Projects

Compass

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:17:25 +0000

Compass is an independent democratic pressure group that campaigns and organises on behalf of its members, operating on the centre left of the political axis.

The organisation wanted to challenge existing industry processes for policy formulation by opening up to their membership and actively encouraging participation. The 21st Century Policy competition allowed Compass' members to produce, discuss and vote on ideas which Compass would then campaign on. Our job was to take this very social and community-centric approach of enabling visitors to quickly and easily submit policy proposals, and make it work online without breaking the bank.

We designed a solution on top of the popular open source CMS, WordPress, extended with a number of community plugins and customised theming and functionality. This platform also provides for an editorial layer for quality control and community management. This allowed us to create a well tested and usable site for Compass' supporters to submit their ideas for policy reform in a context which explicitly was oriented to the 'normal' user, not those who have been embedded in policy formation and discussion. The Wordpress platform already has excellent support for commenting, but we were able to extend that, allowing conversations to form around each element of a submission, not just over the entire document. This meant that submitters were easily able to take on board praise and criticism and refine their ideas.

In our view, the project has helped position Compass at the forefront of policy process innovation, whilst also enhancing Headshift's third sector offering. We were pleased to be able to deliver such an open and low-cost solution for the third sector.

The Big Green Challenge

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:53:58 +0000

A NESTA initiative, the Big Green Challenge is a competition designed to encourage and reward those who work together towards developing and implementing new approaches to CO2 emission reductions. The finalists compete for a prize fund of £1 million to help finance the development and exploitation of the most promising innovative ideas.

The competition attracted more than 300 entries. Each competitor submitted details about their initiative and documentation through a private area of the Big Green Challenge website. NESTA judges accessed the same online competition management system (OCMS) to review and rank applications in order to identify semi-finalists and finalists.

Once the finalists were identified they became the subject of attention from mainstream media as well as people interested in the field. This had been anticipated and NESTA had signed up the COI to deliver media training to the finalists. To complement the traditional media training, Headshift conducted workshops with each of the finalists on how to use social media to engage with their stakeholders and other interested parties. The workshops focused on free or low cost tools appropriate to each finalist's purpose. The topics covered in the social media workshops were serialised in blog format.

The Big Green Challenge website was built using WordPress drawing on many different media tools such as feeds, podcasts and videocast embeds. The OCMS was built in Ruby on Rails.

We feel very passionate about creating a sustainable future were very pleased to have been able to contribute.

Medicine Chest

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:59:32 +0000

Medicine Chest is a space to share, find and compare traditional approaches to health and healing. Channel 4 approached Headshift when they wanted to create an online environment that would help people find and compare traditional approaches to health and healing. To complement their critically acclaimed Medicine Men series they felt that something needed to be done to preserve traditional remedies and know-how about health for future generations.

Preserving precious knowledge for future generations
The new media department at Channel 4 saw the Medicine Men series as an opportunity to generate support and enthusiasm for an online repository designed to preserve traditional knowledge for generations to come.

In it's current version the site focuses on the process of collecting traditional knowledge relating to herbal remedies, as well as letting users share these with their peers.

In order to capture the diversity in opinion between traditional and western healthcare, Medicine Chest pulls in a number of external feeds from around the web. Some of these are from solely traditional or western sources, including universities and academic publications, and some are from other sites with a stronger focus on user generated content.
The aim of this aggregation of content is to present a balanced perspective of both traditional and modern approaches to health and well being.

Continuing the development
Medicine Chest is entering a period of user testing which will inform the continued development of the site.

We are focusing on mapping the information that has already been collected through the site, and to develop the visualisation of the cross-cultural similarities and differences in the use of traditional medical knowledge.

"Magic Circle" law firm injects life into intranet using a bottom-up approach

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:55:16 +0000

Using a wiki platform, the international law firm made it easy to create and maintain "subwebs". Subwebs are microsites on the firm's intranet, devoted to a specific subject such as a specialty within a practice or key client information. Headshift helped the firm explore how to broaden the participation in providing subweb content and how to move away from a process that required pages to be prepared individually in FrontPage, a web page design tool.

Headshift recommended an enterprise wiki platform, customised to feature dynamic navigation and designed to match the intranet look-and-feel. Only minimal subweb manager training, in the form of workshops, were required to get the content population going, and content activity started before design and customisation were completed in order to learn from early feedback. A standard subweb home page layout was created and embedded as a template, with a right hand column showing recent subweb changes, popular pages and a tag cloud - all new concepts on the firm intranet but features that quickly grew popular.

