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

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?

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

As a theory, creating content for an organisation’s website and sharing responsibility for its maintenance by devolving the authorship (allowing many to write and publish) is a pretty fine idea. However, for it to work well the authorship  needs to be given to the right people otherwise you end up with no content, bad content, unhappy authors, an unhappy central team and a spiral of training-correcting-retraining which means the model may as well not be in place.

There are lots of reasons why this theory shouldn’t be written off merely because it is hard to implement and maintain. The main one is probably this: councils have hundreds of services they could or should publish information about online and the staff in those services are the ones with the knowledge about how they work. They are in a good position to know what information they are commonly asked for or what a citizen needs to know in order to access that service or carry out a transaction.

What they don’t have (in most cases) is the specialist knowledge and experience of presenting that information to meet a variety of online targets or the time / interest / empowerment to add online publishing as a task on top of their unrelated workload. This means a central team either ends up re-writing the content to make is meet accessibility, usability and house style; there is a long cycle of training where neither the trainer or the trainee end up happy; content gets stuck in a workflow because the central team aren’t happy to publish and the author can’t or won’t make changes. In other words the model stops being efficient and starts evolving into a beast.

Of course those issues could be dealt with by taking away any involvement by a central team. In essence this means deciding to no longer manage the content of your website and in the end this will lead to the citizen and the organisation losing out. The citizen may lose out due to poor or out of date information or no information at all and through a lack of consistency and therefore confidence in the brand. The organisation will find itself failing to work to optimum efficiency with duplicated information, some services not represented at all, reputation issues and (probably) breaches of accessibility guidelines.

So, what to do? We discussed this at length in the small session I ran at LocalGovCamp Lincoln. It was interesting to hear views from North Devon, Coventry City and East Lindsay councils on the models they had in place and how they were working. We all seemed to be struggling to get the right people into the author roles and therefore be able to balance efficiently with central editorial control.

I don’t think we came to any firm conclusions about how to tackle changing an existing model or how to engage stakeholders in the importance of this issue to the success of the website / online channel. What did come out of it, for me,  was:

• What works for one organisation probably won’t work for another. In fact, in big organisations what works for one department may not work for another.
• In the same vein, I’ve come to the conclusion that what works for your external site in terms of authorship may not work for your intranet or smaller sites. Some of the success may depend on the workflow here and that should be considered as a vital ingredient in implementing a devolved authorship, not a separate decision.
• I’m not aware of any way of trialing or testing to find out what is an appropriate author model for a department, organisation or site. If anyone knows of a way of analysing before implementing I would be really pleased to hear about it!
• I’m also not aware of anyone who thinks they have successfully devolved authorship. If anyone would like to share an example of an organisation in which the model is working well from all view points I would also be happy to hear about this – especially if you want to share the secret of the success!
• It is easy to get carried away talking about the newer channels of the digital stream but if we can’t produce the right content in the right way at the right time either through devolved or centralised authoring we won’t have anything worth publishing to the wider social web.

I’m still interested to hear others experience or view of devolved authorship so please join the discussion through the comments section. Thanks!

Related posts:

1. Power to the people
2. Do councils need websites?

In fact it isn’t even quite the question which needs answering. A more appropriate way of phrasing it, as quickly became apparent in the session, is Do Councils Need the Website They Have Right Now?

Councils have huge amounts of services and information which they need to get to residents. They also have tight budgets to meet, lots of requirements from central Government, limited resources but in most cases a big desire to do things right. Having a website helps to meet lots of these requirements with the limitations in place. Or they would, if they were done well.

Lots of people in this session felt that council websites had in lots of cases got a little bit out of control. A sometimes bloated beast hard to control with only the whip of a malfunctioning devolved authorship model. We agreed in the group that an online channel or mix of channels would meet the efficiency savings head on while fulfilling an increasing demand from residents to communicate in this space – if only we could get it working right.

So, councils need websites but how do we build and run the website a council needs?

We discussed a whole range of things but most of the sharing focused on:

• Devolved authorship – a really nice theory but almost no-one has got it working right. I blogged about this separately as it was also the theme of the session I ran later in the day.
• Respect for web teams – the need for organisations to recognise that online is a channel which needs to be run with the same respect as traditional channels, and that respect should also be given to those employed to be experts on how to do that.
• Definition of boundaries – how much of what is online is within the remit of the web team to either run or advise on?

