Share your stuff with LocalGov Digital!

I’m well chuffed to have joined the steering group for LocalGov Digital, the informal network of bods doing interesting stuff with computers, the internet and change within local councils.

I’m leading on communication and am kicking off a few pieces of work to drive up levels of awareness of and engagement with the network.

The first of these is to pull together some great examples of digital resources in the sector. Stuff like:

  • Digital, IT or technology strategies
  • Service manuals, playbooks and how to guides on digital and transformation
  • Templates for conducting user research or assessing a digitised service
  • Presentations outlining an organisation’s approach to digital and change

…and anything else folk think might be interesting!

Do you have anything like this that you wouldn’t mind sharing with all the good people of LocalGov Digital (and anybody else who browses their website? Just get in touch by email: d@vebrig.gs.

I’ll publish details here of the pages once they are live on the LocalGov Digital website.

Thanks!

Photo credit: Jonathan Simcoe on Unsplash

Great resources for online community building

At the weekend I got my copy of Rich Millington‘s new book, Buzzing Communities, through the post. It’s excellent and provides everything you need to know about building successful online communities.

Thinking seriously about community building is something that I think digital engagement efforts in government and beyond are lacking a lot of the time. In many ways, I think it is the secret sauce that will take online engagement to the next level.

One of the key parts of this is a platform-agnostic mindset. Whether your efforts at building a community work or not is unlikely going to be down to your decisions on technology (unless your decisions are really bad of course). Instead, community management is a set of skills with which you start a small community and build it up by encouraging activity, fostering conversations and meeting the needs of members.

No matter whether your chosen medium is a forum, a blog, a Facebook page or even just a Twitter feed, you can use community management techniques to foster engagement and encourage people to stay involved.

So, I thoroughly recommend Rich’s book. While you’re at it, here are some free bits he has made available too:

Bookmarks for April 25th through April 30th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Bookmarks for March 16th through March 18th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Bookmarks for March 8th through March 13th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.