Helped by the ease of editing pages in the wiki spaces, subweb managers enlisted colleagues in the process of growing and maintaining subweb content. Knowledge of html coding is no longer a barrier to contributing content, and maintenance of content is a quick procedure: Press Edit page, update the content, press Save.

The wiki is the first step of the firm's adoption of social tools behind the firewall. There are plans to roll out a firm-wide RSS infrastructure and an enterprise blogging platform, supported by a business case to simplify the publishing process for internal and external current awareness content.

BBC Blogs Network

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:46:52 +0000

BBC Blog Network - from consulting to final implementation
Over the last 2 years Headshift has provided strategical advise and implemented BBC's new external facing Blog Network - one of the largest networks of blogs on the web. The process has gone through several stages, of which we are currently completing the final implementation.

Upgrading infrastructure
The first stage of work saw us advising on an improved infrastructure model and implementing this model. This was done with the expectation of the BBC Blog Network growing extensively in the immediate and more distant future.

Consultation on usability and information architecture
In a comprehensive consulting piece, Headshift reviewed the existing blog platform and all the available trial data including technical feedback, usage logs, editorial feedback, and feedback from users in workshops and at a user event.

Based on the review of data and feedback, we provided a comprehensive report on lessons to take forward into the live service. We also made further recommendations on the choice of technical platform, as well as additional editorial criteria for commissioning and decommissioning blogs.

Implementation
Headshift is currently working with the BBC to implement the new blogging platform according to the findings of our research and the feedback from the Beeb's editorial teams. This will include changing and refining templates on more than 200 blogs.

Demos

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:40:29 +0000

Headshift transformed Demos' former one-way information hub into a transparent collaborative network to engage the think tank's target audience, as well as Demos employees.

Creating Interaction and Discussion
By developing a tool for project collaboration, ideas dissemination and relationship building, Headshift helped Demos reflect their core brand values of 'interaction and discussion'.
In doing so, the research process was opened to the target audience to benefit from their collective intelligence and Demos' own work and collaboration processes were improved.

Fostering Transparency and Debate with Social Media
Headshift set out to create a platform which placed social media, transparency and debate at the front and centre of its activities. The development included a personal social interface that provides lightweight, informal knowledge sharing tools to help groups organise their own view of Demos' information, allow users to connect and collaborate with each other more effectively, and increase transparency around Demos' research process.

The Strategy included:

Rigorous analysis of user profiles, cultures and behaviours leading to a user-centric interface and information architecture
Customisation and integration of blogging and discussion forums
Introduction of tagging and themes, including tag clouds and mapping which allows users to follow themes via key offerings - e.g. projects, publications, events, research
Custom-developed content management and a fully-fledged publication system
Ability to receive project updates via RSS, podcasts and email

The extranet system - based on Confluence - is integrated with the site's administration system to enable individual Demos project to utilise the enterprise wiki in support of various activities which include news publishing, content co-creation, event organisation and social bookmarking of key resources.

Significantly Increasing the Site's Utilisation and Winning an Award
By now, there are over 170,000 page views per week and the number of average downloads ocurring in the first week of a publication's relase have increased from 300 to 3,000.
The site's utilisation has also increased significantly among Demos employees, which has in turn facilitated further collaboration and engagement with the external target audience including an unprecedented international audience.

For example, Demos research fellows report that they now receive considerable external input on projects thanks to this development.

Beside these positive effects, the project was also selected as best think tank website at the Prospect Magazine Think Tank of the Year Awards 2006.

Involve's People and Participation

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:39:03 +0000

Headshift built a wiki based publishing platform for Involve to easily update their research, case studies and methodology in the area of public participation. The platform introduced interactive functionality to the findings and also implemented a collaborative approach to their research and case study gathering process. The platform leveraged the knowledge base of interested communities enabling them to collaboratively add to the resource, extending its relevance and allowing continual evolution of the content.

Building On A Successful Base
People & Participation is based on Involve's successful book by the same name, launched in 2005. The book provided a useful summary of participatory methods and practice but was impossible to stay accurate for long due its static nature. People & Participation is more dynamic with both site authors and site users adding their knowledge and experience to the resource. The effect if to create a collaborative experience which a book simply cannot achieve.

Comparing theory and practise
The online resource is split into different sections with a combination of Involve authored editorial content and community submitted content. The platform is modular and designed to be scalable for future development.

The interactive process planner helps you to choose which participatory methods are most suitable to your situation. You answer a series of questions that are compared to a database of methods to determine which methods best fit your needs.

The Methods sections is a rich resource for how to facilitate public participation, providing full run downs of methods, hints and tips. It is authored by Involve and editorial access is granted their specific authors.

