Monday, 14 July, 2014

Friday, 4 July, 2014

Daveslist #11

Issue 11 of my newsletter was sent out this morning.

You can read it on the web here to see what it’s like.

If you are already getting email alerts for this blog, don’t worry – the newsletter contains completely new content which doesn’t appear here.

If you’d like to sign up, you can do (for free!) at daveslist.io.

#Daveslist #11

Thursday, 3 July, 2014

Wednesday, 2 July, 2014

Accelerators, intrapreneurs and changing organisations for the better

Lucy Watt shares an excellent, honest post on the FutureGov blog about their learning from the PSLaunchpad project.

Having regularly spoken to one of the teams on the launchpad, Martin Howitt and Lucy Knight from Devon, I’m aware of the transformative impact the experience had on them, and their attitude to work.

As Martin himself reflects in one of his own blog posts about the Launchpad, there are some pretty big takeaways for local government as a whole from a process like this.

There is undoubtedly a tension between existing Council culture and the sort of thinking and process that accelerators typify. I don’t personally believe that there will be another PS Launchpad that involves local government in the same way. I think we are more likely to see a specifically local government version of it instead and this is something I would strongly advocate and be keen to be involved with in some capacity.

Lots of the conversations I am having with people across government – but particularly in councils – is about how traditionally bureaucratic, process heavy organisations can move quickly: make speedy decisions, get new products and services out faster, learn from feedback and respond in a timely fashion.

Being in a process like an accelerator such as PSLaunchpad provides many of the skills and experiences needed to answer these questions. Being told you have to ship something in two weeks, being advised from feedback that you’ve built the wrong thing and need to pivot quickly, having the authority to make decisions and plot a course accordingly yourself, without lengthy governance processes.

But not everyone can spend weeks out of the office on a programme like this – in fact, it’s probably impractical for many more than a handful in any one organisation.

Perhaps the answer is to run this type of programme internally, to embed it into people’s work. Got a change project on the go? Run it within an internal accelerator. Set some boundaries and some rules, put those working on it in a different room and let them get on with it. Put them in touch with potential mentors who have completed similar projects before, in the same sector and in different sectors.

It doesn’t have to be difficult, it doesn’t have to cost any money. It’s just a case of trying something different and not doing things the same way they always have been.

#Accelerators, intrapreneurs and changing organisations for the better

Monday, 30 June, 2014

CommsCamp14 session ideas

I’m looking forward to CommsCamp14 in a week’s time, and have pitched a couple of session ideas on the event’s Ideascale site:

User centred comms

What does user centred comms look like? Who actually is the customer? How do we find out what they want to know and how they want to know it?

Online community management

A session on online community management – what it is, how to do it well, and where it fits in the public sector comms kitbag of skills.

If you’re interested in either of these topics, please go and vote for them!

#CommsCamp14 session ideas

Thursday, 26 June, 2014

Tuesday, 24 June, 2014

Why be a councillor?

Pretty damning stuff from Cllr Roger Gambba-Jones:

If somebody was to ask me about becoming a councillor nowadays, I’m not sure what I would tell them were the benefits of doing so and I don’t mean to the councillor. Government funding cuts and more and more centralisation of power, hidden behind the facade of Localism, means that getting elected is more likely to become a exercise in frustration and disappointment, than a fulfilling experience in serving the community.

#Why be a councillor?

Monday, 23 June, 2014

Podcast episode 5 – Anne McCrossan

Here’s my fifth podcast. This is becoming a thing!

I’m joined in this episode by Anne McCrossan, who runs Visceral Business. Anne’s thing is getting organisations perform as genuinely social businesses.

Here’s a link to download the original mp3 file if you would like to do that.

If you would like to subscribe to the podcast in your favourite podcasting app, the feed is http://davebriggs.libsyn.com/rss or you can find the podcast on iTunes.

Show notes and related links (in a slightly jumbled order):

#Podcast episode 5 – Anne McCrossan

Sunday, 22 June, 2014

LocalGovCamp 2014 thoughts #5 – tools

I found LocalGovCamp a really refreshing and cheering event this year. I’m going to spend a few quick posts writing up my thoughts.

