An online notebook
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An online notebook
Haven’t published one of these in a while, so here’s a quick guide about blogging. PDF over on the Kind of Digital site if you can’t see the embed below.
Enjoy!
Just a quick pimp of some of the great events we’ve got lined up in September through the Public Sector Web Network:
As for the rest of the year… we’re hoping to run an intranet focused workshop in October, along with events around making and publishing video, and some WordPress training events too.
We’re also putting together a big jamboree for all those working in web publishing, bringing together a load of the latest thinking and innovations taking place in public sector web teams.
If you’re interested in finding out more, just drop a comment below or email me,
A common risk associated with public bodies engaging online in spaces like Twitter is that there’s too much interaction to cope with. It’s something that often gets raised when I am talking with clients.
E-government bulletin covered the issue recently:
A second delegate from an NHS hospital trust told the group that her communications team was underfunded to respond to social media. “We are becoming an arm of our complaints service, but with no budget – and the complaints team itself won’t monitor Twitter,” she said. And a third told the group that his council’s elected members were receiving such a volume of direct messages on Twitter they were unable to respond to them.
This is, I think, another argument for comms teams not to ‘own’ social media within an organisation. If complaints are coming in through Facebook, or Twitter (or whatever) then it’s the complaints team, not comms, who ought to be monitoring those spaces.
As I think I have written before, communications teams have an oversight role, and a championing one too. They look after the main corporate channels, manage the strategy and governance processes and look after arranging training and that sort of thing. Most of the activity should happen in service areas though.
It’s social media as telephone, not press release. Another way of putting it is that it is communications not Communications. In other words, it’s the normal communicating we all do everyday, by talking, using the phone, emailing and so on; rather than the formal Communications that happens with press releases, interviews and so on.
If you are in a comms team and are drowning in social media interactions that aren’t in your area of expertise, pass them on to someone who is responsible!
Here’s the latest of our mini-guides to social technology, where we have had a go at explaining what Facebook is all about.
It’s embedded below, but if you can’t see it, you can visit the Kind of Digital site and download the PDF.
The new Government Digital Service, the part of the Cabinet Office tasked with taking forward various elements of the digital agenda in Whitehall (and beyond) has a new blog.
Very nice it is too, and anyone with an interest in online innovation in public services really ought to subscribe. Simon has some background on the blog’s setup.
Simon also refers to the first project coming out of the GDS, with involvement from the Government skunkworks team of under the radar innovators, headed up by Mark O’Neill, is the return of e-petitions to central government.
E-petitions were originally on the Number 10 website, where I used to have an awful lot of fun moderating the damn things during my stint there. Now they are on the DirectGov domain.
Interestingly, the e-petitions system is using a new system, developed in the Ruby on Rails framework, rather than using an existing project like the MySociety system, or indeed WordPress which was used by Kind of Digital’s WP guru Andrew Beeken to build a petitioning system for Lincoln Council.
One issue with the e-petitions system I picked up quickly, as did others was the fact that it now requires the user to select which is the relevant government department to deal with the petition. As Stefan writes:
An eager e-petitioner clicks the button to start the process and finds themselves with a simple form to complete. The first task is to give the petition a title. Pretty straightforward. The second is to identify the ‘Department that looks after your issue’. That’s a poser. There is a drop down list. There is a link to a page which explains which department does what. But the list is of ministerial departments and the help page gives little more than mission statements. Many of the bits of government which people have at least some understanding of don’t appear at all – there is no HMRC, no DVLA, no NHS, no Jobcentre Plus. Might a petition be appropriately directed to the Scotland Office, or should it go to the Scottish Government instead?
It sounds like this is being worked on to fix – but I’d argue this is a major barrier to participation and probably needs to be fixed if e-petitions are to have a significant impact.
I’ve written before about my view of e-petitions – they’re a blunt object and the process questions they raise are far trickier than the technological issues. One of the first petitions to be submitted was by the blogger Guido Fawkes, demanding the return of capital punishment for certain crimes.
What will it tell us, and tell the Parliamentarians who have to then debate the issue?
That lots of people support the death penalty? We know that – most polls (though not all polls, as Guido claims) show that a little over half of people still support the death penalty, though the number has declined over the years.
That a hundred thousand people want hanging back enough to fill in an online form? What does that add to the knowledge that twenty-five million or so want it across the country?
