extended reach

With the release of principles for online paticipation, one of the channels that needs to be addressed is Facebook.

More on this ‘group’ later…

One of the things we face as civil servants, or consultants to the civil service, is the fact that we are not only designing and building policy, tools and services, but as citizens we are also end-users of the ‘products’ we develop. An occasional result of ‘ticking all the boxes’ leads to slowly delivered solutions that may have been achieved far faster if the ‘right’ person, at the ‘right’ time, provided some critical appraisal of the ‘product’.

Doesn’t always work though.

ZDNet reports on Bill Gates’ frustration in trying to install and use Moviemaker and Digital Plus Pro. Amongst his comments:

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.

He adds:

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package.

And then ends with (which I would perceive as a gentle hint):

When I really get to use the stuff I am sure I will have more feedback.

What is so valuable here is Gates reporting his experience as a user. He tested the user experience and it didn’t work.

So, Digital People, how would your project stand up if the PM was the end-user? Why should it make a difference if it was a user named G. Brown or Prime Minister?

Each comment counts. It improves what we’re doing. As Gates says:

There’s not a day that I don’t send a piece of e-mail … like that piece of e-mail. That’s my job.

It’s ours as well.

Emma writes an interesting post today which urges greater collaboration between e-comms teams and policy officials. She challenges the civil service community to be more than a network.

This already reflects a change in use of social media, less than two weeks since the principles for civil servants participating online were announced. This step-change poses an interesting question: what’s next?

Most of the existing ukgovweb community were pioneers, now we are part of an existing network that has legitimacy: we have ‘permission’ to do what we were doing anyway.

As a community, we have a choice: be a pioneer, try new things, test new products, take a risk, or… keep doing what we were doing.

Which would you choose? Digital pioneer or digital person?

How would you innovate?

Over the weekend I wrote about the value of a common disclaimer for civil servants that blog - it seems I didn’t need to worry as there are now principles for online participation in place, launched today by the UK e-government minister.

I’m not sure this will lead to an explosion of government bloggers but it does provide some sense of security for those already bloggingt. It will be interesting to see where this leads - the public sector digital community seems to be responding positively: some can already see potential in the announcement, whilst for others there is a general sense of relief.

My original post on a common disclaimer had some very helpful steers from colleagues in the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, I’d be really interested to hear what they think of the guidance, as would the team behind them.

I’ve replicated my original twitter project and have aggregated a number of government feeds into a HMGov News friendfeed. Looking at the aggregated product I’m not sure which I prefer - all of the gov feeds in one spot, or something that’s a little less cluttered, like the downing street friendfeed.

The more I use friendfeed the more I like it. I don’t know if it will end up being a twitter replacement but it seems to have it’s merits and dedicated followers who are increasingly championing its potential.

Thanks again to Dennis for telling me to have a look.

There are a lot of discussions at the moment around guidance for civil servants on social media.

I think, as a community, we’re missing a trick here. Most of us have, in one form or another a disclaimer on our blogs. If we could agree to a common disclaimer for civil servants/gov consultants (or better yet public-sector staff world-wide) wouldn’t that put us in a situation where, as practitioners, we agree to hold our selves by a common set of standards and principles that reflect a commitment to being open, professional and part of a wider government community? Wouldn’t a common disclaimer lend itself to use across a wide range of social media tools? Couldn’t this be integrated into overarching guidance when it is released?

Or am I just being naive? What do others think?

With the recent downtime in twitter and the arguments around why this has been happening, I thought I would look at friendfeed as an alternative. I have to admit I like what I see, particularly the ability to create a ‘room’ to host conversations - this could be great for ad-hoc consultation activities. I’m still getting the hang of it, but it seems that friendfeed can offer a better ‘lifestream’ of UK Gov activities than shoveling press notices into twitter.

I’ll probably stick to twitter for the moment because the HMGOV feed works for me (when twitter does). Having said that, while I’m exploring friendfeed I’d like to see news I want come to me, so I’ve started aggregating UK Government feeds - I’ll add more as I find the time.

This isn’t an ‘official’ activity - but the content is. If any civil servants want to take ownership of their stream, or can suggest improvements, let me know and I’ll hand it over/do what I can.

Anyway, for now I thought I’d start with one of the more active government players in the social media space: 10 Downing Street is now on friendfeed.

HMGOV

A while back I mentioned that I’d developed an aggregated news feedof UK Government press notices for Twitter. It works for me because twitter is (when it’s working) where I spend a lot of my time online.