There’s a kitbag of tools and approaches that can be used to tackle the problems facing us. Not everyone knows about them and this needs fixing.

I’m not necessarily talking about digital tools either – although there are some of those of course.

It’s more than that – it’s some of the emerging practices and processes, and mindset too. They don’t even cost money, most of these things.

Take the example from Carl Haggerty. At Devon they have a meeting room, decked out with fairly random, non-officey furniture, that can’t be booked out. It’s a room for the curious and the collaborative. You can have meetings in there, but be warned that anyone might turn up and join in. Or you could take your laptop in and get on with your day to day work, only sitting next to people who you don’t normally get to meet.

Like organisations acting responsively to their users. Being agile in the way services and products are delivered. Iterating in response to feedback. Co-designing to improve the way things work.

It’s also about a plurality of tools and systems to be used to help fix problems. I know this is a recurring theme of mine at the moment, but one size fits all solutions are dead.

People and organisations have to be flexible enough to be able to deliver different services in different ways to different groups depending on their needs.

This mindset, these tools and practices need to be rolled out to people in ways that will really help them bring about change. I don’t think training courses or online tooklits will cut it, somehow. We need something new.

#LocalGovCamp 2014 thoughts #5 – tools

LocalGovCamp 2014 thoughts #4 – communities

I found LocalGovCamp a really refreshing and cheering event this year. I’m going to spend a few quick posts writing up my thoughts.

Communities always come up a lot, in terms of engagement and also new methods of service delivery.

The trouble is that organisations such as local authorities like scalable, repeatable processes – and communities fit neither of those things.

Communities are messy, unique things. Even ones that sound the same are usually very different, depending on the history, the personalities. In one area, a service that could be delivered by one parish council couldn’t be delivered by another, say. One neighbourhood watch group is likely to be unlike any other.

What’s more – communities, whether formal ones of the type I just mentioned or more informal social groups, are pretty much all facing exactly the same problems that councils are – lacking money, lacking volunteers, facing the sudden need to make dramatic changes to everything they do.

I’m on the board of my local Citizens Advice Bureau and we are facing the fact that our core funding is being reduced, needing to find new sources of income, and needing to help our clients to move towards self service online over face to face interactions, so we can save money and time while still delivering a service. Sound familiar?

So, “community” isn’t a panacea – but it can be part of the solution. It won’t, however, be a simple solution, but one that is based on meeting the needs of the communities you are working with as much as it is those communities meeting yours.

#LocalGovCamp 2014 thoughts #4 – communities

LocalGovCamp 2014 thoughts #3 – collaboration is key

I found LocalGovCamp a really refreshing and cheering event this year. I’m going to spend a few quick posts writing up my thoughts.

Mary McKenna brilliantly facilitated an excellent discussion on collaboration – why it is needed, why it hasn’t worked that well up to now, and how that might be fixed.

Some great input came from FutureGov‘s Dom Campbell, who spoke about the some of the challenges trying to implement their Patchwork tool across multiple agencies.

There was also discussion of the limitations of the traditional approach to partnership working – overly bureaucratic, slow to make decisions, agencies working individually to deliver what should be shared objectives, really boring meetings, and so on.

What’s needed is a more agile, responsive and flexible approach to working in partnership to deliver shared outcomes.

This needs to mean organisations sharing people, resources, systems, data and more – and not just tick-box style partnerships.

What’s also vital to to this working are grown up conversations are needed about who can deliver what with the resources they have. This is no time for pride.

#LocalGovCamp 2014 thoughts #3 – collaboration is key

LocalGovCamp 2014 thoughts #2 – don’t panic

I found LocalGovCamp a really refreshing and cheering event this year. I’m going to spend a few quick posts writing up my thoughts.

Another thread of discussion was around – as it often is – how do we engage more people with process x, or y.

Catherine Howe led a very interesting session on local democracy, and forming a more holistic view of what that actually is (clue: think active citizens; not politics, elections and councils). My takeaway was that we shouldn’t panic when something we do doesn’t seem to be important to people any more.

