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)

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

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:

When I first started this blog…ages ago…I used to do a regular piece called Friday Funday, the lighter side of local government, which was pretty much usually published on Fridays.   I was always afraid that my posts about graffiti or council silliness over ‘elf n’ safety would get me into trouble some day, but then I thought “Hey, no one’s actually reading this,” and “Dismissal procedures in the public sector are often more costly and time-consuming then they’re worth.”   The business of government is serious, but if you can’t have a laugh sometime, well then you might as well cry.

My friend and colleague Vicki Goddard often helped me source articles, and indeed it was named after the sometimes slightly giddy approach we’d develop on Friday afternoons after a hard week strategising about local government improvement (you may sneer, but it’s suprisingly tiring).   I can’t promise we’ll have a regular return of Friday Funday – but I need a little pick-me-up today.

Glum, not fun

It’s ironic that the first thing I’d blog about is something so glum.  It’s been making the rounds of the Internet for a while now, but if you haven’t checked it out yet - Glum Councillors is a must-see site for those in localgov land.  It pokes gentle and not-so-gentle fun at councillors posing for photos in front of items of disrepair.

My personal favourites are: councillors at sea, councillors on the chain gang.

Usual disclaimer: councillors work very hard and why should they be smiling in front of giant pothole?  Democracy is not something to make light of and so on (but it does make me LOL).

The serious bit about this is that I’ll be including this site in as an example in a talk I’m giving Monday night at a National Standards Board conference fringe event about how councillors can avoid trouble online.  I’ll be sharing the slot with Councillor James Cousins, who has his own answer to glum councillors.

But even better than regrettable PR photo-ops are a series of photo portraits of councillors taken by  young people through the Cubitt Education Programme.   Yes, this councillor, the Leader of Islington Council,  looks a little silly, but marvellously so…

From Cubitt Education Programme's Picturing Democracy Set on Flickr

See the full photo set on Flickr. (And I admit, I’ve totally violated copyright by reproducing this picture here – I’m going  to contact the content owners or contact me and I’ll remove immediately)

Vicki’s started a discussion on Glum Councillors in the Policy and Performance Community of Practice (sign-in required)

We’re poster-babes!

Yes, everyone’s concerned about the looming prospects of crunched finances in local government.  That’s part of the reason why we’re developing a new social media enabled resource called the Efficiency Exchange.

Derek Myers, chairman of the SOLACE management board and CEX of Kensington and Chelsea offers a fantastic  list of the top ten reasons why we should cheer up through the doom and gloom of  recession.  They include the potential for more high quality services and tasty pastries and he says:

Local government is the poster babe of the public sector when it comes to making efficiencies. No-one does it better.

Plus, more pastries.

I attended a fascinating LGA event last Friday on public spending cuts from the 1990s onwards in Canada, and the use of a ‘quality of life index‘ to monitor the effects.  The starkest personal lesson for me was how little I knew about this not so distant foreign country and how much there is to learn from their parallel experience.

The first lesson was about perspective.  At an event earlier in the year, the Canadian experience had been portrayed as an enlightened, theme based approach rather than crude salami slicing.  This time it was characterised as central government simply passing on the costs to local government.  (A BBC report provides yet another perspective)

They don’t have the same sort of enforced reporting by local government as here, but the quality of life index looks at key indicators across 25 of the larger communities covering social, economic and some environmental trends.  It is a local government led initiative, co-ordinated by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities.  There are indicators on things like social housing, number of recreation centres, how immigrants are faring etc.  The index is apparently high profile, on the national news and taken seriously by government (even if not necessarily high in the consciousness of the general public).  Based on these indicators, the FCM believes that Canadian cities have only just recovered from the 1990s cuts.

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.

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

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

Data

OK, first off – everything I wrote before about Capital Fund still stands.   If you want to use the Capital Fund for a social media project read that post.

Phase 2

Some of you may have seen the words Phase 2 used in the Social Media and Online Collaboration Community of Practice and a deadline of 9 October.  And you thought “Crikey, did I miss Phase 1? did I fail Phase 1?”

No, you didn’t miss anything.  There was a Phase 1, but it was small – for a set of taster projects. You didn’t miss anything.   All of the projects that we received in August needed more work.   All of them. But you should see those as an initial submission for Phase 2 rather than a fail of Phase 1.

