In the morning we heard from Chris Chant, Director of Digital at the Cabinet Office,  about being digital by default, about how we need to think about the user experience from the beginning to end and how we can reflect that improved service design through the online experience.

Then we heard about the rise of the app. For me, I’m unconvinced. I love my apps, I do. But I’d rather see a more ‘perfect’ mobile web experience – unless it’s an action I often repeat (like flinging a bird into some pigs!)  or a website I visit all the time which makes my experience better or something that helps me take better advantage of the native features of smart phones. Then, yes please! Give me an app.  Certainly, I think there’s a place for the app – where do you think it fits in a perfect council website?

I spoke on the future of open council websites.  For me that means how a council website encourages openness, transparency and engagement with the public.  But an open council website is also one which is an interactive part of the wider web.   It’s about publishing both data and documents (documents are data, too – but you know what I mean).   I think there’s a lot that could be done, fairly easily and fairly quickly to make council websites more open.

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Go check out the many useful ideas for using local data. Such as:

• Budget information as open (and machine readable) data using existing standard headings.
• Profiling and combining local area data such as index of multiple deprivation.
• or my personal favourite – sharing data about things to do in the local area…(vote for this! I need this app as a parent of very active, easily bored child!)

Or check out any of the sixteen (and counting!) other ideas, Vote on the ideas, comment on them or add your own.

Remember this event is only the beginning of a cooperative, sector-wide effort to share and use open data much more effectively – so share your ideas now.

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This week I took my son to Deen City Farm. It’s one of a small number of city farms spread across London, helping little kids tell the difference between a sheep, a cow and an alpaca. I jest a little, because I’m a country girl. But I remember taking a university friend from Philadelphia up into the mountains of Tennessee and showing her some white tailed deer, beautiful creatures. But she was far more interested in the cattle and desperately wanted to get in the field with some young bullocks. Not a great idea! So city kids do need to know about farm animals, where their food comes from and so on.

Deen City Farm, like many community and voluntary sector organisations, is partly funded by the council. In this case, Merton council. They’ve already announced cuts for next year, with further cuts almost certain. Signs around the farm explained the funding situation and that they weren’t likely to be able to continue without more support.

That really would be a shame. We’ve certainly enjoyed our regular visits to the city farm. And I’ve always seen many happy families there!

There was a call to action. To sign their petition on Merton’s e-petition form. Frankly, Deen City Farm, that feels a little tame.

On that trip my son was messing about in the cafe where the staff were meeting. I couldn’t help but overhear them talking about trying to use Facebook more effectively and getting celebrities to Tweet their cause. Interesting. Intriguing actually, given what I do. Another farm visitor asked if they could take their picture to post on her own Facebook group.  I took the opportunity to give them my card and offer my help with social media. I might not have mentioned that I would do this for free. But anyway, they haven’t emailed me.    Probably because I wasn’t wearing my social media ninja shirt.

If they had called me, I would have sat down with them to talk them through their objectives, their wider communication efforts and how social media could help them galvanise a rather passionate local fan base around a really amazing community resource.

A campaign must have a call to action! Yes, they’ve asked people to sign the petition. But so what? What will that do?  Will that really save the farm?  I looked over Merton’s e-petition pages, but  it’s not clear what actually happens to petitions. Do they go in front of full council? Scrutiny? Are they sneered at by bored council officers?

Save the Farm is a brilliant call to action at the highest level. It has cultural resonance and it’s clear and emotive.  But underneath that high level call to action, you need some clear steps people can take to save the farm.  These could include signing the petition. Giving their  contact details, since email drives action at crucial points in time. Telling their story. Giving their skills to support the campaign. Giving money. And the ultimate but easy social media campaign ask – telling their friends. To do that you need to get your social media house in order.

1. Sign the petition.

Nothing wrong with that, but I’d like to see more clearly what you expect to happen as a result. If you live work or study in Merton, go on and sign the petition. It can’t hurt.

2. Get those contact details!

It’s easy to set up a Google form which can be embedded or linked from your website asking for contact details. The best social media campaigns use contact details to drive traffic and action when the time is right.

