Over the past few years, a number of events have happened which could loosely be described as ‘GovCamps’ – taking the barcamp idea of open space style ‘unconferences’ and governmentising it a bit.
Starting with Jeremy’s efforts in 2008, we have since seen two subsequent national level govcamps, and several local versions, in Birmingham, Lincoln, London and Cheltenham.
The next one takes place in York on 12th June – find out more here.
It’s always occurred to me that the GovCamps are something that public sector folk in the UK could really be proud of – proof that a decent number of people are interested in improving things, and that they aren’t afraid to give up their Saturday to do it.
So how to best shout about this activity? Best thing to do is build a website. We had a Ning network – but that was very much dominated by the national, January event, and had a stupid domain name (ukgovweb.org – will be closing at the end of the week) which didn’t come close to describing what it was all about.
So, I had a quick play with WordPress and BuddyPress and produced UKGovCamp.com – a simple social site where people can find out about the GovCamps, see which ones are happening and which are being plotted.
Go and take a look, and get involved! I’ve even written up a 10 point plan for running your own event.
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1. IBM, Opportunity Peterborough and Peterborough City Council are working together on a project which aims to transform Peterborough into the leading sustainable city in the UK.
From the IBM website:
The collaboration has outlined plans to launch a Sustainable City Visualisation project, which will initially focus on building a new online platform to monitor and analyze data on Peterborough’s energy, water, transport and waste systems. This data will be used to produce a real-time, integrated view of the city’s environmental performance. Residents and city officials will be able to log on to the web portal and easily access the necessary information to make more informed decisions about resource usage. For example, the city will be able to make suggestions to improve home water and energy usage, while being able to work more effectively with the utilities to plan the long term energy and water infrastructure that is needed for a sustainable future.
Interesting stuff, and something I’ll keep an eye on. GreenMonk is a great source of analysis on sustainability and IT, and here is a link to all their posts which feature IBM, who seem to be doing quite bit in this space at the moment. It’s vital for local government to be seen to be leading on this agenda too, so it’s an interesting collaboration.
Hat tip to James Governor for mentioning this story on Twitter, where I picked it up.
2. The RSA are working with the Council in Peterborough to run the Citizen Power project. From the project’s Ning-based site:
Working in collaboration with Peterborough City Council and the Arts Council East, the Citizen Power project will span two years and be made up of a number of programmes based around the arts and social change, an area-based learning curriculum, a sustainable citizenship campaign, user-centred drug services and the use of online social media. Together, these different programmes of work will aim to address Peterborough’s challenges as well as work towards achieving the city’s potential.
I see David Wilcox is being his usual challenging self on the site, which is good, and I have joined to see where I might help (I’m a fellow of the RSA myself). Must say, the fact that the launch event for this local community based project in Peterborough took place in John Adam Street isn’t particularly inspiring. It will be interesting to see how this one pans out.
Good to see interesting things happening in Peterbough – it’s just down the road, and was the nearest big place to where I grew up.
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I hadn’t come across this before, but the Community Roundtable looks like quite a useful resource. It describes itself as
a virtual table where social media and community practitioners gather to meet, discuss challenges, celebrate successes, and hear from experts.
…which sounds rather fun.
Two things on the site caught my eye this afternoon. First is the community maturity model, an attempt to craft some standards around the role of community management. I tend to eschew things like this as unnecessarily complicating something that ought to be really simple – but there’s always value in sharing ideas, as long as it isn’t in a prescriptive way.
Here’s the model, anyhow (click for a bigger one):
The second thing is ‘The State of Community Management‘ report, which is full of good practice and whatnot. Well worth a download (warning: you have to give up some personal info to get the report).
Community management is a skill required within any team using social tools, whether within an organisation or as part of some external engagement activity. It might not necessarily be a job in itself, but the simple art of making people comfortable and welcome, and encouraging activity and participation is one that is vital for success.
Any time I post about community management, I have to urge people to subscribe to Rich Millington’s blog. Also, read Jono’s book (disclosure – that’s an Amazon affiliate link, and I might make a few pence if you buy anything having clicked it).
