We suggested a theme of ‘collaboration’ as it seemed to fit with what was being talked about as well as the way unconferences run.

At the end of the day we had a tracklisting for a compilation CD. Here is the LGCYH Mixtape as it sounds at the moment:

1. I Wanna Go (where the people go) – Wildhearts
2. Let’s Stay Together – Al Green
3. Stuck in the Middle With You – Stealer’s Wheel
4. Within You and Without You – The Beatles
5. Altogether Now – The Farm
6. Come Together – Primal Scream
7. We Are the World – Michael Jackson
8. 24 Hour Party People – Happy Mondays
9. I Belong to Glasgee (traditional)
10. Smile – The Fall
11. (I’m in with) The In Crowd – Dobie Gray
12. Money – Pink Floyd
13. Free Will – Rush
14. He’s Making a Mixtape – Billy Childish
15. Ice Ice Baby – Vanilla Ice (I think for the line ‘Stop, collaborate and listen’)

Cheekily I’d suggest one more – Perfect Day by Lou Reed. Because LocalGovCamps always make me smile when they’re filled with the innovating cynics who are trying so hard to find ways for localgov to go forward.

I’ll put this together as a playlist over at epicmixtape when I get a moment too! If you have any other suggestions please feel free to add them in the comments!

No related posts.

This is my fifth unconference and once again the only slight disappointment is that I couldn’t be in more places at once!

It was a great opportunity to catch up professionally and socially with some of the people I talk to lots online about localgov and have met at previous unconferences but it was also great to meet some new people in person for the first time.

LGCYH ran a parallel stream in the morning, dedicated sessions for councillors to find out more about social media and engaging online. Meanwhile the rest of us pitched our ideas and crowdsourced an agenda and began the conversations, collaboration and sharing.

Taking a step back it’s heartening to see this discussion and work taking place. There are harsh times ahead for the public sector and these people, who are willing to give up part of their weekend, a healthy blend of innovation and cynicism in most of them, are inspirational.

Here are some rough notes from the three sessions I attended.

Web Content Strategy

The first session of the day for me was one I suggested.

I’m looking at Web Content Strategy (creation, delivery and governance of web content) for my dissertation (specifically in relation to Derbyshire County Council) and as I’ve informally asked colleagues at other councils whether they have on in place.

Most commonly I’m hearing that they’re thinking about doing one or when I explain what I mean that they are doing it but haven’t got it documented.

So, this session was really a conversation about what a content strategy is or could be, what the benefit is of having one (for web professionals, for the organisations, for the visitor) and how to audit and analyse content.

We also talked about how having some of this stuff we’re doing documented against business goals, user needs and benefits / risks may help support getting stakeholder involvement and more greatly facilitate channel shift and the budget savings we all so badly need, by setting out a clear route based on research.

We also veered off into looking at supporting documentation and training for writing for the web with some interesting examples from Mike Leigh Cooper about Yortime.

We sort of wrapped up with talking about how Web Content Strategy is probably just one part of a wider Digital Strategy for organisations and should fit alongside strategies for things like Search, Engagement, Social Media etc.

Mixtapes and Cake Maps

This was a session that myself, Dan Slee and Janet E Davis came up with to discuss some of the collaborative projects we’ve been involved in or have seen. It was roughly aimed at showing how these sorts of ‘fun’ collaborations are actually really good at capturing social culture.

Teh usual unconference thing happened where once the group started talking we went off on a few tangents and covered a lot of ground: the blurring line between personal / professional identity online; how these projects allow localgov officers to develop online skills and try out tools in their own time and can then see ways to benefit the organisation with the skills and tools;  peer-to-peer reviews and information about location.

We did discuss the collaborations of the session title as well – EpicMixtape, the mmmmmmcake blog and the United Cakedom map.

We even took the collaboration offline and asked attendees of the conference to add their song suggestions for a LocalGovCamp mixtape on the theme of ‘Collaboration’. (We got lots of suggestions and the playlist will be posted soon!)

Gaming and Geo-Sensitive Services

A really interesting session by KevUpNorth on whether localgov can make use of games or location-based games / services such as FourSquare.

There were some interesting facts and figures about the current numbers using Farmville (primarily a Facebook based game app), Foursquare and the growing interest in Geocaching.

