A lovely bit of North Shropshire

I used to work for the worst performing council in the country. You understand that I went to work for it after it had received this dubious honour and along with a few hundred other colleagues helped to turn it into one of the best performing councils in the country. That’s right a few hundred for this was a teeny tiny district council.

North Shropshire District Council (for such it was) was inspected by the Audit Commission in 2004 under a process called the Comprehensive Performance Assessment which looked at how well run the Council was. They concluded that it was Poor with little prospect of improving.

Now, as you know, I am a remarkably skilled and talented writer but even so I would struggle to express the massive blow to the morale of the organisation as a whole and the staff and councillors individually that this report generated. To be labelled as failing by a bunch of faceless bureaucrats who had probably never worked in a real-live customer-facing environment made people really angry and then really sad and then really fatalistic. And it triggered an incredibly traumatic set of events that seemed to go on and on. The Council was placed into a process called engagement which meant that it was directly supervised by the government. The secretary of state had the power to tell the Council what to do. When you have that power, of course, you don’t need to use it. There was massive churn within the management of the organisation bright young things (like myself) were recruited and through all this the members of staff (who had not been criticised in the report at all) had to carry on delivering services. Everything in the way the organisation was managed and governed changed. And 1301 days later the self same Audit Commission concluded that we were Good, really good (though frustratingly short of Excellent).

So you might think that I’d be joining the Danse Macabre around the deathbed of the Commission. But I am not.

I recognise that the inspection regime has been getting in the way for most local authorities. And I recognise Michael Douglas’ description of the AC as being “staffed by very bright, and very capable people, in an almost academic atmosphere.  But self-awareness was short in supply.” And I have said some harsh things about Commission employees myself in my time. I recognise the argument that the sector should police and support itself and that it is troubling when the will of democratically elected councillors is challenged by unelected state employees.

And yet. I don’t know what is going to happen to really poorly run local authorities in the future. Councils are special and different. They can take money from you whether you want to give it to them or not. We trust them to look after the vulnerable and the homeless, to protect us from poisoning, pestilence and plague and to keep our towns and villages moving.

I’m not arguing that we should keep the Commission and, in any case, the ship has sailed on that. I am arguing that there is a need for special scrutiny of local government. The Leaders and Chief Execs of the many, many really well-run councils may gripe and complain but behind them lurks the spectre of corporate failure and they should accept some chafing to make sure they no-one gets left behind.

“Councillors can campaign for change at a personal or party political level, rather than throwing away other people’s council tax on the corrosive and wasteful practice of government lobbying government.”

Well up to a point Lord Copper.

Local government frequently finds itself trying to influence the decisions of ministers. Maybe the leader of every English council really can pick up the phone and have a quick chat with Eric Pickles, or Vince Cable, or Grant Shapps. Maybe they’ll all take that call. Or maybe they won’t. I’m guessing they won’t.

And of course there is a club for local authorities: the Local Government Association so maybe councils should direct their resources in that direction? And of course they should, and do, but the LGA talks for all councils and not all parts of England are the same.

To pluck an example from the ether. I live in Shropshire. It’s very rural. Access to broadband here is a massively important issue in terms of public service delivery, independent living and economic development. It is a different issue here than it is in, say, the West Midlands conurbation.  The LGA may not prioritise broadband and why shouldn’t Shropshire Council be able to influence the decisions of ministers and regulators in the interests of the communities it serves?

Ah yes I hear you say, but do they need to engage lobbyists? Government lobbying government as Eric says.

I guess all I can say is if lobbying is so bad then the Government should ban lobbying. To deny local authorities the right to access professional support which is freely available to, oh I don’t know BT and BP, is bizarre. It is ill thought out, stupid, and, like I say, populist nonsense.

Hare tracks in the snow by Space & Light

There are people sitting in offices near you right now imagining all the worst things that could befall you and your neighbours. They don’t want bad things to happen to you, rather the opposite. On the other hand they recognise that bad things do sometimes happen to good people and they would like to minimise how bad they get. They are called emergency planners, they work in the emergency services, local authorities and some other public bodies and this post is addressed largely to them. You might want to come a long for the ride.

