“Where are you from?”
“Shrewsbury”
“ Where’s that?”
We’re not in Kansas any more.
So the general idea is that a bunch of people interested in local government and online stuff rock up to a venue. When they get there they decide what to talk about. They eat cupcakes. Then they go home again.
There was a much talked about localgovcamp in London a little while ago. I didn’t make it because, well, it’s London isn’t it? I hummed and harred about this one because, well it’s York isn’t it? And then, suddenly there I was, on the 0544 heading north.
In no particular order: the National Railway Museum is a good venue, networking next to a model of Stevenson’s Rocket certainly appeals to a resident of Shropshire (we kicked the whole thing off you know (Cornish folk look away)). The vibe was relaxed and collaborative, there was an interesting bunch from within and without local government even (whisper it) elected councillors thanks to a morning workshop just for them.
I’d agreed to offer a workshop with @kevupnorth and @alncl on social media and emergency planning. I think it’s fair to say that we were a bijou and select group. Discussion ranged far and wide from successful use of twitter, taking in (my obsession) the back channel, and ending up with a discussion on mobile and remote working (of which more later). It is clear that emergency planners and those who will manage emergencies need to be thinking pretty deeply about the how social media can help and hinder their work.
Then a discourse on open data from . Which was picked up after lunch when the workshop I was expecting didn’t start so a bunch of us did our own thing. Which seemed in the right spirit.
Now open data seemed to me to be quite a good idea before these workshops. Following these workshops it seems to me to be absolutely imperative. It really is powerful stuff though, the sort of stuff Prometheus might hand us if he weren’t rather indisposed. Opening the data is just the first step (though a step that generated much pointy-headed argument about database and mark-up). Next people like me who want to do cool things with the data need lovely easy to use tools. We need an Ubuntu for open data.
We didn’t really touch on other bodies but it seems to me we can’t leave them out. If central and local government frees its data then presumably quangos will too (if there are any left). Next there’s the issue of closely allied bodies: housing associations, PFI providers, contractors and suppliers. And then there’s all the rest of you. Open data leads only in one direction and it leads that way for all.
And finally the energetic and impressively bearded Ken Eastwood talked us through the changes Barnsley has introduced to encourage (mandate even) home and remote working. It’s great stuff with very sensible (to my mind) changes to the ways teams work, to the trust that is placed in individuals and to the physical environment. Also some actual cost savings and some efficiency gains.
Which is delightful of course but there were a few of us there who already work in a radically different way, home-based, freelance, portfolio workers. Can local authorities go far enough to accommodate us? Could I get a job in Barnsley but stay in Shropshire? Could I stay freelance but join the team. Ken says they’re not there yet but that’s where they’re heading.
It’s local government Jim but not as we know it.
I really can’t remember the last conference that gave me such a buzz. Holding it on Saturday really changed the atmosphere, the unconference approach was very effective and engaging, and making it free to attend was a major benefit for poor impoverished freelancers like myself. All conferences are self-selecting and so in that sense preach to the choir but there was enough diversity to make it worth the choir’s time. That said, the world is changing quickly and radically, it is no longer acceptable to leave all of this in the hands of the converted. Senior decision makers, politicians local and national and busines leaders need to get a handle on how the environment in which they operate is changing.
Three cheers to Ken Eastwood, Kevin Campell-Wright and everyone else. Great day, really great day.
As a loyal CIPR member I am required to be suspicious of go-it-alone council group LGComms.
That said, their previous work on reputation was extremely useful to me when I ran a local authority comms operation and I wait with breath baited for their new work on reputation (launched tomorrow). The massed bands of local government comms staff are, even now, in Leeds. Of course, this being the 21st Century you don’t need to actually travel you can follow the (pretty quiet) chatter on #lgcomms and watch video clips with sponsors and speakers.
This clip caught my eye because when the Director of Comms at Communities and Local Government speaks, local authorities listen (and tremble a little).
Of course he brings tales of woe and foreboding. It is not a crisis and he doesn’t talk cuts but you will have to show value for money (and who can disagree with value for money) and shared services are clearly going to be pushed. There is an apparent ray of light about halfway in when he says
“Good well planned, professional communications has just got more important”
But at best, that is a double-edged sword.
Comms is more important but you’re going to have less money to do it.
