Category Archives: Local Government

I work for Hull City Council. The things I write about that have some kind of bearing on that organisation or are informed by things I’ve seen there will fall under this category. It’s important to point out that these are my thoughts published for the world to see. They do not represent council policy and they have not been reviewed prior to publication. I stand by whatever I’ve written on here as my opinion and my opinions alone.

Cumbersome processes

Work, Local Government, ,

Just a quick thought.

Tomorrow the new Lord Mayor is getting installed and beforehand all 59 councillors have got the opportunity to press the flesh with the different directorates and service areas that make up Hull City Council in a marketplace event.

It’s a pretty good idea – councils are massive and it must be pretty daunting for any newly elected councillor to get a handle on what it is we do. And there’s value in taking a similar approach for communicating that breadth to the public (Walsall100 is a practical demonstration of that).

Anyway, in preparation for this event the different service areas and directorates have been pulling together briefing notes. In the Regeneration Directorate are two services: Economic Development & Regeneration and Physical Regeneration. And that covers a further 11 distinct areas of activity (BSF is part of Physical Regeneration). So putting together something brief that communicates everything from new schools to museums with European funding in between is not straight forward.

What we’ve ended up with is succinct and (hopefully) helpful in giving a nice overview of the directorate. It was the result of three different people working on it in their own spheres of influence – someone from the Economic Development & Regeneration wing, someone else from the Physical Regeneration arm and also the BSF team. In the end it’s come to us to wire the different bits together and produce a single document.

There’s no trouble in doing that but I yearn for a day when we might together, in our three separate offices, have been co-authoring a shared document and discussing the amends in real-time rather than the slightly delayed and cumbersome fashion that has seen slightly different versions of the same basic document flying about whilst different additions ping into inboxes; there is a better way to do this…

Remember Tom?

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In 2003 Tom Anderson helped launch MySpace.  It wasn’t the first social network but it was the first to capture the world’s imagination.

Even for those of us who’d been using IRC and ICQ, or the Messengers of Yahoo and MSN Myspace represented something very different: a website, not something you installed.

You might have been invited, in which case you’d have a friend. Or you might know what you were doing and be confident. But neither of those were guaranteed, there was every chance you’d be joining this strange and alien world without any friends.

With nobody to hold your hand or guide you through it Myspace did something very clever. Everybody who signed up was welcomed, hosted and befriended by Tom. Continue reading Remember Tom? →

Where should they sit?

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Yesterday Dave Briggs spotted that Stoke were looking for a new web editor, somebody to be ‘the councils (sic) on-line champion’. And they’re not alone in allocating a specific resource, Hull’s recent restructure included a new e-communications role with a similar brief. Both these roles are in Communications.

This prompted a discussion on Twitter (Storify here).

Brief conversations like these are one of the great side effects of using Twitter. But not everybody will see those tweets. So I thought I’d try to start capturing interesting exchanges in case there’s some value to those outside the conversation (the Alpha(Local)Gov post was originally prompted by something similar).

So what follows is my adding a bit of flesh to the opinions communicated in 140 characters. As you might have seen if you’ve looked at Storify, the discussion asked whether Communications is the right location for ‘social media’ (although neither role is Twitter Tsar). Continue reading Where should they sit? →

Alpha(Local)Gov

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I started this post at the start of April, returned to it with the demise of Flip but finally finished it after Andrew Beeken shared his own thoughts yesterday.

April saw the demise of Flip. Despite being the leading camcorder brand in the US, parent company Cisco judged the marketplace to be unsustainable in the face of the competition posed by our mobile phones.

Given that they paid $590m for the technology two years ago it’s a bold move. Equally, their quitting from a position at the top is shrewd because of the inevitable future of hand-held video recording.

I really like my Flip camera and when the product was first introduced it disrupted the market but I expect to get similar functionality from my next mobile phone without having to carry something else in my pocket. Whilst convergence is not good for the 550 employees at Flip, the rest of us benefit – we get one thing where once we might have had to use more.

It’s that sort of approach which lies behind Martha Lane Fox’s vision for a single government domain and over the last three months it has been brought to life by 11 people somewhere in London. There had been glimpses of what they were working on and The Telegraph had featured a couple of screenshots as well as some interviews but this week we were able to get our grubby mitts on this “proof of concept prototype“.

