local government – Page 22

GoogleLocalGov review

August 9, 2009

Here’s a list of some of the coverage of Friday’s event… I’ll keep it updated with everything I come across:

Ingrid Koehler:

Despite all the slickness and the fabulous hospitality, the day was kind of a near miss. Google knows there’s money in the public sector (maybe less than there has been, but still a lot), they know we’d make good customers, they know they have products that we can use to achieve what we need to, but they didn’t quite know how to make the sale.

Michele Ide-Smith:

I have no doubt that the migration to the cloud won’t be driven so much by business strategy so much as by social needs and expectations. As time goes by our experiences of computing in our personal lives will be drastically mis-matched with our computing experiences at work.

Sarah Lay:

We asked for Google to keep speaking to us and get to know the specific issues and challenges we’re facing in local gov and for a space where we can store the developments we’re working on. It was suggested that the /localgov website was expanded to include this sand box and perhaps forums too where we can pitch questions and ideas and Google can get a feel for us.

Alice Ainsworth:

The local gov day at Google’s London HQ this week (#googlelocalgov) definitely gave me some food for thought. No, they didn’t have all the answers, but as a group we do tend to have a LOT of questions.

Sharon O’Dea

Overall, I was a little disappointed that the day wasn’t more of a constructive, two-way session, but nonetheless it was a useful overview of their products. The key is in what happens next. I love Google, and I’m sure there’s potential for them to help us achieve our aims of communicating better with residents while bringing down costs. But this was only a first date; we’ve got a lot of flirting to go before local government will even consider going to bed with Google. Local Government just isn’t that kind of girl, you see.

Al Smith

So that’s what happened. We came. We listened to a (slightly off-topic) sales pitch. We went home.

But it’s a start as I say. Google got plenty of feedback from the day and hopefully there are a few things people can take away and build into what they’re doing.

Carrie Bishop

It was a pretty intense day of presentations by various Googlers about their products, much of which was interesting and applicable to local government, though there wasn’t much talk about local government until the end of the session.

Paul Canning

As the day progressed it was very clear that they were new to this local government lark (they only opened shop in January). Given that the sponsors and the people they have been talking to thus far are Whitehall ones, and local government’s needs and issues are very different, it’s hardly surprising that many of the pitches needed refining.

From Google’s LocalGov event today, Alex Nurenberg talked us through the steps you can take to make sure your website works – in other words that visitors find what they want quickly, especially when they come in via a search engine or advert.

Bring me to the right page
Make your homepage useful
Help me navigate
Give me the right results when I search
Display services clearly
Give me the detail I need
Make registration optional
Make it easy to enquire
Reassure me
Let your users design your website (it’s all about testing)

Also:

Use Adwords to drive the right traffic
Use Analytics to monitor performance
Use Website Optimiser to optimise content

GoogleLocalGov tomorrow

August 6, 2009

The GoogleLocalGov event is taking place tomorrow, and by the sound of things it is going to be packed to the rafters with attendees and great content.

Here is what topics will be being discussed by Google’s team of experts:

Google Adwords
Site Conversion & Analytics
Google Adsense
Enterprise Solutions
YouTube & Creative Options
OpenSocial
Android
Google Maps

There is also a nice little site leading local gov folk through what Google can offer, which is well worth a look.

If you can’t make the event tomorrow, fear not, you’ll be able to follow it all on our friend Twitter – just keep an eye on the #googlelocalgov tag.

Edit: another bit of fun will be carrying on after the event for drinks and more nattering in a boozer near Kings Cross, McGlynns to be precise. If you want to come to the drinks but aren’t at GoogleLocalGov it is probably best to aim for 5.30-6ish as that is when the Googlers will be arriving. Thanks to Dan for organising.

Local Gov is self organising

August 5, 2009

As much as I enjoyed being involved in organising LocalGovCamp, when emails started to be sent to the group asking when the next one was, I was quick to distance myself from it. These things can take up a lot of time, and the reward is rarely financial.

I’d mentioned at the event in Birmingham that one way forward might be for regional events to be run by groups of councils together. This idea has been taken up with some gusto by several local authorities and their friends, and some remarkable things are now starting to happen.

Stephen Hilton at Bristol was the first to step up and start getting an event going for that area, with the help of Shane McCracken at Gallomanor.

The second follow-up event to start being organised will be for London authorities, and there seems to be a real desire in the capital to run this sort of get together.

Second, Andrew Beekan at Lincoln City Council is working with the University in the city to host an event there.

Thirdly, Jon Hyde at Cheltenham Borough Council is organising an event in his neck of the woods, but with a particular focus, on project management within local authorities.

Last but not remotely least, last week Ken Eastwood at Barnsley announced an event for Yorkshire and the Humber, to be organised along with Kevin Campbell-Wright at JISC. This event will also have a subject focus, that being remote working and the issues around that – a vital topic in the current climate of reduced budgets for local government, as well as the need to reduce carbon footprints.

The are two really interesting things here I think.

Firstly, the new tools are being used to bring people together around these events. Twitter, WordPress and Ning, as well as more traditional tech like Google Groups, are being used to make it easy for local gov folk to self organise. It’s Here Comes Everybody, innit.
Also, there is a massive industry around providing events to local government. They are generally pretty pricey and need teams of events managers to get them going. Or do they? It’s now being shown that local government can organise its own events, on whatever subject matter they choose. There is the potential here for some real disruption in the industry of local gov events, and I would argue that anyone who makes a living out of this needs to pay attention to what is starting to happen.

So, if there is a LocalGovCamp event happening anywhere near you, make sure you get along. And if there isn’t, JFDI and organise it yourself. You simply don’t need to wait for anyone else anymore.

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