3. Help people tell their story. Can you get people to tell the story of what the farm means to them?  It only needs a few lines, exposed in the right places, and sometimes people need a few simple guidelines about what’s required like a simple question such as…”My favourite Day at Deen City Farm”  I would be happy to tell the story of how my boy took his first ever pony ride at Deen City Farm.  But there will be more powerful, more emotive stories out there.  Signatures might get you in front of the council but real stories from real people beat an electronic signature every time.

And don’t forget people are already telling their Deen City Farm story online.  Here’s a sample of Flickr pics tagged deencityfarm.

People are already sharing their experiences of the farm

Boy and chickens

And there are quite a few videos on YouTube as well, such as the one above showing my less-than-stellar parenting skills.   Curate and showcase the best examples. (There’s more here on Beth Kanter’s blog – she’s much more knowledgeable on this kind of thing than I am)

4. Ask for more.

There is a link on the Deen City Farm main website to a donations page.  And that’s awesome. But why not be a little more upfront about asking for cash? Or donations of skills. Yes, it is hard to manage volunteer effort, but the farm is already good at that when it comes to mucking out and caring for the animals. Now’s the time to call on some of the professional skills of people who live in the area. Wimbledon isn’t exactly short of communications, IT and business professionals who have kids who love Deen City Farm.  I know because I met a whole bunch of them at my first school parent evening.  Or take a look at who’s already following DCF on Twitter, like  Rob Dyson @RobMDyson who handles publicity for WhizzKids – who could probably share a tip or two from their amazing non-profit social media efforts.

Find out where people are already talking about Deen City Farm and join in the conversation and ASK FOR HELP. Kudos to DCF for joining in this MumsNet conversation. But you could have made a little more of some of the suggestions – such as a Facebook group or a Friends board. There are tons of very skilled women in Wimbledon who are taking time out to raise kids who would be thrilled to support this.

But this ‘under construction’ page on how to help the farm sort of typifies the engagement with people who want to help.  And despite the cute picture of the piggy, that’s not the right impression.

It's almost like you don't want our help

5. Get your social media house in order and get people to tell their friends

DCF is already using social media and people are really receptive to this fantastic local resource.  There’s a Facebook page and a Twitter account. But DCF have yet to claim their Facebook places page (which is what comes up first when you search in Facebook). And I don’t see much engagement in either place.  Nor do I see much cross linking between their social media and web presence and almost nothing (that I saw) in the ‘on land’ world.  And a few simple signs at the farm asking people to ‘like them’ on Facebook would be awesome.  Yes, I know all this takes time and it isn’t free in terms of people resources, but I bet there are a handful of local women with previous experience in comms and marketing who would be happy to take this over – if you can let go a little bit.

And bonus tip!  You gotta have a gimmick.

Great social media campaigns usually have some kind of eye catching gimmick.  Manchester Police’s 24 Hours on Twitter. Walsall did the same. Southampton University Hospital Trust used their Twitter feed to highlight what went on durring one shift in a ward under threat.

I don’t think a 24 hour tweet-a-thon is the thing for Deen City Farm. (1am, pigs still asleep – oink…zzzzzz) But I could be wrong.  To me it would be much more cool to look at the impact on the life of a volunteers or to set up an Twitter account for an animal and tell its story for a week. Deen City Farm is also right next to Wimbledon Studios (television and film). Maybe they could see about getting visiting celebs to pop in and spread the word. I dunno, there’s probably people out there with more gimmicky minds than me. But these can get you wider press attention and capture the imagination of potential fans.

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At the recent LocalGovCamp, I was asked to present a session on performance management for social media.  This is a little like performance managing telephone use. Yes, you can measure how many calls you receive, the time taken, lost calls and possibly even action taken because of phone calls, but a lot of the most productive phone calls in local government are conversations between people – someone who needs something and someone who can help them.   The objective isn’t using the telephone, it’s merely a tool to help you get the job done.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t be better at measuring what we can measure and understanding where social media can add value to local public services.  When is social media most effective, with whom and how can we get better at it? I mean why else would you want to know? Why else would you want to measure and monitor performance.

