Dave Briggs – Page 54 – An online notebook

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An online notebook

Wednesday, 22 December, 2010

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.

Saturday, 18 December, 2010

When clouds don’t taste so delicious

There appears to be a considerable amount of uncertainty about the future of Delicious, the web’s preeminent social bookmarking service.

Not sure what social bookmarking is? Here’s a video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeBmvDpVbWc

It seems a shame that Yahoo! have been unable to find a way to make a service with plenty of active and dedicated users pay for itself. I know I would pay a few quid a month to keep it going.

Either way, the service will be sold on or shut down in the nearish future. Users are looking for alternatives, with the likelihood being that if everyone leaves, who cares what happens? It’s easy enough to export your data from Delicious, and I would recommend you do it right away.

The two options at the moment seem to be Diigo or Pinboard. The former is much more polished than the latter, so it’s a case of choosing what matters to you. There are other options discussed in this post on SearchEngineLand.

Personally, I use Delicious mainly as a publishing tool – to get the links posts published every so often here on DavePress. Most things that I save to read later go into Evernote.

Flickr?

The potentially more worrying issue here is that Yahoo! also own Flickr, the photo sharing site. Bookmarks and links are one thing, but photos entirely another. I’d always advise users of cloud services to back up your stuff locally just in case something goes wrong – it’s good practice anyway.

That’s fine for those of us who have PCs or laptops at home where you can store media locally. But what of the future of low-cost computing – like the ChromeOS netbooks I wrote about the other day, where the machines themselves have virtually no storage and everything is held on the servers of companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and, er, Yahoo!.

This is one of the implications of cloud culture, where increasingly our cultural artefacts – books, music, films, photos, art – are being stored and curated by tech companies rather than traditional publishers, museums, libraries etc. The medium is also changing of course, from physical objects to digital ones.

The book won’t disappear anytime soon, of course, nor will painting on canvas. But the everyday access and storage of this stuff will be moving online, and we all need to have a proper think about how we deal with that.

Tuesday, 14 December, 2010

Guide to Facebook Pages for Government Organisations

My partner in crime at Learning Pool, Breda Doherty, has written an awesome guide to using Facebook pages. She introduces it below – do have a read and then download the guide!

Facebook is now used as an everyday means of communication and information source for most people, well if you agree that over 500Million active users worldwide is a fair summary of most people… The fact that the Social Networking site has continued to grow and develop since its launch in 2004 shows that it’s not likely to join lapsed Social Networking sites in the sky such as Bebo or My-Space who simply haven’t been able to compete with Facebook’s constant innovative ways to keep people talking on their platform. Whilst friends use Facebook’s Personal Profiles; bands, businesses and those with a cause to promote often use Facebook Pages to market themselves to its millions of users.

What is a Facebook Page?

A Facebook Page is a public profile that enables groups like this to share their organisation with Facebook users. It is similar in layout and functionality to a personal Facebook profile but Facebook Pages have been created with the intention that it will be used for brand promotion and discussion between those with something to sell or promote and those Facebook users interested in showing their support of these.

Facebook Users show their support for Facebook Pages through Liking their page and adding the pages they like to their own personal Facebook profile, which in turn will be seen by friends who visit their profiles

The reason all these groups use Facebook pages is because it’s free, easy to use and offers the opportunity to connect with large numbers of people. If Facebook didn’t work, people would simply stop using it.

Facebook Pages and Government Organisations

Government Organisations are slowly seeing the benefits offered by Facebook Pages with effective use of this seen in the page maintained by Coventry City Council. However many are still unsure of how it can fit in with their wider communication strategies and are fearful that those staff assigned to maintain their Facebook Pages will take advantage of this and spend the time chatting to friends rather than the community members the organisation is eager to engage with. There is also the same fear which many Government Organisations have about Twitter in that with one status up-date on Facebook or one Tweet on Twitter the organisation will be called into irrefutable dispute!

