Public Sector Bloggers

Schoolgirls

I agree with Lord Soley, not only that there may be dangers in uninspected home education, but also that children miss out on many advantages if they do not spend their time in the company of other schoolchildren. Learning to mix, discipline, sport, drama, outings, various aspects of learning that are not available at home. I was reminded of this when I went to a good girls’ school a few days ago as part of the Lords’ outreach programme. This programme sends peers to all sorts of schools all over the country to speak to older pupils about the work of the House of Lords and give them the chance to think about politics and hear firsthand what we do. My presentation covered the history of the House, its composition, its expenditure, its future, the different types of work that it does, and drew attention to some peers of whom they would have heard, to illustrate my points about expertise and diversity.

The two most interesting questions they put to me afterwards were “Will a general election end the expenses scandal?” and “How can David Cameron be prevented from appointing 100 new peers to secure a Conservative majority in the Lords?” It will take more than a general election or even a change in the voting system to remove the taint. The second question was harder to answer. I had to explain the Royal Prerogative and how it would be almost impossible for the Queen to refuse a request by the Prime Minister to create large numbers of peers. Does anyone have a better answer?

Home education

I have received a number of letters and emails expressing concern about Schedule 1 of Clause 26 of the Children, Schools and Families Bill which sets out the Government’s scheme for compulsory registration and monitoring of all home educated children in England. 

The Home Education Advisory Service believes that the proposed powers of local authorities to check on children being educated at home are excessive.

I am not convinced by their argument. Of course we want to allow parents to educate at home but there are risks attached to that and in one of the letters to me they hint at that difficulty. They say:  ”It is unacceptable for public servants to undertake routine intervention on this scale in the lives of private individuals when it is acknowledged that the majority of parents are providing satisfactory educational arrangements”. The five words that worry me here are ‘the vast majority of parents’ . Of course the majority are good but by implication they accept there maybe a problem with a minority. Many of our laws would be unnecessary if it wasn’t for a minority. Only a minority of parents abuse their children and only a minority of home educating parents won’t teach their children necessary basic skills but they are the problem.

Problems can arise in a number of ways. It maybe extreme battering or cruelty where the parents are anxious to keep the child out of site of any authority figure. Or it maybe parents who believe that a girl should not receive education because in their view the role of a girl is to be trained as a mother and housewife. Or it maybe because the parents are providing a level of education that fails to enable the child to learn basic skills like reading and writing. So if we are to protect the minority we will need some power of intervention. I’m not sure if the Bill has the right safeguards in it but that is why we have Parliamentary scrutiny. To claim it is excessive for the state to have a checking role here is I think wrong.

Imagine the headlines when a case first appears of a child grossly abused and hidden from authority by the home educating parents. I don’t think the Home Education Advisory Service knows what will hit it if that should happen. 

links for 2010-02-08

• Mark Lund's COI: From 'lifeblood of ad industry' to political football | Markets & Analysis
  (tags: coi)

Filed under: Bookmarks

RIP Ian Cheewah

Today, February 8th, would have been Ian Cheewah's 45th birthday. Sadly he didn't live to see this one, passing away three short weeks ago. Ian was a true and dear friend for many years. His friends, colleagues, customers and suppliers gathered for a memorial service last Thursday. I met Ian many years ago. We worked together, we spent time together, we worked together and so on. I was honoured to have had the chance to say a few words at his memorial service:

… 2010 wasn't supposed to start like this
If Ian was standing with me now, saying those words, his smile would have been broad and he'd have added "you know what I'm saying?"

And then that deep, rich belly laugh of his would have erupted. A laugh that made you laugh along with him, that forced a smile to your face, no matter what else was going on.
At this difficult time, it is that laugh that I am holding on tight to.

But truth be told, more than half the time I didn't have a clue what Ian was saying, but I went along with the laugh anyway.   

Early on I realised that Ian was thinking more deeply than me – Ian knew things that I didn’t and his brain had already raced ahead of mine and I was playing catchup; and I so often played catchup.

I last spoke with Ian the night before his operation. He was at work, making sure - he told me - that everything was organised because he thought me might be away a few weeks. Little did any of us know that wouldn't be the case, although perhaps Ian had half an idea - and he was handling it better than any of us would have done.

We shared some laughs that night, in a conversation that had I known what I know now, I would have made last a lot longer. Again, he was ahead of me, only this time I didn’t catch up. It wouldn't have been difficult to talk for longer. There was never a shortage of things to talk about and time with Ian was always precious, always cut short by his travel schedule or mine, by some meeting or another, by some interruption.

But you can never know what you don't know, and you'll never know why you don’t know it.

How many of us would have chosen such a day to be at work? I know that I would not have done. And so there stands the test of the man that Ian was. Ian loved many things. Ian loved life too much for him to go so soon. He loved his work and he loved everything he did outside of work. He held his family and his friends dear whilst embracing all of the fun that life had to offer. Ian was the buddy you always wanted to have around because he made you and everyone else around you feel comfortable.

