Councils and that new fangled social media stuff

I spent the day at the Local Government Information Unit’s conference on social media and local government.  A fabulous day chaired by Andy Sawford.

I presented alongside Iain Dale (of political blogging fame) and Kerry McCarthy MP – Labour’s Twitter Supremo.

I trotted out my old 10 Social Media Myths in Local Government – it’s the most popular post on this blog and I’d never presented on it.  It’s lengthy, but seemed to go down well.

I was also on a panel in the afternoon with Jon Ball, Liberal Democrat Councillor from Ealing, James Cousins, Conservative Councillor from Wandsworth and Fiona Colley, Labour in Southwark (who provided SEO tips for councillors!) and the excellently philosophical Anthony Zacharzewski who is President of  The Democratic Society

Jasmine Ali from the LGIU also launched a new handbook for Youth, Social Media and participation in local democracy, talked about their social media action learning set (which they’re re-launching in the New Year).  Dominic Campbell of FutureGov also outlined the work he’s doing with LGIU on a very interesting project about using social networking to support children’s safeguarding.

(Coverage of the conference in Local government chronicle online)

When pigs fly…what I’ve been missing and where I’ll be

I’ve missed out on a lot of fads in my day, I had the kind of parents who never indulged me in the purchase of friendship bracelets, legwarmers, OshKosh overalls (except when some ridiculous kelly green ones went on sale…why do you think they were on sale?), Sony Walkmans, boomboxes, or a car made in the same decade in which I’m driving it.  Though I do have to thank them for not allowing me to buy the parachute pants.

The iconoclasm stuck, I’m afraid – and even as I embraced my adult purchasing power, I’ve never really been a dedicated follower of fashion – being in clothing or consumer trends.

This past week though, I’ve gotten involved with something that all the cool kids are coming down with.   Swine Flu.  Everybody’s doing it.  It’s the rage.  It’s pandemical, I tell you.

So,  I sniffled and shivered in my bed last week and caught up on the latest doings of the Jeremy Kyle set  (That one lied, that one didn’t, and no – thank goodness-  the cousin’s ex-partner’s brother is not the father).  Unfortunately, I was missing out on a lot of great events.

1. I missed the Guardian/Kable Public Sector Online conference where I was due to spend a few minutes talking about the Knowledge Hub and participating in a panel discussion.

2. I missed Lincoln LocalGovCamp

3. I missed the GLA’s London data event

4. I missed an internal roundtable on new performance management projects, which I was really looking forward to.

This week, thankfully, has been fairly light in terms of obligations given that I’m still feeling a bit shaky – and I have still haven’t caught up with all of last week’s work.

Next week’s fun

I’ve got a couple great things lined up for next week.

1.  The LGIU conference The New Social Media and Councils – places are still available for this conference which has an impressive line up of speakers, like Iain Dale, Kerry McCarthy,  (me), Dominic Campbell, the folks from LGIU – of course who are looking at some pretty transformational approaches to changing up the way services are provided.

2. The London Councils Summit 2009 – which is open to senior officers, councillors and prospective candidates for the 2010 London local elections.  I’ll be part of a panel on social media, and I expect there’ll be lots of questions on using it for campaigning

Standards and social media

On Monday night I defied some kind of nasty stomach lurgie passed on to me ever so kindly by my toddler son to present at an IDeA fringe event at the Standards Board Annual Assembly in Birmingham on social media in local government (quick, quick overview) and my sense of how to avoid trouble online.

Everyone needs to think about their online presence, from the drunken picture on Facebook, to posting the occasional foul mouthed nonsense on Twitter (confession: I’ve only ever sworn when posting about football), to the ill-advised blog post ranting about poor service somewhere which crosses the line from a bit of customer feedback to libel and a takedown letter from a firm of faceless solicitors.

However, public figures need to think about it even more.  And councillors can get into specific trouble by being referred to their standards committee for various obvious breaches of standards and slightly less obvious things like bringing the council into disrepute or disrespecting a fellow councillor. So although I think the role of councillor is one that fits very well with social media (though of course individuals will vary in their desire, skill and attitude).

The talk seemed to go down well, though there were probably slightly more questions about social media in general than standards.  And although I know less about the latter, we had Vanessa Walker (who has lead a lot of the IDeA’s work on ethical governance) and Jane Scullion, one of our Regional Associates who has been a monitoring officer herself.

James Cousins, a councillor from Wandsworth, a Tweeter (one of the guys behind CllrTweeps) and a blogger also presented on his experience of staying out of trouble online.  Or at least not falling foul of any standards of conduct.

