Category Archives: Work

>Hull-Freetown Good Practice Scheme

Sierra Leone, , , , ,

>My arrival in local government was more by accident than design. After finishing my History degree I decided I wanted to throw myself into serving other people and help rebuild war-torn countries and work in international development.

So I did an MA at York’s Post-War Reconstruction and Development Unit and that included great discussions with various professionals on the course as well as those teaching us. We went on a group research trip to Lebanon (during the Parliamentary sit-in) and I researched my dissertation in Sierra Leone.

It was a fantastic year. The people I met and the discussions we had offered an incredible opportunity to learn as well as to reflect that, again, most good practice is effectively sound theology (I have a number of partially completed blog posts exploring this which I will get round to completing, one day).

However, by the end of it I had reached two personal conclusions:
1 – that the most inspirational people I met, the people whose jobs I wanted to emulate, were those who had lived through the conflicts and were rebuilding their country for their families with an understanding of language, culture, food, weather, etc that would always be difficult for me to acquire.
2 – that I had very little other than youthful enthusiasm and academic training to offer a post-conflict situation.

That is not to criticise those who work for the aid and development sector, just to say that for me it wasn’t the right moment. But I still wanted to pursue something akin to the work of international development but in a British context. And so I ended up on the graduate scheme in Hull.

I’d argue that in our wealthy country our lead development actors are found in the local public sector agencies. I have a lot of love for a system that is not without its flaws but which tries to recognise local concerns whilst applying national policy in a coordinated fashion.

I’d also argue that for development will always struggle to take root and produce national improvements for a country if competent and effective local administration isn’t sat at the table talking about how to coordinate programmes and identify priorities.

My dissertation considered the ‘Peace Gap’ between elite ideas of what makes peace and the reality for those who live in places that are still recovering from conflict. We spend a lot of time and money and effort with national governance – getting countries to a place where they can trade internationally and receive delegations. At the same time international NGOs work at a local level to meet the most pressing needs of a community. And both of those things are brilliant because they will help to transform lives.

We bypass the bit in the middle at our peril and it’s often identified as being the least effective bit of the jigsaw because of corruption or lack of skill. ‘Good governance’ is a much discussed phrase but does the focus on national governments and democracy overlook the need for all sections of a public service to be effective?

I only have fairly vague ideas about what my career might look like but I’ve been lucky enough to study for an MSc in Public Administration whilst in Hull and I have this hope of bringing the two worlds together. At the end of my MA I didn’t have anything particularly special to offer but perhaps a grounding in international development and local public administration can prove useful? Whether that’s true or not is a question to be answered in a few years – 2 years of experience is not enough to provide credibility and besides, I’m quite excited by the potential waiting to be unlocked within local government.

So, what has that got to do with Freetown?

Well, Hull is twinned with Freetown and has been for 30 years. Last Autumn a delegation from Hull visited Sierra Leone to look at how we could support Freetown City Council in delivering a waste strategy for the city and then we got some funding from the Commonwealth & Local Government Forum to do it.

Which means four of us are heading to Sierra Leone for a week to begin the first phase of the project – the evidence gathering. Our brief is to look at procurement, contract management, asset management and performance monitoring within the council. The goal is to start to put into place a waste strategy for the city but to get there we need to make sure the right foundations are there. Part of that is talking to Freetown City Council about their role at the hub of various efforts at tackling waste, water and sanitation.

Earlier this year the European Union provided 6 million Euros to organisations wanting to tackle these topics in Freetown. That’s a lot of capital money that will be applied to the work that Freetown City Council is trying to achieve. Obviously it is vital that whatever is done includes the council, and doesn’t take place full of good intentions but ultimately completely disconnected from any strategy the council may have.

Which is brilliant really.

This was meant to be sent from Heathrow before we left but sadly didn’t get a chance to post it! So, we’ve been here a couple of days already.

#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

Local Government, , , , ,

>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)

Listening to the interwebs

Work, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The other day I saw a tweet that pointed me towards @SavvyCitizens and their Top Ten online resources for getting savvier ahead of the general election. It really is a top list of resources and all but one of them are fully featured, for free.

Council Monitor is the one that you have to pay for to get all its features. Now, for a basic ability to look around the country and see your council’s sentiment rating or look at how it compares to others this is excellent. It can give you at a glance that sort of information. However, to find out anything more you need to pay. And, for me, the costs they’re suggesting make this a little bit more than just Freemium.

