1. Kill your babies

Suttonboro is supposed to be a serious digest of the news stories that matter in Sutton, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to slip in two of my own stories that wouldn’t have made the cut had they come from elsewhere. I’ve deleted them. It won’t be happening again.

2. Rewriting the headlines

Before I started, I imagined that the only editing I’d have to do would be story selection. Thus, once I’d found a good story all I’d have to do would be to paste the headline and its TinyURLd link into Twitter. Wrong.

In the Suttonboro Twitter feed, all you get is a headline and a link. There are no photos, no standfirsts nor any other supporting content. The headlines have to tell the whole story by themselves. This is no place to tease or to be cute or coy. You can click through to read the full details of the story but you shouldn’t have to do that just to find out what it actually is. If you’re reading the feed in an RSS reader, you have to click through twice as the whole Twitter update becomes a link to the individual Twitter post page, breaking the separate TinyURL link to the real story. So getting the headline right really matters.

For example, this original headline:

Councillor quits over ‘backstabbing and general bitchiness’

becomes:

UKIP’s Councillor Pickles to quit over “backstabbing and general bitchiness”

In this context, having the councillor’s name and party is significant and useful. You don’t need to click through just to discover which councillor is leaving or to imagine how this might affect the political composition of the council. Also, the original headline is inaccurate. The councillor will not be standing for re-election, but he hasn’t resigned already. Thus, it’s “to quit” rather than “quits”. By adding four words to the headline I’ve added two significant bits of information about the story and corrected an inaccuracy. That’s good.

Consistency of tone matters in these headlines too. Left unaltered, one from the Sutton Guardian might be tabloidesque, the next a self-congratulatory press release from the council. Both need to be edited back to a neutral mid-position that plays it straight and makes it easy for the reader to judge whether the story merits clicking through to read in full. While I haven’t gone back and edited the existing updates in the feed (not least because Twitter quite rightly doesn’t allow edits), in future the whole feed should be tonally consistent.

So:

Spin doctor bill up by £200k

becomes:

Council’s PR bill up by £200K

The pejorative and clichéd “spin doctor” gets neutralised to “PR” and we need to know that it’s the council’s PR bill if we’re to get the whole story from just the headline. It’s implicit that we’re talking about Sutton Council as this is a Sutton-specific feed.

3. Story selection

There’s always going to be an element of intuition about what’s right to include and what’s not, but the aim is to cover all the significant and serious stories in the borough with an emphasis on those that affect or are affected by public policy. For example I don’t include individual crime stories unless they suggest a change to law or policy, which would be more likely for a group of related cases than a single case anyway.

I’ll include any public policy issue that affects a large number of people or that affects a small number of people significantly. So while “Hospital u-turn on doctor charges” seems at first sight like a serious story, which it is, it’s not a very significant one. It affects a small group of people (junior doctors) in a relatively minor way (having to pay £36 for a CRB check).

What’s left out is as important as what’s put in. Anything that makes it harder for the reader to form an accurate and consistent expectation of what they’re likely to find in future harms more by its presence than by its absence. If you care about missing wizards’ cats or Dalek-decorated compost bins you probably already devour the Sutton Guardian whole anyway, so you won’t miss much by me excluding such things from Suttonboro.

Here’s to another successful three days and onward to version 1.2!

1. Sutton Council’s Latest News section doesn’t have an RSS feed or any easy way for the public to track it other than by visiting it regularly.

2. The Sutton Guardian has more dirt than diamonds (although at least it has a feed).

3. Other things happen that don’t get reported.

4. You don’t have time to plough through two dozen websites to keep track of what’s going on in Sutton.

Solutions:

1. Visit http://twitter.com/suttonboro for a concise, well-edited overview of borough activity.

2. If you use an RSS reader, subscribe to the feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/suttonboro

3. Subscribe to the latest updates by email, if that’s your thing.

Enjoy.

Then there were the guerilla benchers, installing street seats where the local authority had been too poor or too mean to do it themselves.

On the web, a growing community of civic hackers has been building sites on top of public information to mash it up in new ways that the publishers hadn’t imagined or didn’t have the means or motive to build.

