Here at Enabled by Design HQ we're on the look out for a super duper online community manager extraordinaire to join our small but (we like to think) perfectly formed team. Could you be the missing piece of our jigsaw puzzle?


So what is an online community manager?
We're looking for that certain someone who can support the Enabled by Design team to reach out, engage with and grow its online community. This can be done in a number of ways including posting content on Enabled by Design's website and social media platforms including facebook, twitter and flickr, forging links with other online communities with a common interest such as design, independent living, health and disability, keeping up-to-date and engaged with related blogs and blogging yourself, to name but a few.

Who are we looking for?
Enabled by Design was partly borne out of the frustration of jobs with flexible working conditions not being readily available. For me flexible homeworking is helping to remove some of the barriers I've experienced and for this reason we'd like to support someone else to work under the permitted work scheme too. Therefore, working hours available would be up to 15 hours per week, keeping within the rules given.

What are we looking for?

Community manager checklist:
* Confident user of technology, the web and social media
* Strong communication skills, both written and verbal
* Interested in the work of Enabled by Design
* Passionate about design for all and accessibility
* Happy to read around the subject
* Willingness to learn
* Independent, organised and creative
* Good at networking
* Sense of fun

Have you got what it takes or do you know someone who does? If so, we'd love to hear from you!

How to apply:

We wanted to make the application as straightforward as possible, so we're asking for two things:

1. A personal statement (one A4 page maximum) on why you want to work with Enabled by Design, outlining any relevant personal experience.

2. A 200-300 word blog post on what design for all means to you. The blog post should express your own personal writing style, so we can get to know you a bit better.

Please send both parts of your application by email to denise@enabledbydesign.org by the closing date shown below. If you have any questions at all or would like to do things a little differently (perhaps a video application even?), drop us a line at anytime.

Deadline: Friday 24th September 2010

Thanks for your time and we look forward to hearing from you!

Team EbD x

I was talking to a friend who’s looking to start using the web and social media more effectively to reach a specific group of people. It got me thinking about the basics - the things that are, in most cases, mission critical when it comes to finding success in a digital world.

Former prime minister issues statement explaining how he and his wife, Sarah, are to embark on a number of charitable projects

Gordon Brown today broke his silence to set out his plans for the future announcing that he is to embark on a number of charitable projects and will set up an Office of Gordon and Sarah Brown to coordinate his work, paid for by a string of lucrative speaking engagements.

In a move designed to rise above the furore surrounding the avalanche of criticisms contained in Tony Blair's memoirs, Brown issued a statement setting out his "priorities for the future" and how both he and his wife plan to contribute to public life in the future.

He confirmed he had spent the summer finalising his book on global economic affairs and visiting local schools, businesses and charities. He announced three new appointments: as convenor of the Global Campaign for Education working with Queen Rania of Jordan, working on a new programme to bring the internet to Africa and joining the board of Tim Berners Lee's World Wide Web Foundation.

 The statement said: "Each of these positions are pro bono and Mr Brown will not accept any remuneration.

 "He will continue to write on global issues, as he has been doing recently with articles on the desperate plight of those in Pakistan and Niger. 

"To facilitate their ongoing public policy work, the Office of Gordon and Sarah Brown has been set up to employ a number of staff to work on the projects they are committed to. 

"Gordon and Sarah have always made clear they are determined to continue to make their contribution to public life and these latest initiatives are a sign of Gordon's priorities for the future."

A spokesman confirmed Brown has put his name on the books of the Washington Speeches Bureau in order to fund the salaries of his staff, which has been cleared by the advisory committee on business appointments.

New York Times publishes allegations that PM's media adviser 'actively encouraged' unlawful practice while editor

The prime minister's media adviser, Andy Coulson, freely discussed the use of unlawful news-gathering techniques while editor of the News of the World and "actively encouraged" a named reporter to engage in the illegal interception of voicemail messages, according to allegations published by the New York Times.

Coulson, who resigned as editor of the News of the World in January 2007 after its royal correspondent was jailed for intercepting voicemail messages, has always insisted that he had no knowledge of illegal activity when he edited the paper or at any time as a journalist. He told a Commons select committee last year: "I have never had any involvement in it at all."