The basic subscription of £99 a month gives you insight into your own organisation and allows you to actually see the mentions being made about you. For an extra £100 a month you can add 5 keywords and for the princely sum of £299 a month you can have up to 10. And they’re the special introductory prices.

OK so that’s only about £1,200 a year and no more than £4,000 tops, so what’s the big deal? After all that’s nothing for organisations with budgets in the multi-millions. But it’s this seemingly common attitude to the pennies leaves me thinking that it’s no wonder we have a problem with the pounds. So, perhaps what will follow is not worth your effort but I end up feeling a bit disappointed that we’d rather end up paying for a service than shaping the tools that are out there ourselves*.

Council Monitor is an aggregator of content that can be found ‘out there’ but happens to be housed within a shiny package that allows for comparison across the national picture. I have nothing at all against the shiny but what is most important is actually hearing what is being said, listening to it and then responding. It’s gratifying to know that ours is the council with the most positive mentions in the country but it’s not what’s important.

What’s important is recognising that people are saying things and we need to hear them because our service delivery can be improved by responding to the comments being offered in cyberspace. Not in a terrifying Big Brotheresque fashion but in the way that we’re coming to expect of organisations and companies that are important to us. The way that sees a need and then fills it or hears a criticism and fixes it so that not only are people valued for their contribution but the next person benefits from such a proactive response.

So, on that basis it’s content which is key. It’s not the overview of sentiment, which can be picked up for free but it’s the actual information itself, the stuff that sets you back £99 a month for a single keyword that an organisation wants to hear. Set against Radian6 or one of the other very impressive, and fairly expensive reputation management/social media monitoring services that seems good value.

But we don’t have the budget even for the good value. Dave Briggs flagged up this list of Social Media Monitoring resources which are free and sometimes have similarly shiny interfaces. But we’ve been thinking about how we make something that we can control and that which can pull a variety of different sources into one place. It is still in a prototype stage but the idea of doing something ourselves, whilst it might seem daunting, may actually be preferable.
But first, 2 caveats, and 3 tools:
  • These are not pretty solutions
  • There is a lot of potential to improve them
  • A variety of search engines
  • Yahoo Pipes
  • Netvibes

 

There is an impressive array of tools with which to interrogate the internet. We identified the following 15 services as being useful for different reasons but it is by no means exhaustive.

 

 

Almost all of these use APIs to enable the interrogation of their results from afar. What this means is that we can enter a search term away from the site in question and get a response directly to us or as part of an RSS feed or into an email or a widget.

In order to do this I use Yahoo Pipes. Now, I’ve blogged here and here about how to do this for wildly different purposes and I like Yahoo Pipes. It is certainly quite daunting to begin with and it can be quite temperamental but on the whole it is a very clever environment in which to build tools that can search for information, connect it together and then filter it as necessary. We’ve used it to make pipes for the search engines listed above.

So, using that lovely technology we’ve put together a pipe that looks at SocialMention, and, crucially, for the point I’m hoping to make, it does return sentiment too. At the moment it is pulling two pipes – the Social Mention search and the Sentiment tracker into one.

If it doesn’t work in the page then take a look at one of the following:

SocialMention (all mentions)

SocialMention (sentiment)

SocialMention (mentions and sentiment)

We’ve got pipes for all the search engines we listed above and had wanted to make a single feed from these individual elements but find Pipes cannot cope with this although, if we had there was a recognition of what we could do and a commitment to resourcing it I think we could probably identify some other solutions too. And the beauty of it? Once you have it set up outputting for one search term you can set up more using the same infrastructure (if you want it all lumped together it will accept multiple search terms separated by commas).

We have a dump of all our pipes onto one page. Some of them do not contribute anything to us and will be rooted out; some of them duplicate content and that may mean those two feeds could be merged into one; and being a public page makes tracking and storing activity impossible. In practice this would be a private page accessible to whoever has the responsibility to keep track of the content that had been seen and/or dismissed and that which was still of interest or had not yet been looked at. The Comms & Marketing team are going to be testing it out and exploring how best to use the information and how to process it for the benefit of the organisation.

