Social media 'could transform public services' - BBC website

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8382252.stm - By Mark Ward Technology correspondent, BBC News.

This article describes the usefulness of Web 2.0 in providing user involvement in health and public services. This report is from the MyPublicServices conference. This provides a useful solution to current problems that centralised systems don't give patients and users enough involvement, but plans such as relying on Google tools for the management of systems are misguided. This conference investigated ways of involving users to a degree that is practical.

"Social media could transform the NHS and other public services in the same way that file-sharing changed the music industry, a conference has heard.

Growing use of tools, such as Facebook and Twitter, offered an opportunity to reinvent services, delegates heard.

The MyPublicServices event debated ways to harness these conversations, many of which are critical, to make services better and more inclusive.

If this was not done, many services would be undermined, speakers said.

"It's happened to the music and travel industries and it's going to happen to public services," said Dr Paul Hodgkin, founder of the Patient Opinion site that organised the MyPublicServices conference.

Said Dr Hodgkin: "The question is how do we cope with it in a useful and productive way and not spend decades beating each other up?" "

Here are more interesting articles about this debate -

Tories attack leaked five-year IT plan as 'unambitious' - BBC News Website - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8387972.stm.

The politics of crowdsourcing - BBC News Website -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/12/the_politics_of_crowdsourcing.html -

- "Politicians in opposition and in government are latching onto the idea of using the web to engage with the wider public
Rory Cellan-Jones
BBC's technology correspondent"

- "This leak isn't likely to generate lurid headlines, as the report on transforming government by using "interactive (web 2.0) tools and processes, cloud computing technology and service-oriented architecture (SOA)" isn't exactly dynamite.
Still, the Conservatives have come up with quite a clever idea - they've put the document online and are inviting the public to comment on every part of it as they frame the party's response. "

BBC News - Google previews Chrome open source operating system

This is an interesting development in bringing Web 2.0 web browser software on a stage -

"Internet search giant Google has lifted the lid on its operating system, known as Chrome OS.

The free and open source system is initially aimed at low-cost netbooks and does away with many of the features of a traditional programme.

All programmes are designed to run in a web browser and all the user's data is stored on Google's servers.

Engineers from the firm said the first computers running the system would be available before the end of 2010."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8369611.stm.

Researcher Collaboration - Web 2.0 - Strength in science collaboration - BBC Article

This looks like a useful Web 2.0 collaboration tool for researchers -

The BBC article is at - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8342851.stm

"Victor Henning is the co-founder of Mendeley, an online collaboration tool which was created specifically for scientists.
The free software allows scientists and researchers to upload papers which are then trawled for bibliographic data - author, title, issue and so on - and paired up with similar papers already in the database."

"Mendeley is supposed to take the work out of managing these [research] papers.," explains Mr Henning.
"You can just drag and drop your collection of PDFs into the software and it'll automatically extract all the bibliographic data - all of the stuff that you'd usually have to type in manually." - Victor Henning.

Engineering modelling an iterative approach

This post discusses how links between engineers and modellers/modelling tools can be improved, using an approach of visualising a modelling structure that mirrors the structure of the engineering product design. The main method for this is diagrammatic modelling.

Making the structure of a model be the same as the structure of the engineering component modelled turns 2 problems into one. This speeds up co-operation in prototyping of both the software model and the component. Both rapid prototyping and rapid application design/development involve iterative fast development with prototypes communicated. Requirements emerge gradually as part of this process, so early stage design can begin, in co-operation with life-cycle management, marketing accounts etc. To get full benefit from this all staff who are part of this design process, manufacturing, management, and life-cycle management need to be able to access the models. The longer term aim is to enable direct modelling/prototyping of this by customers of the modelling tool e.g. engineers/end-user programmers. Such a system documents itself as the structure of the engineering product and software model are displayed/visualised.

Integration of information representation UML/Doors (http://www-01.ibm.com/software/awdtools/doors/productline/) is progress towards this. Also a user interface is required that makes it easier for engineers to model using such a combined UML/Doors solution

Despite object-oriented programming techniques being heavily influenced by the approach used by engineers for Bill of Materials/Product Data Structure modelling this link has become difficult. Much of object-oriented programming was developed before graphical user interfaces became practical and common. So objects/classes are often represented mainly by text with visualisation/representation being added as an afterthought. This is not useful for engineers who are used to objects being physical things, or at least diagrams. A further problem has been an over-emphasis on encapsulation (hiding an objects' details, while creating an interface for its use), and re-use. This can lead to errors due to re-use of objects that are not fully understood. So the classes/objects need to be visualised, even if the user does not intend to change their contents, so the user of objects has sufficient understanding of how to use them.

The above steps would improve the link and co-operation between engineers and modellers/models.