As with so very many things my thoughts started to whir after passively being involved in a Twitter discussion (predominently) between Phil Rumens, Sarah Jennings and Carl Haggerty.

What started as a back and forth about the possibility of an outdoor govcamp, considered a govcamp tour and simultenous camps in various locations (using Govstock for rural camps and the citycamp type badge for urban happenings) and sort of wound up being about innovation spaces (well, wound up in so much as the conversation has slowed for now).

It’s all interesting stuff in itself – I’d certainly be interested in Govstock or the CampCamp which has been talked about before (an unconference outdoors in actually tents and the like). But what really caught my eye was the talk about innovation spaces.

At the Digital Summit event last week (and I will blog about that soon) Carl was part of the panel and one of the first things he mentioned was the room we were in. The facilities at Local Government House are nothing to sniff about, interesting enough and suited to conferences and workshops but, Carl asked, is it inspiring?

He compared the white walls of the room we were in that day to the colourful, quirky, offices of Google. He pondered whether we need to rethink the environment that surrounds us, as well as change culture, if we’re to really support and encourage digital innovation in local government.

That question was still going around somewhere in the back of my mind as I watched the Twitter conversation happen today – and it started flashing brighter as the words ‘innovation space’ were tweeted.

What does an ‘innovation space’ look like, I wondered? Is it the great outdoors as suggested by Govstock, is it the bright colours and playfulness of an internet empires urban office, or is it the removal of outside stimulus to let thoughts flow (think floatation tank or the dimly lit reflective practice room at UKGC12).

Is it less about the physical environment and more about the removal of the expected cultural norm. The flattening of hierarchies, trusting and listening to people, allowing choice and passion to be the order of the day.

Is it that an innovation spaces would be different to each person? That one person would find inspiration in the bright colours while the next would find them a distraction? That dim quiet room would be oppressive boredom for some.

So what’s the answer? As usual I’m not sure I know. I don’t think there is a wrong one though other than doing nothing at all. Try different ways to nurture creativity, to inspire and support innovation. It might be getting outside, it might be changing the space you work in, it might be chatting to likeminds and constructive challengers online, or it might be going off grid. I guess it might even be a combination.

So, what does an innovation space look like?

This post is titled after Wide Open Space by Mansun.

No related posts.

What is LocalGov Digital?

LocalGov Digital is a practitioner network created and functioning in the spirit of local government’s sector-led improvement agenda.

Our overarching purpose is to raise standards in web provision and the use of digital by councils across the country, and to create a digital framework that is flexible enough to respond to local needs.

We exist to support improvement strategies in the delivery of services so that local government can be efficient, productive and serve local needs.

Our belief is that an overarching and fundamental principle is that local government is and should be ‘open by default and digital by design’.

At the centre is a steering group which connects the wider network with national bodies such as the Local Government Association (LGA – the voice of local government), government departments and other partners involved in improving how services are delivered to citizens.

What’s your involvement?

The group has so far been self-selecting and I’m honoured that the work I’ve done at Derbyshire, collaboratively as part of my MA (in eCommunications) and the thoughts published on this blog and elsewhere online have led to me being a part of LocalGov Digital.

The steering group has met a couple of times to discuss terms of reference, what we are, what projects we feel are key and how we’ll achieve that. This week the group voted on a few positions to give the work some shape. The results were:

• Chair – Carl Haggerty, Devon County Council. Carl and his work on digital content strategy for a transforming organisation has been key in the creation of this group.
• Vice Chair (South) – Phil Rumens, West Berkshire District Council. Phil has a great mix of technical and communications skills and has been a driving force in getting the group started.
• Vice Chair (North) – Carl Whistlecraft, Kirklees Council. Carl is a driving force in transforming democratic services through digital and this experience, and the areas of work he represents, are an essential part of the group.
• Communications Lead (South) – Alastair Smith, Hackney Council. One of the best communicators in local government right now I’m very happy to be sharing the comms lead responsibilities with Al.
• Communications Lead (North) – Sarah Lay, Derbyshire County Council. Yep, that’s me. A grown-up position on a grown-up committee, providing communications support for work I really believe is not only vital but achievable.

Where can I find out more?

