Month: May 2011

From New Public Management to Open Governance (the back story)

I’m delighted to publish this – a guest post from Emer Coleman, Director of Digital Projects at the GLA, sharing her dissertation with us.

Anyone who has been following me on Twitter for the past year will know my struggles with “the dreaded dissertation” so it might be worth putting its origins in context.

In a previous life as Director of Strategy for Barnet Council I disagreed with a very deeply held belief in Local Government that the holy grail of resident satisfaction was how much you communicated with your residents. There was a correlation in Best Value surveys carried out every three years between “how informed” residents were and their satisfaction levels. But of course correlation does not imply causality. The simple edict went as follows Council Magazine + A to Z of Council Services + Managing Local News = Satisfied Residents.

Our corporate management team therefore wanted to do a huge communications campaign in advance of one of these surveys to ensure that residents knew exactly what their council did for them. The logic being that when they filled out their surveys on council performance they would recognize the council’s work. If only.

My Chief Executive at the time in response to my doubts said – “well if you want to change their minds you better put up a well argued case”. My dissertation is my attempt to do that.

In a nutshell it draws on the work of the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas who draws the distinction between the System and the Lifeworld. In the system where government lives we believe in these simplistic correlations but in the messy and complex Lifeworld we know that human beings don’t act in rational or predictable ways.

My belief is that open data, open government and the open conversations that take place in public in the social web offer great opportunities to move from the rational ordered public sector way of doing things to a more humanized, communicative form of governance. I tried to example that in the case study on the London Datastore and by including contributions by so many people in the open data movement that have helped me in developing my public policy work around open data.

My work and practice has been incredibly energized by the interactions that happen on the web and through my engagement with developers and innovators committed to the public realm. Mark Drapeau (@cheeky_geeky) calls them The Goverati (though my tutor didn’t like the name much) but I do. So a big thank you to all of you (you know who you are).

Download From New Public Management to Open Governance (PDF 2.3mb)

Spreading the GovCamp love

A quick cross post of something Steph put up on the MoreOpen blog, highlighting the great events funded in part by UKGC11.

At the beginning of March, we announced a small grant scheme using sponsorship from the UKGovcamp in January 2011 to help seed-fund a batch of further such events around the country. We had some great applications, and here’s the list of who we’ve funded so far:

We Are What We Tweet
8 April 2011

As part of the Social Media as Practise course as MA students of Social Media at Birmingham City University, the class staged a one day event looking examining the context of social media use and how it can bring governments and citizens together.

Recipient: Chioma Agwuegbo
Received: £300

ShropCamp
19 April 2011

Focused on communities and services. How can we use social media and open data to help service providers to work more effectively at a local level?

Recipient: Ben Proctor
Received: £600

MailCamp
12 May 2011

MailCamp is a free, one-off show & tell event on 12 May for people interested in how the public sector uses email marketing, newsletter and alerts to engage its audiences.

Recipient: Steph Gray
Received: £600

YouthWorkOnline unconference
21 May 2011

This one-day free open space event brings together practitioners from youth work, participation and voluntary youth projects with digital media developers and experts to share ideas and practice, to explore what the digital world means for young people’s lives, and for services seeking to support young people as they navigate growing up in a connected world.

Register at: http://cgen11.eventbrite.com/

Recipient: Tim Davies
Received: £600

Localgovcamp
18 June 2011

LocalGovCamp is coming back to its spiritual home, Birmingham, this June – and it’s going to be bigger and better than ever. 200 of the most innovative and creative people in the local government sector will be coming together on a Saturday to talk about making things better – sometimes with technology, sometimes not.

Register at: http://localgovcamp2011.eventbrite.com/

Recipient: Dave Briggs
Received: £1,000

LearnPod
13 July 2011

LearnPod aims to debate the use of technology and innovation in learning, predominantly in the post-16 education context.

Register at: http://learnpod11.eventbrite.com

Recipient: Kevin Campbell-Wright
Received: £500

QuangoCamp

July/August 2011 TBC

A one day pratical & sharing event for those who don’t quite fit in with central gov, are a long way from local gov and also don’t quite click with the events in higher education, museums or the charity sector. Reclaiming the word ‘quango’ for a positive, rather than a focus for scorn.

