Public Sector Bloggers

links for 2008-11-21

• Three social media principles for journalists « Reportr.net
  Good advice: “Journalists should not approach social media by thinking, “how can I use this for a story”. Social media should be part of your job, not an add-on or something to be used for a story and then abandoned.” And I like the blog template they’re using …
  (tags: twitter socialmedia journalism)
• BBC | Online time ‘is good for teens’
  Oh yes it is … oh no it isn’t …
  (tags: technology socialmedia socialnetworking internet online youth research)
• Apple Trailers | Australia
  Am I the only one around here to think that this film has absolutely no redeeming appeal whatsoever? It’s like a spoof …
  (tags: movies)
• Boy diagnosed with PlayStation addiction
  So - IS it possibel to have a physical addiction and overdose on computer games? Discuss.
  (tags: addiction game playstation)

links for 2008-11-20

• BNP member proximity search
  I don’t know whether to be impressed or appalled at this mash-up of leaked confidential details. Or the results I get when I put in my own postcode …
  (tags: mashup bnp information)
• Strictly Message Board: What Happened
  An insight into what goes into managing a discussion forum when the mother of all tsunamis crashes through the front door
  (tags: moderation bbc)
• Woolworths to sell 800 stores to American company for just £1
  Adds an entirely new dimension to the phrase “pound store”. I’d be sad to see it go - it’s been part of my world since I was a kid, and I still pick up useful things there. But it’s ended up being a badly focussed mishmash of a store with no USP these days, sadly.
  (tags: retail)
• BBC | UK ‘ahead in digital TV uptake’
  When it comes to mobiles and TV, the Brits seem to lead the way. It’s ncie to know that - if it intersects with our personal priorities - that Brits can be quite this cutting edge.
  (tags: television digital)
• BBC | Presumed consent ‘not ruled out’
  Disturbing tendency from the ‘listening’ government to run expert reviews, get the findings - and decide to ignore it. First recatgorisation of drugs, now making organ donation ‘opt-out’ rather than opt-in. As a long-time organ donor card carrier I’m very much in favour of doing some good after I die, but I don’t like the presumption that your body belongs to the state after you die which this infers.
  (tags: ukpolitics donor health)

links for 2008-11-19

• Can Lincoln’s playbook help Obama in the years ahead?
  More on Obama’s oratory, this time comparing closely with Lincoln - given that it’s the 145th anniversary of the Gettysburg address today.
  (tags: uspolitics obama oratory lincoln)
• BBC | Obama: Oratory and originality
  “He has certainly studied all of his predecessors, he is quite aware of the rhetorical heritage that he draws on,” says Ekaterina Haskins, professor of rhetoric at the University of Iowa. “He clearly sees himself as a descendant of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King.”
  (tags: obama oratory)

links for 2008-11-17

• Trailers | Star Trek
  Sneak peeks at the forthcoming Star Trek ‘reimagining’ prequel. The second’s the one to look at. It could be very good … or an utter disaster. Guess we’ll know in May 2009.
  (tags: trailer startrek star trek film)
• BBC | Hadron Collider repairs cost £14m
  Huge bills follow the failure of a single, badly soldered electrical connection in one of its super-cooled magnet sections. The end of the world has been postponed.
  (tags: science cern)
• Obama’s BlackBerry to be banned?
  Obama’s thought to be the first US prez with a BlackBerry addiction, but the law might stop him …
  (tags: uspolitics obama blackberry)

links for 2008-11-16

• Government Twitter etiquette: talk but don’t follow
  I’m biased because I’m quoted in the article, but Neil Williams asks an interesting question: Is it bad form for a corporate Twitterer (like a govt dept) to follow new people to gain followers? If it is - how can government and other corporates build their Twitter following without following people on Twitter itself?
  (tags: twitter ettiquette)
• Using Social Media To Create Social Media Training - Social Media Training
  What should a ‘Social Media 101′ course cover? What tools should people be aware of? How should we use those tools? What are the pitfalls? What are the basics that everyone in your marketing/communications department should know?
  (tags: socialmedia web2.0 tools training socialmediatraining)
• Malcolm Gladwell asks is there such a thing as pure genius?
  In an extract from Outliers: The Story Of Success, Malcolm Gladwell (of The Tipping Point and Blink” questions whether ‘genius’ actually exists.
  (tags: book science talent work genius)

I have to thank Mark Stephens for posting the link to the interesting piece (below) on the NI14 online community on the IDeA web site.

