So, as a way of breaking the seal and getting back to posting here is a catch up post on what I’m using right now.

Technology

I’m afraid I don’t do technical specs or anything like that but this much I can tell you:

• Mac – still running Tiger and in desperate need of an update. Usually use Firefox as the browser and barely look at Safari these days.
• PC (work)
• Netbook (Dell Inspiron Mini 10″) – running Ubuntu, Open Office and Firefox. Tend to use it for writing when away from home or at (un)conferences.
• iPhone 3g – probably my most used bit of kit now. Used for casual social network browsing at home as well as when out and about. Rarely use it as a phone though!

Platforms

That’s not a great heading but hey, I’m out of practice. I really mean the places online I am to be found most often at the moment.

• Twitter. Still my favourite social network. Is the first online thing I check in the morning and last thing at night. I use Tweetdeck for iPhone and on the Mac, Hootsuite for the work stuff and have also been trying out Twitter for iPhone in last week.
• Facebook. But mainly for work purposes and to keep up with people who are only on that network. And for pictures.
• Foursquare. Have been trying this out on the iPhone. No real pull for me as an individual but can see some possibilities for use at work.

Once in a blue moon

Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, email (I tend to forget about my personal email although I still received loads at work) and websites…yes, websites

Online is all about people and connections for me at the moment and I’ve noticed I’ve been spending a lot less time on information, news or e-commerce sites.

What are you loving or loathing at the moment?

No related posts.

The session was intended to share progress, experience and tips on social media,online and technology for local government. The focus was on how to get middle and senior management to see the value in social media for communication.

In this respect, for me, it was a familiar topic for a govcamp but this wasn’t a bad thing. It’s always useful to be reminded that we’re not all at the same point on the journey and those of us further ahead haven’t necessarily passed on all our tips to everyone just yet.

The session was a real mixture of people from those of us who’ve made some progress with projects or ideas and others who are struggling to do anything at all due to lock downs and risk avoidance.

There were some good tips shared on starting to monitor what is being said about an organisation and the Derby social media map by Tim Cooper and Paul Coles was cited as a great way of giving stakeholders a visual overview of the reach of social media. (You can find the social media map on the Derby and Derbyshire Social Media Cafe website).

Ideas around calculating opportunity to view figures and other marketing-style reporting of social media. Choosing a project and, here’s a GovCamp phrase, Just F**king Doing It (JFDI), in order to show benefits rather than presenting an abstract concept was also muted by several of us with stuff already underway. There are good examples of use by different councils and organisations and these could be tapped into if you can’t JFDI yourself – an example with a tangible result may take away the ‘Emporers’ New Clothes’ feel for risk averse organisations.

My raising of (another GovCamp phrase) ‘forgivness being easier than permission’ got mixed reactions in the room and on Twitter. In retrospect I may have sounded more blase about JFDI than I really am. It is a big step, and I’ve not got so many projects behind me that I’ve forgotten the fear and the risk of the first time.

A big part of my feeling able to take that risk is the support network and expertise I’ve found through GovCamps and networks like Twitter.The group shared some of the resource points we go to – Liz Azyan’s amazingly wonderful and extensive LGEO Research site, IDeA Communities of Practice, pubsectorblogs, Twitter and, hopefully in the future, the Knowledge Hub.

(I shared our Local Elections 2009 example as part of this discussion.)

The general feeling at the end of the session was that most local gov organisations are still at the stage of having only one, or a small group, of passionate people determined to move forward in the right way with online communications and social media. Through sharing across local government (and with the wider public sector too) we can support the individuals and provide evidence to enhance the confidence of organisations in communicating in this new channel.

Perhaps once communicating online seems more normal than innovative we can move onto engagement and other ways the social web can transform local government.

* No physical hugging took place as a part of this session

Related posts:

1. ‘Change’
2. Getting the conversation started
3. The future of journalism

This session started with a discussion about whether council’s should use Facebook or whether people are going to Facebook for purely social reasons and therefore council services are irrelevant. This lead to a brief spin around whether council services are social or not – certainly for county and unitary councils there are more ’social style’ services (cultural for example) that would fit more neatly with the idea people are only using Facebook for this sort of activity.

