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

It’s one of those tasks that is often pushed down the To Do list or is put off because of the scale of the challenge, particularly when you manage an organisation’s entire web presence or intranet. Sometimes it’s easier to assume you know your website, because you’re the manager and that’s your job, than set aside the time to plan and execute a content audit, analyse the findings and get your recommendations taken up.

I have just started looking at auditing my organisation’s website, as part of the work toward my MA dissertation (more about both on the About page). I’m collecting a load of information about the content (initially a sample of 300ish pages) including mapping the structure, where the content is stored server-wise, what type of content it is, keywords, unique page views over a three month period, feedback from users, enquiries into our contact centre and elements of content on the page (such as documents, images etc).

As well as collecting all this information there is a more heuristic evaluation involved in checking the content for accessibility and usability, currency, compliance with our style guide, whether it is (or could be) transactional, who the owner / author is and which business goal or user need this is supporting.

Putting aside the academic reasons for doing this audit from an organisational point of view the findings should help to identify content which needs removing or archiving certain areas of content, improving areas which should be but aren’t working for the site visitor and formulating a plan for development for specific content and the governance of it as well as for the site as a whole.

I’ve made a first pass over the 300 pages in my sample and the findings weren’t unexpected but were a little surprising in places. Some pages got a lot more external traffic than I’d assumed they did, others which support high priority services barely registered with visitors (based on stats and visitor and channel feedback).

There were also some likely candidates for archiving simply because the information was not current. Of course the content owner may be able to update it to give some current context making it relevant to visitors.

I’m looking forward to getting to know this content better as I head back into the audit for the heuristic elements and linking it to the business goals and user needs. It’s making for an interesting dissertation but also knowledge without which I’m not sure I’d ever been really, truly managing the organisation’s web content or supporting authors in our service areas where they are responsible for managing the content.

There is always loads of talk about how creating channel shift to online will create efficiencies for local government / public sector but one of those efficiences surely needs to be in the way we manage and nurture the online content? How can we do that if we don’t know what is there or how people are already using (or we’re failing to support them using) it?

Related posts:

1. Say anything:Google’s Sidewiki
2. Snow…to go!
3. Do councils need websites?

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

Carl Haggerty & Stuart Harrison tweet from PSF Buzz

Headed up to Newcastle today for the Public Sector Forums’ event on Effective Social Media and Web 2.0 Strategies for Local Authorities – AKA PSFBuzz North East!!!

This a chance to meet up with some very inspiring, enthusiastic and dedicated local gov online people – some of whom had been at localgovcamp a few weeks ago but some of whom I had only had online conversations with so far so good to meet in person.

Oh, and the line up was pretty good too! I live blogged my notes for each session as well as I could (shaky wifi due to rampant tweeters) and will go back and try and add a sensible summary to each post. You can also catch up with the metaconference on Twitter at #psfbuzz.

Speakers for today:

• Simon Wakeman, Medway Council – Social Media: A Revolution in Local Government Communications? You can see my notes from the session or Simon has posted the presentation on his blog.
• Mike Saunt – sorry! I didn’t write the title down
  
• Jack Pickard – Accessibility and social media
  and you can also see what Jack blogged at The Pickards
• Carl Haggerty – unblocking access to social media and creating policy / guidance
• Alistair Smith – Managing reputation online
• Stuart Harrison – Planbot / TwitterPlan
• Dave Briggs – Four steps to social media success

The whole day was a blast with the presentations being thought provoking, funny and useful in equal measure. Thanks to all involved in putting it on (PSF, Newcastle, Dave Briggs, suppliers etc). Good to see so many people there – would be great to see other events on same format in other regions

A few actions I have set myself after this day:

• Revisit the social media guidelines I drafted and make some changes / additions then chase to get them in place
• Start tracking the conversation happening in the online space about our organisation
• Start tracking the scope and impact of our socmed communications
• A few other things too vague to be stuck up here but have made it to the ‘think on’ post-it in my diary :0)

Related posts:

1. PSF Buzz NE Simon Wakeman
2. Public sector intranets
3. Getting the conversation started