The New York Times website published a trail to a story due to appear in its Sunday magazine. It made detailed allegations likely to bring intense new pressure on Coulson and the Metropolitan police force, which stands accused of favouring Rupert Murdoch's newspaper group by cutting short its investigation, withholding crucial evidence from prosecutors and failing to inform victims of the newspaper's crimes against them. Coulson declined to comment on the allegations. The News of the World and Scotland Yard have denied all the charges.

Coulson resigned after the imprisonment of his royal reporter, Clive Goodman, and a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, for "hacking" into the voicemail messages of eight public figures. When the Guardian revealed last year that the scandal involved other journalists at the paper and numerous other victims, Coulson said he had nothing to add to earlier denials of involvement, and the Conservative leader stood by him. David Cameron said: "I believe in giving people a second chance."

The New York Times, which has had an investigative team at work on the story since March, is citing two former News of the World journalists who specifically claim that Coulson was directly aware of his reporters' use of illegal techniques.

An unnamed former editor is quoted as claiming that Coulson talked freely about illegal news-gathering techniques, including phone-hacking, and that he personally had been at "dozens, if not hundreds" of meetings with Coulson where the subject came up. "The editor added that when Coulson would ask where a story came from, editors would reply 'We've pulled the phone records' or 'I've listened to the phone messages'."

In addition, Sean Hoare, a former reporter who used to be a close friend of Coulson, is quoted as saying that when he worked with Coulson at the Sun, he personally played recordings of hacked voicemail messages for him and that later, when he worked for Coulson at the News of the World, he "continued to inform Coulson of his pursuits. Coulson 'actively encouraged me to do it', Hoare said".

Hoare, who was sacked from the paper at a time when he had drink and drug problems, says he personally listened to the voicemail messages of celebrities such as David and Victoria Beckham and that he has spoken out now because he believes it was unfair for Goodman to get all the blame.

Coulson told the Commons media committee last year that he had never even heard Mulcaire's name and that Goodman had been the only reporter involved: "I am absolutely sure that Clive's case was a very unfortunate rogue case."

The New York Times claims to have spoken to a dozen former News of the World reporters and editors who say that phone-hacking was "pervasive" in Coulson's newsroom. "Everyone knew," according to an unnamed senior reporter. "The office cat knew." Most former reporters are unnamed, but Sharon Marshall is named as having witnessed hacking when working under Coulson from 2002-04. "It was an industry-wide thing," she said.

The paper says that Coulson ran a highly competitive newsroom "with single-minded imperiousness". Former News of the World journalists claim that there was a "do whatever it takes" mentality and that reporters were told to "get the story, no matter what". "They described a frantic, sometimes degrading atmosphere in which some reporters openly pursued hacking or other improper tactics to satisfy demanding editors," according to the New York Times.

The paper gives a specific example of the involvement of an editorial executive: "Matt Driscoll, a former sports reporter, recalled chasing a story about the soccer star Rio Ferdinand. Ferdinand claimed he had inadvertently turned off his phone and missed a message alerting him to a drug test. Driscoll had hit a dead end, he said, when an editor showed up at his desk with the player's private phone records." Driscoll was later dismissed and awarded £800,000 by a tribunal, which found that he had been bullied by Coulson.

Bill Akass, managing editor of the News of the World, dismissed the New York Times claims as "unsubstantiated". He said: "We reject absolutely any suggestion or assertion that the activities of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, at the time of their arrest, were part of a culture of wrongdoing at the News of the World and were specifically sanctioned or accepted at a senior level in the newspaper."

The New York Times goes on to quote unnamed sources from the Met suggesting that its inquiry into the phone hacking was hampered by a desire to avoid upsetting Britain's biggest selling newspaper: "Several investigators said in interviews that Scotland Yard was reluctant to conduct a wider inquiry in part because of its close relationship with the News of the World."

After a raid on Goodman's desk in August 2006, according to the New York Times, "several detectives said they began feeling internal pressure. One senior investigator said he was approached by someone from the department's press office, who was waving his arms in the air, saying 'wait a minute, let's talk about this'."