In digital and physical space, if something can be hacked it will be. People are no longer content to live with what designers give them. As Stewart Brand argues in How Buildings Learn, the end of the formal, official design process isn’t the end of design, it’s just the start of the informal process where the users take over and adapt their spaces to their ever-changing needs.

Within the design profession, the practice of co-design is acknowledging that products are better when the users aren’t just consulted but actually participate in the design process. But this is only half the story. Design is part observation and part clairvoyance, discerning likely future needs from current and past ones. When the scope is limited and familiar — a container to hold liquid temporarily for drinking — one has to try very hard to design badly. When the scope is broad and novel — a cashless and paperless ticketing system for a large urban transport system — the risks of poor systems and rapid obsolescence increase.

This is where the hackers, or guerilla designers, come in. Hackers take a designed system or object and modify it for their own needs, sometimes by changing the thing itself, sometimes by combining it with other things to produce new possibilities. Unpaid and usually unrecognised, the hacker delights in the intellectual challenge and the satisfaction of making something for practical use. Sometimes the results are crude, sometimes elegant. The only true criterion for success is that they work.

Relatively few people have the inclination or opportunity to work as big-D professional designers, but as design tools and the hacker ethic become ever more embedded in the general population, the world is looking a lot more malleable than it used to be.

Where do you want to hack today?

You may remember that this is the place where the council spent £15,000 to remove a set of steps on which young people liked to sit. It’s also the place where a housing association sees fit to impose a 9pm curfew on its tenants’ children.

Now the borough’s police and town centre retailers have teamed up to hand out “Positive Citizen” discount cards for local shops and businesses to the area’s youths — which they’ll lose if they misbehave.

Most young people are perfectly capable of staying out of trouble. They need neither a reminder nor an incentive to do the right thing. For those that aren’t, particularly those who misbehave habitually or impulsively, I’m sceptical whether the prospect of a future discount at McDonalds or Top Shop will be enough to prevent the current guilty thought progressing to a guilty act. The very nature of the scheme, which requires youths to apply formally for membership, will likely repel and exclude those already dismissive or suspicious of authority.

But the real problem isn’t that it’s unlikely to work, it’s that it’s likely to further muddle and weaken the notion of citizenship among young people in general. Citizenship works best when citizens have a common collective purpose and mutual respect. The role of the citizen is largely informal, varied and often subtle. Beyond keeping the law and meeting our formal obligations, good citizenship requires our active participation in improving the life of the community. This might mean nothing more than a friendly and positive demeanour in the street, a helping hand offered spontaneously to those that need one, or a more structured effort to work towards the common good. We may feel a sense of satisfaction by doing these things, but the benefits are largely collective and often hard to quantify. The motivation is considerably more complex than a simple economic incentive, instinctive rather than calculated.

Conversely, the effort-leading-to-reward model, particularly when the reward is a discount on the high street, maps directly onto consumerist impulses which we know simply decrease satisfaction and reinforce existing social and economic divides. Beyond a certain level of security and subsistence, the more you shop (or think about shopping), the less happy you are. Tapping into young people’s already considerable status anxiety and offering rewards that can only be realised by shopping is a recipe for a lifetime of misery, not young people growing into adults whose instinct is to ask, “How can I help?” rather than, “What’s in it for me?”

UPDATE 10 August 2008 from the Sutton Guardian:

Dr Roy Bailey, a consultant clinical psychologist, expressed worries that youngsters would need professional support once photo cards were withdrawn.

As always, truth is stranger than fiction.

Coverage elsewhere:

• “Junk food bribes for teens”, a2to.info
• “You won’t fool the children of the revolution”, Londonist
• “Sutton police bribe kids to be good”, This is Local London
• “Experts attack police ‘bribery’ scheme”, Sutton Guardian
• “Sutton police bribe kids to behave”, The Register

The 2008 Opportunistic Book Title of the Year Award goes to…

Giles Milton!

Paradise Lost is an account of the great fire that destroyed large parts of the Turkish city of Smyrna in 1922.