I knew Ian in a few guises. First, as long ago as 1996, I was a customer, then a friend and then both. Over the years, his teams have told me that as a boss he let you be master of your own destiny and seeded ideas for you to grow; as a customer, it was his energy and thinking that kept everyone moving, changing and striving to do great things. As a friend, it was many things – the mad ideas, the laugh out loud phone conversations, the dinners, the bars and the clubs.

I have many truly endearing memories of Ian but the ones that I savour, the ones that truly capture the Ian that we all knew, were the times at restaurants, ones like Hakkasan when Ian would hold court - that's kind of how it seemed. He’d be sitting on a couch, his arms spread wide, welcoming everyone in. Ian would be surrounded by people that he knew well, knew a little and some that he didn’t know at all. It didn't matter. People he only vaguely knew would quickly become friends - and when he saw them again, sometimes weeks or months later, things would pick up where they had left off. One big Fusion workshop.

I'm sad that it will be some time before I can pick up with Ian where we left off but I know that when we do he will be there with that huge smile and that deep laugh, ready to share the latest news and to introduce me to his new friends, St Peter on his left, Gabriel on his right.

So as we sit here in St Botolph's, the patron saint of wayfarers, know that Ian has made his way to a better place. And consider in the weeks and months ahead as you make your own journey through life,
if you could know now what lies ahead, if you could know what you don’t know, would you be doing what you're doing, travelling the road that you are travelling?2010 wasn't supposed to start like this, you know what I'm saying?

Sleep tight good buddy – ‘til I catch up with you again.

Bookmarks for February 3rd through February 8th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

• WordPress Mobile Pack « WordPress Plugins – "The WordPress Mobile Pack is a complete toolkit to help mobilize your WordPress site and blog."
•   A digital engagement framework adapted for local government by Michele Ide-Smith – "I’ve been doing a bit of research into citizen engagement models for my MSc research and started to think about how these models relate to digital engagement. I looked at various models and frameworks and combined them to help me conceptualise digital engagement."
• Trackle.com – Find It. Track It. Share It. – Trackle looks a really good option as an online monitoring tool.
• TeaCamp – A blog to help folk keep track of the regular government tea drinking meetups.
• Why do councils still use Internet Explorer 6? | Learning Pool Blog – "the web has moved on substantially since then and, given that Microsoft has released two excellent versions of the browser since, I think its time for local government to turn its back on an outdated, insecure and slow browser."
• Local knowledge is everything – BankerVision – "We seek to use systems to impose standards of service and uniformity across the offering. “People are unreliable!”, we scream as we write as much discretion away from users as possible, thinking, as we do so, that we are serving both them and the customers. Well, we’re not."
• Cloud Culture: any new threats? « Perfect Path – "My personal experience with Tuttle has been that the network is much stronger and more robust than we imagine. Whenever it get’s a push against it, it either repels invaders or morphs into something similar enough to still be Tuttle, but different enough to survive."
• Innovation unlimited – Enterprise and Industry – European Commission – Interesting use of a blog from the EU's innovation unit.
• So your council wants to blog? – "Having said that blogs are mundane, there are still not many examples of blogs written by local government officers (as opposed to councillors or community activists)."
• Communicating Cohesion: Evaluating Local Authority Communication Strategies – "The report is the culmination of an in-depth investigation into local authority communications, from the perspective of promoting community cohesion. The findings reinforce the need for effective communications to address perceptions by some groups that they are losing out to others and the need for local authorities to take a strategic approach to communications that needs to involve not just the council staff and elected members, but the community itself."

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

A digital engagement framework adapted for local government

I’ve been doing a bit of research into citizen engagement models for my MSc research and started to think about how these models relate to digital engagement. I looked at various models and frameworks and combined them to help me conceptualise digital engagement.

Firstly I evaluated the participation model provided by David Wilcox in his 1994 participation framework, which was based on Sherry Arnstein’s ‘ladder of participation’ from 1969.

I noticed some similarities with Charlene Li’s and Josh Bernoff’s ladder of Social Technograph profiles. The profiles are based on survey research into consumer participation in social technologies. The ladder was recently updated to include a category for Twitter users!

The Groundswell site provides an interactive profiling tool which is based on demographic and behavioural data, to help companies define their commercial social technology strategies. However I think the tool has some transferable relevance for defining citizen participation profiles and assessing the propensity of certain age groups and genders to engage. What would be really useful would be to overlay this behavioural data with the type of profile data that some local authorities have access to, either through OAC or Mosaic, along with other data layers, e.g. Council survey data, Place Survey data.

Li and Bernoff suggest various activities which the Social Technographs participate in. I have adapted these along the lines of Catherine Howe’s recent ‘long list’.