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On Wednesday 20th January, Paul McElvaney, Director of Learning Pool and Alison Stott, Project Manager at Essex Strategic HR will be hosting an online hotseat on the commissioning of Open, Distance and E-learning. This will be taking place in the Leadership Development Community of Practice, using the IDeA’s CoP platform. You need to register with the platform and join the community before you can get involved.
The way this will work is that a special forum has been set up inside the CoP in which questions can be left ahead of, and during, the day of the hotseat. Paul and Alison will then answer as many questions as they can before the end of the day. It’s like a day long asynchronous online Q&A session.
Subjects you might want to ask about include:
- How to promote collaboration and sharing between organisations
- How to save money and make efficiencies by working differently
- When to consider commissioning e-learning and what criteria should be considered?
So go ahead and sign up with the community and start posting your questions! Alternatively leave a question in a comment to this post, or email it in to [email protected] and we’ll make sure it gets posted.
You can also get involved in the discussion using Twitter – just use and keep an eye on the tag #copel.
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After just one day, interest is already starting to build up for January’s barcamp. We have had a tonne of responses to the register of interest form, which is awesome, and have made significant headway in getting the venue arranged.
More on that as soon as I know it.
In the meantime, I’ve been doing some gardening on the community site we have set up on Ning. Deleting spammers, starting new conversations and creating some new groups.
We now have specific groups to discuss government data sharing and cloud computing – both hot topics. Make sure you sign up and jump into the conversations about these two topics.
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You may not have heard of Zoho, but they are one of the leading providers of cloud-based applications on the web. If you are looking for an alternative to the likes of Google Docs, you might not go too far wrong with Zoho.
They have just released a new service, called Discussions which allows you to run internal or external discussion forums, and includes loads of functionality like rating posts, creating idea style forums – a bit like UserVoice or IdeaScale – and a bunch of other stuff.
Well worth looking into, and this video explains more:
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A few interesting sites I’ve come across in the last few weeks have got me thinking – always dangerous – and have also connected some stuff in my head. As always, I might have got this wrong, but thought it worth sharing.
Some of the most exciting uses of the web to emerge over the last couple of years have used the power of web 2.0 to foster conversation online amongst people with things in common, who might not otherwise have found each other.
This is effectively what I am banging on about in the talks I give on this subject, putting together the apparently opposing aspects of the web which I label – in line with the books of the same titles – The Long Tail and Here Comes Everybody. That is to say that the web allows us to be incredibly individual online, to find information that’s incredibly niche, to write our own blogs about very esoteric subjects (the Long Tail bit). But at the same time, the web connects us, so no matter how apparently individual our interests, we can always find others into the same stuff – whether they are geographically near or far (the Here Comes Everybody bit).
By combining these two things – individual interests and self organising, websites can create new communities for people who may have otherwise thought they were alone. We can belong to as many of these communities as we like too, no matter how apparently contradictory – just like our own personalities. For instance, I could be a member of an online conservation group, as well as a Range Rover owners’ community. Belonging to one need not preclude me from another as long as I feel comfortable with it myself. This would not necessarily be the case with other, mainly offline groups – political parties being one obvious example.
This is incredibly powerful – and potentially very disruptive. There are a few examples of mass scale communities which are often trotted out – NetMums is one, Money Saving Expert another – but these are generally technically pretty traditional. The new communities are increasingly targeted at niche areas and are increasingly sophisticated in terms of the tech.
Disruption is considered a bad thing in many circles – wrongly, as is failure (the best we can ever hope to do, after all, is fail better). In fact, disruption is just doing things in a different way – perhaps bypassing process or procedure, or creating a whole new process in place of the old one. It’s just change, really.
These new, disruptive communities bring people together, and it is at that point that real change can start to happen. Websites don’t really change anything – but people do. This has a considerable number of implications for many different organisations, but particularly government. This ranges from what kind of organisations and groups should be consulted on issues to actually who should deliver services.
