Tuesday, 5 May, 2009

Technologies for participation

I had the pleasure of bumping into Fraser Henderson at the recent Digital Inclusion Conference, where he mentioned an event he was helping to organise with the Consultation Institute, called Technologies for participation. It’s on 21st May at the Holiday Inn near Kings Cross.

Sadly I can’t attend as I will be taking a much needed break up in Edinburgh. However it looks like a really interesting day:

This seminar offers both IT specialists and those responsible for public engagement the opportunity to consider what’s possible , what’s new, and what’s best. Hear from solution suppliers as well as experienced analysts, and consider how to overcome some of the known barriers to their successful implementation.

The Local Democracy Bill will require councils to offer ePetition systems ‐ and other public bodies will follow suit. Social Networking applications are also having a major impact upon our ways of interfacing with citizens.

The event will be suitable for staff from all public service agencies – central and local; it may also be of interest to elected members committed to innovative engagement methods.

Visit the event site to find out more and book yourself a place!

Monday, 4 May, 2009

LocalGovCamp a sell out

I’m delighted to be able to say that all the tickets for next month’s LocalGovCamp have been claimed. This is remarkable: all gone in just over a week! Many thanks for the enthusiasm so many people have shown.

If you haven’t got a ticket but would like one, just email me and I will add you to the reserve list. I’m hopeful that we will be able to get everyone that wants to come into the building!

The focus now shifts to making sure we have stuff to talk about on the day. I’m delighted that we have had a couple of suggestions already on the blog: one from Steve Dale about the Local Gov Knowledge Hub project he is working on; and one about strategy by Alan Colson from Solihull MBC.

Keep the ideas flowing, people!

Finally, the support from potential sponsors has been outstanding. You can find the latest on the Supporters page. There is more to come.

PSFbuzz: Facebook applications

Image credit: Steven Tuck

I had a remarkably fun time up in Manchester last week, chairing the Public Sector Forums event at Old Trafford about local government web 2.0 strategies.

There was a whole lot of Twitter action during the day, which you can take a look at in this Google Spreadsheet. The tweets and other social media bits were all pulled together on the PSFbuzz site.

Also on that site, you’ll find a whole bunch of video interviews which Liz Azyan took. Do have a look through – they are rough and ready in a true social reporter style, but really give a flavour for the day and how delegates responded to the event.

As well as chairing, I was presenting on the subject of Facebook and how Councils are using it, and putting some ideas forward as to how they could do it a bit better.

Effectively, my argument is that applications are a great way for public bodies to engage with people within social networks. The main advantage for me – and one that is particularly pertinent for Facebook – is one of vocabulary, because an application won’t demand that you become its friend, or fan.

I’m currently working up some specifications with a developer of Facebook apps to provide a hosted service for local authorities to have their own Facebook applications at a very reasonable price. If you’re interested in this, then please do get in touch.

Sunday, 3 May, 2009

Cultural agoraphobia

John Naughton’s Observer piece this morning is a good one:

The cultural agoraphobia from which most of us suffer leads us always to overemphasise the downsides of openness and lack of central control, and to overvalue the virtues of order and authority. And that is what is rendering us incapable of harnessing the potential benefits of networked technology. Industries and governments are wasting incalculable amounts of money and energy in Canute-like resistance to the oncoming wave when what they should be doing is figuring out ways to ride it.

Well worth checking out in full.

Tuesday, 28 April, 2009

Social networking in local gov event

I’m going to be speaking at and chairing an event run by Public Sector Forums this Thursday, which is going to be all about how local authorities could be using social web technology to reach out to citizens.

I’m going to be joined by some great speakers, including my good friends Paul Canning, Tim Davies and Simon Wakeman. You can find the full running order here.

Another person who will be at the event will be Liz Azyan, who will be blogging and tweeting her thoughts on each session. To keep all of this activity together, I’ve made an aggregator which will republish:

  • Blog posts
  • Comments
  • Delicious bookmarks tagged with psfbuzz
  • Tweets tagged with #psfbuzz
  • Flickr photos tagged with psfbuzz

Visit the aggregator at www.psfbuzz.com.

It should provide a great way for people not attending to get something out of the day.

Sunday, 26 April, 2009

Bookmarks for April 19th through April 26th

Stuff I have bookmarked for April 19th through April 26th:

Add LGSearch to your browser

LGSearch

LGSearch is a search engine for the UK public sector that I developed quite a while ago. It’s built on Google Custom Search, and isn’t particularly clever, but is rather useful.

Anyway, inspired by Simon’s recent efforts on behalf of DirectGov, I thought I would make it easy for Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 users to add LGSearch to the list of search engines they can access from within their browsers.

Simply click here to install LGSearch, or visit this page to find out more about it.

Friday, 24 April, 2009

Monday, 20 April, 2009

The importance of evaluation

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.