It is true that we might not be getting the same results as Council Monitor and we might not be able to gauge sentiment elsewhere (although with the right commitment to developing this we could certainly get there). It’s also true that we can’t get trends but that’s just a metric that means nothing if we’re not hearing or responding to the people who are talking about, or to, us.

We’re exploring how we make this better and more useable. I’m moving placements but I’ll look to blog through the technical aspects of making these things happen so that you can make your own sentiment monitoring tools. But, in the meantime, feel free to test ours and see whether they’re useful as an alternative to spending money.

🙂

*I feel the same about GovDelivery. What they offer is much more technical and would require more effort to duplicate but, nevertheless, it is essentially publishing content in ways that would not be difficult to fashion yourselves. At least that’s my take on it.

Principal Agent

Work, Faith, , , ,

As part of my job in Hull I get to study for an MSc in Public Management in Birmingham (where I am currently in a fairly ropey hotel room). This is a wonderful opportunity but not necessarily one I’m always enthusiastic about (I need to work on cultivating an attitude of gratitude). Before we came down for some lectures on research methodology today and tomorrow I was completing an essay on the insights that the principal-agent theory has in terms of performance management. And it got me thinking.

Before I continue I ought to explain what the principal-agent theory is. Don’t run away at the thought of economic theory I’ll keep the explanation brief and hopefully straightforward.

If I employ you to do something that makes me the principal and you the agent. I want to minimise the inputs I give you in exchange for a maximum level of effort that ensures I get what I’m looking for from you. You, on the other hand, want me to give you as much reward as possible in exchange for less effort. What we both want is an outcome that suits us both – I want my interests to be maximised, as you do yours.

The principal-agent theory then lets people work out how to design performance incentives or measure effort in order to get the best outcomes for everyone concerned. And it struck me that there’s a school of thought about Christianity that looks at us within this framework (even if they don’t know it).

On the one hand are those who unwittingly make us the principal and God our agent. That’s those who think we’ve made him up to make us feel better (it’s certainly a remarkably complex and well fleshed out crutch that’s the product of invention, must be the work of some Machiavellian genius). And there are those who turn to God when the chips are down or when they need something. An ATM saviour who responds to our needs.

Not to suggest that God doesn’t answer prayer of course but that we are not the principal in this relationship, it’s to refute the suggested that he’s an on-call deity should we need a favour. God is obviously the principal, but recognising that doesn’t stop the misconceptions from floating about.

I don’t know when it was that the church dropped the ball but we seemed to have done so in a big way when it comes to an understanding of the motivation behind our Christianity.

This lens of God as principal and me as his agent means I must be performing because of something God is doing. My motivation for dancing to a Holy tune, perhaps, is fear, a fear of hell, a fear of damnation and a fear of being judged a failure by God. It’s an understanding that says I have to comply with a stated norm in order to be accepted as good enough for God. I’m sure there are plenty of people who love God, seek Him and serve Him that reckon that’s the nature of our relationship with Him. By my reckoning it’s a bit brimstone heavy and grace light which is a tragedy.

Alternatively, if not fear of consequence, then clearly it’s all about reward. Heaven is the carrot dangled under our noses that we will get if our behaviours make it possible. Like imagining the God of fear, this God of prizes forms another theological construction that squeezes grace to the margins.

And that’s because whilst it is possible to see elements of principal-agent theory in how the world understands us it totally skews the nature of our relationship. It’s not a transactional or contracted situation. Our performance is not measured, there are no proxy indicators suggesting whether we are pleasing God or achieving salvation. God loves us for who we are, as we are and irrespective of what we have done or ever will do. It’s not contingent upon fulfilling stated aims or meeting certain goals (beyond the having a relationship in a first place which, if it exists, suggests that reconciliation has happened).

The reality of Jesus’ sacrifice is that it breaks the idea of principal versus agent and makes them one and the same. Perhaps we’ve lost sight of that behind the veneer of something transactional because we’ve seen relationships move away from being selfless in their search for a unity of one flesh and themselves becomes something principal-agentesque. Maybe the church is responsible for advertising this idea of family that places man at the head of a house and wife as subservient to him.

The thing is that’s not what I see when I read the oft trotted out Ephesians 5:21-32.

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church— for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

I’ve obviously missed the bit of that which is about servitude or subjugation. Is it not a recognition that both parties give of themselves to the other out of love. Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. And so, if you’re in submission through reverence to Christ then as women submit to their husbands so their husbands are submitting to them. Not a transaction, not a greater or lesser role, no one thing making something else happen as a result. Just love.