The Case Studies section provides examples of how public participation has been used, and invites users to add there own experiences. This aims to develop the resource by learning from the experiences of others.

Other functionalities include News and Events (RSS and Calender functionality), Ask an Expert (Web to Email functionality) and Participation Library (Upload Files and Tag Navigation functionality). Each of the sections are easily updatable and editable with little or no technical knowledge.

Balancing editorial control and openness
People and Participation was developed with an appropriate permission system in mind. The site strikes a balance that allows Involve tight editorial control in certain areas, keeping quality high and enabling Involve to set the direction of the content, but also having spaces that invites users to submit content, allowing the knowledge base of the community to add to the resource.

Legal Division - Major International Investment Bank

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:34:56 +0000

With the high levels of innovation and complexity in banking products, our client wanted to ensure that people involved in the negotiation and implementation of associated transactions could stay abreast of change and be better connected with relevant expertise and information. In that context, we have been working in a consultancy capacity with members of pilot groups from distinct operational areas and communities, to identify key processes/business needs to be supported by well-positioned social tools.

Connecting people with information and expertise
The project stemmed from the client's initiative to explore improvements to existing work process, and opportunities for better networking and collaboration. The perception was that practices were constrained by existing systems, which did not adequately connect people, information and expertise. Many of their issues stemmed from the (over) use of shared drives, spreadsheets and emails.

Pilot groups with distinct yet representative needs were selected for the project, to enable us to examine the depth and breadth of possibilities for improvement in people's ability to find, share, and use information and expertise.

Our work with those groups fell into two broad areas:
1. Information-related operations
2. Social networking

In the first area we focused on designing a social tools platform to improve the findability, retrievability and processes for updating documentation, linking contextual information to underlying information, and promoting knowledge capture and sharing.

In the second area we investigated how that same platform could facilitate increased communication, networking and collaboration between globally dispersed group members in relation to 'event' organisation activities, with a view to the future extension of the platform to regional groups and their networking activities.

Solving the problems
Common themes echoed throughout our pilot group workshops included:

The lack of genuinely flexible technology to allow people to collate ideas, discussions, communications, opinions, and other information regarding underlying documentation or group activities
The ability for the above to be easily accessed, updated, searched and personalised.

Our user-centric analysis enabled us to prepare use cases which would enable us to address those issues through the integration of social tools with work processes and existing technology investments. That approach ensured that we did not squeeze users into pre-existing software models and workflows.

Implementing social tools that fit the use cases
Our recommended solution combined, amongst other things, a wiki, shared blogs, book-marking, tagging and personalised pages. Rather than developing multiple distinct sets of requirements, our investigation identified commonalities to be implemented across the current (and potentially future) pilot groups, together with individual sets of requirements that characterise the interaction within each of the pilot groups.

The wiki's high level of configurability allowed us to design with the users global and page templates, which highlight key pieces of information and create sign-posts to the underlying documentation, as well as allow users to comment on different content areas within the pages.

A key issue we have been helping the pilot groups overcome is the traditional problem associated with hierarchical file and folder structures - namely that documents can reside in only one place and therefore one category. However, in many instances the same document may relate to different jurisdictions, products, or clients. Consequently, we have devised a customised 'tagging' interface to enable users to place and view documents in relation to a number of different categories.

Blogs also form an important part of the solution to the email problem. Using the group blog to share ideas and opinions about issues, then linking those discussions to relevant documents attachments in the wiki, will provide users with a stream of information to update yesterday's agreement with today's intelligence.

Adopting popular aspects from social networking sites
Based on the feedback from pilot group members, we have adopted popular aspects of public social networking sites that suit the corporate culture and the more specific needs of the groups. More particularly, this involved personalising the interaction by showing who's online, letting people write in each other's blogs, sharing upcoming event information and news about conferences and networking functions.

As a result, the client now has clearly defined requirements tailored to user needs and work processes for the development and roll-out of a social software platform.

Age Concern England

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:33:08 +0000

Aimed at web users over fifty, the ACE community and social networking site is a place to make friends, share photos, stories and memories.

Meeting the needs of those over fifty
Headshift developed this community and social networking platform for ACE converging and transforming pre-existing online offerings, such as Discussion Forum, Chat, Time Capsule, Podcasts and Blogging functionality, into a single 'user community' section of the ACE website.

Age Concern is one of Britain's biggest charity dedicated to elderly people. It needed a lightweight and highly accessible and usable community site that could help elderly people get in touch with each other and share stories, memories and photos safely and easily.

