Tuesday, 22 September, 2009

Zoho Discussions

You may not have heard of Zoho, but they are one of the leading providers of cloud-based applications on the web. If you are looking for an alternative to the likes of Google Docs, you might not go too far wrong with Zoho.

They have just released a new service, called Discussions which allows you to run internal or external discussion forums, and includes loads of functionality like rating posts, creating idea style forums – a bit like UserVoice or IdeaScale – and a bunch of other stuff.

Well worth looking into, and this video explains more:

PermalinkZoho Discussions

Bookmarks for September 21st through September 22nd

Awesomeness off of the internet for September 21st to September 22nd:

PermalinkBookmarks for September 21st through September 22nd

Sunday, 20 September, 2009

Bookmarks for September 16th through September 20th

Awesomeness off of the internet for September 16th to September 20th:

  • Postscript two: Lessons from the great 2009 Birmingham City Council website disaster – Paul Canning keeps up the pace on the BCC website story.
  • Crowd Fusion | Web Publishing – "Crowd Fusion is a publishing platform that combines several popular applications – like blogging, wikis, tagging and workflow management – with some original concepts."
  • stribe.com – Welcome – "Stribe is a plug and play service to instantly create a social network on any website"
  • Case Study & Example Round-Up for Local Gov Using Social Media – Local Communities – Here's a simple round up of links to case studies and information about local governments using social media.
  • Apps.Gov – "Cloud computing plays a key role in the President’s initiative to modernize Information Technology (IT) by identifying enterprise -wide common services and solutions and adopting a new cloud-computing business model. The Federal CIO Council under the guidance of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO), Vivek Kundra, established the Cloud Computing Initiative to fulfill the President’s objectives for cloud computing."
PermalinkBookmarks for September 16th through September 20th

Wednesday, 16 September, 2009

Building local government 2.0

The Knowledge Hub is a terrifically ambitious project being run by IDeA, in partnership with CLG, to bring knowledge and information sharing to the local government sector. A mixture of technology and capacity building, the aim is to alter the culture of local government, to change the way people in councils think about how success is measured, and how innovations and improvement can be rolled out across the entire sector.

Learning Pool are keen to play as big a role in this process as possible: after all, we have the background in local government, we have collaboration in our bone marrow, and we also have a pretty good idea about what works, technology-wise. So when the opportunity came up to bid for a project to develop a prototype which will inform the development of the Knowledge Hub, we pulled out all the stops to make sure we got it.

And get it we did (subject to the usual cooling off periods and boring contract stuff, of course).

The Partnerships and Places Library is an online resource of case studies from local authorities and local partnerships. It’s chock-full of useful content, but isn’t terribly interactive and probably isn’t the most engaging collection of content on the web.

Learning Pool will produce for the IDeA a fully interactive community, where content sharing, conversation and use of rich media will be encouraged and supported. Our concept for the site was called WorkTogether in recognition of the collaborative, silo-busting nature of the project.

We’re also keen to get the detail right on this project, and support open information and data sharing where we can. The new site will produce RSS a-plenty and will integrate with services like Calais to produce really useful semantic metadata. Everything will be built on open source technology, and where bespoke development is needed, that too will be released to the community.

Updates on development will be posted on the Learning Pool blog. We’re on a pretty tight schedule, so you all should be able to see some results before too long. If anyone is keen to be in on the user testing, leave us a comment here and we’ll do our best to involve you.

We’re delighted, because we see this as the first step in an exciting journey for Learning Pool. We’re going to be delivering a really innovative online project, and will be a part of the wider Knowledge Hub process. But this is also the start for us becoming local government’s trusted advisor and partner when it comes to developing social media, web 2.0 – or whatever you like to call it – strategies and products.

If your council is considering taking its first tentative steps into this new media world, get in touch with us – drop me a line on 07525 209589 or email me on dave@learningpool.com. I’d love to come and talk to you about this stuff, and see where Learning Pool can help.

Update: if you want to keep an eye on this project’s development on Twitter, follow @worktogetheruk!

Cross posted from the Learning Pool blog.

PermalinkBuilding local government 2.0

Socialwok

Socialwok

As a user of Google’s enterprise tools, usually known as Google Apps, Socialwok looks very interesting.

It sticks a social networking layer on top of your email, calendar, Docs and so on – something that the Google suite was really missing if being used as the main infrastructure for an organisation.

