBoo equivalent of “Testing, 1, 2, 3…” - and even those are surprisingly addictive" - Basheera Khan, TechCrunch UK

"..after using it recently in London and in a street in Paris (with public Wi-Fi) I'm impressed. It even produced a map to show where I was in Paris"  - Victor Keegan in the Guardian.

"AudioBoo has me excited. It fills a gap, it’s a missing link" - by Documentally on Our Man Inside

How it's being used

But the press coverage is only half the story. For me the most exciting thing is seeing how AudioBoo is being used. When 4iP invested in AudioBoo it hoped to support a fledgling UK start-up build a tool to empower users to better create audio journalism or first person narratives. I hoped it might see the creation and sharing of first person audio commentary by location and tag.

So imagine my excitement when I saw how The Guardian's Matthew Weaver used AudioBoo to capture audio at the G20 protests in London. Matthew posted audio interviews with Pete Murry from the Green Party, Jenny Ricks, from Action Aid and Brendan Barber, general secretary of the TUC amongst others. Truly shows just how flexible and forward thinking the Guardian's news team are nowadays.

As well as national news stories it's good to see how users reporting on hyperlocal stories and issues that wouldn't necessarily be reported. Boo user Veterus reported on a major fire in Gosport with geo-located images, photos and audio.

While a concerned resident from SE1 reported on Southwark's licensing committee.

But Audioboo's an open platform and users can use the tool however they wish. Some of my favourite, perhaps less serious boos over the last couple have weeks have been:

The BBC's Rory Cellan Jones at a secret rugby game!

and the Boo Bot's giggling baby!

How it's developing

I know all good web products are in perpetual beta but the boys at BestBefore really practise what they preach.

Over the last two weeks they've redesigned the website, developed plug-ins for WordPress, integrated with Twitter and inserted geo-location data into the Atom and RSS feeds. While I was hanging out in their office yesterday they released commenting too!

They know the site and app are far from perfect but better to release early and often taking into account users' needs than build in a bubble.

Bruce Sterling's geek thought crime

I really think it's the original sin of geekdom, a kind of geek thought-crime, to think that just because you yourself can think algorithmically, and impose some of that on a machine, that this is "intelligence." That is not intelligence. That is rules-based machine behavior. It's code being executed. It's a powerful thing, it's a beautiful thing, but to call that "intelligence" is dehumanizing. You should stop that. It does not make you look high-tech, advanced, and cool. It makes you look delusionary.

Even if you took an oath never to read anything more about web 2.0 you need to read this speech by the legendary Science Fiction author Bruce Sterling.

The Rise of Transparency

In late January President Obama published an Memorandum on Transparency.  Here it is (I've added the bold):

MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES

SUBJECT: Transparency and Open Government

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing. Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public feedback to identify information of greatest use to the public.

Government should be participatory. Public engagement enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. Executive departments and agencies should offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public input on how we can increase and improve opportunities for public participation in Government.

Government should be collaborative. Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector. Executive departments and agencies should solicit public feedback to assess and improve their level of collaboration and to identify new opportunities for cooperation.

I direct the Chief Technology Officer, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Administrator of General Services, to coordinate the development by appropriate executive departments and agencies, within 120 days, of recommendations for an Open Government Directive, to be issued by the Director of OMB, that instructs executive departments and agencies to take specific actions implementing the principles set forth in this memorandum. The independent agencies should comply with the Open Government Directive.

This memorandum is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by a party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

This memorandum shall be published in the Federal Register.

BARACK OBAMA

Last week the UK Government published a new document called ‘Working Together - Public Services on your side’ outlining its vision for public sector reform.

This contains the comments below in the Strategic Government section which refer to the Power of Information Taskforce report:

Delivering transparency

A focus on outcomes is only meaningful when it is combined with clear and reliable information on performance. Transparency that delivers accessible and useful information on the performance of services and the outcomes they achieve is at the heart of our strategy for improving public services.

The independent Power of Information Task Force published its report on 2 March. The report contained 25 challenging recommendations to government aimed at improving the use of information in this new world. The Task Force’s work has been recognised internationally as providing a cutting-edge vision, with examples of what modern public service delivery might be.

The Government welcomes the task force’s vision, accepts its overall messages and will be responding on the detailed recommendations shortly. We are already taking steps to implement this vision and in 2009 we will seek to deliver the following:

Open information. To have an effective voice, people need to be able to understand what is going on in their public services. Government will publish information about public services in ways that are easy to find,easy to use, and easy to re-use, and will unlock data, where appropriate, through the work of the Office of Public Sector Information.