Slides from the presentation:

All things turn to dust

It’s always amazed me how great works, like the Mayan cities or the glories that were Egypt or the grandeurs that were Rome can be abandoned, left behind.  What happened exactly that people would walk away from magnificent buildings and complex societies and indoor plumbing (who walks away from indoor plumbing?) to live in state of nature (nature as in sharing your hovel with your goat, not bunnies-and-butterflies nature).

But we can see that process happening now in a city called Detroit.  I haven’t studied Detroit’s history and current problems in great detail, but it seems to have resisted all attempts at resusscitation.  And yet less than 50 years ago it was being praised as a centre of learning and culture and the Mayor of Detroit was lauding its renaissance from an impressively high base of art, architecture, commerce and industry.

Today, there are websites and Flickr groups (like Vanished Detroit) dedicated to capturing the images of the decaying and not-quite-abandoned city.

St Curvy-Detroit by Tunnel Bug on Flickr (Creative Commons License)

One of the interesting things from the old film is the emphasis on how town planners would drive the further development of Detroit.  Events, a shift in economy and a shift in population overtook them.

A Baltimore City Planner writes:

I have never been to Detroit but I always have a fondness for cities like it because they will never be what they once were. I primarily grew up in Baltimore and spent a lot of time in Philadelphia so I understand what it feels like to see a city past it’s glory years. No matter how much time as planners we spend to make our overall city environments better, we know that the factories that helped build our towns and cities and the factory workers who lived in them, are not coming back.

…and…

Detroit was a great American industrial jewel that we are allowing to crumble like the ruins in Rome. The only catch is that Detroit has not been deserted. Among these industrial ruins is the nation’s 11th largest city where over 900,000 people reside. Our nation’s forgotten major city is still larger then the cosmopolitan cities of San Fransisco, Boston, Seattle and Washington D.C. While we can never bring Detroit back to what it was 50 years ago, we can still transform the city from a once great industrial city into a great historical city and not watch city turn into a ruin from a far.

And I guess there’s still some hope.  And there’s still investment being poured into the city.  I only have the slimmest of anecdotal evidence, but  thirteen years ago I changed planes in Detroit and vowed I’d never do that again – worst airport I’d ever been in – nastier than Heathrow.   But four years ago I had to again and the airport was one of the nicest American airports I’ve been in.

Planners especially seem fascinated by the story of Detroit.  It’s one which demonstrates that you can bring some of the brightest minds of their profession to build a new future and still end up with decay for a variety of reasons.   The video was brought to my attention by Kyle Ezell, someone I went to high school with and who now teaches planning in Ohio.

He’s not only passionate about the potential of planning, but about bringing the power of planning to the people.  He’s working on a new project called Sensory Planning which is described as:

We’ve revolutionized the planning process by empowering people to help plan everything from a small neighborhood park to a global initiative such as saving the rainforests.

The key difference between Sensory Planning and much of what is currently available to the stakeholders in the planning process- from citizens to planners to developers- is simple. We’re building a platform to empower you to solve unique planning & development problems instead of relying on costly one-off “solutions.”

I hope so, could be good.

Would have involving the public more closely in the planning process, through more open consultation and engagement have saved Detroit from its current fate? Doubt it. But it couldn’t have hurt and maybe it just might lead to a better future for that city.

The IDeA runs the Planning Advisory Service.

Around and about

A big catch-up post on what I’ve been up to:

Thursday the 17th  we held the Knowledge Hub advisory group which you can read all about here.

Friday the 18th  saw me at the IDeA’s Community of Practice Facilitator event.  The CoP facilitators that I see on a regular basis are my own colleagues (no surprise there), so it was great to see a whole range of people from across the UK who are using communities of practice so well and so constructively to share learning and support improvement with colleagues.

Chris Collison was the excellent keynote speaker and  he ran through some of the techniques from his new book No More Consultants.   I’m a big fan of the principles of Knowledge Management, but occasionally the trappings of KM strike me as a load of old rope.  I’ve a pathological dislike of calling workshops and focused networking funny names like cafes (sorry David Gurteen, though I love what you do with your funny named workshops).   The funny-sounding river diagram approach Chris highlighted  looked incredibly promising and appealed to the performance geek in me as it used numbers and spreadsheets (it was developed for use with engineers so should be enjoyable for PM and efficiency types).    I was excited when I saw that copies of his new book were to be given away as prizes if we guessed either the right numbers of communities of practice currently on the platform or the number of visits to it in August.

