Tag: writetoreply.org

The Fake Digital Britain Report

Jumping on the “Fake” bandwagon, we’ve decided to do a little experiment over on WriteToReply, by providing t’community who complained bitterly about the Digital Britain Interim report an opportunity to come up with something better…

And so, I’d like to announce the The Fake Digital Britain Report wiki.

So if you think that we need 2Gbps rather than 2Mbps broadband access, then argue your case on the wiki pages…

The initial section headings are taken form the original WTR republication of the report (“Digital Britain Interim Report” on WriteToReply although of course, they are subject to change… (A lot of people were complaining that the UK games industry was not well represented in the interim report, so now they have an opportunity to add in the missing section…;-)

As ever, a feed is available from the fake report in the form of a changes feeds to the wiki: Recent changes to “The Fake Digital Britain Report” feed.

Another thing we’re trying to do with the Fake Digital Britain report is find a way of supporting the wiki activity by pulling in comments made to the report on WriteToReply to the “Fake Digital Britain Report” discussion page:

This is achieved using the MediaWIki Extension:RSS:

The re-use of the original section headings in the wiki page means that there’s also a sensible mapping to the comments in the discussion page, which are pulled in at the section level from WTR.

PS We’re also going to have a look at the WIki Article Feeds Extension to see if we can do anything interesting with that… In the meantime, we’ve already got a demonstration of how to pull a mediwiki page into WordPress page here: Guidelines for re-publishers (scraped from the wiki) (uses the Append WIki page plugin (I think?).

Who knew that blikis could be so much fun…?;-)

Teaching Round the Issues on WriteToReply

No time for blogging properly at the mo – too much crappy crap “work” crappy crap to do – but looking through some recent comments on WriteToReply just now, I saw this one:

a trackback from a blog post – Money Programme – Media Revolution: Tomorrow’s TV – that reviews a recent episode of the Money Programme that “explains the importance of the formula in raising money and the reduced role of direct TV production funding as a proportion of costs”, an issue that is also touched upon in Digital Britain – The Interim Report.

The post links to the actual programme, which you can view (at the moment) on iPlayer: Money Programme – Media_Revolution: Tomorrows TV (on iPlayer)

(I’m not sure if this one is an OU co-pro, too?)

This put me in mind of Trackforward – Following the Consequences with N’th Order Trackbacks and Trackbacks, Tweetbacks and the Conversation Graph, Part I where I’d started thinking about the “link context” around web content.

So I’m wondering – would it make sense to have someone doing some “gardening” around the report, looking to see if there is content – such as the Money Programme episode referred to above – that could be linked to and used to help people make sense of the issues raised by things like the Digital Britain report, or “educate them” in the issues, even?!

That is, as well as using WriteToReply as a place where people can comment back on reports, could we also find ways of using it as a resource that helps people learn about the issues raised by the report, whether or not they want to comment back?

Comment on “Digital Britain” at WriteToReply.org

In an scathing review of Stephen Carter’s “Digital Britain” interim report – Reporting behind closed doors – technology columnist Bill Thompson noted how difficult it is for the digerati to comment back on the report:

The widespread coverage has certainly provided a rich source of suggestions, comments, ideas and critical reviews to feed into the next stage of the process.

Unfortunately for those who lack access to mainstream media outlets like newspapers and broadcasters or their associated websites, there is no easy way to respond directly to its author. The report website has no information at all on how to make a contribution, and you’ll have to read through 72 pages of the report before you find a suggestion that “organisations or individuals interested in joining the discussion should register their interest at digitalbritain@berr.gsi.gov.uk”

Apparently the Digital Britain team will follow up these expressions of interest, which is nice of them, and we must just hope that Carter and his expert panel will be carefully reviewing every blog post and online comment to ensure they don’t miss anything important.

But it doesn’t have to be this way, as the some of the consultation initiatives coming out of DIUS show (Public Policy Engagement with Commentariat).

So a couple of days ago I posted the following tweet:

And I got this reply…

…which was quickly followed by this one…

And now, two evenings (incl. a rather late night, last night), a lunchbreak and morning coffee later, Joss has writetoreply.org up and running (I got in the way not getting Daily Feeds working;-), a commentpress site for commenting on public documents.

And the first report to be hosted there? Digital Britain – The Interim Report, of course:-)

So if you want to comment on the report, as @billt surely does, head over to http://writetoreply.org/ now and follow the link for the Digital Britain, Interim Report; or go there directly: Digital Britain, Interim Report on writetoreply.org.

We can’t guarantee that anyone who actually produced the report will read the comments, of course, but there is a comment feed for them to subscribe to if they want to;-)