Things change, people move on, stuff dies. Something else replaces it.

It’s fine.

Don’t spend too much time and energy trying to prop up a thing that nobody else wants any more – find out what they do want, and build that – whether you’re talking democracy, services, products, whatever.

#LocalGovCamp 2014 thoughts #2 – don’t panic

LocalGovCamp 2014 thoughts #1- culture

I found LocalGovCamp a really refreshing and cheering event this year. I’m going to spend a few quick posts writing up my thoughts.

Lot and lots of discussion about culture and culture change. This discussion has been going on since forever, and if we are being frank with ourselves, it isn’t going to change dramatically soon.

So what to do? Don’t lets make the culture change discussion stop us from doing things. Have a go, fix what you can right now.

It could be that by having enough people doing this at the same time the culture will look after itself.

#LocalGovCamp 2014 thoughts #1- culture

Thursday, 19 June, 2014

Monday, 16 June, 2014

Podcasts you might like

As well as making my own podcast, I also love listening to those created by other people.

Here are some of my favourites – maybe you will like them too!

Try Doorbell

Robert Brook and Lloyd Davis chanter on about technology, work, and getting old.

This is the podcast that inspired me to give it a go myself.

Go there now.

This Week in Google

Leo Laporte’s TWIT network is full of great podcasts, but the Google one is my favourite, mostly due to the co-hosts, Gina Trapani and Jeff Jarvis, who really add insight to the weekly discussions about Google,
the cloud, mobile, social media and more.

Go there now.

The New Disruptors

A great podcast featuring weekly interviews with people doing new, creative things in new, creative ways. Hosted by the ace tech journalist Glenn Fleishman.

Go there now.

Cmd+Space

Myke Hurley chats every week to someone interesting who does interesting things. What can I say? I just like interview style podcasts.

Go there now.

In Our Time

Something a bit different – Radio 4’s In Our Time is just wonderful. Taking a different, often rather esoteric, topic every week, Melvyn Bragg teases a bunch of academics and experts for 45 edutaining minutes.

Go there now.

It would be great to hear what you make of these podcasts! Also, any crackers out there I ought to know about?

#Podcasts you might like

Sunday, 15 June, 2014

Problogging

I’m hugely envious of folks like Shawn Blanc and Ben Thompson. Their job is their blogs! How lucky is that?

This year I’ve really got into the content-producing swing of things – dunno if you’ve noticed. With this blog settled down and at home on WordPress.com, my newsletter working nicely thanks to Goodbits, the podcast rumbling along nicely on Libsyn and my Pinboard bookmarks providing even more stuff for people to look at if they need it, the tech and workflow is all slotting together very nicely.

It would be fantastic to be able to just focus on this content creation an curation work. It’s what I really love doing. Figuring a way to make it sustainable though is not easy.

Shawn and Ben both have membership schemes. Their core blogging is available for free, but extra bits – including content via email and podcasts – are members only. Members have to pay a certain amount to get access to it all.

This is a great way of doing things, but you need people willing to pay for your content.

Sponsorship is another way of doing things. John Gruber’s Daring Fireball does this, with the blog’s RSS feed being sponsored every week by a tech company wanting to reach his (many) readers. Gruber charges $9,500 per week for this sponsorship. Wowza!

The other option I guess is what I currently do, which is to use the content creation as a way of promoting my consulting work. The downside of this is that a) the blogging etc is a means rather than an end; and b) that I have to leave the house now and again.

Maybe I should just stop being lazy!

#Problogging

Friday, 13 June, 2014

Recording podcasts

A few people have asked how I go about recording my podcast. So I don’t need to keep repeating myself, I thought it worthwhile to write it up here.

Skype

So, the format of my podcast is usual an interview, or really just a chat, between myself and one other person. It’s done using Skype,  just a normal free call using the basic service. It’s not perfect but is usually good enough.

When recording, I wear a pair of Logitech UE 4000 headphones which feature a microphone on them, which cuts down on too much background noise, and using headphones means there’s no echo too.