Open innovation. We will promote innovation in online public services to respond to changing expectations. The Government will seek to build on the early success of innovate.direct.gov.uk by building such innovation into the culture of public services and public sector websites.

Open discussion. We will promote greater engagement with the public through more interactive online consultation and collaboration. We will also empower professionals to be active on online peer-support networks in their area of work.

Open feedback. Most importantly, the public should be able to have a fair say about their services. The Government will publish best practice in engaging with the public in large numbers online, drawing on the experience of the www.showusabetterway.com competition and the www.londonsummit.gov.uk, as well as leading private sector examples like www.ideastorm.com.

It's amazing just how much political currancy and baggage is now hanging on the word transparency. Sunlight's London based designer, Kerry Mitchell, has come up with this brilliant visualization that shows the mentions of the word “transparency” in The New York Times from 1990 until 2009.

Think of it as a clock. 1 o’clock would be the early ’90s and 11 o’clock being 2008/2009. As you go around the clock the instances of the word increase.  Each line is a month of time.

Kerry didn’t write the code that generates the image. The visualization was created with Processing, and makes use of The New York Times Article API. The Processing code comes from a tutorial available from blprnt.com.

AudioBoo Lives

Today is a good day! Mark Rock and the team at Best Before have dodged and weaved their way around the Apple App Store Police to launch the first version of AudioBoo. Not only is it a great tool but one of my first 4iP commissions Head to the app store now to download it for free!

As you may already know AudioBoo is an application for recording and sharing your audio with the world. The built in microphone allows you to create audio up to 3 minuets in length and post it to the web. You can easily wrap the audio in a rich layer of metadata by adding titles, text, geo-location and a photo.

From a 4iP perspective I hope it empowers users to better create audio journalism or first person narratives as well as makes it easier to find this type of content on the web.

Needless to say it's V1. A huge step but there's a tonne of work to do on the application itself, the API and other tricks Best Before have up their digital sleeves. Keep your eyes out for updates.

Once again a huge congratulations to the Best Before team. They've done an amazing job.

Update: Here are a few links to blogs and chat about AudioBoo:

http://www.nevillehobson.com/2009/03/18/easy-audio-blogging-with-audioboo/

http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/03/16/audioboo-out-of-beta-now-available-at-app-store/

http://www.4ip.org.uk/blog/audioboo_lives/

Mr Hacker goes to Washinton

"We must use all available technologies and methods to open up the federal government, creating a new level of transparency to change the way business is conducted in Washington, and giving Americans the chance to participate in government deliberations and decision-making in ways that were not possible only a few years ago."

From Barack Obama's campaign platform on technology

It's the final day of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and time to draw some early conclusions. This year's conference focused on how the way we live is changing - through policy, technology and ideas with the schedule loosely following tracks like: city tech, developing markets, geo-location, health, materials, mobile and wireless signals.

While not a theme in it's own right I've detected a strong sense of civic duty and public service flowing through many of the plenaries and sessions. The USA's strong sense of identity and patriotism seems to more than make up for the lack of public service funding. However, if the ETech programme organisers are anything to go by (and in my book they most certainly are) the context for a project like 4iP couldn't be better. These are tricky times and digital public service media has an important role to play in addressing some of the problems we face as a society.

I won't reiterate the importance of working on stuff that matters but only empress the sense of urgency I now feel. The intergalactic radioactive crisis cloud we face today is an opportunity to do things differently and to change the way we live, work and play. Barack Obama's presidency and the amazing fact that 30% of the civilian work force in the US Gov Executive are retiring in the next five years offers an unequaled opportunity in the US. Clearly the political landscape and timetable is different in the UK but we're probably subject to similar time pressures. Practically speaking, we have two years to get it right and two years to implement before the naysayers regroup.

Encouragingly fixing democracy was where the drive and ambition was most tangible. Tim O'Reilly announced the inaugural Government 2.0 conference and there have been sessions from Greg Elin of Sunlight Foundation, Mike Mathieu of Front Seat and Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices. If you want to get things done quickly there's probably no better audience than a room full of hackers and alpha-geeks - all Utopian dreamers with DIY attitudes.

Broadly speaking Sunlight Foundation and Front Seat represent the two major works streams in the e-government and democracy space. The Sunlight Foundation are principally concerned with release of public / governmental data while Front Seat build web 2.0 technologies and social media services that facilitate better engagement between the government and it's citizens.