There were some interesting examples of how councils are currently using Facebook – a portal page for the whole council to sign post to information elsewhere online, for disseminating emergency information and specific pages for specific services. In all cases the people in the session were advocating using it as an additional channel rather than a replacement for existing online information.

The talk moved on to how it might be run in the future – would services take responsibility for their own pages? Would it be a centralised web team task or fall into the remit of the contact centre? How much time was needed to run, manage and engage in social networks and was this attainable / correct resourcing given the current numbers of people choosing these as their preferred contact channel?

The conversation moved on now, with Paul Canning asking whether councils were going for the low hanging fruit by joining social networks rather than implementing RSS on their sites (for example). The facts were stated that there are more councils on Twitter than have basic RSS feeds running from their websites and the question asked to why this is. The Mash The State campaign was referenced and a few people offered forth their opinion on the matter.

There seems to be a lack of understanding about RSS and its importance. This may be why Twitter is proving more popular with councils at the moment – it is easy to set up, the audience is clear and it is a direct channel. RSS needs some technical knowledge and access to the set up of your website in order to implement, it’s also more about making data free for anyone to use or re-use rather than a direct channel between organisation and citizen.

Again there seemed to be a general consensus in the group that RSS was important and something we all felt our councils should be doing or could be doing better. However, saying and doing are two seperate things and I do hope that from discussions such as this one greater understanding and therefore wider implementation will happen.

Moving away from the social web now to email – still one of the biggest entry points to online information and there aren’t many council’s using it correctly as a communication channel. There is an untapped efficiency to be made in publishing once and letting the information flow – and this includes re-purposing information through email newsletters (and RSS can help here to).

This lead to the session turning their attention to social networks for internal communications. This is particularly interesting to me as I’ll be looking at the issue for my dissertation next year (or will I? My topic is currently under review!) – at the moment the research will be along the lines of whether employees are looking for information or interaction.

There were questions raised about whether internal communications and intranets really need social web tools and to some extent I suppose this depends whether you are using your intranet as a document store, a communication or a collaboration tool. I am really interested at the moment on how councils are preparing for the workforce of the future and optimising their efficiency by tapping into the collective knowledge of the workforce through a social intranet. A internal serendipity engine could help an organisation make leaps and bounds forward while also engaging the workforce in a positive way – it could, maybe not yet but it could.

Some interesting points were raised by Helen Williams about some of getting this type of project underway was down to how it is ’sold’ internally. She said Carl Haggerty of Devon County Council had re-branded social networking as business networking in order to get chief officers to look past what they thought they knew toward the potential of such a system. More about the pilot Devon has run here.

Time to sum up then – most of the conversation today has been about the big, media darling networks of Facebook and Twitter but there are many more and some may be more appropriate to council services than others. Chris Schubert has done a piece of work to list more than 300 networks including details of the age group and whether membership is open or not. Hopefully this is the sort of information which can be shared across the sector with Knowledge Hub. In the meantime it is certainly worth remembering that there are networks beyond the obvious and a proper channel analysis should be carried out before launching in any online space.

And there is more to choosing and launching on a network. You’ll need proper monitoring and sometimes this might mean paying for the depth of analysis needed to report back to chief officers and service areas. It is also about reputation management and if each service area is acting independently without any central involvement this task will be increasingly difficult.

There was lots more to talk about than we had time for in this session but it was really useful to hear how other councils are thinking about or already getting involved with the social web. The emphasis at the moment seems to be on internal communications but there could be real benefits and more efficient working to come out of using some of the tools as internal implementations. And there is still a lot to learn about the number and type of network out there, how this relates to council services, how we monitor before and after launching and how we manage an organisations reputation when there is no longer a central publishing team but real devolved authorship through services managing profiles across a number of different networks.

Related posts:

1. What I use and why
2. Getting the conversation started
3. Social internal communications

There was lots of good chats but one that really got me thinking happened on the street as we tried to bid our good-nights. We started talking about hyperlocal, something which has been in the periphery of my vision but I haven’t looked directly at yet.

What is hyperlocal? It is information and data published about a specific community and living in that community. It might be aggregated news stories about that community, blogging, images – anything really that reflects or comments on life in the community.

It is an interesting subject for me as it potentially comes into contact with my two areas of professional interest – local government and local journalism – so I was glad to get the chance to chat about it.

