Tuesday, 7 June, 2011

Monday, 6 June, 2011

Just because you can say something…

…doesn’t mean that you should. Of course.

A bit of a Twitter flurry this morning about a case of a civil servant apparently being disciplined because of their use of the service.

The account in question, nakedCservant, is protected, so the updates aren’t public, and as I have never requested access, I can’t see what they are saying. However, according to this report, the civil servant behind the account was critical of ministers and government policy.

Various folk have called this out as being an example of a crack down on public servants being allowed to use services like Twitter in the workplace.

I’m not convinced it is.

The issue here is the message, not the medium, and it reminds me very much of the Civil Serf affair a few years ago. Whilst I don’t know the exact detail of this case, it’s clear that the civil servant is almost certainly in breach of the civil service code in terms of the content of their tweets.

In other words, the Twitter bit of this story is irrelevant. The result would be the same if this person were saying these things in emails, memos, letters to the newspaper, whatever.

I’ll go through my usual list of points when these stories emerge:

1. If you want to stay out of trouble, don’t slag people off in public.

2. Don’t rely on anonymity to protect you. Unless you’re very good, if somebody wants to find out who you are, they can do.

3. Having ‘these are my views, not those of my employer’ in your Twitter biography means absolutely nothing in reality. It’s no protection at all and I worry when I hear people being advised to do it as a way to feel safe about this stuff.

4. Never publish anything on the web you wouldn’t be happy to show your boss, your mother or a journalist. Assume everyone can see everything you write and that way you won’t be surprised when it turns out they can.

5. We’re in a strange situation at the moment where our personal and professional identities are in a state of flux and can’t be separated in a reasonable way. Most people, especially those that work in public services, can easily be traced to their employers online with a bit of Googling.

Maybe at some point in the future this will be sorted out, and we’ll have a common understanding of where work stops and home starts. But until then, be careful and if you have to think twice about posting something online, don’t post it!

Update: Steph adds on Twitter “don’t do politics” – and he’s right.

Update 2: Jimmy Leach blogs the view from the FCO.

Sunday, 5 June, 2011

What I’ve been reading

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

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

Thursday, 2 June, 2011

Wednesday, 1 June, 2011

Localism needs bespoke, not scale

David Wilcox does his usual excellent summarising and commenting job on the latest snafu involving BIG Lottery funding and the internet.

It’s all about a grant of £1.89 million to the Media Trust, to fund the establishment of “connected news hubs around the UK to support citizen journalism and to help communities and charities get their voices heard”.

Hmmmm. I’ve said many a time before that the future of journalism debate is one of the most boring in the world – certainly one of the least relevant to actual people with proper lives with real things to worry about.

So the use of the word journalism in this project concerns me – it brings to the table assumptions and values which I’m not sure belong in this context.

This follows a grant of £830k under the People Powered Change programme to Your Square Mile to develop a network of local community websites. It’s described as a “digital one stop shop” – excellent!

Excuse my sneering, but 1999 is calling and it wants its slogans back.

David writes in his analysis:

The issue is perhaps not so much why the Media Trust got the funding, but why Big Lottery didn’t spend some time exploring the difference between citizen journalism, community reporting, and hyperlocal media. Or if they did, could we please see the report? That would be transparency.

One thing that is becoming clear is that communities come before websites. That is to say, the motivation for starting a community web project must come from the community first and not a solution being imposed from elsewhere. It’s been tried countless times and doesn’t work.

The experts in the field, such as the Talk About Local guys totally get this, which is why their nationally-focused solution takes the lead from local need, and is platform neutral. No one size fits all model there, and rightly so.

It’s also why social media surgeries work so well. Nobody there has a service to push – the ‘surgeons’ listen to people’s problems, or what they want to achieve, and they advise on the quickest, cheapest solution.

There is often an assumption that a centre of power must always fill a vacuum. In this case, there is no doubt that local communities organising themselves online can benefit both those communities and the local council, if it chooses to listen.

That doesn’t mean however, that the council should be the provider or indeed the instigator of the websites. Far better to bring in a third party, who understands this stuff and who will advise the different communities what the best solution is for them – not develop a single platform and assume it will work for everyone.

Likewise with these big national programmes. What if the Your Square Mile product isn’t what communities want? What if the MediaTrust’s understanding of a ‘connected news hub’ (actually, does anyone have an understanding of what one of those is?) doesn’t match anyone else’s?

The point of localism is that different communities have different needs, which means they need different tools and solutions. Yet still ‘scalable’ single solutions get funded. But of course you can’t scale bespoke, even though bespoke is what is needed here.

Tuesday, 31 May, 2011

Give us a break

Am sharing the details of this event on behalf of my good friend Jude, who is running what looks to be a really interesting project.

GIVE US A BREAK: Ideas for developing easy ways to source respite breaks for carers online

Give Us A Break tackles the feelings of social isolation that are often experienced by people caring for an ill, frail or disabled family member, friend or partner. Give Us a Break aims to ease the burden of caring by providing a few days away from day-to-day responsibilities, as well as ongoing support over the phone and online. It is the first project run by soundinnovation, a not-for-profit hub to develop projects with a social purpose.

A key part of the project is to develop ideas around online support for carers to enable them to access respite opportunities. There doesn’t seem to be any specific ‘go to’ websites for carers to tap into carer friendly accommodation. For example one of the most interesting carer friendly accommodation like the Kiloran Trust are very hard to find.