Planning for emergencies

So the job of an emergency planner is to plan for an emergency which is (in case you were wondering) any of these:

• an event or situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom
• an event or situation which threatens serious damage to the environment of a place in the United Kingdom
• war, or terrorism, which threatens serious damage to the security of the United Kingdom

(from the Civil Contingencies Act 2004)

And they will have a series of plans covering situations like flooding, widespread power failure or pandemic influenza. The broad framework of these plans is usually pretty simple (complexity is pretty-much to be avoided when it all goes pear-shaped). There will be a trigger to activate the plan, a standby phase, an activation phase and a recovery phase. Much of the plan will identify what people and resources are needed for each phase, where they normally are and where they should be during this phase. There will be mention in the plan of how to communicate with the general public. I’d like to suggest that emergency plans could keep up more effectively with where modern communications are going.

Triggers

Information is needed to trigger a plan. Sometimes this information is reliable and from an extremely reputable source. If the Environment Agency say that the River Severn has broken its banks, you probably don’t need independent verification. If the police receive a phone call saying there’s being a massive explosion then they are probably going get some more information before triggering a mass evacuation.

Could social media play a role in triggering an emergency response? If there is a massive explosion in a town centre you can bet that within minutes pictures will be whirling around the twitterverse. This should carry at least as much weight as someone dialling 999. Should 999-responders and local authorities be monitoring social media sites for emergency triggers? I’m inclined to think they should and, short of that, they should certainly monitor this space for additional information once they’ve received a trigger.

Standby

Good organisations go to standby an awful lot. It’s good practice for one thing. If in doubt go to standby because you can always stand down in half an hour.They don’t usually make a big song and dance because they don’t want to worry anyone. The emergency plan will have a check-list of things to be done on standby. Wake up the chief executive, open the emergency control centre, contact a series of staff and ask them to get ready to stop whatever they are doing and do this instead.

I think that the checklist should include the following items:

• designate a #tag for this incident
• announce on appropriate social media platforms that the organisation is aware of the incident and is standing by, ask people to use the designated #tag
• listen out on social media for information about the incident and respond to questions and concerns in real time
• collate all social media feeds in the opps centre

Activation

At this point, something quite bad will have happened and the public bodies (Cat 1 Responders as they call themselves) will be working hard to try to make sure it doesn’t get worse. If it is going to get worse, they will be trying to minimise the impact on people and the environment.

Once the emergency plan kicks in, it will no doubt include an item triggering an emergency communications plan. Emergency Planners, in my experience, like to see their in-house comms staff as a nice safe buffer between the people managing the emergency and the media. I’m not sure this was ever a sensible way to behave but I’m convinced that in the 2st century it is unsustainable.

Social media has several roles to play

• it can be a very useful way of getting information out in a timely fashion
  People who use social media really use it. That’s where they are, if you want to tell them to stay in doors and close the windows you have to do it there. Not to the exclusion of other media of course but as part of the mix.
• it will still have an important role to play in getting reports in about the emergency
  Rumour, odd reports, speculation all fly around emergencies. Emergency planning training in the UK focuses pretty heavily on ways to process this data and turn it in to useful intelligence upon which some decisions can be made. Social media adds to the volume of that mix but also to its richness with audio, video and photographs all available in an easily accessible form.
• it can be used to mobilise resources not simply the “We need 4×4s and drivers” but also “please check on your neighbours”
  Barrack Obama used facebook to get his supporters to get out his vote. We could do the same. If we needed to.
• it can also provide data and even information that is not easily available any other way
  There is something beautiful about the uksnow map.  This examines twitter for the #tag #uksnow and then extracts simple information to map the movement of snow across the UK. It’s a proof of concept you would probably not use it to plan a military operation. You could set up a map of your county ready to pull information out of the twitterverse. You could display reports of road closures due to surface water flooding (data that is very hard to get in any other way). People could spoof the system but would they? And in reverse you could use the same system to map information only from your own twitter feed. So if you open rest centres they could be automatically mapped for everyone to see.

Recovery Phase

This is the phase of most interest to local authorities who, in the way of these things, have the responsibility for looking after people and cleaning up. That can take a long time, I mean years. Emergency plans already cover issues such as how to provide practical and emotional support to large numbers of people affected by a serious emergency.

