An online notebook
The advert is up for the UK government’s Director of Digital Engagement. It looks like an exciting role with stacks of potential.
Steph has already started to crowd source what it is that whoever gets the job should start doing.
Dominic has also given his commentary on his ‘dream digital director‘.
Duncan Stephan and Alex Stobart are building up an online resource for public bodies in Scotland to help them make the most of social web technology, with a blog called ScotWeb2.
Building on the momentum of the successful barcamp-style event held last autumn, they are writing plenty of great content, pointing out good examples of good use of the web and how this stuff might help those organisations that aren’t quite there yet.
Alex also recently posted asking if public sector folk in Scotland would appreciate a ReadWriteGov style event. Hopefully they do!
The snow has made it a tricky week this week, with transport problems and the local school being closed. What’s more, just outside Cambridge, the snow is still falling on DavePress Towers.
It’s quite pretty, mind.
It’s hasn’t all been bad news, though. As Tom Watson reports, the confusion around the schools closures spurred DirectGov’s innovation dudes into swift action. Whilst the site is down right now for maintenence, this type of proof-of-concept prototyping is just what government needs to test what works and what doesn’t before project managers and the like get their claws into things.
Another remarkable outcome of the weather was the use of the #uksnow hashtag and snow level rating system which spread on twitter. Paul Clarke tells the story:
Fresh from yesterday’s UK Government Web BarCamp, #ukgc09 (worth looking at ukgovweb.org), my mind was pretty open to data sets and what could be done with them. Except the contents of #uksnow wasn’t data – at least nothing that could be readily useable.
Time for a suggestion on standards. I’d put my own tweet out about weather conditions in RH1, so quickly came up with a format: #uksnow [1st part of postcode] [n/10]; as a simple way of getting the holy trinity of mashable data together. Place, condition and time (from Twitter’s own logging). Bingo – three things that could readily be parsed by someone with the time and inclination to do so. And then analysed, mapped, mashed, shared, whatever…
What’s really interesting is the way that Twitter is starting to be used effectively as a command line. People seem to have no problem typing data in conforming to a form of markup so that their contributions can be parsed and mashed up.
Steph has released some details of his short survey of the blocking of useful websites within the public sector. The following figures show the percentages of organisations which allow access to each type of site:
Google 100%
LinkedIn 100%
NetMums 100%
Wikipedia 97%
Digg 97%
Google Reader 91%
WordPress.com 89%
Yahoo account 86%
Flickr 83%
Twitter 83%
Bebo 69%
YouTube (able to see well) 63%
Gmail 60%
Facebook 54%
The worst offending organisations seem to be:
And Steph concludes by saying:
Does DIUS or Cabinet Office have staff any more or less likely to waste time than the Home Office or DWP? Is ’security’ more important in Surrey than Devon? Might the good burghers of Directgov benefit from a bit more exposure to the social web? Would people at FCO tasked with engaging around the world be helped by being able to view more of the World Wide Web?
You decide. Or you could always pop your CV on LinkedIn to find an opening somewhere that actually lets you do your job?
I have spoken to a number of people about this issue. The reasons giving for blocking that are given by IT departments are quite often laughable: network overload? Increased risk of viruses? The truth is that the reason why these tools are blocked is because organisations don’t trust their staff not to abuse them. It sucks.
Simon Wakeman presents a nice roundup of some of the new websites being launched, comparing Barnet and Cheltenham‘s latest efforts with the current poster-child, Redbridge.
Generating an environment for residents to interact online with their councils will generate more engagement with the democratic process and council work in general – but it needs truly interactive platforms, a supportive culture within the council and a drive from officers and members to create genuinely two-way conversations.
Simon is right to call out Redbridge for the lack of interactivity in his post. Some basics have been missed: no RSS, no home page box for me to enter my email address to get news updates straight to me.
I think Redbridge and other sites like this are missing what the web is really about these days.
What local authorities (and government generally) need to understand is that they need to stop thinking about their websites as a destination. They should provide people with the information they want, where they want and in the format they want – not force them to spend hours personalising a site in which they have very little interest other than finding out when their bins get collected.
In fact, here’s a (only slightly stupid) vision for council websites. Make them look like Google. Not iGoogle, but the actual Google homepage, with just a search box on it. Make sure the search works, so people can actually find what they want, and then add an option to receive an email when that content changes.
Sorted.