Guest post

Police, Twitter, and riots

Really pleased to be able to publish this post from Cisco’s Jeremy Crump on the use of Twitter by the police, with specific reference to the recent disturbances in London, Birmingham and other cities.

The widespread use of social media has been a significant feature of the riots in England over the last week. Looters used BBM to organise and swarm. In response, outraged citizens used Facebook  and Twitter to organise clearing up local streets. The police are making extensive use of social media. They have used it for keeping people updated about what has been happening, and very importantly for dispelling rumours when things haven’t been happening. They’ve used Flickr to crowd source collecting photographic evidence, and for getting citizens to help in identifying offenders. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary noted in their report on public order policing earlier this year that the police were lagging behind demonstrators in their use of social media. The service has had to learn fast.

What we have seen in the last week shows some real innovation, building on the  work of @nickkeane of the NPIA and innovators across the police service over the last three years. There will be extensive analysis of what worked and what didn’t over the coming months. An immediate pointer to the extent to which social media are becoming an essential aspect of policing is the growth of the number of people following police force twitter accounts.

Almost all of the 43 local forces in England and Wales have central twitter accounts, which are run by force comms departments and are mostly used for giving out public information notices, seeking information about incidents or reporting successes. Since June, the total number of followers of these sites has increased 121,000 to 347,000. Unsurprisingly, the forces with the biggest growth include those where there was the most unrest – Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Merseyside, Greater Manchester, West Midlands and Derbyshire all show increases in the number of followers in this period of over 200%. So do Cambridgeshire, West Mercia, South Yorkshire and Hampshire. The biggest growth has been in the Met, which was relatively late in committing itself to the use of twitter. @metpoliceuk now has over 34,000 followers, against 2,900 in June. Of course, not all the 346,000 followers now following police force accounts in England and Wales are unique individuals – there is overlap between these groups. But the scale of the growth is striking. The experience of Greater Manchester Police from their GMP24 exercise last year suggests that these high numbers of followers will persist. A significant group of followers are media organisations and the publication of information through the site is a means for the police to feed their messages into a debate which goes wider than their immediate followers on Twitter.

There has been more modest growth in the number of followers of the accounts managed by neighbourhood and borough policing teams.  402 such accounts which were already set up in June and still used in august have grown from 108,000 to 166,000 followers – an increase of 54%. Some of them, such as @brumpolice and @suptpaynewmp have gained several thousand new followers.

There is more work to do in understanding how the police have used these sites, what the impact has been and what new and effective practices have emerged. Much will be changed by the events of the last week, including the way the police work with local citizens to share information and maintain confidence. We can expect the police service to build on what it has learned about the potential of social media for closer engagement with the public.

Note on the data

 The number of followers for 41 force accounts and 402 local policing accounts were downloaded on 22 June 2011 and 11 August 2011 using NodeXL, which is a free extension to Excel. http://nodexl.codeplex.com/. The source of the account names are the lists @nickkeane/ukcops-who-tweet and @nickkeane/uk-police-force-twitters. The local police list excludes specialist units, ACPO officers’ accounts and others which aren’t used primarily as channels for communicating with the local public.

Jeremy Crump is a director at Cisco Systems and was previously Director of Strategy at the NPIA. He will be publishing articles on the police service use of Twitter later this year.

Announcing moreopen micro-grants

Cross-posted from the new blog over on moreopen.org, here Steph announces some small-scale funding available for public sector-oriented digital events and projects:

As UKGovcamp 2011 fades into the memory, and exciting events such as ShropCamp (19 April) hove into view, it’s time to formally lift the veil on our mini grant scheme to help get more great public sector digital innovation off the ground.