Then there were lots of great ideas about how this might be relevant and useful to localgov. Libraries, museums, galleries and other public spaces could all use games like FourSquare and Gowalla to promote themselves or specific events (we considered this for our recent literature festival).

Role playing games along the lines of Farmville could be used to support community cohesion projects (I think Call of Civic Duty is already in development) and virtual worlds like Second Life used for consulation and exploring planning and development opportunities.

Local gov shouldn’t write off gaming as irrelevant to them. They may miss out on new audiences or finding ways to deliver or evolve services in ways they can’t by traditional means.

Thanks to Kev Campbell-Wright for this session.

Thanks also to Ken Eastwood, Melanie Reed and Kev for organising the day and to the National Railway Museum for a great venue and wonderful food!

Related posts:

1. LocalGovCamp mixtape
2. Overcoming small hurdles in digital engagement #localgovcamp
3. LocalGovCamp – an unconference for local government – Birmingham 20 June 2009

With so much to pack into a day we were asked to use just one word to describe why we’d come along and what we hoped to get out of the day as we did a round of introductions. My word was ‘change’.

Here’s a quick round up of the sessions I made it to:

Mapping

Headed up by Peter Olding this session showed off Bournmouth’s web mapping as well as illicited plenty of discussion about GIS, open data, consistent formats, displaying cross-boundary information and including information from across public services.

There was also a good little chat about ‘the OS copyright issue’ and what impact the changes that are coming in April will have on local gov mapping.

I also talked about my dream (obsession) with mapping Derbyshire’s grit bins.

Accessibility of the social web

A good general discussion which posed the question ‘does anyone care about the accessibility of social media?’.

It’s an interesting discussion and there were lots of great suggestions for how accessibility can be improved around social media such as accessible Twitter and making sure you’re not offering something on a social media channel your’re not providing in a highly accessible format elsewhere.

I think a lot of people in the session (and following on the back channel) could benefit from the hugely useful presentation on social media vs accessibility by the much-missed Jack PIckard at PSFBuzz North East last year.

Libraries on Twitter

As I’m in the process of supporting Derbyshire Libraries as they set out on Facebook this was a really interesting session to listen in on and hear about how other libraries are using social media.

Haringey Library gave a great case study about how and why they got started, how they’ve grown and the benefits the channel is bringing to library users. They also shared some of the ideas they have for increasing their use of Twitter in the future.

Social Media and online communications for local elections

I put this session on to share how we made use of social media channels to deliver local election information and results in real-time in 2009. I’ve blogged this all before so check the archive for a summary of what we did!

Internal communications

Last session of the day in which we shared ways social media was being used internally, what problems is was addressing but also what barriers we were coming up against.

Session leader Hadley Beeman rounded up by asking us all to make a pledge about something we would have done at our own place of work by the end of the next day. My pledge? To stay motivated, keep being creative and continue to spread the word and try to enthuse those with more influence than I.

So, another great day filled with a lot of chat with hugely inspirational and enthusiastic public sector people who filled me with the need to get back to work as quick as possible and turn some ideas into a reality.

I did, however have a nagging feeling all day that me getting fired up and adding fuel to my desire to map grit bins (I’m at peace with my obsession) isn’t going to be enough. Or maybe it will be enough but this is a longer play than I initially thought. Either way I’m at a point where talk needs to become firmer, faster action if ‘change’ is to be more than the word I say in the morning.

Related posts:

1. Do councils need websites?
2. LocalGov group hug*
3. The future of journalism

Al had some interesting experience and innovations to share around communicating quickly information on school closures, road gritting and any affected services.

The group talked about how in a rapidly occurring situation online communication was best placed to deliver information first and respond to any inquiries from the public. Indeed, in some councils the online communicators were delivering information out of hours before press officers and others were even aware of a developing situation.

This way of working was also discussed – online communicators working in isolation are an unsustainable plan for crisis communications. Too often they are left out of the loop and get information too late or not at all meaning the benefits of the online channel are lost.

Al shared his experience of being able to work out of hours with a line to chief officers and the on-duty press officer. He is also involved in emergency planning so the online work can be included in the plan but also he is aware of where the authority is at in terms of response.

The discussion strayed further into the territory of emergency planning bu eventually came back round to how online could be used to gather information into the council as well as disseminate outward. I briefly outlined a change we were planning on making to how headteachers report school closures, using our secure schools’ extranet to which they all have access. Bringing the information in from this source would mean we could repurpose and quickly send out by RSS, by SMS, and across a number of online channels.