The investigator, who has since left Scotland Yard, added that the press officer stressed the department's "long-term relationship with News International". The investigator recalled furiously responding: "There's illegality here, and we'll pursue it like we do any other case." Scotland Yard says that operational decisions are made by police, not by press officers.

Former journalists told the New York Times that when Scotland Yard raided Goodman's desk, two senior journalists "stuffed reams of documents into trash bags and hauled them away". Police did not interview any other reporter or editor apart from Goodman. The material seized from Goodman and Mulcaire included paperwork which potentially implicated three named journalists. None was interviewed and, as the Guardian disclosed last year, the police failed to pass key paperwork to the Crown Prosecution Service.

The New York Times quotes an unnamed former senior prosecutor who was "stunned to discover later that the police had not shared everything. 'I would have said we need to see how far this goes' and 'whether we have a serious problem of criminality on this news desk', said the former prosecutor."

When the case came to court, police identified eight victims of the hacking. However, the New York Times claims that the officer responsible for the inquiry, the then assistant commissioner Andy Hayman, had been shown a "target list" of names and numbers taken from Mulcaire's home which ran to eight or 10 pages and which "read like a British society directory".

The Met told prosecutors that it would approach all known victims, but failed to do so. One who was approached, the then Respect MP George Galloway, told the New York Times that police warned him that his voicemail had been intercepted but refused to tell him who was responsible.

Scotland Yard denies cutting short its inquiry or being influenced by its relationship with the News of the World. The Press Complaints Commission was criticised after two inquiries into the affair failed to find evidence of wrongdoing other than that originally presented by police.

After revelations in the Guardian, the Commons media select committee held a second inquiry into the affair last year. Its report expressed concern "at the readiness of all of those involved – News International, the police and the PCC – to leave Mr Goodman as the sole scapegoat without carrying out a full investigation".

Press Complaints Commission confirms it was told two months ago that journalist was under investigation over new claim

The News of the World is facing a fresh allegation of phone hacking against one of its journalists, the Press Complaints Commission confirmed today.

The commission was informed by the paper just over two months ago about the allegation, and the journalist involved has been "suspended from reporting duties".

Stephen Abell, the PCC director, confirmed today that the press regulator was informed in by the paper in June "of the existence of the recent allegation of phone-message hacking against the reporter". Abell said that the PCC was prevented from launching its own investigation because the allegation was "the subject of legal action".

The new claim was revealed late yesterday in a New York Times article on the News of the World phone-hacking affair. The paper reported that the News of the World was conducting a new phone-hacking investigation and had suspended a reporter, after a "television personality" had been alerted by her phone company to a "possible unauthorised attempt to access her voicemail" and the number was traced back to a journalist at the paper.

Bill Akass, the News of the World managing editor, confirmed in a response to the New York Times that an internal investigation was under way and that a journalist had been "suspended from reporting duties".

It is understood that the News of the World was first made aware of the phone-hacking claim around Easter this year and that the internal investigation is ongoing.

"A serious allegation has been made about the conduct of one of our reporters. We have followed our internal procedures and the reporter has been suspended from reporting duties, and a very thorough and extensive investigation carried out into that allegation (involving, for example, external forensic specialists)," Akass said.

"The allegation is the subject of litigation and our internal investigation continues in tandem with that, which means I am unable to comment further. If the conclusion of the investigation or the litigation is that the allegation is proven, the reporter will be dismissed for gross misconduct without compensation.

"We have a zero-tolerance approach to any wrong-doing and will take swift and decisive action if we have proof of any wrong-doing."

Abell said: "The PCC was informed by the News of the World in June of the existence of the recent allegation of phone message hacking against the reporter. This is currently the subject of legal action, which has prevented the PCC from becoming formally involved at this stage.

"However, once the legal action has been concluded, the commission will consider the matter further. It was right that the News of the World disclosed the existence of this claim to the PCC, and we will address the issues when it is possible for us to do so. The PCC has made publicly clear on a number of occasions that phone message hacking is deplorable and that view – of course – remains."