And what if Parliament debates the issue and rejects it by a large margin (as happened in the ’80s and ’90s)? Will signers, and Guido, go away happy that the issue has been given a good airing in the democratic forum of the nation? Or will it just be used as another example of the perfidy of elected politicians in refusing to do what fifteen-hundredths of one percent of the Great British People tell them to do?
In which case, what’s the point?
Rob Dale at LGIU blogs about some research being done in collaboration with Networked Neighbourhoods about the impact of online local community activity.
You can take part:
If you are a councillor, complete this survey.
If you are an officer in local government, take this one.
Should be interesting to see the results!
Yup, they’re still coming. This one tries to explain the mystery that is RSS.
Enjoy! If you can’t see it embedded below, you can download the PDF version from the Kind of Digital website.
Once again, the quality commentary on the latest reports into government IT spending is coming from blogs.
The real story, such as it is, is the Committee’s apparent recognition that the current process – reliant on a small number of large suppliers being given over-spec’ed, over-detailed, over-sized and over-priced projects – is the ‘root cause’ of the problem. And it’s quite nice to see them challenging the Cabinet Office, about whether its initiatives are tackling that root cause, or just the symptoms (paras 10-11).
Can it really be that a single office computer can cost £3,500? Read that again. £3,500.
No. Of course not. And it almost certainly doesn’t.
Charges made for desktop computing in the public sector are invariably composed of an element for the hardware, plus a rather greater element to cover installation, support… in fact quite a bit more. IT managers (disclosure: I used to be one in the public sector) can play quite a few tunes on this figure; using it to cover centralised development work, packages of software and all manner of other “hidden” costs.
According to the BBC’s article on the report issued by the public administration committee, departments sometimes pay up to £3,500 for a single desktop. What this figure includes, who knows? Undoubtedly there are some howlers out there—some costs that need to be called out and reigned in. Big time. But comparing desktop costs both within government and with those that you or I would pay on Amazon is bananas.
After being suitably inspired at June’s LocalGovCamp, the effervescent Nicky Getgood has been working away to get StoryCamp up and running.
She describes it thus:
StoryCamp is a time and picturesque space for storytellers (digital or otherwise), independent publishers, those in local government, hyperlocal-land and beyond to meet, share stories and ways and means of telling them.
If you can see the importance of telling a powerful story to communicate and would like to think, discuss and learn more about how to do this effectively, or share examples of storytelling that has had a real impact, then StoryCamp is for you!
It’s taking place on October 1st, in Ludlow in Shropshire.
There’s a blog, and an organising group, and you can sign up for the event here. I think it’s going to be great.
Next up in the series of introductory guides to social technology is this one about Flickr.
Embedded below, or as usual, there’s a PDF to download from this page if you need it.
Yesterday’s live Kind of Digital web chat about overcoming barriers to implementing social media went really well.
You can relive the whole thing over on the KoD website, or download a rather basic PDF of the transcript.
Our next chat has been scheduled in for Tuesday, August 16th at 11am BST. It’s going to be on the thorny subject of evaluation of digital engagement activity – great!
You can sign up for a reminder over here – hope you see you there!
Here’s another of my short What is… guides – this time it’s about LinkedIn.
Embedded below, and as usual, if you can’t see it, you can get the PDF from the Kind of Digital site.
More soon!
There was a bit of discussion on Twitter this evening about explaining Twitter to the uninitiated.
(If this sounds a bit navel-gazingy, that’s because it probably is. Hang around in any online space for long enough and you soon end up in meta-conversations of this type.)
Emma Maier of the Local Government Chronicle is organising some collectively written guidance on a Google Doc – here’s the link and I recommend you get stuck in!
Of course, a longer guide is the one I wrote for Learning Pool a couple of years ago, and which is soon to be republished in an updated form.
In the meantime though, I thought I’d knock together a quick single page effort, which ought to be handy for the absolute beginner.
I’ve embedded it below, but if you can’t see it, go to the ‘Useful Stuff’ page on the Kind of Digital site and you can download a PDF.
I’ll be doing some more of these – LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and blogging are all bound to feature. Would these be useful? Any other topics spring to mind?
Let me know!
I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.
You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.
I’ve been looking into QR codes recently – yes, I know, I’m somewhat behind the times – as part of some research I’m doing into how digital engagement can help in planning.
For the uninitiated, QR codes are square barcode-esque looking things, that when scanned, contain data such as a web address or indeed any other text string.
Though there are other ways of accessing QR codes, most people can do it using their smartphones, through an app that uses the phone camera. The app I use on my iPhone is Quickmark – there’s an Android version too.