Here are some examples, which are those interesting sites I mentioned at the top of this post. They aren’t necessarily new, but are great examples of what I’m talking about.
PatientsLikeMe
PatientsLikeMe is a US based site which creates communities out of people with similar health complaints. It allows members to share experiences, information and knowledge about their conditions, with obvious benefits. Those people living in small rural locations, for example, are unlikely ever to meet other folk with similar issues – but online it is easy to connect and discuss. Members of the site also share data relating to their illness, which in turn is shared with partner organisations to help develop cures.
Enabled By Design
Set up in the UK by Denise Stephens, with help from Dominic Campbell and others, Enabled by Design
…is a community of people passionate about well designed everyday products. By sharing their loves, hates and ideas, Enabled by Designers challenge the one size fits all approach to assistive equipment through the use of clever modern design.
The site brings together people who have great ideas for design in assistive and other equipment, as well as taking contributions from those who spot great – and terrible – examples of design out there now.
Help Me Investigate
Help Me Investigate is a site that encourages people to get together and, well, investigate stuff. It’s a mixture of local journalism and a social network. People list things they want to investigate, and others join them, adding what they find out to an investigation page online that everyone involved can see.
With a team boasting the best in networked journalism and technology that Birmingham has to offer (Paul, Nick and Stef) Help Me Investigate is a great site for bringing citizens together around the issues that matter to them – and issuing challenges to public and private organisations.
Signpostr
Signpostr is a very new site, only just out in Alpha testing mode. The brainchild of School of Everything’s Douglad Hind and Colin Tate, Signpostr is a community for job seekers, particularly those leaving education into the current job market. It offers three things:
- a space to talk honestly about the realities of looking for work at a difficult time;
- a user-generated resource directory, where people can share information about resources useful for finding work or living cheaply;
- and a tool for organising and developing your own projects.
There are an awful lot of government sponsored initiatives out there to help people get (back) into work during the recession – and it will be fascinating to see whether a self organised community can add something that ‘official’ projects cannot provide.
FreeLegalWeb
FreeLegalWeb describes itself as
…a project designed to deliver a web service that joins up and makes sense of the law and legal commentary and analysis on the web, providing a substantially more reliable, useful and efficient service than is currently available.
So, the current arrangements are perceived to be failing people, so here is a self-organised attempt to put that right. A great team is behind the project, including Nick Holmes, Robert Casalis de Pury and Harry Metcalfe; and support is being provided by the Cabinet Office, OPSI, BAILII, the Open Knowledge Foundation and mySociety. Well worth keeping an eye on.
All of these community projects have identified a need where government or the market is failing people, and have stepped up to fill that gap, using digital technology as a cost effective way of bringing large numbers of people together in one (online) place.
These communities are also, I think, great examples for local authorities to follow when making applications to the (deep breath) Communities and Local Government Customer-Led Service Transformation Capital Fund which Ingrid at the IDeA has been doing so much to promote recently.
This fund is looking for projects that fill a genuine need for citizens which isn’t currently being met, to provide information to key identified groups of people and focusing on specific issues that have been made priorities by local government. It isn’t really about getting those little projects kick started that you’ve never found the money to do – it strikes me that these sites funded by this money will be new ideas – and big, scalable ideas too.
Those interested in going for the funding should be looking at the sites I have mentioned above, and thinking what are the issues where citizens currently aren’t getting the access to information, or the conversations, that they need.
Beyond the CLG dosh, though, is a bigger question for government, which is whether it should be involved in building these sites at all. There is a convincing argument that says they shouldn’t, and that self organised action is entirely preferable.
I agree with that view to an extent, and in an ideal world, that’s how it would work. But where government – local or otherwise – can help kickstart that community building process, whether by acting in a convening capacity, or investing in the necessary technology, promotion and community management work, it should. It need not matter whether an online space is set up by a community activist or a local council – just as long as it does the job required and is run in the interests of its members.
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Those who attended, or would have liked to have done, the Google event last week might be interested in a new group we have set up:
http://groups.google.com/group/googlelocalgov
To talk about how local government can use Google tools. Though this isn’t an official Google space, it will have Google folk as members who will be able to join in where they feel they can help.