The News of the World's editor, Colin Myler told the Commons culture select committee last year that he had introduced new procedures to avoid a repeat of this behaviour. Myler became editor in 2007, when Andy Coulson resigned over the Clive Goodman phone-hacking affair.

Myler told the committee that all staff were ordered to follow the PCC code of conduct and warned that failure to comply could result in disciplinary proceedings. Stricter controls on cash payments and sources were also introduced and all staff had to attend workshops on the PCC code, he added.

The committee called several current and former executives from the News of the World's publisher, News International, including Coulson, last year as part of its inquiry into privacy, press standards and libel.

This fresh round of hearings was prompted by the Guardian's revelation that News International had paid £700,000 to settle a breach of privacy claim from Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, after a private investigator working for the News of the World hacked into his phone.

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.

• If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

A new study by email software purveyor Xobni confirms what we bloggers know to be true, there’s actually no such thing as a day off in the Internet age (Want more visceral proof than an email study? Check out the timestamp of this post).

Information anxiety has pretty much put the kibosh on “time off” as two out of three Americans and Brits check their email outside of regular business hours (ha) and half of Americans email while on vacation (double ha).

The Xobni study, an online survey of 2,200 British and American adults conducted in August, holds that the traditional 9-5 work day has gone the way of the Dodo, due to the fact that Americans and Brits can’t stop checking their email. Apparently we sneak a peak at out inboxes while on vacation, weekends, sick days and even when we are (gasp!) in bed.

The press release blames this behavior on the down economy and the iPhone, but I blame it on the fact that we now live most of our lives online, and we feel compelled to check our email/Facebook/Twitter because that’s where most of the exciting stuff is happening anyways.

More highlights from the study/the life we have chosen:

* The 9-5 work day has gone the way of the Dodo. 72% of Americans and 68% of Brits say they regularly check their email on vacations, sick days, and at home in bed.

* Yes, IN BED. Conveniently for Xobni, work email in bed is apparently, you know, like a thing, with 1 in 5 Americans checking email as the first thing they do in the morning or the last thing they do at night before falling asleep (Again I can personally vouch for this).

According to Xobni, email has become an addiction, and like most addictions it is fueled by peer pressure:

* 27% check email outside of regular working hours because they feel it is expected.

* 26% of Americans feel they can’t handle/overwhelmed by the number of emails they receive during vacation.

Everyone in the world agrees that managing email has become a challenge to our sanity. And various companies are scrambling towards solutions including Google with its recent Gmail Priority Inbox launch and Xobni, obviously. My favorite low-fi way to deal with the bottleneck is a service called Sentenc.es which makes it clear to your email reader that you are limited to short responses.

Even though I’m not sure how well that will work, in bed.

Video, vaguely related.

Email overload image above: Ario_

Has there been a failure by the Metropolitan Police to properly investigate alleged criminal activity by those working for the mainstream media?


This question has been around for a long time, but it looked as if it was to linger until we all forgot about it.


It was a question raised by the circumstances around the prosecution of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire.

It is also the subject of a spirited libel case currently being brought by solicitor Mark Lewis (and click there for relevant links into the PCC "activity" on the matter).

But, until last night, it looked as if the question was not really going anywhere, unless Mark Lewis's case got to a substantive hearing.


However, in a detailed article which must be read by anyone with an interest in police conduct and media activities, the New York Times has revived the question and has sought to substantiate it with supporting material.

Much of this material is from anonymous sources and not open to verification.


The Guardian has picked up the story, though it is focusing on the particular role of Andy Coulson.

(It is a feature of UK political culture that any political problem needs to be personalised before anyone will report it and anyone will want to read it, and so this is one reason why we have staggering wider abuses whilst many get flustered about duckhouses and junior ministerial special advisers.)


Serious allegations always just remain allegations; and so a due process needs to be followed in investigating them: a process fair to those involved, but also a process open to public scrutiny.


As the New York Times allegations go to the relationship between the police and the press, it is not appropriate or possible that it should just be left to their respective supervisory bodies (even if one had any confidence in such bodies).

There instead needs to be an open judicial inquiry, and the Deputy Prime Minister (a Liberal Democrat) and the Home Secretary (a Conservative) should appoint one immediately.

