I recall some years ago wandering around a city looking for a phonebox. I found one but the phone was broken. About ten minutes later I came across another one, in working order, and made the phone call.
Today I would have got out my iphone and made the call immediately.
I recall some years ago wanting to buy a music CD. I went into the city. The first record shop didn’t have the one I wanted, but fortunately the second one did. I got in the car and drove home to play it… this was before CD players were widely available for cars. It was about two hours before I heard the music play.
Today I would logon to Amazon or Play.com and download it immediately.
I recall writing a letter onto a piece of paper, folding it and placing in an envelope. Then walking to the post office (I hadn’t got a stamp) and posting to Auntie Mabel in Australia (I haven’t really got an Auntie Mabel in Australia but you get the idea). In about a week or so the letter would reach Mabel and if she replied by return I would get a letter back from her in a couple of weeks.
Today I would email Auntie Mabel, and she might even email me back in a few minutes…better still, we could have a free video conversation on Skype.
I recall some years ago having to research school homework by looking in the encyclopaedia we had at home, then walking to the local library and checking in the books there. Writing up notes into an exercise book then walking back home to write the work.
Today I would search through Google from my front room and get the answers off Wikipedia immediately.
A few weeks ago whilst driving on the M3, I realised I had left my phone on my desk at home. I instantly felt vulnerable and out of touch with the world. I had become accustomed to being able to communicate at will.
A few weeks ago my internet went down. Until it was fixed I found myself feeling isolated.
The point I am, somewhat inelegantly, trying to make is that so much more is now instantly available and that our expectations and behaviours have changed accordingly… and as technology develops we will continually expect much more… there’s probably no going back.
There is an absolutely unimaginable amount of electronic data in the world, accessible on web servers via the internet, on home and business computer hard drives, portable drives, backup tapes and so on down to memory sticks and cards.
The Internet Archive currently has 20 petabytes (20 trillion gigabytes) and apparently grows by a further 20 terabytes (20,000 gigabytes ) every month. Your average home computer holds around 250 to 500 gigabytes, which gives you some idea of the scale.
How much of the world’s data is actually of any use is quite another matter… I am told that quite a lot is not!
A quick trip round the accessible parts of i-drive on the HCC network makes me support this view.
Within 5 minutes of looking for CCRA files, I have found over 100 megabytes of powerpoints from 2003, images and pdfs from 2004/5, minutes of team meetings from 2003/4/5, letters from 2003, an mp3 of an extract from Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, superceded phone lists in Excel spreadsheets and even folders set up people who no longer work for the authority.
So the challenge is to go into i-drive and delete any files belonging to you that are no longer required… send me the quantity measured in kilobytes if it’s a little or megabytes if there’s a lot and we’ll see how much lighter we can make i-drive. I also want to find the oldest piece of redundant data… so don’t delete it, but email it to me at rhwebteam@hants.gov.uk
At 10am yesterday in San Francisco, 6pm in the UK, Apple launched their new table called the ‘ipad’.
I watched the launch live online along with tens of thousands of other people with a geeky interest in technology. My view of the launch event came via a journalist from the online ‘engadget blog’. The postings came every 15 to 30 seconds, complete with photographs of the new tablet and descriptions of its functions.
Ten years ago a product launch would have been seen only by those at the launch venue and relayed to news rooms via phone and email. Now anyone can take part.
This morning Flickr already has photographs taken at the launch. Steve Jobs, ipad and Apple were listed amongst the top trending topics on Twitter. Bloggers around the world will have written millions of words on the subject, and all less than 12 hours since the launch.
It looks like an impressive gadget, described by Steve Jobs as filling the gap between the smartphone and the computer. It’s not too expensive… from $499 or just over £300. The days of the Kindle and Sony reader are over as it will definately supplant the current generation of ebook readers, and if Apple are correct will create a new paradigm for mobile computing.
Take a look at the picture below… it shows ‘the bookshelf’ with your downloaded books. A simple touch of a book on the shelf will open it so you can begin to read it!
It’s going to be three more months before they appear on the Apple store shelves in the USA, and longer before they arrve in Europe… I imagine an ipad will be on my Christmas present list, so once I get a hands-on I will write about it again.
In his book Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World
If you are one of the ‘grown up digital’, then you are likely to have little perception of how the pre-digital world worked. It must be difficult to comprehend how we ever got things done considering the cumbersome and ponderous processes which were the way work worked before emails and a computer on every desk.