I think there are efficiency savings to be made by joining up comms between partners, in procurement and in all services by using comms effectively but these are not low hanging fruit. This interview heralds some really sweeping changes in the coming years.
Public sector spending cuts are obsessing the public sector of course. Birmingham City Council is planning to cut lots of jobs. Prudent council finance officers are already beginning to trim their cloth. Councillors are hunkering down for an unpleasant few years. But it’s not enough.
On the face of it you wouldn’t have thought that housing associations (the bodies represented by the aforementioned NHF) would be too bothered by public sector spend. They are independent bodies financed by borrowing against their property and collecting rent. In fact they are fretting about the impact of cuts in a number of ways. These are just the first ones to come to mind.
1) Actually a lot of that rent comes from the public purse as housing benefit. If the axe falls there it will hurt tenants and affect landlords’ plans for management and improvements.
2) Much of the new build undertaken by housing associations is only viable with funding from the public sector (such as cash from the Homes and Communities Agency or land from the council), even more so with property prices depressed.
3) Housing associations foresee councils rolling back from local services (maintaining play areas or parks or providing enhanced support to vulnerable people) and expecting the local social landlords to step into the breach.
All of these issues have implications for real people living in real communities. They are concerns about the outcomes that will actually result from spending decisions. They need managing effectively and at a local level.
Local authorities are already struggling to see how they can do “more with less” or even, as I have suggested, “a bit less with a lot less”. How many of them have properly involved their partners in these decisions?
We have a mechanism for tackling this in Local Strategic Partnerships and Community Strategies. These mechanisms are about to be tested to their limits. You thought it was challenging delivering outcomes in partnership against a backdrop of rising public spending. You ain’t seen nothing yet.
The principles are simple. We need to identify, together as partnerships, what absolutely must be done. What would be nice to have. And what will not be done. We need to focus on the outcomes. We need to be really open and honest about which partner can achieve what with least and then we need to crack on and deliver.
And cycling? Doesn’t look like a must have does it? In fact what we need to know about the Cycle Demonstration Town, and every other local project, is what outcomes it achieves. If we want people to be healthier are we better-off spending money on health promotion or on cycle maps?
I don’t know the answer. If we are to get through the next few years these are the questions we need to be asking and debating together.
Image is a graph showing “Movements in public sector net investment real and planned”. The data come from a slide prepared by Matthew Taylor MP, Chair of the NHF. You can view the presentation here (opens a PDF).
So I spent some of today chewing the fat with an old local government colleague. (That’s just an expression, they are not old). We were, for reasons that need not detain us here, musing on what a good local government comms leader should be fretting about now. I thought that you might find an edited version of these musings diverting.
Partnerships
An increasingly complex area is the role of corporate comms within partnerships. It should be comparatively easy when things are proceeding well. At the very least we’d expect local authorities to be working on joint campaigns and to understand the risks and opportunities of joint approaches to communications.
But who provides comms leadership within the partnership? Is it the local authority? and if so why? In many areas the police force will have substantial comms resources as well as the various bits of the health service. The partnership might want to develop its own comms resources.
I don’t know of any areas where LSPs are fully sharing comms resources but that seems a logical direction for some areas.
However LSP comms is managed, it’s going to be much harder when things go pear shaped. Haringey provided a case in point. I can see similar issues with CAA on an annual basis.
For most local authorities, internal comms stops at the local authority boundary. But that seems old fashioned now. Police staff, housing landlord staff, health service workers and a whole host of other workers all have a real interest in many of the internal messages within the local authority (though not all of them). The same is true vice versa.
Social Media (-sigh-)
I know, I know I keep going on about it. But I can’t apologise. It really is that important.
My view is that 2010 will be the year of social media. Senior managers have the sense that “we should be doing something with social media” so stuff will happen. What should really be exercising comms leaders is the question of where all this is going. Social media tends to open up organisations. It’s fantastic at developing relationships, it it is quite levelling so organisations have much less control over the message and have to take part as much more equal partners in conversations.
In 10 years time an excellent authority will relate to its publics in a much more complex and dynamic way. Getting from here to there is going to require some changes. I bet your Council blocks staff access to social media sites, just for example.
