Adverts on council websites

Adrian Short picks up on some adverts that appear on a council’s website. They’re for debt management companies that encourage people to apply for bankruptcy.

Probably not a good thing – I think we’d probably rather people needing advice about that sort of thing go to the Citizens Advice Bureau, for example.

Soem folk don’t think councils should run adverts on their sites. I’m pretty indifferent personally – if they can make it work and get some revenue to help develop the website, then that’s fair enough.

Councils running adverts on their websites do need to be very careful however about the contents of those adverts. If you’re using Google Adsense then it is possible to moderate the adverts to keep inappropriate content off your site. As a reputation management issue, this is a vital activity – but also of course to protect those using the site.

Maybe an alternative is to use a more local, friendly service than Google – such as Addiply. This would offer far more control.

Peter McClymont raises another interesting issue:

After all, councils get plenty of web traffic because there’s nowhere else to go for that content. If I want to pay my council tax, I have to visit the council website, meaning any adverts on that site get the benefit of my eyeballs and potential clicks as a result of that monopoly position.

I doubt if anyone has done any research in those areas where councils do run ads as to whether it has affected the revenues of the local newspaper website, for example. It would be interesting though, I think.

For more information on councils running adverts, Catherine Howe wrote an excellent summary post earlier this year.

Fancy sponsoring LocalGovCamp?

LocalGovCamp isn’t far away – just over a month. So far 150 tickets have gone and we have another 50 which we are looking to distribute in a new way to get a few different faces along!

So we’ll have 200 of the most innovative and creative people in local government in one place, on a Saturday, ready to talk about how we can improve the way we do things. It’s going to be ace.

One thing we do need though is money. Bringing the event out of London made finding a free venue impossible, and so we face a bigger bill than usual from the get-go. On top of that we have some extra money to find for some unexpected expenses.

So, if you would like to help this event out and ensure it’s the success it ought to be, please get in touch with any offers of cash you might have spare.

  • £250 gets your logo on the website, the ability to bring a pop up stand and some marketing literature with you, and lots of vocal thanks throughout the day.
  • £500 gets you all the above plus a logo on the t-shirt.
  • Anything substantial over the £500 mark means I’ll also give you a piggy back around for the day (or something).

Thanks go to those who have already put their hands in their pockets: the MoreOpen fund, Huddle, LGIU and Podnosh. Also Digital Birmingham who have helped massively with organising things. Oh, and Kind of Digital of course 😉

Here comes Noot – the public sector social business tool

I’ve written loads in the past about the importance of using social technology in the workplace, especially in the public sector.

It’s great for tearing down silos, sharing knowledge, making the most of talent, completing projects successfully and maybe making life a bit more interesting.

One bit of technology I have had my eye on for a while is a bit of open source loveliness called Open Atrium, which is based on the popular and powerful Drupal framework.

What really caught my attention was that it was announced recently that the White House were using it to collaborate with. This is a bit of software that means business.

So I was delighted when I started talking with my good pals Harry and Rupert at Neontribe – web developers and user experience legends from Norwich (and who are organising RewiredState Norfolk this weekend, which you really ought to get to if you can). It turns out that they live and breath Drupal, and whats more, had started to get enquiries about OpenAtrium themselves.

Noot

We put our heads together and came up with Noot. Noot is a hosted Open Atrium offering aimed squarely at the public sector here in the UK. The Neontribe gang handle all the technical stuff, while Kind of Digital provides the consultancy and training to make sure customers get the most out of their investment.

Noot provides you with:

  • Groups, allowing people across your organisation or from partner organisations to get together and collaborate.
  • Discussions, so folk can talk to one another.
  • Collaborative authoring, allowing people to jointly create and edit documents.
  • Project and task management, helping to get stuff done
  • File uploading and sharing
  • Yammer or Twitter style status updates

…and a bunch of other cool stuff. What’s more, we’re going to be actively listening to users and developing more features to provide the functionality people really need.

So whether you just want to get people in your organisation talking to each other, want to manage cross departmental projects better, or start doing some serious partnership collaboration, Noot could well be the technology that suits your people and your process.

We’re still tidying things up, getting our marketing messages right and figuring out just how much we are going to charge for this thing. In the meantime, do follow Noot on Twitter, and bookmark the homepage so you know where to go to find out more.

If you’d like a demo or an early chat about Noot, you know where I am.

I like MyFarm!

Now, when I started writing about micro-participation, I never envisaged the possibility of micro-farming, but there we are!

MyFarm is a great initiative from the National Trust, effectively making games like Facebook’s Farmville real.

Participants pay £30 a year to be involved, and get to vote on various decisions affecting the farm. It’s a bit like an agricultural version of MyFootballClub, which saw a bunch of people from the internet buy Ebbsfleet United.

The benefits are increasing knowledge about farming and the countryside – and also to help people understand where food comes from.

It’ a great idea – and a brave one too.

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