An online notebook
Us Now is “A film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet” and it’s also rather good.
Even better, you can now watch all 60 minutes of it.
Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.
Once you have seen it yourself, do something helpful and organise a screening of it where you work. It might just make a difference.
Stephen Hale at the FCO has an excellent, interesting and important post about measuring the success of the London G20 Summit site.
With wonderful openness and transparency, Stephen has set out some of the factors by which the site’s success could be measured, along with the results. Its fascinating reading, and provides lots of lessons for anyone approaching an engagement project like this.
Indeed, this ties in with Steph’s recent (and overly-modest) post about the achievements of the engagement bods at DIUS over the last year or so. He wrote:
We still haven’t nailed some of the basics like evaluation, [or] the business case
Figuring out whether or not something has actually worked is terrifically important, and the long term efficacy of online engagement relies on this nut being cracked.
Stephen’s post highlighted some really good practice here: outline what your project aims to do, and come up with some measures around it so you can work out whether it worked or not.
As Steph mentions, having an up-front business case is really important – a written down formulation of what the project actually is and what it ought to achieve.
Now, business cases and evaluation criteria can be developed in isolation and in a project-by-project basis. I wonder, though, how much more value could be created by developing a ‘package’ of evaluation which could be used as a foundation by everyone involved in government online engagement?
Of course, each project has its own unique things that will need to be measured and tested, but surely there are some basic things that every evaluation exercise would need to look at?
How about some common evaluation documents were created, and that every project undertaken ensured that the basic, common stuff was recorded, as well as the unique bits. That way, some kind of comparative analysis would be possible, especially if everyone submitted their results into a common database.
Just how hard would it be to come up with a common framework for online engagement projects? I think it is worth a shot.
Helen has launched a new community blogging project over at digtialengagement.org which aims to be:
a collaborative space for all those interested in digital engagement to share ideas and agree priorities for action around digital engagement
This is of a much wider scope than digital mentors, and has the potential to be a real hotbed of interesting and vital debate. Helen writes:
By digital engagement we mean the use of social technologies for social good. What do you think we should do on digitalengagment.org? In the immediate future, we want to use this site to create a digital manifesto, what more could we all do, and do together to get more people online and engage in the right tools for them to help them in their lives.
I’ve helped out by setting the blog up, and will be adding my thoughts on digital engagement in due course. The aim is for the site to be as inclusive as possible, so see how you can get involved.
We are going to have some interesting announcements coming up, including how we are going to try and get this conversation going en masse at the Digtial Inclusion Conference in April.
Cambridgeshire County Council have put up some videos on their YouTube channel from the leaders of the three main political groups on the Council.
The aim of the videos are to encourage people to put themselves forward to become councillors.
As the Council’s press release states:
The films represent a first for local democracy in Cambridgeshire, with the leaders broadcasting individual messages on the importance of people coming forward as councillors for the County Council elections, to be held on 4 June 2009.
The videos are classic talking head style, and as with all initial attempts at this stuff, they are a little stilted. But that’s fine, and hopefully these councillors, and others, will continue to use YouTube as a communications tool – after all, with more practice things will always improve.
There doesn’t seem to be a single place for people to go to find out about becoming a councillor anywhere on the web at the moment – there is information on individual council sites, of course, and CLG have some bits too. London Councils have a special site to encourage people to consider standing for election. However, the content is very static and not particularly engaging.
Having some video stuff from councillors explaining what they do and what is involved would be great, I think, along with links to councillor blogs and other information resources. Even better would be some sort of interaction between those who are considering being a councillor and those with experience to pass on. Something to humanise the whole thing a little.
I wrote a little while back about a fairly terrible website being used by Cambridgeshire’s Transport Commission to consult people on their views.
Cambridge News now reports:
A PROBE into Cambridgeshire’s transport crisis – including the idea of a congestion charge for Cambridge – has been hit by a technical blunder.
The chairman of the Cambridgeshire Transport Commission, Sir Brian Briscoe, has revealed the commission’s website has been affected by “initial teething problems”.
The result is that some of the responses to the commission’s request for people’s views on how to tackle the traffic issue have been lost.
People are now being contacted to resubmit their views. Let’s hope they can be bothered.
Oh dear oh dear. I found out that this website cost the sum of £2,990 to produce. Now, that might not sound like a huge amount, but for a microsite like this it’s a sizable budget. What the Transport Commission got for their money was – frankly – piss poor, and it now turns out that it doesn’t even work properly.