Of course it is.

Mr Milton wins a £10 book token for his efforts in getting the book to come up fifth in the Amazon search results for “milton paradise lost”. No small achievement.

This is The Hamptons — not the real ones on Long Island, New York but a housing development in the south London suburb of Worcester Park.

But as ever there is trouble in paradise, or at least the contemporary spectre we call the fear of crime and “anti-social behaviour”.

Like most new developments, The Hamptons features a mix of tenures, with owner-occupiers holding homes valued up to £800,000, down through tenants in privately-rented properties and social housing tenants.

The curfew at the Hamptons comes courtesy of Twickenham-based Thames Valley Housing which runs the social housing on the estate and is implemented through its tenancy agreements. Parents of children under 15 must ensure that they’re inside after 9pm or risk losing their homes for breaking the terms of their contracts.

As a modern, progressive and socially-conscious organisation, Thames Valley Housing is keen to ensure that its policy and practice avoids prejudice and discrimination:

Thames Valley Housing believes that no person should suffer disadvantage by reason of their race, colour, ethnic or national origin, or because of their religion, gender, sexual orientation, appearance, age, disability or marital status and opposes any discrimination which denies this.

Paradoxically, it sees no conflict between this policy and a requirement of tenancy on the estate that residents under 15 must be indoors after 9pm, in contravention of their legal rights and accepted social norms.

One might expect that such a curfew would meet a fair bit of resistance from the locals, but if the Sutton Guardian is to be believed, many of them quite like it. In fact, not only are the young social housing tenants observing the curfew, but some of the adult residents too. In the words of one local mother:

We all have to be in by 9pm, it’s adults as well. They don’t want people wandering around the estate at night. But it doesn’t really bother me as I’m in by that time anyway.

Another comments that her children aren’t allowed to sit on the grass in groups of more than four because “this could be seen as intimidating”.

Very few people would defend the kind of inconsiderate and malicious misbehaviour that blights many people’s lives, whether it’s vandalism, violence or persistent late-night noise. I’ll oppose those strongly where they happen. But in the rush to be seen to clamp down strongly on “anti-social behaviour” our society seems to have forgotten the nature of society and sociability and thrown the baby out with the bathwater. If this were sex, we’d be advocating chastity as the antidote to rape.

Society and that much abused concept, “community”, arises from people living together, working together, playing together and forming numerous reciprocal relationships at varying degrees of intensity. As we’re not all (yet) a homogeneous mass of automatons, this interaction causes friction. Often this is experienced positively, as new ideas, opportunities and ways of living arrive serendipitously in our lives. Sometimes it’s negative, as others innocently or maliciously transgress our personal and collective boundaries.

In seeking to resolve these conflicts as they inevitably occur, we are forced to answer the perennial question, How should we live? The answers apply to ourselves, of course, as well as those we may consider to have done wrong. Therefore, while addressing the (perceived) misbehaviour of others, we clarify our own responsibilities towards the community and strengthen our own commitment to meet them. The Golden Rule, that we should treat others as we would like to be treated by them, remains paramount.

Using a curfew as a prophylactic against potential disorder ensures that the possibility that the normal functioning of community may be disturbed is replaced by the inevitability that it will be. To prevent people occupying common space and socialising with each other, even passing by and exchanging glances, nods and smiles, reduces the space in which real social relationships are formed and nurtured. Using rules rather than customs imposes values on people rather than allows people’s own values to be expressed. The post-9pm teenager sitting with her friend becomes a deviant and a threat, regardless of the purpose and nature of her conduct.

I’ve long believed that the real cure for disorder on our streets isn’t to scour them clean of humanity, but to fill them up with people of all ages, classes and “lifestyles”, to encourage diverse activities and to promote the notion that we as citizens have equal responsibilities to be tolerable and to tolerate the reasonable behaviour of others. The notion is as old as cities themselves and defines the very essence of citizenship. The alternatives, seen far too often in contemporary Britain, are disconnection, alienation, segregation, mistrust and a paralysing fear that becomes more potent than the feared object itself. We need an anti-curfew that fills our streets with the vast mass of well-behaved and well-intentioned people, rather than just the marginalised few that have no private space to which to retreat. It’s not the presence of bad people that creates disorder but the absence of good ones.

