An online notebook
I’m looking forward to CommsCamp14 in a week’s time, and have pitched a couple of session ideas on the event’s Ideascale site:
What does user centred comms look like? Who actually is the customer? How do we find out what they want to know and how they want to know it?
A session on online community management – what it is, how to do it well, and where it fits in the public sector comms kitbag of skills.
If you’re interested in either of these topics, please go and vote for them!
Love this slide deck talking about lessons learned by a tech startup entrepreneur.
[slideshare id=9628635&doc=10thingsivedonewrongennovation-111010061148-phpapp02]
Pretty damning stuff from Cllr Roger Gambba-Jones:
If somebody was to ask me about becoming a councillor nowadays, I’m not sure what I would tell them were the benefits of doing so and I don’t mean to the councillor. Government funding cuts and more and more centralisation of power, hidden behind the facade of Localism, means that getting elected is more likely to become a exercise in frustration and disappointment, than a fulfilling experience in serving the community.
Here’s my fifth podcast. This is becoming a thing!
I’m joined in this episode by Anne McCrossan, who runs Visceral Business. Anne’s thing is getting organisations perform as genuinely social businesses.
Here’s a link to download the original mp3 file if you would like to do that.
If you would like to subscribe to the podcast in your favourite podcasting app, the feed is http://davebriggs.libsyn.com/rss or you can find the podcast on iTunes.
Show notes and related links (in a slightly jumbled order):
I found LocalGovCamp a really refreshing and cheering event this year. I’m going to spend a few quick posts writing up my thoughts.
There’s a kitbag of tools and approaches that can be used to tackle the problems facing us. Not everyone knows about them and this needs fixing.
I’m not necessarily talking about digital tools either – although there are some of those of course.
It’s more than that – it’s some of the emerging practices and processes, and mindset too. They don’t even cost money, most of these things.
Take the example from Carl Haggerty. At Devon they have a meeting room, decked out with fairly random, non-officey furniture, that can’t be booked out. It’s a room for the curious and the collaborative. You can have meetings in there, but be warned that anyone might turn up and join in. Or you could take your laptop in and get on with your day to day work, only sitting next to people who you don’t normally get to meet.
Like organisations acting responsively to their users. Being agile in the way services and products are delivered. Iterating in response to feedback. Co-designing to improve the way things work.
It’s also about a plurality of tools and systems to be used to help fix problems. I know this is a recurring theme of mine at the moment, but one size fits all solutions are dead.
People and organisations have to be flexible enough to be able to deliver different services in different ways to different groups depending on their needs.
This mindset, these tools and practices need to be rolled out to people in ways that will really help them bring about change. I don’t think training courses or online tooklits will cut it, somehow. We need something new.