The tool was/is far from perfect, and with some very helpful suggestions from Dave Briggs, Simon Dickson, Paul Webster, John Sheridan and a host of other peopleI have managed to improve (I think)  the content by incorporating more feeds, hash-tags and doing a bit of QA on the links. It’s not perfect - but it works for me.

One thing I haven’t been able to do is sit on the end of the account and respond. This is one of the fantastic things about the Downing Street service - civil servants, responding and providing advice in an ‘official’ capacity. This probably explains why I was only recently able to clock just over one hundred subscribers (124 today) - a feat the Downing Street feed was able to achieve in roughly an hour.

As I said in my original post, if there are any civil servants out there that would like to take ownership of the account to make it more two-way, I’m happy to hand it over.

Picking up on a Home Office press notice, I’ve just had a look at a new a bebo site that is a result of a creative summit between the Home Office and teenagers trying to prevent knife crime.

I’m not much of a bebo user, but the platform seems to appeal to the teenagers that the Government (and other teens) are targeting. The campaign will run for the next three years, so it will be interesting to see how the Home Office tweaks the campaign if they find it isn’t hitting the mark. Hopefully they’ll continue to have discussions with teens on the best way to prevent knife crime, and then feed this back into the campaign.

All in all though, a great example of collaboration. I hope it works.

I’ve been neglecting my blog recently as I’ve been in Australia on personal business. I’d hoped to attend the first Canberra Barcamp but wasn’t able to go at the last minute. As a result, I spent much of the weekend watching the coverage of the Australia 2020 summit. 

The similarities to a barcamp, even with 1,000 people in attendance, were pretty significant. Participants were equipped with white boards, sticky notes and some even sat on the floor in the more popular sessions, like Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, in the session on the Australian economy.

Kevin Rudd said the purpose of the summit was:

‘…to do something new. Today we are throwing open the windows of our democracy, to let a little bit of fresh air in. Rather than pretending that we, the politicians of Australia have all the answers, and the truth is, we don’t, we are turning now to you, the people of Australia.’

The event started on Saturday and was broken into 10 separate sessions on the Australian economy, sustainability and climate change, rural change, health, communities and family, indigenous Australia, creative Australia, governance, productivity and Australia’s future in the world. Each working group was asked, by the Prime Minister, to deliver the following:

‘…First, to nominate at least one ‘big idea’ in their area for the future. Second … submit at least three, and I am sure there will be more, concrete policy ideas, at least one of which is to involve no cost or negligible cost… Third … identify at least three specific goals for which we should aim by 2020.’

As with most large gatherings there remains a degree of scepticism that the goals will be achieved. But, there is also a degree of hope. In 48 hours 1,000 Australians came together to suggest Australia should, amongst other things, open up schools 24/7 for ‘after school care; develop a bionic eye; lead the world in creating a green and sustainable economy (less than 12 months ago Australia hadn’t signed the Kyoto agreement); encourage retirees to act as workplace mentors; provide rural-city student exchanges; provide universal first aid training and digitally archive Australia’s art collections. Oh, and that republic thing seems to be on the agenda again.

I have to say that I was one of the sceptics when the Australia 2020 summit was announced. Though the public was asked, and did, contribute to the agenda, I thought the overarching event with 1,000 of Australia’s ‘best and brightest’ might tend to be elitist. I still have some reservations, but I can’t help feel a resonance with many of the ideas and suggestions. I think there were a few things that the summit organisers could have done to increase participation even further, but on balance it was well organised and aggressively covered by the print and broadcast media. Where the organisers may not have thought of ways to keep the debate alive, bloggers are rising to the challenge.

It will be interesting to see how the Australian government goes about implementing some of the ideas; there are some big, although not impossible, challenges  (Kev, if you’re reading - try this: http://www.sicamp.org/). The Australian Prime Minister has committed to a public response by the end of the year, although I have a feeling some of the suggestions will be implemented far quicker (he announced a couple as policy objectives in the last election).

For me one of the most interesting things has been the reaction of friends, family and colleagues who have all said they feel there is a better chance of being ‘part’ of the way forward, one in which people, not just politicians, ’own’ Australian policy. It might be a tall order for the Australian Government to make good on some of the ideas that have been suggested - but they’re willing to get stuck in and give it a shot.  As Kevin Rudd said:

“We can either take command of the future, or we can sit back and allow the future to take command of us.”

So, anyone up for UK 2020?