Facebook: A Quick Guide for People in and Around Government

To try and rely some of the worries mentioned above and which we’ve heard about first-hand through our Learning Community, Learning Pool decided to create Facebook: A Quick Guide for People In and Around Government. The guide provides a quick overview of how to set-up a Facebook Page, useful things to bear in mind as a Government Organisation when doing so and to highlight some of the legitimate ways in which Facebook, despite being labelled as a Social Networking site can be effectively used as an engagement site between Government Organisations and the public they are finding it increasingly difficult to connect with.

The Facebook Guide complements the Twitter Guide for Government written by Dave earlier this year and also looks at how the two can be used in conjunction. Download our Facebook Guide for free here.

Sunday, 12 December, 2010

101 cool tools: Doodle

I haven’t done one of these for a while, sorry! Here’s the third in my series of 101 cool social media tools, it’s Doodle!

Doodle is a neat little tool for organising when to meet groups of people. Someone starts up a Doodle poll, and lists the dates and times that are possible. They then invite everyone who needs to attend to vote by clicking on the slots they can make.

Doodle then highlights the date and time that the majority of people can make, and that’s your decision made.

So much easier than pinging emails back and forth with suggestions!

Don’t forget, you can follow these tips in the future on Twitter…

The network is the computer

Google announced a bunch of stuff last week, finally bringing to the mainstream some bits of tech that have been bubbling away for a few years now.

One is the Chrome operating system, a lightweight OS for netbooks that pretty much hand everything over to the web. So, the OS handles keyboard and mouse inputs and that sort of thing, but basically just boots into a browser and lets you do all your stuff online.

After all, with developments in web technology, who needs software anyway? Google Docs does most of the stuff people who need an office suite use, Picnik is a pretty cool image editor, Gmail is a far better mail client than Outlook is and tools like Huddle and Basecamp provide neat ways of organising your work and collaborating on projects.

Even big, enterprisey software is available through the web now. Salesforce provides a pretty comprehensive CRM offering, Kashflow does the same for accounting, and sites like Netsuite and SAP’s Business by Design provide boring ERP software in the browser.

This is the part of cloud computing known as software-as-a-service. Learning Pool‘s stuff runs on very similar lines: our customers have no software to install, and therefore no patches or upgrades to worry about. Everything can be accessed from anywhere with a browser and a connection to the net.

Anyway, back to Google and Chrome OS. Here’s a video with the skinny:

The idea of the online operating system isn’t new – here’s a review of a previous attempt called YouOS (now sadly dead) that I wrote back in March 2006 – but developments in cloud computing and the almost ubiquitous availability of decent speed broadband (ok, it’s not everywhere yet, especially in rural locations) make it a much more realistic proposition.

What’s interesting about the YouOS example is that it included native applications within the OS itself, rather than just pointing people to existing, external apps. I wrote at the time:

The notion of the online desktop is an interesting one, that conjures the image of computer boxes doing nothing other than handling the keyboard, mouse, display and internet connection; and where you can log in with any machine anywhere in the world and get your own desktop. I suspect, though, that the route that YouOS is taking is the wrong one. What the online OS needs to do is not provide the applications, just the means of accessing the applications, which can be developed by other people on other sites, and the means of storing data to be used and shared between those applications.

It seems like I was probably right about this one (it doesn’t happen often).

Chrome OS won’t be made available for existing netbook owners to download and install – although the fact that it is based on an open source project means that someone else could make it happen. This means that it isn’t possible to have a play with it to see how it works, which is a shame.

One thing that you can have a play with – assuming you have access to Google’s Chrome browser (currently my browser of choice, mainly due to the speed and efficiency of the thing) – is the Chrome Web Store.

A healthy proportion of people are pretty comfortable with the idea of app stores – we’ve used them with our iPhones and iPads, and Android phones and Blackberry users have their own stores – reasonably safe places where applications can be found for the device you are using. Linux users have had an app store like experience for years.

Where these differ with the Chrome store is that Google’s offering is all about web apps, those that work within a browser rather than being native applications that you have to download and install onto your computer, or mobile device.

