More travels, more talking

After this week’s exciting trip to Scotland, I’m venturing slightly less far north a couple of weeks afterwards, to Lancaster.

It’s for the ‘Digital networking and community safety partnerships conference’, taking place at the town hall in Lancaster on 16th February. It’s a joint LGID and NPIA event, and features really interesting discussions about how digital engagement can be used to make partnership working more effective, and to actually help change behaviour.

I’ll do a quick introduction to the subject at the beginning of the day, and will hang around to answer questions and help out where I can.

Here’s the blurb from the site:

Bringing together the worlds of community safety and digital networking, this free one-day event organised by LG Improvement and Development, the National Policing Improvement Agency and Lancaster City Council aims to provide an overview of social networking, social media and digital networking, their use generally and how they are being used within community safety and policing.

The event will include sessions on:

  • the policy landscape for digital engagement in community safety
  • what digital engagement is and how to use it
  • community use of digital engagement.

If you are interested in attending this free event, just email Rachel Duke by 9th Feb.

Incidentally, I’m probably going to be driving up to Lancaster on the 15th. If you’re on my route, let me know and maybe we can arrange a meet up at a motorway service station, or perhaps something less seedy.

A brief tour of Scotland…

I’m looking forward to my quick tour of Scotland this week, visiting Edinburgh tomorrow, to deliver a seminar on social media strategy for public services; and then Aberdeen to talk to the Scottish Knowledge Management Network about how technology makes sharing and storing knowledge a wonderful thing.

Both these events are in partnership with the Improvement Service.

Social media strategy

The seminar tomorrow is going to be quite interesting, as it is the first of its kind that I have delivered, and so it might be worth covering in a bit more detail.

As Joanne Jacobs expressed very eloquently in this post, strategy is vital for an organisation wanting to get digital engagement right. I’ve tried to design this seminar around the process of writing a strategy.

So, the agenda looks a bit like this:

  1. Background
  2. Objectives
  3. Implementation
  4. Evaluation
  5. Risk management
  6. Operational guidance

Each section will feature a short presentation from me, introducing the topic, and then a discussion on tables. Then all the delegates fill in the relevant section of the workbook we have created for them, with a page for each section, where notes can be jotted down.

Then after the event all delegates will be sent an electronic version of the workbook so they can type it all up, make any changes to the format they want to and that kind of thing, so that – wahey! – they have a draft strategy ready to go.

I’ll share the slides and workbook on this blog – assuming the seminar works! – next week.

I’m interested in making this seminar available to others as well, which could take the form of running more face to face sessions, for which a charge may well be necessary; or online as a webinar, which is likely to be free.

I’d appreciate any feedback on which of these people might prefer!

Introducing My Learning Pool – e-learning for everyone

Today we are delighted to launch our newest product – My Learning Pool – which is one of the most exciting things we have ever done!

My Learning Pool is a suite of online learning resources which can be bought and used by anybody.

Here’s a slidedeck that explains things a bit more – if you can’t see it, here’s a PDF version (opens in new window).

Whether you are some who is about to have a change in career, or a volunteer with a local community group, or the person in charge of an organisation – My Learning Pool provides all the training you need, when you need it, where you need it.

What’s more, all this lovely learning is available at a price that is jaw-droppingly good value – exactly what the civic sector, for example, needs right now.

No more giving up a whole day to travel to attend a training session, or spending hundreds of pounds getting the basic knowledge you need to be able to contribute to your full potential.

There are over 20 courses available in My Learning Pool at launch, and we will be adding to them all the time. They cover vital topics for individuals, such as:

  • using social media
  • finding a new job
  • presentation skills
  • personal health and safety

For those looking for a cost effective solution to providing training for your organisation, My Learning Pool also fits the bill, with modules on subjects like:

  • procurement
  • customer service
  • technology and change
  • managing stress

    • data protection

So if your organisation needs to get all its volunteers trained in say customer service, or heath and safety, My Learning Pool can ensure you do so in a cost effective manner.

So, how much does My Learning Pool cost? For a year’s access to all the courses, the price is a mere £25 per person.

Yup. Twenty-five quid.

As we add more courses through the year, you get those as part of your subscription, too.

You can buy it for yourself right now, by visiting the web site and signing up with your credit card.

If you want to bulk buy for your organisation, there are discounts available – check them out.

For anyone looking to brush up some of their skills, or for organisations that need the peace of mind that their people are getting the vital training they need, My Learning Pool fits the bill.

For more information, email hello@mylearningpool.com or follow us on Twitter @mylearningpool.

If place is a system, let’s make it an open source one

This is a post that has been brewing for a long while, so sorry if it smells a bit. The basic concept hit me during FutureGov‘s excellent CityCamp London event, and keeps reoccurring as I have chats with people and read stuff online.

It’s not a post about technology, really, but rather taking some of the lessons learned from technology and seeing how it can be applied to everyday public services.

The way I see it is this – places, whether cities, towns, villages, or larger areas like districts, counties or regions, can be seen as systems. They have a number of different sectors and organisations working within them, all of which have their own distinct processes, but all of which also interact with one another all the time.

When you think about it, it’s amazing that the system works as well as it does most of the time. These are complicated beasts.

So what about this open source business? Well, whilst in theory anyone can contribute code to an open source project, in general, not many people actually do. Instead, development is handled by a small core group, and most people’s effort is put into testing software and submitting bug reports.