It is already common for facebook groups to spring up after emergencies to rally support for public appeals or (in the case of Raoul Moat) for less pleasant reasons. The emergency plan should anticipate this and indicate how the organisations involved should begin to respond. This is not about publishing the location of the Humanitarian Assistance Centre on your council facebook page (though clearly you should do that) it is about using the technology to understand people’s wants and needs.

And finally

Emergency Plans are plans for organisations that help them to manage their response. The wider public will be doing all sorts of things while this is going on and they will be doing it, increasingly, on social media platforms. The flow of comment and opinion and information there can’t be controlled by anyone. Public bodies can make sure that their accounts are authoritative and trusted but that can’t be done on the fly. If you want your facebook account to be trusted in an emergency that happens in 18 months time you need to start building that trust right now.

Social media opens up organisations, they become more porous, information slips out and moves around speedily. Lots of people get involved in managing emergencies and all of them will have mobile phones and (on current figures) half of them will have social media accounts. You cannot stop this back-channel and it’s not sustainable to ignore it. Emergencies will have to be managed much more transparently than we are used to.

I know that proper emergency planners are shaking their heads silently. They worry a lot about the resilience of communications (they like pen and paper, land-line and satellite telephones and big generators). Social media is remarkably susceptible to failure. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be in the plan but it does mean we should not rely on it. But actually that’s the case for all media.

Photo used under a Creative Commons Licence the original is here

Photo is "Do the right thing" by Wadem

PR people should be the moral heart of their organisations.

Now I know that placing the word moral in the same sentence as PR is likely to generate, well, at least some cynicism. It may sound rather wide-eyed and idealistic. Not many people call me wide-eyed and idealistic. Not if they’ve met me. My submission is that it is both pragmatic and prudent.

Let’s take, oh just at random, the hypothetical example of a global oil giant losing an oil-rig, killing several employees and pumping loads of unpleasant thick black oil into a small and beautiful sea. I know it seems unlikely but bear with me. What’s the role of the PR team in all this? Damage control? Mopping up the fall out as fishermen go around mopping up the oil slick? Making sure the company gets its side of the story out there? This is the “in case of emergency break glass” model of public relations. It’s not right and it’s not sensible.

PR Practitioners are often culpable in maintaining this model. We all like to think that we’re important, the go-to guy in the crisis, the safe pair of hands. Who am I to criticise? I’m an Associate Member of the Emergency Planning Society.

And actually, within the profession (PR that is not emergency planning), we know how to handle crisis comms. It’s pretty simple. React swiftly, do everything you need to do to make people safe and to put right what went wrong, say sorry, and listen with respect to and act upon the criticisms of your organisation.

In short: do the right thing.

I’ve got to float the idea that do the right thing might actually be a sensible way to run an organisation. It seems mad but possibly, just possibly, it might be possible to run an organisation that listens to others, that does everything it can to make people safe and not to screw up the planet and that reacts to problems swiftly.

Now there are lots of reasons that drive organisations to do the wrong thing. What they really need is someone trusted at the heart of the organisation to stop them.

Now I’m not arguing that this role is the exclusive preserve of the shiny-suited ones. Clearly the more people who behave in an moral way within organisations the better.

PR people have less excuse than others though. They are trained to be objective and detached from the groupthink. They are trained to see the organisation as others see it. They have (or should have) the interpersonal and communication skills to help others understand why some decisions are just plain wrong.

So there you are, PR people the moral guardians. That’s either an exciting vision of the future or a sad indictment on where we are as a society.

First, let’s establish what I think is happening in online communications. Broadly, I think that communication has flattened and speeded up. The barriers to publishing finally went when decent blogging platforms were developed. The barriers to distribution have also crumbled with the widespread use of social media tools. Only a few years ago, emergency planners scared each other with stories about how quickly Sky could get a film crew on site. Now anyone with a phone can beam live images, audio, video, commentary, whatever you want around the globe before the incident officer has been woken from their gentle slumber.

There is some good news. Social media platforms are being used, right now, to disseminate information that the general public needs to know about emergencies. Visit the website of the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command and you’ll see facebook, twitter, flickr, youtube, del.icio.us, digg, rss and even e-mail icons ranged in serried ranks. With 1/3 -1/2 of the UK population on facebook it would be madness not to try to give them important messages via that platform. You can’t invent this stuff on the fly. Or rather, of course, you can but you don’t need to and you shouldn’t. It would be more effective to gather followers and likers in advance of an event. This will help to establish authenticity and have a whole army of distributors of your message. This is important. It is a strange and lawless world out there my friend. Some people seem to have taken bpglobalpr at face value. Well BP encouraged them to be explicit about the fact that it is a visceral, angry and penetrating satire.

