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

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

I did. Bridesmaid for my friend on the 22nd and then the joy of my nearly-three-year-old bouncing off the walls with seasonal excitment. I had the whole of Christmas week off for these two landmark events. I didn’t think about the corporate twitter account at all.

But Boxing Day is pretty boring isn’t it? So I nipped on to see what had happened during my week off. And what had happened was that at least one person found it wholly unacceptable that there had been no corporate tweets during Christmas week.

I do agree. If we used RSS for our news / events etc there would have been one tweet. Or if we used something like Hootsuite I might have scheduled a couple of things in. However, we do it all manually here because we like the human touch. That did work against us last week though.

The question of whether we were the exception or the rule  roused my interest though. Who else had been tweeting to their corporate Twitter charge over Christmas? Well, Dan Slee at Walsall Council had for one. This account’s Christmas service was highlighted to me by several others on Twitter (thanks guys) and he had indeed been doing a sterling job.

Excellent tweeting had been done each time their gritters headed out. I wish I’d been as organised as Dan in getting the highways team to email me each time ours went out (something which has gone straight on the to do list this morning on my return to the office).

There were a few others councils also standing by to reply to @ messages – Hillingdon, Northampton and Richmond (BC, Canada rather than North Yorkshire).

Maybe there were more but this was the extent of the response I got. Whether or not more of us should / could have been tweeting more leads to an interesting question though: who is required to offer a Christmas social media / online service and how many of us did it out of our own goodwill?

Perhaps it depends on who looks after your Twitter. A press officer who is on call (and contracted to be so)? If I tweeted (and I did on Boxing Day just because there was something to say) it was because I felt, in myself, that it was the right thing to do and I was willing to log on and do it.

I’m not contracted to work out of hours or be on call. But online doesn’t recognise office hours, Bank Holidays. It is a non-stop real-time channel and so (in my opinion) organisations should be ready and able to respond as such. It’s a significant shift in thinking and ways of working, particularly for public sector.

It was interesting to look over the state of play though. It’s given me a few ideas for what I’d do differently given the time over as well as things I’ll be trying to implement to further improve the service as soon as possible.

I’d love to know whether anyone had any feedback from citizens / residents / followers on the service given? Or any thoughts generally on what the round-the-clock online space means or could mean for working patterns in council PR / online comms.

Related posts:

1. Getting the conversation started
2. Crisis comms online
3. @citizens –local government twitters

Top five: things in my head about LocalGovCamp:

1. Yesterday was a day full of meeting very very nice people. Meeting people you tweet with a lot, about work and about things outside of work, for the first time in person is a bit like meeting a celebrity; you feel you know them yet you know you’ve never seen them face to face before. For me it was less like networking and more like meeting up with great friends to talk about the stuff we’re passionate about (online local gov, music, real ale, cake…)
2. That (aside from the usefulness of what was discussed) having that network of people who are willing to share their experiences and epic visions of where this is all going is the best support network imaginable. Often you may be the lone voice in an organisation pushing for change or certain projects and to be able to share this with people going through the same thing is both motivating and comforting – always good to you’re not the only one fighting the fight and so aren’t completely off track with your thoughts!
3. There are some great projects and changes going on around the country and it is great to be able to hear about them and think about what that might suggest for our organisation. So useful to have a space to thrash out ideas, here people’s experiences, lessons learnt and the possibilities for digital enablement.
4. I’ve been thinking for a while about a social media cafe in Derby / Derbyshire and I’ve come back from yesterday convinced that it would be of benefit. Not only would it be a forum for web managers / web people from each of the authorities in the area (not just local gov but the partner organisations too) to meet and chat about things but a great opportunity for us to find out about the community groups and digital business in the area too. I’m already formulating a list of things to do in order to make this happen. Luckily, yesterday gave me a chance to chat with people who also want to make this happen – so let’s JFDI!!!
5. Twitter has changed my life. Without having tweeted with people on there I would probably not have found out about LocalGovCamp, might not have gone even if I did. And this also brings us back round to point one

So, there are the top five things in my head at the moment and beneath these are a thousand little thoughts which came out of the sessions I attended yesterday – @timdavies session on overcoming the small hurdles to social media in organisations (his notes are here and my notes are here); @paul_cole’s session on listening to the conversation happening about your organisation whether you’re involved or not (my notes on this session are here) and @carlhaggerty’s session on the internal network pilot he’s part of (some very rough notes here by me).
I hope people found the impromptu (and definitely unexpected) session that @liz_azyan and I did on academic research into local government social media useful. I hope to speak to all of the people who came along (and more) as part of my thesis research (begins January 2010). I’ll try and write up notes from what we talked about in this session as soon as I can.

There are some videos by David Wilcox and photos from the day on Flickr and once again, thank you Dave for organising and thanks to the sponsors also. Really great to meet you all

Updated (22 June 2009): I was also interviewed by @podnosh about our use of social media in the recent election. You can see the video and post on the podnosh blog.
And there is a round up of all the stuff being said online at the LocalGovCamp blog.

Related posts:

1. Academic research for local gov – LocalGovCamp
2. Local government and social media – response to Ingrid Koeler at IDeA
3. @citizens –local government twitters