I ran a workshop (or insight interchange as I prefer to call it) on the day with Dan McCartney on online conferences.  (Here’s some slides, updated slides in the CoP Facilitators CoP) He happened to know how many CoPs were on the platform since he’d asked about it the previous week.  So, I took that insider knowledge and won a copy.  The KM Team called that cheating, but I prefer to call it effective information usage.

I also had some great meetings on Friday.  In the morning, I saw Charlotte Eisenhart and Bridget Harris from the Leadership Centre for Local Government and the 21st Century Councillor project.  They’re doing some really interesting things and I look forward to working with them more.  Particularly in relation to councillors’ use of social media.  (See my draft guidance here, comment or even change it up – it’s a wiki!)

I also saw Alison Hornery and John Wells  from Know and Then to talk about some work they’re doing on knowledge management for councils across the commonwealth.  Very interesting stuff.  They’d suggested that we meet for coffee, but them being Australians and all coffee turned into beer, which was a most satisfactory end to a very busy week.  (Is that a shameless cultural stereotype?)

On Monday the 20th, there was a big meet up of programmes and social innovators who are working on social media convened by David Wilcox and Amy Sample Ward.  Incredibly useful to get a bunch of people who are working across the sphere of social media in the public sector to get together and we’re looking at how we can be even more social.

Tuesday I met with a couple of developers who are working on a local engagement platform for councils and local people.  Looks really interesting.   I also had a long chat with Adrian Barker about the uses of social media to support practice development for the Managing Local Performance Project.   It may have been a bit of blue skies thinking, but now is the time to be bold since the need to develop our efficiency and performance improvement practice is greater than ever.

Wednesday and Friday I got my head down – rare days without meetings, although technically I’m part time and as far as payroll is concerned I’m definitely part time – so one of those days probably should have been a day off.

Thursday I met with Simon Dickson from Puffbox for a good long chat over coffee.  It was good to finally meet him and great to spark some ideas back and forth.  He’s thinking about new directions and one of the things that struck me about the people I’ve been working with on social media in local government is that they’re as passionate about local government, local democracy and its potential as they are about the potential of social media to make a difference in that sphere.  That passion, that local gov bug, is what sets them out.

In the afternoon, I was working with Challenge Managers and the Efficiency Exchange team on the use of social media to support improvement.  My slides from that event are quite inwardly IDeA focused – that was the audience – but they’re here anyway (also see Gordon Murray’s slides on the Efficiency Exchange)  I proposed that we start using Yammer in the IDeA (it’s like Twitter but enterprise based) , and I was so pleased by the support that I got from my Twitter network including documents and strategies about the use of Yammer in a knowledge sharing organisation.   And the other super pleasing thing about that workshop was the follow up comments left on the slides.

Thanks for opening the door to a whole new world and endless possibilities

Last week’s links

Just a few of the things I found interesting on the web last week.

Data

cnewmark: Serious civics apps a big deal in San Francisco

Describing how the Mayor of San Francisco is getting useful info to citizens in useful applications just by making data more open.

Do you know where your postboxes are?

Free Our Data outlines some of the issues around freeing geographic data using post-boxes as an example.

Transport for London really doesn’t like Ordnance Survey: response to consultation Ouch! Outlines some of the issues around Ordnance Survey’s business model.

Sounds like a good idea: Sir Tim Berners-Lee goes to Downing Street to talk open dataUrging action beyond good intention and presumption that data should be public, unless it shouldn’t (e.g. personal data).”It would be interesting if the “efficiency of public services” meant “to stop different bits of government squabbling over the data they collect like children in a playground and instead start to share it freely, rather as we adults advise children to do so they can discover the benefits of sharing””

Social media for work

• Why is Twitter useful for work? | Simon Wakeman – public sector communications, marketing and public relations
  A little while ago Simon Wakeman asked the question “why is Twitter useful for work?” Here were some of the answers.
• The Top Six Reasons Companies are Still Scared of Social Media
  Nice list of corporate social media myths and hints at how to counter them.
• Online Database of Social Media Policies
  Enough policies to make your eyes pop out. Yikes. We need to do this, too. And quick.
• Chief Information Officers Council – Secure Use of web2.0
  US Federal Government guidance on secure use of web2.0: “The goal of the IT organization should not be to say “No” to social media websites and block them completely, but to say “Yes, following security guidance,” with effective and appropriate information assurance security and privacy controls.”

