I don’t understand how this is even possible but… wow.
research
Residents online: opportunities for councils?
Rob Dale at LGIU blogs about some research being done in collaboration with Networked Neighbourhoods about the impact of online local community activity.
You can take part:
If you are a councillor, complete this survey.
If you are an officer in local government, take this one.
Should be interesting to see the results!
What I’ve been reading
I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.
- What we talk about when we talk about RSS – A useful bit of background to the future of RSS debate.
- Media Trust explains how local news hubs will work – David Wilcox follows up the story.
- Civil Servant 2.0 (PDF warning) – Interesting ebook on 'practical tips for working in government 2.0'
- Arrested for filming a public council meeting – What a mess.
- Trolling in asynchronous computer-mediated communication – An academic version of the debate on whether or not trolls ought to be fed.
- NESTA Neighbourhood Challenge – Nice blog covering this hyperlocal project.
You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.
Auditing digital engagement
One of the things that comes out of the training we do is that evaluating online engagement is hard. What’s more, just finding out whether you are doing the right things is tricky too.
Looking at other people’s good practice can help, but unless you have a couple of days spare, finding the time is tricky.
So, we’d like to present our Digital Engagement Audits as a nice quick solution to this problem.
What we’ll do is do some research into your current online engagement efforts and provide some feedbeck. We’ll also take a look around your local area and tell you about the communities, blogs and tweeters already active nearby. Finally, you get an action plan of some quick tasks that will help improve your efforts.
You get a report, and a web conference that goes through all the findings. The process shouldn’t take longer than a week, and it aims to be practical, quick and lightweight.
The cost is £1,500 + VAT and you can get one now by simply getting in touch and asking for one.
More details on the dedicated page, or here’s a PDF flyer you can download, print and show to your boss.
Cross posted from the Kind of Digital blog.
‘Official’ local gov blogging
Simon writes a nice post celebrating the existence of the new official BIS blog, and provides a handy list of existing Whitehall “formal, properly-designated corporate ‘blogs'”.
Here they are – I’ve also added UKTI’s blog to the list, which I’m sure Simon will do too on his when he gets a moment:
- Foreign Office
- Ministry of Defence
- Business, Innovation and Skills
- Energy and Climate Change
- Health
- International Development
- Culture, Media and Sport
- UK Trade and Investment
I’m pleased, because as I have written on many occasions, I think blogging is a fantastic way for organisations to tell their stories, unhindered by having to go through third parties, media organisations and that sort of thing.
As Simon makes clear, these are public, official blogs, corporately branded and not the personal blogs of civil servants or politicians, which is a quite different thing. So what makes a blog an official one like this? I’d say some, not necessarily all, of these are factors:
- Use of corporate departmental or organisational branding
- Sitting on the official domain of that organisation
- Linked to (reasonably) prominently on the standard corporate homepage
- Written by a group of people rather than an individual (or a collection of individuals’ blogs, like in the FCO case)
There probably are others too – please do suggest them in the comments.
I’d like to start looking at which local councils are blogging officially, like the central government examples above. At the bottom of this post, you should find a form to complete if you have any to submit. If you can’t see it, that might be because you are looking at this in an email or your feed reader. Viewing the original post is your best bet.
[contact-form 2 “blogging survey”]
My next post on this topic will be on how we can get more blogging happening in this way, and perhaps what Kind of Digital can do to help! 😉