local government

On leadership

Light blogging recently, mainly because I’ve been busy talking to people and haven’t had much spare time to write here. Apologies.

One of those talky things was at the Cllr 10 event, organised by the Local Government Innovation Unit, expertly led by Andy Sawford.

My session was somewhat pompously titled: Leadership 2.0: why local authorities need to become learning organisations. It was my usual hotch potch of ideas, snatched magpie-like from thinkers far more original than myself.

Big props go to Jemima Gibbons whose book, Monkeys with Typewriters informed a lot of what I said and is a very worthwhile read – as is her blog. David Wilcox has extensively covered Jemima’s work.

Here are my slides, for what they are worth:

Many thanks to Carl Haggerty for providing a screenshot from the internal business networking tool currently being piloted by Devon County Council.

Broadly speaking: the new online social technology changes the way we behave, and makes open, collaborative working methods much more likely to work. It’s also probably true that organisations need to be able to have proper grown up conversations internally before they can converse effectively with external people. New ways of working means new ways of leading, and in the local government context councillors can provide that leadership.

This is still half baked thinking on my part, and the bits that work are the bits I have stolen from others. But I’d welcome any feedback.

Moronic reporting of non issues

Take a look at this story, excitingly titled on the BBC News site “Council Twitter users face rebuke“.

Councillors in Cornwall could face being reported to the authority’s standards committee for using social networking sites.

The trouble is, no they’re not.

Later in the article:

It follows claims that a number of councillors used Twitter during a meeting and mocked other members.

If a councillor is found to breach the code of conduct for inappropriate comments, they could be suspended.

So this is about councillors saying naughty things, and not about them using Twitter, or whatever.

Another example of the easy fixation on technology as being the story, when it isn’t. The story is behaviour: people and the relationships they have with others.

We really don’t need anymore Twitter scare stories, it isn’t productive and it helps nobody.

More ukgc10 stuff

UKGC10 Wordle

Thanks to Graham for putting together this Wordle produced from the text of all the tweets at Saturday’s govcamp. I like that ‘people’ is the second biggest word, and that ‘good’ is nicely central.

He has also made this spreadsheet available so you can follow all the tweets from the day – it’s like you’re there all over again. you’ll need access to Google Docs to be able to see it.

A quick reminder that content from the various sessions is being put together at http://ukgc.wikispaces.com/ – check to see if sessions you ran or attended have notes – if not, add them!

Where next with all this? Anthony at the Democratic Society has some ideas.

Update: great post from Pubstrat.

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?

LocalGovCamp London is on!

We’ll keep it *very* local so as to not get confused with UKGC10.

This will be an all-day event on (or around) 25 Feb in partnership with IDeA. Venue will be Central London. Exact date and location tbc.

Themes will be relevant to anyone working with local government in the social media/digital engagement space. We are aiming to create spaces for discussion and engagement, the sharing of experiences and creation of new ideas. Conversations are encouraged. We will have lots of parallel sessions and break-out spaces. In the tradition of localgovcamps, you set the agenda in the beginning of the morning and afternoon sessions.

Apart from local authorities, MPs, councillors, ICT and social media specialists, we are inviting arts centres and other local heroes to work with us on involving their existing communities in learning how to engage online.

So even if you’re not able to make it for the whole day, come for however long you can!

You can register for your ticket on the Eventbrite page.

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