Top posts in 2010

As is customary at this time of year, a list of the most popular posts I’ve published here is probably in order.

  1. Oh dear, Andrew Marr…
  2. Adventures in open source land
  3. Why chief executives should blog
  4. Where next for digital engagement?
  5. That was the ukgc10 that was
  6. Social media resources for Local Government
  7. Councillors! Here’s how not to do Twitter
  8. See, local gov *can* do Facebook
  9. Google jokes
  10. Google goes for Twitter

Not a particularly interesting list, if I’m honest. The list is by the number of hits the post got, and I suspect that skews things rather.

What is interesting is that by a mile, Twitter was the biggest source of traffic here over the year, more than six times the referrals than I got from the second largest, Google Reader.

Parliamentary online petitions

So, online petitions for Parliament?

In an attempt to reduce what is seen as a disconnection between the public and parliament, ministers will ensure that the most popular petition on the government website Direct.gov.uk will be drafted as a bill. It is also planning to guarantee that petitions which reach a fixed level of support – most likely 100,000 signatures – will be guaranteed a Commons debate.

I haven’t read much online that is particularly in favour of this idea. I suspect it’s one that can be filed in the ‘doing the wrong things righter’ cupboard.

Glen Newey on the LRB blog is particularly scathing:

Now the coalition plans to outsource law-making as well. On Tuesday it signalled that it meant to bring in ‘X Factor-style’ online petitioning for new laws. This latest wheeze hails from the same stable of Mutt and Jeff populism as John Major’s cones hotline and Tony Blair’s ‘Big Conversation’. The Gould-era Blair government was hexed by the popularity of Big Brother and saw political dividends in pretending to smile on government by mouse-click. So, after the focus-pocus of the early years, in 2006 Blair launched interactive petitioning on the Number Ten website. Not much happened, apart from a little ministerial consternation when petitioners gave Douglas Alexander’s road-toll scheme a mass thumbs-down. But in general the demos itself seems to doubt whether it needs more chances to vote. John Prescott’s proposal for a North East regional assembly in 2004 drew an impressive 78 per cent ‘No’ vote.

This time, 100,000 online signatures will win a debate on the floor of the House. A new era of democracy beckons: you name it, we’ll go through the motions of considering it. Safeguards will be installed to stop the virtual parthenogenesis that, for example, allowed Christian zealots to inflate their numbers when browbeating the BBC over its screening of Jerry Springer: The Opera. Petitioners won’t be able to clone themselves, impersonate the dead, or give the dog a vote. But this won’t be enough to insulate the process from fruitcakes and jokers in the population at large, let alone in the blogosphere. Adherents of the Jewish religion registered by the 2001 UK census were easily outnumbered by some 390,000 self-confessed Jedis, a figure bloated by online gerrymandering. Hartlepudlians repeatedly elected H’Angus the monkey as mayor after he had committed an act of indecency with a blow-up doll in Blackpool.

Paul Clarke covers some of the issues around identity with his customary élan.

I’ve noticed that a few councils are now starting to go live with their own online petitioning systems, including my local council, South Holland District, with what looks like the MySociety system.

Not sure if any readers have experience of either using or administering such a system, and are keen to share them?

I spent many an unhappy hour moderating petitions on the Number 10 system, which was a generally very depressing experience, with the petitions submitted bearing a very direct correlation with the headline in the dailies Mail or Express that morning.

Whither open government in 2011?

Ingrid has published a set of five rather grim predictions for next year. Go and take a look, and make one of your new year resolutions to stop them from happening.

Here are some thoughts from me on what might happen next year. These certainly aren’t predictions, and are more hopes really.

1. Collaboration grows up

Big changes within organisations, lots of layoffs, knowledge retention becoming a big issue, a growth in partnership working and shared services, greater involvement of the civil sector in service delivery and a focus on making the most of existing talent should all point government organisations towards making better use of social technology as part of operations, through social intranets, collaborative extranets and the like.

It’s certainly something we at Learning Pool are hoping to support people with in the new year. We’re working with the Improvement Service in Scotland, supporting a project to promote agile and flexible working in councils north of the border and will be contributing to a knowledge management seminar in Scotland in February, amongst other events.

I’m also in the process of writing a guide to the use of social technology within the organisation, which I am hoping to have finished in early January!

2. Online communities are taken seriously

I’m increasingly convinced by the arguments put forward by Catherine Howe on her blog about the idea of online civic spaces. There needs to be some structure around online conversations in democracy and public service delivery – albeit not too much.