A custom built platform
Following a dedicated consulting piece addressing the challenges regarding usability and accessibility, a people-centred user interface design process and a prototype that was tested with end users, the site was entirely custom built. This ensured that the specific needs of the user groups over fifty were fully met.

Connecting people through interest groups
The ACE community provides a great online meeting place. Experience, memories, photos and information on a range of relevant topics, including events, can be provided and shared. People can engage in conversations with each other in a conducive environment. Moreover, the site is a place for any topical conversations in groups of interest, such as gardening or health-related issues. Local ACE groups can stay in touch easily. The site benefits from ease of access, use and engagement.

Major FMCG company

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:27:31 +0000

The wiki for this globally operating company in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods Industry (FMCG) is a platform designed to support the work of researchers. It offers them collaborative project spaces and shared intelligence corners to foster discoverability of ideas, people and research.

Supporting research teams
To meet the pilot group's needs, we analysed workflows and user requirements of three pilot groups and put forward a plan for the implementation of various wiki spaces. We designed and created open project and collaboration spaces, ideas and discussion areas, resources areas in which bookmarks, blog posts and external research news are aggregated and displayed, as well as rich user profiles containing personal information and a skills matching feature.

A wiki-based platform
The system for this organisation was built entirely on the Confluence wiki platform which was customised to match the needs of the teams taking part in the pilot programme.
The wiki-platform includes tools such as blogs, social bookmarking, and RSS to aggregate relevant news, dashboards aggregating the latest bookmarks, workspace tags, multi-user editable pages, templates, meeting notes and project archive.

Cross-pollination of research areas
The purpose of the platform was to create a central place where researchers can share work related ideas and contents for new products, work together across teams allowing them to get a sense of community but also obtain new insights and enable cross-pollination with regard to different research areas.

Leading British Museum

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:25:01 +0000

Headshift implemented a wiki-based intranet for one of Britain's leading museums. Responding to the need for a lightweight solution, the new intranet allows for easy publishing and simpler and more personal collaboration tools, such as wikis, blogs, social tagging and bookmarking.

Easy publishing
The solution comprises easy, version-controlled publishing of departmental and corporate info, images and documents including handbooks and forms. Moreover, the intranet also contains:

A rich people directory including a skills matching feature
Employee-driven classified ads section
Employee driven news section
Searchability of all formal and informal contents
LDAP integration for easy authentication
Basic reporting tools (e.g. most visited pages)
Flexible permission system
Project and collaboration spaces for departments and teams

Confluence - enterprise wiki
Following a people-centred user interface design process with workshops and user testings, as well as the creation of a prototype tested with end users, the site was built and customised using Confluence.

Employee-to-employee collaboration
Conventional intranet content management systems tend to be rather static and top-down emphasising centralised content management, storage and classification. Moreover, they suffer from low usability and adaptability. The implemented wiki solution, however, serves as dynamic, real time intranet platform emphasising employee-to-employee communication and collaboration whilst being an instrument for easy publishing of corporate and departmental information.

Major UK Publisher

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:21:24 +0000

The wiki for this UK publisher is a platform designed to support the work of editors, PR specialists and innovators inside and across departments around new product ideas, innovations and market intelligence.

An increased need to share ideas
With the wiki we responded to the increased internal need to be able to brainstorm and share ideas for new innovations and books collaboratively online, and share market intelligence around products and authors.

Through an analysis of the needs and user requirements of three pilot groups of users Headshift agreed a plan for the implementation of tailored wiki spaces meeting each pilot group's specific needs.

A wiki-based platform
The system for the publishing house was built entirely on the Confluence wiki platform which was customised to match the needs of a diverse internal audience taking part in the pilot programme including PR professionals, editors and innovation team members.

The wiki-platform was customised with ease of use in mind, and included tools such as blogs, social bookmarking, and RSS to aggregate specifically relevant news.

Overcoming departmental borders
The main benefit of the wiki has been to overcome departmental borders and create spaces to explore and think about new innovations, products, as well as new ways of working. The wiki also provides them with a tool to monitor what is being said on their books and authors on the web complimenting traditional PR and media work.

Innovation Exchange

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:19:50 +0000

Headshift built a social aggregator drawing together innovative ideas across the third sector into a single space. It facilitates connections between people in the third sector (practitioners, innovators, etc), social investors and public sector commissioners to catalyse collaborative innovations. It is a space where people will be able to develop thoughts, ideas and collaborations in open ways and smaller groups.

Feeling supported to innovate
In the public sector, people often don't feel allowed to innovate whilst in the third sector, they often don't feel supported to innovate. Decision-making is radically distributed this however, can create barriers to sustaining and scaling innovation. The online system aims to help to bridge the chasm between the people who buy services and those who use them and create them.