Here is a video to explain more:

PermalinkSocialwok

Bookmarks for September 13th through September 16th

Awesomeness off of the internet for September 13th to September 16th:

PermalinkBookmarks for September 13th through September 16th

Tuesday, 15 September, 2009

Monday, 14 September, 2009

The decent council website – top 5 so far

There has been a great response to the What makes for a decent council website? experiment.

Here’s the top 5 at the end of the first day:

  1. Plain english – Jargon and acronyms should be kept to the absolute minimum, or if they must exist, they should be metatagged with common english counterparts eg. Penalty Charge Notice should be crossindexed with parking fine and parking ticket.
  2. Services not portals – Services that poke you when something of interest happens and help you sort something out when you are annoyed. Council websites should not be destinations/portals.
  3. A home page that gets you to where you want to go quickly – The home page should have a list of links that cover the main user tasks, as well as allowing the user to search by keyword, subject area, and offer predictive results as they type.
  4. Test the site before launch – This should be a no-brainer, but sadly it appears not to be. Yes there will always be problems no matter how much testing is done, but NEVER launch a site without ensuring that the majority of links work and that most of the pages contain content.
  5. Have people that respond to users’ suggestions – Use http://getsatisfaction.com to collect problems and suggestions in one place. Then have people employed to answer them, and engage in a conversation about the most interesting ones.

So, some good stuff, and there are even more ideas on the site. Keep them coming!

I’ll keep the site open til the 20th September, after which I will cobble all the thoughts together, along with comments and votes into a document everyone can share.

PermalinkThe decent council website – top 5 so far

What makes for a decent Council website?

After the kerfuffle over the Birmingham City Council website, as expertly documented by Paul Canning, there has been a considerable amount of discussion about what a Council website should look like, and what it should actually do.

This isn’t just an academic debate, as some local authorities have been making some really innovative steps in redesigning their sites, such as the search dominated Westminster and Lancashire sites – which I quite like; and the personalised Redbridge and Nottingham sites – which I am less keen on.

There are, it seems to me, three main groups which have a view on council websites, in particular order: citizens in the area who use the site, internal staff, and the wider world of interested folk (I hesitate to say ‘experts’).

So I wondered how the third group might go about putting a wishlist together of features that a Council website really ought to have, and perhaps of deciding which are the most important. These could then be documented somewhere so that Councils have a free point of reference of some good quality advice on where they should go with their website.

So I have set up a page on IdeaScale, which is a bit like UserVoice only it has a few more collaborative features. You can find it at:

http://localgovweb.ideascale.com/

It is straightforward enough to submit an idea and then vote on it and others, you can comment on ideas and even edit them collaboratively, using wiki like features.

So do come and join in, leave your ideas and let people know what you make of theirs, and let’s build a really useful wishlist for what makes for a decent Council website.

PermalinkWhat makes for a decent Council website?

Sunday, 13 September, 2009

Upcoming events

I’ve got a few speaking engagements coming up, as well as other events that look like fun…

1. Developing Public Sector Communications through Social Media, 15th September, London

This is an LGC event, spending the whole day talking about how local authorities can be using social media.

My spot is part of a panel session alongside luminaries Dominic Campbell and Carl Haggerty. I’m talking blogs and podcasts.

2. Knowledge Hub Advisory Group, 17th September, London

The IDeA‘s Knowledge Hub is a game-changing project – an attempt to provide local government with some of the focus that central gov has through the Power of Information process. The Advisory Group will act as a sounding board for the project, which should be fun.

3. Learning Pool Summer Party, 23rd September, London

The annual Learning Pool summer bash will be my first, and I’m looking forward to it! If you fancy coming along, the details and the ticket thing is here. Just stick in the comments that you saw the event on here, and all will be well, I’m sure.

4. ProjectCamp, 26th September, Cheltenham

A LocalGovCamp with a project management flavour, as organised by Jon Hyde. All the details are on the dedicated online community, and signup in on a good old Google form.

5. LocalGovCamp Lincoln, 23rd October

Andrew Beekan has organised a LocalGovCamp for Lincoln in tandem with the local university, which should be wicked. Learning Pool are sponsoring this one!

6. Policing 2.0 – the Citizen and Social Media, 22 October, Ryton-on-Dunsmore, Coventry

The NPIA‘s Nick Keane has invited me to this event, to give an introductory overview to what this social media thing is, and why it might matter to the police. It should be fun, also speaking will be Sarah Drummond from MyPolice.

PermalinkUpcoming events