Where a number of government organisations in an area want to engage with people on a reasonably regular basis, I’d like to see them either getting involved with an existing online communities, or developing one platform for all such interactions to take place. Keep it informal, barriers to entry low, but enable a community to be built up, relationships to be formed and a body of evidence to be developed.

Rather like Let’s Talk Central, the project we worked on this year with Central Bedfordshire Council. I’d love to work on one of these on a local or regional basis, with councils, health, police, fire and rescue and other organisations on board and contributing.

3. Technology and innovation works its way up the food chain

I’m getting more requests to talk about social media and related technology to groups of senior managers and chief executives. It seems like if Ingrid’s fear that this stuff is going to get siloed into communications departments is to be prevented, it is by ensuring interest at the top of the organisation.

Language is a vital thing here. People at the top are going to be less interested in means and far more engaged by the talk of ends. Focus on benefits rather than operational details. It’s easy (but wrong) to label this activity as a frippery that’s inappropriate for these austere times – convince those at the top that it is necessary and hopefully stuff will get done.

4. A much needed focus on public sector employees

There’s much that one can disagree with Andrew DiMaio about, but one thing he has consistently got right is the need for those with an interest in reforming government to focus on the role and needs of the people who work for government, or at least those that will be left after the cuts.

A much maligned group, especially in certain sections of the media, public servants do an incredible job in increasingly difficult circumstances. They aren’t perfect, and it’s fair to say that some are much more able than others, but nonetheless they all require support and credit.

5. A revolution in local democracy

A real one from the left field from me here. This isn’t going to happen next year, or any year soon, but it’s something I have been increasingly thinking about during the last few years. The way our local leaders are selected and operate is broken and I don’t think real change can be effected until a new way of running democracy at this level is found.

It strikes me that the way things are currently done is profoundly exclusionary both in terms of the requirements of the role of councillor and the way that they do business.

Firstly, the workload of a councillor is far too great, and means that the only people with the time to do it justice are those who are retired or who for some other reason do not have to work. In other words, people are getting elected because they have the time to do the job, not because they would be good at doing it.

Another aspect of this is that councillors are expected to have an interest and knowledge across a huge range of different policy areas, which is, I think, somewhat unrealistic.

So, right now we have too few people doing too much. We need more people doing less each. So, more councillors please, who each cover fewer issues, concentrating on the stuff they are good at.

Whilst we’re at it, let’s change the way the whole thing works, with fewer meetings, more online decision making and conferencing. Fine, there are gazillions of points of process and procedure that would need working out, but it strikes me at the moment that local democracy and governance isn’t terribly strong, nor interesting, and it could do with a thorough overhaul.

OK, so this really isn’t going to happen in 2011. But I can dream…

Bookmarks for December 12th through December 30th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

GovCamp 2011 update

So another 50 tickets were released for January’s Govcamp this morning, and they went within twenty minutes. Remarkable.

There is still space, but very limited. If you want to come along, please leave your name on the waiting list. There’s only the one list, so if you email me, all I’ll do is ask you to visit that link!

Don’t panic though, as there is often churn on the list, as with any free event, so you’ll probably be able to get a space.

Steph, my main man on the GovCamp organisation, has written up a post on sponsorship of the event, and how we are hoping to use this lolly to fund all the regional and local govcamps that happen during the rest of the year. Go and check it out, and if you have some marketing spend, please give it to us. Everyone will think you’re really cool if you do.

Steph writes:

The idea behind MoreOpen is frankly somewhat ill-defined, probably because Dave and I are the people behind it. But in our vagueness, we’ve got a plan that by using some of the platforms available including the January event, this online community, and the govcamp chat in social media, we can help commercial organisations large and small to get involved in supporting the community and showing us what they can offer, without turning UKGovcamp into a cheesy, sponsor-packed conference.

In return, we’re aiming to build up some cash that we can use to help self-organised local govcamps or thematic events which aim to promote public sector collaboration, participation or transparency. We’re aiming to be able to offer some seed funds to help these events get off the ground, pay for food, venues and AV stuff, as belts continue to tighten within public sector organisations.

To answer some questions: no, it’s not a for-profit enterprise (at the moment it’s nothing at all legally-speaking, so we’re collecting sponsorship monies for UKGC11 via my limited company). No, we don’t have cash to help you run events yet, but we hope to in the New Year. Yes, it does sound a bit dodge, doesn’t it – hence our plan to recruit a small independent Board of Advisors from the Govcamp community to keep an eye on it, and us. By all means leave a comment or question below and we’ll do our best to answer it.

This slidedeck (PDF warning) explains what is in it for sponsors.

Also, as with last year, Learning Pool will be hosting some drinks on the Friday night before the big day. More soon.

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