Some people don’t have access to social media. Many people have imbalanced access (they use it at home but not on their mobile say). Some people choose not to use social media. Do we encourage them to get on-line, leave them behind, develop work-a-rounds so they can carry on being outside the digital economy?
Cuts
Local Govt funding is about to drop off a cliff, there will be cuts, closures, reduction in discretionary spend on a big scale. This single sentence is going to dominate the working lives of local authority comms staff for years to come. I have more to say but I have written about this previously.
The excellent comms leader
Someone once told me that a local authority is an organisation constantly in flux. It’s also an organisation unusually reliant on relationships within its structures and in the delivery of its services. This should be grist to the comms director’s mill. It should be…
Just before Christmas I decided to have a look for Councils who were doing good things on facebook so that I could point you to them. Now actually there are plenty of things that Councils could be doing on facebook but the easiest one to spot is where they have corporate pages. The best list for Councils on facebook is maintained by the eGov register. Finding pages is one thing, how to we identify organisations using the technology well?
In my view effective use of a facebook page would be evidenced by lots of fans, lots of interactions, regular updates and content specifically prepared for facebook. So I measured these figures for each Council page just before Christmas (and looked back for 2 weeks preceding this). Then I combined these scores to give an overall score for effectiveness. The breakdown of the scores for each page I looked at is here.
Who’s top of the pops?
Belfast scored the highest despite the fact that it doesn’t make a lot of use of content prepared specifically for facebook. It has more fans and more interactions than any other page. If you want to improve your local government corporate page, they are definitely the ones to watch.
Barnett and Torbay have plenty of fans but aren’t very interactive. Still bums on seats certainly count.
I also rather liked Maidstone BC’s page which had a rather middling score but seems to be run by someone who “gets” social media.
These are highlights in a landscape of local authorities who are, at best, putting a toe in the facebook water. Plenty of council’s haven’t established a presence, plenty more have very low-key pages.
What’s Belfast doing so right?
Well Belfast has some in-built advantages compared to (let’s say) Carmarthenshire. It’s a university city, it’s the capital of Northern Ireland and one of the two most important cultural, economic and political centres on the island of Ireland. So you might expect plenty of social media appetite there. The page seems intelligently managed, it isn’t just re-publishing the RSS feed from the Council’s news pages. it’s timely and relevant.
In the scale of things though, even this powerhouse of social media effort is a actually pretty small beer. Sitting next to the City Council page is simply the “Belfast” page with over 30x as many fans as the local authority, oodles of interactions (many with swearing) and almost now official status updates.
And the conclusion is?
Simon Wakeman has argued that local government shouldn’t use corporate facebook pages. I wouldn’t go that far. These findings suggest that there is an appetite for a well managed page. I do agree with him that social media requires a different approach. Council’s (and indeed all corporates) need to learn how to use these tools to engage with and converse with people.
Decent PR people are fretting about how we can measure the effectiveness of social media. This is a start. What do you think?
I said: Arguments between local authorities and their local partners will break out across the England as a result of CAA reporting.
Was I right?
Yes but I can’t prove it.
In December, the Government has set up a slightly confusing site which enables you to find out how your local public sector is doing. So far councils seem to be getting the blame for everything. That is not sustainable. Gossip suggests that there are considerable tensions behind closed doors.
I said:There will be a general election in June and Labour will be returned to government with a reduced majority.
Was I right?
No. And no room for obfuscation either.
I said:There will be an amusing range of rubbish and embarrassing forays onto YouTube.
Was I right?
Well I was clearly in a bad mood. There have been a range of experiments with virals and video content. Some have been more successful than others. UK public bodies are still feeling their way with all this stuff. Few of these forays have been ground-breaking but few could fairly be described as I did a year ago.
I said:Millions of pounds of public investment will be wasted as infrastructure schemes are rushed and poorly planned.
Was I right? Pretty much, even though the media buzz is around twitter, facebook is where the action is. Just by way of example: people spend a lot more time on facebook than on any other site and facebook users share 3 times as many photos as flickr users (which is a dedicated photo sharing site).
I was pretty negative about twitter back then and I’m still ambivalent. I still think the most interesting thing about twitter is where it might lead.
So that’s 3.5 out of 5. Despite this I will be publishing my 5 predictions for 2010 very shortly. Call again soon.