Well, there is another reason. And in a room of true believers that reason is to build up enough evidence to help the social media curious take a plunge into using social media more effectively in their services.  It’s about helping councils move from a social media broadcast model to a conversation model to embedding it in services which become more open, responsive and just plain better.

So where are we in terms of measuring social media performance? Well, not very far… We do some measurement in terms of followers, likes, and retweets and some people maybe even do a little bit in terms of understanding the value of channel shift (examples include sharing winter travel advice on Facebook and seeing a reduction of calls to the call centre – a quantifiable savings)

But on the other hand, we’re not terribly good at performance management anyway.  We can quantify the quantifiable in terms of activity,  but we don’t always start with the objectives, the reason we do stuff and then measure up against that.  For many councils, their use of social media doesn’t fit any particular objective, but instead is experiment or a kind of social me-too-ism.  That’s still in the ok territory for now, so quantitative measures like followers or just the fact that you’ve done it means you’ve met your objective.  But without evaluation, where can you go next?

_______

At the beginning of this session – we looked at where people wanted to better measure effectiveness at social media use. In the next post, we’ll look at what some people are already doing now and how we can make that even better.

• telling the qualitative story
• not reducing everything to a number
• reducing things to a number that tells a meaningful story
• reputational measures, understanding how
• measuring the effectiveness of conversations (did the conversations lead anywhere, what happened as a result)
• what’s the value of these conversations
• are your social media conversations furthering your reach and expanding your audience
• what metrics are other people using
• understanding the value of conversation
• understanding the value of social media in a ‘mixed media’ campaign
• qualitative conversation monitoring
• exposing and visualising the measures you do collect
• the value inside the organisation…making bureacratic processes lest costly and painful
• effective community management for consultation and participative processes
• effective measures of crowd-sourcing data or policy
• intrinsic rewards as an employee
• impact on channel shift

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At the Interactivism event in London.

Hack days are proliferating. These are collaborative events designed to turn open data into useful things.  Getting a bunch of developer talent into a room and writing some code which will deliver a working prototype by the end of a day or two-days.  They may be attached two a wider event, like Local by Social or a CityCamp, which also has conference elements as well as idea generation and design.  Or they might be very data and coding focused stand-alone events designed to deliver prototype apps or web products and services.

That there are more and more of these means that we now have enough experience in the local government sector to begin to understand what works, what’s useful and how we can organise these days to make them even better.  Liz Azyan and I ran a session together at LocalGovCamp on 18 June in Birmingham to look at the features of really useful data collaboration days. There was a great collection of people who’d run, attended and want to run their own hack and collaboration days and ironically I’d left the rather wonderful Interactivism hack run by Google and FutureGov to attend LocalGovCamp.

This is what we came up with.

• getting the right mix of people in the room.  It’s important to have development talent, but it’s also important to have people with experience of government, service delivery. strategy and importantly users.  Users are important whether the application is designed to be citizen facing or help gov practitioners work more effectively.
• it’s important for the organisers to have a clear vision in their mind about what they want to achieve.  Is it an app? Is it to put pressure on data holders? Is it educational? Is it about network building and skill transfer? Or some combination of these things.  Each of these objectives are worthy and valuable and you can have multiple objectives, but be clear what they are. This is particularly important for smaller events.
• be very clear with participants what those objectives are.  This means you draw the right people to the event.
• Map your stakeholders.  Each of the different kinds of people who will need to be involved will have different needs to be satisfied if they’re giving their time, skills, and efforts.
• do you have enough people with technical and data skills. Do you have people who can use the data tools that are already available like Google Fusion tables? Do you have enough people who can code? Understanding data and understanding code are not the same thing.
• This isn’t just about the tech.  There’s an important role for communications in sharing the event and the results of the event.  This probably isn’t so much a big hit but a long, slow burn.
• Understanding policy and service delivery is also important.  Some things might work technically, but need a policy ‘tweak’ to gain traction in gov.
• If there are specific objectives – how is the event being facilitated to make sure that they are met.  Are skills being distributed well across teams.  How can you re-direct teams with volunteer labour?
• There may need to be some facilitation to get over particular issues of programming languages to make sure that developer skills are being used well throughout the event.
• As apps or products are developed – what are the plans for completing them, sustaining them and making them pay (either inside government or as a commercial venture).