(This strikes me as being a bit of a barrier to QR code usage, to be honest. Why can’t it be built into phones from the get go? Having to download an app – even a free one – will exclude a lot of people.)
Here’s an example of how I’m using them as a way of helping people get in touch with me. I’ve created a QR code that links to a site I have created with all my contact detail on it.
Here’s the QR code:
The site it points people to is one I have created using Tumblr – this is because Tumblr automatically generates a nice mobile friendly look and feel if a smartphone is being used to access it – which is most people as I won’t be promoting it other than with the QR code.
I’ve just ordered myself some new business cards, which have the QR code on them – it’ll save people the hassle of typing my phone number in, if nothing else!
Anyway, what does this have to do with planning? Well, at LocalGovCamp in Birmingham the other week, there was a lot of talk of using QR codes on planning notices.
The way this works is that on the planning notices – usually attached to lamp posts and similar – people could read about the planning application and then scan the QR code into their phone, which would then bounce them onto the consultation site where they could air their views.
This seems quite a nice easy way of getting people to contribute. However, I suspect that getting people to the consultation site is the easy bit – you’ve also got to make sure that people can easily get involved once they get there.
So, if your planning consultation platform doesn’t play nicely with mobiles, then the whole QR code thing is probably a waste of time. You need to make sure also that what you are asking people to do is simple and suitable for mobile interfaces – making people read long documents or answer hundreds of questions won’t work either!
So, as usual, QR codes aren’t a solution – but I suspect they ought to become part of the answer.
We haven’t done a live webchat this month yet, so let’s squeeze one in before August is upon us!
So, at 11am on 26th July, please join me on the Kind of Digital site for an hour’s live chatter about overcoming barriers to implementing social media type online innovation.
Am sure there’s plenty to keep us occupied on that topic!
If you head over to the chat page now, you can sign up for an email reminder.
One resource that’s worth scanning before we get together is Tim Davies‘ great wiki on the barriers to getting going with social media.
Looking forward to chatting next Tuesday! 😉
A few months ago I was interviewed by some very nice civil servants from BIS and CLG about how central government could help support and scale innovation in local public services.
I can’t remember much of what I said, but I’m guessing that ‘get out of the way’ probably featured several times. Oh, and ‘don’t impose models, tools or platforms from above’ as well.
Anyhow, the team have reported their findings, which focus on four main areas for action:
You can download an executive summary of the report (PDF) or the whole thing (also PDF).
It’s worth a read.
I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.
You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.
Barnsley Council, and Public Sector Nomads’ Ken Eastwood has written a lovely, and important, blog post about his experience of LocalGovCamp:
The 200 or so attendees again demonstrated that there is genuine talent within the sector and an interest in innovation that transcends the traditional 9 to 5. However, it was all too apparent that many of these people are held back, they are blocked from affecting change, from doing things differently and from doing different things. In many cases they are frustrated by their lack of influence and by local government’s resistance to change and bottom up innovation.
I had a fun day yesterday at the Civil Service Fast Stream conference, which was focusing on big society type stuff. I was running a session on open government, with a concentration on open data.
As a bit of fun, while we were talking I asked the members of the group to draw what occurred to them when thinking about open data.
If you click the photo, you’ll be taken to the original on Flickr, which I have annotated with what I remember of the descriptions from the artists.
Once again, in a conversation about open data, I ended up coming across as being somewhat sceptical.
I’m all in favour of transparency in government, and I’m also very much in favour of public services publishing their information in accessible formats.
What I’m not so sure about are some of the claims made for the potential of open data to transform government, and its relationship with citizens.
I can’t see where the business model is for third parties to create applications based on this data, unless government itself pays. I’m also unconvinced that there are enough people around with the skills (and indeed the inclination) to either be effective armchair auditors or civic hackers all over the country.
I suspect the biggest users of open data will end up being journalists, and the work that newspapers such as The Guardian are already doing seems to support this. It’s a good thing, but hardly sees a great redrawing of the traditional ways of doing things.
The other area where I can see benefit coming from an openness around information assets and a different attitude towards data is in the use of it by government itself. I agree with Andrea DiMaio that if open government is to become a reality, it is going to happen through the actions of public servants themselves, rather than from activists on the outside.
So, transparency is important. There are opportunities around open data, as well as challenges. Right now, though, I struggle to see how dramatic change will happen as a result of publishing data.
I’d be very happy to be proven wrong, though!