This subject was explored a bit at localgovcampy&h (in a session I helped out with). There are a few (a very few) examples of local authorities using twitter effectively to communicate school closures (for example). The best examples (such as Newcastle City Council) already had an established and popular twitter feed. People use social media differently too. They talk to it. Not like people shout at John Humphreys on the radio but actually interact with it. Your carefully crafted public message will be challenged, added to, and argued with. Do you need to respond? Yes, yes you do.

We could go further. You could have a map ready to read your twitter stream and map whatever you push into the world. I can see this being really useful for a rising tide incident (literally or metaphorically) closing roads all over the place. That would be of interest to your partner agencies and the public and, well, all of us.

We could go further. You could have a map that reads twitter generally and maps reports with a specific hashtag. You could use that to map flood reports. People could game the map but probably most people wouldn’t and you could keep an eye on that. Imagine that, moderate quality information and no-one needs to answer the phone.

In any case monitoring social media seems to be a must, not just for lonely journalists and PR merchants but for anyone with a professional interest in knowing what’s kicking off.

In a future post I’ll look at the sort of things that I’d like to see put into an emergency plan with regards to online tools. If that would interest your good selves.

Like many of the best things in the world, Social Media Surgeries originated in Birmingham and have subsequently found their way across the UK with strongholds in Yorkshire and the south west. They exist to help voluntary and community groups and community activists make better use of social media and online technology.

It’s a simple idea.

Let’s say the chair of local community group wonders if there might be anything in this facebook idea that people keep banging on about. So they decide to drop-in on the Social Media Surgery. At the surgery a “surgeon” (really a geek like me) sits down with them, asks a bit about their group and what they are thinking of doing. Then they can show them on a conveniently located computer how to go about actually doing it.

It’s relaxed, informal, and tailored to each individual’s needs. There will be no presentations, powerpoint slides or talks be invited speakers. Just a quiet chat with someone who knows what they are talking about. It relies on volunteer surgeons and I think it’s going great.

And the first one in Shropshire is happening in OMH so it’s right in the centre of town and in a rather fabulous building with coffee, tea (or something stronger if you prefer) easily to hand.

That’s it really. So if you have any questions about how your voluntary or community group can get more out of the internet, come and visit us any time between 1730 and 2000 on 12th July 2010. Find out more and let us know you’re coming here.

If you’re on twitter use #shrewsms and we’ll see you.

I’ve cross-posted this onto tellthehours.posterous.com and benproctor.co.uk/blog. First time I’ve done that.

“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.

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.

Are you up for it?

View from the conference: George from LGcommunications on Vimeo.

The upstairs room at Shropshire Jelly, during a cake break

So yesterday I spent all day sitting at a table typing away on my laptop computer. No surprises there.

What was unusual was that I was surrounded by the chatter of 20-odd other workers all typing away on their respective laptop computers. I was at the second Shropshire “Jelly” co-working event organised by @janminihane who should be lauded for her efforts.

It’s a simple idea, which originates in the USA, get a bunch of homeworkers and put them all together in a room for a day. Not to network, not to train, just to do their normal work.

I wasn’t sure how it was going to pan out. In fact I had an e-mail conversation with a colleague (who ended up not going to this one) along the lines of “Well they say it’s not networking but presumably we will have to talk to each other or we might as well stay at home”.

And we did talk to each other. It was a lot like being in an office. We talked about what we were working on, we talked about whether Flash would survive the dual assault of HTML 5 and Apple (not all of us talked about that to be fair), we talked about twitter (a lot). We talked about how nice it is in Coalport and how lovely the weather is and we talked a bit about our businesses.

The atmosphere was really collaborative and friendly. No-one was trying to flog stuff, Enterprise HQ was a great venue and the cafetieres were of unusual size.

I did make some useful contacts but mostly I had a really great day, I got loads of work done and I came out feeling really positive and motivated.

There will be another Jelly next month. The past two have sold out very promptly so Jan has said the next one will go on Eventbrite at 0900 on the 1st June. You have been warned.

See you at the next one.