government

Local digital impact

I’m increasingly interested in how creative collaborations between small suppliers, public services and organisations from other sectors can come together to solve problems in an open innovation-y sort of way.

The digital arena is probably one of the best places for this type of thing to happen, and a useful post has appeared on one of NESTA’s blogs about it.

In the post, they provide a list of things that government can do to foster local digital activity and collaboration:

  1. Encourage the take-up of broadband and internet access more widely so that we can all participate in this world. Let’s not leave anyone behind.
  2. Find new business models to balance freely available broadband in cities with ISP’s right to recoup the costs of putting in a next generation infrastructure.
  3. Open up local data at a very local level, and then find ways of encouraging engagement between the private creative businesses and our public sector. Our Make it Local programme is trying to do this, but we need much more of it.
  4. Remember that most digital developers still need to make real-world connections to get business and the role of local and regional agencies – both trade associations and screen agencies can be tremendously valuable in helping digital SMEs to win business.

There’s another post to be written at some point about the different aspects of digital activity in an area, and what the role is of government in supporting and nurturing that. But it’s certainly more than just subscribing to local bloggers – important though listening is.

I’m going to be writing a few posts about this in the future, I think, so have created a category – ‘digital local‘ – for them to sit in.

Bookmarks for January 27th through February 19th

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

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.

6 objectives for public service digital engagement

One thing that really came out of the social media strategy seminar we ran last week was that it’s vital for an organisation to have a decent handle on just why they want to be doing this stuff.

I think we’ve reached the point now where most organisations understand the power and reach of emerging social technology, and get the fact that they ought to be involved.

For an approach to be truly successful though, you have to have some objectives in mind. It’s not enough to just do – knowing what you’re doing and why is just as important!

Another thing to consider is what it is that you want those you digitally engage with to actually do. It’s great having thousands of people liking your Facebook page, or loads of Twitter followers… but what are you going to do with them?

Here are some of the more obvious objectives for an organisation to be involved in the social web.

1. Engagement

Lots of people have their own definition of engagement, but just for the purposes of this post, I am talking about a more engaging method of communicating with the public.

I’ve written previously that social media activity doesn’t belong exclusively to communicators, but there is no doubt that there are real opportunities to improve the way organisations communicate using the web.

So using online channels to make people aware of the good work your organisation is doing is a perfectly valid objective – I’d just argue it shouldn’t be the only one!

A great example of this would be Coventry City Council‘s use of Facebook.

2. Open innovation

Perhaps a more interesting use of social technology is in increasing the pool of people contributing ideas and solutions to problems and the improvement of services.

Open innovation differs from traditional approaches by opening up the innovation process beyond the walls of the organisation.

The web provides a great platform for encouraging people to share problems and for groups to work together on solutions.

There are a couple of potentially great examples emerging in this space – DotGovLabs, which is currently an invite only platform, but which will be opening up a bit more in the future; and FutureGov‘s Simpl, which combines open innovation principles with an online marketplace.

3. Participation

The web provides a great opportunity to get more people involved. Too many participation processes in public services involve people being in the right place at the right time, and completely fail to fit in with the way people’s lives tend to work these days.

Using the web as a platform for participation makes it possible for lots more people to get involved. All those who don’t have the time to spare for a 2 hour meeting in the evening may well have 15 minutes spare when they are sat near their computers to contribute.

One great use of social tech to increase participation that I have come across recently is South Yorkshire Police who run their community meetings online in parallel with the offline traditional meeting with virtual attendees outnumbering those who turn up in person.

4. Collaboration

More and more, organisations involved in the delivery of public services are having to work together to ensure the best service is provided for the best value. This means sharing information and having effective means of communication -stuff which the social web was made for.

Too many public service partnerships are run on the basis of meetings, which are often monthly or even quarterly, and where too few people are able to get involved. Using an online platform to provide a space for discussions, online meetings and document sharing and collaboration makes total sense.

An illustration of this is action is the Essex Vine project, where Learning Pool provided a common platform for the Human Resources partnership in the county, and where common learning resources are shared by all, including a management training programme. Find out more here.

5. Crowdsourcing

Corwdsourcing is similar to open innovation, in fact it’s probably a type of open innovation. It focuses on spreading the net as widely as possibly in search of ideas.

Often this takes the form of competitions, where cash or other resources are provided to winning ideas to develop prototypes.

Two great instances of this are Kent and Medway’s Transformed by You project, and the open data competitions run by Warwickshire County Council.

6. Knowledge sharing

Number six focuses on the cross sector need for organisations involved in the delivery of public services to share experience and lessons learned amongst one another. Again, a key thing here is efficiency and making the most of scarce resources: if one council has been through a process, they really need to share what went well and what went wrong with others before they embark on a similar project.

Social tools make this really easy, and the outstanding example of this is the Communities of Practice platform, operated by LGID.

Any more?

There’s six from me. Disagree with any? Let me know in the comments, or add some of your own!

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.

Bookmarks for October 3rd through October 19th

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

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.

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