The problem in much of my public management MSC is that the language is transactional. It’s not relational. You won’t find love being spoken about when it comes to understanding the interaction between the public and its governing agencies or a contractor and his staff. You won’t find love entering the equation when it comes to maximising sales or minimising costs. Yet in the economy of grace the greatest value is to lose, the biggest joy is in giving away. Freedom comes not from the what but from the who. The who of our friends, the who of our family, the who of our communities, churches and colleagues.

If the principal and the agent submit to one another, simply because they want to maximise the interests of the other then greed, self interest and the negativity of desire vanish. So, if the principal agent theory tells the church anything at all it reminds us that our principal does that – God lives in us, trusting us to be His hands and feet and empowering us with the same spirit that created the universe.

I’d like my effort to look like it’s the work of an agent responding to the most generous, over-the-top, outrageous contractual arrangement from the principal. Economic theory says that the agent is always looking for the principal to ‘reward’ them hugely. It says that any principal making the kind of commitment our saviour has they’d be after a commensurate level of response. The magnitude of our riches in Christ are incomprehensible, there’s no way that (even if we tried harder) we could come close to matching them with our efforts. Thankfully we don’t have to. But I don’t want to rock up and meet St Peter saying I never tried to respond to God’s grace cos I didn’t have to. I’d like to be able to say I could come close. Not because I’m scared of hell, not because if I do God might answer my prayers, not because I want to go to heaven but because I don’t want to forget that what God has done for me as I was, continues to do with me as I am and has in store for who I could be isn’t for my benefit but is to bless him, those around me and the world.

Interesting thing economics…

Dividend

Work,

The first thing I blogged was a introspection on where I am and how life felt a bit inert. By the end I’d reached a conclusion that inertia is a negative way of looking at waiting. But that actually waiting is trusting in God knowing the best route.

And it appears he does.

At our church weekend one of the congregation had issued a call to prayer for people involved in local government/public policy, basically those involved in shaping society. He invited everyone to the 7am Tuesday prayer meeting to encourage and be encouraged. Unfortunately I couldn’t go because I have to be on my train but instead chatted to Phil about how frustrating it was to fall between the two stools of Hull and York.

So, fast forward to this week and I return to the office to find an email waiting for me from the Christian who had been on my interview panel. He’s an incredibly busy guy so getting in touch with me should hardly be a priority especially given that outside the interview I’ve only met him once, when he briefed us as part of our induction…hardly presenting an opportunity to share what excites us about knowing Jesus.

Nevertheless, the email said “I was involved in your interview last year…I recall at the time, that you said that you were a Christian, so I wonder if you might be interested in the “kings breakfast” initiative that we started in January. This is a prayer breakfast for those who work in and around the city; we haven’t had such a thing in Hull for over 12 years, so it was exciting to see 78 people get together to pray in January. We are doing it again in May, and I wondered if you wanted to come along”

In my first placement there was a Christian, I’ve passed the invitation onto her too. In this second placement there’s a lady who wears a crucifix but I’ve not spoken to her, this is a great excuse. And just this week one of my colleagues on the Master’s degree in Birmingham wears a cross, with obvious pride, around his neck.

Of course people wear crosses for all kinds of reasons, not all spiritual (although I’ve yet to see anyone wearing a guillotine round their neck, or an electric chair), so they may be red herrings. Undoubtedly as a Christian I’m sensitive towards seeing Christian paraphenalia (I wear a Global Day of Prayer band around my wrist because random Christian strangers might be encouraged by it) and sensitive to seeing God at work. Sometimes, no doubt, we read too much into things, but on the flip side I’m sure we don’t appreciate just how much the church envelopes us. The Body of Christ is home to God’s hands and feet so it shouldn’t be a great surprise that it’s the vehicle of answering prayer.

There’s riches in patiently chucking prayer heavenward and seeing God-incidences happen. The dividend of patience is in the heightening of faith, in the encouragement of knowing that the small whisper, the faint flicker of insight wasn’t just your imagination. That all those other little God-incidences were of Him and that you can move on from being stuck somewhere stagnantly fretting over what comes next to craning forward to peer expectantly into the (still murky) horizon.

There’s a lot of joy to be had in experiencing the completion of patience with the hint of more to come!