You are a generation who use computers, mobile devices and games consoles quite naturally than your elders and betters. But importantly, you represent a sizable proportion of staff in both CCRA and the county council.
An article in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago discussed how today’s babies and toddlers will grow up even more digitally enabled than their older siblings. They will see the ebook readers alongside paper books and have no appreciation of which came first. They will grow up surrounded by technology, which they will interact with quite naturally and in new ways, probably using hand gestures instead of typing on a keyboard. They will use the social networking tools to plan, manage, interact and collaborate.
Yet it would be fair to say that the County Council is mostly managed by an older generation, many of whom still find the digital environment challenging, and who often have little understanding, empathy or insight into the digital world.
So how do we resolve this mismatch?
I believe we need to engage much more with our younger staff to help us start to built structures, procedures and service delivery mechanisms that the ‘net gen’ will want and expect.
I’d like to re-establish the CCRA ’Innovations Group’ to look at new ways of working using the new and emerging technologies… so, any volunteers from the under 30s to help us really build a digitally enabled department fit for the 21st century?
On frequent occasions, I receive copy which includes the phrase, or variations thereof, “find out more by logging onto name-of-website”
Logging ‘on’ or ‘in’ is when you fill in a box with your username and password to access a web page. It isn’t when you click on a link and visit a website.
It can be abbreviated to logon or login.
So now you know…
Don’t block social networking sites, says Socitm, Society of Information Technology Management.
Not only is it good, they are encouraging councils to embrace social media rather than block it as many currently do.
Social media is now being recognised as valuable business tools. So instead of it being a ‘waste of time’ and managers trying to block access, they are advising that councils ought to be investigating how these collaborative technologies might help to engage with residents and deliver services more efficiently and cost effectively.
In all fairness to Hampshire, the Council has never banned staff access to social media via the HCC network despite the hue and cry in the press last year… and CCRA has been in the forefront of using social media tools in the County Council.
I feel this is an ‘I told you so’ moment.
This week Google said it was no longer prepared to censor search results on its Chinese service.
Censorship is seen as bad, and rightly so. Ironically we, in the County Council, also have our access to the internet restricted to corporately approved websites, or more precisely not being allowed access to web content on a proscribed list.
For example, anyone on the Council network wanting to search for images in Google will come across this screen.
So, what’s the difference?…. answers below in the comments box please.
I’ve just donated £20 to the British Red Cross for their Haiti Earthquake Appeal… it’s not much I know, but I hope it will in some small way help.
If you want to donate you can do it online… it takes about one minute… go to their Haiti Earthquake Appeal webpage
Shorts are for Summer when the weather is warm, or for the gym or sports field, not for shovelling snow.
A Canadian of my acquaintance told me yesterday that Montreal airport has weather colder and snow deeper that anything we’ve experienced, lasting at least three months of the winter and yet never closes, whereas here everything shuts down with just a couple of degrees below zero and 20 centimetres of snow.
The authorities in Montreal can predict that the Canadian winter will be severe every year, and I’ve lived in Hampshire for over 20 years and this is the worst ‘freeze’ I have known.. a couple of recent winters didn’t even require scraping the car windscreen.
It comes as little surprise that the media are blaming local authorities for the chaos resulting from unsalted roads and diminishing reserves of grit. It would not make sense for local authorities in this part of the country to invest in expensive machinery or huge salt stockpiles that may rarely be used… but we live in a blame culture and local authorities have become an easy target in recent times. If anyone is at fault it’s the Met Office, as their long-range forecast was not for an arctic winter… and let’s not forget their forecast of the barbeque summer!
I think CCRA coped particularly well during the cold snap… whilst many of a our venues have had to close, some were able to remain open despite the adverse weather.
We were able to use the website with considerable effectiveness to make sure that up-to-date information was available for users of our services. We had already put contingency systems in place for the predicted flu pandemic, but instead they have been used to provide each main subsite in the CCRA website with links to the latest closures and changes of service.
The only improvement I would suggest for next time (hopefully not too soon) is the we get staff to notify us even when venues are open… we can’t really know somewhere is open just because we haven’t been told it’s closed.
So well done to all of you who managed to keep services going and thanks to those of you who kept the webteam informed!
