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Councillors connected

Over the next three days, a rather special event is taking place online – a virtual conference for council officers and members to learn about the benefits of using social media to engage with communities.

It’s happening on the IDeA Community of Practice platform, which does mean there are a couple of hoops to jump through before you can start posting. But it will be worth it!

Some of those contributing to the debates and discussions are:

  • Councillor Richard Kemp, of Liverpool City Council, Deputy Char of the LGA Executive and Leader of the LGA Liberal Democrat Group
  • Councillor James Cousins, of the London Borough of Wandsworth and co-founder of the Cllr Tweeps site
  • Dominic Campbell of FutureGov Consultancy
  • Shane McCracken of Gallomanor and CivicSurf (blogging mentor project for councillors)
  • Stuart Bruce, Wolfstar PR, former councillor
  • Hugh Flouch of Haringay Online (hyper-local networking site)
  • Simon Wakeman, Head of Marketing at Medway Council

I am helping out by facilitating some of the discussions and adding useful tidbits to the various conversations that will be going on. Hope to see lots of people joining in!

Councillors connected: social media online conference

I’m going to be facilitating an online conference with Steve, Ingrid and others, which will be all about encouraging councillors to make better use of social web technology.

It will be happening on a Community of Practice, meaning that there is no limit on how many people can be involved, and no travelling either!

Here’s a quick outline of some of the discussion points:

  • What are councils and councillors doing with social media?
  • How can its use help communities and citizens make connections to local public services and the decisions that affect our everyday lives?
  • How can social media support empowerment, engagement and improvement?
  • What are the risks involved in these new ways of communicating?
  • How can councils and councillors get started?

Some of the speaker involved are:

  • Councillor Richard Kemp, of Liverpool City Council, Deputy Char of the LGA Executive and Leader of the LGA Liberal Democrat Group
  • Councillor James Cousins, of the London Borough of Wandsworth and co-founder of the Cllr Tweeps site
  • Dominic Campbell of FutureGov Consultancy
  • Shane McCracken of Gallomanor and CivicSurf (blogging mentor project for councillors)
  • Stuart Bruce, Wolfstar PR, former councillor
  • Hugh Flouch of Haringey Online (hyper-local networking site)
  • Simon Wakeman, Head of Marketing at Medway Council

It’s happening between 6 and 8 April. It’s going to be awesome.

Digital mentoring for public servants?

Ingrid has a very nice post about the training my good friend Steve Dale and I provided to some folk at the Local Government Association and the Improvement and Development Agency today.

I think people left the room enthused.  A colleague whose arm I twisted to attend the course (when I was worried it wasn’t full – in the end it was overfull) thanked me for getting her along.   I’m planning to meet with another colleague in the near future to take some of the training into real concrete action.  And that’s the best feedback of all.

Which is very gratifying to hear.

I think there is a real need for fairly basic overview sessions like this one, introducing people to some of key aspects of this social web thing: not just what the tools are and what they do, but some of the philosophy behind it all.

Digital mentoring for public servants? Quite possibly. Maybe a topic for Barcamp?

IDeA Performance

This Friday (9th January 2009) the Improvement and Development Agency and LARCI are holding an event entitled Performance management plus: the next stage of performance management for operational improvement. Sounds like heavy stuff, but with a great mixture of speakers and workshop sessions I’m sure it will be a great day.

I have a little involvement with the event, though, because one of the people behind the event is IDeA’s own social media evangelist Ingrid Koehler, who fancied applying some of the ideas from my work in Sweden with Cisco to this event, and another one which is coming up at the end of the month.

IDeA Perfomance

To this end, we have created a site very much along the lines of the Cisco08 one (if it ain’t broke, right?) with a few modifications. There is going to be some blogging, bookmarking with delicious, flickr photos, video interviews and of course the Twitter backchannel – all aggregated on the front page. The tag to use in any content you would like to contribute is ideaperf – so tag away!

We really going to try to apply some of the principles described by David Wilcox in terms of creating a ‘social learning space’ – we want to make it possible for those not attending to play a part in what happens at these events – and for the conversations and shared learning to carry on afterwards for as long as is required.

So, anyone with an interest in local government performance management – do visit the site before, during and after Friday’s get together: share what you know, and find answers to your questions!

John Hayes: Another Bloggin’ Boss

John Hayes, a Director at the Improvement & Development Agency, has started a blog – and started it really promisingly, too:

So, having taking my own personal plunge into this Web 2 pool with this my first blog, I’m hoping I can encourage other local government staff and councilors to use this medium as an additional channel for dialogue and debate, and that the transparency will serve to illustrate that we are all working towards the same goals of better government and improved services for our citizens.

Just the sort of thing we need to hear following the events of the last week!

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