I wasn’t too keen on the concept of eel collagen makeup, but I don’t have to wear it, however the company and its management methods sound fascinating. After several bad business experiences over the years they’ve made a success and primarily because the customer is made king and that has had the effect of empowering the employees. The thought of a senior manager ringing a customer back within ten minutes from the sniff of a complaint to sort things out obviously has the desired effect, along with their associated community and environmental policies. The staff manually log 8000 communications a day, which are all reviewed by corporate maangement and which generate 400 suggestions for improvement, for which action plans are created. They are making positive use of complaints. Read it for yourself:

http://www.evolvingexcellence.com/blog/2008/10/jke-day-2-saishunken-cosmetics—customer-care-trumps-a-factory.html?cid=139869522#comments

Just back home from the LGA/IDeA/Leadership Centre Innovation conference.  Here are a few points from it (not representative, or even the best – some things are hard to summarise – like a very powerful video from Ruth Kennedy of ThePublicOffice, http://www.thepublicoffice.org.uk/index.aspx, of a family’s difficulties with a daughter with learning difficulties – real ‘customer insight’).

·        Some inspirational trips of children abroad – Serbia, South Africa – but often rubbished by the press.  Some of the best ‘social cohesion’ activities are very simple, though – Lewisham young mayors scheme, Newham community planting days, Harrow Divali celebrations – which all bring people together.

·        Mike Freer, Leader of Barnet, talked about innovative work on commissioning, behaviour change and ‘conversations with the community’.  Also noted that targets and performance management are good for stable issues but not so much for complex problems like obesity, where you need a trial and error approach

·        Simon Tucker, Young Foundation. 

·        Complaints choirs sing their complaints to the council (it works apparently).  Started in Birmingham, moved on to Helsinki, Budapest and elsewhere. 

·        You would expect 1% spending on R&D and innovation – we don’t have figures for UK local government, but most likely nowhere near that.

·        If you’re doing innovation, you may fail, so ensure your stakeholders know that.  If you’re going to fail, try and make it early and small.  Have a portfolio of innovation, so even if you fail sometimes there are also successes.

·        Young Foundation are developing a toolkit of innovation methods with Nesta.  Intending to share and develop through a wiki on the Nesta website in the next month or so.

·        Innovating requires different skills than running services, so it’s often helpful to have intermediaries to help (it’s a market that needs building)

·        Charlie Leadbeater –

·        entertaining example of a YouTube video of a boy playing his guitar in his bedroom that got 51 million hits and comparing that to what would have happened if he’d tried to broadcast that through old media (going to ITV commissioners saying you want to broadcast a 5’21” video of me playing my guitar in the bedroom …)

·        It’s quite a delicate process that determines when a social networking initiative will take off.  Key factors include: a core that others can gather around; the tools and motivation to contribute; lateral, not centralised communications; collaboration.

·        Comment – to make best use of social networking, we councils need to accept we’ll have to lose control.  CL – but you’re not in control!  These things are already happening without you!

·        Jonathan Kestenbaum, despite being a former venture capitalist and now Chief Exec of Nesta (http://www.nesta.org.uk/) reminded us that innovation isn’t easy and even the ‘experts’ can get it wrong.  You need carefully selected partners – people who can make things happen.  Involve your commissioners early.  Easy to get the timing from prototyping to scaling up, wrong.  Useful to have money separate from mainstream budgets so not subject to the same accountability and risk management.  Multidisciplinary teams talk very different languages and take time to get to work.  You need a problem for them to tackle; don’t just bring them together and hope.

·        Sir Michael Bichard, had 10 things innovative leaders should do.  Lead by example.  Reshape the incentives (rewards for innovative people). Build capacity (including skills in tools of innovation).  Increase energy (cut paper work and meetings).  Manage risk and failure.  Revisit structures (not hierarchical and introspective).  Reduce narrow targets.  Build partnerships (within and beyond the organisation).  Connect with the front line (and clients).  ‘Nurture’ before ‘audit’ (give ideas time to grow).

·        We’ve got the wrong balance between accountability and innovation at the moment and need to rebalance it.

There were lots of ideas generated during the conference – many made their way onto an ‘innovation wall’.  Due to be made available more widely at some point (hopefully through these communities of practice?).

I spent Wednesday at Microsoft as part of the launch of e-skills Big Ambition initiative which aims to increase the number of girls in ICT.

The figures are depressing, whilst the number of women studying technical subjects has increased in recent years, the number of women studying ICT has fallen and it continues to fall.

What is it about my world that makes it so unattractive to women?