Tricky but resolvable issues

• One group that’s often missing from these events are budget holders or people who can make spending decisions.
• Government procurement remains a problem.  A team comes in to develop the framework, bring creativity for free and then a major firm is asked to deliver it.  This can be solved, but there seems little will to do so.
• We need a place to store these apps (tag them or whatever) and we need a place to store emergent standards so that councils can change data standards (a bit, perhaps) to ensure that anything that’s developed can be used in as many councils as possible
• Are we using the wrong name? Isn’t hacking illegal? Is there a better way to describe these events that will get management more engaged?

Come to the next not-hack – a Really Useful Local Government Data event

Liz Azyan and I are working with Local DirectGov to support a Really Useful Local Government Data event on 1 July in London. It’s not a hack.  But we’ll be start the innovation and design process that will be carried out over a series of ‘on land’ and online events over the next six months which will lead to a series of apps and visualisations for local government data.  Sign up here. Share your ideas and challenges here.

Updated: Oh, and here’s Emma Mulqueeny – Doyenne of the Hack, blogging What’s the Point of a Hack Day.  Great stuff.

And Lucy Hughes posts fresh-from-the-event thoughts on Interactivism.

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I blame the Internet.

In the olden days, that is when I went to university – it was hard to find someone who could write you a decent term paper.  The search costs were high. You’d have to arrange to discuss your needs with them.  Now contacts can be passed easily through social networks.  Papers can be tailored and re-submitted by students at different institutions, reducing costs.  You can even complete the whole process online – here’s one such purveyor of purloined knowledge.   Although if the quality of writing on their pitch page is anything to go by…

Are you one of those students who are saying “Please, someone complete my research paper”? Then we are the right choice for you among online research paper writing services since we are best research paper selling company. We have best custom research paper writers who answer to your call of “help me with my research paper” with confidence and they make us confident custom written research paper sellers.

But it’s not just plagiarised term papers. You don’t have to go far to run into a story about how Internet, and Facebook in particular, is ruining everything from the jury system to the the trust we place in day care providers.

This morning David Davies, in a Comment is Free piece, writes:

Many reports focus on the fact that Ms Fraill is the first juror to be convicted for contempt of court through her use of a social media site. This misses the point. That Fraill used Facebook is neither here nor there. The real problem this case revealed is that, in this internet age, it is becoming more and more difficult to try cases without prejudice.

Some people are lazy or vile or curious beyond the bounds of the law. But the internet and social networks allow them to establish relationships with like-minded individuals at lower cost and effort than we have ever before imagined possible. That some seek to exploit these relationships for evil ends should not be a surprise. But because we’re not always equipped to deal with the extended networks of the criminally minded, we often treat it as if it is.

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I believe that I’ve done some great work at Local Government Improvement and Development (ex IDeA ).  I’ve certainly worked with some amazing colleagues. But to be honest, I’ve been feeling itchy for some time. Wanting to do something different, but not so different. Yet the projects I was working on were hard to walk away from.  For the past several years, I’ve been doing a lot with digital. I’ve been using it to support better governance and improved performance management. And as I used social media and worked with open data more, the more opportunities I could see for local public services.   I’ve been blogging about it. Sharing examples. Taking the Local by Social events around the country. Helping practitioners to share information about social media and open data.  I know the future is digital.

And yes, there was probably still much good I could have done at LG Group with that. But I’d been there for almost 8 years.  It was time to go. And when I put in my form for voluntary redundancy, I slept better than I had in weeks.

But what to do next?  Well…FutureGov were doing the kind of stuff I wanted to do. Digital at the core, but the focus was on people, innovation, improvement – radical improvement.  Tech as a means but not an end.  A firm belief in local democracy, representative, participative, collaborative.  It seemed a natural fit. We started talking.

And so this morning I announced some very exciting news!

I think it’s going to be a fun ride.

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Of course, there’s campaigning for office, but there’s also campaigning on local issues.  Over the last year I’ve been gathering some examples of campaigning, but we’re looking for more!  We’re looking for examples of how councillors are using social media, the web and/or open data to campaign on local issues or for election.