This is the role I think citizens can play in redesigning local services – not necessarily producing solutions, but spotting the issues, the bugs, and reporting them. As Eric Raymond wrote in his seminal work on open source development, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, identifying problems is the hard bit, the bit where you need ‘many eyeballs’ – solving them should be straightforward for those that understand the system.

That’s not to say that citizens shouldn’t be involved in contributing ideas for improvements, but it shouldn’t be their only contribution. I suspect this is the reason why the success of ideation competitions across the world has been variable, as Andrea Di Maio has noted on several occasions.

A key part of the bug tracking process, though, is visibility, and this is what our public services lack right now as part of the feedback mechanism.

The bugs people identify are published on the web, categorised and tagged so they can easily be found. Other people try to recreate the bugs so they can be further tested. People suggest possible solutions, which the core development team may or may not take on board.

For place to work effectively as an open source system, then, we need an open, public repository of bugs that anybody can access.

After all, there are very few areas of service delivery that just one organisation has ownership of. Take anti-social behaviour – it’s a police matter, sure, but also a health one, an education one, a social services one. There are probably some community and voluntary organisations that have an interest too.

Any one of those services might have an easy solution to a problem, but if they don’t know about it because it was reported to someone else, then nothing is going to happen.

Likewise when people are submitting issues, or bugs, they don’t necessarily care which service they should be reporting it to. Which tier of local government? Is it a police matter? We shouldn’t force people to understand our hierarchies and structures just because they want to point something out that is going wrong.

Some people might be crying out ‘FixMyStreet!’ at this stage, and that site does go a certain way to answer some of the issues I’ve written about. But there are a couple of key differences. The first is the nature and tone of FMS, which the name makes clear. ‘Fix my street!’ yells the citizen. Maybe we should turn that around, and make it ‘How can I help you to fix my street?’ might be a more positive exchange.

Not only that, but while FMS provides a space for public responses to issues from the council, it doesn’t make the process of producing a solution an open one. It doesn’t open the conversation up to the other actors in a place, it doesn’t enable citizens themselves to contribute to the solution – whether through their ideas or actually physically doing something.

Here’s another example. Maybe someone reports a bug in the local public transport arrangements, getting from a village into the local town – there isn’t a bus early enough to get them to work. They could report the bug straight into the local council, in which case it would probably end up being pushed to the transport operator. But this misses the opportunity for perhaps a local private car hire firm to step into the breach, or indeed for a local resident to offer a lift. In the latter case, sometimes a problem in the system doesn’t need a system wide fix.

There are a number of challenges to open sourcing a place like this. A major one is the way that partnerships work at the moment, which can be incredibly slow moving, bureaucratic and not terribly collaborative. A more enlightened approach will be necessary – although in this age of public sector austerity, such an attitude is likely to be required anyway.

There is some tech required – the best place for the bug tracker is online, but throwing something together in WordPress or Drupal shouldn’t take anyone who knows what they are doing too long at all.

So this concept I think starts to tie together some of my thinking around coproduction, crowdsourcing, open source and my more recent outpourings on innovation and creative collaboration.

I’d be really interested in people’s thoughts. Please spot the bugs in what I’ve written!

Whilst the half baked thinking in this post is entirely mine, the bug tracker idea was originally blogged about by Tim Davies a few years ago; and the importance of visibility was made clear to me in a conversation with Nick Booth.

If not skunkworks, then maybe creative collaborations?

C4CC Launch

On my recent two posts on bringing the idea of skunkworks to local government, several people made the extremely reasonable point that I probably wasn’t really talking about skunkworks at all.

Steph said in the comments:

…it seems to me that we’re at risk of hanging more onto the ‘skunkworks’ peg than it’s fair to ask it to carry. To me, skunkworks is about a team delivering a tangible technical output quickly and creatively because they’ve been relieved, to a great extent, of bureaucracy and management.

I hold my hands up to this!

My time spent with Lloyd on Saturday reminded me of the really interesting work he is doing with Brian Condon and others at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in Kings Cross.

Perhaps this is a better model than a skunkworks for helping local councils improve and innovate?

Creative collaboration is all about the idea that if you put interesting people in a room together, magic starts to happen. We saw that in abundance on Saturday at GovCamp.

As the site for the Centre says, it is:

A neutral place where people from many different backgrounds – universities, large corporates, SMEs, freelancers – can work together on new things in the belief that real innovation happens at the edge and in the gaps between disciplines.

I suspect this is the sort of thing I was thinking about. I think there are two elements here for councils – the purely internal, and then opening up a bit to outside ideas.

Firstly, perhaps a local authority should have its own ‘centre for creative collaboration’ where innovative, idea-laden people work together, no matter what their role or duties. In other words, allow the networkers, the collaborators and the innovators to leave their desks and put them next to each other to create wonderful things.

This isn’t the same as a skunkworks, because these guys are still doing their day jobs – just in a different environment, where connections and collaborations can flourish, organisational boundaries be leapt over and ideas generated.

The second stage is then to open the conversation up to others, probably in a neutral space, rather than in a council building. Maybe this is something that empty shops on high streets could be used for? Just arrange Tuttle or Jelly like meetups, allowing people to hang out and talk about their work and ideas. Start off informally and see where the conversations and ideas go.

If similar initiatives are happening in places across the country, then sharing experience should be fairly easy to do through online networks.

I’d be interested in people’s thoughts!

Photo credit: Benjamin Ellis.

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