The conversation between myself, @danslee and @theyamyam continued to explore some of the potential for hyperlocal bloggers that Dan looked at in his post about how local gov PR should deal with the movement. We talked about how newspapers were changing, or failing to change, in the face of online and our own experiences of journalism. This lead onto a discussion about the Northcliffe Group’s hyperlocal pilot scheme.

The Local People network of hyperlocal sites (currently in beta) for the South West of England is about ‘Your place. Your people.’ and encourages members to join groups, find out about their community and read and write local news. It deals specifically with communities with populations between 10,000 and 50,000 with has 36 portals online at the moment.

How does this project support the local newspaper business? Well, presumably they can feed their own local news, business directories and classifieds into the portal and sell advertising against that. Allowing the community to contribute also means they have a beat reporter in all these locations – a set-up they haven’t directly employed for some time. There is clearly a market here that local newspapers would want to tap.

And local government? Well, with initiatives like ‘cohesive communities’ and generally trying to make people as happy with the place they live in as possible supporting them with hyperlocal would be beneficial. @theyamyam expressed his belief that hyperlocal communities naturally spring up around the local council as they deal with the business of being a resident and so much of the content is about services for residents, the business of the council.

This is probably pretty accurate for urban or suburban areas where the geographical area covered by a council can be quite tight. It may be less so in rural areas where county and district council’s often have large geographical areas containing a number of disparate communities. In these areas perhaps hyperlocals would spring up more around the parish or town councils, or perhaps communities we wouldn’t define in any traditional sense will emerge.

If local government does start looking at hyperlocal will they look to enable through training and support or deliver more along the lines of Local People? Certainly local councils already hold a lot of hyperlocal information – from directories of groups and organisations, events, news and services.

Most councils probably aren’t enabling or delivering at the moment. A low percentage have RSS on their websites for key areas such as press releases and meetings so existing hyperlocals can’t make use of this information easily. The press offices also may need to evolve, as @danslee explored in his post, to consider and converse with local bloggers in the same way they have and do with the traditional media.

It’s certainly an interesting area filled with vibrant, creative, passionate bloggers. If you want to explore some examples look to The Yam Yam or The Lichfield Blog or take a look through the directory of ultralocal blogs that Matt Wardman is compiling.

Our discussion of hyperlocal led to talk of the need to move, especially for local government online, away from pulling people to our websites and toward making our information available for them to pull into their own online space, be it a blog, iGoogle or another network. But that’s another story, for another day…

Related posts:

1. Local government and social media – response to Ingrid Koeler at IDeA
2. LocalGovCamp – an unconference for local government – Birmingham 20 June 2009
3. Social networking for councils

I have, on occasion, asked myself the same question – why do I participate? Broadly (and a bit lazily) I usually summarise with a) It’s useful and interesting b) It helps me and is essential to my work c) for my studies d) I enjoy it. Those points are always organised in that order.

Carl’s post was interesting though as he described why he was participating in the online spaces he currently occupies. This is, again, something which has been skimming the surface of my mind (Dave Briggs posted a similar sort of list / description on spaces, software and hardware he was currently using).

So, inspired to stop thinking and make a note of this myself, here is what I am currently using and why:

Twitter

Twitter is currently at the top of my attention stack in social media terms. It is the network I look at most, turn to first and get the most value from. I’m not going to be coy – this network has had the biggest impact on me since the thrill of ICQ. Heck, let’s just say it, Twitter has changed my life.

Through this network I have been able to build an amazingly valuable professional network which has helped me, inspired me and really got me thinking about the bigger picture in local gov online as well as the nitty gritty of projects I am directly involved in. But the people who I found and followed on Twitter initially because of the common ground with our work have also become friends in a lot of cases.

The value of the hive mind has shown itself in relation to my work, to my university studies, to my continuing exploration of the internets, to discovery and recovery and manages to be both interesting and fun. I guess it is the people I follow but my stream is anything but this network’s stereotype of banal.

However, it’s also made me have to work harder at keeping my attention span up and I’m careful not to let myself rely on collective knowledge for my answer to everything (after all, where would that leave search?). Recently though, and I’m a little sad at the realisation, my love for Twitter has wibbled – I’m just not sure why.

