Well, we’re currently advertising for just that – on a 12 month contract. This is mainly because myself and another of the officers have both got maternity leave coming up.

You can see the advert on the Jobs Derbyshire website as well as a job description and person spec – you can even apply online! The JD is, well it’s a job description and doesn’t go into the minute detail of the job.

If you’ve read anything on this blog or work or follow digital comms and engagement for local government you’ll have a good idea of what it might involve: content and task management for websites, digital development, reputation management etc etc etc. You can of course drop an email (as per the job ad – not to me) for an informal chat.

So if you fancy seizing the opportunity to continue developing our digital portfolio for the good of citizens and the organisation I urge you to apply!

Closing date is 26 September.

Related posts:

1. Getting the conversation started

As with most Facebook functionality the default option is that you fully opt-in to the service, which will allow you to use GPS to share your location. There are a few of these location-based services duking it out at the moment – Foursquare, Gowalla – but these have you opted out of sharing your data as default, unlike the Facebook approach. And let’s not forget that Facebook is by far the bigger network and therefore any changes to privacy settings is affecting far more people, most of whom are not uber-savvy early adopters.

I’ve noticed lots of people in my Facebook network posting instructions of how to ’switch off’ Facebook places. The step-by-step they suggested led you to untick two options in the Notifications tab. This struck me as being only part of the process if you really want to opt-out entirely.

An email from a friend along the same lines led me to dial up my interest and have a proper look at Facebook Places.

Turning off the options on the Notification tab only stops Facebook from notifying you when you or a friend in your network is tagged with the Places system. Your friends, applications and applications used by your friends will still be able to use your location and share this information. Clearly if you have concerns about having your location shared this is the bigger problem – in fact you’d probably want to be notified, especially if you’ve tried to opt-out.

And how do you opt out? Well, there are some good instructions in this Mashable article – check the What About Privacy? section.

So, what are the things to remember right now? Well, firstly that Places hasn’t rolled out to the UK yet. Secondly, like Fourquare and Gowalla it is intended to be used from a Smartphone. Thirdly, switching off the notifications does just that – you need to change your custom settings to stop yourself being tagged with locations.

What Facebook Places means for businesses and (in my case) non-profit organisation Pages remains to be seen – alongside all the other changes Facebook plans for this area of the network.

Related posts:

1. What I use and why

We’re currently gearing up for the project to redesign / rebuild our public website and I tweeted a couple of people at other authorities I knew were a little further down the line or recently relaunched. Within a day we’d gathered a number of like minds and Liz Azyan had suggested we find a space to share more fully.

From this Ken Eastwood set up a Huddle for us all to join, discuss and share our experiences and knowledge around redesigning council websites.

There are already some interesting and useful discussions happening around user research and testing, technology, information architecture and content migration.  Potentially this could help share good practice, hints and tips between authorities and somewhere in there is a saving I’m sure

If you work in local government and have experience to share or questions to ask about redesigning a council website contact me or Ken Eastwood for an invite to Huddle.

Related posts:

1. Crisis comms online
2. Do councils need websites?
3. Getting the conversation started

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

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?

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.

To be honest, I hadn’t really thought through the detail before throwing the tweet out there (there’s my JFDI streak coming out again) but it seemed to gain a little momentum.

My idea? How about sharing case studies, work in progress, lessons learnt etc through short video clips. A local gov version of the TEDx presentations if you will.

In response Ingrid Koehler called for people to make suggestions of who they’d like to see a video from or a subject they’d be interested in. Suggestions were forthcoming but for big names like Martha Lane Fox. A great idea – and I’d watch that video – but my real interest would lie in getting contributions from local gov officers working at the coal face of digital (so to speak).

A three-minute video sharing a how to on something like setting up social web monitoring, how an authority has got some value out of using social bookmarking, success at selling ideas internally, step-by-steps to ‘techy’ sounding things explained for non-techies. I’m sure some of those things exist already but if they’re done by local gov officers if gives a point of call for further information or referencing.

I guess it assumes we all have access to to a webcam or Flip  or can screencast what we’re doing and that without the prompt of a social reporter can speak on a subject without clamming up. Maybe someone has suggestions for how we might overcome these sorts of issues?

I wonder also if presenting ideas and case studies in this way might help reach some of those working on digital in authorities but who aren’t (for whatever reason) engaged with Communities of Practice or informal networks on Twitter. It’s a way of passing on the knowledge in a way where they can still be passive.

A start could be to aggregate all the videos of local gov people and information that is already out there into one place. Or maybe I should have vodcasted this post to kick things off?

Related posts:

1. Crisis comms online
2. Social networking for councils
3. Getting the conversation started

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

Having already renamed the A52 dual-carrigeway between the city and Nottingham Sir Brian Clough Way who would be next?

An online poll run by Derby City Council shortlisted three Derby-connected people and opened the vote to the world.

John Flamsteed (the first Astronomer Royal) and Merlin (after the Rolls-Royce engine) both lost out to a virtual child of the city – Lara Croft.

The star of the Tomb Raider games and played by Angelina Jolie in the spin-off films was created by Derby-based firm Core Design in the 1990s. While no longer coming from the city her inclusion clearly caught the eye of online voters around the world with 28,000 people backing her and giving her 89% of the vote.

So the Osmaston Road to Burton Road stretch of the ring road will take on her moniker (another stretch will be named Mercian Way after the army regiment which recruits from the area).

It’s interesting that the council decided to use an online poll to make the choice – a great display of letting people decide on issues in their own community. It was also interesting that they made it a poll open to absolutely everyone though. I wonder how many of the 28,000 voters are Derby-citizens?

A great PR opportunity for sure and the cynical may say that is why Lara was included in the poll – for the cult / youth / cool vote. However, I think it is great that Derby’s digital heritage is being honoured.

So her pixels aren’t still honed in Derby and she caused Core (and later Eidos) a few problems but her birth there is an important part of the city’s modern industry. She’s not a passing fad having been well-established globally in the gaming and movie markets.

It’ll be interesting to see whether the council use more online polls or means of engaging with local (and not-so-local) people for other decisions. Twenty-eight thousand certainly sounds like more than the average for consultations undertaken in traditional channels (I am guessing there though).

In the meantime let’s all hope that driving along Lara Croft way doesn’t involve a series of tasks which end up making you want to drown things.

If you’re interested in digital in Derby check out the Social Media Cafe and have your say about its future in our very own online survey!

No related posts.