Dave – Page 214 – Dave Briggs

Engaging communities in the scrutiny process

July 4, 2010

I had a great time last week at the Centre for Public Scrutiny conference last Thursday. I ran a workshop, which involved me talking for a bit, and then a discussion amongst those in the room.

Here are the slides from the talk, just in case they are useful:

Community engagement through social networkingView more presentations from Dave Briggs.

(If you can’t access Slideshare, here’s a PDF.)

The discussion bit of the workshop was very simple, but quite illuminating. I simply asked the delegates to have a chat around their tables about what their hopes and fears are for this new way of doing things.

Many of the hopes and (especially) fears were common across the groups. I’ve listed them below, aggregating the similar ones together. Over the next week or so I’m going to be coming up with some possible approaches to tackle some of the fears, and to ensure the hopes become reality, and I will share that here as well as with the CfPS.

Hopes

Inform future debate
Engaging younger people in scrutiny
Engaging those who cannot attend meetings
Be able to get good intelligence for enquiries by listening to local forums and other online groups
Getting members involved in forums, to learn the local view on issues
Get a better balance of involvement, rather than just those already involved in the scrutiny process
Use social networking in balance with traditional methods for a blended approach
People would know what they are contributing to – and not have responses disappear into a black hole
More open conversation with the public
A method of getting members themselves more involved
Culture change in the council not being scared on losing control of comms and messages
Greater participation will give more weight to decisions and recommendations
The authority will be more accountable
Potential savings in time and cost for consultation activity
Great transparency of process
Better targetting of engagement and communication to particular service users, for example
Potential for deliberation between the public and members without it becoming a fight

Fears

Confusion of role between elected members and officers in answering questions etc in online spaces
Potential for being overwhelmed by responses, or activity being generally too time consuming
Need to manage expectations of action resulting from engagement activity
Can councils react spontaneously – can they do “real time”?
Capacity and knowledge both of officers and members to do this stuff
Issue of manipulation of process by vocal and active minorities and also using pseudonyms to skew results
Corporate communications may wish to control messages coming from the council and interfere – or shut down activity entirely
Nobody wants to get involved!
Resource implications of moderating and managing websites
Potential impact on council reputation
IT access to technology – many of these sites are blocked. Also lack of support from corporate IT
Need to support members in this activity could be very time consuming
Fears of negative comments which make the council want to stop its involvement
Problems of interesting people in the less thrilling aspects of scrutiny work programmes
Risk averse nature of most councils
Need to be selective as not all the information can be online.

Bookmarks for June 17th through July 3rd

July 3, 2010

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

Digging digital government: recent major works and what they mean – "But now, and for the first time, it’s starting to feel like we can retire some of those old soapboxes and get out our toolboxes instead."
Newsroom: the backstory – "Early feedback on the prototype from journalists was positive, the Press Office got a nice-looking tool which required literally zero additional work beyond emailing over their contact list, and Neil got one of his much-loved quick wins – and within SiteCore too."
What do 25% cuts look like? Like this….. « Whitehall Watch – "There is zero chance cuts of this magnitude can be implemented without affecting “front line services”."
Gephi, graph exploration and manipulation software – "Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs."
How to Secure Your WordPress Site From Getting Hacked: WPSecurityLock – Useful site.
9 signs you know you shouldn’t bother with innovation – Great stuff as always from James Gardner. How many of these can you tick off for your organisation?
Innovation: Who Else Is Doing It? – "I'm often amazed at the lack of courage exhibited by so-called leaders who profess to value innovation."
When Public Servants Make the Difference – "However, as one of the secret sauces of Singapore’s success is trusting its own employees, so almost all gov 2.0 success stories in the Western world share the same ingredient, i.e. they come from the intuition and the willingness to innovate of people who work in government."
Enterprise 2.0 2010 – Enterprise 2.0 TV – Videos from the keynote speeches at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference. Some good stuff here.
A timeline of open government data – Great work Tim Davies – this is really interesting!

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Clay Shirky at the LSE

June 29, 2010

I had an enjoyable couple of hours yesterday evening at the LSE, attending Clay Shirky‘s lecture on cognitive surplus, which was launching his book of the same name.

It was an enjoyable hour, and a real pleasure to hear stories and arguments for the use of social technology for social good.

I must admit, however, that having read Shirky’s previous book, Here Comes Everybody, and watched other lectures of his online, that perhaps his thinking hasn’t really developed that far. Cognitive Surplus seems to be a continuation of the themes examined in Here Comes Everybody rather than anything radically new.

Having said that, I haven’t read the book, but will report back when I have (it isn’t available on Kindle in the UK yet for some reason, which is annoying).

Here are the notes I took during the talk, which may or may not be useful.

Time we have available (free time) which is growing
Platform for making use of that time effectively (Internet)
Use of the network: consume, produce, share
Wikipedia = 100 million hours of time in 10ish years
Tv = 200 billion hours watched every year in US
The time spent watching adverts in the US over one weekend is roughly equivalent to one wikipedia
Very small numbers of change can have huge effects
Ushahidi – Kenyan tracks updates from various media. Been open sourced and used around the world.
Generosity + digital tech
Successful digital projects are those that appeal to our human instincts
Transition from alchemy to chemistry – same tech but different approach/culture. Supported by printing press and the new scientific journals.
Patientslikeme – huge documentation project of sufferers. Large amounts of aggregate data: shared value. Commercial project. “digital sharecropping”. Why do people contribute for free? They like it!
Social pressure often more effective than contractual (example of picking kids up from school on time) once broken also not self healing.
Openness and sharing is a good thing. Patientslikeme want to effect a culture change in the medical profession. Therefore tech is secondary to the project. Makes it possible but the objective is cultural.
Levels o participation and collaboration: lolcats are communal. Wikipedia has public value. Patientslikeme creates civic value. Gets more difficult and complicated as you go along. Also the civic is the most important.
Role of government – to help to create the space for social capital and cognitive surplus to emerge. Digital divide: participation rates much higher in better educated households
Things to think about: scarcity, loose joins, cheapness of distributing information, Internet routes itself around faults

Events, dear boy…

June 24, 2010

Quite a few events coming up in the next couple of weeks that I should probably let you know about.

Next week I’m attending a few things: on Monday, the Clay Shirky lecture on Cognitive Surplus at the LSE, followed by the Learning Pool steering group meeting on Tuesday. I’ll be talking to the group about our plans for further engagement work along the lines of our Let’s Talk Central project with Central Bedfordshire Council, as well as some updates to our Modern Councillor service, which I hope to be able to tell everyone about real soon.

Then on Thursday I am going to be talking to the Centre for Public Scrutiny conference about engaging with local communities online. I will be particularly looking forward to this as my second job in local government was as a scrutiny officer at a district council.

I’m ending the week in Bristol, at NALC‘s conference celebrating local democracy. I’ll be showing some local council clerks and councillors how they can be spending a little bit of time and no money at all on cool ways of engaging with their communities online.

After a rest – or should I say, chance to catch up on email – over the weekend, I hit the road again, or rather the train, heading down to NESTA’s ‘Digital Disrupters‘ event on Monday 5th.

Then it’s Wednesday at the LGA conference in Bournemouth where I’m facilitating a fringe session, optimistically titled “A thoroughly modern council”. You can sign up for it here.

Finally, on Friday I travel again to the south-west, this time to Cheltenham to the Institute of Local Council Management summer seminar. I’ll be talking about “using social networking technologies for mobilising political and community action”.

Busy times! I shouldn’t complain though, if it were any different I would probably be quite bored.

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