We’re working on this at the moment. The website is under-development and should be available very soon. In the meantime you can follow us on twitter or take a look at #localgovdigital.

Related posts:

1. Digital Content Strategy KHub group
2. ReallyUsefulDay – GDS meets localgov
3. LocalGov group hug*

1. Customer service and information provision is needed around the clock – it was more obvious than ever this year that social media is now a natural part of a great many people’s lives. This we already knew from recent stats (link) but it’s interesting to see it happening in reality on your own profiles. What was even more interesting / frightening is that people have no concept of ‘out of hours’ online. If they can find you in a digital space they expect an answer as quickly at 11pm on a Friday night as they do a 10.30am on a Wednesday. Dealing with this ‘always on’ presence is something that needs to be tackled.
2. Responsive design to suit your audience – the speed at which mobile / tablet is taking a share of the digital audience is really quite phenomenal, and it shows no sign of stopping. This means, right at the top of your to do list, should be finding ways you can better reach and provide information to them. My flag is firmly planted in the responsive design camp – make your site and your content transform dependent on the device accessing it.
3. Findability and not being complacent about search – In the past I’ve been as guilty as any of being complacent about search, about skimming the surface of how things get ‘found’ and thinking SEO is mostly a dark art. But my mind began to be changed when I read the still-excellent ‘Search’ by John Batelle four or five years ago (ish). Search is more important than ever, and is changing. No longer can you purely rely on the authority of your domain, but need a cohesive approach to triumph in both organic (and the value of this is diminishing as display space is at such a premium on smaller devices and paid-for get’s prime position) and paid-for results. If people can’t find you it doesn’t matter how much great stuff you’re doing, the benefit melts away.
4. Resilience and making sure you can take the load – of course, if people can find you then may come in a blizzard, huge drifts of traffic threatening to overwhelm your website. Common sense but be as sure as you possibly can that your website can take the numbers if and when they do come, and have a back-up plan to get back online quickly or push info out through other channels while you dig your server out.
5. Analysis and making a plan for next time – the most important part of anything you do; finding the evidence, learning from it and using it to inform your plan for next time. If you don’t know the finer details of reach, engagement and quality of interaction you’re using digital socially and not for business or service delivery. Get your measurements in order and know how to interpret the data you gather. A vital skill for digital comms practitioners that is rising ever higher in the mix you need to perform well.

And one final thought; recently snow has become sexy in local government comms. Everyone wants in on that grit action and although there are some fairly complex business processes being redesigned in the digital wake, as well as a nudgenudgenudge at culture change this is quite low-hanging fruit in the wider digital service delivery picture. That’s not to say it isn’t important, that it doesn’t touch the lives of a big percentage of the population, or that it isn’t a fine fast-paced open-field in which to learn, adapt and deliver digital comms.

It is all that, but it’s also not the end. Principles developed here, experience gained, should be pointed toward other services in need of the amplification and digital delivery treatment. And the general conversation needs to move on from Twitter Gritter to a more mature model for this topic and all the others too.

The title of this post refers to a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song – check out the video for 15 Feet of Pure White Snow here.

Sarah also writes about music at Louder Than War – read those words here.

Related posts:

1. Snow…to go!
2. Crisis comms online
3. Death of a party

How great a deal for organisations has Facebook been over the last few years? Loads of people you want to reach are using it (and using it a lot), you can set up a presence there in a few minutes, it’s free and well, everyone else has been getting on there, why shouldn’t you? On paper (or screens) it looks like the holy grail of communications and traffic sources.

Things that look too good to be true usually are though and recently organisations have been questioning whether Facebook is really the place for them. Sometimes this has come out of good solid evidence that their business just won’t succeed in the space (wrong business, wrong audience) and other times it’s just been a knee-jerk to having to work harder to play Facebook at the eyeballs-on-posts game.

The new EdgeRank algorithm Facebook uses to decide who sees what is geared toward individuals and making organisations pay to promote. And while this has been met by cries of ‘it’s not fair’ from those who’ve put lots of investment into pages just to see the return snatched from them it’s actually a pretty reasonable move by what is, afterall, a business.

So, now Facebook has started limiting the reach of your effort is it time to ditch the network and get your social media comms on elsewhere? I don’t think so. At least not yet.