All three of these issues could come under one broad heading – respect and understanding. Where many websites and web teams are struggling is that there are two many cooks for the broth. In most councils at the moment there are a lot of people who have a say in what goes on the website and in what format. Some web teams have more control than others in terms of approving or improving this content before it is published but in some cases there is little control at all.

Compare this to the way that information is published through traditional channels and the service areas have to pass several gate keepers and abide by the advice of the communication professionals in order to get messages out. This allows them to reap the success and benefit from the experience of those professionals.

Online is a different matter though. Vanity publishing and ‘just in case’ publishing (there is no real drive to get this online now but one day someone might want this so I’ll publish it anyway) abound. And while there are lots of good reasons to devolve authorship if it isn’t implemented properly and backed with a workflow approval process it causes more problems than it solves. This can lead to poor content (in terms of accessibility, usability, relevance and currency) and too much of it.

Then there are the bits which aren’t directly part of the website itself – the bolt-ons, the dreaded applications. In one of those moments so typical of a LocalGovCamp that I felt simultaneously glad not to be the only one struggling with this problem and disheartened that the issue was so all-encompassing. Council websites are let down by the applications which make them interactive and transactional. Why? Partly because web teams have no seat at the table when applications are procured and no jurisdiction to have them removed if not improved.

What can be done then? Well, there is the Web Professionals group for a start. Paul Canning did a great job of introducing this to us all and it is a good step toward building that respect for communications and technical professionals specialising in the online space.

Each council also needs to work out how to publish information to the online space (across an increasing number of channels rather than just a website) tapping the knowledge of the service from that area while also utilising the skill of the web team in writing content which is accessible and usable.

Councils do need websites, the cost not to is too great (as Peter Barton explored in his blog a while back), but they need to improve the way they run them and part of that may be admitting there is specialist knowledge involved.

Related posts:

1. Power to the People (reprise)
2. Crisis comms online
3. Social networking for councils

Think Tank Lincoln

For the second time this year I have come away from a LocalGovCamp with my head buzzing with ideas, inspired by the people I have met, proud of the work and passion there is in the sector and wowed by the wonderful support network.

Yesterday was LocalGovCamp Lincoln – an unconference for local government web people. As is the way with these things there was no agenda before we gathered at Think Tank and everyone could make suggestions, steer sessions and tell their stories. As is always the way there was almost too much good stuff on the line-up that appeared and I was spoilt for choice.

Throughout the day I attended sessions on how and why councils could or should use social networks; does a council need a website?; maps made easy; guerilla user testing; and ran a (very small) session on devolved authorship for content management. If I could have split myself in two I would have attended sessions on hyperlocal; advertising on council websites, ePetitions, eConsultation and Scraperwiki. In lieu of cloning I’m relying on a collegue to fill me in and being able to read up from tweets and blogs that are surely to come!

I didn’t live blog the day (although I clocked up a good few miles on my tweetometre) but will be writing up posts on the sessions I attended as I get my thoughts together.

General thoughts that came out of the day:

• There are some really wonderful, innovative, passionate people working in and for local government.
• While creativity and innovation might seem to favour a cavalier approach to how we develop our systems the strong message coming out was that however cool and groovy these things were we would only recommend pursuing the ones that really suited our residents; it was their opinion on the worth of doing something and the success of what we did do that was valued most. The citizen is king.
• That often it is easy to make excuses about why we aren’t doing something or why we aren’t asking or listening to residents online. In fact not doing something that residents want can’t be excused, only explained.
• That all of the top five things I said about localgovcamp Birmingham more than apply here.

A big thanks to Andrew Beeken of City of Lincoln council and the day’s sponsors for making it happen. More on the sessions as and when I get the chance!

Check out the tweets from the day on the lgclincoln hashtag.

Related posts:

1. LocalGovCamp – an unconference for local government – Birmingham 20 June 2009
2. LocalGovCamp Yorkshire & Humber
3. #localgovcamp

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