Baroness Hanham from the Department of Communities and Local Government is hosting an online discussion on how councils and the voluntary sector can work more closely together. Has there been enough in the mix about digital collaboration? Runs through the 26th – check it out.

Representatives from DemenShare – are really cool project to use social networking support people with dementia and those caring for people with dementia are going to share lessons in a hot seat tomorrow 26 June.  Find out more here – including links to resources beyond just the Q&A.

Interactivism – an accessibility hack weekend on 17-18 June. The deadline for submitting ideas is 1 June. Hurry! Your chance to work with Google engineers and other really cool people.

There’s another event coming up in early July with a hack feel. Details forthcoming. But if you liked Local by Social – and you like the idea of working with local and national sets of localgov data – register your interest here and we’ll be in touch soon.  And if you can’t access Google forms, then reply to this email and ask to be added to the list.

LocalGovCamp in Birmingham is coming up, too! But that’s sold out. Get on the wait list.

Councillors and social media:

Can you help us refresh the social media guidance for councillors? I’ve come up with a list of things I could really use examples for here.  This is a great chance to get some national exposure in an LG Group publication for your council and your councilors.  Please let me know what you’re up to and forward the link to any councillors who might like to share their experience with colleagues.

Can you help? Stuff from the forum

• Hope this hasn’t happened to you, but how would you deal with abuse of staff on a social network?
• A discussion on setting up and using Facebook well - pages, groups and what kind of ID should you use?
• Using email to support social media (or other content) – a new, but potentially, really useful discussion.
• On the hunt for good examples of central and local gov Facebook pages – or any research on that – includes link to an American study.
• Getting senior management engaged in social media for internal comms - includes some really good examples from the police.
• Social media on no resources
• An awesome collection of links on youth engagement online.
• social media for community development
• using fixmystreet and other reporting services

Just a smattering of cool stuff from the blogs:

• Liz Azyan provides some really helpful info about the alphagov project and how localgov might fit in.
• Steve Peters from DCLG blogs about openly publishing and USING the indices of multiple deprivation for England.
• Spatial planning consultations online from John Heaven.
• Lessons from online communities and the SNP campaign.

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via flickr.com

As part of a community reporters project, local people used a variety of social media to cover the local elections in Kirklees. Some really interesting coverage of election night, candidacy and the roles of the people who make elections run smoothly.

See it all at Election Tales

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I need examples of how COUNCILLORS and COUNCILS (in the UK mainly, but would love to hear about other places, too) are using social media well. In particular:

Councillor examples (I’m really just looking for one or two paras – or even briefer!! 140 characters will do!)

• a one or two paragraph example of a councillor or councillors using video effectively to reach local people.
• a councillor using a wiki or collaborative writing tool like mixed ink , an idea generating and voting platform like UserVoice or some other collaboration software to have policy consultations.
• a councillor using Flickr or other kinds of shared images to celebrate a local area or highlight problems.
• a councillor using open data effectively or taking an active and championing role in promoting open data
• councillors and/or councils using social media effectively to support scrutiny.
• councillors (perhaps particularly leaders) using social approaches to communicate priorities with staff – i.e. through an internal tool like Yammer – or some other approach…
• great examples of a councillor engaging with a hyperlocal site

Council examples:

• councils using social media or web and multi-media to engage with people in advance of local elections or to communicate results.
• councils (or other local public services) using social media monitoring well.
• councils using social media for internal comms
• councils that are developing/ using iPhone or Android apps well
• cool, creative uses of social media to promote cultural events (maybe something you’ve just launched for summer fun???)
• great use of social media during emergencies (e.g. snow, fire, flood, pestilence!) – very happy to use international examples on this one.

If you have any examples…please leave them in the comments, tweet me @ingridk, or drop me an email at ingrid.l.koehler@gmail.com

If your example is already “out there”, I’ll probably feature it on my local case study blog, too.