This is something I struggle with slightly, in terms of understanding what the point is. I mean, when a web app is just an app that runs in a browser, and all you have on your system for accessing apps is a browser, what’s the difference between installing an app and just having a bookmark to it in your browser?!

I guess the answer is around a) making it easy for users to find apps, and providing a space for reviews and that sort of thing; b) enabling a more integrated experience between a web app and the system being used; and c) creating a marketplace where paid-for apps can be, well, paid for.

One neat feature is that by using your Google account, you can sync your Chrome web app setup across machines – so if you log into your account on a different computer, albeit still using Chrome, then your apps come with you, which is cool for portability.

Here’s the video:

The good news about the Chrome store is that folk using the Chrome browser on their usual computer can make use of it. There seems to be a couple of example of Chrome web apps which aren’t available for other browsers – TweetDeck being one.

I’m not quite sure why this is, nor indeed if it is a good thing. There’s the possibility of certain apps only being available to users of certain browsers, which isn’t great.

Still, it’s another step forward for the mainstreaming of cloud computing and software-as-a-service in general.

There’s been quite a bit of talk of a government cloud infastructure as well as an app store for public service use. Indeed, some of these ideas are present in the Knowledge Hub project. The USA government has had an app store for a little while now.

As we pass from the age of the stationary microcomputer and the software industry into a world of commodity computing, understanding the benefits of the approach will be vital – and not just for those working in IT. Indeed, the role of IT departments in organisations will almost certainly need a rethink.

Friday, 10 December, 2010

Bookmarks for October 30th through December 10th

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

Living with rats: Nine signposts towards Our Society – Good stuff from @juliandobson
Wikileaks and the Long Haul – Shirky on Wikileaks
What the attacks on WikiLeaks tell us – John Naughton nails it on the Wikileaks saga.
Budget consultation approaches by Michele Ide-Smith – Nice summary of some of the recent work from Michele.
I’m not anti-SharePoint – chieftech’s blog – Yup – Sharepoint's problems are usually in its implementation, not in the software itself.
Government data in the public domain – intrinsically good, right? – Great stuff from @rossferg
Connected Kingdom – "The UK has a thriving internet economy. It has the potential to grow even bigger. We want your ideas for ways to make that growth happen."
Learning about content strategy by Michele Ide-Smith – Great stuff on organising your website contributors and getting processes and systems right from Michele.
Innovation functions in large organisations – Great insights from @katebennet on innovating.
eDiplomacy: The US State Department’s Global Collaborative Backbone – Interesting stuff on collaborative tech in US.gov

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.

Thursday, 9 December, 2010

#testittuesday – public service use of twitter par excellence

I had a great day yesterday (Wednesday) at the FirePro seminar on social media use in Fire and Rescue Services.

I have a load of notes to type up and share here, but one thing really jumped out at me during the day – the #testittuesday campaign.

Basically, it’s a simple public safety campaign to get people to test their smoke alarms every week, on a Tuesday. The hashtag is used, and folk are encouraged to retweet it to get more coverage.

It was started by Elle from Norfolk Fire and Rescue Service, who gave an entertaining and informative presentation to the group about how it all came about. Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t a vast amount of planning – it just seemed like a good idea and Elle just got on with it.

Here’s why I think this is a great campaign, and an almost perfect use of Twitter as a public service campaign:

It’s completely within the existing culture of Twitter – all about the hashtag and the social nature of the message – it’s all about people passing it on
It’s simple – just a quick reminder to people to perform one straightforward action
Very low barriers to entry – no need to sign up for anything you aren’t already a member of. If you’re on twitter you see the message, and with one click you forward it on to your friends
It’s uncontroversial – nobody is going to take umbrage at being reminded to do something that’s easy to forget, and yet potentially life saving
It’s not about the fire service’s own twitter account – this isn’t some bid to get more followers. It’s about getting the message out to as many people as possible
It takes advantage of the trust people have in their networks. If a fire service asks me on twitter to check my fire alarm, I might do it – but I’m more likely to if some of my friends do so

I think there’s lots to learn here for all public services wanting to make the most of social media channels. Always consider the medium you are using, and what sort of behaviour works well. Don’t ask too much of people, keep it simple and straightforward. Above all, don’t make it about you or your organisation, but about the message you want to get out.