Council websites

Usability, council websites and the obligation to promote democracy
Paul Evans looks at the obligations to promote local democracy and how council websites are contributing.

whatever happened to the UK’s online public services?
As big a fan as I am of Gov2.0, we still need to get Gov1.5 right – better, cheaper, faster transactional services online. And as this post points out, we need to get the back-end service design right, too.

links for 2009-09-17

• Pezholio » Blog Archive » A Social Media Toolkit for Councils?
  Nice idea – I like it.
  (tags: socialmedia toolkit khub localgovernment gov2.0)

links for 2009-09-16

• Data Visualisation: Budgets and Good Morning Twitter
  Cool financial data visualisation
  (tags: data.visualisation data data.gov gov2.0 budget finance reporting)
• Blogging and podcasting for local government
  Dave Briggs slides from a short and sweet panel presentation on blogging and podcasting in local government.
  (tags: gov2.0 localgovernment blogging podcasting Dave+Briggs web2.0)

Using Facebook well

Facebook has had some bad press in local government land lately.  Some councils have been reportedly blocking it while at the same time considering developing a Facebook presence to get in touch with residents.

Simon Wakeman is the Head of Marketing at Medway District Council and the author of an excellent and informative blog on the uses of social media in local government as well as a regular on the Gov2.0 speaking circuit.   Simon wrote an excellent post back in February called Why Local Government Shouldn’t be on Facebook.    Judging from the title you’d think he’d want local government to run a mile, but actually what he really wants is for councils to use Facebook well.  His main point is that councils need to exploit (exploit-good as in use for maximum value, rather than exploit-bad like children stitching footballs in a shed) people’s emotional connections with a place, with music they love, with experiences.  And he suggests that while people often have a really strong sense of place – the council as a jurisdictional area may not always map exactly to that space in people’s hearts.

Tennessee on Facebook

Tennessee's name in lights

It delights me that my own home state government is using Facebook really well.   I noticed some time ago that several of my Facebook friends had become fans of Tennessee.  I love Tennessee, sure I’ll become a fan. One click.  I’m a fan. I just joined over 16,000 people who are also fans.  I didn’t really stop to think who was running it, didn’t really occur to me that it was an official function of the Tennessee state government, which is kinda silly seeing as how it’s kinda my job to notice these things.  I clicked as a Tenneseean, rather than as an observer of Gov2.0.  Hey! They just exploited my emotional connection (and I don’t care).

Although the Tennessee page info says “The OFFICIAL Tennessee fan page”  It has an authentic rather than officious feel.  I doubt it’s being run by a single person, but it does have a single voice across multiple daily postings to Facebook.  It’s fun and it’s friendly.  (Hmmm – the kinda place you might like to visit maybe). It’s run by the Tennessee Department of Tourism and its sole purpose is to promote visits to Tennessee.  But it does this not so much by endlessly promoting Tennessee to out-of-staters, but by creating a community of Tennesseans who are online ambassadors and advocates for their state.

On Monday, Tennessee asked “How was your Tennessee weekend?”  27 comments many of them highlighting fun things to do in Tennessee.   Yesterday Tennessee asked “Ruth wants to know where to have lunch or dinner?“   38 responses – all of them helpful – (salivating thinking about some of the recommendations).

Facebook is only part of the online strategy.  They use Facebook to link endlessly to the various, relevant subsections of the Tennessee Tourism website www.tnvacation.com The site itself is social media enabled and includes user generated content about Tennessee vacation experiences, e.g. a daily Tennessee story.

I don’t know how the Department of Tourism is measuring its success, and it would be interesting to find out.  But from here it looks like a fabulous example of an integrated approach to using social media and static web content for government marketing.  So do check out their online resources, and I can also strongly recommend Tennessee as a great holiday destination, too.

Update: Also check out www.facebook.com/government a Facebook page all about government using Facebook better – tipped to me by @dominiccampbell.

links for 2009-09-15

• YouTube – Data Feeds: Democratization of Government Data
  via @dominiccampbell
  (tags: data data.gov appsfordemocracy POIT us)
• Facebook for Councillors | Local Democracy
  Good advice for councillors using Facebook – really good advice for anyone with a bit of public profile. (note to self – delete that drunken picture of me dressed as a casino dealer from Facebook)
  (tags: facebook councillors local.government gov2.0 guidance paul+evans)
• Measuring the value of data reuse
  The difficult task of valuing the release and re-use of gov data.
  (tags: data gov2.0 POIT data.gov)
• 10 social networking sites to keep you in the loop — Federal Computer Week
  US government Social Networking sites
  (tags: us social.networking gov2.0 information socialmedia)