Public confidence in the press and the police is crucial to a modern liberal and democratic society; any without an inquiry into these serious allegations, it is difficult to see how such confidence can exist.



COMMENTS MODERATION

No purely anonymous comments will be published; always use a name for ease of reference by other commenters.

Back when I was reviewing and distributing zines and other self published paper objects I had a saying. Never think you have a handle on what’s going on or a sense of the scale of the “scene”. There’ll be huge seams of activity going on under your radar, in networks just a few degrees away from yours. The only reason you think you know it all is because you’ve stopped looking.

Stopping looking isn’t a crime. If you’re trying to actually do something drawing a line in your explorations is a good way to start. But if you’re in the business of media in the current era when anyone can create a media platform in seconds you should always be aware of your limitations.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last year. When Twitter first broke out in the UK I could have confidently told you how it was being used because I was part of the relatively small community that was using it. As Twitter adoption grew my knowledge changed. I could no longer tell you how people were using it because the number of uses were becoming huge. All I could do was help you understand the nature of the Twitter model.

It’s probably best to think of engagement through Twitter in terms of slices. I give Twitter some variables (these are the people I want to follow / this is the search query I have) and, after adding some more variables (these are the people who have mentioned you) it returns a slice of Twitter based on who’s posted recently. This slice is pretty much unique to me. The connection is has with other people’s slices is merely how much it overlaps (mutual followers, etc) and these connections will shift and change over time.

Watching people I feel I know well use Twitter can be fascinating. Because their slice is different their whole perception of Twitter is different to mine, sometimes subtly, sometimes drastically. I don’t want to play down the importance of the overlaps – they are the glue thats makes Twitter work – but I think the differences are often under-appreciated by those who celebrate the power Twitter has to bring people together. It’s these these effectively infinite differences between the slices that enable messages, ideas and links to thinks to spread across the network so quickly and effectively.

The other great thing about the Twitter model is it’s a good way of understanding how the Internet works. One of the great early works about the Internet was David Weinberger‘s book Small Pieces Loosely Joined. It’s a very seductive phrase and one that I’ve returned to again and again over the last decade as it seems to be the fundamental difference between old media and new. But it also seems to me to be an accurate reflection on how society works.

In other words, what we’re seeing as a digital phenomena is more like the normal way of things. When Weinberger says in his introduction:

Then we go on the Web, and the pieces are so loosely joined that frequently the links don’t work. [...] But, that’s ok because the Web gets its value not from the smoothness of its overall operation but from its abundance of small nuggets that point to more small nuggets. And, most important, the Web is binding not just pages but us human beings in new ways. We are the true “small pieces” of the Web, and we are loosely joining ourselves in ways that we’re still inventing.

I’d say yes, that’s true, but what’s also happening is we’re rediscovering the power of that loose joining that our great-grandparents knew well.

Maybe.

I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But it makes sense to me. Big media is only 3 or 4 generations old and something must have held society together before then.

My motivation for writing this post came from a couple of posts. The first by hyperlocal guru Will Perrin about the Shott review of economics of Local Television where he argues “For me the overarching question is why do local video programming on TV rather than the internet? The internet does almost everything that small audience local TV can do but far cheaper and more flexibly.”

The second is a followup from social media for social good hero Nick Booth where he asks his network What would you show from Birmingham to demonstrate how the web can do local better than local tv? Now, I think I know what Nick’s trying to do here but I think he’s falling into the trap that appears whenever this sort of thing is discussed. It is very hard, if not impossible, to do x=y comparisons between big media models and the way the social internet operates.

He asks “if he were to come to Birmingham who could [Secretary of State] Jeremy Hunt meet and what locally grown bottom up Big Society media goodness could we show him to help demonstrate an alternative beyond Local TV?”

The implication being that what we have in Birmingham is a viable alternative in scope and reach to that put out by a local television station. And, as Dave Harte points out in the comments, it doesn’t quite measure up.

Overall, I can’t help feeling that even with all the sites mentioned there isn’t really much here that yet adds up to a viable local media scene.