Monday, 6 December, 2010

Online Networked Neighbourhoods Study

Networked Neighbourhoods have published their study into local websites. Written by Hugh Flouch and Kevin Harris, it is as excellent as you would imagine it ought to be.

For lazy people, here’s a link to the four-page summary (PDF warning).

For everyone else, here’s the page of resources including the full reports, research material and video interviews. It’s a great resource and I recommend sifting through it.

Neighbourhood websites, or hyperlocal sites, are an interesting thing in terms of the way they tie into government and democracy. Catherine Howe has written in her customary thoughtful style on this subject numerous times – this post is a good one (and she also covered the launch of the Networked Neighborhoods report in detail).

Here’s a comment I left (before my recent house move!) on one of Catherine’s post which sums up my views on this:

What is local? I can see a street from my bedroom window right next to the one I live in, which couldn’t be any more local to me. But I never walk down there, drive down there, or anything – to be honest, I couldn’t really care less about it. But Stansted Airport – 40 miles down the road – *is* local as far as I am concerned.

I suspect local is defined by the individual and in the context of the issue or activity, which doesn’t sound too much like the great foundation to a community to me.

I’m not denying that location based online communities work – clearly they do – but what is the motivation? You rightly point out that pretty much every hyperlocal effort so far has a different bent to it. The link to democracy has been weak so far, I think – the greatest influence so far has been the dearth of quality local media, I would say.

The one thing I would say is that there is clearly more scope for where locally-focused websites are thriving for councils and local politicians to engage better with them.

The work by groups like Talk About Local also demonstrate that where sites do not exist, there is still an appetite to get them going, once people have been shown how to do so.

It strikes me, however, that attempts by government to act as a catalyst – and indeed a platform – for the creation of such sites itself tends to be less successful.

Thursday, 2 December, 2010

The book

So, the contracts are signed and returned, and it’s all official. I’m writing a book.

Sorry to all of my fans out there who were hoping this would be my first volume of poetry – you’ll all just have to wait a bit longer for that.

No, my book is going to be on my specialist subject: the use of social technology in public services.

The story behind this was that I was approached by Gower Publishing a couple of months ago to see if I would be interested in a writing project. Having met up with them and talked about what would be in the book, it seemed like a wonderful opportunity.

So, by August, I need to get 60,000 words written up and in some semblance of order. To help me in this task, I’ll be using the excellent Scrivener app on the Mac. I’ll also be sharing bits of the book as I draft them here on the blog, to get some feedback and make sure I’m not going off in totally the wrong direction. Everyone who comments will be acknowledged, I promise!

Here’s a brief outline of what the book will include (aside from the usual boring introductions and things):

The social media revolution – the changes taking place in the ways people communicate, socialise, work and play.
Digital engagement – explaining the specific context for public services – why this stuff matters to them
The toolkit – high level discussion of the activities and behaviours online, and some the tools used to express them
Designing and implementing your strategy – what the things are you need to consider and include, and some templates and examples
Governance and risk – pretending there’s no risk using new technology is as bad as deciding it’s too risky to bother with! Governance systems, risk logs, policies and training all will be covered here
Building engagement – how to get people to actually look at and interact with your stuff
Measuring success – what to measure, how to do it and what success might look like

I’m also going to be wanting as many real life stories and examples as possible for inclusion, so if you would like to see your name and work in print please do get in touch!

If you’d like to be kept informed about progress and when the book is likely to be published, please do ping me an email – dave@learningpool.com – and I will put you on a list!