Lastly I thought about what type of roles might be involved at each level and drew inspiration from Steph Gray’s digital engagement roles. I have added other roles which are more relevant to local government, where communities are likely to play a more active role in engagement. Particularly where there are active hyperlocal sites in existence.

So, voilà! An adapted digital engagement framework for communities and local government. It’s a first draft so any comments welcome.

Participation level	Social Technograph type	Activities	Roles involved
Supporting You help others do what they want – perhaps within a framework of grants, advice and support provided by the resource holder.	Creators	Publish and moderate a hyperlocal website/blog Run social media surgeries Upload a video or podcast you create Write articles and post them	Community Manager Digital mentor Community Activist Council Officer
Acting together Not only do different interests decide together what is best, but they form a partnership to carry it out.	Creators	Take part in online deliberations (in forums, web chat etc.)	Social reporter Community activist Councillor Council Officer
Deciding together You encourage others to provide some additional ideas and options, and join in deciding the best way forward.	Critics Conversationalists Creators	Post ratings Comment on a blog Contribute to online forum Contribute to/edit articles in a wiki Vote on polls Create a petition Join social networking sites and enagement platforms Use RSS feeds Add tags to web pages or photos	Community member Community Activist Councillor Council Officer
Consultation – You offer a number of options and listen to the feedback you get.	Critics Conversationalists Collectors	Post ratings Comment on a blog Contribute to online forum Contribute to/edit articles in a wiki Vote on deliberative polls Sign an e-petition Visit social networking sites and engagement platforms Maintain profile on social networking site or engagement platform Tweet Use RSS feeds Add tags to web pages or photos	Community member Council Officer Councillor
Information – The least you can do is tell people what is planned.	Spectators	Read blogs Listen to podcasts Watch videos from other users Read online forums Read comments/ratings Read tweets	Community member Council Officer Councillor

Yes you can change your Twitter ID. Don’t.

A while back, Mark Pack wrote a couple of articles noting that if MPs were worried about breaking election campaign rules by running a Twitter account with the letters MP in it, they probably needn't be. The authorities tended to be 'sensibly flexible'; and besides, it was dead easy to change your Twitter account name. In the piece which appeared on LibDem Voice, I commented:

But is there a risk that someone grabs your temporarily vacated username? I can’t see anything in the Twitter documentation to suggest there’s a ‘grace period’ between one person giving up a username, and someone else claiming it… as is often the case, say, with domain names.

Funny I should ask. Last week, colourful Conservative MP Nadine Dorries changed her Twitter name to 'Nadine4MP', apparently following Tom Harris's lead. But somebody swiftly jumped in, and bagged the newly vacated NadineDorriesMP identity. Tim Ireland at Bloggerheads.com insists it wasn't him, and has done some further digging into who it might have been. The account is currently reporting 'that page doesn't exist'. Accusations and conspiracy theories are flying.

Yes, if you leave your main MP-labelled account dormant for a few weeks and switch to a new non-MP-labelled account, you'll lose a good few followers. But to be honest, if they don't follow you to your new location, they weren't following you very closely, were they?

Instead, where are we? No1 result from a Google search for 'nadine dorries twitter', and in the top 10 for plain 'nadine dorries', is the vacated, possibly hijacked, currently defunct @NadineDorriesMP account page. And this on the evening when said Ms Dorries is getting primetime terrestrial TV exposure for an hour.

You have been warned. Again.

Parliament in the Dark? Responses.

I was delighted to see the number of comments on my last post, and on the debate I led in the Lords ten days ago.  In response:

1.  Scrutiny:  There seems to be a consensus both among commenters, and in the Lords debate (both the other day and on the Queen’s Speech) that we should do more to give legislation proper scrutiny before it reaches the formal parliamentary process, and that we should review how laws are working after they’ve been passed.

A major area of failure in Parliament is the scrutiny of public expenditure:  the Commons Public Accounts Committee produces excellent reports, but these are almost always retrospective looks at how Departments and Agencies have wasted money over the course of years.  Parliament needs better access to Departmental budgets and practices throughout the year, so it can keep a better eye on how public money is spent.  Money (or ‘supply’) has traditionally been the exclusive province of the Commons, so it may be that we should leave improvements in this area to them.

That gives the Lords an extra responsibility, though, to improve our scrutiny of other parts of public policy.  We could start by taking evidence from experts – as already happens in the Commons – on the contents of legislation before we go into line-by-line scrutiny of a Bill in the chamber.  I’ve long thought, too, that there should be a special Lords Committee to sift through all the international treaties and agreements the government signs in our name each year.

In terms of post-legislative scrutiny, we could – for example – establish a committee to keep track of how effective and necessary are the thousands of criminal offences created by Government each year.  Since Labour came to power, Ministers have just about invented one new offence for every day they’ve been in office!  It’s up to Parliament to look at the merits of each of these and expose Ministers where they indulge in pointless headline grabbing.

