Tag Archives: localgov

I Love #LocalGovCamp

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Yesterday I was at 2012′s LocalGovCamp at Maple House, Birmingham.

I started the day on the wrong foot – way too near the start of introductions line. Even though I knew it was coming I couldn’t marshall my thoughts into giving my single word about why I was there. All I could think of was Nick’s (@psfnick) profane suggestion from the previous night.

The words I should have chosen

Relapse. I didn’t go to UKGovCamp because I’d begun to feel like a fraud. As much as I’d contributed beyond my job title in Hull my roles had never gone hand in glove with unconference conversations. So I’d go along and hear great things, maybe contribute an opinion or two of my own but then return to work and be unable to execute anything. When the next event rolled round I wouldn’t have anything to share, or any progress to report.

There is something recharging about being exposed to a collection of brilliant minds with a blank canvas invited to share and think and plan and do but as much as sectoral camaraderie is a great thing there’s little point if it ends up as talking and not doing. And that’s all my contribution felt like. Continue reading →

Opportunity Knocks

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That was quite the momentous week. Probably needs two separate blogs for the two separate events.

There was a problem connecting to Twitter.

Momentous event number 1 – handing in my notice.

When opportunity first came knocking this wasn’t the plan – that was to take a career break and return to Hull City Council when the offer came to an end. But because the work has nothing to do with my day job and coincided with the busiest period in Hull’s BSF programme it caused headaches.

So despite my love for local government, and despite being conscious of how hard it might be to return, I’m walking away. I’m ditching the security of a contract with 16 months left to run and my ‘gold-plated’ pension. I’m leaving the relationships I’ve built over the last 3.5 years. I’m even choosing to spend part of every week in #thatLondon.

And I’m doing all of that for six months’ work. Risky? Cavalier? Unwise? Perhaps, but I think the opportunity is worth it.

You might have read my thoughts about the significance of the single government domain on those of us in local government (Alpha(Local)Gov, Government as a local platform?). They’re proof that blogging is worthwhile because they prompted an email and a phone call and an invitation to spend the day at the offices of the Government Digital Service with the team responsible for the business bit of GOV.UK (that which is currently handled by BusinessLink).

So three weeks ago I took a day off work and travelled south. I’d asked Louise Kidney (who has swapped localgov for GDS herself) what I should expect from her new colleagues. Nothing she’d said prepared me to finish the day using a wall as my canvas to present back work I’d been set a couple of hours to complete.

Prepared or not my scrawl did the trick and I start as a Business Analyst on May 28th.

Exciting.

So, you want to work in local government?

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Last night I was at an event hosted by the University of York called ‘Professional Connect’. This was a great idea – a chance for current students to find out more from alumni who are already on the inside. There were three streams – finance, management and law; media, journalism and publishing; and government, public and charity sector.

Amongst the gov/pub/3rd sector alumni was a wide array of different organisations and careers. Continue reading →

My worlds collide

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When I first wrote this it was relevant but I got overtaken by other events. Still, whilst it’s old news there’s no point it staying sat in my drafts.

There is no single theme for my blog. Most of the time there’s very little overlap so maybe I should be more focused and write in different places for different content. Irrespective of that, today is a bit different.

In the aftermath of this story I’ve read a lot and heard a lot of bluster in various media. As I’m a Christian who works in local government and have family connections to church in Bideford this particular story couldn’t be more relevant. Continue reading →

Government as a local platform?

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Two years ago I researched and wrote a business case to replace our content management system (CMS). This was shortly after BCCDIY and I argued that we should explore the opportunity to coopt partner with Hull’s excellent local talent to build something in the open that encouraged challenge and invited contribution. I lost (“we don’t want to be leaders”) and we picked a safer option. It was approved but something killed the project after I’d moved on in the graduate scheme rotation.

The need hasn’t gone away and on Tuesday I was invited to a meeting to identify tangible benefits for replacing the current CMS that would justify spending some money. Happily there’s talk of open standards and open source so that whilst buying something off a shelf wasn’t out of the question it might not be the automatic choice it once was.

And then that evening GOV.UK‘s beta launched and it brought me back to a piece I’d written last May about the local implications of alpha.gov.uk. Continue reading →

Why I love Local Gov

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The Guildhall by hullcitycouncil on Flickr

The Guildhall, Hull

Last weekend I was asked by @WeLoveLocalGov if I could send them a sentence or two about why I love Local Gov for this post.

Absolutely, I thought; I know I love local government so surely I can send them 140 characters easily enough? Apparently not.

Whenever I sat down to muse and fire some letters in their direction it was really hard. And it wasn’t because I’d had one of those days where you’re reminded about the reasons why Local Gov is a frustrating place to work. No, it was because every time I sat down I remembered something else about why I love Local Gov.

And as the list got longer I thought the only way to do this justice is to blog.