There are countries in the world where punishments are imposed by the state without trial, without the evidence being properly investigated and judged and without the actual culprit being identified. The UK is on the track to be one of them.
The Government has introduced the Digital Economy Bill. This sets out to discourage people like you and me (or, you know, bad people) from breaching copyright law. Essentially if you repeatedly download material in breach of copyright then you will be cut off. Now on the face of it that seems perfectly reasonable. If breaking copyright is theft (and let us assume for the purposes of this discussion that it is) then natural justice means that the thieves should be denied the tools they used surely?
Except of course, it’s not that simple.
For a start if you are accused of stealing, let’s say, a loaf of bread: you can expect to have the evidence presented in court, tested and proved beyond reasonable doubt. Not so for breach of copyright. The Bill suggests that the judge and jury should be replaced with a combination of your Internet Service Provider and the copyright owner.
Call me old fashioned but I think I’d rather stick with the trial.
Also even if we accept that the punishment of disconnecting me does fit the crime, why should my whole family be punished for my offence? The bill only looks as far as the broadband connection not to the actual culprit. And this will still be the case if the connection is provided by an Internet Cafe or a pub. Wifihotspots are a really important economic and social development. You’d be a fool as a landlord to provide public access given the provisions in this bill. Our nascent public wifi infrastructure is a social and economic good, our legislators should be looking for ways to nurture and support it not ways to strangle it at birth.
I’m doing a little research for this blog on local government use of facebook. As part of this I’m looking for Council facebook pages. Facebook’s search feature is pretty rubbish. This is what I’ve discovered so far but I’m sure there are plenty more out there.
If you know of a Council facebook page that I am missing, could you leave the link in the comments or drop a line to ben@benproctor.co.uk or tweet it to @likeaword. Thanks very much.
I’m looking for corporate pages or pages clearly owned and maintained by the Council, rather than pages set up for a specific event or project but I’d rather have too much than too little.
The results of the research will be published here and possibly on http://benproctor.co.uk under a Creative Commons licence.
Let me take you to the delightful area of North Devon. It has coastline, it has moors, almost every inch seems to be subject to some form of landscape or nature designation. In the way of English rural areas it is, for the present, served by a plethora of councils but most notably for our purposes North Devon Council. In a pleasingly ambitious move, Council has ditched the descriptive “District” from its name but it is a district council.
Now I quite like district councils. I’ve worked for a couple (though the Government got rid of both of them shortly after I left). They remain a uniquely English and, even then, rural phenomenon and they are a dying breed. They are small. They deal with a lot of high-volume, low complexity transactions (like paying benefits, collecting bins and deciding most planning applications). They also tackle housing, crime, environmental enforcement and loads of other stuff.
The Government doesn’t like them because they struggle to think strategically. County councils don’t like them because they get in the way and tend to bang-on about dog mess on the streets rather than seeing the big picture. But the public likes them (people, on average, are more satisfied with district councils than with any other sort of counci). And I like them. What I like about them is they tend to just get on and do stuff without that tedious thinking things through and deciding on policy and procedure that typifies larger organisations.
I stumbled across North Devon Council on twitter. You can follow them @ndevoncouncil though they may not follow you back. And I thought the twitter stream was rather good. It has a personality, which is a clever trick for a local authority, it engages with other twitter users and is clearly driven by a human being (rather than, as so many councils seem to have, an RSS feed). Many organisations could learn from this. I’m not saying it’s groundbreaking, it’s just well executed by someone who understands the culture.
I had a charming e-mail exchange with the council’s web content manager, Peter McClymont. He explained
“We set up our account in February 2009 and as you will have seen we’ve been developing how we use it to communicate with our customers. It’s been a gradual development as we try to learn how others use the tool. I’d like to think that it has been a limited success so far.
“…to be honest, there are very few of our customers who use it. Although we have over 700 followers, my best guess is that only 30-40 of these are from the North Devon area. Not all of these are active.”
And this is a real challenge for any organisation with a local focus. The internet in general and social media in particular makes global interaction as easy or even easier than interacting with people up the road. This is a challenge for councils, police, and anyone else delivering local public services. But, as they say, you have to be in it to win it.
