Month: March 2011

Civil sector learning event: Exeter, 8th April

Learning Pool, in collaboration with Cosmic, are running an event in Exeter on 8th April to talk about how civil sector organisations can meet their training needs in this age of austerity.

Paul McElvaney will be showcasing My Learning Pool – the ludicrously cost-effective new service from Learning Pool that delivers over twenty high quality learning modules for a bargain £25 per year – a price that goes down with bulk purchases.

Julie Harris from Cosmic -the ethical IT company – will be giving details of a brand new service from Cosmic for VCO’s and Social Enterprises.

Find out more details and book your free place here.

More on e-petitions

Excellent stuff from Fraser Henderson who has published a summary of some research done into the use of e-petition facilities in councils.

I’ve embedded the presentation below:

Fraser also links to some interesting evaluation of the europetition project, which is well worth a read.

Future of local gov IT strategy

Gotta love blogging local government types. Great post here from Warwickshire County Council’s Jim Morton about their developing IT strategy.

My favourite bit:

1. Embrace the practice of using ICT as a Utility: It is now possible to consume software, development platforms and infrastructure from the cloud which can potentially lead to many benefits. We need to understand where working this way will help save us time and money as well as avoid extensive development in re-inventing the wheel where a product or service can be used off the shelf. As an example our open data site is already provided using the Ruby on Rails platform as a service provider Heroku.

2. Warwickshire as a service: This is a (hopefully) catchy way of saying that we need to expand our initial work on open data to include as many of our data sets and services as possible i.e. build an open API for the organisation. The vision is that both internal and external developers will make use of the same building blocks for creating services applications and web sites.

3. Rational approach to information management: We need to overcome the historical and technical silos that we have built up around information to build single sources of the truth and gain a clearer understanding of the context around our data and documents. This will allow us to build more useful, accurate applications and web sites as well as providing clear understanding of which information must be kept safe and secure.

4. Use the web to extend the organisation: We need to move from an arms-length model of interacting with the public web via a curated web presence and individual point solutions for deeper interaction to becoming an organisation that is engaged with the web at a cultural as well as technical level. Staff at WCC need to merge the web into their everyday work-life in the same way that they do in their personal lives.

Update: just come across this illuminating interview with Socitm President Jos Creese:

The direction of travel has nevertheless been predetermined by irresistible trends on which central government cuts are a powerful catalyst. Networked citizens have high expectations of digital services. Professionals have realised that open data, open standards and transparency are incontestable requirements of the networked age. Digital innovation, joined up services, citizen-centricity and wide collaboration are all emerging quite naturally as every possible actor, from public and private entities to all kinds of people, are thrust into ever greater immediacy by the internet.

What is happening to local government is a form of coagulation. But it is happening slowly. It relies on internet infrastructure, so it must wait until local authorities have finished building their bits of the Public Sector Network, and the public sector as a whole has established a competent way of formulating open standards of interoperability.

Webinars a-go-go

Two more upcoming webinars from Learning Pool to tell you about – both free of course.

Closing the third sector skills gap

New for 2011 is My Learning Pool – a suite of over 20 online courses that have been designed for community and voluntary groups, small charities, social enterprises and others in the third sector.

During the webinar you will receive a guided tour of the training available on www.mylearningpool.com and learn how the bite sized chunks of learning can help improve your organisation or yourself from as little as £25 per subscription.

To find out more about My Learning Pool you can follow @MyLearningPool on Twitter, visit the Facebook page or log on to www.mylearningpool.com.

Find out more and sign up here.

#Walsall24 – an experiment in local government radical transparency

Join Learning Pool’s Dave Briggs and Walsall Council’s Dan Slee for this exclusive free webinar discussing Walsall’s groundbreaking Twitter experiment – #Walsall24.

Over a period of 24 hours, Walsall Council tweeted a cross section of what they were doing, providing a unique snapshot of the daily activities of a local authority.

Dan will discuss how the project came about, what the barriers were to making it happen and how they were overcome, and what the Council has learned from it.

Find out more about Walsall 24 at http://www.walsall.gov.uk/walsall24.htm.

Find out more and sign up here.

Digital local resources – and a bit about Your Square Mile

Continuing the posts about local digital communities, here are a couple of links to interesting research and publications on the subject, which I’ve been giving a re-read recently.

Of course, there has recently been a very interesting move in this space with the announcement of the Big Lottery funded Your Square Mile project, which has very close links with the wider Big Society agenda, and which involves some kind of relationship with the social networking platform SocialGo. David Wilcox blogs comprehensively here.

I’m not sure anyone has access to enough information about this to make a proper judgement, however, some alarm bells are ringing in my mind:

  • As per the comments from Will and Manny highlighted in this post, government sponsored online community development does not have a great track record. I appreciate this is at arms length – but Your Square Mile is heavily linked with the Big Society Network, and therefore the current government
  • People will drift towards the funded option, and if (and I emphasise if) SocialGo is the mandated or preferred solution from those with the cash, we are going to be in a one platform fits all situation, which doesn’t really work
  • Objectives are important. Right now, I don’t fully understand Your Square Mile or what it is setting out to do. Hopefully internally they know exactly what they aim to achieve – because if it’s just a vague ‘we’ll get people to talk to each other on the internet and they’ll self organise themselves to do wonderful things’ then that might not work so well
  • What about those organisations that have being doing this stuff for the last few years? Are they just going to be steamrollered by the beast?

I think my real worry is that the one thing that has become apparent, from conversations I have had with people about this stuff, is that with online local communities, in the majority of cases, you need the community before the online. It’s what brings sustainability to the online effort.

Online elements certainly bring visibility to the community’s activities and spread reach, and enable more people to be involved. But a square mile, online or off, is going to be pretty empty if there isn’t the desire or will to keep it going.

Update: just seen this post from Kevin Harris, featuring this lovely line:

There is a study to be done of the damage caused by highly persuasive people who seem to feel compelled to impose template social ‘solutions’ on others.

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