2.  The Salisbury-Addison Convention: This was always an agreement between two parties:  the Conservatives and Labour.  The Liberal Democrat position is that there is certainly no way to codify, or even have a common understanding, the idea that some bills constitute ‘manifesto legislation’.  It makes sense for the Lords to avoid voting down whole Bills at second or third reading, since doing so would turn us from careful revisers into blanket vetoers, but that’s about all the convention means in practice.  That’s why the Joint Committee on Conventions advocated renaming it “the Government Bill Convention”.  The name hasn’t yet stuck!

In 1945, the Labour manifesto was eight pages long; it was incredibly simple.  Today, manifestos are typically more 100 pages long, and it really is rather difficult to ascertain which policies are those which enjoy a popular mandate, and which were popped in at the last moment, read by no one and swung no votes at all.  Even Conservative Lord (Terrence) Higgins, who sat with me on the Joint Committee on Conventions, and originally didn’t accept this case, has come round to my point of view.

Ultimately, if people are concerned that a second chamber full of people you didn’t elect (and can’t get rid of) might stand in the way of a popular government attempting to get its programme through, it might be worth considering the merit of having a second chamber full of people you did choose and can boot out if you don’t like what they do.  There’s no point having a legislative chamber that is afraid to vote down laws it opposes, so you have to have it constituted in such a way that it’s accountable.  I think regular readers already know my views on that!

3. Parliament Acts:  These do act as a ‘long-stop’ irrespective of the vagaries of what is ‘manifesto legislation’– and even reformers like me, who want an elected chamber, do not suggest they should be altered.  The Acts ensure the Commons can get its way if it insists on doing so, but only after a period of one year – its keeps the Lords in place as a revising chamber, there to make the Government think again.  The Acts also enshrine the Commons’ right to have its own way over tax and public spending, without a delay.

4. The Lisbon Treaty:   following some probing, in which I was involved, we discovered this last week that Parliament – not least the House of Lords – has significantly more power over European decisions as a result of the Treaty.  More on that when our Procedure Committee’s report is available.

5.  Electoral Reform:  I am amused to note how the Westminster obsessives are all concentrating on the effect on parties and parliamentary politics of a fairer voting system.  What about the people?   Why should a small section of electorate have far more power to influence what happens than the majority?   Why should so many voters be completely powerless?   The First-Past-The-Post system simply does not work any more.   The Conservatives had a substantial majority of votes over Labour in England in 2005 but 92 fewer seats.  Is that fair?   What happens if that is the case for the whole UK this year?  Meanwhile, Liberal Democrat supporters have tended to get much less valuable votes than the supporters of the other two.  Why?   Not one single current MP enjoys the endorsement of more than half his or her constituents.   There is a direct correlation between those with the safest seats and those with the most questionable expenses claims, because they knew they only needed to be accountable to their parties rather than to the public at large.  Let’s stop looking at the need for reform through the eyes of politicians and examine it from the viewpoint of the people – that’s what democracy is all about, isn’t it?

#TAL10

Talk About Local Un-Conference 2010
We are pleased to announce that the Talk About Local Un-Conference 2010 will be held on Saturday 17 April at Old Broadcasting House in Leeds.  Old Broadcasting House is an excellent venue in Central Leeds, in the Civic Quarter just off the Ring Road.

We are delighted that this event will be in partnership with The Guardian’s Local initiative

As in Stoke-on-Trent in October, we will be using the Un-Conference format and we hope to have some of the very best hyperlocal publishers and special guests attending on the day.

After the success of the Pork Pie rounders, arranged by our own Nicky Getgood, there is a rumor that a skool sports day is being planned for one of the sessions, more than that we can’t yet announce, yet….

50 Tickets will be available on EventBrite from 1400 today (8 February)  with further tickets being made available after we have ensured that local bloggers in Yorkshire and the North East have got their tickets.

We will be publishing updates at http://talkaboutlocal.org and on Twitter @talkaboutlocal or you can search Twitter for TAL10 to see what other people are saying the Un-Conference Google Group is reopened for you to start discussing and planning what you hope to gain from the event.

Talk About Local Un-Awards
The glittering Talk About Local Un-Awards ceremony will take place on Saturday evening after the Un-Conference at a venue yet to be confirmed. As you will no doubt remember we were going to hold the Un-Awards in Birmingham earlier in the year, but after much procrastination and it being left on a low light we decided that it made logistical sense for us to hold it in conjunction with the Un-Conference.

Tickets for the the Un-Awards will be available on Eventbrite as soon as the venue is confirmed.

The public sector learning conference

Learning Pool’s public sector learning conference takes place on 12th May – the day after my birthday, fact fans – and is already looking like it will be an utterly awesome event.

Find out more and book your place – if you do it by the end of this week, you’ll get a ticket for 20% cheaper than everyone else!

Whether you are attending or not, make sure you sign up for the conference network, where you can connect and share experience and knowledge with the finest minds in public sector learning and collaboration.