If community is to become a reality rather than a cute marketing euphemism we’ll all need to get out more, not less. The one thing that worries me more than those imposing curfews are the Stepford Wives (and husbands, and children) that blindly follow them, naively hoping that heaven is a quiet house in an empty street where no-one knows your name.

Westminster City Council has taken a bold step today towards ending the misery of thousands of London tourists each year who buy counterfeit street sign souvenirs. The forward-thinking council has purchased the copyright to the design of its signs, created by notable designer Sir Misha Black in 1967.

The council has promised zero-tolerance enforcement of its new intellectual property, threatening fly-by-night design theives with heavy fines for selling unlicensed souvenirs.

Westminster Council’s Martin Low said, “In buying the copyright, we felt we needed to retain an element of control over the signs to maintain Westminster’s image as a world class tourist destination.”

The problem of the counterfeit signs — which are produced on everything from mugs to t-shirts to mouse mats — has ruined thousands of holidays and besmirched Westminster’s international reputation.

Tourist Mariella Bogus from Sacramento, California, said:

I paid £2.99 in good faith for a ‘Leicester Square’ fridge magnet from a street vendor, but it wasn’t until I got it home that I noticed that the font was wrong and the proportions slightly out of whack. Whatever the font’s meant to be it’s not sodding Arial and while I can’t afford a Pantone swatch book that red doesn’t look like the proper Westminster red either.

I emailed the council’s trading standards department who were very sympathetic but said that there was nothing they could do. Thank goodness that’s all changing now and people like me will get the protection we deserve from these unscrupulous hawkers. Now I feel that I can go back to London and shop safely again.

Souvenir sellers have until the end of the month to buy a licence from Westminster Council or face the full might of the law.

At the risk of descending into cliché, this is intellectual property gone mad.

Copyright law provides a creators’ monopoly so that people or organisations wanting to create works for profit retain the incentive to do so. Professional creators and publishers need this protection and without it their work can immediately be exploited by others, including those who may be able to profit more easily from the work. But step outside the realm of work created for profit and the concept of a creators’ monopoly becomes a nonsense, as it is here.

Now that Westminster Council owns the copyright to this design the most sensible way forward would be to forget about licencing, trading standards investigations, courts and lawyers. Just release the design into the public domain and spend your time on something more important to local taxpayers. The council will be able to keep using the design on its signs and the souvenir makers will be able to carry on their trade as they have always done without doing anyone any harm. The world is unlikely to stop turning.

The notion that enforcement of this copyright could ultimately land someone in jail for non-payment of fines for selling unlicenced t-shirts of street signs shows the gross lack of proportionality of this measure.

Council officers and the courts will be able to spend their time and our money better than by enforcing the copyright in a design which wasn’t produced for profit, whose designer was presumably well rewarded and has been dead since 1977, which has served and continues to serve its public purpose admirably and the “infringement” of which has gone unprosecuted for four decades without anyone seemingly coming to harm.

Whichever politician or council officer dreamed up this ludicrously pettifogging scheme needs to think long and hard about why they went into public service in the first place. They’re changing the world — but not for the better.

More recycled press releases incisive reporting on this story from the Mirror, 24dash , Building.

UPDATE 9 April: Design Week are reporting that Westminster Council paid £50,000 for the copyright.

Interestingly, they go on to say:

Chief executive of Anti Copying in Design Dids Macdonald recommends the council charges a ‘nominal’ licence fee ‘Otherwise it is putting an intellectual property straitjacket around an iconic piece of design,’ she says.

 

I am the creator of this article and the Privatising Culture graphic and I dedicate both to the public domain. Do what you like with them within the limits of the law. If you republish them, I request but do not and cannot require a credit to Adrian Short and a link back to this page.

Sometimes this happens through laziness, sometimes with careful thought and intent but mostly through ignorance and fallacy.