It’s all about effort you see – and you’re probably just going to have to make a little bit more to make the network the point at which your users’ need and your business need meet.

Why are you there?

Well, apart from the reasons listed above (it’s free, everyone uses it, other organisations in my sector are) what is the business aim you’re working toward meeting or the user need you’re trying to fulfill? “We’re engaging” is a little bit woolly if we’re honest. With who? What for?

Unless you’ve got a clear aim and a plan for how to get there you’re probably wasting your (and your organisation’s time) on Facebook anyway. Sure, your plan can (and probably should) change as you adapt to a changing set of goals / circumstance, different user behaviour, or indeed the platform itself.

One page to rule them all might not be the way to go – and your digital spidey sense can tell you this as much as the data – but smaller pages serving niche interests and communities may work better.

The long-standing question has been ‘Who wants to ‘like’ their council?’. My feeling is still that a corporate page will have limited appeal but pages for services people are passionate about (countryside, libraries, civic pride), or campaign pages, will do better. To level up you have to make them all work as well as possible for the purpose they serve and know how you would utilise them to reach a wider audience with emergency, or even just a cross-issue, communications.

Brace for impact – here comes EdgeRank

So, you’ve got a few hundred people liking your page and the little number at the bottom of each post tells you that most of the time the number of people seeing that update is in double figures. Seems OK if you don’t delve deeper. But let’s express that number another way:

Take the number of people seeing a post on your page /  number of ‘likes’ for your page overall = % of ‘likers’ seeing your post

It’s probably a lot lower than the 15% of Page likers Facebook itself says will see your updates in their newsfeed under the new EdgeRank algorithm. Most page managers noticed this at the end of last year as the new algorithm rolled out. Simon Dell blogged about it here and Matthew Murray also blogged about how it had impacted on the local gov page he manages.

Around 25% would be a more palatable percentage. It can be done but you have to hit on the right formula – and that’s going to be different depending what your page is about, who your audience is, how you’re telling them about the page and what you’re putting there to interest them.

The music publication page I help manage has more than 11,300 ‘likers’, most of our posts reach 15-25% but we can see up to 70% reach on stuff that is interesting / unique. Know your audience, know your page and know what you’re doing to link the two together and increase the eyeballs each post you make gets in front of.

Time to leave or time to be better?

One answer to how local gov, organisations and businesses make the most of Facebook is, quite simply, for them to be better at using the network. Easier said than done, especially as everyone is being expected to do more with less.

And, assuming you want to be better at engaging or delivering via the social network, how do you do that?

Well, tracking and evaluating is one way. How many Facebook Page managers really know what’s working for their page, what the people ‘liking’ their page actually ‘like’ and how this fits with the bigger digital picture for their organisation? Probably not as many as should.

There are more than 200 types of data you can get from your Facebook Insights. You’re not going to have time to look at them all nevermind analyse and plan from them. That’s ok though as you’re not going to need them all.

I’d suggest you do need to get some basics in hand though – headline figures such as how many likes you have (and how much this has grown by) are fine but need some more detail to be useful. Check how many subscribers you’ve got (people who have told Facebook to show your updates in their feed), what sort of posts are getting the highest levels of engagement and reach, what day and time is busiest on your page (clue: it’s probably not during your office hours as this is a ‘social’ network for the everyman/woman).

Page managers have all this data at their fingertips and should be using it, along with some qualitative data pulled from their activity and analytics from their other digital presences, to get the most (and offer the most) through their Facebook page.

The bottom line is that if you use all of this quantitative and qualitative data to inform your efforts and you’re still not getting people engage with you on the network, it’s probably not the right channel for what you’re trying to achieve. There’s no shame in that – you just have to adjust your expectations and your business plan accordingly.

Give it to me quick

In summary then:

• EdgeRank is limiting the number of people seeing the posts you make on your page in their newsfeed: Fact
• Review why your organisation is using the network, and how you’ve established your presence (one page for your whole organisation or many pages for services or niche communities).
• Get to grips with your data. Learn how to use Insights and use the data to track activity, understand the platform and audience. Then be better.
• Don’t forget your qualitative data too. Insights give you the numbers, you need to gather the qualitative info to balance it out and give context.
• Try to stay away from knee-jerk reactions. Like any communications, engagement or service delivery activity you should investigate why you’re going to use a certain channel, and likewise you should know exactly why you’re going to stop. Don’t forget to compare the ‘success’ of your page with your ‘success’ in other channels.