Possibly related posts:

• Fresh ideas for tomorrow’s people
• Learning Pool cop an elearning hotseat
• C’llr.10 conference – 4 February 2010
• Learning Pool Breakfast events
• GovCamp explained, kind of

links for 2010-02-08

Berners-Lee, Bin Laden and business logic

Watching BBC2's The Virtual Revolution at the weekend, I found myself drawing an unexpected and slightly uncomfortable parallel.

Entitled Enemy Of The State?, this week's installment looked at social networks and political activism - touching, as you'd expect, on Twitter during the Iranian election, the great firewall of China, Islamic fundamentalism and the Estonian cyber-attack. All implications of the decentralised network, it gently argued:

Al Qaeda, like the internet, has no centre. It's a dispersed group of loosely associated people.

Those few seconds of prime-time Saturday evening telly seemed to be laying down a challenge. If you asked people name the biggest influences on modern life over the last decade, the internet and Al Qaeda would be right up there. Both hugely successful, despite the lack of formalised structure. So why am I getting hung up on the supposed need to build a bigger company, and become a 'proper' business?

There are, of course, entrepreneurial opportunities in this field, for those motivated, resourced and skilled enough to exploit them: to build large corporate structures, and extract money from fellow large corporates. As I've blogged here previously, I know I probably should be looking at these. But the truth is, I don't feel a compelling need to do so.

I'm left wondering whether the lesson of the decade of Bin Laden and Berners-Lee is that loose affiliation isn't just as good as formalised corporate structure; but is actually better. Anyone?

Local budget consultations

I was out-and-about the other day and came across this advert:

My local authority want me to have my say in how they spend and collect their money. When I got home, I visited the www.barnet.gov.uk/budget site accordingly.

It was quite good. It  went some way towards explaining how the council is funded and what it spends its money on. There are some big headline graphs that show “Barnet Council’s back office costs are amongst the lowest in London” and “Barnet receives substantially less financial support from central Government than the London average.”

It also has a budget simulator using Delib’s platform. For some reason, it only offers us the option to see the impact of budget reductions in specific policy areas (I’d like to see options to increase some of the spends). For the sake of completeness, there’s a detailed document that shows the figures tabulated, and if anyone had the time and energy, they could go through the figures and raise questions about particular elements.

But Barnet deserve credit for having also taken the figures and poured them into a good info-graphic (by the way, I’m including these images just in case they are taken down when the consultation ends).

All-in-all though – leaving the graphic aside, I couldn’t help feeling that the whole thing was being framed to suit a desired outcome. I’m sure that there are comparison charts where Barnet’s performance is closer to the mediocre than the outstanding.

Now Barnet are something of a controversial local authority. They fell out with Ken Livingstone when they removed a lot of traffic calming measures a few years ago. As the Association of British Drivers put it, “Barnet is on the front line against Ken Livingstone and TfL’s anti-car policies by adopting common sense policies on transport.” They also have a hawkish approach to social care and the EasyCouncil model are not without its critics.

I’m not here to go over these issues, but it’s worth looking at some of the more bog-standard questions that I think a lot of councils would benefit from answering. My biggest problem with the way Barnet are doing this (and I should be clear, I’m picking on Barnet because I live there – you could do a similar exercise with any council, and you may find that Barnet have gone further than most in even bothering to ask) is that there seems to be a political and managerial monopoly on the framing of the consultation.

Surely the opposition groups could have been provided with comparable resources to describe the situation differently and frame the options to suit their agendas?

Or even better, they could have adopted the following workflow:

1. Follow The Conservative Party’s lead in using Google Moderator to crowdsource a set of questions from the public. Get dozens of people to ask questions (invite texts and tweets – they don’t need to all be from local residents!) and try to drive thousands of people to bid those questions up or down. Texts are crucial here – any local lists that can be used, and any way of incentivising people to do so – perhaps even a small prize for the selected questions?
2. Then commit to getting an independent body (not selected by the council) to answer those questions on the council’s behalf. Invite all councillors to provide their own commentaries on the answers if they wish.
3. Provide the raw data and offer a cash prize (say £3k?) to anyone who can take that data and use it to help visualise what the key decisions are most effectively. Invite a group of local residents to award that prize to the people who help improve their understanding and clarify the issues the best
4. Only then, present your options to the public – and get indicative results by reaching out over the heads of the hard-to-avoids to the hard-to-reach local residents – I have a suggestion of how this could be done here.

None of this is likely to prove too attractive to councils for two reasons.

Firstly, it takes a lot of power out of the hands of unelected officials – the monopoly on describing problems was always a key weapon in Sir Humphrey’s armoury. Secondly, Barnet’s Tories would only have been human if they’d framed the questions that they wanted answered. Most ruling local groups will do this. But they did so, and it’s a bit naughty, isn’t it?

