government

That was the ukgc10 that was

The agenda
Flickr photo credit: Paul Clarke

Blimey.

The third annual unconference, or GovCamp, for government types went pretty well. Two main factors, marvellous and generous hosting by Google, and a terrific level of participation from pretty much everyone who attended. What’s more, nearly everyone stayed til the end!

Massive thanks to the other sponsors, including Huddle, Opportunity Links, Learning Pool, Boilerhouse, IDeA, Polywonk, Timetric, the Dextrous Web and probably others.

Huge props too to Tim Davies and Lloyd Davis for organising the agenda setting bit of the day – it really helped everything go smoothly.

Highlights for me were the sessions of getting internal communication and collaboration right – which resulted in the prospect of a spinoff event dedicated to these issues – and a session on discussing innovation in public services.

As always, how do we follow up on all this goodwill and enthusiasm? Let’s try by:

  • sticking around the online community set up mainly for the event, but which has pretty much everyone signed up to it.
  • Don’t forget that there is also the Teacamps – afternoon meetups in central london for government types. The next one is on the 3rd February in the cafe at the top of the House of Fraser on Victoria Street.
  • A simple wiki is available for people to add content from the sessions they ran and attended, so those that missed them (or indeed the whole event) can still find out what went on
  • Finally – the growing movement of ‘camps in and around government just goes to show that organising events that are useful, interesting and fun doesn’t need to be expensive or difficult. There’s nothing at all stopping you from organising your own, and there are plenty of people willing to help.

There’s lots of coverage online already, and will be more, I’m sure. I’ll keep the following list as up to date as I can:

David Wilcox grabbed Jeremy Gould and I before we left. It was Jeremy who kicked off this whole thing two years ago, and it’s been a privilege – as well as a pain in the arse – to have picked things up this year. Had Jeremy not stuck his neck out back then, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Anyway, enough brown nosing, here’s David’s video:

UK GovCamp 2010

The UK govcamp event is happening on the 23rd January. Everyone should have had an email who has a ticket to come – if you think you ought to have had something, but haven’t, please let me know!

It’s an unconference, so if you are coming, please do come prepared to talk about something. Discussions are taking place on the event network, so dip in there if you are feeling low on inspiration.

For those that can’t make it, we’re hoping to have a bunch of active social reporters there on the day, recording words, pictures, sounds and videos. We’ll find a way of pulling them all together for your multimedia pleasure – probably again on the network site.

Jakob Neilson on intranets

Jakob Neilson has some good stuff in his yearly roundup of intranet trends:

Intranet design is maturing and reaping the rewards of continuous quality improvement for traditional features, while embracing new trends like mobile access, emergency preparedness, and user/employee-contributed content.

Ideas of enterprise 2.0 are leaking into intranet design, and quite right too.

As per this post, I’m focusing a lot of my attention this year on what goes on within organisations. I dare say that few councils and other government organisations have interactive – and mobile – intranets as discussed by Nielson.

I want to explore what technology people are using and what the barriers are to adoption – and then think about what the solutions might look like.

I’m on the lookout for stories about collaboration and innovation in this space within public services – like the stuff Carl Haggerty is up to in Devon. If you have any examples, drop me a line, or leave a comment.

Is government a knowledge business?

Enterprise 2.0 is a label Andrew McAfee coined to describe the use of collaborative tools within large organisations, focused on the benefits this offers to non-technical managers rather than technology-for-technology’s sake enthusiasts. In other words: blog, wikis, forums, and social networks are nice, but what does it mean for a service manager? As always Wikipedia is your friend.

McAfee’s book, helpfully titled Enterprise 2.0, is a great read. I’m halfway through it myself.

This ties into what will be a key theme for me in 2010 – that the interesting bits around social software is not the software but the implications of it: sharing, openness, transparency, collaboration, co-creation.

Dennis Howlett posted a while back that enterprise 2.0 is a crock:

Like it or not, large enterprises – the big name brands – have to work in structures and hierarchies that most E2.0 mavens ridicule but can’t come up with alternatives that make any sort of corporate sense. Therein lies the Big Lie. Enterprise 2.0 pre-supposes that you can upend hierarchies for the benefit of all. Yet none of that thinking has a credible use case you can generalize back to business types – except: knowledge based businesses such as legal, accounting, architects etc. Even then – where are the use cases? I’d like to know. In the meantime, don’t be surprised by the ‘fail’ lists that Mike Krigsman will undoubtedly trot out – that’s easy.

It’s an interesting point Howlett makes, that greater collaboration and knowledge sharing through social technology works well in ‘knowledge based businesses’ but that the business case is harder to make otherwise.

How does this fit with government and public services? It’s a complicated one because there are clear examples of where greater collaboration and information sharing would have benefits, but also there are services provided by government which have to follow strict procedure, and to circumvent that would lead to disaster.

I see a clear opportunity to blend technology to produce systems that produce real value to staff working in public services: the intranet, eLearning, collaboration tools like Huddle, communication platforms such as Yammer and more traditional forums, knowledge sharing systems such as wikis. Carl hints at this in his recent post:

the intranet is now just part of what many people are referring to as Enterprise 2.0

The focus on the use of interactive web technology has been on external citizen engagement up til now. But many of the real wins might be behind the firewall.

Is there a conversation already going on about this? If not, let’s start one. I’m tagging this post – and any other relevant ones here on DavePress – as entgov. Feel free to do the same, or if someone comes up with something better, let’s use that.

Update: John Suffolk, UK government CIO, has posted this:

So if the customer/citizen becomes the CIO what does the CIO become… time for a new TLA; How about CCO, the Chief Collaboration Officer? In our world of ever decreasing time to launch our products and services and our increasing reliance on global supply chains and a multi supplier (IT and business service) world, increasingly our roles demand substantial collaboration to get the job done.

Whither government 2.0?

Government 2.0 seems to be a well established meme in many parts of the world, but doesn’t seem to have taken root at all in the UK.

I can understand why people might think that is a Good Thing – Will and Stefan make the case on Twitter during a quick chat about the issue.

But I can see why having a label like this would be useful – there are so many disparate elements going on around change and the public sector, whether transformational government, Smarter Government, Power of Information, eGovernment, eDemocracy, open data, hyperlocal, CRM and VRM, transparency, openness… wouldn’t it be better to have a bakset to put all this stuff in?

By having a common tag to describe all this stuff, and bring it together, couldn’t we make more out of less? Reduce duplication? Make some useful connections?

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