Author: Benjamin Welby (Page 13 of 18)

I’m Benjamin Welby.

I live in Croydon with my wife and two children. I church at Croydon Vineyard. We’ve had season tickets for Bradford City since 2007. I’ve got degrees in History, Post-War Recovery and Public Administration and have spent the last 15+ years working at the intersection of digital transformation and good governance.

I began my career in local government, went on to help launch GOV.UK and most recently worked on defining global standards for digital government at the OECD. I'm currently currently co-authoring a book integrating biblical values with civic life, encouraging Christians to adopt a hope-filled, faith-inspired perspective on democracy and how we are governed.

I’m interested in too many things: being a good husband and father, following Jesus, the theology of governing well, a warm welcome for refugees and asylum seekers, that ‘digital’ leads to fair, inclusive and equitable transformation, exploring the world, League Two football, Pantomime, various England sports teams and Team GB…

Cumbersome processes

May 25, 2011 / Benjamin Welby / 0 Comments

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…

1 John:4 – Love Wins

May 20, 2011 / Benjamin Welby / 0 Comments

1 John is a book that sets out some of the most fundamental characteristics of who God is and what being a Christian, part of His family, looks like.

And John’s quite blunt really. He sets it out quite clearly that God is holy, we are sinful and Jesus is our only hope.

Then he says that if you say you keep God’s commands, and don’t, then there’s a problem. And he says that if you’re more in love with the world than you are with God, then there’s a problem there too.

So we end up with an ideal of what we should be aiming for. John tells us about the need for right doctrines, right lifestyles and right relationships. It’s almost as though there’s something of a tick box exercise happening – tick all the boxes and well be called children of God and we’ll be like Him. If we live in Him then we won’t sin any more because Jesus has destroyed the work of the devil. So we should love one another and when we do that we know we’ve qualified for eternal life.

Sounds straightforward – the Eye-Spy of Christianity. An easy reference guide against which we can mark ourselves and score those around us.

Thankfully God isn’t sitting on a cloud waiting to smite us for cocking up but is desperate for a relationship with us that isn’t about legalism and transactionality. Continue reading

Remember Tom?

May 20, 2011 / Benjamin Welby / 0 Comments

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

Where should they sit?

May 17, 2011 / Benjamin Welby / 3 Comments

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

Alpha(Local)Gov

May 13, 2011 / Benjamin Welby / 3 Comments

This entry is part 1 of 7 in the series Local government digital service

I’ve added this post and the second on Government as a Local Platform to my series on ‘Local Government Digital Service‘ because it’s a helpful original piece, reflecting my perspective from before joining GDS.

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“.

York’s local election

May 8, 2011 / Benjamin Welby / 2 Comments

In the aftermath of York’s election I was interested in the sort of things that might get talked about at a general election in terms of a picture changing from election to election. The simple picture was a crushing defeat for the Liberal Democrats as Labour swept to power but in the spirit of Whitehall Watch is there a story in the votes rather than the seats?

First up, the makeup of the chamber before (taking into account the by-election results since 2007):
City of York Council 2007

After:
City of York Council 2011

And you can see from a quick glance how the vote changed from 2007 to 2011

Labour recorded 18,000 votes more on Thursday than they did in 2007 and increased their share of the vote from 27% to 37%. Much has been said about Thursday representing an incredibly bad night for the Liberal Democrats but in York the result was not down to the complete evaporation of Liberal Democrat support. The ruling Liberal Democrats (only) lost 5,000 votes across the city, a similar figure to that dropped by the Conservatives. The other party to shed votes was the BNP whose support shrank by 70%.

Party	Votes 2007	Votes 2011	Change
BNP	3,582	1,076	-2,506
Conservatives	37,172	32,788	-4,384
Green	14,337	19,196	4,859
Labour	36,746	54,874	18,128
Liberal Democrats	43,764	38,818	-4,946
Others	829	1112	283

Swing is a favourite statistic to work out and in order to calculate it you take the increase in votes from one party, add it to the fall of the other and divide it by two.

This means a swing to Labour from the Liberal Democrats of 8% with a similar figure for the swing to Labour from the Conservatives of 7.7%.

But there are some more nuances to what actually happened in the city. Although the Conservative party vote fell by 5,000 this is more connected to a reduction in candidates from 47 to 33. In 3 wards, which had contributed 3,724 votes in 2007 there was no Conservative candidate at all. Despite their share of the city’s vote falling to 22% their average vote per candidate increased to 994, more than any other party except Labour.

In contrast, the Green party’s significant improvement overall comes from their fielding an additional 15 candidates. In Clifton, for example, they tripled their candidates and secured an additional 10% of the vote (although their leading candidate only increased her votes by 33). But, apart from Skelton, Rawcliffe and Clifton Without (the neighbouring ward) where they picked up almost 12% more of the vote their performance across the city was fairly static with the average number of votes each candidate received falling by 74.

The Liberal Democrats don’t seem to have simply lost seats due to dissatisfaction with the national political picture. In Strensall, Haxby and Wheldrake they lost seats to their coalition partners (Christian Vassie’s loss of Wheldrake compounding a miserable 12 months in politics after last year’s general election when he was unable to dislodge Hugh Bayley).

So the convincing nature of Labour’s victory seems to be much more down to getting people to vote rather than seeing a massive drop in support for either the way the Liberal Democrats ran York or in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in Westminster. In 2007 the turnout was 41.8% (approx. 136,000 voters) but this year the extra 10,000 voters in a turnout of 44.7% seems to have made all the difference rather than disgruntled voters switching from one party to another. Edit: of course, I’d failed to think about the aggregating effect of wards where individuals got more than a single vote. The difference between 2007 and 2011 was actually closer to 4,500 voters.