However, I’d suggest that councils may be pleasantly surprised if they did it my way. The biggest thing missing from Barnet’s current consultation model is that there is very little space for the public to tell everyone something that they didn’t already know about Barnet’s policy options.

When I was five, I was just alive

Last week, this blog hit five years and 400 posts, just as it became apparent that blogs are history.

As this momentous milestone approached, there was a flurry of coverage of the latest Pew Internet Project report, on social media and young adults, picking up on the decline of interest in blogging – at least among young Americans.  The Guardian reported that:

Blogging, on the other hand, may become more and more of a side issue. In fact, among all the content creating activities the decline in blogging among teens and young adults is striking as it looks like the youth may be exchanging “macro-blogging” for microblogging with status updates. Since 2006 blogging among teens has dropped from 28% to 14% and among young adults (aged 18 to 29) by 24% to 15%. Some 11% of those aged 30 and over now maintain a personal blog, and 14% of them maintain a personal website.

There is nothing terribly surprising about that:  maintaining a blog is not a trivial undertaking, and it has always been true that a lot more people are consumers of online material than are producers of it. Kathryn Corrick recently picked up on some Forrester analysis (again based on the US) which shows this very clearly:

What has changed, perhaps, is that tools have become better tuned to what it turns out people actually want to do.  As John Scalzi puts it:

For the vast majority of what people (not just teens, but teens also) used blogs for — quick updates on line to friends and family — Facebook and Twitter offer an easier, friendlier and therefore better solution than starting up a blog. If you’re starting out in social media, for most folks it makes sense to go there. Later, if you want the ability for customization and a format beyond 140-character tweets and status updates, you can always start a blog. But I suspect most people don’t need to get to that point, and certainly not most younger users of social media.

Also, you know. Blogs have been social media’s Last Year’s Model for a spell now; heck, they were Last Year’s Model when Friendster hit. And it’s certainly true that when I note that I’ve been blogging since 1998, certain younger folks get that look in their eye that says No! No one was even alive then! That’s when I hit them with the concept of “newsgroups.” Good times, good times.

Or, more pithily:

Great content is really, really hard to make. That’s why so few blogs have it, but that’s not the medium’s fault. The same is true for any other media.

And so back to the discussion of the state of the UK gov blogosphere kicked off by Dave Briggs, continued before and at UK Govcamp.  Now Dave is back with some fresh thoughts (and with a great comment from Steph Gray), most importantly and perceptively that none of this is really about blogs:

I was wrong to mention blogs. A lot of the resultant discussion in the comments of that post and other chats have focused on blogging, which is of course just the medium. It’s the content I am interested in. What we seem to lack is an ecosystem of ideas in public services. Discussions about new ways of doing things, how to change the way things are, how ideas get progressed into prototypes and then into actual delivered services or ways of working. Whether this happens on a blog, in a social network, on a wiki or over a cup of tea is neither here nor there.

I think that’s a good way to approach the question,  not least because the first incarnation of this blog was as the only available tool for the job I really wanted to do.  Its original purpose was to act as an informal knowledge management exchange for me and my team at work.  In the absence of any official way of doing that, a group blog  – with access restricted to members of the group – seemed as good a way forward as any.  For a whole range of reasons, it never quite took off in the way I had hoped, so it fairly quickly became more of a personal notebook of things I had found interesting or thought I might want to remember. That meant I wrote largely for myself – if anybody else found it interesting, that was a bonus, but their absence didn’t stop me (which is just as well).

Large organisations tend to be predominantly inward looking:  there is so much going on and calling for attention on the inside that it can sometimes be hard to remember even that there is an outside, let alone that that is where challenge and innovation is most likely to be found (I read something interesting and thought provoking on that, using the pattern of email usage as the way in to the question, just in the last few days, but now I can’t find it to add a link here – which is itself a measure of one part of the problem).  Blogs are one good way of countering that trend, for readers but perhaps particularly for writers, but its not the only way nor even the best way for many people and many ideas.  As Steph says, there is an existing ecosystem (and set of assumptions) which long predates the world of social media.  The challenge for government – and probably the challenge for any large-ish, non-technology focused organisation – is to recognise and embrace the additional power which comes from widening that ecosystem and, critically, to accept the loss of control which comes with it.

In the meantime, there’s a few more years blogging to be done.

On leadership

Light blogging recently, mainly because I’ve been busy talking to people and haven’t had much spare time to write here. Apologies.

One of those talky things was at the Cllr 10 event, organised by the Local Government Innovation Unit, expertly led by Andy Sawford.

My session was somewhat pompously titled: Leadership 2.0: why local authorities need to become learning organisations. It was my usual hotch potch of ideas, snatched magpie-like from thinkers far more original than myself.

Big props go to Jemima Gibbons whose book, Monkeys with Typewriters informed a lot of what I said and is a very worthwhile read – as is her blog. David Wilcox has extensively covered Jemima’s work.