Deadline

We need submissions for Phase 2 in by 9 October.  But don’t worry if you can’t make that, because as I said in the previous post the final, final deadline is ages away (money runs through til 2011).  And there will be ongoing reviews of proposals – three more are planned (Dec 2009, Spring 2010 and Summer 2010)

Cash guidelines

We’re probably looking at proposal of between £25k and £150k and to be completed within 6-9 months

How to apply

There’s an updated form for proposals (it’s a little easier to use).  You can download it from Social Media and Online Collaboration Community of Practice (you will first need to register at www.communities.idea.gov.uk, if you haven’t already)

Then send proposals to social.media.proposals@idea.gov.uk by 12noon on Friday 9th October (if you have a customer insight proposal – which is the other strand then use: customer.insight.proposals@idea.gov.uk against the same deadline).

Good luck!

Catching up on the papers this weekend I found myself nodding in agreement throughout an interview with BBC Director General Mark Thompson, right up until … but more of that later.  First, what lessons does the success of the BBC have for local government?

I may be biased, (my main experience of the BBC is through Radio 4 and BBC1 comedies), but it seems to me to be a British institution we can really be proud of.  Publicly funded and admirably fulfilling its mission to inform, educate and entertain, it produces high quality programmes, respected round the world.  Its impartiality and independence make it a trusted source of news and a bulwark of democracy.  Of course it has its faults, and a debate is needed on its size and role but on the whole I would say it’s a success story.

So what.  It’s got all that guaranteed money from the licence fee and independence from the government, how could it not succeed?  Easily.  Those features could just as easily have made it soft, lazy and inefficient. The perceived failure of the nationalised industries in the 1960’s and 70’s contributed to the prevailing wisdom that public funded organisations could not be efficient and effective, leading to greater privatisation and reduced state activity.

It is the underlying causes of its success which is interesting for local government, especially given the move to greater sector-led improvement.  This is sometimes set up as a dichotomy between public and private sector.  Can the public sector ever have the motivation to excellence of the private sector’s competitive markets?  But there are more than just two alternatives.  There are many features that make the private sector successful, some of which can equally be applied in the public sector and vice versa.

Efficiency in the private sector results from many factors: free markets, competition, the profit motive, the ability of firms to go bust (providing motivation and the ’survival of the fittest’).  In the public sector are democratic pressures, values (public sector ethos) and external pressures such as inspection and regulation.  But councils can benefit from user voice, or commissioning services from competitive markets.  Just as companies can build collaborative partnerships and motivate their employees with vision and mission statements.  Similarly, the BBC has managed to combine a public oriented mission, contracting out through independent production companies and external competition (over ratings which may influence future licence fee settlements but also artistic and creative competition), to produce top quality output.

A common distinction is between organisation through markets, hierarchies or networks, (and hybrid forms).  However, that is to focus simply on efficient organisation.  Two other dimensions are important: power and motivation.  Power is about getting people to do things they would not otherwise do, such as working hard to meet the organisation’s objectives.  Motivation, is key for local government.  The argument has long been that democratic processes are not sufficient to keep local government efficient.  So the market (e.g. CCT, best value) or external regulation (best value, CPA, CAA) is needed to provide the necessary discipline.

Neither profit based markets nor public service ethos guarantee good customer service.  However, with free markets, customers can at least take their custom elsewhere.  We in the public sector therefore need to be more rigorous in ensuring the motivation exists for consistent, top quality fulfilment of local authority functions.

Some initial thoughts on the breakdown of mechanisms between these purposes and forms of organisation are given in the table below.

By combining these factors in different ways, we can ask more pertinent questions about alternative arrangements for producing local government improvement, both from the national perspective, under the control of government, and locally under the control of local authorities themselves.

It is easy to assume that there are more benefits from a given approach than exist.  Tendering out services may be seen as bringing the benefits of private sector markets to local government, but it brings into play only a limited number of the mechanisms identified in the table.  Profit may be a powerful source of motivation but it is not the only one.  Indeed you might ask, is naked self-interest necessarily going to produce more socially beneficial results than social ideals such as a public service ethos?  Where do you turn for in-depth, unbiased news?

There are other ways in which the various mechanisms can be combined.  For instance, we could positively encourage league tables, not by regulators who tell you how to do things, but purely to inspire professional pride (this has downsides, such as potentially weakening collaboration, but it’s an idea).  Could we make more use of social enterprises to get the benefits of some competition, and public service ethos, without the restrictions of having to increase stakeholder value?  And could we use social media to bring more of the benefits of networking for greater efficiency and responsiveness?

And the point at which I diverged from my agreement with the BBC Director General?  It was when he was defending BBC executive pay and said “The public will not get things like the iPlayer if some artificial lens is used that says people in the BBC are just like people who work in local councils.”  So high pay is fine to get you nifty little aids to entertainment but not planning the areas in which we live, keeping us clean and safe and safeguarding children from harm?  Grrrr!