Mind you, given that the majority of York wasn’t voting last Thursday I wonder whether any of these thoughts are in any way relevant.

If you want to pick over the data and point out any of the flaws in my data literacy there’s a spreadsheet on Google Docs.

‘Stagnant and Lost’

April 1, 2011 / Benjamin Welby / 1 Comment

Last week I had a week of holiday. Amongst a lot of doing very little it provided an opportunity to reflect on life ahead of Christine finishing her phd and starting work in Huddersfield at the start of May.

I effectively spend 12 hours of every weekday on the way to, or at work. And I realised that I wasn’t happy with either the commute, or my role. I was summing myself up in two words – stagnant and lost.

But on the back of this evening I’m reclaiming myself and rejecting those words.

I’ve just got home from a prayer meeting where it became apparent that God was gently mocking me. Five things neatly coincide in a way that has reset my thinking. Continue reading

Is Storify the answer?

March 12, 2011 / Benjamin Welby / 2 Comments

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

Alternatives?

February 23, 2011 / Benjamin Welby / 2 Comments

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

>Christmas time, mistletoe and lies

November 27, 2010 / Benjamin Welby / 2 Comments

>Every year there is a supposed attack on Christmas. Every year it’s another example of how our heritage is being dumbed down, hidden away and removed in the name of ‘political correctness’ and to avoid offending other faiths.

Often those allegations wheel out members of said faith communities to support the apparent slight being directed towards Jesus’ birth by saying they have no trouble with anybody talking about Christmas.

The most famous of all apparent attacks on a festival that isn’t important in and of itself is Birmingham’s. We’ve all heard about how Christmas was rebranded as Winterval in an attempt to minimise any offence at all and to make sure that we of a faithful disposition knew that secularism has absolutely and completely done away with God from public discourse. I saw a member of General Synod appear on BBC Sunday Morning Live telling the nation all about it.

There’s just one snag with that story – that it isn’t the truth.

The truth is pretty ordinary. I quote from Mike Chubb, who was Head of Events in Birmingham at the time, and who himself is quoted by Andy Mabbett in a post titled ‘Winterval – the truth‘. Mike says

Quite simply, as Head of events at that time, we needed a vehicle which could cover the marketing of a whole season of events…Diwali (festival of Lights), Christmas lights switch on, BBC Children in Need, Aston Hall by Candlelight, Chinese New year, New Years eve etc. Also a season that included theatre shows and open air ice rink, Frankfurt open air Christmas market and the Christmas seasonal retail offer. Christmas, called Christmas! and its celebration, lay at the heart of Winterval.

So, just like a red coated Father Christmas and actually the linking of Christmas itself to an existing festival by the early church, the brand of Winterval was that. A brand. The success of that marketing campaign is clearly up for debate but the pervasive understanding that it was an attack on Christmas appears to have been whipped up by people who would identify themselves as speaking for me, other Christians and by extension as a representative of God.

And one of the characteristics of God is truth. This means that as Christians we stand in the middle of an epistemological minefield. On the one hand we talk about absolute truth whilst at the same time following a personal saviour who is absolutely relational. It’s why we find conflict with both ends of the philosophical spectrum. But our knowledge of truth and belief in the relevance and application of those truths is absolutely central to who we are.

One of the offending lights from Rochdale
(borrowed from the Daily Mail article)

So it’s always really distasteful when people lie in order to present a position that attacks other people and somehow ‘defends’ Christianity. Whether that is the individuals and councils who are behind the supposed slights or entire communities of people who aren’t like us the fact is that we’re not called to dominate. We’re not called to win. We’re not called to force people and coerce people into doing anything. In fact, The Church should stand at the front, clamouring in support of any attempt to hang Christmas decorations alongside those of Diwali and Eid because we’re called to love.

Not just a subtle, hidden and diluted love. No, our love is sacrificial. It’s loving beyond our own capabilities. It’s loving people for who they are, as they are, not for what they might become or how they can change. It’s unconditional. And so, it follows, that we would pour ourselves out to give value to other people and would, as the Daily Mail so generously suggests, want to shout ‘Merry Christmas EVERYBODY’ (except they seem to be suggesting that is A Bad Thing).

It does not follow that we would continue to spread untruths about Winterval. It does not follow that we would simply applaud Eric Pickles for suddenly giving us permission to forget about Christmas being about more than memorial. It does not follow that we would do anything other than demonstrate what it is to know Christ by making Him known in our lives as we challenge injustice, act with humility and hunger after mercy.

Let’s make more of a racket about how much we spend on Christmas. Not just focusing outside our church walls on ‘the world’ but about how much we invest into Christmas as The Church. The Advent Conspiracy put together this little video – £34 billion pounds gets spent on Christmas by Britain alone; £31 billion pounds could go a long way to solving malaria, feeding the world and providing clean water. Of course it’s not that simple but where would Jesus have us place our focus?

Today is St Nicholas Fayre in York, we’re opening our church during the day for ‘Thank God It’s Christmas’. The church, next to the Minster, will be open as a cafe with free drinks and cake on one of the busiest days of the year. We’ll also be having 12 minute long carol services every half hour through the day – a couple of songs and a brief talk about ‘why Christmas is important to me’. I’m involved with one of them. This wasn’t my theme, it could have been.

Tonight Conversations is celebrating Christmas. We’re holding a Party with A Purpose. The purpose? Providing ‘Christmas’ for families in York who otherwise won’t enjoy a turkey and trimmings, decorations or even presents. This is a city where 1 in 3 children live in poverty. That isn’t my theme either, although maybe it should have been.

One reason Christmas is important to me is because it’s a victory for humility. And that means it’s all about everybody else. And even that isn’t what I’ve prepared to talk about. Christmas, it is important…can we get on with telling people why please?

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