Here are my slides, for what they are worth:

Many thanks to Carl Haggerty for providing a screenshot from the internal business networking tool currently being piloted by Devon County Council.

Broadly speaking: the new online social technology changes the way we behave, and makes open, collaborative working methods much more likely to work. It’s also probably true that organisations need to be able to have proper grown up conversations internally before they can converse effectively with external people. New ways of working means new ways of leading, and in the local government context councillors can provide that leadership.

This is still half baked thinking on my part, and the bits that work are the bits I have stolen from others. But I’d welcome any feedback.

Possibly related posts:

• Moronic reporting of non issues
• Social media and local government culture
• C’llr.10 conference – 4 February 2010
• Whither government 2.0?
• The biggest mistake councils made with online engagement

Social media as a channel

I’m not sure whether social media is a service channel but it’s certainly one for feedback. A short report from Right Now clarifies this and explains, obviously in order to sell their product, why we should take notice. The little pamphlet is entitled “Customer Service Meets Social Media – Best Practices for Engagement”, and you’ll find it on their web site. Even more appropriate for me is the term “engagement”, since anyone who has looked at my model will realise I promote “Citizen Engagement Management”.

I wonder how many councils even employ “Google alerts” on a daily basis to find out whats being said about them, without delving into the different social media? If you don’t I should get on with it!

However, the Right Now publication does offer some important guidance, such as (p.3): “Another major difference between traditional contact channels and social media is that when you respond, your conversation is often visible to a large audience” and on the same page and perhaps more importantly: “social media accelerates and democratises publication, which means consumers can create content about your organization.” The development of the alternative Birmingham City web site #bccdiy was one example with all the local and national social media debate that followed.

The report also provides a list of eight simple questions entitled “Before you get started”, which can be employed in many ways, and in many media, but check that you are prepared for the venture before you waste too much time and money on it, or before it comes back to bite you on the bum!

To them that hath … a fifth poverty trap for Africa?

Paul Collier’s last book, The Bottom Billion, proposed that there are four “traps” in which the poorest countries can become enmeshed (a conflict trap, resource trap, geography trap and governance trap).   He vividly explains why he thinks that “business as usual” will not lift these countries out of poverty, creating the prospect that 58 countries, home to the poorest billion people, will fall further and further behind the standards of living of the rest of the world.

At a conference at Wilton Park this week a number of people gathered together to review progress since the Africa Commission and Gleneagles Summit in 2005, and to discuss the prospects for a transformation in Africa over the coming years.  One participant (one of the authors of the Africa Commission report) argued that the Commission set out a comprehensive action plan which, if implemented across the range of its recommendations, could address these traps and lead to real progress.

I am not so sure. I think there is a fifth trap facing Africa which is more chronic and pervasive than any of the four traps identified by Paul Collier. It is the “unfair rules” trap, and I think it makes it very hard for Africa to make much progress on the other four.

Development and an improved standard of living for people in developing countries will come not from aid but from industrialisation and economic growth.  We do not know exactly how to ensure that these economic transformations occur, though there is much we can do to create the conditions in which it is more likely.  (Aid can help create the conditions for growth, and can help people to live better lives while the process is under way).  But as the world economy becomes more integrated and more globalised, many (though by no means all) of the determinants of a country’s opportunities for economic development are determined by international institutions, systems, rules and agreements.

The “unfair rules” trap is that the rules of the game are determined by the rich for the rich.  And the consequence for the poorest countries is that they are having to fight uphill to create conditions for their development; so they continue to fall behind the rest of the world economically.  Their relative lack of economic power reinforces their lack of political influence internationally and so makes it harder for them to influence the institutions and rules which contribute to their continued economic marginalisation.

This “unfair rules” trap takes many forms.  There is a myriad of complicated rules and institutions that affect a huge swathe of economic and political life.  These international agreements range from highly political – such as the global allocation of the right to emit greenhouse gases under the post Kyoto framework for climate change – to the deeply technical such as phyto-sanitary standards which unnecessarily limit exports of groundnuts from Africa to Europe.

On BBC World this weekend there is a debate among a group of African leaders in which Linah Mohohlo, the Central Bank Governor of Botswana, points out that new global rules are currently being devised to promote financial stability – an issue that affects every country in the world – without any participation by Africans.

