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Dec 21

Open Government, Open Business, Open dialogue: a UK view of social media and government

This is a copy of a piece I’ve written for the December 2011 issue of Service Contractor [PDF page 14], the magazine of Professional Services Council in the United States. All links are at the end of the article.
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On May 16, 2011, Jeremy Hunt, U.K. secretary of state for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, asked
citizens and those who work in fixed or mobile communications, television, radio, online publishing, video games, and other digital and creative content industries for responses to an open letter reviewing communications in the digital age. The open letter contained a series of questions aimed at gathering business and citizen ideas “to help frame the Government’s initial approach to deregulation and maximize the communications industry’s contribution to economic growth.”

Hunt invited responses and ideas via a YouTube video (the department has had its own channel since 2006), and the department’s dedicated webpage encouraged visitors to have their say using the Twitter hashtag #commsreview. The open letter responses would be used to form a green paper, the U.K. equivalent of a proposed rule, to be published later in the parliamentary term for further consultation, followed by a final policy directive, known as a white paper, to be put before government.

Hunt describes the aim of the communication review as to “strip away unnecessary red tape and remove barriers to growth. The wider public interest will underpin the way we address these issues.”
And therein lies the key, “wider public interest”,not just to how this review is being conducted but the significant shift in how policy creation and government are now operating, which is essential for businesses to understand.

On both sides of the Atlantic transparency, open government, open data and social media have been increasingly discussed. Going hand-in-hand with freedom of information, they have been part of policy and communications development for a number of years.

In the U.K. we have seen the development of No. 10′s transparency Web pages, which include lists of which corporations government ministers are meeting with and the energy usage by departments communicate consistently every government department building. The Public Sector Transparency Board set up by Prime Minister David Cameron has the agenda of ensuring the release of key public datasets, setting open data standards across the whole public sector and “listening to what the public wants and then driving through the opening up of the most needed data sets.”

To make sense of this raw government data, new services are beginning to appear. Initially using U.K. data, this year saw the launch of Open Corporates. They aim to create a URL for every company in the world on their website (think of it as a corporate Wikipedia but with financial data) and import government transactional data relating to those companies where possible. So far they have 26 million companies listed across 31 jurisdictions, including the United States. Put this service together with another data driven U.K. site, Who’s Lobbying?, and you have the beginnings of a new accessible set of transparency tools.

This is a significant cultural shift. The U.K. civil service has been long renowned for its closed, conservative, cautious nature, doing the bidding of ministers and senior civil servants quietly. It is now being asked to work openly, publicly and collaboratively, of which using social media for public two-way communication with citizens and businesses is just a part. For some, this is terrifying. And it is already challenging how departments communicate consistently to everyone, rather than exclusively to press or favored business partners.

The economic climate and global down turn has also made citizens more aware of how their tax dollars are being spent. Yet unlike the past, citizens are now not only more easily able to access government spending data but to share their thoughts via social networks, forums and blogs. Obvious results are the “Occupy” protests in the U.S., U.K. and elsewhere.

Catherine Howe, chief executive of the company Public-i, thinks this social media, transparency and open data shift has both a positive and negative impact for companies doing business with the public sector. She considers the upside to be access and connecting to the right people quickly. However, “You have to assume that every contact you have with government will end up in public. Not just contracts, but taking someone out to dinner,” she says. “This is fine if you share values as a business with the ministers or councillors you are dealing with but it will cause problems if the dealings are inconsistent with your (or their) brand.” And just like civil servants, this is something she believes that businesses will have to adjust to.

Welcome to Open Business.

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Links
http://www.culture.gov.uk/what_we_do/telecommunications_and_online/8109.aspx
http://www.youtube.com/user/dcms https://twitter.com/#!/dcms
http://kathryncorrick.co.uk/2011/07/04/reviewing-the-uk-communications-act-an-open-
letter-to-jeremy-hunt/
http://www.number10.gov.uk/transparency/who-ministers-are-meeting/
http://opencorporates.com/
http://whoslobbying.com/
http://data.gov.uk/blog/new-public-sector-transparency-board-and-public-data-
transparency-principles http://www.public-i.info/
http://www.public-i.info/


With kind thanks to Service Contractor magazine for permitting the re-publishing of this article.

Dec 16

3 Comments

Is the games industry institutionally sexist?

