Disagreement and discussion are, as ever, welcome.
Showing posts with label local government. Show all posts
Showing posts with label local government. Show all posts
Monday, 7 February 2011
21st century branding
So, day zero for Blackburn with Darwen draws to a close. There will be 500 or so compulsory redundancies and there is no way to avoid them. 500 more posts have been deleted - meaning a total, by mid summer of 1000 posts which will simply no longer exist. What that means for the people left behind wont be clear for months, perhaps not even before the end of the year, but for those 500 people, I have some advice. It's offered freely and for free, because I believe there but for the grace of god, but also because I am going to call it straight.
Disagreement and discussion are, as ever, welcome.
Whether you like it or not, a social media presence right now is a sensible thing. And I'm not talking about your personal Facebook page. Smart people network their way into jobs - not by preferential treatment, but by knowing about jobs which might not be advertised in the normal way any more because there is no budget, but will be tweeted or posted on LinkedIn because it's free.
Networking aggressively will get you nowhere. Bombing hashtags with your consultancy offerings or training solutions will get you ignored at best and blocked at worst. It's lazy and it requires no thought - and the people whose stream you're interrupting will think you're a complete idiot and if you continue to do it, will get very cross at you.
Networking is a subtly nuanced thing. Build relationships with people. Don't bombard people with responses to every single one of their tweets, but if you have something in common with someone, in the same way that you would probably chat about football before a meeting started, chat to them about your common interest. Small talk paves the way for the more complicated work based stuff.
If communicating well with words is part of who you are, start a blog. Don't sell yourself directly, talk instead about the things which interest you. Comment is free. Well researched posts which are thought provoking and offer a different viewpoint of a policy, current affairs event or scientific discovery are usually welcomed. Don't think of it as giving away good ideas for free - think of it instead as a way of allowing other people to see what they're going to get if they should ever have a post free which you might fit into.
Being made redundant hurts. Just ask the MySpace lot. The natural reaction is to kick back and kick out. Social networking is a quick and easy way to do that. Unfortunately, for your opinion to have any credence, you're going to need to use your real name. And everything you type and submit, every negative comment, every piece of snark, every inappropriate comment will remain there as a testament to how carefully someone should consider when looking at employing you. Leaving your social networking profiles off your CV or consultancy pitch or tender wont work either. People Google. Get over it. Watch every word - it's fine to be upset and hurt, it's not fine to make the lives of those left behind hell - it's not their fault the axe didn't swing for them. Make sure that if you must be angry, the anger is pointed in the correct direction.
Set up your RSS feeds. If you don't know how to do that, ask me, ask on Twitter. Assorted job sites allow you to customise a search for jobs and then RSS the results, so that every morning, instead of wading through tonnes of emails in various states of undressed formatting, you can skim down a list which will update the second a new job role is posted to the relevant site, meaning in theory you could get the jump on a job application a few hours before less tech savvy applicants. Not such an issue with application form posts, but a big deal with agency advertised posts.
Find the people who are influential in your sector and read their blogs. Educate yourself. Blogs are full of the current thinking, current reactions and current issues and problems, and they're free. They're also often written by incredibly well respected academics or leaders in their respective fields. The same people who contribute and write white papers which you've probably been reading as part of your job. It's not good enough any more to wait for the papers to come to you - find out the thinking before it comes to you, and if you're comfortable doing so, leave comments and get into discussions. Make impressions - but most of all, bring your learning, awareness and thinking up to speed.
If you're a local govvie - take advantage of the fantastic live Q & A panels which the Guardian are running on almost a weekly basis to help you get a job, should you need one, or to set up a social enterprise should you want to, or how to improve internal communications even if you're one of the ones left behind. They're free, the experts on the panels generally really are, and they're free. Did I mention free? If you don't want to be seen to be asking for advice then set up an account which doesn't make it obvious its you - and ask the questions under that - the nature of the website means you wont be accorded any less consideration for not asking under your real name. The Guardian Local Government Network content is all archived and is a wonderful resource.
