An online notebook
Gerry McGovern has been writing an excellent trio of posts on the topic of government and the web. He has identified five things that government should be addressing:
He expands on each of these things in the three posts. Recommended and thought-provoking reading.
I rather glossed over it at the time, because of the general excitement of the moment, but a remarkable thing happened a couple of days ago. A man called Dylan Jeffrey commented on this blog.
Why is this so remarkable? Well, Dylan is a civil servant. What’s more, he was commenting as a civil servant. He was also giving the official line of his department (Communities and Local Government) in a place where discussion was happening online. Not by emailing out a press release, or making some grand announcement, but by quietly finding where the conversation was, and taking part.
Indeed, Dylan did his department great service – the conversation was a fairly tempestuous one, with disgreements abounding about who was at fault for the decision to cut the funding for ICELE, the centre for local eDemocracy in the UK. Several bits of communication had come from ICELE – a press release here, an email there – but nothing, apparently, from CLG. This was a communications risk for the department, as their side of the story simply wasn’t being told.
The comment that Dylan posted was pretty uncontroversial, simply providing some background factual information and then adding detail of a Ministerial statement on the issue, which was probably available buried away somewhere on the CLG website as a press release or somesuch. But Dylan brought it to us, where we were talking about the issue, sticking his neck out to both inform us, and do his department a service by communicating their message.
Of course, this week saw the publication of the guidance for civil servants engaging with the social web. Of the five main points, three were: be credible, be responsive and be a civil servant. Dylan hit all three of these.
Let’s hope other civil servants take note, and that Dylan’s colleagues at CLG thank him for doing this on their behalf.
Interesting stuff going on at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with a wiki being built by Ben Hammersley using MediaWiki with a bit of skinning and the addition of a few plugins, like that which adds social network type features to the wiki.
It’s a nice piece of work, though I have personal reservations about MediaWiki as a collaboration platform, rather than just community-publishing content. But then it’s free as in beer and speech, and very quick to deploy.
Let’s hope that this wiki experiment isn’t vandalised to death like the last one that a department headed by David Miliband experienced.
In other wiki news, I have been taking a look at the white-label services offered by wiki-hosts Wikispaces today. For £500 a year, you can have as many wikis as you like running off subdomains of a web address of your choice. Each can have it’s own access criteria, and with the rich and easy to use functionality of Wikispaces, it’s an absolute bargain.
It’s a bit like picking a scab, this – kinda painful but at the same time irresistable. Anyway, seeing as this blog has become semi-official place for ICELE-related news, I thought it only reasonable to provide the latest in the saga – this time in the form of a press release from ICELE:
Cllr Matthew Ellis, Chairman of the International Centre of Excellence for Local eDemocracy, said:”Whilst it has been made clear that Lichfield DC would not be seeking to take ICELE forwards in the future, we have been calling for a formal decision to be made by the Minister for some time. It takes considerable time and money to create a trusted and recognised brand, which ICELE has now become, not just in the UK, but in Europe. It would be unfortunate if the Centre was closed down before a useful and sustainable home for both its products and its brand can be secured.”
He continued: “The Centre now has partners across the UK and Europe, having been successful in securing, with others, future funding for specific areas of work. We believe it would be unfortunate if ICELE, as a focal point for sharing information and best practice, and some of the projects were simply abandoned. I’m hopeful that the talks we are now having with CLG will ensure that a thorough review is undertaken to find a sustainable future for areas of potentially ongoing work.”
Although ICELE will cease operations at the end of June, with the interim funding recently agreed with CLG it could provide resources for work to be undertaken to secure a future for VOICE and other aspects of the Centre’s work.
I’m not sure what to say, really, which makes a change. I am, however, started to put things in place for a community driven way forward on this stuff. If you’re interested, email me or leave a comment.