So, why do I love Local Gov?

I love it for the visible reasons. For gritting streets and filling potholes. For tending parks and watering flowers. For planning and environmental health. For libraries and museums. For doing the stuff that most people think is the be all and end all of the local council.

I love it for the serious reasons. For protecting children who need looking after. For supporting the elderly. For standards in housing. For prizing education. For championing employability. For community cohesion.

I love it for its compassion. For working alongside and supporting the voluntary and community sector to stand in the gap and protect the weakest, the vulnerable and the hard to reach.

I love it for its diversity. The variety in what Local Gov does, and the collection of people who do it. The way different local politics and different local communities mean that we’re not all the same. And yet we’re all seeking similar things.

I love it for the public. Occasionally individuals can be pain but more often than not the involvement of the public can bring unexpected, and valuable, dividends. They’re why we’re here. Not as customers but as the principal actors in our democracy. It isn’t the leader of the council, or the chief exec, or even Eric Pickles who’s in charge; it’s the public.

I love it for its ambition. We come to work to fix problems, not to make do with them, not to settle for them but to try and find ways of meeting needs, and transforming circumstances, with finite resources.

I love it for bureaucracy. No, honestly. Not for the constricting and soul destroying excesses that bureaucracy can be but because groups of professionals committed to shared visions and working within effective and efficient processes can transform things. And I think that’s what Weber had in mind.

I love it for its inventiveness. Maybe it doesn’t feel like that’s always true (see bureaucracy) but there’s a long tradition of doing clever things to solve intractable problems (I particularly like Birmingham’s purchase of the Elan Valley). And the 21st century is keeping that up with innovative solutions and brilliant ideas in both digital, and real, spheres.

I love it for its camaraderie. We have a pretty good atmosphere in the office and my various travels around Hull City Council have been in warm and welcoming community. And that’s matched by the quality of company offered by local government people in various digital spaces. People who share what they’re thinking, demonstrate what they’re doing and lend their encouragement when you’re doing the same.

I love it for its history. It is a rich and varied past but the emergence of a professional and accountable organisation to hold the balance between national policy and local need is a compelling story and one whose narrative is crucial to the way our local communities function. You don’t need to appreciate its history to love Local Gov but you are missing out.

These 10 are worth more than a short paragraph each. It is only a dash through, and a skirt round, the reasons why I love Local Gov but WLLG wanted that one or two sentences so I had to settle with sending them this…

I love Local Gov because it’s full of unsung people who work tirelessly to do the mundane, the important and the seemingly impossible.

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).

First up the reasons why comms is the wrong place…

Cons?

Public sector comms teams receive their share of criticism around being focused on marketing, clinging onto a broadcast mentality and being risk averse in the name of reputation management. The conclusion is that such teams will never achieve the benefits that are obvious to the choir because these are alien cultures to the ones needed when encouraging listening and engagement.

Another criticism relates to the future of the web in an organisation. To be fit for purpose digital activity needs to be considered equal to the traditional, offline, access channels. In focusing on this issue as part of the debate on channel shift, SOCITM have called for the web to be embedded within customer services rather than placed into a Comms (or ICT) silo. After all, who is better equipped to answer queries or communicate information than those on the front-line?

Pros?

On the flip side you could argue that these roles have been created in comms teams because that’s a very logical place for them to be. Communications teams have historically been at the heart of their organisations for both internal and external purposes; they have cultivated relationships and have an appreciation of the council in macro rather than micro. As a result they are well situated to be the people providing the lead and the steer on a better use of the web.

And evidence suggests they already are providing that lead. Many, if not all, of those officers who are trailblazing and providing sparks of inspiration are drawn from Comms teams with successes that show it is possible to work in comms and not focus on broadcast or marketing.

It shouldn’t be a surprise! Although the web is clearly useful in giving cheaper transactions and providing clearer information it’s also a great opportunity to vocalise the often under appreciated narrative of the public sector. 24 hour experiments in Manchester and Walsall have used Twitter to paint their pictures and now Walsall100 will attempt to stand on the shoulders of many platforms to weave a richer tapestry. Story telling is a natural fit to the skills of a Communications team, would any of these have happened without their leadership?

Does it matter?

The jobs in Stoke and Hull could be important steps for these councils but the ambition could (should?) be that much of what those roles look like today are rendered obsolete. Success for these jobs would be making digital the default and embedding social media and web tools into service delivery across the organisation so that such discrete roles are no longer necessary.

In that world the reacting to customer service related queries via the relevant web channels becomes part and parcel of the job. Such operational activity is different to the strategic need these jobs are advertised to meet. In asking for an ‘on-line champion’ they’re looking for someone to build the necessary relationships and explore the possibilities with themto create a more future proofed and digitally effective organisation. They’re looking for a leader to facilitate culture change rather than simply someone who can tweet.