UKGovcamp was a great event, and we managed to bring in enough sponsorship to cover costs, and set up a small fund to support follow up events. So far, four have been supported:

  • ShropCamp: how social media and open data can help service providers to work more effectively at a local level in and around Shropshire
  • Youth Work Online: the third national get-together of people interested in using the social web for youth engagement and participation
  • Localgovcamp: the national get-together of local government folk, held in Birmingham, to talk about digital stuff at a local level
  • MailCamp [working title]: a show-and-tell seminar event on how effective use of email can help public sector organisations reach audiences more cheaply and drive engagement at scale

But to cut a long story short, there’s still a bit of money in the pot, so we’re inviting applications from individuals and teams who have an idea for an event or project which ticks the following boxes:

  1. Is for people in, or interested in, the UK public sector
  2. Is about transparency, engagement or collaboration involving new technologies
  3. Doesn’t have much – if any – other funding or sponsors, and needs help to cover catering, venue or logistics costs
  4. Is run on a not-for-profit basis; ideally free to participants

So it might be that you want to run a weekend localgovcamp in your area. Or you might want to get together a group of people new to this stuff and run a pecha kucha evening. Or you might want to focus on something specific like film-making or consultation or using Facebook effectively in the public sector, and get people to show-and-tell their experiences.

The application process is really simple: use the application form on this site to tell us:

  • a little bit about who you are
  • what your event or project is about
  • what you need the money for

You can bid for any amount up to £1,000, but we expect most grants for small events to be around £250 or £500: enough to cover pizzas or a large room if you can’t find one for free.

The grant scheme will be run on a rolling basis, until the money runs out, so don’t delay in making your application. Having a bit of seed funding behind you will hopefully make you a stronger candidate for sponsorship by other organisations, so the idea is to help you get the ball rolling.

FAQs

  1. Can you run the event for me?
    No, sorry. We just help with a bit of money. We’re still knackered from organising UKGovcamp.
  2. OK, but can you promote it for me?
    To an extent, we’d love to. We’ll tweet and blog about it here, and can set you up with a subsite on http://www.ukgovcamp.com if you want. In any case, we recommend you set up a group and get people talking about the event, to sound out interest and ideas for content.
  3. How big is the grant fund?
    Not very. A few grand altogether.
  4. I’ve got an idea but I’m not sure it’s what you’re looking for
    Drop us a line and let us know what you’re thinking about. There’s no harm in asking, and it’s a very informal process.

 

Pulling, Not Pushing: How To Make Me Pay Attention

In my previous post about online listening, I mentioned RepKnight, a soon to launch lightweight tool for tracking keywords across social media services. In this guest post, RepKnight’s Lyra McKee talks about getting people’s attention online without irritating them.

RepknightSocial media is like the Internet in 1999; no one’s quite sure how best to use it or what exactly it should be used for. This tends to lead to a lot of bad behaviour, mainly by those trying to engage or market to citizens. At times, it verges on spam, with scheduled marketing messages and PR copy blasted in your ear like a trumpet.

The marketing spin gets our attention but it doesn’t make us “pay” attention; like the man being scolded by his wife to clean the living room while watching the Arsenal match, we’re listening but tuning the noise out so that the message doesn’t get through anyways. So how does someone make us “pay” attention on social media? And how can you get those you want to engage with to pay attention to you?

In the Web 2.0 world, marketing and adverts no longer impact us. We’re no longer wowed by the glossy billboard or TV ad. The only messages getting through are those that contain value. They are the ones that make us “pay” attention.

I separate the value providers in my Twitter and Facebook streams into 3 categories:

  • The Influencers: These people are like the parents of teenagers who actually do as their told. In our eyes, they have credibility so we listen to their every word. Generally, they’re either celebrities or industry thought leaders.
  • Friends: Our peers bring us value by satisfying our need for social approval (and sometimes making us laugh).
  • Founts of Knowledge: These are the folks who tweet links the rest of us find useful, like marketers who Tweet links about how to use Facebook and Twitter properly. We visit their social network profiles again and again to see if they’ve tweeted any news or info we’ve missed.

If you’re not the first or second one, you need to be the third one.

The important thing when pushing links and information is to be aware of who your audience is and question if it’s relevant enough to them. Try to add an element of engagement to the information; ask a question, like “What’s everyone think of the latest news *insert link*”. Use a tracking tool such as Bit.ly that lets you monitor how many people click the link.

Most of all, add to the conversation – not with your opinion (unless asked for it) but with useful tips and hints. You must constantly be bringing gifts to the table. This will get you noticed and make your target Tweeters and Facebookers pay attention.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to Tweet or Facebook me at @RepKnight; alternatively, follow me on my personal Twitter account @LyraMcKee or email me at lyra@repknight.com.