Call Recorder

To record the conversation I use a Mac app called Call Recorder. This really does exactly what it says – you start the Skype call, then when you’re ready, hit record and it starts to record both ends of the conversation.

The file is saved as a .mov on your desktop, and Call Recorder comes with another app to convert this file to mp3.

If you’re on Windows, then you could try Evaer instead of Call Recorder.

Garageband

I tend not to bother editing the podcast, unless something catastrophic happens during recording like Skype dropping out or similar. I use Garageband for this, which is a free bit of software on the Mac.

If you’re on another platform then the open source Audacity would be a good place to start.

Libsyn

Once the file is ready to go live, I upload it to Libsyn, which hosts the audio file and also creates an RSS feed for the podcast with the appropriate enclosure. Libsyn also submits the podcast to iTunes, helps you add an image to feed and so on, to make things look at least reasonably professional.

It’s pretty cheap – the basic tier is just a few pounds a month, although I pay a bit extra for more storage and some stats.

One thing I have found with uploading the file is that rather than using Libsyn’s browser based uploader, it’s best to save your audio file in Dropbox first and then use Libsyn’s tool to transfer that file into Libsyn. Just seems to work better and have less chance of failing.

WordPress

I then promote the podcast by creating a post on my blog here in WordPress. WordPress has an inbuilt audio player, so all I need to do is paste the URL to the audio file into my post, and WordPress does the rest for me.

I listen through the podcast and add links to the show notes as it plays, to help listeners find out more about what I am talking about with my guest.

Hope that’s useful! Any other podcasting tips?

#Recording podcasts

Wednesday, 11 June, 2014

Podcast episode 4 – Andy Mabbett

Here’s the fourth episode of the podcast, where I chat with Andy Mabbett, twitcher birder extraordinaire and Wikipedian par excellence. He’s also done a bit of web work in local government.

Here’s a link to download the original mp3 file if you would like to do that.

If you would like to subscribe to the podcast in your favourite podcasting app, the feed is http://davebriggs.libsyn.com/rss or you can find the podcast on iTunes.

Show notes and related links (in a slightly jumbled order):

#Podcast episode 4 – Andy Mabbett

Tuesday, 10 June, 2014

Where should internal communications efforts be focused?

shutterstock_129038351I was part of an interesting discussion recently where internal communications was being debated. It was revealed that only 40% of staff were engaged with the communications coming from the corporate centre.

The conversation focused on what could be done to engage better with the other 60%. What mediums should be used? What tone and style? Should it be online? What about those without computer access?

I jumped in, slightly provocatively perhaps, to ask why you would want to that. Perhaps there’s a bigger issue here, which is that probably 40% of people paying attention to internal corporate communication is about right, and nothing could really be done to change that more than a couple of percentage points either way.

Maybe it’s the case that 60% of workers in a large organisation just don’t care that much. They come to work, do their job, and then go home and do the stuff they are really interested in. I’m not being critical, it’s just that different people have different priorities.

It might sound insane to the readers of this blog, but not everyone gets excited about the idea of transforming local government!

Instead of spending time and resources chasing after this large group of people, who, with the best will in the world, couldn’t care less about the new corporate strategy, perhaps it would be best to focus that energy on those who actually want to talk about this stuff.

In other words, who are your 40% of enthusiastic, motivated people? How do you find them? What do they want from you, in terms of communication and engagement? Give it to them!

Yammer is a good example here. Someone said in the discussion referred to above that not that many people were active on Yammer. That’s an experience across a load of organisations I know who use that particular tool.

However, those people who use Yammer are likely to be positive about change, curious about new tools and ways of working, willing to experiment and to go beyond the usual ways of doing things. I’d say they are exactly the sort of people that a corporate centre would want to have on-side, engaged with what’s going on in the organisation.

What do people think? I’m not actually saying to stop trying to communicate with everyone, just that putting extra effort to persuade people to do something they don’t really want to do might not be a good use of precious resources.

#Where should internal communications efforts be focused?