So why isn’t everyone serving up full-text feeds? The argument tends to go like this:

We’ve got a great website and we want people that are interested in what we do to visit it. Letting people subscribe to our RSS feed is a good way of generating more traffic as readers will click through to read the full text of articles that interest them.

There are two main problems with this line of thinking:

The assumption that a summary-only feed will generate a lot of click-through traffic is a poor one. Most people are only subscribing to RSS in the first place because it gives them a quicker and easier way to follow lots of sites. Force those people to click through to read the full articles and those people will either rarely bother clicking through or they’ll even just unsubscribe. Sadly, the people that decide website policy are often not heavy RSS users themselves and can’t see things from the perspective of those that are.

The bigger and more fundamental mistake here is to put the requirement that people visit your website above all other considerations. If you’ve got a message to get out there, put as few barriers in the way of potential readers as you can. Getting read is the only thing that matters — how and where shouldn’t be issues.

People visiting your website has its benefits for you. They will get a better “branding” experience. They may be able to find other interesting things your organisation is doing. You will be able to track these visits in your web stats.

But all these considerations are of limited interest and value to the user. They want to read your article right now. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s a good thing, right? So don’t get in their way and let them read it the way they want to. By subscribing to your RSS feed, the user has said, “I don’t want to read this on your website. I want to read it in my RSS reader.” Frustrate that good intention at your peril.

Don’t think of RSS as a teaser for the main event that happens on your website. If what you’re saying has value and importance to your readers, they’ll come back to you in other ways anyway. They’ll recommend you to others. They’ll buy your products and services. They’ll join your organisation. They’ll write about you. Most of all, they’ll feel good that you’ve chosen to put their convenience first. A little thought and generosity goes a long way.

It’s more important that your material gets read than it gets read in the way that you dictate. It’s more important that your material gets read than your ability to track that reading in your web stats — though using sites like FeedBurner you can keep stats on your feed subscribers too. If your logo and palette are more important to your branding than your words and your message, you’ve got a problem that no amount of web visits can solve.

We’re moving towards a world where information is read in a multitude of ways, many of which haven’t been provided by, designed by or even sanctioned by the original publisher. The ability of third parties to find your information, share it, combine it with others’ in mashups, convert it to different formats, translate it and redistribute it hinges on them being able to find useful, comprehensive feeds in the first place.

Other people now have a massive ability to add value to the information you produce by transforming and recontextualising it, either just for themselves or for a wider audience. Serving full-text feeds from your website is one way your organisation can be a part of that. If you choose to ignore this, you’ll be at a disadvantage to those that don’t.

• File attachments (eg. images) can now be imported directly (#5466). Just tick the box at the bottom of the import form once your WXR file has been uploaded and all the files from your old blog will be copied to your new server. This is particularly useful when moving blogs from WordPress.com to a stand-alone WP setup.
• Tags are now correctly imported as named tags rather than numbers (#5330).
• Some strange bugs which caused WXR import to crash now seem to be fixed.

In short, moving your WordPress data from one installation to another has just got a whole lot easier and more reliable.

You’ll still need to import your blogroll links as these aren’t part of the WXR file. You can grab these directly from http://www.youroldsite.com/wp-links-opml.php if the old site’s still live.

Every year 10,000 gallons of urine is at risk of ending up in the city’s streets and alleyways through irresponsible and anti-social behaviour.

But help is at hand thanks to the new Sat Lav service, which promises to locate the nearest public convenience for a modest 25 pennies:

Just text the word “toilet” to 80097 and you will be texted back with the location and opening hours of your nearest public toilet.

So despite being comfortably ensconced in my well-provisioned Stonecot Hill chambers I decide to give it a go and find the location of my nearest Westminster toilet.

But no, foiled!

Sorry, we cannot locate your current position. Please try again later (Service is not available on Three or Virgin). You have not been charged for this reply.

I wonder if this later is the later when Three and Virgin’s services become compatible with Sat Lav’s system (or vice versa), or the later when I decide to switch my mobile phone network.

Either way, I doubt nature’s call will wait that long.