We’re not the only council looking to make changes in this area. Along with us there are many others who are looking at making content delivery not just through the online channel but also make it mobile (I blogged about our stats on visits from mobile and other devices during the January snow). From this a discussion on digital inclusion began with differing views across the participants about whether online was a waste of time or not given how few people can access it well. Ally Hook gave some interesting information about the number of people joining the council’s Facebook page when an unexploded WW2 bomb closed parts of the city.

There were a number of interesting points I took away from the session in terms of developing our online communications in the face of a crisis as well as integrating more fully with the council’s general contingency plan. There were some great social web innovations around reporting the uksnow but these ideas could be applied to other situations. It has also helped consolidate the thoughts floating around my head about not just thinking of online as web, or social media, or mobile – it is all of these, none of these and more.

Related posts:

1. So this is Christmas
2. Getting the conversation started
3. Do councils need websites?

This session was led by Eve Shuttleworth from the Ministry of Justice and was a great example of how an unconference can work; someone tweets a comment from an early session, leads to back channel chat, session suggested and duly added to the agenda.

The session looked at how journalism and traditional media had changed in recent times; newspaper sales declining, the number of journalists reducing but the set of skills they needed increasing. There was a lot of talk about how journalists in traditional media where increasingly becoming ‘content producers’ gathering information across a number of channels to form their story.

In some ways this lower resource in the newsroom has made a press officers life easier. as one person in the room put it: “Make a journalist’s life easier and they’ll bite your hand off.” I spoke about how increasing the amount and type of content we offered online for local elections 2009 had meant fewer enquiries into our press office on results day – the media took what they needed from what we’d already published.

A lot of the group expressed concern about journalists taking whatever they were fed without any other source being examined. Much of the time press releases were issued verbatim in the media and if any analysis was presented this was increasingly an opposing view rather than actual critical analysis. The group discussed how this shift in role for journalists, forced because of the decline in traditional media, was leading to a hole where the fourth estate used to be.

Or is it? Or are we just seeing traditional media failing in this role but haven’t noticed that there may be a movement coming along to take up the mantel. Hyperlocal blogging and citizen journalism are on the rise. They may not yet have the maturity in reporting that  media journalism does but in some areas they are just as, or even more, interested in what the press office can supply.

So how do press officers treat ‘new media’ journalists? Well, there is no consistent approach. Some provide information and answer queries on the same footing as they do for other news organisations, others see bloggers as amateurs and tend to forget they’re there.

The view that citizens shouldn’t be treated as journalists was put forward and in most cases this is true; the voice in a press release is different in tone (and rightly so) from that used in web content and different again from that when responding or communicating through social media channels. However, the hyperlocal blogger, slips somewhere between journalist and citizen and a press officer needs to build them into their contacts and speak with them in the right voice for them.

Communicating outside of the sphere of established media contacts seemed to be a sticking point for some press officers – not necessarily because they didn’t want to but because they didn’t know how. We heard from Neil Franklin of the importance of responding in a timely fashion in social media channels and from Alistair Smith on knowing when and where to respond. The flow chart to help make response decisions, by Michael Grimes, was also shared with the group.

The biggest sticking point though was attributing responses – should it be done in a personal name or could it be done under the banner of the organisation? There were some well-founded fears from press officers about putting their own name against responses or profiles. Also the issue of sign-off on communications was raised – a system which doesn’t lend itself to fast responses. Sharon O’Dea – who also blogged about this session – suggested ‘presumed competence’ may be one way round this.

There was no answers to where the future of journalism lies or what this will really mean to us as communicators. However, this session gave clear examples of how government press officers need to start developing their skills to keep pace with journalism, and the communication needs of citizens, right now.

Communication teams need a mix of skills – media liaison, listening, monitoring, responding. They need to be as comfortable creating ‘complete’ packages across channels suitable for the media or citizen consumption and they need to be aware of the benefits and potential pitfalls of communicating on the social web. And beyond this they need the support of senior management to allow them to evolve, quickly, in this way.