Right, I’d better start typing…

Monday, 29 November, 2010

Wikileaks and radical transparency

The one thing that the internet does more than anything else, is that it brings the cost of distributing information to zero, no matter how far you are distributing it. We’re only now, I think, starting to be aware of the consequences, let alone learn how to deal with them.

A great example of this disruptive power of the net as a publishing platform emerged this weekend with a further release of confidential communications from US Embassies, on the website Wikileaks.

Most of the damage will be in terms of embarrassment and in personal relationships rather than security threats. Indeed, I’m not entirely convinced of the worth of this activity by Wikileaks – although I suspect that the interest here is less in the message and more in the medium.

One thing that struck me when listening to some of the commentary on the television news yesterday was how many times it was said that there was nothing new here, that everyone within diplomatic circles and the attendant press knew all this stuff anyway, it just wasn’t reported on.

That really annoyed me.

It goes back to the point that the blogger Paul Staines, AKA Guido Fawkes, often makes about lobby journalism and its negative effect on our democracy. I’m sure we all have our own views on Staines’ work and his politics, but I totally am behind him in his efforts to report on what used to be the unreportable. The idea that there is a cosy club in Westminster that decides what we proles can and can’t read really gets my goat.

It turns out the same thing was happening in the world of international diplomacy too. ‘Everyone’ knew that the Saudis hated the Iranians, apparently, but nobody thought to write about it in case somebody got upset.

In steps the internet, and now any can publish to a massive, world-wide audience. People without the bonds of whatever gentlemen’s agreement exists can get hold of information and put it into the public domain – then sit back and watch the crisis unfold.

It is in this radical transparency that I think the effects of the open publishing and data movements will be most keenly felt. Not a state-sponsored publication of how much a government department spends on paper clips.

I’m not saying that this will always be a good thing. Indeed, for government to work effectively there must be, where appropriate, methods of working in an environment which protects secrecy.

Incidents like this will also result in governments shutting down even more, becoming less open, and locking down their communications channels to prevent similar incidents.

But if there is one thing that is becoming abundantly clear, security will always be breached, firewalls hacked, data leaked. Computer security is an illusion, and a potentially dangerous one.

A quote I find myself repeating over and over at the moment is from Scott McNealey, who in 1999 when still CEO of Sun Microsystems said “You have no privacy. Get over it.”

Act like you have no protection and you’ll find that is the best protection you can get.

Sunday, 28 November, 2010

Change for the better

It’s pretty obvious that local government, like all areas of public service, is facing a challenging time.

Most of Learning Pool’s customers work within Organisational Development, or Learning and Development roles, and when budgets get cut, it’s often training that suffers.

However, as I pointed out in a talk at our ‘Hit the North’ event a couple of weeks ago in Sheffield, this could be a really good opportunity for folk working in these roles.

After all, during times of change, getting staff on board is a really tricky thing, and L&D people often have access to channels and tools that are already trusted by, and engaged with, by a lot of staff.

This is especially true of Learning Pool customers who have our learning management system – the DLE – which provides web 2.0 functionality including blogs, wikis, forums, live chats and all sorts of other interactive goodness.

Here’s my slides, which cover a whole load of ground. Not sure what happened to the font…

Engaging Change

View more presentations from Dave Briggs.

As an extra help, we’ve produced a free e-book to point out some of the ways that collaborative, social and learning technology can help organisations in the midst of significant change.

You can download it, and access a bunch of other cool resources, by clicking on the graphic below.

Thursday, 25 November, 2010

Open government needs more skills

Apologies for the total lack of updates here. A recent burst of activity at Learning Pool has made thinking about what to blog about a bit trickier than usual. Luckily, the Public Sector Bloggers do a damn fine job taking up any slack.

Anyway, while I try and get back my blogging mojo, here’s a pointer to an interesting post from Gartner’s Andrea Di Maio:

In order not to fall into the trough of disillusionment government 2.0 must shift its emphasis from the organization to the individual, and from policy to operations. There is still time for that to happen, but we need to talk less about transparency and open data and do more around training, encouraging and rewarding government employees.

