local government

City of Angeles moves to Google Apps

Interesting!

Google Apps will also help conserve resources in the city’s Information & Technology Agency (ITA), which is responsible for researching, testing & implementing new technologies in ways that make Los Angeles a better place to live, work and play. Because the email and other applications are hosted and maintained by Google, ITA employees who previously were responsible for maintaining our email system can be freed up to work on projects that are central to making the city run.

By ITA estimates, Google Apps will save the city of Los Angeles millions of dollars by allowing us to shift resources currently dedicated to email to other purposes. For example, moving to Google will free up nearly 100 servers that were used for our existing email system, which will lower our electricity bills by almost $750,000 over five years. In short, this decision helps us to get the most out of the city’s IT budget.

The decision to move to Google Apps was not taken lightly. The city issued a request for proposals and received 15 proposals, which were evaluated by city officials. The top four proposals were invited to give oral presentations, with CSC’s proposal for Google Apps receiving the highest marks. This decision was reviewed and discussed by the Los Angeles City Council which, after a healthy debate, voted unanimously to move forward with Google Apps.

Here’s a video for more:

The biggest mistake councils made with online engagement

It’s frequently costly. It almost always achieves little. It lets people tick the “use the internet to engage with the public” box without actually achieving much.

I am, of course, talking about webcasting council meetings. The idea has honourable roots. But the world has moved on.

Both print and broadcast media have steadily moved away from providing lengthy, verbatim reporting of what goes on in elected bodies. That’s despite such coverage being very cheap and easy to produce. Stick a journalist in front of the Parliamentary TV channel, give them a bookmark to Hansard and you’re away. Yet the volume of such coverage has fallen hugely in the last few years – because it’s not what the public wants.

We may wish the public thought otherwise, but when the public is so clearly turning its back on being interested in such verbatim coverage, it’s rather implausible to think that they would lap it up for their local council, if only it were available.

It is therefore no surprise that the audience figures for council webcasting are almost always low. It is a telling sign that it is extremely rare to find a council boasting about the size of its webcast audiences. To be fair, there are some niches and exceptions, but overall the picture is clear: webcast council meetings don’t get much of an audience.

That has been consistently the case, as the systematic evaluation of pilots back in 2005 as part of the Local e-Democracy National Project showed. None of the pilots got a large audience.

It is true that the number of members of the public turning up in person to council meetings is often so small that a tiny online audience can seem quite large by comparison. But it is not an audience that comes for free.

Webcasting costs. It costs money that could be spent elsewhere. Council webcasting is relatively cheap compared with big council IT projects, but it’s relatively expensive when compared to the costs of exploiting social media tools. For example, Croydon’s £33,000 budget for its 2006-7 webcasting pilot could have paid for a substantial social media campaign.

It isn’t just the immediate audience that is limited, so is the follow up audience because by locking up content in audio-visual format webcasting hides it from search engines. That is starting to change, with some speech to text conversion technology starting to creep in to search tools, but for the moment the money spent on webcasting usually could more effectively be spent on putting other content online in search engine friendly ways that serve the public.

A few less minimalistic pdf files of agendas and a few more pages rich with background information and links would go much further than many a webcast.

Webcasting does, perhaps, have one plus point. Councils often cover the basics when it comes to promoting webcasting: mention in the council newsletter, mention on the council website, mention in their email list. Added up this marketing still doesn’t provide a decent audience – which is a healthy reminder of how not only does the substance have to be attractive but also how hard you have to work to build up a decent website and email audience to which you can promote activities.

But overall, whilst piloting webcasting made sense, now we know the lesson: it rarely delivers.

Mark Pack is Associate Director, Digital at Mandate Communications (www.YourMandate.com). Previously he was Head of Innovations at the Liberal Democrats, heading up the team which arranged the first use of Google Video by a major UK political party, the first UK party leader on YouTube and the first UK election campaign to use Ustream. He blogs about politics, history and technology at www.MarkPack.org.uk. He’s on Twitter at @markpack.

Strategy stuff – a three pronged approach

Drawing together a few discussions I have been involved in recently about the different types of documents an organisation – such as a council – might need to put together to define its approach to engaging online, I thought it might be useful to set out how I think it could be done.

My initial inclination is always to dispense with strategy, to be honest, as process has a habit of stifling Good Stuff, and over strategising leads to attempts at control and general alienation. My second thought is that even if strategy is required, there shouldn’t be any need for anything specific for digital, as really it’s all the same – technology shouldn’t matter.

Realistically, though, at this stage organisations need to feel comfortable with what they are doing, and if that means having bits of paper explaining it all, then so be it. The important thing is to get those bits of paper right. I see a need for three types of document, each of which I will explain below:

1. Corporate strategy

A high level document explaining what the organisation wants to do, and why it wants to do it. Don’t make it tool focused, else it will go out of date very quickly. Keep it broad and general, as the specifics will be covered in the other documents. This should be the paper brought out to win arguments where necessary. Make sure people at the top of the organisation read it, and endorse it: it will be an enabler to get stuff done.

Issues it should cover:

  • How important does the organisation see the digital space?
  • What are the opportunities and risks, and how are they managed?
  • How online interaction fits in with other channels and processes
  • An overview of the approach: something like the classic listen, acknowledge, create, share
  • How are staff supported in their delivery of the strategy?

2. Staff guidelines

This is the bit which explains in clear terms what staff are enabled to do at work using the internet. There are plenty of good examples available on the web, from the Civil Service guidance, to the BBC, IBM and others. It performs an important role, and should be less about saying what people can’t do and more about encouraging and empowering staff to engage in online conversations.

This should set out how staff are encouraged to engage online, what they can do on their own, and what they might need to seek advice on. My general advice on this is:

  1. If the information or content is already published in some form or other, then it should be repeatable on blogs, in forum or whatever without the need to gain permission
  2. If something new is being generated, whether a viewpoint or a response to a question, say, then it’s best to get it checked out first
  3. If the staff member is at all uncertain, even in the instance of 1. above, get some advice

3. Individual project engagement plans

These form the nitty-gritty of the online engagement work, and there should be one for every digital project undertaken. While the other two documents I have written about are pretty high level – to ensure they remain relevant – with the plans, you can be pretty detailed and focus on activities. These plans should describe:

  • What the project is about, and how digital can support that
  • What the objectives of the digital work are
  • How those objectives will be measured – ie evaluation
  • What the roles are and who is responsible for them
  • How reporting will work
  • Which tools will be used and how
  • Some kind of timeline showing when activity will happen, for how long and how it will be shut down.

I reckon this three-pronged approach more or less covers the necessary bases. It would be interesting to hear how people are approaching this area, and how it differs to what I have written here.

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