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via flickr.com

“NYC Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne today unveiled Road Map for the Digital City – a comprehensive strategy to make New York the nation’s leading digital City.” 16 May.

This amazing effort and beautifully structured and designed report sets out examples of what has been done and where New York City will be headed in the future. It’s a really fantastic mix of excellent basic web offerings, data and apps, and communication and engagement through social tools.

In fact, NYC will be partnering with social web companies like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Foursquare. Not only does this benefit New York City, but this is an amazing step forward for all of “digital municipal” as they work together and innovate in the civic sphere.

Anyone working in a strategic position in local government needs to check this out.

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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.

Yesterday the Making a Difference With Data site launched at madwdata.org.uk .  This is an exciting initiative which is helping practitioners, councillors and active citizens alike to publish and use data more effectively.  It covers the local authority (transparency and democracy), education, health and social care, housing, roads and transport and police – all the stuff that touches our every day lives.

There are editors for each of these topics, but more importantly you can share your stories, examples and tips, too.  There’s already a host of great material there already, including open government events, too.  Such as Making a Difference with Data event, Local by Social North West (Blackburn) – both on 18 March – and Local by Social North East (Sunderland) 4-5 March.

The Local by Social NE event will be focused on making a difference with data, information and use of social media to help children and their families improve their life chances.  This is a hands-on event, focused on one particular community in Southwick.  The practical and geographic focus and the participation of local parents and residents, ensure we’ll be making a difference, but the lessons are applicable everywhere.  Come and lend a hand on the hack day 5 March or just attend the event and workshop on 4 March.  Tickets are free, of course.  Find out more about the philosophy of the event or sign up here. Check out what we did at Local by Social SW – Apps for Communities in Bristol.

Guidance on publishing contracts and tenders

Following the LG Group’s successful open consultation on publishing expenditure and senior salaries, we’ve responded to the consultation on publishing contracts and tenders.  Find the original guidance and our response here. You can also discuss the recently published DCLG draft code of practice for publishing open data in the Local Open Data Community of Practice.

Can you help? from the Local Open Data Community  Forums

• Mapping public sector assets
• Open data license – fit for local government
• What is meant by payments above £500?
• Information architecture for open data
• Is anyone looking at your open spending data?
• Senior manager expenses data?
• Boiler plate transparency clauses in contracts
• Publicising tranparency data

From the blogs:

Right to data bill – Matthew Pearce

Enterprise architecture – Peter Winstlanley

And I’ve added lots of new examples of open data at local, state (and sometimes regional) level at the LocalGov2.0 blog – check out the data tag for data and location services related posts.

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Lives are messy.  Lives are full of complex relationships and difficult circumstances.  All families are chaotic. I mean, I guess they are.  Mine is.

Certainly some of the most intractable problems that we face in the public sector are caused by we frail humans and our silly, sometimes tragic ways. If we were all alike in our unhappiness, then problems might be much simpler to solve.  And these problems are compounded by dis-organisation, lack of information, a failure to communicate and layers of people who need to know or act, but don’t.

Social media doesn’t solve this.  But social media and digital technologies do enable connections to be made more easily and information to be shared quickly and easily.  Information that can range from a feeling to a picture to case information to reminders of how to access services.

The next Local by Social is going to be delivered through the lens of child poverty. Initially, we were reluctant to say this – maybe child poverty sounds stigmatising or patronising? A bit of a downer?  But really this is about life chances, opportunity and making a difference. This is about starting with the problem and not just championing a solution that you hope will fit.  This is the most exciting and innovative edge of how social tech can be used to transform not just services but people’s lives.  It won’t be easy and it won’t be fast, but this is what public service is about.  This is a chance to be a part of one of the most exciting, purposeful events you’ll ever attend.

