It’s frequently costly. It almost always achieves little. It lets people tick the “use the internet to engage with the public” box without actually achieving much.
I am, of course, talking about webcasting council meetings. The idea has honourable roots. But the world has moved on.
Both print and broadcast media have steadily moved away from providing lengthy, verbatim reporting of what goes on in elected bodies. That’s despite such coverage being very cheap and easy to produce. Stick a journalist in front of the Parliamentary TV channel, give them a bookmark to Hansard and you’re away. Yet the volume of such coverage has fallen hugely in the last few years – because it’s not what the public wants.
We may wish the public thought otherwise, but when the public is so clearly turning its back on being interested in such verbatim coverage, it’s rather implausible to think that they would lap it up for their local council, if only it were available.
It is therefore no surprise that the audience figures for council webcasting are almost always low. It is a telling sign that it is extremely rare to find a council boasting about the size of its webcast audiences. To be fair, there are some niches and exceptions, but overall the picture is clear: webcast council meetings don’t get much of an audience.
That has been consistently the case, as the systematic evaluation of pilots back in 2005 as part of the Local e-Democracy National Project showed. None of the pilots got a large audience.
It is true that the number of members of the public turning up in person to council meetings is often so small that a tiny online audience can seem quite large by comparison. But it is not an audience that comes for free.
Webcasting costs. It costs money that could be spent elsewhere. Council webcasting is relatively cheap compared with big council IT projects, but it’s relatively expensive when compared to the costs of exploiting social media tools. For example, Croydon’s £33,000 budget for its 2006-7 webcasting pilot could have paid for a substantial social media campaign.
It isn’t just the immediate audience that is limited, so is the follow up audience because by locking up content in audio-visual format webcasting hides it from search engines. That is starting to change, with some speech to text conversion technology starting to creep in to search tools, but for the moment the money spent on webcasting usually could more effectively be spent on putting other content online in search engine friendly ways that serve the public.
A few less minimalistic pdf files of agendas and a few more pages rich with background information and links would go much further than many a webcast.
Webcasting does, perhaps, have one plus point. Councils often cover the basics when it comes to promoting webcasting: mention in the council newsletter, mention on the council website, mention in their email list. Added up this marketing still doesn’t provide a decent audience – which is a healthy reminder of how not only does the substance have to be attractive but also how hard you have to work to build up a decent website and email audience to which you can promote activities.
But overall, whilst piloting webcasting made sense, now we know the lesson: it rarely delivers.
Mark Pack is Associate Director, Digital at Mandate Communications (www.YourMandate.com). Previously he was Head of Innovations at the Liberal Democrats, heading up the team which arranged the first use of Google Video by a major UK political party, the first UK party leader on YouTube and the first UK election campaign to use Ustream. He blogs about politics, history and technology at www.MarkPack.org.uk. He’s on Twitter at @markpack.
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Bristolian eDemocracy dudes Delib have published their audit of local authority online consultation offerings across the UK.
Delib – Local Authority Audit of Online Consultation
It’s interesting reading. Personally, I’m still not convinced I really know what proper consultation looks or feels like.
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Last Friday saw LocalGovCamp moving to Lincoln for the first of the follow up days. Learning Pool were happy to help out with some sponsorship of the event, which was marvelously organised and convened by Andrew Beeken of Lincoln City Council.
The day was an enjoyable one, with plenty of interesting sessions, including one facilitated by Fraser Henderson on ePetitions – an issue I have a professional interest in – and commentable consultations by Joss Winn.
Some great write ups of the event have already been posted up by Sarah and Andrew – and I’m sure there will be others.
The day was more obviously web focused than the Birmingham event, with many of the attendees coming from web teams. Nothing wrong with that – although the focus at times was more on making local government websites better, rather than making government better. Perhaps the fact that I have never worked on a web team means I’m a little distant from some of these conversations.
That the web will play an increasingly important role in the way councils and people interact with one another is a no-brainer. But more interesting to me than how that will work technologically is how it will fit within the culture and processes of local government – or how local government must change to fit with the new ways of working.
