Yesterday was a fabulous day at UKGovCamp, generously hosted by Microsoft in their plush London offices.  Lots of great stuff on digital and government – with a much greater emphasis on local this year, which – of course – suits me fine.

I did one session on blogging for community.  But it wasn’t for the communities that we live in, but the ones we work in: communities of practice.

Now when I say communities of practice, what instantly springs to my mind and to the minds of a lot of other people who work in local government is the LG Improvement and Development’s Communities of Practice platform.  And it has been a great online platform for supporting communities of practice – but they aren’t the same thing.  So from here on out – if I mean a group of people who sharing insight and ideas to improve what they do, then it’s community of practice – and if I mean the platform, I’ll refer to it as CoP.

The lonely blogger

You can blog on your own.  You can start up a blog and start writing and just keep writing and maybe you’ll attract some readers and maybe you won’t.  There’s a lot of value in solitary blogging.  It’s a personal record.  For me, it’s my online memory for both my professional and personal life (on separate blogs with separate IDs).

It’s personal reflection.  I’ve worked out a lot of things through blogging, the process itself has often help me achieved clarity.  But other things that are great about blogging are community aspects – feedback, additional information, learning new things, reality checks and correction.  And for that you need an audience, but not a big one.  And many people (like me) find that having an audience provides some stimulus to keep doing it.  But again, it’s not about big numbers.

My blogging beginnings

Bear with me while I tell a story, it’s probably relevant

I feel lucky that when I started blogging, it was into a community of interest based on geography.  I come from a story-telling culture which is highly individualist – often to the point of orneriness.  That’s the South, but in particular the strong Scotch Irish founded East Tennessee.  And when I started, there was already a well developed blogging community being nurtured by a guy called Randy Neal.  Back then he was South Knox Bubba – and he was my blogfather.  My founding inspiration.  He aggregated a group of bloggers called the Rocky Top Brigade and it had some core principles you had to adhere to before you could be inducted.  Your religion had to be Tennessee football.  You had to be blogging for a while.  And you couldn’t just blog about what you had for dinner last night, unless it was an astonishing breakthrough in BBQ or tailgating.  He hung up the SKB nom de keyboard, but carries on with a hyper-local community blog site called KnoxViews.

But we also had some other things going for us back in the day (2004, 2005).  We had some well known Mommy bloggers in Tennessee who would often link to relevant posts.  We had Glenn Reynolds - Instapundit – a right/libertarian blogger who focuses on national politics but would often link to members of the local blogging community.  When he linked you, we called it an Instalanche because of the traffic he’d send your way.

But probably most important of all, we had Brittney Gilbert and Michael Silence.  Brittney worked for a Nashville television station and Michael still works for a Knoxville newspaper.  And both of them blogged about local bloggers, as part of their jobs.  Linking people and including items in regular coverage.  Getting link love from them was enough to create a bit of an audience.  And they were hubs of a community that linked each other a lot.

And link love is positive loop of bloggy goodness.  But I think it’s important that there were a number of significant nodes for the community, some of them driven by old media.  Some of them representing more traditional institutions.  But the influence of others in that network was entirely digital native. And that encourage a lot of blogging.

But when I started blogging about practice, about my work – there wasn’t in any way the same kind of community around it.  And 5 years later, there still isn’t.

Blogging networks in the local gov community

So what can we do to create a similar level of community in blogging about practice?  People like Dave Briggs have done a lot for the public sector blogging community.  He set up the public sector blogging list.  He blogs – a lot at davepress.net He links – a lot. He’s a node.

But we need multiple nodes.  Dave doesn’t pick up on every kind of blogging in local government (and we shouldn’t expect him to) – he’s interested in digital.  But not everything that goes on in local gov is digital and we shouldn’t just be encouraging blogging about digital things  in government.

Over the past year, I’ve definitely seen an uptick in blogging. Blogging about practice.  Most of this been has been on the CoP platform.  But there are people who are blogging elsewhere on free platforms and self-hosted blogs.   It’s been amazing, and I’m sure it’s been beneficial – a bit.  But unless we promote and encourage this and make it easy to find we can’t maximise the value.  The blogging function on CoP is a bit unwieldy and it’s almost impossible to find good archived blogs – fortunately that will improve with the Knowledge Hub (which will replace the CoP platform shortly).  But it’s still an excellent place to start, there’s a ready made audience and in a number of communities there are some excellent facilitators and community managers who are encouraging activity by celebrating and sharing what people are doing.

But how can we use ‘old media’ more effectively?  At the LG Group, we could probably do much more to promote blogging on the CoP – using the power of our promotional networks.  Not only would this beget more blogging, which would help to spread best practice and an environment for collaborative and innovation but it would provide us with a valuable overview of how we could serve local government better.

Tips from the session

• writing for a computer screen – got to be very clear to read and scroll down – break up your text – the one sentence paragraph (from Jack of Kent blog)
• Link! linking gives you credibility -and  information for others
• workforce development – most cost effective ways of accessing and sharing learning – blogging and a whole range of other tools to support personal and self-directed learning
• some places are encouraging blogging instead of CPD forms – and if people aren’t comfortable with writing up – allowing short audio or video blogs instead.
• don’t get bogged down in the process
• use other networks to find good blogs to read and places to promote your blogs
• the gap from doing nothing to something is huge – an easy first step for people who work in localgov, try using the CoP platform – it’s a safe place to start.
• if you already do blog in localgov, try to remember to repurpose it and republish it into the CoP – but you won’t have to do that with KHub
• be aware of political sensitivities if you’re blogging from within government, but there’s still plenty of factual stuff, experience and observations you can blog about – don’t let that be a barrier
• syndicate your blog – use things like Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook apps like Networked blogs where appropriate to give your blog a wider reach

Post script – I was supposed to do this session with Steph Gray – but in the mayhem of GovCamp, wires were crossed – but he did some awesome and very helpful slides