We had some great speakers on Wednesday who made it plain that it was possible for women to succeed in IT, have a great job and manage to achieve a winning work/life balance. The audience of 170 13~14 year old girls were obviously inspired by what they had heard as only 33% said they would consider a career in ICT at the start of the day but that had risen to 81% by the end of the day.

Part of the day was a workshop where the girls came up with new ICT product ideas which they presented to a panel of judges, of which I was one. The ideas were fun, well thought through and there was a real sense of excitement about the whole process.

So how do we preserve that sense of excitement and engagement? How do we make our world visibly appealing to a wide range of people?

Why is ICT such a monoculture? Not just in terms of gender or ethnicity but mindset as well. People will talk about how it attracts people into maths, physics, logic hence it is mainly a world of inward focused people whose minds run on linear paths.

But that strikes me as a description, not an explanation. In ICT we spend much of our lives working with people, not machines. Trying to work out what it is that people want to do. Testing our assumptions with them. Training them how to use the systems. The machine bit, the “logical” bit is the easy part, ICT is not an exercise in hermeticism, it’s about making things happen for people.

The more we can do to encourage a broad swathe of people into the profession the better. I am sure that one of the reasons why so many corporate systems are ugly, inefficient and hard to use is that we have allowed ICT to become a world of stereotypes.

It’s down to all of us in the profession to challenge those stereotypes and encourage diversity. Not for moral reasons, though those are important, but because else we will simply be unable to deliver the critical systems which people need from us.

Oh and someone asked me about the “dream job” line on the Big Ambition website. My dream job? IT obviously

In an attempt to get some feedback about the Parliament Podcast Pilot we visited a secondary school in South London. It was a really positive experience.

We spoke to a group of about 20 first year A-Level Government and Politics students. We did a few demonstrations and asked the students to do some exercises which got them to visit different parts of the site. The students also filled in a questionnaire which provided some useful insight into their level of political engagement and how they access information about politics and current affairs.

Throughout we encouraged discussion and feedback about the various services on the site. The group we spoke to gave us lots of constructive feedback about podcasts and the site as a whole. We are using this experience to inform the development of the podcast pilot.

Some of you may remember, have been at, or heard about UKGovBarCamp last year. It was the catalyst for many great things.

Well, it is on again.

(Un)fortunately I am not involved in this one - yes, it will be less noisy! It is being held slap bang in the middle of when my day job goes stratospheric. I will be involved in other things later in the year and will bring you tidings of these as soon as I know.

It will be great fun - even though I won’t be there - sign up, I expect places will go very quickly.

links for 2008-11-20

• BNP member proximity search
  I don’t know whether to be impressed or appalled at this mash-up of leaked confidential details. Or the results I get when I put in my own postcode …
  (tags: mashup bnp information)
• Strictly Message Board: What Happened
  An insight into what goes into managing a discussion forum when the mother of all tsunamis crashes through the front door
  (tags: moderation bbc)
• Woolworths to sell 800 stores to American company for just £1
  Adds an entirely new dimension to the phrase “pound store”. I’d be sad to see it go - it’s been part of my world since I was a kid, and I still pick up useful things there. But it’s ended up being a badly focussed mishmash of a store with no USP these days, sadly.
  (tags: retail)
• BBC | UK ‘ahead in digital TV uptake’
  When it comes to mobiles and TV, the Brits seem to lead the way. It’s ncie to know that - if it intersects with our personal priorities - that Brits can be quite this cutting edge.
  (tags: television digital)
• BBC | Presumed consent ‘not ruled out’
  Disturbing tendency from the ‘listening’ government to run expert reviews, get the findings - and decide to ignore it. First recatgorisation of drugs, now making organ donation ‘opt-out’ rather than opt-in. As a long-time organ donor card carrier I’m very much in favour of doing some good after I die, but I don’t like the presumption that your body belongs to the state after you die which this infers.
  (tags: ukpolitics donor health)

links for 2008-11-19

• Can Lincoln’s playbook help Obama in the years ahead?
  More on Obama’s oratory, this time comparing closely with Lincoln - given that it’s the 145th anniversary of the Gettysburg address today.
  (tags: uspolitics obama oratory lincoln)
• BBC | Obama: Oratory and originality
  “He has certainly studied all of his predecessors, he is quite aware of the rhetorical heritage that he draws on,” says Ekaterina Haskins, professor of rhetoric at the University of Iowa. “He clearly sees himself as a descendant of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King.”
  (tags: obama oratory)