The title of this blog post is taken from the Blur track Death of a Party. See the video here.

Sarah also writes about music at Louder Than War and is a local music promoter at Noble and Wild. You can also follow her on Twitter.

Related posts:

1. Turning the volume down
2. Social networking for councils
3. Fifteen feet of pure white snow

This blog has been dormant for most of it. I started 2012 with the intention to blog something about local government digital comms every week. And like all resolutions I started off strong. Then life, rather than laziness, got in the way.

But my early commitment was fuelled by Dan Slee – he encouraged me to blog every week – and from his enthusiasm and gentle pushes on Twitter Weekly Blog Club was conceived.

Even though I’ve not actively been posting since March I’ve kept an eye on the Weekly Blog Club and been impressed not only with the wide range of curated content but also the genuine support network it’s become.

It seemed only right that in breaking my own blogging silence I recognise Weekly Blog Club.

Mainly helmed by Janet Davies it’s also had guest editors curate the posts to spread the load. It’s encouraged people to start writing on subjects that interest them, helped them get something from blogging on a personal and professional level. All this from an off-the-cuff jokey tweet about my own lack of commitment to regular blogging.

Whether or not you write, whatever your interests, if you like reading original words and thinking then I’d strongly suggest you start following on Twitter or head over the blog.

What about me in 2013?

I suppose it’s time to get back on the blogging carousel!

I’ve been writing (a lot) in 2012 but not about local government or digital comms. It’s still my day job but my writing this year has been focussed on a different subject, albeit one just as close to my heart; music.

I’ve been incredibly honoured to become a part of the Louder Than War editorial team and be given opportunities not only to write about, but meet, some of my most favourite artists. It’s taken some getting used to one of my Top 5 Music Journalists of All Time being my editor but it’s wonderful to get feedback on my writing and work from someone who’s own writing and ethic I admire very much.

Anyway, if you’re interested in that side of my writing you can find my author profile on Louder Than War here.

It’s also time though to get back into writing for this blog on local government and digital comms. 2013 will be a big year on this front – the work of the Government Digital Service and GovUK has transformed central government but this year could be local government’s time to harness the pockets of innovation and really move forward as a sector.

There’s interesting things happening on that front and I’ll blog more about it in the coming weeks.

For now though, it’s time to press publish and see if all the sparks still fire in the right places

Oh, and happy New Year everyone!

Related posts:

1. The Fear

It’s something that makes it way to the front of the thought queue every couple of weeks but got a boost a few days ago when I was sent the infographic below off the back of my post about women and ambition.

The infographic shows that girls are smarter than boys but perform worse when asked to actively think about their gender. Some of the figures are pretty shocking although no surprise.

Even in the non-techy bits of digital I tend to see there are definitely more men than women (although it’s an unfair representation of society in a number of other ways as well.

Putting aside the ratio of men to women for a moment what about this stat: “One fifth of female computer science students questioned whether they belonged there”. If it’s something you’re interested in, good at and have chosen should you ever have to question whether you should do something based on gender?

Created by: Engineering Degree

There’s been a couple of other interesting conversations I’ve seen this week about women in tech. One about sexism in tech being one of the reasons women don’t go into the field or stay there. The discussion came off the back of this piece.

And then today I noticed a conversation on Twitter between LouLouK, Adrian Short and Phil Rumens about whether Wired UK is too male-focused or whether it is that way because their readership is predominantly male.

The conversation covered some interesting points in a short number of tweets including what ‘geek’ actually means now. Is it a label which is being corrupted by advertisers? Who identifies with this term?

Aside from recognising the issues here what is / could be done in a practical sense to move forward? Even if the number of women working or attracted to the many disciplines in the tech field grows slowly how can we help the women already working their feel they belong?