A bold question I know, but please bear with me.

This started as an update to this post but I realised that once I had written over eleven paragraphs it probably needed its own URL. Right, deep breath, here goes…

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I’d like you all to read ‘In which I don’t try to write like a man’ by Margaret Robertson. Margaret is both a leading games writer and development director of Hide & Seek. It is her response to Mark Sorrell’s blog post ‘Dear Men, Please Listen. Love, Man‘ and also a discussion thread about his article on Reddit.

Reading it made me feel so incredibly sad. Margaret is one of the leading thinkers and writers in the UK about games, and is someone who I regard highly. And yet she has felt that she has had to behave in certain ways within the games industry and online so that she did not become a target for abuse. She writes:

Here are some other things that I included in my ‘not making myself a target’ strategy:

- not wearing skirts
- not wearing heels
- not coming to the defence of other women on the receiving end of abuse and threats and dismissals
- not, under any circumstances, ever ever ever ever indicating that there might be any sexual activity in my thoughts or my life or my body
- not talking about ‘being a woman’ or anything dumb and feminist like that
- judging the success of my approach on the number of people who didn’t realise from my writing that I was female.

She also points to how games executive, Jade Raymond, has been accused within the Reddit discussion (and presumably elsewhere) of letting herself be used as a sex symbol in the following photo:

Jade Raymond

Good grief.

As if to prove the point, the accusation gets repeated in the comments under Margaret’s post, by a determined but rather ignored troll.

Margaret has made be ponder whether I similarly self-edit. I don’t think I do, and I don’t think in the industries I work in that I fear being known as a woman or fear that I should play down that fact. I am aware that I self-edit in terms of professionalism, business objectives and protecting the privacy of friends, colleagues, clients and family but those are very different reasons to self-editing from dread of abuse.

No one should feel they should self-edit to such an extent that they deny who they are out of fear. For there lies tyranny.

But what to do?

This story by PestilantialSpoon in the comments of Margaret’s post (there isn’t a comment URL so I can’t link to it, but it appears about 69 comments in) perhaps highlights a common challenge:

I’d tried playing by the rules when I started a new game industry job a couple of years back. You’ll understand this when I say that I wanted to be respected as a professional, and I was afraid that my propensity to joke around with “the boys” at my previous game job diminished the respect they had toward me. So with some resolve, I vowed to “play by the rules” when I started my new job. Let’s just say it wasn’t even a month in before flagrantly inappropriate behavior started happening.

Regardless of how I dress, what I (don’t) say, or what I (don’t) do, there will always be men who don’t treat me with the respect they should. The good news is there are men who do! Indeed, there was one programmer who was a tremendous support to me throughout the sexual harassment I was experiencing. It’s good to know there are guys like that.

I’ve left that job due to a multitude of reasons, and now that I find myself gearing up to start a new job, I ask myself repeatedly how I should conduct myself on a day to day basis. I definitely want to be myself – and for me, that means I still want to joke around with the boys sometimes. That might leave the playing field open for the occasional dodo to cross the line, but I guess all I can do is make that line well and fully known and deal with anyone crossing it swiftly and decisively. I guess it remains to be seen whether I can have it both ways, but it’s worth a shot. Wish me luck.

Margaret herself has concluded:

But in the end, I was right to think I was clever and smart. I have avoided making myself a target of sexist assholes by playing by their rules. I’ve done a *blinding* job of that so far.

I think I’m going to stop doing that now.

Hurrah!

Yet, all of this has made me wonder – is the games industry institutionally sexist? I don’t have an answer to this. I don’t want to make a sweeping generalisation, particularly given that I do not work directly in the industry I work more on the outskirts. But it is difficult to come to any other conclusion.

If that is the case, then I’d suggest that it may make some of the problems easier to tackle. Rather than at the moment the vague notions that the situation is part of games industry culture and wider complex social issues regarding gender. In doing so it would make the problem less abstract.

Institutions have policies, regulations, best practice, goals, KPIs – and numerous other managerial and business instruments. We all love to dislike such policies at times, but quite often they have good purpose behind them. This wouldn’t be a cure, but it would be a starting point*.

Thoughts?

*This does not mean that I do not think other industries don’t have similar challenges be it for either gender, but as I stated in the last blog post it’s good to try and change your corner of the world if you can.