Continue reading Alpha(Local)Gov →

Is Storify the answer?

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message board
Photo by Hungarian Snow

Twitter is still evolving but thus far nobody seems to have come up with a clever way of combining the thread of a discussion on Twitter with contributions from elsewhere.

It’s something that has come up in looking after Vital Bradford. I’ve found Twitter an excellent companion to supporting my football club and there’s a very active community with considered opinion and not the sort of stupidity that can plague footballing message boards.

One of the reasons it’s a pleasure is the way you can capture a sense of the match in real-time from all corners of the ground. But even though we are the most followed #bcafc account it’s only a fraction of those who might be interested.

Whatever the subject matter we need to be careful that the coverage of any event doesn’t get stuck inside Twitter. Your updates can get missed by your followers so it’s good to keep them on record somewhere. But it’s actually quite hard to record and curate a specific time-bound period of activity, especially if it involves many voices. Continue reading Is Storify the answer? →

Alternatives?

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This morning I read the latest from WeLoveLocalGov, a post on Conferencing.

It’s a mighty peculiar way of developing your staff but local authorities are reluctant to not attend the conferences.

After all what if something is missed?

And more importantly how else will this good practice get spread and learning take place?

I think I was musing about what I’d do for my dissertation when I first hunted for conversations about the internet, public services and democracy. I’m pretty sure that’s how I stumbled upon Liz Azyan’s Twitterati.

A little knowledge is definitely a dangerous thing.

Without that little bit of knowledge the last 18 months would have looked quite different. I’m once again reminded of my good fortune in coming across the digital community of people who are passionate about the nature of public services and the shape of democracy. They’re a diverse bunch who think and scheme but, crucially, they’re also doing and teaching; collaborating and sharing.
Continue reading Alternatives? →

#lgcyh1: Crowdsourcing

Work, Local Government, , ,

>Sorry that this has taken so long to emerge and you’ll have to forgive that it is no longer as directly attributed as I might have liked. So, it may be less a report of the session and drift into a discussion of the themes…

This session was hosted by Rob Wilmot who wanted to talk about how we could harness the wisdom of crowds in the work that we do. He showed off Nation Thinks which asks people to contribute their ideas to the budget and then to either vote up or vote down the responses. Sites like MyStarbucksIdea.com are the inspiration for it and this is that idea writ large for the very act of governance on a national level.

We started off with our doubts. Aren’t we all already over consulted? How on earth do you manage to differentiate between what is noise and what is of value? Isn’t encouraging the crowdsourcing of opinion dangerous? After all, newspaper polls generally suggest that the crowdsourcing of criminal justice policy would result in reintroducing capital punishment? And we forget Godwin’s law at our peril

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1

Emma Langman suggested that it was possible to crowdsource arguments and connect their dots to maintain credibility. She flagged up Cohere, a project from the Open University that helps to visualise the thread of an argument and cite wildly different sources in a way that allows cases to be assessed on their merits and sources to be verified. She argued that it is in the divergent opinions that crowdsourcing finds its beauty. Too often we are encouraged to fall in to a particular way of thinking and to follow the crowd. Can crowdsourcing present an opportunity to change that?

There’s probably a lot of us who went to LGCYH because we want to find those divergent opinions and get stuck into them. Understanding conflict is something that in general we don’t do very well and we try to hide from. Crowdsourcing has the potential to shine a giant light onto those disagreements and we don’t much like that so it’s inevitable that it isn’t coming to us naturally.

But crowd sourcing isn’t just about ideas, it’s about gathering data and information too as we saw in the way that The Guardian treated the expenses scandal. We shouldn’t forget that it’s also about being able to make a personal contribution to seeing change take place. Chris Taggart very wisely pointed out that the act of self-organising used to be really hard but the tools are there for people to get something off the ground very quickly.

Sites like What Do They Know simplify the act of making Freedom of Information requests whilst publishing them to give everyone access. The internet has changed our expectations: 28 days for a response used to be fine, but we find it possible to get almost instantaneous tweet. The pre-internet age restricted dialogue to letters, now rather than single, direct answers we offer open and transparent conversations that can be accessed by anybody. I think what the state of Texas has done with GetSatisfaction is excellent and the open discussion and publication of ideas, questions, problems and even praise it offers can build into an excellent resource for the public and a much cheaper access channel for the state.