No, it doesn’t. And that’s not to detract from any of the efforts out there because, with some exceptions, I don’t think they’re trying to be part of a vibrant local media scene. Either their not capable or they’re not interested or they have another agenda for doing what they do.

But there’s a more fundamental point. These sites Nick rolls out are, I think, aberrations. While they might be distinct from big media models they still share more with them than we might like to admit. If we’re talking about a media landscape it’s a bit like Houston (where my Dad used to live and which I’ve visited a few times).

This is Downtown Houston.

It’s about a mile across and contains lots of big tall buildings. It’s the skyline that Houston is known by.

pic by telwink

But Houston as a whole doesn’t look like that. I picked Houston because when I visited it I was struck be how spread out everything is. Land is relatively cheap in Houston and the motor car rules so the city sprawls in a way that boggles the mind of this walk-everywhere Brit. Here’s Houston as a whole with the Downtown bit marked in red.

And from the side:

pic by Jason McELweenie

This idea of a effectively infinite space housing a sprawl of relatively small buildings is what I perceive Birmingham’s local online media scene to be like. Sure, there are some striking things in the middle there which many people will point to as a shortcut, and yes they are impressive and important, but they do not and cannot and should not represent the whole.

The problem for the policy makers is they’re thinking in terms of things they can get their heads around, things that fit into the old models of doing things. There’s this attitude that because a model worked well in the past it’ll work well in the future and so we see bizarre projects like this Local TV thing (something which I’ve only ever seen supported by grey haired people who used to work in local TV back when it was a commercially viable model).

And so the danger for those who are trying to talk to policy makers is falling into the trap of comparing the old and the new within the framework of the old, to give the impression that these new things can fill the gap perceived to be left by the withering old things.

As Jon Bounds said last Spring after talking to a reporter about the decline of local newspapers:

He wanted to talk about whether blogging would “fill the gap” that a demise of local papers would create and kept trying to get us to say that we were waiting and wanting to do it commercially. We’re not. We said so a number of times. In my opinion it would be stupid, we’re already filling gaps and have been for years — the hole that “papers” currently fill isn’t a shape that blogging can be forced into (and papers themselves don’t fill the hole anyway).

There’s a tendency to see the shifts in the media landscape as a fragmentation of what was dominant into lots of smaller pieces. While I like the “smaller pieces” bit I do think the term “fragmentation” is a little misleading. It’s not that services provided by larger media outfits have been devolved – it’s more that the needs that those services were developed to fulfill are being serviced by something else entirely.

And, I would argue, that something will not be easy to identify as an entity. It’s a toolset, sure, and literacy in frictionless sharing environments like Twitter and Facebook are important, but it’s also an attitude, an understanding that this isn’t about using media in a broadcast way. It’s about using media without realising you’re using media.

I’ve been thinking for a while now that people like me make for the worst examples of social media usage. The early adopters and power users are too self-aware, too knowing in what they do online. Dubber calls Twitter “performance conversation” and I’ve been told off for playing games with my followers by posting provocative stuff for kicks. We’re the sort of people who are supposed to be pushing and tickling this stuff to see how it works. Everyone else is just using it, and that makes them a lot more interesting.

I think the examples Nick his commenters gave are good and important things that are doing important work. I would not want to take anything away from what they’ve achieved. But I do not think presenting stuff like Created in Birmingham and The Stirrer as replicating the services of monolithic media outlets is doing anyone any favours because it’s too easy to say they’re not without addressing the real phenomena. That these online things are the anomalies in a rich tapestry of stuff, most of which which is too small or to temporary to get a handle on.

No-one should try and predict the future but in order to better define the present I’ll have a go. I think things online are going to get more atomised. We’re going to see smaller pieces reaching smaller audiences over smaller periods of time. I think concepts like hyperlocal will be seen as transitional stages between the big and the small where the small is effectively the personal. And I think we’ll see the importance of identity diminish as reputation is spread across networks and becomes a more fluid thing.

(As an aside I think Tumblr is a fascinating example of this and something I want to study in more depth)

In short I think the future of online media looks a lot like soup. There will be carrots and they will be important but on the whole it’ll be a murky and opaque and very hard to perceive as anything other than a whole.

And I think this will be a good thing.