I’m under no illusion that one day something will take over from Twitter at the top of the stack – after all I have a long list of platforms, networks and toys that were once mighty and now don’t get a look in. For now though – Twitter gets to be Number One.

Blogging

I’ve blogged in various places and under a number of avatars since 1999. This is my main blog at the moment and my reason for beginning one related to my work and studies (initially over at Blogger in 2008) was to keep track of my thoughts and add my voice to discussion about local government online. Partially vanity publishing and I do like it when people read my blog and find it useful but it’s primary function is to be an offboard memory for me.

I also keep a less formal blog over at Mirror of the Graces. This is used sporadically now for me to review things – mainly music and gigs. Again, there is a big scoop of vanity in that blog with a side order of self-indulgence. I like giving myself the space to keep in touch with my first love – music journalism. I guess, if I wanted to try and justify it further I could say it gives me an outlet to write in a more creative style and therefore improves my writing overall.

Facebook

I think of this as the network for my personal stuff – I mainly linked to family and real-life friends. It is only recently that I have ‘friended’ colleagues and contacts from the sector. I tend to post random updates and lots of pictures. I don’t do quizzes, throw sheep or indulge in poking of any kind. I run a few groups / pages on there and am members of many more – most of which I have read the name of, laughed, joined and never gone back to.

About a year ago Facebook was top of my online chart for attention but it has been ousted by Twitter and a return to blogging. I think my presence on the network will diminish over the next few months as I move photographs off somewhere else (possibly Flickr). However, I’ll still be checking in as it is the main online space for many of my non-geeky friends and family.

email

Yeah, I still use email although the length of time between checks is getting longer. I have realised that sometimes I forget about it completely for periods and then think ‘ooh, email, better have a look’.

With messaging built in to the other networks having a separate account that doesn’t really do anything else and isn’t always synchronous seems a bit, well, old-fashioned and chunky. I use a couple of accounts as spam / marketing catchers but email is still getting a big proportion of my time, probably more than I think it deserves.

LinkedIn

I use LinkedIn for professional networking and may at some point want it to start really working for me in opening up opportunities. Basically LinkedIn promotes the professional part of my identity where Facebook supports the ‘at play’ part.

I’m not sure I’m using it to its full potential and I have a suspicion towards it as the functionality seems to move around a fair bit. In my mind I see it becoming an index for my online portfolio more than just an online version of my CV so I keep chibbling away at it and finding more features as I go.

Nurphy

I’ve been trying out Nurphy for two or three weeks now. It’s sort of like email or email groups with the real-time and conversational aspect of Twitter. Although there aren’t huge numbers of people over there I’ve found it useful to continue conversations which begin on Twitter but need more space (no character limit on Nurphy). I’m still getting my head round some of the possibilities and usefullness over here and I’ve yet to really find the serendipity element of discovering people / conversations (perhaps there isn’t one?) but I’m having enough conversations for it to make this list. Not tried it yet? Come and join me in a conversation.

What are you using? Anything new or fun (do not mention Google Wave as my invite still hasn’t processed)? Anything really useful that you think might be game-changing? Anything you think I am missing from my list?

Related posts:

1. Social networking for councils
2. Getting the conversation started
3. Finding a voice

The first Derby/shire Social Media Cafe took place at QUAD in Derby on 1 October. It was a very informal gathering but I was thrilled that around twenty people turned up and chatted away about all things online, digital, social media and cake related! I blogged about it over on the cafe site but thought I would post her about some of the conversations I had with people.

I found it as useful and interesting to speak with people from other sectors about how they were using the digital stream and facing challenges as I did to catch up with some good public sector colleagues. I’ve found it’s been really good to widen that view and think about how we can adapt our experiences to their sector and vice versa in order to re-invigorate the way we think and work online and digitally.

Some useful conversations:

Bebo / Youth engagement – I’d been asked to raise this by someone who couldn’t attend and I’m glad I did as I ended up learning something which has already been valuable to moving forward with a piece of work. Do young people use Bebo? I’d assumed so from research and stats I had seen but according to research carried out by a couple of the cafe participants as part of their jobs it seems while this may have once been the case young people are now to be found on Facebook (isn’t everyone?).
Secondary to this though was another piece of research had shown Bebo to be particularly popular with the deaf community. Both these pieces of information and a shared experience of abandoning attempts to create a profile on the network have been useful in to the colleague who wasn’t there and myself.
It also furthered my suspicion that published stats aren’t always that reliable, you can’t beat direct research with the audience you’re trying to reach and I need to re-evaluate the demographics I associate with the big networks.