So can the #opendata movement help local government to move beyond the numerical to seeing dramatic shifts in organisational culture? Emma Langman had seen her sister driven to ask her council for the process maps relating to a particular issue and that raised the question of why our default position isn’t to put those maps somewhere accessible for people to understand what exactly happens when they report a problem, or request a service. There’s very little to be gained by shrouding the act of doing local government in mystery.

There’s also very little point in just publishing data believing that it equates to transparency. The thirst for transparency needs us to think about how we use crowd sourcing tools and practice to make consultation, data providing, wisdom gathering and idea generating more meaningful. Successfully doing that necessitates it to be rooted in a culture that is open to the things it flags up, or that seeks to build on, or feed into, the personal contribution of others. It’s the implications, not the technology.

>LocalGovCamp Yorkshire & Humber: #lgcyh

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>I spent last Saturday at the National Railway Museum but I wasn’t there to look at the trains. I was there with about 80 others for an unconference about local government.

Erm, what’s an unconference?

I’m sure there’s a full definition at Wikipedia but I think of them as being what you’d be left with if you turned the principals of participation on their head and removed keynote speakers and the cost from a traditional conference. There is a venue and there are organisers but the agenda and the structure are pitched over coffee and bacon sandwiches. Some come more prepared than others; the experts can be relied on to bring their insights, others collaborate before the event but equally things just bubble up as the day progresses.

Hold on, you gave up a Saturday during the World Cup to talk about work…are you mad?

I have some sympathy for those who looked at me like I’d lost the plot when I attempted to entice them along and I wonder whether it’s hard to see the value if you’ve never come face to face with the concept in the first place? I’m not sure of the conversion rate but it always seems to find people singing their praises afterwards.

Twitter eavesdropping had given me my exposure to these events as well as connecting to some of the main protagonists but I did get to LocalGovCamp Lincoln where I put real human people to @s and avatars and found the unconference format to be really enjoyable (Andy is talking of hosting another). And Saturday was another opportunity to rub actual shoulders with some of the people pioneering new ideas in local authorities around the country. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to collar all those I follow and sadly I was the only person from Hull City Council to make it (obviously I was more irritating than persuasive in my efforts to encourage people to come!)

One of the other disappointments of the day was the absence of the movers and the shakers. I work in a very hierarchical environment and it seems that across the country there’s a real disconnect between the influential and the innovative. Of course there are notable exceptions and it’s clear that some of the places represented at #lgcyh have achieved significant victories. Their trailblazing can help to further the debate but, for now, those paid to provide leadership in facing down the challenges we face are conspicuous in their absence from the discussions and these events.

In many ways perhaps there was little point in my having gone on Saturday given my role at work. However, from a completely selfish perspective it was fantastic to spend the day surrounded by a group of people who are passionate enough about the work they do and the public they serve to give up a Saturday and travel significant distances to share ideas and talk about the challenges they are overcoming. I took plenty from the four sessions I attended (blogs coming soon) and it was great to meet new people as well as those I already knew.

Last week saw the start of the formal process of the Graduate Scheme coming to an end. When I applied for this job I was excited by the hope of transformation that shone through the city’s rhetoric. That excitement has been dulled by the discovery that much of it was just words and the apparent lack of value or strategic thought given to our futures. However, it’s great to know that elsewhere in the region real value is placed on innovation and that there’s a real ambition to transform public services.

An event like #lgcyh fits snugly with the excellent parts of the Graduate Scheme. Our flitting from service to service has offered a wide experience of local government. Our studying in Birmingham has exposed us to new ideas and encouraged us to explore innovation on an equal footing to men and women with varied experience and varied responsibility. Saturday was an opportunity for the story of local government to be told from a variety of angles and provide a fertile environment for new ideas. It was inspiring, exciting and challenging.

Huge thanks to Ken Eastwood, Kev Campbell-Wright and Melanie Reed who were the ringleaders in organising the day and kudos too to the National Railway Museum which was a cracking venue and put on a good spread (I judge most things on the quality of the cake).

Picture credits:
‘The Programme’ by London Looks (@ingridk)