My emphasis added.

I must admit, the whirlwind around open government data has rather taken me aback in the last few weeks – blog post coming on that one – and it’s almost as if we’ve decided that government has social licked, and now it’s time to move on.

I suspect that is a rather optimistic view, rather as Di Maio does. I’m still regularly getting requests from across the public sector for both high level presentations on what social technology is; and for training on how to make the best use of it.

Further to that, the benefits of these tools are still very much just in the hands of communicators, web folk, and so on. That needs to change too.

It’s worth pointing out, though, that in the last five years significant progress has been made. I remember how lonely it was being a blogging local government bod back in 2005. That’s changing – but we need to make sure as many others are involved as possible before we move on.

Monday, 15 November, 2010

Get your UKGovCamp ’11 tickets here!

A bit later than expected, but I’m delighted to launch the first tranche of tickets for the annual UK government unconference – UKGovCamp – to be held on 22nd January 2011.

This is the fourth event, which was kicked off back in 2008 by Jeremy Gould, then of the Ministry of Justice.

2011’s event will be bigger and better than ever. We’ve got room for over 200 attendees and more breakout rooms than you can shake a stick at.

This is thanks to the generosity of Microsoft, who will be our hosts for the day at their London HQ on Victoria Street in London.

Tickets are free, and you can register via Eventbrite.

Don’t forget to join the online group for the day over on the UKGovCamp site, ably hosted and maintained by Steph Gray.

SPONSORS!

For the first time, we are accepting financial donations to fund this event (and future ones) rather than just asking people to pay for stuff.

This means there is more opportunity to provide sponsorship than in previous years. Steph and I are putting together a sponsorship package thing, but all sponsors will get logos on t-shirts, get to bring a stand along and have the kudos of being associated with the coolest government conference in the world.

Wednesday, 10 November, 2010

Councillors! Here’s how not to do Twitter

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Twitter is a great tool for local politicians to use to connect with their electorate.

It’s also a brilliant channel for espousing your views on the stoning of women, as Gareth Compton, a councillor in Birmingham demonstrates:

The golden rule of Twitter (and indeed life generally), is of course “don’t be a dick”. This is what happens when you ignore that advice.

Update: The Guardian has picked up the story, and Cllr Compton has apologised for what he describes as an “ill-conceived attempt at humour” – and deleted the offending tweet.

Tuesday, 9 November, 2010

Learning Pool content jam

Learning Pool is running a ‘content jam‘ event in December in Birmingham, on Tuesday the 7th, at Fazeley Studios.

It’s a new type of event for us, and one I had a bit of a role in putting together. What I wanted to do was to take the idea of the ‘hack day’ and make it relevant for Learning Pool customers.

So, on the day, a bunch of Learning and Development folk from across local government will get together with some LP folk, and put together a brand new course, which will be finished on the day.

Some people will be writing the text for the course, others sourcing and taking photos, others producing video and interactive content.

Afterwards, the finished course will be put into the Learning Pool catalogue and made available to all our customers to access and remix for their own use.

The subject of the course is also being determined by the community, with a discussion on the lively Learning Pool forums to decide what to cover.

So if you are interested in taking part, or if you are in Birmingham anyway and fancy popping in, do either register or get in touch.

It should be a great day, and a good example of collaborative working across local government!

Sunday, 7 November, 2010

Thursday, 4 November, 2010

The future of comms in local government

The Local by Social online conference (various levels of sign-up required) is turning out to be a bit of a triumph. Yesterday saw some fascinating discussions about various elements of technology (mostly web) enabled change. Well done Ingrid (and team)!

One was superbly facilitated by Walsall Council’s Dan Slee, who ran discussion on the subject of where communications in local government is likely to be headed.

I came fairly late to the party, and my point was that it’s probably less important for people in comms to consider how they fulfil their current role in a web 2.0 age, rather than to think about how the internet disrupts their entire way of working, and that a back to basics, “what are we here for?” type discussion is probably needed.