Being or managing online workers -This is something which came up in the session Tim and Paul ran at LocalGovCamp although it was slightly left of centre from their original topic. It’s also something that has come up in conversations with lots of different people recently and I don’t feel I’ve really got to the bottom of the issue yet. Again this conversation centered on the ‘never off’ temptation of working online. We talked about how we combated or succumbed to this and the challenge it brings to managers in having team members who work outside of their contracted or set hours. We also spoke about where the line is for individuals – we agreed that organisations benefit from a named, human contact online but what did that mean for that person? Where is the line between personal profile and professional profile – especially when you can be found in both roles on one network? I don’t think we came up with any answers but it’s always useful to discuss this issue.

Privacy -In the sense of how much information is available online about you and how much of it you are aware of and have control over. I am probably nearer to digital native than settler in my approach to this and so it isn’t something which has troubled me much so far. However, I think hearing differing views and concerns about the importance and impact of changing views of privacy is a good pull up for me to take stock myself.
I’ve been back and reviewed some of the settings on some of the networks where I know there is information about me. I’ve also been thinking that a session on privacy / identity might be good for sharing and learning at a future meet of the cafe.

Integrating online into the communication mix -As something that I’ve been working toward for a while now I think it is interesting to hear other experiences of how this has worked or not. In some cases online and the ease of two way communication has made significant differences. What really fascinated me is that online is already moving from being primarily a communication channel to being a transformation tool – even in the smallest of operations. It’s got me thinking afresh about things for certain and I’m looking forward to more chats and examples of this to come out of the group.

Google – There were three main threads in relation to Google – Wave, Sidewiki and whether Google is evil or not. The chat about Wave was that none of us there had received an invite and we were pretty gutted about this. Sidewiki chat was split between those who hadn’t heard of it and those who had and were wary. I blogged my thoughts on it already and I’m still looking at it, I’m not getting any less wary though, and just like @gertmellak (who I’ve been talking to on Twitter and Nurphy about this) I’m worried that if the API doesn’t offer forth richer features for website managers in the short term it’s unlikely to improve medium / long-term.
And is Google evil? Well, we came to no conclusion on this but they are certainly fascinating as a company and I’m sure this is a conversation that will go on, and on, and on…

So – that was my first Social Media Cafe in Derbyshire. I am already excited about the conversations continuing online and getting to chat to people again at the next meeting. From an attendee point of view I know that the conversations I’m going to have at future cafes are going to be useful, creative and inform the way I think about online and digital (as well as being a chance to meet with new friends). From an organiser point of view I am, as mentioned, thrilled this idea is starting to take shape in Derby and I’m now looking at how I can adapt the social media cafe to rural Derbyshire and make this truly county-wide.

Related posts:

1. Launch of the social media cafe
2. A social media cafe for Derbyshire

@coseleybaths They have boarded me up and removed my mermaid
@coseleybaths These may be my final tweets

This account is the voice of a swimming baths in the Black Country on which the local council has taken the decision to condemn it to closure and demolition. I don’t know the whys and wherefores of the decision and I am sure the council would defend their viewpoint in the same way supporters of the baths would rally against it.

But the use of social media caught my attention, and yes, my heart too. It seems to have come late in the day but the way campaigners have tried to use Twitter has given real personality to Coseley Baths. In a short space of time they gathered around 300 followers and I guess a proportion (including me) are outside of the borough.It may not have meant the campaign was successful but presumambly garnered as much or more local support than traditional protests as well as making those further afield aware of a local issue.

Humanising the baths and using links to appropriate songs on blip.fm in tweets captured my imagination and made me care about a place I had no connection or previous knowledge of. It wouldn’t work for every campaign and it won’t work forever, especially as this becomes commonplace, but it was a good tactic even if ultimately the decision went against the campaign this time.