 

Stimulating informed debate around AV

Steph provides an update on the AVdebate project (cross-posted from Helpful Technology).

Six weeks ago, Dave kicked off a little project which he described as follows:

I’m rather interested in the referendum that we are going get get next May in the UK about changing our voting system.

It occurs to me that it isn’t an issue I have a particularly strong understanding of, and I’m sure that’s the case for a few other people as well.

So, with the help of friends like Anthony and Catherine, I’ve kicked off AVdebate – which will be an online space for constructive, deliberative debate and learning about voting reform, which will hopefully help folk make up their minds.

For now, AVdebate is a Google Group with a dozen or so people on it, but there’s already been some interesting activity:

My small recent contribution was to start thinking about how the site might be organised, and how you might start to visualise a debate of this kind online. A timeline? A mind map? The pros and cons? Or something else?

There’s great potential in this kind of site, that takes the work of pioneers like Debategraph and uses a combination of curated and original content, social media aggregation, and a really good interface to help host and stimulate an intelligent discussion about a tricky question. The AV referendum feels like a great testing ground, but I see potentially much wider application to help explore the big policy questions of our time. What’s the economic case for cuts vs stimulus? Why is tackling climate change difficult? How can we improve the lot of people in the developing world? What would it take to make our society more socially mobile?

It would be great to have some more minds and ideas on the job. If you’re interested in this stuff – whether it’s the content, the aggregation, the user interface or the sociology of it all – then it would be great to have you on board the Google Group. It feels like we could build something really quite clever if we put our collective minds to it.

6 months of Google

Paul McElvaneyPaul McElvaney, Director at Learning Pool, posts an update on how the company is faring with Google’s suite of enterprise tools for email, calendaring etc.

Learning Pool moved its corporate systems like email, calendaring and document storage into a Google service. I wrote about it at the time but thought we’d do an update on what our experience has been since.

In general terms the move has been a real success. We’ve never lost connectivity, our service is reliable and robust and there are no performance issues. It also lets us work in a different and often more efficient way. All that being the case, there are a few things that are different from what we were used to and in some cases not as good. While these things definitely aren’t as good a reason to despair, they might be useful for someone. Here goes:

  1. The new solution have us no way of managing our desktops in the office. This seemed like a solvable problem but in the end we relented and bought an Active Directory licence which cost about £2,000. Not bad value but we hadn’t budgeted for it and it was a bit of a pain – at least we can print again though!
  2. Connectivity with iphones just isn’t as good as with an Exchange set-up. Things like calendaring are a bit weird and we miss the Exchange set-up for this
  3. Using Outlook isn’t a wonderful experience with Google. In hindsight we should have banned Outlook and forced people to use the Google interface but we may have had a mutiny if we’d one that!
  4. Mail is sometimes unexplainably slow – it always arrives eventually but if its 4 hours late its a bit of a problem. That said if your exchange server goes down, 4 hours looks like a walk in the park!
  5. Google spreadsheets are a real let down – they are fine for managing simple spreadsheets but once you go into an complexity (like introducing a formula for example!) then you are pretty much on a hiding to nothing!
  6. Everything changes a lot – while this is fine in the main and the changes are normally good, things like removing docs offline access caused a stir!
  7. Training is a bit of an issue. I know I know, Learning Pool should be on top of this, but we have struggled to help some of our users learn how to use the technology most effectively. The stuff that Google give you is pretty good but you always need to spend some time with non-technical users so that they are up to speed. When you don’t do this, as we didn’t sometimes, acceptance of the system tanks pretty quickly.

As I said, those things are slightly annoying but we can, and are, living with all of them. Overall, I’d heartedly recommend moving to a Google environment to handle the boring stuff like email and calendars – and whilst the Google productivity apps (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations) can’t quite match the desktop equivalents for features or power, their web enabled sharing and social functions make them a fantastic part of the toolkit, especially for a distributed workforce like ours.

We’re also keeping our eye on developments in places like Los Angeles, where the city government is moving across to Google Apps. Here’s a video explaining why they went for a cloud based solution:

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