North Devon Council is also making some good use of flickr with press and publicity shots routinely posted on-line (which frankly everyone should be doing). [ sidebar: They are routinely published with all rights reserved where as I think that a Creative Commons licence is probably much more appropriate]. They are also encouraging the use of groups.
I asked Peter what his five-year vision is and he said.
“My online vision is creating a website that has a unique personal voice, allows our customers to talk to us directly in real (or near real) time and that helps deliver quality services. I’d like the website to handle more transactions than any other channel. And, when people in the community need local services or information they will look to the website or another online channel (Twitter, web chat, forum or whatever) in the first instance.”
That’s a coherent vision. I think mine would be a little different. That’s where you need some leadership. It should be the Councillors and senior managers of his organisation who really shape the vision (though I suppose they may need their Web Content Manager to inspire them).
It seems to me that in too many organisations, this social media stuff is popping up because individuals think it’s something we should be trying. Senior managers are allowing low-key experiments and getting back to the day job.
Sometime, soon, the strategic layer of organisations has too seize control of this agenda. This technology is transformative. It can change the way organisations work, take decisions, influence and structure themselves. I can see massive benefits to the economy, culture and communities of, for example, North Devon from really embracing the new on-line technologies but these benefits won’t be realised unless the Council (and its partners) decide to invest heavily in those areas. Deciding not to reap those benefits is rational too but you do have to decide.
I feel that this post should contain a health warning. It’s going to be basically positive.
It is the nature of this blog that I mostly use it to pour scorn and, even, bile upon bits of the media or PR industry that I don’t like. That’s cathartic for me and, hopefully, enjoyable for you.
And I’m conscious that positive, happy posts suggesting that some organisation has actually got it right: navigated the arbitrary, hidden and tortuous moral maze within my head and emerged glowing into the light of my praise are likely to be pretty dull.
But a friend sent me a link to the new Democracy Live website from the BBC and, try as I might, I can’t find a way to heap something bad [I originally wrote approbation but that means something good, ah the perils of blogging tired and away from the dictionary] upon its webby head.
It brings together feeds from various national, sub-national and super-national debating chambers. You can watch live or recorded proceedings. If you are, for example, a political nerd like me you can dip in to a debate on Anti-Social Behaviour in the House of Commons and then switch to questions to the First Minister in the Welsh Assembly. You can even watch plenary sessions of the European Parliament if you are having trouble sleeping. It makes it easy to find this stuff but this stuff has been available for a while.
The exciting new bit is the fact that you can search the video. The Beeb is using speech to text technology so you can type a search term and be taken to the place in the video where that was used. So if, for example, you want to find out what elected representatives have been saying about social housing just search for social housing. It’s very clever. It could well aid research. It certainly makes these institutions much more accessible (to those with the kit, wit and inclination).
Small sidebar.
I’m idly interested in how it copes with the use of Welsh in the Senedd (the building used by the National Assembly of Wales which has a significant story behind it). I assume it can cope with speeches made in Welsh because these are translated live but it is common to call strategies, initiatives and even bodies by a Welsh name alone (TirGofal or Estyn for example). To cope with this, the speech to text has to be able to speak Welsh. When I have spare time I shall examine whether it does.
BBC Marketing blurb says
“Democracy Live sits at the heart of the BBC’s public purpose around sustaining citizenship and civil society”
and to prove it, the site also has lots of helpful information on who the elected representatives are, and how the bodies they are members of work. This is the weakest part of the site (though I have to say I hadn’t noticed how marginal the constituency I live in actually is). The problem is that it puts the BBC into its public-service Reithian mode. So much of how political bodies work is actually not procedural but is political. Explaining how decisions are reached, how laws are made, how governments are held to account is more opinion than fact. Sticking to facts backed by evidence renders these guides rather banal.
Still Auntie at her banalist is still, you know, OK.
So all in all. A great start, likely to lead to even better things. Let us also remember that it would probably not have happened without the excellent work of mySociety.org.
That’s the BBC, standing on the shoulders of giants.
So that was a localgovcamp.
Let me take you to the delightful area of North Devon. It has coastline, it has moors, almost every inch seems to be subject to some form of landscape or nature designation. In the way of English rural areas it is, for the present, served by a plethora of councils but most notably for our purposes North Devon Council. In a pleasingly ambitious move, Council has ditched the descriptive “District” from its name but it is a district council.