Related posts:

1. Mike Saunt

This week we launched the Digital Content Strategy group on the Knowledge Hub and we’re hoping this will be a good starting point to build a community. share knowledge and files, have discussions and bring together blog posts on the subject.

Over the last couple of months we’ve tried out a couple of different online spaces to try and make what we envisioned a reality but, for now, KHub seems to be closest fit and the place where most practitioners can access and are happy to share stuff.

While we’re intending to focus the group on content strategy in local government the group is open and so if you feel it would be a good place to learn and share from your own work in or around the sector please do join us. You can get started by joining the KHub and then joining the group.

Carl and I will be facilitating the group but if you’d like to join us then just drop one of us a line.

Let’s get the Digital Content Strategy in local gov conversations underway…

Related posts:

1. Content strategy WTF? session at UKGC12
2. Content strategy linkapaloosa
3. Content strategy in local government

Are some of your web pages a bit slow? Do they make you moan or wail in despair when you see them? Are they a bit grey and possibly have words flapping loose? Do you have nightmares about them and fear they want to suck the living will from you?

*whispers* You might have an infestation of zombie content on your website.

That is to say your website might be a bit bloated because it’s carrying a lot of dead weight. Pages which have outstayed their welcome and which fail to serve any purpose at the end of their useful lifespan.

The information might be out of date, the campaign might have long since passed. The pages could be the unwitting victims of vanity publishing or a page that was once vital but the user or business need which spawned it has now disappeared.

This zombie content, pages that should have gone to their grave (or at least the archive) but haven’t are still hanging around your website. While they’re doing that they’re getting in the way of your visitors. Do I need to tell you that’s not good? Well, it’s not, not good at all.

Creating content, publishing content, even promoting that content are all pretty common activities and whether we get them right or not there’s a whole load of people busily getting on with these activities. Content management though, that’s got to include taking care of your content when it comes to the end of its life.

Stages of digital content lifecycle

There are a few different theories about how many stages content goes through in its lifecycle. Gerry McGovern proposes there are three – creation, editing, publishing and Bob Boiko argues in a similar vein in the Content Management Bible.

Others make cases for up to seven stages in lifecycle, with this longer cradle-to-grave pathway proposed by Bob Doyle recognising that there is an end to a piece of content’s useful life and action should be taken to actively manage this end point (he calls this archives).

You could infact make the chain even longer by getting tighter on activities within each point of the lifecycle. Kristina Halvorson suggested 15 steps to the cycle in Content Strategy for the Web – audit, analyse, strategise, categorise, structure, create, revise, revise, revise, approve, tag, format, publish, update, archive. This takes into account that getting content right isn’t an easy or quick process but also that the current way of working online requires more than just writing and publishing the right words – you need to make your content findable (tag).

Not all content lives forever

To my mind the number of phases in the lifecycle will depend on the piece of content – a tweet will have a different lifecycle to an organisation’s contact page on their website to a personal Facebook status update to a news report published on YouTube.

Self-publishing for pleasure or vanity (and perhaps this blog falls into both!) will likely have less phases than something official for an organisation’s website just because there are less people involved. This blog post, for example, will have the following lifecycle – created,edited, published, active (being promoted, visited and commented on),archived. That last bit – the archive, well that happens pretty automatically on a blog as newer content knocks it back and eventually it finds eternal peace in a month by month archive. You may need a more hands on process for your organisation’s web content though.

For a typical organisation web page I’d suggest the following lifecycle:

1. Creation – this could be curation of existing content from other sources, original work or collaboration. I’d say that this first step can include gathering many content types together to form a page (words, images, documents, links) and also should include tagging and addition of any metadata.
2. Editing – this may be done as part of the next step or may be done before. It may loop around between steps 2 and 3 a lot before moving to its next phase.
3. Approval – possible two-step between an offline approval through organisation hierarchy and online through workflow processes.
4. Active – like the blog this will be when you content is useful, in use, being promoted, visited, shared and talked about. During the active phase there should be several loops where the content is checked and possibly revised (so briefly revisting steps 2 and 3 again). At some point one of these visits will end with you moving to step 5.
5. Archive or removal – this is the point at which your content has stopped being useful or in use. You may need it to remain in public view but it needs to be marked as out of date, linked to its successor and be embalmed – change its metadata to stop it getting in a users way when they search. You may be able to remove it from your website altogether however as a whole page or its component parts it may need to be stored somewhere to meet your organisation’s record management needs.
6. Reanimation – your content may need to come back from the dead. Seasonal content in particular could be retrieved from your archive and start it’s lifecycle at step 2 again.