Greg Elin's talk provided a whirl-wind tour of how opaque yet surprisingly accessible US federal government is along with a buffet of action-able resources, initiatives, and activities.

There are times when hackers, coders and campaigners rightly get agitated with governments hiding data that should be in the public domain. But Greg reminded me that governments doesn't just have legacy systems, they *are* a legacy system.

Governments are an application designed for one user at a time, with the elected official as that one user. I won't even go into just how much of the US Government is paper based suffice to say that we won't find ourselves sticking bills into subversion anytime soon. In some ways both the US and UK Government have suffered from being an early adopter. Like the London Underground and NY Subway they suffer from all the first mover problems with prehistoric technology falling apart and patched together because so many things came online before the current situation.

But things are changing. Greg sees organisations like MySociety, FrontSeat , Stamen as creating alternatives that force government to adopt another model. He mentioned the awesome Apps for America, Sunlight's annual development contest where prizes go to developers who can use data from Sunlight and it's partners to make Congress more accountable, interactive and transparent. This is practically identical to some of the work 4iP is funding / wanting to fund in the UK. Ironically, being Channel 4, our branding isn't quite as sexy.

So the Sunlight view is an optimistic one. People at all level of government are starting to understand that making things public means putting them online *forever* in a format that's both human and machine readable. Papers like the Power of Information and initiatives like Show Us A Better Way give me reason to be optimistic in the UK too.

Work on stuff that matters

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.

From "The Man Watching" by Rainer Maria Rilke

This week I'm on holiday in San Jose, which has to be one of the most boring cities I've ever had the misfortune to visit. Luckily I'm not here for the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum and Planetarium or History Park but for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference which continues to be the most thought provoking and brain stretching of conferences.

On the opening night Tim O'Reilly gave his traditional radar keynote but unusually and unlike previous years he seemed less concerned with the future or emerging opportunities but focused on the demands of today.

These are tough times and Tim urged us to take on the current economic crisis and take advantage of a new administration at the White House. While his talk was very US focused it helped me think in more depth about the types of challenges we should be trying to tackle through 4iP and more broadly about the role of UK public service media on digital platforms.

Work on stuff that matters

The time has come for UK broadcasters with digital ambitions and anyone involved in digital to think more deeply and work on stuff that really matters. I agree with Tim when he says 'we have greatness in us' but 'we've wasted it on so much'. Now is the time to move onto really big thinking. This goes to the heart of why 4iP was formed.

Tim told the story of Shai Agassi who quit his job as a software executive at SAP to rethink the business model for the electric car. Granted this is a huge challenge and he might not succeed but that's partly the point. Shai's company Better Place might not achieve sustainable transportation, global energy independence and freedom from oil but we'll almost certainly learn something important in the process.

Through it's funding I hope 4iP can encourage people to start something not necessarily to get rich and famous but to work on something really hard and something that matters. I love the story of the developer who quit is job at Google to go work for an organisation trying to make solar cheaper than coal saying he thought it would be fun because the maths was harder. Jobs working on stuff that really matters that's really hard is really fun.

So as a commissioner and as a team we have to accept that the ideas we fund might not work and accept that we're unlikely to crack some of the really big problems first time. But let's remember the importance of having a go. As I've seen on the web for over ten years now pioneering generates momentum and waves that can propel others forward. Together we mustn't be afraid to dream big.

It's not all about non-profits

Because of it's public service remit people continue to think 4iP is about non-profits or maybe social ventures. From time to time 4iP might fund a non-profit but I don't think we should relegate everything important to non-profits. Generating revenue above and beyond sustainability is an important part of the answer. However, to focus too much on the bottom line is more of a problem.

Tim uses a lovely metaphor of going to on a road trip when talking about business and business models in this space. When you're on a road trip you need to pay attention to the gas tank just like when you're running a business you need to think about revenue. But the 4iP  road trip is not a tour of gas stations. I definitely think its more important to think about what you want to accomplish not weather or not it's going to financially succeed or not.

Alongside this comes a bit of personal advice that you can take or leave. Find something that matters to you that's worth more than money. Passion for your subject goes a long way in my book when I'm looking through the submission system. Passion stands out on the page.