Consider our attitude to property rights.  Rich countries have attached considerable importance to the establishment and global enforcement of intellectual property rights, which enable their firms to secure revenues from the use of their intellectual property. They have, for example, pursued this through the WTO.  Whatever you think about intellectual property rights, there is no doubt that they can be expensive for developing countries, both because of the huge revenues that flow from Soweto to Seattle and because of the restrictions imposed on access to vital knowledge rich products such as pharmaceuticals, software and business practices.    But consider a parallel property right: the right to emit greenhouse gases.  Like intellectual property rights, emission rights are an institutional construct designed to bring about an improvement in economic efficiency (by rewarding innovation in the case of IPRs, and by taxing polluters in the case of emissions rights).   Emissions rights, if properly designed, fairly allocated and enforced around the world, would entail a reallocation of wealth from rich countries to poor countries.  But while the rich world is happy to insist on the importance of intellectual property rights (of which it is a seller) it is unwilling to consider the establishment of property rights over assets for which it would be a buyer.  In the run-up to the summit in Copenhagen, there was no serious discussion of the idea that every citizen should be entitled to an equal share of the atmosphere, and that anyone wanting to occupy more than their fair share should pay compensation to those who are using less. The discourse is limited to the realpolitik of what rich countries are likely to accept.

Of course, it was ever thus.  Nobody should be surprised to hear that the rich and powerful set the rules, and that these are not always to the benefit of the poor.  But within nation states this dilemma is partly addressed through the political process.  Universal suffrage has made it impossible for national institutions, laws and regulations completely to ignore the interests of the poor; though of course there is still a long way to go before the interests of the poor are given the attention they deserve.

But the international system does not benefit from the equal representation implied by universal suffrage within nations.  In some international institutions, power is formally one-dollar-one-vote.  In many others  this is not the formal position, but it is true in practice.  The global political system does not rebalance economic power between nations in the way that political processes can within nations.

To address Paul Collier’s four traps will require concerted international action – for example, to take steps to prevent the corruption and patronage that is associated with extraction of natural resources, to limit the sale of arms which fuel conflict, or change trade rules in ways that improve Africa’s prospects of trading with the rest of the world.  That is why the trap of “unfair rules” is so profound: for as long as Africa remains politically weak in the international system, it is hard to envisage how the international cooperation is required will be brought about.

I find it hard to see how a transformation can be brought about unless we find a way to address the problem “unfair rules”.  For as long as Africa remains economically disadvantaged, it is marginalised in the setting of rules and governance of global institutions.   This in turn profoundly affects its ability to escape Collier’s four traps, and so limits its prospects for development, and thus locks in the growing divergence from the rest of the world.   Africa seems to be likely to be caught in the jaws of this trap for as long as there is no political process that allows African countries to obtain more power and influence within these international institutions than their relative economic weaknesses entails.

The arrogance of aid?

The State has core functions which overall allow citizens to flourish individually, socially and economically. These functions include ensuring the rule of law, managing public finance and assets, developing social policies, upholding human rights, maintaining administrative control and the legitimate use of violence. It is ONLY the State that can carry out these duties and therefore one could argue that any form of external aid, especially in times of conflict and/or disaster,  should – indeed MUST - support and enhance these functions. But does it?

The answer is generally – no. At a CPA conference last week I argued strongly that aid unfortunately tends to undermine the unity and power of the state. There are too many examples for this to be refuted. The World Bank’s own Evaluation Department as well as the US National Academy of Public Administration have provided corruscating reports on the absolute failure of billions of dollars  expended in Haiti  over three decades – much of it directed at the development of democratic governance – to achieve anything other than political dysfunction and impoverishment.  One of the reports concludes that aid: 

 ”made almost no impact on governance. Institutional development impact is negligible and the sustainability of the few benefits that have accrued, unlikely.”  Similarly a World Bank Operations Evaluation Dept report says that aid was ineffective ‘………..due to inappropriate conditionality, ineffective capacity building, faulty implementation and delusions about what constituted program success.’

In Afghanistan there was a golden opportunity once the Taliban had been routed in late 2001 to build a credible government, respected by both its citizens and the international community. Instead  donors and their programmes became instruments for division and chaos; each donor agency of which there were and are 100s, created alliances with different ministries, contributing to the fragmentation of Cabinet unity. Dozens of donors and agencies and 100s of NGOs each had their own budgets, priorities, rules and preferences. One minister reported that he spent perhaps 60% of his time simply trying to co-ordinate donors.

A week-end guest has just told me of an amputee centre in Sierra Leone in which immense piles of oversupplied prosthetic limbs are visible – and those agencies requiring even greater exposure fly a few victims to a Western country for highly sophisticated treatment which is then used as promotional material for yet more fundraising. Meanwhile, reports on the sexual abuse of war victims by international community staff in war torn regions of Africa are quashed. And has anyone calculated the cost of the  thousands and thousands  of the multilateral and private donor agency staff who sit in the capitals of the world ? Your tax money and mine?

You may think that I am being over critical – but in the late 1970s I and others set up an independent reseach institute to look precisely at the aid industry. We applied scientific method to evaluating the impact of aid and came to some very shocking conclusions which we published …….earning the undying hostility of much of the aid community. Not much has  changed, the wrong aid goes to the wrong people at the wrong time and it does damage. Perhaps the most injurious outcome is the destruction of the state’s ability to devise and implement indigenous policies and thereby begin the task of building effective states.

The customer CAN handle the truth

links for 2010-02-07