Lots of people are excelling at steps 1-4 and while they think of themselves as ‘content managers’ they’re really ‘content creators’. To be a content manager you need to see past your content’s hey day and plan for it’s demise, and be willing to take action at the appropriate point. Don’t allow zombie content to flourish on your website through failure to work out the right lifecycle and manage the content through all the phases.

*If your problem isn’t with zombie content but with actual zombies then I believe removing the head or destroying the brain is the way to go. Good luck.

Photo credit

Image by aeviin of Zombie Walk Warsaw 2008 published under a creative commons licence on Flickr.

Related posts:

1. Content strategy in local government
2. Content strategy linkapaloosa
3. Getting to know you

Hosted at DCLG, the day had a practical bent as after some initial background information was given we broke into groups and focused on re-working a user task to come up with an ideal wireframe for the journey. In the morning sessions we looked at tasks a citizen may be carrying out while the afternoon tried to focus more on services for businesses.

It was a great way to tackle the problem and get everyone involved and trying to think in the GDS way – putting the user at the heart of it all, simplifying the journeys and making savings for Government.

I joined the team working on ‘disruption to services caused by severe weather’ in the morning and ‘complaining about the council’ in the afternoon (other topics included planning applications, paying business rates, school term dates. getting a license for a street party and registering to vote).

Here’s five things I took away from the day…

The creation of simplicity is a complex process

What came out of both the journeys I looked at was that to create the GovUK level of simplicity on these tasks is going to be incredibly complicated, mainly because of the number of tiers in local government and involvement of other agencies. Not to in any way undermine what GDS has achieved (because it is a massive shift) but this, I think, is more complicated that what they’ve done so far which is typically one question / task with information from one department. They’ve made massive leaps in the way that’s presented but it’s (usually) and A to B journey.

However, it’s not going to be A to B with services from local government. It’s going to be A to B, or C, or B and C, and D. This came up pretty quickly with the severe weather topic. A user probably wouldn’t start from ‘severe weather disruption’ but the main service they’re interested in disruption of – school closures, road gritting, bin collections. Severe weather disruption could be a lot of different services from a lot of different organisations and sign posting to the right one at the right time is going to be a doozy.

The quality of information they’re signposting to is yet another potential issue with no easy answer. Anyone worth their salt working in digital will know what they should be doing in terms of content quality and user experience but whether they’re able to implement that against their organisation’s culture, technology and current offering is a different thing altogether.

Your culture is not our culture – yet

The question baking my noodle throughout the day was ‘how is the GDS culture and direction going to get embedded in local government?’. The simple fact is that the Government Digital Service has been specifically created to do this (massive) task for central government and empowered to make it happen. They can’t force that on local government but they’re going to need to persuade them to follow suit if this is really going to work.

But at the moment Agile is alien, UX is theory more than practice and digital by default has yet to reach the provinces. Of course this is a generalisation. There is massive innovation in local government, bags of passion (also pockets of apathy and resistance to change).

The people there today, and at things like GovCamp, are generally the impassioned and engaged, who want the change and are willing to do it by stealth as much as persuasion. But at the end of the day central government has been tasked and empowered to turn the digital supertanker in a way that local gov (mostly) has not.

The LocalDirectGov database is the key

It’s also been the secret. It’s been recent news to me that the way GovUK is linking to local services is via the listings councils upload through the LocalDirectGov database. I’m willing to accept I might be the last person to learn of this but I suspect I’m not.

Someone needs to do some sustained leaning on councils to take their info really seriously, get on top of their uploads and sort out their 200/404 error pages.Someone needs to tell them it’s going to be doing this job and communicate the benefit to them of getting on board.

Keep it super simple for citizens

The basic premise is that the average citizen doesn’t know which organisation delivers which of their services, they don’t care and to be frank, why the heck should they? Keep it simple, let them use words that make sense to them and get them to the info they need or through the process as simply and efficiently as possible without troubling them with trifles like who’s delivering it and how that fits in the bigger picture of society.