Coseley Baths and the campaign group also have a blog and a facebook group. The blog also seems pretty new but the FB group looks to have been running a while and has more than 2,000 members. It’s been used to make people aware of the issue, promote meetings and protests and link to coverage in the local press.

I wonder whether the council has been listening in to this group or their other online activity? As it seems more riotous protests were attempted by other groups on FB only to be stopped by the police it seems someone was listening in. Maybe the council, maybe the local press, maybe someone else altogether!

And, seeing as I seem to be on a wondering streak, I wonder how much more online campaigning would have been done on the blog and Twitter (or other spaces) if the group had more guidance or even more knowledge of how to harness the web?

Social media surgeries and a people generally becoming more comfortable with the online space mean campaigners will really start to grasp the tools the social web is offering them and councils will have to both support this and be ready to respond and act accordingly.

Related posts:

1. What I use and why
2. Social networking for councils
3. So this is Christmas

This is the second guest post of a series that Dave will be featuring on his blog. My piece is called ‘Getting Noticed: The Five Step Programme’ and it’s about…well, why don’t you pop over to DavePress and read for yourself?

No related posts.

to sarahlay.com. I’m currently closed due to swine flu.

No, of course I’m not. But I have been pretty ill with it for the last seven days. Ill enough that I took to my bed for pretty much five days solid – something which hasn’t happened since before my toddler arrived two and half years ago. Ill enough that at one point I didn’t check my texts or Twitter for around 30 hours sending at least one friend into a mild state of panic.

I am, of course, fine. I perhaps had it heavier than some or that could have been the Tamiflu. I may have had something else entirely as it is merely assumed I had swine flu because I answered yes to two or more symptoms on the list on the NHS Direct website. And then said the same thing when I spoke to my GP (I snook in just before the launch of the special website and number).

But a presumption was made about my condition, drugs collected by a dutiful husband (hastily nominated as my ‘flu friend’) and a week in a feverish sweat planning revenge on all pigs was thus spent.

Aside from the 30 hours where I was ‘off grid’ what did online and social media do for me this week? Well, it showed me the strength of some of the connections I have made, mainly on Twitter. Rather banally I announced my diagnosis on there as soon as the phone to the GP was down and was cheered by the ‘get well’ ‘good luck’ and ‘get on with it’ messages from people who I’m mainly connected to though the job I do. Easy to tweet off 140 characters (or less) to someone you don’t really know or care for on something which doesn’t affect you. Easier not to do that at all.

I think this was made even more obvious to me in the same week by the #freealncl campaign (@alncl suspended wrongly from Twitter). Same thing expressed in a more organised and passionate manner. People going out of their way to stand up in solidarity with someone that they may only know online (side thought: isn’t it funny that it only really took about five years for us all to become ‘them freaks on t’internet’?), have met a few times at professional functions or become aware of through someone elses network. Hashtags, @support messages, a Twitter petition and a Twibbon ensued. And after a number of days the account was re-instated and our network both expanded and grew a little closer.

It’s about solidarity. For me, confined to the house and in a loose quarantine it was about not being alone. It was about being able to see the world was carrying on and that I could jump back in and be a part of it when I was ready.

So, thanks to my ‘real-life’ (gonna have to re-visit that phrase soon as it doesn’t really fit any more) and my online friends who wished me well and worried about me this week.*

*And thanks to my husband for looking after me and our toddler this week while continuing to keep house and work as well

No related posts.

This is just a quick note to explain what the heck is going on with my Thought Store blog. Or as it currently is blogs. If you’re reading this you’ve found Thought Store’s new home. Albeit a little way off from being complete.

I’ve been pondering on moving from Blogger for a while and last week the wisdom of Twitter and the generosity of Carl Bembridge gave birth to www.sarahlay.com – the blog previously known as Thought Store. We’re now on WordPress. You might have noticed that

Anyway, while I’m getting the kettle plugged in over here and arranging the scatter cushions the original is still running on Blogger. Once I think I’m ready I’ll be asking kind people who link to my blog to re-bookmark me over here. I intend this to be my home for the foreseeable future and hope the new functionality I have to play with will give sarahlay.com/Thought Store plenty of space to grow.

Anyway, I can’t hang around here yakking all day – I’ve got plugins and themes and all kinds of other stuff to distract me from blogging vital local gov/social media stuff.

No related posts.