If you're weighing up weather or not to submit a 4iP proposal against taking the road to fame and fortune by developing the coolest Facebook or iPhone application consider this. If you're working on a project for the money and you fail you're probably going to feel like you've wasted your time. On the other hand, if you work on something you love that delivers some public good and you make a small improvement in the world because of what you care about then that's going to feel a whole load more worthwhile.

Take the Long View

Part of what we need to do when working on big challenges is to take the long view. A good example here is the good folk at MySociety who have been working on e-democracy and government transparency for many many years. It wasn't popular in 2003 like it is now with conferences and think tanks popping up all over the place.

Sometimes, just like in science fiction where you can travel at the speed of light, you need to set things in motion and then go to meet up with them five or ten years later. At 4iP we shouldn't need to be sure of the outcome or know the future but we should rise to meet it.

Many of today's economic, environment, social and organisation problems haven't crept up on us but we've been too concerned with the present and hooked on immediate success to notice them or tackle them effectively.

Create more value that you capture

There is probably no better example of too much value being captured than the current world banking crisis. Many of those involved in the management of banks were seemingly complicit in the failing of the economy because of their drive to capturing value for themselves or their organisation. Greed had become systemic in the economic system. 

In contrast, Tim Berners Lee created the the web as a simple system and let it evolve to create enormous amounts of value. The web set a few rules and left the rest for us to do. Twitter, Google Maps and Wikipedia were built on similar principals and have created enormous value.

Generosity is at the heart of generating value rather than capturing it. 4iP needs to be generous and not just in a fiscal sense. We must try to create more value than we capture by helping you to build your ideas and tell your story.

Ultimately, that's 4iP's raison d'etre. We must work to helping you take on those giant challenges that matter to you. The world is full of big crunchy problems - find a place where you can make a difference and send it in.

Code for a better country

Rewired State Hacking Room, originally uploaded by Ben Dodson.

On Saturday Tom and I went along to “Rewired State: National Hack The Government Day” at The Guardian's super swanky new offices in King's Cross. The brainchild of James Darling, Richard Pope and Emma Mulqueeny it set out to demonstrate creative uses of public data and how the government might make better use of internet to engage and empower it's citizens. Showing the government what's possible in this space sits at the heart of the 4iP agenda.

But to cut to the chase, if you only remember one thing about this post it should be that if / when this event is repeated you need to cancel whatever you have planned to be there. Both Tom and I were blown away by the quality of the ideas and by how much everyone achieved in just eight hours coding time. All the demos were a credit to the incredible talent in the room and the skilful way the day was organised.

Sitting at the side of the room watching the final presentations was an inspiration and it was hard work tapping out notes and thoughts fast enough. There were a plethora of imaginative, innovative and fundable ideas and I hope we see more than a couple come into our submissions system.

A personal favourite was Job Centre Pro Plus which allowed you to search, set email alerts and subscribe to RSS feeds for vacant jobs listed in your local area. This idea combined with others like Moving There could be combined to generate a better sense of place than currently provided by most property sites and local aggregators.

A satellite workshop in Brighton developed an idea I'd love to hear more about. The Transparency Machine is an app to encourage more local-government interaction. The app reads in PDFs from council meetings, sorting by date, and the makes them available with details of minutes, agendas for future meetings, and a feedback form to allow residents to ask for items to be placed on the agenda. It's live so you can check it out in action.

I was with the rest of the room in admiring Companies Open House which provided restful Companies House look-up for a company's basic registration information. Unbelievably, the government's Companies House website doesn't have a permanent URL for each registered company, and is shut between midnight and 7am!! Companies Open House is an app that parses company data and gives you a nice page with all of the basic details about each company at a permanent URL. Companies Open House is open 24/7 and you can use each company's permanent URL as a reliable and stable link when making inferences about a company on the Web. It would be interesting to see if the richer 'subscription' data might be set free or derived from other sources to make an awesomely powerful service

But at the the end of the day 4iP had the tricky job of having to pick a few winners to take forward. After a quick huddle we named our favourites as Who Voted Which Way and Foafcorp. Who voted which way, is a twist on They Work For You that allowed you to search by policy as opposed to by MP. They demonstrated how it could be used to create a map that show sthe geographical spread and patterns of the UK's controversial fox hunting bill.

Foafcorp, revives an interactive SVG app by Dean Jackson which shows you links between companies and their directors. Originally based on US originated theyrule, the idea here is to use UK Companies House data.

We're really looking forward to talking to both you guys and anyone else who'd like to put their idea through our submissions system.

See the videos on blip.tv

See Ben Dodson's awesome flickr set