E-Democracy

Get satisfaction with your council

Jon Bounds has come up with another brilliant idea – using the ‘people powered customer support’ site GetSatisfaction to create a community around the services provided by Birmingham City Council.

So, I thought, could this work for a local council? Imagine time saved by council officials if knowledgeable citizens helped answer questions, imagine the resources available (once someone had explained how to apply for a licence, the information would be there for everyone), imagine a monolithic body “joining the conversation”.

Rather than deciding to attempt to persuade my local council (Birmingham City Council – one of the largest in the UK) that this would be a good idea, I discovered that – as the site is “a space for an open conversation between you and other people with interests and passions in this organization.” – anyone can set a company page up. So I have.

It ill be interesting to see whether the City Council gets involved. I guess it is like a Fix My Street but for all Council services. Might just have to make one for my local council in Kettering…

A day’s reporting

Today was most enjoyably spent at the Digital Inclusion conference, with David Wilcox, doing some video and other social web stuff on behalf of DC10plus.

Digital InclusionWe decided that, rather than drown DC10plus’s own blog with everything we produced, we would host our own blog featuring everything we did, from which people could take what they chose.

Our blog is at http://dc10plus.socialreporter.net – hosted at RuralnetOnline on their WordPressμ platform. This enables us to create minisites quickly at the socialreporter.net domain for any future events too, and maybe even building up a portfolio of work. David and I will be doing some more formal blog posts for the dc10plus blog over the next day or so, but for now the current arrangement gave us complete control over how stuff was displayed (such as embedding Qik video…) and just let us get on with the job.

We also used the blog to aggregate the bits of content around the web tagged up with dc10plus by embedding del.icio.us bookmarks in the sidebar, along with bits posted on Twitter with the dc10plus hashtag. Photos were uploaded to Flickr throughout the day and tagged, and again aggregated in the sidebar. WordPress really does make this stuff so easy.

I took my digital camera along, but didn’t use it. Much easier to take photos of the iPhone (did I mentioned I’ve got an iPhone? It’s beautiful. I am now of the opinion that you aren’t really a proper person unless you have one) and email them straight to Flickr. The quality is perfectly adequate for the web and the ease of use is something else.

The real story was in the video though, and we managed to get plenty done. I am slightly limited technologically speaking, because my camcorder hasn’t got an external microphone, meaning that I really couldn’t use it in crowded, noisy spaces. But while the conference sessions were going on, I managed to pin down some exhibitors to get the skinny on what they were up to. Hopefully the results were useful, like this with Bob Holmes of Digital Unite, who tells a nice story about how the social web can bring older family members back in contact with their families:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWufgu3WJ5I]

I used YouTube to host my efforts, with minimal editing. One slight pain is that the Sony Camcorder doesn’t like talking to my Mac – fortunately I brought my Vista laptop along as a backup. The wifi at the location (The Brewery near the Barbican) was excellent, and th uploads took no time. Videos were online and on the blog within 20 minutes of them being taken.

Computers and coffeeMeanwhile, David wandered about grabbing people for interviews, using both Qik and blip.tv for hosting. Using different services is good, offering slightly different things, but all can be aggregated in the blog, so it doesn’t really matter too much.

Things we learned? Organisation is important. We needed our own table, rather than sharing the DC10plus one (not that we weren’t grateful…) but the volumes of kit and wires meant we could have done with our own space. We were also still experimenting with various bits (embedding Qik in WordPress, getting hashtags to work) into the morning, which was a little too much brinkmanship, probably. But we have the basics in place, though, and the WordPress platform is the key to it all, really.

It’s definitely a two man job, though – possibly three if you want to have the actual conference sessions live-blogged too. I’m definitely up for doing some more, and it’s one of those things that you can only get better at with experience.

I’d like to thank David for letting me have a go – and to the folk at DC10plus for taking a punt on having us hang around, recording stuff. I hope the results work for them, and help get some of the messages across.

Update: Shane McCracken has blogged his thoughts on our efforts.

Civicsurf in action

Shane McCracken has blogged at Cllr 2.0 about the experience of Norfolk County Councillor Tony Tomkinson who started blogging at the beginning of this year:

The post is a superb example of how using a blog a civic leader can gather considered and in-depth views from a wide range of people with a wide range of views.  The blog hasn’t replaced the village public meeting but it has complemented it very well.  Although Tony is prevented by his position as a councillor from expressing an opinion before the Planning committee meeting, he is providing leadership by encouraging discussion and opinion through having a place for that discussion to take place.

A great example of the benefits that blogging can bring for local politicians and their communities.

I wonder how well a blogging councillor like Tony would fit in with a local social media community like I described this morning?

Digital inclusion

From a piece by Helen Milner of UfI in egov monitor:

The flipside of our increasing reliance on ICT – in public, economic and social life – is that the digitally excluded, by default, also become excluded from public services, modern working life and society itself.  Digital inclusion is at the heart of the debate not just around skills and the knowledge economy, but around social justice and personal well-being.  The new research is a continuation of UK online centres work in this area, and stems from a previous report which examined the links between digital and social exclusion.  It found 75% of those counted as being socially excluded were also digitally excluded*.  Those already at a social, educational or financial disadvantage are therefore three times more likely to be off-line, and missing out on the potential benefits, conveniences, opportunities and savings computers and the internet can provide.

Paul Canning’s 10 point plan

Paul Canning – challenged by Tom Watson to do so – has come up with ten things that need to be looked at as part of the government’s web strategy. His number one issue is ‘findability’:

Search is the prime route to content and is followed by links from other websites. How government addresses this is through newspaper ads – see DirectGov – or, slowly, very limited textads and rare banner ads. I’m not aware of any strategy which looks at how people find services or information in the real world online. Most pages are not optimised for search, most top results are by fluke rather than design and most links by legacy. All of that is and will continue to end – there is competition online. If they can’t find you, what’s the point?

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