Another example was the session on hyperlocal blogging and local councils’ relationship with bloggers, which spent quite a bit of time discussing issues of judgements of quality and the need for editing and the relevance of the journalist in a networked society. Again, the real issue for me is the fact that outside the main urban areas, local newspapers are dying out and will continue to do so – and how will this affect the attitude local authorities have towards reputational risk, so much of which is focused not on the needs of the organisation or the people it serves but on what might appear in the local rag the next morning?
ePetitions are a good example. How hard is it to build an ePetitions system? Not very. What’s harder, and more interesting, is how you fit those ePetitions into the democratic and governance arrangements of the local authority.
This kind of ties in with the discussion on OpenSocitm about the future of the council, where I wrote the following:
I attended one of the Council of the Future sessions at the conference and found it a little unambitious. Indeed most of the things discussed were those that councils should be doing now – that many aren’t needs to be fixed, but it was hardly visionary stuff. I’m really thinking here of things like selling buildings, paperless office, EDRMS, business continuity, remote working, etc etc.
In fact, local government will be facing a crisis far worse than the current funding situation, which will be focused on staff and people. Look at the demographics of councillors – where are the next generation of people to take on the role once the current incumbents just get too old? Who will there be left vote for?
The problem is the same with officers, if not quite as bleak. There will be a massive churn in the next two years as expensive managers are pensioned off and younger, cheaper people will replace them – assuming those younger and cheaper people exist!
Perhaps this is a chance to rethink the roles played by councils and councillors – perhaps the reason why nobody is interested is because the roles are just wrong for this day and age – ties into Will Perrin’s point that government faced 21st century problems, has 21st century technology available to tackle them, but is lumbered with 19th century governance processes – and so no progress is ever made.
The things that should be discussed when the future of the council is considered should include:
- Who delivers services – should the council be the retailer or the wholesaler of services?
- How can councils work more closely with the private and third sectors, and community groups, in terms of carrying out its functions?
- How can the council manage its information assets in a more open way, to encourage reuse by the community and the adding of innovative value that local gov isn’t able to provide itself?
- How can councils become more entrepreneurial themselves to help bridge the funding gap?
- How can customer service, communications and service design be blended into an iterative process to help make sure services deliver what users want?
- What will the role of councillors be when nobody has the time to attend meetings in dusty town halls? Do we need to rethink the way our local democracy works?
Perhaps one framework to answer these and other questions might be to consider – if you were to start a council from scratch, right now, how would it work? What would it look like? What would you build first – an office or a website?
Am looking forward to these sorts of conversations at future events – and online, of course!
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Headstar reported the other day about the progress of the piece of legislation that will mandate local authorities to set up systems allowing residents to create e-petitions, and to respond to such petitions.
Under the ‘Local democracy, economic development and construction Bill’ (http://bit.ly/1nEC4Z), councils will be obliged to provide an e-petition facility and publish schemes for both electronic and traditional petitions, to acknowledge any petition to its organiser, and to offer a response, all of which should be published online.
I’ve got quite a bit of interest in e-petitions, not least as a result of spending time helping moderate them for Number 10 during my time there. I’ve seen how these things can work, and how they can be frustrating.
Learning Pool have been keeping an eye on the development of the need for e-petitioning by councils, and already have an e-petitions platform in development which we will soon be looking to engage local authorities in testing. As always with Learning Pool’s stuff, it will be based on open source technology and will be easy to use and very cost effective. If you’re interested, please do get in touch.
In a related development, Andy Gibson is going to be working with Dominic and Fraser to develop a data standard for e-petitions.
From next year, it’s probable that all local councils will be required to provide electronic petitioning tools to their citizens, and we want to make sure they all do it the right way, and in a form that means they can all talk to each other.
I’ve put my name down to get involved, and will ensure that Learning Pool’s e-petitions system fits in with any agreed open standards.
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A great post from the FCO’s Stephen Hale reveals their digital diplomacy site.