On the first day,  4 March -  we have an absolutely amazing line up. We’ll hear from innovators, Sunderland’s political leadership will share how they’ve been leading on digital and from Carla Ross from NESTA’s ReBoot Britain programme where a series of programmes are trying to tackle some really complex issues in people’s lives.  (See here for full agenda). We’ll hear from people at the leading edge of digital innovation in gaming and touch screens  and then we’ll work together to see how some of these lessons can be applied to a particular neighbourhood in Sunderland.  And the people who live there will be working with us as citizen innovators.   This is a huge opportunity to see in a very practical way how digital tech can reach into the heart of public service and to be a part of spreading these lessons more widely.

On Day 2 we’ll be working with developers, citizens and public sector practitioner to design  and build things which can be used not just in that neighbourhood in the North East, but maybe in a neighbourhood near you.  Neighbourhoods are both happy and unhappy in their own unique ways, but we’ll be sharing lessons about ways of thinking about addressing  these issues which are the same everywhere.

You can attend either or both days, and of course, the tickets are free.  Sign up here.

_________

Friday 4^th March, Southwick Community Primary School, Sunderland

9.30 – 10.00: Registration and coffee

1000 – 10.10: Sunderland’s Vision for Digital Inclusion – Cllr Florence Anderson, Deputy Leader of Sunderland City Council and Child Poverty Champion

10.10 – 10.20: Sunderland’s approach to Digital Inclusion – Tom Baker, Head of Communications and Corporate Information and Communication Technology, Sunderland City Council (TBC)

10.20 – 10.30: Hopes for the day – Trish Stoker, Head Teacher of Southwick Community Primary School (TBC)

1030 – 10.45: Introduction to Local by Social and LG Groups’ Knowledge Hub -Ingrid Koehler, Improvement Strategist, Local Government Improvement and Development (LGID)

10.45 – 10.55: Gov 2.0 – Carrie Bishop, FutureGov

Questions and comments

11.05 – 11.20: Coffee break

11.20 – 11.35: Reboot Britain – Carla Ross, Innovation Programmes Manager, National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA)

Questions and comments

11.45 – 12.15: Generating and filtering ideas for afternoon workshops

12.15 – 1.00: Lunch

1.00 – 2.15: Afternoon speakers

• Herb Kim, Chief Executive of Codeworks, which facilitates connection and collaboration between digital innovators within North East England and throughout the world.
• Jeremiah Alexander, Ideas Architect/Director of Ideonic, an ideas-driven serious games studio based in Newcastle.
• Mahmoud Elsaid, Managing Director of LamasaTech, which develops multi-touch technologies such as interactive walls.

2.15 – 2.30: Introduction to afternoon workshop sessions

2.30 – 3.30: Afternoon workshops

3.30 – 4.15: Workshop feedback

4.15 – 4.25: Review of workshop presentations

4.25 – 4.30: Closing Remarks

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Online communities have been important since probably the week after there was an online at all.  And they’re growing in importance.  Communities of practice and communities of professional interest have been an important part of my working life for around seven years now and personal communities of interest have played a role for me for much longer – in fact I met my husband in a Usenet group back when we still could have had tabloid coverage for meeting up and marrying.  I’m very thankful to the community moderators of that group for making that connection happen, most days anyway.  And I’m also really grateful to a huge set of people who’ve helped me in my personal life – from the maternity and baby forums here and there (a life line!), the traditional Irish music email list I used to engage with and really helped my fiddle playing, community mods all across flickr who’ve helped me grow as a photographer.  Most of those people were operating under pseudonyms and I’ll never be able to thank them properly.

But as for work and in terms of communities now… I want to thank:

• Charlotte Hayes who helps me out tremendously in communities I facilitate.
• Steve Dale for pushing forward on the Commuities of Practice platform back in the day.
• Adrian Barker for pushing me to innovate and develop my community management style and Vicki Goddard who carries on with Policy and Performance.
• Michael Norton and others for creating and managing the community facilitators community of practice – with tons of great tips and tricks.
• Dave Briggs for kicking off the social media community of practice and for being a major node still.
• David Wilcox who kicks off communities and raises interest in stuff before it comes onto the map.
• Sandie Bakowski for her amazing work with Innovation Hub at dotgovlabs.

