Dave

Bookmarks for January 14th through January 21st

Stuff I have bookmarked for January 14th through January 21st:

  • apophenia: Taken Out of Context — my PhD dissertation – Danah Boyd's PhD dissertation. Well worth a download.
  • Government 2.0 Club – "Government 2.0 Club is a national organization that brings together leading thinkers from government, academia and industry to share ideas and solutions for leveraging social media tools and Web 2.0 technologies to create a more collaborate, efficient and effective government — Government 2.0."
  • Anecdote: Profiting from Collaboration – "Google and P&G are both known for their innovation capabilities and strict internal policy. Driven by market forces, they made an exception. They swapped about two-dozen staffers who spent weeks dipping into each other's staff training programs and sitting in on meetings where business plans get hammered out. This is terrific example of purposeful collaboration delivering results."
  • DELL COMMUNITY – Great example of taking a community approach to customer service.
  • McLuhan Program – Research – Current Academic Research – "Because language is intimately integrated within the human mind, any technology that processes language in one way or another may have strong effects in the way the mind processes that content. Though they may have deciding common points such as plot, period and characters, a film adaptation is processed very differently by the mind of the viewer, than by that of the reader. "

Digital mentoring for public servants?

Ingrid has a very nice post about the training my good friend Steve Dale and I provided to some folk at the Local Government Association and the Improvement and Development Agency today.

I think people left the room enthused.  A colleague whose arm I twisted to attend the course (when I was worried it wasn’t full – in the end it was overfull) thanked me for getting her along.   I’m planning to meet with another colleague in the near future to take some of the training into real concrete action.  And that’s the best feedback of all.

Which is very gratifying to hear.

I think there is a real need for fairly basic overview sessions like this one, introducing people to some of key aspects of this social web thing: not just what the tools are and what they do, but some of the philosophy behind it all.

Digital mentoring for public servants? Quite possibly. Maybe a topic for Barcamp?

Learning from Obama

Edelman have published an interesting white paper on what lessons can be learnt from Obama’s use of the social web in his campaign. It’s worth a read.

Here’s the headline list of learning points:

  • Start early
  • Build to scale
  • Innovate where necessary; do everything incrementally better
  • Make it easy to find, forward and act
  • Pick where you want to play
  • Channel online enthusiasm into specific, targeted activities that further the campaign’s goals
  • Integrate online advocacy into every element of the campaign

This seems to tie in rather nicely with some of the messages I have been banging on about of late, including the emphasis on prototyping, ‘worse is better’, etc.

Be less boring

I wasn’t sure whether or not to blog about this. But I think I ought to, simply because this is such a cracking example of how badly digital engagement can be, and how easy it could be made much better.

My local authority, South Cambridgeshire District Council, has a modest announcement on its homepage:

Your views count!

Great!

Only, on clicking the link to the consultation area, what did I find? Classic local gov: PDFs and an email address. Sigh. Just click that link and look at that page! Hardly inspiring, is it? Not the sort of thing that makes you think ‘This is something I want to get involved with’ – is it?

But it does get worse. Try clicking one of those PDF links. Here’s one you can try from here. Yep, that’s right: they are just excerpts from council meeting reports. That one I linked to opens on page 11. You might want to know where the other ten pages are – it’s a reasonable question. I don’t know the answer.

Not rewriting the content to be more accessible for non-local government geeks is unforgivable. But to not even change the formatting, or the page numbers! to make it more understandable for the layman? Criminal.

In total there are four PDFs to download and read, cogitate on and then respond by email or in writing. The only way you can do this sensibly is by printing them all out, highlighting the important bits and then writing the response. And that’s assuming you can make sense of the reports themselves.

In fact, this consultation is so bad that I wonder whether the Council – shock, horror – actually wants any responses at all.

There are some occasions where providing some weighty PDFs and an email to respond to is an appropriate online consultation method. For example, when dealing with a large organisation, which needs the detail, and needs to incorporate the views of various different people in a response.

But this is most definitely not the case with consulting with what one might legitimately call normal people. For a start, it’s too boring. Why would anyone want to do it, seriously? Another issue is that by making people fire emails off into a black hole, how is anyone meant to know whether their comments actually make sense or not? With no conversation to react to, and very little in the way of context, those less confident at responding to these things just won’t bother because you can’t know whether what you are saying is appropriate or not.

Here’s what I would do with this, and similar attempts at engagement:

  1. Set up a micro site using something like WordPress.
  2. Split the material down into five sections.
  3. Put five big buttons on the site to go to the consultant for each section. Make it clear what they are about.
  4. Describe that section of the consultation in easy to understand language on different pages, linked to from the big buttons. Don’t use any more that half an average screen’s height to do so. Be informative, but keep it succinct. You can still link to the PDFs if people want to see the detail.
  5. Allow residents to leave comments underneath. Keep it all public, so that everyone can see, and respond to each others comments. Allow conversations to flow.
  6. If you like, make sure the relevant officers are on hand to answer any questions or put right misapprehensions.

What’s more, this would be really quick and easy to set up. It wouldn’t even use up that much time to moderate or manage. And you never know, some value might actually be generated.

I’ve emailed Cllr. Tim Wotherspoon, my local councillor, who happens to be the ‘Policy, Improvement and Communications Portfolio Holder’ – perfect! I’m hoping we can talk about making the way the Council engages with its residents just a little bit better.

If you don’t do it, someone else will

Here’s more proof.

bcpt

Birmingham City Council are asking for people’s views on their ‘Big City Plan’. They have even created a website to help people to do so.

I asked Jon Bounds, Birmingham blogger extraordinaire, what was wrong with the Council’s approach. He answered:

Not so much “wrong” per-se as we thought helping discussion (rather than just comment) would generate understanding & ideas.

So Jon and others did something to generate that understanding and those ideas. They’ve translated the consultation document out of local government regenero-speak and into something approaching normal English. They’ve also made the thing properly commentable enabling people to have discussions about their city and what should happen to it.

They’ve called it Big City Plan Talk, and it’s a lovely thing. Let’s hope that Birmingham City Council take note and engage with these people with an obvious love for their city.

Readers working within local government: how could you make the most of the civic energy in your area, to work with residents to create something really worthwhile?

Everyone else: What’s going on in your local area that you could take a bit of time out to help out with, or improve?

Load more posts!