How can you help?

On Thursday 9th June from 6.00pm we’re hosting a brainstorming evening with tech savvy individuals to explore and potentially develop ways of enabling carers to access info for breaks – online. For example it could simply be finding a way to map appropriate and available respite opportunities across the country by geo-tagging respite opportunities around the country and getting other carers to rate them or make suggestions for carer friendly accommodation.

We’re not planning on reinventing the wheel but what is clear is that when a carer can get access to a break we want them to be able to find it quickly – but there doesn’t seem to be much available.

Location:

soundinnovation offices at Happy Computers, Cityside House, 40 Adler Street, London E1 1EE.

If you can come along, please RSVP to jude@soundinnovation.org.uk.

Thursday, 26 May, 2011

The digital engagement game

At the introduction to digital engagement workshop we ran this week, I debuted the digital engagement game.

It’s a workshop exercise that’s an expansion of my version of David Wilcox‘s social media game, which in turn has been developed into the Social by Social game.

The original game featured a pack of cards detailing various social media tools, and a few traditional ones too. Teams then came up with scenarios, and used the cards to produce solutions.

It was always good fun to run and is helpful in getting people to focus on purpose and not getting hung up on the tools.

Over time though it became clear that the cards needed updating, and if we were going to do that, then we might as well revisit the whole thing.

So, now there are four different sets of cards in the game. These hopefully cover the range of issues people planning digital engagement projects need to consider.

Tools – the technology

  • Blogging
  • Social networks
  • Status updates
  • Media sharing
  • Online collaboration
  • Newsletters
  • Aggregation
  • Social authoring
  • Web conferencing
  • Mobile apps
  • Location services

Roles – the people

  • Champion
  • Community manager
  • Digital mentor
  • Moderator
  • Social reporter
  • Developer
  • Strategist
  • Data expert
  • Evangelist
  • Content wizard

Activities – the other stuff you have to do

  • Training
  • Events
  • Workshops
  • Social media surgeries
  • Network mapping
  • Codesign
  • Listening online
  • Evaluation
  • Publish open data
  • Carry out surveys

Process – tackling the bureaucracy

  • Develop strategy
  • Write policy
  • Campaign plans
  • Project management
  • Identify the keen
  • Make business case
  • Get IT support
  • Get political buy-in
  • Get senior managers on board
  • Manage risks

Teams in the game have two sheets, one to set the scenario:

Red team scenario

And one to plot the solution:

Red team solutions

This format of the game seems to work pretty well, helping people think about all the issues involved in solving problems using digital tools – especially the idea that the people and the process matter just as much, if not more, than the technology.

If you’d like to make your own set of cards, here’s the PDF (3.1mb) which you can print out, cut up, fold and laminate.

Online consultation and policy engagement

Neil Williams writes a great post about digital engagement on the AlphaGov blog:

On the face of it, you could say it’s a simple case of government doing something a bit whizzier and more user-friendly than publishing thousands of PDFs on hundreds of websites for people to find, comprehend and comment on by email. And it was tempting to build that whizzy something, pooling the best current practice from forward-thinking departments (like mine) as a baseline to push things further.

But scratch the surface and you quickly find yourself dealing with big issues around democracy, the delicate balance of trust between citizens and the state, the complexities of our constitution, and the culture of the civil service.

You find yourself touching on every opportunity for citizens, businesses and organisations to interface with any part of the state online, be it to give feedback, ask a question, seek help, present an argument, influence thinking or help solve a problem. And – most importantly of all – you touch on the capability and capacity of the state to process all this user feedback, to analyse, respond and interact.

A chunky quote, but there’s still more good stuff on the original post – go take a look.

There are also some slides that Neil developed in collaboration with Steph and Simon (what a dream team!). Embedded below, apologies if you can’t see them.

Steph followed up with his own post, which again is worth reading in full, though here’s a useful list he provides of things to do to get engagement right:

1. treat people with respect: if you spend time contributing constructively, that should be worth a proper acknowledgement, at least

2. treat different people differently: there’s not a ‘general public’ who have views on policy: there are service users, their relatives, people who work in public services, people who lobby about them, people who have oddly expert experience or niche specialisms. Consultation should be layered, asking people to give feedback on different aspects of the same thing, based on how much they know and care

3. combine customer and citizen roles: boost participation and improve public services by asking people for ideas when it’s relevant, connecting a public service experience with feedback on the policy behind it

It’s great to have some proper thinking done on this subject, though as Neil and Steph themselves have said, this is a start rather than the finish.

Some interesting bits came out of yesterday’s digital engagement workshop that we ran in Peterborough yesterday, and once I get my head together I’ll post them up here.

Wednesday, 25 May, 2011

Portfolio: sharing council comms resources

Portfolio looks an interesting idea, coming out of Nottingham City Council.

This, from an article at LGComms:

We’re launching Portfolio, a web portal that allows public sector organisations to share marketing materials. Councils and other public authorities can sign up to it for free and save money by buying ready-made, proven marketing campaigns. It also enables them to make money by uploading and selling their own designs.

Kind of an app store but for comms resources. Cool.

Right now it’s just traditional print media designs that are available, but I’m guessing it wouldn’t be too hard to include video assets, audio and so on.

Maybe even WordPress templates and the like?