Across the pond, I’d like to thank….

• R Neal for doing so much for the online community in East Tennessee and my original inspiration.
• Steven Clift of the e-democracy forums – this is a recharge zone for me.
• Steve Ressler and Andrew Krzmarzick of GovLoop – super-community managers, amazing!

See yesterday’s post on community - including some great slides from Steph Gray on what online communities are and why they’re important.

Anyhoo…there was a question on Quora I answered recently Does open government require a democracy?

Off the cuff, I answered yes.

But surprisingly many people answered no, the two weren’t necessarily connected. Citing China  and its experiments with open data and government as a platform or wikileaks forcing government information  into the open.

This strikes me as missing the whole point of open government.  Open government isn’t about the information, it’s about what you can do with it.  And I don’t mean use data to come up with commercial web services (nothing wrong with that) or to embarrass current or former administrations through leaked diplomatic cables.  It’s about how you can make things change, how you can make things better, or how you can influence decisions. As a citizen.  As a citizen who isn’t necessarily a member of powerful political group or with enough cash to buy power.

I don’t want to get into some kind of semantic debate about what is democracy, as democracy can take many forms.  But what it boils down to is a system where citizens can make some decisions which affect outcomes.  That is – whether decisions are made directly or decisions are delegated to representatives, people make the choice.  People make the challenge.  And importantly people can do so without fear of losing liberty or property.  So sorry China, I don’t really care how many data sets you publish, so long as people can be forcibly evicted from their homes and have no right of redress and can be locked up for pointing that out or while religious groups are persecuted or artists are under house arrest and there’s only one viable political party – there’s no open government.

Talkin’ bout a revolution

In a number of speeches I’ve given, I compare social media to the printing press.  And I think open information could be just as revolutionary.  But not all revolutions end well, in fact they usually end up with progroms and purges.  Not all revolutionary developments are universally beneficial to humankind.  As transformational as the printing press has been to much of Northern Europe – undermining the role of  the church and the monarchy and putting power in the hands of ordinary people – the widely distributed written word hasn’t changed lives for the better everywhere.   And even where it’s been largely of benefit, pernicious documents like Mein Kampf or Protocols of the Elders of Zion can be easily and cheaply mass produced to stir up heaps of trouble which they’ve done from first imprint until today.  And the Internet certainly has its equivalents – from Al Qaeda inhabited Islamist chatrooms to racist hate group websites – the power of the Internet is being used for good and ill.  And as people become more sophisticated at open data or use leaked documents to target political opponents we’ll see good and bad coming from open information.

But where there’s a foundation of democracy and liberty, open information is more likely to support open government. Where there’s an expectation of free speech, which allows you to make challenges based on open data then you can have open government.  But where there isn’t a firm foundation of liberty, it won’t.  Look at Glasnost – Gorbachev’s attempt at open government.  It changed things forever, it contributed to the fall of the USSR, but years later speaking out against power in Russia might land you in Siberia or in a London hospital with polonium poisoning.  That’s not sustainable open government.

Open deliberation

I’m a huge fan of open information. I think it will make democracies stronger.  I think it will bring us closer to open government.  But open government isn’t about data, it’s about deliberation.  It’s about choice, influence and participation without fear and as much as possible without favour.

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I can see people preparing New Year’s prediction lists for tech and government and the two combined.  All about how things will change in the New Year.  I’ve always been a bit suspicious of these kinds of lists because 1. it seems a bit faddish and 2. they’re way too easy to get wrong. It’s too easy to check back and prove to yourself that you’re not the visionary guru that you hoped you were.  The lists are literally hostages to fortune.

So instead of predicting a bright new future, I thought I’d draw on my natural pessimism to identify five things I think might happen in the New Year.  And if they don’t – hurray!  I can look back at the list and say: “Awesome! I was wrong.” I’m hedging my bets.  And if they do, well – I told you so.