Recipient: Matt Jukes
Received: £400

ScotGovCamp
September 2011, TBC

ScotGovCamp is a self organised unconference for people who work in and around government in Scotland.

Recipient: Lesley Thomson
Received: £500

North London LocalGovCamp
TBC

A North London localgovcamp event, inviting people who are involved with related projects, focusing on North London boroughs – Camden, Islington, Haringey, Barnet, etc.

Recipient: Anke Holst
Received: £300

RuralCamp
TBC

Recipient: Dave Briggs
Received: £200

…

Ten spin-off projects ain’t bad going, touching maybe another 1000 people and keeping the govcamp buzz and optimism going through the year. Good luck – and thanks in advance – to the organisers above, and another big thank you to the original sponsors of UKGovcamp whose patronage helped all of these get off the ground via MoreOpen. An organiser of one of the events reported:

You were the first people to offer us sponsorship and that managed to convince other people to take us seriously. Without your help we probably wouldn’t have been able to deliver the event at all.

There’s a few quid left (really, not very much) so if you’re inspired to run your own event and would like a bit of help getting it off the ground, you know where to go.

 

More notes on mobile apps and government

I still haven’t really got my head around mobile apps and their use for government services. However, James Coltham wrote up some excellent notes from a meeting up in Scotland on the subject recently:

There is definitely a groundswell of interest, though, as well as a growing demand from the public, making for interesting times for anyone involved in making sure their services are ready to go mobile.

I wrote a few bits down last August, and if I’m honest my position hasn’t much changed from:

  1. Platform neutral mobile friendly websites are probably a better bet in an age of austerity
  2. App development is probably a job for the private sector, but I’m not convinced there’s an actual market (ie would people pay for an app to access government services?)
  3. Any app that would work for more than one organisation will need open data in a common format which doesn’t yet exist, though it might do soon (LinkedGov, KnowledgeHub, etc)

Also, what are the sorts of things people will want to do with councils or other public services on their phones? I suppose there are two elements to this:

  • Those things you might want which are suited more to a mobile device than anything else: ie, I need this information now, and here. Bus timetables are a good example, perhaps, or something else that can use location data.
  • Everything else, but delivered to a phone because that either where the owner prefers to access information and services, or because it’s their only way of accessing information and services

I think the second point is probably key to winning the argument for whether government organisations should seriously explore delivery via mobile devices. If we come to a point where a lot of people don’t bother with PCs because their phones do want they need them to, then that’s where the focus of electronic delivery probably should be pointed.

In other words, what does e-government look like in a post-PC era?

Workblogging

Euan Semple wrote a short post the other day that really caught my eye. Here it is in full (hopefully he doesn’t mind!):

A business where everyone blogs. Everyone thinks about what they are doing and writes about what they are doing. From the top to the bottom, the edges to the middle. Everyone awake and bouncing off each other intellectually as they get more and more effective at whatever they do.

Now, Euan is a great thinker, writer, speaker and doer in the world of deploying social technology in organisations to make them work better. He was one of my first inspirations when I first started getting into this stuff seven years ago or so. He’s still writing great challenging stuff and sparking new ideas.

Because, of course, while blogging – one of the oldest forms of social media – may have been overtaken by social networking, status updating and location services in the fashion stakes, it remains one of the most powerful and useful methods of online interaction that exists.

After all, there’s no way I would be sat here, running my own business, doing what I love, were it not for the fact that I started blogging however many years ago it was.

Indeed, given that we seem to have a knowledge economy these days, how does an individual promote what it is that they know to the outside world? I’m not sure there’s a better vehicle than a blog, to be honest.

But it’s not just about personal gain and career enhancement. Having employees blog, as Euan states, has a great impact on organisations. Whether the blogs are out there on the web or just run internally, having people thinking and writing about their work means they get better at their jobs, and with everyone knowing what everyone else does, collaboration, knowledge sharing and silo-busting becomes a reality.

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