Month: January 2009

Fantastic social reporting result

Just have to dash out a quick blog post on this as it’s just so brilliant!

One of the presenters at today’s IDeA Performance event, Andrew Hudson-Smith of UCL (see Ingrid’s notes here and a video here) mentioned the use Birmingham City Council have made of Second Life.

I tweeted about this, which was picked up by some of those involved in the Birmingham project, Dave Harte and Soulla Stylianou, who then wrote a blog post about it on the IDeA Performance site sharing their experiences. All within the space of an hour.

Great stuff!

More IDeA social reporting

…is happening over at IDeA Performance. This is a great initiative by IDeA, trying to open up the training and workshops they provide to anyone with an internet connection.

If you, or anyone you know, is interested in local government performance, do check out the content we are putting up, leave a comment or tag your own stuff with ideaperf.

Social Media Exchange materials now online

As I mentioned in my previous post, in a few hours (must…sleep…) I’ll be running a couple of sessions at the Social Media Exchange.

I’ve now finished my slides, and have put them up on slideshare. Rather than make your life easy, though, I’m forcing you over to my posts on the Social Media Exchange site to get at them:

Would be good to have people’s thought on these in the comments over there!

Social reporting and learning at the Social Media Exchange

Tomorrow I will be hanging out with loads of cool people at the Social Media Exchange, which has been marvelously organised by Jude Habib and Mark Ellis at sounddelivery.

I’m helping out by running a couple of sessions, but also by lending my social reporting/learning WordPress theme, which I have spent today tweaking and filling with content ahead of tomorrow’s event.

The whole schedule has been added to the site as blog posts, so you can track who is presenting what and when by clicking the links on the schedule and speaker pages.

Sadly the home page dashbaord is bereft of live Twitter and Blogsearch updates as the server the site is hosted on didn’t seem to like pulling content in rom elsewhere with RSS. But there are links out, which people should be able to find easily enough.

One thing I am looking forward to is the amount of video that will be going on, thanks to Matt Waring and his team at Best Before TV, who are helping to cover the event with their VideoBoo package, which turns any Mac into a portable VideoBoo(th). We’ll get as much as we can embbed on the blog.

My two sessions are WordPress for Good, described as a masterclass (which means I get to talk a bit) and the other a surgery on blogging (which means I answer questions). I’ll be putting any slides and other media output up on the Social Media Exchange site as and when it gets created – just check out my tag page.

(Other great sessions (amongst many others!) will be those from my good friends Nick Booth and Steve Bridger.)

Of course, I did create the WordPress for Good microsite to house plenty of resources that people could use after they have been suitably inspired by my usual combination of mania and enthusiasm for all things WP. Thanks to all the stuff people have suggested, I’ve got plenty to be getting on with. Another late night, then…

What should a council’s website look like?

Simon Wakeman presents a nice roundup of some of the new websites being launched, comparing Barnet and Cheltenham‘s latest efforts with the current poster-child, Redbridge.

Generating an environment for residents to interact online with their councils will generate more engagement with the democratic process and council work in general – but it needs truly interactive platforms, a supportive culture within the council and a drive from officers and members to create genuinely two-way conversations.

Simon is right to call out Redbridge for the lack of interactivity in his post. Some basics have been missed: no RSS, no home page box for me to enter my email address to get news updates straight to me.

I think Redbridge and other sites like this are missing what the web is really about these days.

What local authorities (and government generally) need to understand is that they need to stop thinking about their websites as a destination. They should provide people with the information they want, where they want and in the format they want – not force them to spend hours personalising a site in which they have very little interest other than finding out when their bins get collected.

In fact, here’s a (only slightly stupid) vision for council websites. Make them look like Google. Not iGoogle, but the actual Google homepage, with just a search box on it. Make sure the search works, so people can actually find what they want, and then add an option to receive an email when that content changes.

Sorted.

Load more posts!