I don’t disagree with this approach in general, it’s a blunt way of expressing the need and desire for world class UX. However, that doesn’t mean I’m entirely comfortable with it. On some level is Government not making it ok for people to stop being engaged citizens? Is there a happy medium here?

When are we going to tackle the tough stuff?

While there was complexity in all the journeys looked at today they are, pretty much, ‘light touch’ contact. While we need to improve the digital journey they’re almost the easy wins because they absolutely can be done digitally and contact can be avoided.

So, when are we going to tackle the tough stuff? When are we going to look at digital’s role in social care referrals or child protection? I doubt that can be wireframed in an hour long session round a flip chart. And the stakes for getting it wrong are much higher. But we need to do it and I think we need to do it soon.

Final thoughts

Today was brilliant; it got me thinking and I met lots of localgov folk that I hadn’t had chance to before. I hope there are more Really Useful Days (perhaps even outside of London) and central and local can work together to really make digital fly. It would be great if as a first step GDS/LocalDirectGov thought about their communication channels with localgov – not enough people knew this day was happening and I think they really, really need to.

Related posts:

1. Content strategy in local government
2. A little light reading
3. The mind-bending brilliance of UKGovCamp12

A few days ago, in conversation, someone called me ambitious. She was not being unkind and yet my instinctual reaction was to recoil in horror from the tag.

I do not think of myself as ambitious and that’s because in my internal thesaurus the word is interchangeable with ‘ruthless’, ‘isolated’ and ‘power-hungry’. I do not like to think I am any of those things although I concede I am competitive in petty things, despite it not being one of my best traits.

No, ‘amitious’ was a dangerous and unwanted quality. It was Lady Macbeth, the Iron Lady, power shoulders and making a million before 9am. It’s drop-kicking kittens on your endless pursuit of getting to the top. It’s shunning femininity and motherhood and being unkind. It is a prison of your own making that cuts you off from others and locks you onto a set course.

As my denials of ambition derailed the conversation it was explained she meant I was ‘career focused’ and yet this too, seemed to be negative to my ears. Why? Surely recognising that someone is dedicated to their work, passionate about their path and (mostly) joyful in their job it is a compliment?

As I’ve thought about this remark over the last few days it’s occured to me that ‘ambitious’ bothers me on a personal level too. It seems, in my mind, completely divorced from being a wife and mother and suggests that those roles, those people, are less important to me than a career (which they’re not, it’s just a different part of my life, of me). This thought often ends up on the merry-go-round of ‘can women really have it all’.

Why do I associate ‘ambition’ with ‘isolation’? Again, because it feels like I shouldn’t do well in a career as well as have a happy family life so I am either isolated from my husband and children or from my peers. Because it feels as if by being ambitious I would lose friends, or be screwing over the sisterhood or being somehow less of a woman…

In trying to settle my mind on why it bothered me so much I turn, as usual, to the interwebs for solace, to not feel I am alone in my discomfort with the label.

I read this wonderful article on Brainstorm about Ambitious Women and recognised my feelings in many of the words and I found this quote from John D Rockerfeller which sums up my approach to work-life:

““I had no ambition to make a fortune. Mere money-making has never been my goal, I had an ambition to build. ”

Between these two I’ve actually managed to stop feeling ‘ambitious’ is such a bad label. Today, I sort of rejoice. The very fact I can be seen as ambitious means I am free. I am not constrained by my gender as my female ancesters would have been, or as other women around the world still are because of the regime they live under. No, my birthplace, my generation, my family, my upbringing, and my education all make me free ( alas, my generation also makes a small voice at the back of my mind throw up the victory sign and shriek ‘girl power’ at this point).

I’m working on re-writing my internal thesaurus so ‘ambitious’ becomes interchangeable with ‘determination’, ‘freedom’ and ‘learning’, an altogether more positive way to view the label.

* I’m a little early but I’ve tagged this post with ‘International Womens Day‘ which is on 8 March this year. It seemed to fit better with that than anything else!

Related posts:

1. Where did all the girl Devs go?
2. Always on my mind