But that leadership will only be possible with the right mandate. It doesn’t matter where this job is located or how it is structured if what’s lurking behind the scenes are organisations committed to a marketing focused, broadcast heavy, tightly controlled digital presence. If they’re working for someone who is committed, supportive and enthused themselves then maybe these roles have a chance of putting the web at the heart of their organisations?

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“.

This 261k investment is the start of something greater with Chris Chant, the (interim) executive director for digital government telling SOCITM’s spring conference “it’s not perfect and it could be significantly different when we go live with the real deal, which will probably be in about a year” and Tom Loosemore (who is heading up the project) calling it a three year project in his interview with The Telegraph.

Unlike the world of mobile technology the public sector doesn’t have disruptive companies redrawing the playing field for market advantage and the lack of impetus that can cause provides a barrier for innovation. So it’s good to see the drawing board being dusted off and a team starting from scratch to explore how you might transform the way we do stuff with central government. But taking that approach centrally has repercussions for the things we access locally and perhaps even the role of local government websites full stop.

There’s nothing the British public love like a good postcode lottery debate and local decision making and local priorities can often lead to sometimes large differences in very similar policies or services. Normal people don’t tend to visit any council website other than their own so this particular postcode lottery debate doesn’t come up very often. Even a brief consideration of how different Yorkshire councils approach the web highlights the fact that where you live determines the quality of relationship you might have with your council online.

As a result, some councils are limited in their use of the internet to save money by getting people to do stuff online but there’s also an increasing democratic impact on our ownership of local decisions and access to opportunities to participate in place shaping discussions.

Local authorities have expended time, energy and money developing online solutions for very real and present local needs. Each council has a mapping solution, they’ll tell you when your bin should be collected,  publish their £500 spending data, provide mechanisms for paying council tax or renting social housing. But they don’t look the same and they’re of varying quality. Andy’s post calls that perplexing and it’s hard to disagree. He goes on to wonder

if local authorities open their data up, share it in easily consumable formats that Alpha can suck in and push out via location to their users, why do we need distributed websites?

That’s a threatening question for all those whose livelihoods depend on the local government web because it questions their existence. It suggests that myriad council websites are a layer of complexity too far when a single, location aware portal could aggregate what’s relevant and unify the experience of being a citizen.

Such an experience sounds attractive and I think he’s asked a good question because there are clear merits in the convergence of local government’s best web tools. When it comes to local information, or local transactions, the most important thing has to be the quality of experience for the public. At the moment that quality varies wildly. Perhaps you can achieve that from scraped content within whatever AlphaGov becomes. That’s already been in the public consciousness as Stef Lewandowski‘s involvement with first BCCDIY and then DIYcouncil (the site was down at the time of writing) attests. That approach does little to resolve the fun and games with back office systems which is the Holy Grail in terms of both experience and savings.

There’s another aspect to a local web presence that could get lost in this convergence. And that’s participation. Local issues are shaped by our local needs, by our local characteristics and our local politics. Strengthening local democracy is important and that’s part of a local council’s responsibility (obviously without being partisan).

There is already a disconnect between the services people receive and their relationship with local government. The life of the council, so effectively demonstrated by Walsall24, is a rich story that deserves to be told. The efforts of local people whether elected, employed or volunteering their skills warrant being heard. I don’t like focusing on the ballot box as the sum of democracy but it helps highlight the issues. Last week the balance of power in York shifted, apparently decisively, but the new council’s mandate is 16.5% of the city’s electorate because a majority of people didn’t vote.

The nature of the relationship between citizen and state is beyond the remit of AlphaGov. It’s not attempting to recast democracy, its focus is on creating an effortless experience of the services our tax pays for. It’s a prototype that showcases a very different approach. That approach may be reflected in future designs from across the country. It will definitely change expectations, particularly in 12 months’ time if the central government experience is so different to things locally.

I think it would be a mistake for the local response to be “how can we adopt the best bits of AlphaGov?”. That’s the status quo – web teams trying to achieve the same outcomes in a myriad of different ways. That’s localism but it isn’t the best use of limited public funds. Cisco decided their model was no longer sustainable. They’d invested a lot of money in buying a product and even though it was still good they recognised it was not the future of hand-held video and took a decision.

It’s probably overly naive and simplistic to ask whether local government can do something similar. Humour me. Could there be a proactive, shared response to what’s happening centrally? Instead of waiting for the fruit of AlphaGov to push local government towards a single portal (not entirely unexpected as Gordon Brown suggested this last March) can local government pool its talent and test whether a common platform, an Alpha(Local)Gov, could work? Instead of suffering under the weight of rubbish technology or wrestling with archaic attitudes could those involved with the local government web be freed to invest in things that enhance local participation and involvement instead?

Like I said, naive and simplistic.