Social Media Big Day Out

I’m the (or rather now, ‘a’, but more on that later) facilitator at an online community of practice for social media and online collaboration using the Communities of Practice platform put together by Steve Dale at the Improvement and Development Agency. It’s ostensibly for local government, but I like to operate a big tent, and so anyone with a public sector interest can come along.

Yesterday we ran our first face-to-face meeting ludicrously entitled the ‘Big Day Out’. Given that it was held where I work, at the LSC National Office in Coventry, it wasn’t much of a day out for me, but hey! who cares. I took a few photos, some of which are below, the rest here.

The day ran pretty well, starting with a short and probably quite boring introduction from me:

[slideshare 283861 social-media-cop-intro-1204122043184802-4]

We then moved onto more interesting stuff, notably chats from Hadley Beeman and Shane McCracken on what they have been up to recently.

(That’s Hadley, by the way. Not Shane.)

Later on we played a little game, a cut-down version of David Wilcox‘s Social Media Game – although as Tim Davies pointed out mine is best overall because the cards are laminated. Two teams set each other scenarios which they had to solve using different social media and web 2.0 tools.

I think it was a useful exercise as everyone got to learn something about a web service they didn’t know existed before.

Next up was Steve Dale, chatting to us about the latest developments tech-wise on the CoP platform. There’s going to be some really interesting new features added, which will at the very least make facilitating the communities an awful lot easier.

Finally we had a little chat about the future of the Community, what we could do to improve participation and what we got out of it all. Michael Norton of the IDeA had a wicked-cool idea about setting group social media challenges, making us go out and try new stuff, and reporting back on our findings. One is already under way on YouTube. Nice one!

Throughout the day, the ever resourceful Carl Letman was doing a great job of videoing some of the action, and soon I should be able to post some highlights up here. If you need any video work doing, whether on or offline, Carl really is your man.

I also requested a bit of help of the facilitation side, and thankfully I got a great response from Michael, Hadley, Steve and Carl. So hopefully we should be able to keep the Community active and ensure that everyone gets the support they need.

What was also nice was that everyone said they would like to do it again. Hopefully if the word gets out that it was a fun day, then more folk might be encouraged to come along. Noel Hatch of Kent County Council has already offered to host, and suggested we could run it virtually in parallel using Second Life. He’s mad. Let’s do it.

FriendFeeding

FriendFeed is an interesting service, which I was alerted to by Neville Hobson.

It enables you to create a ‘lifestream’ – a list of all your interactions with various social networking sites. It create a narrative list of, for example, tweets, blog posts, flickr postings, youtube videos, del.icio.us links etc etc.

As an example, here’s mine (please be my friend).

You can also choose to subscribe to other people’s feeds, which is presented on the friendfeed homepage in a Twitter stylee, or you can click to view the entire FriendFeed universe in a river of news type affair.

FriendFeed is useful, there’s no denying that. The splitting of our online personalities is well due for a reassembling, and FriendFeed makes a pretty good stab at doing that with an interesting social element to it as well. I do wonder how much services like this, and Twitter, are drawing us away from our RSS readers and back to using actual websites on a regular basis. I find myself less reliant on RSS, getting the key ‘must read’ updates through other means these days. Not that I am reporting the death of the aggregator, of course, merely that it’s slightly less dominant these days, for me at least.

I also think there might be some really useful applications of this, especially if it becomes possible to extract stuff from the public timeline along the lines of subject matter, maybe through tagging or just identifying keywords, rather than just by identity as it is done now.

Oh, and Scoble‘s in now. So it’s going to be huge.

Social networking in the public sector

Interesting report published by Quocirca on behalf on IBM, on the topic of the opportunities web 2.0 and social media offers the public sector:

Social networking can help public sector bodies interact to a far greater extent with citizens as well as with internal and external resources. Full policies are required to be put in place to mediate social networking, and back-end technology needs to be chosen carefully to include support for the majority of clients likely to be found within a consumer-focused end-user environment, as well as kiosks and other systems aimed at the non-computer owning citizen.

Usig web technology presents a huge opportunity to engage with people on a scale that wasn’t possible before. But we do have to acknowledge that it can only ever be a part of a consultation strategy. Too many people don’t have web access, or don’t want to engage with that medium, for more old-school methods to be ignored.

From small acorns…

Just to give heart to anyone out there who is struggling with a blog they’ve just started, I thought I would share something with you all.

This was my first effort at a blog and it was terrible. Now, I am hardly some kind of uber-blogger these days, but I would like to think that I am a little better at it!

So, blogging is a skill like many others – it can be learned. Just give it time and stick at it.

For anyone interested in the complete Briggs archive, most of it is here.

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