Do you have a great story from the recent local elections or even last year’s council elections?  Did you or someone you know organise campaign workers through Facebook? Did you use Facebook Connect? Did you get messages out through Twitter?  Did you remind people to vote through email lists (gathered wholly or partially online) or SMS texts?

Maybe you’ve seen or delivered a great local issues campaign that used social media to help galvanise opinion and support.  Is it something related to council cuts? Something else? We’d love to hear from you if you’ve been involved in something any time over the last year.

I’m keen to hear from you! Tell your story in the comments section here or leave comments on the Connected Councillors page on social media campaigning – or just drop me a note at ingrid.l.koehler@gmail.com

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Baroness Hanham, from the Department of Communities of Local Government, will take part in a web discussion between 24 and 26 May exploring how councils and the voluntary sector can work more closely together. She will be using the Local Government Improvement and Development’s Communities of Practice platform to engage in discussion with practitioners between 24 and 26 May.

To make sure you’re not missing out on this important conversation and the chance to engage directly with a minister – just sign up here with your email address and we’ll contact you with joining instructions.

I’ve mostly been hanging out in my hometown.  It’s in Lawrence County, Tennessee and sits right on top of the Alabama border.  I don’t know if you’ve seen the news lately – but northern-ish Alabama and across the Tennessee border has been hit by some pretty heavy weather.  It wasn’t a great place to be on Wednesday.

We’d been up in Kentucky, visiting Mammoth Cave National Park and the roadside tourist trap Dinosaur World (see my fabulous set on flickr), but I knew a storm was on the way and we cut our visit short.  Kentucky radio was ominously full of interruptions from the weather service predicting “quarter sized hail” (that’s the size of a 10p roughly! though worth slightly more) and flash flooding.

We got back to my mom’s just before the storm hit. We would have been safer in Kentucky. Thunder, lightning, heavy rain all night.  In the morning it started to clear and then the tornado warning sirens went.  There were tornadoes on both the leading and trailing edges of the storm.  My family suffer from cabin fever, so my mom dragged me out during the middle lull to do some early voting in local elections.  We were voting for liquor by the drink – allowing you to buy a glass of wine or a mixed drink at a bar or restaurant.  Clearly, that’s something worth dying for along with the whole democratic principle.  And we went shopping.

Now some might say that shopping for shirts is a low priority when people are warning of super cells coming up from Alabama – but not for my mother.  The staff were telling us to go home.  I have a three year old son that was in my mom’s house that’s nothing but windows, so I was saying we should go home. My mom was looking at capri pants.

The tornado sirens went and the staff locked us in the store.  We had to wait it out in the back – away from any windows. But not my mom! She made them unlock the doors while she went shopping at another store.  I hung out with the staff and the one other customer.  Finally, it looked clear enough (though tornado weather is deceptive) and we went home.

Although Lawrence County was hit by tornado activity, my family and friends seem alright.

Serious stuff

But that’s a lot more than can be said for much  of the mid-South and central Alabama.  This is one of the worst series of tornadoes to ever hit the United States and is the 2nd in death toll (now standing at around 350).

Thursday dawned clear and beautiful, but as we drove across the bottom of the state of Tennessee toward Chattanooga we saw sporadic devastation.  I saw flooding across several counties that I’d never seen before, and I’ve seen some flooding – creeks swollen to rivers and lakes.  Fields, parking lots, sports fields covered in feet of water.  As we came toward Chattanooga we saw places off the Interstate where roofs had been blown away and stands of mature trees mown down.

South of Chattanooga, the town of Ringgold, Georgia was blown away.  On the right hand side of the Interstate everything looked as normal, on the left hand side it was a debris field.

Helping hand

I know what good friends and neighbors people in the South are. So it’s no surprise that the day after the storms people were taking time off work to search for survivors and to begin the clean up.

In my own hometown, not hard hit, they’re re-focusing the Lawrenceburg Green Streets festival and market down on the town square as a way to gather supplies for the hard hit in Alabama. Baby supplies, water, non-perishable food.

Cash will also be needed to help people clean up and get back on their feet.  There are many ways to donate.  I tend to use the Salvation Army (and in the UK for Gift Aid)   But the Red Cross is great, too.

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