links for 2008-11-17

• Trailers | Star Trek
  Sneak peeks at the forthcoming Star Trek ‘reimagining’ prequel. The second’s the one to look at. It could be very good … or an utter disaster. Guess we’ll know in May 2009.
  (tags: trailer startrek star trek film)
• BBC | Hadron Collider repairs cost £14m
  Huge bills follow the failure of a single, badly soldered electrical connection in one of its super-cooled magnet sections. The end of the world has been postponed.
  (tags: science cern)
• Obama’s BlackBerry to be banned?
  Obama’s thought to be the first US prez with a BlackBerry addiction, but the law might stop him …
  (tags: uspolitics obama blackberry)

links for 2008-11-16

• Government Twitter etiquette: talk but don’t follow
  I’m biased because I’m quoted in the article, but Neil Williams asks an interesting question: Is it bad form for a corporate Twitterer (like a govt dept) to follow new people to gain followers? If it is - how can government and other corporates build their Twitter following without following people on Twitter itself?
  (tags: twitter ettiquette)
• Using Social Media To Create Social Media Training - Social Media Training
  What should a ‘Social Media 101′ course cover? What tools should people be aware of? How should we use those tools? What are the pitfalls? What are the basics that everyone in your marketing/communications department should know?
  (tags: socialmedia web2.0 tools training socialmediatraining)
• Malcolm Gladwell asks is there such a thing as pure genius?
  In an extract from Outliers: The Story Of Success, Malcolm Gladwell (of The Tipping Point and Blink” questions whether ‘genius’ actually exists.
  (tags: book science talent work genius)

People have been asking me almost since the end of the last one when the next government barcamp would be held.

I’ve been reluctant to be involved in planning or organising it, partly because I thought there were plenty of others who could take it on (and it was a lot of work to get off the ground), partly because I wasn’t sure why we needed to have another one (otherwise someone else would have organised it?).

Doing something to follow up the barcamp has been on my mind for some time and I’ve thrown out all sorts of ideas without any real conclusion to the discussions.

Anyway it just so happened that two days ago discussion about a follow up barcamp came up on three separate occasions. Over lunch with two of my fellow conspirators from the first barcamp I was persuaded encouraged by them that now is the right time to think about another event.

Why? Because so much has happened in the last year of egovernment. In January 2008 it was all about making connections, getting the network going, and thinking about the possibilities.

But a year on, there’s a lot to show for the energy generated by the barcamp. Great social media projects, brilliant initiatives to make better use of government data, excellent work to improve existing government websites, and a geek minister.

Its never easy for us all to get together to share what we’ve done, how we did it, what went well, what went not so well. What you’re planning next.

So, what are you doing on Saturday 31^st January 2009? Don’t know where it will be yet (but have a few ideas) or what will happen. But as I learnt to my cost last year, that’s all part of the fun. Hope you can make it.

Sometimes one’s speech in debate doesn’t quite go according to plan. On Tuesday afternoon 17 November, Lord Warner had raised a short debate on the Charter for Dying Well produced by the organisation Dignity in Dying http://www.dignityindying.org.uk. The Charter contained much that everyone could agree with but also included a call for the legalisation of the right to request an assisted death when terminally ill at a time of the individual’s own choosing, a sentiment I agree with strongly. There was only an hour tabled for the debate, I guessed we’d get about 5 minutes each. Then 16 people put their names down to speak and I cut down the speech to 2 minutes. Then the Government Whips Office decided to let us have an hour and a half, giving the by now 20 of us 3 minutes each.  I was rushing about beforehand, my notes got in a mess. I followed the ineffably cool and elegant Baroness Jay, who was as lucid and measured as ever. I lost page 2, I dropped page 4 and frankly lost the thread of my talk. With 3 minutes one can’t afford to get it wrong. I feared I implied depressed old people should be offered assisted dying, hardly the thing for a psychiatrist to say and indeed the opposite of what I meant. I looked at Hansard with some trepidation yesterday and by some miracle, they’d managed to say broadly what I meant better than I had! Not perfect but a bit of a rescue job. Next time I shall rehearse better for that important 2 or 3 minutes. 

So John Sargeant, the erstwhile political broadcaster and now amateur ballroom dance TV competitor has voluntarily stepped down from Strictly Come Dancing, (and it was headline news on the Evening Standard billboards last night) recognising that his popularity with the public voters was subverting the purpose of the show. What a pity, I enjoyed watching him just as much as the strutting showbiz professionals. Just think what would happen if popular but talentless members of both houses of parliament stood down in favour of the skilled and competent but less popular….