Towards an open collaborative environment
Many of the issues were focused around the cultural dynamics surrounding project development within the third sector; Open innovation vs secretive match-making, wisdom of crowds vs expert judgement, pitching mentality vs co-creation, enabling local connections vs focusing on national excellence. With these in mind we had to develop a platform that mimicked the cultural permissions and trust structures, but worked towards a more open collaborative environment for ideas development and knowledge sharing.

By creating a platform for discussion, bookmarking and filtration we are helping to enable people to connect, discuss ideas, develop concepts and build a critical mass around projects/ideas more easily. It helps people to identify opportunities for collaborative innovation and to work together to begin to exploit them across silos and geographical boundaries.

Thought- and idea-collaborations gain traction
Through tracking the saving, tagging and viewing trends of the users, we are able to market which thought- and idea-collaborations are gaining most traction and attention. This information in turn is represented to users so they can follow the changing importance and awareness of different subjects and issues among different user demographics. The system utilises piping technologies (RSS) to pull in data from a wide range of sources, this also offers the user the option to create their own content in there own personal spaces rather than forcing users to create content within the system.

BBC Backstage

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:15:57 +0000

BBC Backstage is the BBC's developer network to encourage innovation and support new talent, and has served to kick-start the developer community around the various feed and API services provided by the BBC. However, as the community has grown there has been a need to enhance the site's features and broaden the audience beyond the developer community.

A new look, wider functionality and a broader appeal
There were a number of key objectives for the new BBC Backstage:

Refresh the design with a clean, modern, look, and adhere to BBC guidelines 'as far as practical'
Broaden the audience and cater for non-technical visitors
Provide a more engaging platform for developing ideas and showcasing prototypes
Move to a fully supported platform

Headshift engaged in a collaborative effort with the BBC to meet these objectives.

A solution serving many functions
The backstage.bbc.co.uk site needed to perform a number of functions:
Serve as a repository for BBC APIs and feeds documentation, or at least act as a comprehensive index to this information.

Provide a space and mechanisms to engage with the developer community who may wish to make use of these services that the BBC provides, allowing them to showcase prototypes they have built, discuss new ideas, and interact with the backstage team.
Allow the non-technical community to gain some insight into how these services can be used, and hopefully, get the non-technical community to engage with suggesting ideas, discussing them, and commenting on the work of developers through the mechanism of ratings and comments.
Provide some communication and dialogue channels for the backstage team and other interested parties within the BBC.

Headshift built the new BBC Backstage platform according to the above specifications.

Do the Green Thing

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:11:56 +0000

'Do the Green Thing' is an experiment in changing social behaviour through the use of social media. The aim is to reduce CO2 emissions by doing 'green things', and then sharing and displaying your green activity to encourage your peers to follow suit. Headshift built the vertical social network for 'the Green Thing' based on the core idea that behavioural change must come from the bottom up. So go on... make a difference - do the green thing!

Building a community that helps people help the environment
To make people change their behaviour from the top down is hard work. Yet many would be willing to change if the right impulse came along and gave them a push to do something they deep down think is worthwhile.

The Green Thing aims at becoming exactly such a friendly impulse by letting groups of people influence each other to take action. When the monthly 'green actions' are performed they are immediately displayed to the closest peers, but also to the wider community. This 'peer pressure engine' is designed to be as fun, playful and personal as possible. Doing the Green Thing should be associated with a feeling of having done something good, both for oneself and for a wider group. Beyond doing the actual green thing this can be done as a comic gesture by uploading an entertaining photo, a piece of audio, or a video, or through a more substantial piece of information posted in these formats, or on the blog and wiki.

Getting involved by sharing stories, insights and real life actions
A large part of the Green Thing is dedicated to aggregating information about the ways in which one can reduce CO2 emissions. These take the shape of aggregated links, tags, blog-posts, audio-clips, videos and photos, as well as longer and more technical pieces of writing or statistical table on the wiki.

The Green Thing site also works as an information and organisational hub for social events and public 'Green actions'. These are then often documented and fed back into the community as stories, photos and videos.

Social media sustains social initiative
The social media tools incorporated into The Green Thing all serve the purpose of creating and supporting active and vibrant social initiatives. Headshift built a platform that includes nearly all the social tools available at the time of launch, ranging from the backbone wiki, to the public group blog, to aggregated meta-data, and all the aggregated audio-visual materials.
The tools are there to be used for a purpose, and ultimately sustain a wider important social agenda.

The Green Thing has shown that the right type of peer pressure, or encouragement, really gets important things done.