I’ve pasted in my comment below, it should still make sense despite being ripped out of context.

Perhaps in this – extremely interesting and thought provoking – thread, we are asking the wrong question.

Maybe the question should be “What is the point of the council communications team?”

Here’s what I mean: framing the discussion around social media and whatever comes after it may not be entirely helpful in this instance. I suspect that the real changes that affect the way organisations communicate are longer term and wider ranging.

It’s clear that advances in technology are changing both the information that people are consuming, and the way that they consume it.

The internet – and I use that word deliberately – is the force that is behind this change, and it has both been a long time coming and been going on for a long time, before Facebook, blogging and even the web itself.

If the internet does one thing, it reduces the cost of delivery of information to zero. That has profound consequences which are now starting to be realised. Any organisation, or role, that is based on the delivery of information (and I would argue that comms is one such role) needs to have a real think about a) what it actually wants to achieve; and then b) figure out the processes and tools to make that happen.

Take the newspaper, TV and music industries – probably the three hit most hard by the effects of the internet. All of those three industries failed to realise in time what business they were in. The newspapers thought they were about news; the TV stations about making television programmes; and the music industry about making music.

Nope. They were all in the logistics business. The value they added was in delivering content to people, whether on paper, through the telly or on CD.

If you listen to the bleating of the record labels, you’d actually think that nobody made any music before they came around, and certainly that no poor, suffering musician made any money. In fact, there was a BBC interview with Mick Jagger recently where he pointed out that, other than a few years in the late 1970s, the Stones haven’t made a penny personally from any of their records – all their income was from concerts and merchandising. In other words, if we cut out the record labels, as the internet allows us to do, nobody but the record labels suffer.

Anyway, I digressed a bit there. But the point remains: what business are you in? What are you trying to achieve?

I honestly don’t know – maybe that’s because I never worked in comms… is it something about managing the organisation’s reputation?

In the past (and probably the present) comms departments controlled messages, fed stories to local papers, got councillors on the radio and local TV and that sort of thing.

But how can they continue to do that when they are no longer faced by a couple of newspapers, one TV channel and a handful of radio stations, rather hundreds of blogs, locally or nationally, YouTube users who can put video up at the drop of a hat, people armed with mobile phones, throwing up audio online – all of whom potentially have audiences way in advance of those traditional mediums.

How can comms teams do that job when every member of staff also has access to these tools, and every councillor too?

So what, now, is the purpose of the comms guys? Why does a council need a comms department at all? Figure that one out, and I would imagine everything else will just drop into place.

Wednesday, 3 November, 2010

(Some of) My favourite bloggers

Here, partly as a thank you to those listed for being so thoroughly excellent, but also as a way of pointing readers to great sources of content, are some of my favourite bloggers.

Dan Slee

Dan is a phenomenon. He seems to literally give away everything he knows on his blog. He’s a great one for lists, which is always a great framework for a post. Ten ideas for innovating in cold weather? 42 (count ’em!) ideas gleaned from a conference? 16 lessons for councils using Flickr? Dan has it covered. The best kind of blogger – he innovates, and then tells the world how it went, and what he’ll do differently next time.

Visit Dan’s blog, or follow him on Twitter.

Catherine Howe

Catherine writes with considerable knowledge and verve about democracy, localism and the internet. Part Phd research notebook and part public service, her blog provides neat summaries and ruminations on what she has been reading lately, along with perceptive coverage of events – she attends these things so we don’t have to.

Visit Catherine’s blog, or follow her on Twitter.

Steph Gray

There are some bloggers who don’t post as often as you like, but that’s only because when you see they have written something new, it makes you smile. Steph is one of those. He’s not just full of insight and practical ideas, but he’s a great writer too, with a neat turn of phrase and a ready wit. Steph’s also willing to hand out praise to those that deserve it, as his recent series of digital heroes shows.

Visit Steph’s blog, or follow him on Twitter.