UPDATE 17/12/2011: If it’s not clear above, I would be as interested in hearing that the games industry isn’t institutionally sexist, and evidence to show that. This is a genuine, not rhetorical question.

Dec 12

4 Comments

In response to: ‘Dear Men, Please Listen. Love, Man’

Once again it started with a Tweet from the loveable Bill Thompson, writing:

Reckon @Doctoe will find @Sorrell piece of interest: Dear Men, please listen. Love,Man http://www.bewareofthesorrell.com/2011/12/dear-men-please-listen-love-man.html

To explain, @doctoe (Jo Twist) is leaving Channel 4 in January to become CEO of UKIE, the Association for UK Interactive Entertainment. @sorrell (Mark Sorrell) is Head of Games at Screenpop.

Now we’ve got that out the way, let’s link to the post and tell the story of what happened next [warning post contains some language that some viewers may find, well, sweary]. Dear Men, Please Listen. Love, Man, wrote Mark aka @sorrell.

When you read it through make sure you also take time to view the comments.

[inserting some time for you to read and digest - this took me about ten minutes].

Digested version
For those of you who do not have ten minutes to spare then here’s the digest digested:

Mark is angry at the way women are often treated online, ‘particularly in the game community and their lack of representation in the game industry’. He’d like to change this. He also thinks that for things to change men need to talk about it and agree that there this is a problem, and begin to think through how to change this behaviour.

This is an issue and area which often brings with it sweeping generalisations and polemic positions. It’s also incredibly complicated, far wider than the games industry. We could chew the cud as to the extent of the problem and look at other industries to see where the reverse occurs, however many of these discussions have been rehearsed and re-hashed elsewhere. Let’s keep focussed.

Timing is everything

Mark’s post is timely. It follows a piece written last week by Kira Cochrane looking at Why is British public life dominated by men?. There are also numerous other initiatives that have been growing within the tech industry over the last several years to encourage more women to work in technology and digital related jobs, and also to support those who already work in these industries.

For instance, the work Suw Charman-Anderson has done in establishing Ada Lovelace day, highlighting women who work in science & technology – which we took to OpenTech in 2009. Or She Says which focusses on women in advertising and creative businesses.

Gathering apace is also a movement to change England & Wales’ teaching of ICT from being mainly about using office software packages to programming and coding. Coding for Kids and the Young Rewired State, lead by Emma Mulqueeny, are aiming to ‘find and foster the young children and teenagers who are driven to teaching themselves how to code’.

Having worked in digital media for over ten years trying to encourage both men and women to fulfil their potential, my point is that this feels different. Dare I even say ‘zeitgeist-ie’ or the beginnings of a tipping point. We’re not there yet, and if you read Cochrane’s article you may even feel that in the wider sphere of British public life things are going backwards, but it’s good to try and change your corner of the world if you can.

But perhaps we’re further than we think? Last year I invited a male friend to the launch of Social Media Week. What surprised him was the number of women in the room (it was roughly 65:35 or 60:40 male:female if memory serves me correctly), particularly he said in comparison to the advertising industry, which was what he was used to and where you’d hardly see any women at a similar event.

Anyhow what happened next?

After reading Mark’s post I had a chat with him on Twitter (apologies if these don’t quite seem to be in the right order, Twitter has yet to make linking to entire conversations that easy):

Twitter chat with Mark Sorrell
Twitter chat with Mark Sorrell
Twitter chat with Mark Sorrell

What I like about Mark’s approach is that it is not only the premis that men need to begin to take responsibility for behaviour online, but that changing attitudes and behaviour to women online and in the games industry makes good business sense. He’s not the first to say this, and I remember having a conversation along similar lines with Tom Armitage back in 2006 after we’d been to the first Game City festival, but this point is the leverage, it’s the potential reason for change:

The more diverse your team, the more diverse your products, the more attitudes and angles will be considered and the better your product will be. The more money you will make. In a world of freemium, of mass-market gaming, of digging out those few whales that will bring money and fame to your game, you need to have as broad an appeal as possible. More diversity in your company will bring more diversity to your product. So form a more diverse team. And if the people just aren’t there for you to hire, make damn sure you’re pressuring everywhere you can to ensure that these people do exist in the future.

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