1. Local open data stalls.

After an initial flurry of activity in January for expenditure data (see revised LG Group guidance here) and a bit more a little later on related to contracts (new consultation guidance here on publishing contracts and tenders).   Local government open data begins to stall.  This is a patchy prediction. Some councils are going to be absolutely forging ahead.  Places like Bristol (which is hosting the next Local by Social: Apps for Communities), a few places in London and some other bright stars in the data firmament begin using more and more open data and nurture their developer communities to make stuff useful to citizens and to local public services.  But the rest slow down, drag their feet and don’t really see the point and fail to get on the bandwagon when pressure from the centre dies down.

Some cool apps are developed in some locations, but because there’s little collaboration on open standards for what’s quite similar data, we don’t see the benefits spread over the sector as a whole.

2. Social media in local gov become the domain of Comms

A lot of comms people in local government have been resistent to social media, but 2011 marks the end of that.  Hurray, you say.  Danger! I say.  Social media works best where it’s a conversation between real people.  Comms teams work under a model of communication that facilitated messages going between monolithic entities – the council and the local newspaper.  Or where it was a more disperse model, it’s the council and broadcast only mechanisms like advertising and newsletters to a passive public.  This is the year that councils comms catches on to the free to use (but labour intensive) social media scene, but attempts to control the messages even more tightly.

Of course central communications must play a role, but the benefits of social media can only really be achieved when there’s a more federated model of communications.  Councillors communicating more easily with their constituents.  Local people sharing information among themselves and council officers sharing matters of fact and pointers to more information with local people.

3. More councillors get in trouble for using social media.

This one is a shooting-fish-in-the-barrel prediction.  Of course a councillor will get in trouble for his/her imprudent social media use.   What’s sad about this is that coverage will continue to focus in 2011 on the medium (Twitter, Facebook, etc) rather than the fact that some in elected office has said something rather silly.  Or rather than the fact that more councillors are using social media sensibly to engage with residents on matters from gritting to real discussion about the really hard decisions that local government faces this year, which is truly good news.  (There’s some good advice here on staying out of trouble online).

4. Collaboration slows

Over the past year in particular, I’ve seen a big shift in the way that people are using Communities of Practice.  People are sharing more, working more closely together, using it as a networking platform to get stuff done.

And the need for collaboration will be even greater as local government faces some tough times.  So along with a growing trend, greater need and the roll out of the Knowledge Hub a new and much better platform for sharing for local public services -  we should be well set to see some really great uses of tech-facilitated collaboration.  But instead  in 2011 we see practitioners drawing closer in, the value of content creation and practitioner led facilitation being questioned at ‘home base’ and people under threat behaving more like rats in a sack than team players across organisational boundaries.

5. Hyper-what? Neighbourhood and community networking doesn’t expand much.

For all the talk of localism and Big Society, there won’t be  much walking the talk happens when it comes to local networks and blogging.  Sure more sites get set up, but there isn’t much of an air of seriousness about it all.  Unless blogging by local people is taken to heart by local news outlets (i.e. the crumbling papers and whatever happens with local broadcasting) there won’t be the kind of exposure that local blogs deserve.  Local papers could easily set up a aggregating feed of local folks and maybe invest a bit of time into monitoring traffic and promoting stories of genuine local interest (letting cute pics of dogs in sweaters find their own traffic).  And the more these stories are highlighted and promoted the more genuine local interest blog posts there would be.  But that won’t happen.

And councils won’t take local blogging and social networks all that seriously either.   And why not?  See prediction 2.  Can’t have someone else running the story can we?  Can’t think of allowing bloggers to be emailed press releases, even though these are a) public documents or b) often a good way of getting the information out to a lot of people who live or work locally. And many councils still can’t be bothered to set up RSS feeds or start Twitter feeds to make up the difference where RSS is difficult to implement because of archaic content management systems.  So despite some stellar work on online neighbourhood networks sponsored by Capital Ambition – few councils take heed and start to exploit online networks in a good way.