To save you a click or two, here’s a handy form…
|
| Subscribe to GoogleLocalGov |
| Visit this group |
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I put a tweet out last week pointing people to a new domain, www.localgovweb.com, asking people to complete the form it contained.
I asked for people’s:
- Blog addresses and whether they would like their posts to appear in an aggregated list
- Twitter names and whether they would like their tweets aggregated with everyone else’s
- Whether people would like to contribute original content to a group blog
If you haven’t already, please do visit the site and complete the form.
You’ll notice I have added some neat Google Friend Connect features to the site after the exciting trip to the UK Googleplex last Friday. This seems an easy way to add interactivity to a site – do have a play.
Here’s what I am planning to do. Firstly, localgovweb.com will be a place where blogging and twittering about local government and the web is pulled into one place. This will be through a blog aggregator, just like Public Sector Blogs, and a similar thing for Twitter.
The third strand will be an aggregation of delicious bookmarks tagged localgovweb – similar to DigitalGovUK or WP Sauce.
Once these are up and running, I’ll start to look at putting a blog in place where the original content can be posted. I’m hoping this can become a proper group blog, with plenty of contributions from people across local government, writing about the issues that are important to them.
So, thanks to everyone who has signed up so far. I’ve already got a couple of the elements of the initial aggregating activity up and running, so please do submit your details and starting tagging relevant stuff in Delicious with localgovweb.
More updates soon.
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I have run the social media game many times now, and it always turns out differently and is always rewarding, and interesting.
Basically, it is learning and FUN!
Here is a PDF of the cards I used, which I put together about a year ago for the 2gether08 conference. It’s based on the original by David Wilcox and friends, which has subsequently been developed in a different direction into the Social by Social game.
I’ve been involved in building and managing online communities for a while now, and it looks like I’m going to be doing even more in the near future (more on that later). To help refine my own thinking, and as an aid in planning online community work, I’m putting together a version of the game specific to to community building.
The game will work as normal, with teams asked to produce ideas around projects or problems which an online community could help solve. Then, in this version, the teams use three sets of cards to develop a strategy for what that community needs to work effectively. The sets of cards are technology, roles and activity.
Here are the cards I have thought of, under each category. Have I missed anything obvious? Anything you would change?
1. Technology
Hopefully these are self explanatory:
- Blogs
- Forums
- Profiles
- Status updates
- Wikis
- RSS feeds in
- RSS feeds out
- Embedable media
- Polls and surveys
- Email alerts
- Respond by email
- Email newsletters
- Groups
- Event listings
- Document sharing
- Social bookmarking
- Chat
- Third Party Applications
- Public and private spaces
2. Roles
Note – these are my definitions for the purpose of this game. You might not necessarily agree with how I describe certain roles – let me know in the comments if you would call them something different!
- Community manager – overall responsibility for success of the community
- Community cultivator – helps to develop conversations and use of the community
- Digital curator – finds good content on the community and elsewhere, and brings it to members’ attention
- Social reporter – creates content around the subject of the community, whether text, images, video or audio
- Community evangelist – someone to promote the community and encourage new members to sign up
- Moderator – ensuring content is appropriate for the community, works with members to ensure conversation stays on track
- Technology steward – helps manage the tech side of the community, provides help and support on how to use the features available, plans for future development
- Domain expert – someone with a deep knowledge of the subject matter of the community
- Facilitator – someone with a wide range of skills who can support the community by providing a little of all the other roles
3. Activities
These are a touch verbose right now, and will need to be a bit more succinct to fit on the cards!
- Plan community activity in advance
- Identify existing communities (online and offline)
- Identify enthusiastic potential members
- Identify relevant websites to promote community
- Promote community through social networking sites
- Run hotseats
- Seed content and discussions
- Run online conferences
- Develop user guidelines and policies
- Communicate with members and potential members using backchannels
It would be awesome to get feedback on these ideas before I set @davebriggswife to work with the laminator!