There is plenty of good stuff on there, but of particular interest to many will be the social media policy and guidance.
Many thanks to Stephen and his team for sharing.
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Interesting paper from Delib on the approach to government taken by the Obama administration in the States:
The reality has certainly been a lot more muted than most geeks would have liked. Nothing overly glam and technologically ground-breaking, but instead a steady stream of pilot e-democracy projects and iterative improvements using an array of different web 2.0 tools.
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Us Now is “A film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet” and it’s also rather good.
Even better, you can now watch all 60 minutes of it.
Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.
Once you have seen it yourself, do something helpful and organise a screening of it where you work. It might just make a difference.
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Stephen Hale at the FCO has an excellent, interesting and important post about measuring the success of the London G20 Summit site.
With wonderful openness and transparency, Stephen has set out some of the factors by which the site’s success could be measured, along with the results. Its fascinating reading, and provides lots of lessons for anyone approaching an engagement project like this.
Indeed, this ties in with Steph’s recent (and overly-modest) post about the achievements of the engagement bods at DIUS over the last year or so. He wrote:
We still haven’t nailed some of the basics like evaluation, [or] the business case
Figuring out whether or not something has actually worked is terrifically important, and the long term efficacy of online engagement relies on this nut being cracked.
Stephen’s post highlighted some really good practice here: outline what your project aims to do, and come up with some measures around it so you can work out whether it worked or not.
As Steph mentions, having an up-front business case is really important – a written down formulation of what the project actually is and what it ought to achieve.
Now, business cases and evaluation criteria can be developed in isolation and in a project-by-project basis. I wonder, though, how much more value could be created by developing a ‘package’ of evaluation which could be used as a foundation by everyone involved in government online engagement?
Of course, each project has its own unique things that will need to be measured and tested, but surely there are some basic things that every evaluation exercise would need to look at?
How about some common evaluation documents were created, and that every project undertaken ensured that the basic, common stuff was recorded, as well as the unique bits. That way, some kind of comparative analysis would be possible, especially if everyone submitted their results into a common database.
Just how hard would it be to come up with a common framework for online engagement projects? I think it is worth a shot.
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Helen has launched a new community blogging project over at digtialengagement.org which aims to be:
a collaborative space for all those interested in digital engagement to share ideas and agree priorities for action around digital engagement
This is of a much wider scope than digital mentors, and has the potential to be a real hotbed of interesting and vital debate. Helen writes:
By digital engagement we mean the use of social technologies for social good. What do you think we should do on digitalengagment.org? In the immediate future, we want to use this site to create a digital manifesto, what more could we all do, and do together to get more people online and engage in the right tools for them to help them in their lives.
I’ve helped out by setting the blog up, and will be adding my thoughts on digital engagement in due course. The aim is for the site to be as inclusive as possible, so see how you can get involved.
We are going to have some interesting announcements coming up, including how we are going to try and get this conversation going en masse at the Digtial Inclusion Conference in April.
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Cambridgeshire County Council have put up some videos on their YouTube channel from the leaders of the three main political groups on the Council.
The aim of the videos are to encourage people to put themselves forward to become councillors.
As the Council’s press release states:
The films represent a first for local democracy in Cambridgeshire, with the leaders broadcasting individual messages on the importance of people coming forward as councillors for the County Council elections, to be held on 4 June 2009.
The videos are classic talking head style, and as with all initial attempts at this stuff, they are a little stilted. But that’s fine, and hopefully these councillors, and others, will continue to use YouTube as a communications tool – after all, with more practice things will always improve.
There doesn’t seem to be a single place for people to go to find out about becoming a councillor anywhere on the web at the moment – there is information on individual council sites, of course, and CLG have some bits too. London Councils have a special site to encourage people to consider standing for election. However, the content is very static and not particularly engaging.
Having some video stuff from councillors explaining what they do and what is involved would be great, I think, along with links to councillor blogs and other information resources. Even better would be some sort of interaction between those who are considering being a councillor and those with experience to pass on. Something to humanise the whole thing a little.