Related posts:

1. Crisis comms online
2. LocalGov group hug*
3. Do councils need websites?

I started out as a journalist, became and intranet manager and now sit (sometimes uncomfortably) on the fence as an all purpose online communications officer. My role covers both our external and internal sites and I am beyond fascinated (nearing the city limits of Obsession sometimes) with how the social web can drive them both for communication and engagement.

This session on social internal comms was the second of the day for me at UK GovCamp and it was as interesting as I’d hoped to hear examples of how people are already using social internally as well as discussion around problems facing internal comms.

There was some good talk around the pilot Carl Haggerty and Martin Howitt had run in Devon. Not only did Carl share the way the project had worked but also the ways the idea had gained senior buy-in – from the language used to describe it (business network not social network) to the ways different employees had got involved and the savings it had made / could make for the authority.

The way internal communications was managed got some traction, particularly on the back channel, around whether for online internal and external should be looked after by different posts, different teams or lumped in together. The fear with the latter, as Sharon O’Dea expressed, is that internal becomes the eternal poor relation as energy and resource is favourably directed at the shop window of external sites.

The talk was fast-paced in this, like every session, and it felt like it could have gone on a lot longer. The idea of a barcamp specifically for internal communications was suggested and this is now well underway to becoming a reality.

One point that really got my pulse racing was the idea that social is what an intranet should always have been.That is ecactly the thought I’ve been trying to pin down for a while!

Internal is the perfect environment for social to thrive as communication, collaboration, employee engagement and empowerment environment. While staff get the benefits so does the organisation. I’ve been interested for a while in how much power and knowledge (and efficiency) an organisation could gain from allowing all staff to feed in and create a hive mind, an internal serendipity engine.

But that sort of talk is too much to really explore at the end of one session – exactly why a barcamp for internal comms is a great idea!

Related posts:

1. Social networking for councils
2. Internal networks – #localgovcamp
3. Public sector intranets

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

Sessions I went to and will try to post thoughts on soon included:

• Local Gov Group Hug  – an experience sharing session about ’selling’ the idea internally. Lots of positive examples of social media working beneficially for citizens and organisations.
• Social internal comms – is there a place for social web technologies to be used internally in the organistion?
• #uksnow – innovation used in recent bad weather and how social media / mobile could and should be used in crisis comms.
• The future of journalism – where is traditional media headed and how should a government / local gov press office evolve.
• Knowledge Hub workshop

There were loads of other sessions I would have loved to attend – lots of stuff about opening up data, what makes a perfect council website and the Downing Street response to the postcode petition. I’m always slightly disappointed I can’t be in more than one place at the same time. Excellent social reporting helped me keep up as the day progressed and soak up more details since.

I always come away from an unconference buzzing with ideas and re-invigorated to carry on with projects already in process. At several times yesterday though I did wish that I wasn’t the only one there from my organisation.

A lot of the sessions or discussions are continuations of those from other unconferences or that I am involved in online. Sometimes there is a sense of preaching to the converted. I’m not sure how much further I can move on certain things without more people from my organisation joining the conversation to allow some momentum to gather.

Yesterday there was lots of new conversation too – less about social media (perhaps this is moving toward being the norm) and more about opening up data. And the energy gathered from simply being around so many passionate people who are really thinking about changing the way we / things work is invaluable.

So, thanks to Dave Briggs for organising, Google for hosting us at their HQ and all the sponsors. Thanks also to Hadley Beeman and sponsors for the social gathering afterwards.

And well done, big thanks to Sharon O’Dea for raffling off epicvisionary.com raising more than £300 to be donated to the DEC appeal for Haiti. Whoever had the winning ticket I hope you use it well

No related posts.

‘Be passionate, be pursuasive, persevere and share’

I think this has stood me pretty well for the second half of the year and is sentiment I’ll be taking with me into 2010.

This year has been a fascinating and exciting journey for me professionally and academically. I finally feel as if the freaks and geeks of my beloved online are starting to make a real difference. Slowly, with plenty of frustration, but also with imagination, creativity and insight I can only dream of.

Without gushing too much it has been an honour to share ideas and conversation with so many passionate and inspirational people. I’m truely excited to see what is built in 2010 on the foundations laid this past year and having more talk with more people about social web for social good (and no doubt banging on about why devolved authorship doesn’t work!)

Wishing you all the best for the 2010!

Related posts:

1. LocalGovCamp – an unconference for local government – Birmingham 20 June 2009

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