Ingrid Koehler

It’s easy for those outside of government to take the risk of putting one’s head above the parapet, but much harder for those working inside the machine. Ingrid’s relentless blogging has paved the way for others to follow in her footsteps – the Policy and Performance blog highlights good stuff happening elsewhere, promotes good work happening throughout local government and shares the considerable knowledge that resides in Ingrid’s head.

Visit Ingrid’s blog, or follow her on Twitter.

Public Strategist

It’s fair to say that Public Strategist sees things that I would never see, and explains other things in ways I never could. Clarity of writing when discussing hugely complicated topics of public service delivery is guaranteed. A must read.

Visit Public Srategist, or follow him on Twitter.

Kate Bennet

A relatively new addition to my list of favourite bloggers, Kate works as a technology-focused civil servant, who most recently has been focused on innovation and her blog has been full of great stuff on how to innovate in government. It will be interesting to see where her career takes her next, and therefore what her blogging will be about. Am sure the engaging writing and diverse style of posts will continue, though!

Visit Kate’s blog, or follow her on Twitter.

Michael Coté

Michael Coté, or just Coté as everyone seems to refer to him, is a tech-blogging machine. Huge lists of interesting links, regular audio and video podcasts and interviews and in-depth coverage of the tech issues of the day all regularly feature at People over Process. Whilst he doesn’t cover specific government topics, a lot of the things he does discuss – like big data, social enterprisey technology, and open source – are very relevant. You won’t understand everything he posts, but that’s your fault, not his.

Visit Coté’s blog, or follow him on Twitter.

Mary McKenna

How sycophantic is it to choose my boss for this list? Probably very, but there’s a recession on, so, you know. Anyway, I’m lucky that my boss is such a great blogger so I don’t feel too much of a suckup to include her here. Mary’s blog is mostly about people, and sometimes about cats. It’s about the people she meets on her travels, many of whom are genuinely interesting – or at least, that’s how she portrays them. What I like best about Mary’s posts is that I always know I’m going to learn something from them.

Visit Mary’s blog, or follow her on Twitter.

Carl Haggerty

Can’t not mention Carl in this post. His is a great practitioner blog – he writes about what he does, and what he thinks about what he does. Often Carl throws out ideas without ensuring they are 100% polished, often resulting in fresh ideas popping into your own head as you’re reading his stuff. Great coverage of topics too, including internal social collaborative tech, local authority web strategy, big enterprise IT and local community stuff.

Visit Carl’s blog, or follow him on Twitter.

There are loads of others, of course, and I’ll do another post like this soon. Thanks to all those mentioned, though – you’re doing great, important work.

Tuesday, 2 November, 2010

Apples and ideas

George Bernard Shaw on collaboration. Yes, really:

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

Monday, 1 November, 2010

My manifesto for councils engaging online

A couple of weeks ago I was talking to the national conference of the Society for Local Council Clerks up in Durham. It was a great conference with a group of people who really care about what they do and the communities they help serve.

My talk was on the usual stuff of how the web can help all of this happen. Particularly pertinent for this sector, where over half of Parish, Town or Community Councils don’t have a website. Most of the councillors in this sector don’t use email.

(I do sometimes think that we forget, in all the excitement about the new forms of online tools, just how utterly brilliant the act of simply publishing stuff online is. The fact that it is so easy, and can reach so many people!)

So, to help them out, I produced a ten point manifesto for what to do and where to start with this stuff.

If I’m honest, I threw this together in ten minutes whilst slightly hungover. However, I think there is value in most of it, and it would be interesting if others would pitch in and suggest some improvements.

Here’s the ten points:

Get the basics right
Don’t spend lots of money
Go where people already are
Don’t forget: what you say is permanent and findable
Use the right tool for the right crowd
Promote online stuff with offline stuff
Be open, honest and human
Don’t overburden with process
Make your stuff findable, sharable and reuseable
Think: how does the web change the way we do everything?

The entire slidedeck is embedded below.

How local councils can get the most from social media

View more presentations from Dave Briggs.