Learn to ask for help. Swallow your pride if you have to, but ask. We're all happy to help and assist - some of us for free and some of us not. Don't assume free is better, but don't assume it's worse either. Some people know some subjects much better than others. 9 times out of 10, I, or someone else will be able to point you in a specialists direction. If we do, it will be because we know they're good because we read their blog - spot the theme here? If you pay, or if you don't, you will get the same time and consideration - some people are practising giving information and training for free to gain confidence and to practice before they charge for it.
Finally? Baby steps. Don't create a Twitter account, a LinkedIn profile, a Quora account and then.... Pick one. Focus on it. Build a repuation and a profile, and yes, I hate the word but build a brand. It will follow you when you become entirely comfortable on one of those sites and decide to move to another - each of the sites has a subtly different etiquette and a very different way of building reputation - trying to crack all of them at once will simply lead to complete confusion.
Disagreement and discussion are, as ever, welcome.
Wednesday, 19 January 2011
#lgovsm - a redux
#lgovsm is a perfect example of why the JFDI approach to life sometimes just doesn't cut it. And I have learnt my lessons well.
Someone once said to me, make a mistake, own up to it, take responsibility for it, learn from it, move on. This is an admission of the first, definitely the second, a step on the path to the third and most definitely the fourth. And this, also, is what blogs are for, because through sharing mistakes, hopefully someone else will learn to, and thus never have to write a similar really rather embarrassing blog post.
The first session involved about 20 people. A similar amount took part in the second session, and it grew a little more by the time the 3rd one came alone. The core attendance tends to stay the same, with people drifting in and out depending on the subject - Councillors and representatives from the voluntary sector have all wondered in and out as well as local government entrepeneurs.
When I first launched it, I anticipated a few people chatting and it take a while to get off the ground. I expected people to be well out of ideas and things to say by the end of the session. I didn't expect journalists and think tank bods to have it on their radar - I wasn't sure anyone would have it on their radar - this is social media and things tend to be unpredictable.
I first realised there was a problem when Ingrid Koehler from the LGID mentioned some people had been pushing for a space to continue discussions generated on #lgovsm throughout the rest of the week. This has now been set up on the Communities of Practice and I am very grateful for this assistance. As an aside, the Communities of Practice is a fantastic resource for local government bods of all disciplines, not just those of us in social media - you will need to sign up for an account to be able to see the content, but I can highly recommend it - it's a brilliant forum to discuss issues and problems but also celebrate successes.
So, last night I did something I should have done right back at the beginning. Firstly, after discussions with @kazwccsocialnet we decided on a topic which should have perhaps been the first one - using social media to support social media evangelists in their organisations'. That right there is going to help enormously, I suspect, because it can be a lonely old place in the face of barrages of 'what exactly do you do for a job again?', blank looks from your mother when you try and explain, glares from colleagues who are facing redundancy, accusations of being peoples pet projects and assorted other rather negative attitudes which it can be difficult to shake off. Add to this that some people are running under the radar of their management in order to even create a Flickr group and the need for this discussion can be plainly seen.
Then between @carlhaggerty, @808kate and @kazwccsocialnet something rather awesome happened. We decided what was wrong with lgovsm, then we decided how to fix it, and then we decided to have lunch on Saturday at UKGovCamp to iron out the details. And suddenly, a bunch of local gov bods have formed a bit of a team, across geographical distances which still boggle me (West Midlands, Devon, Lancashire, London), built entirely over Twitter.
And this is why we bother. This is why I set up lgovsm in the first place. This is what social networking was built for - cross county collaboration between professionals who want to do things better, want to communicate better, want better tools to do better jobs. Twitter is not just a place to chat or network - it's somewhere to sew the seeds of collaboration out in the real world,. which then are applied back again to the digital world. It's where people with similar interests and drives can come together and assist, and build support networks.
If you ask me the value of lgovsm to others, I cannot answer. If you ask me the value of lgovsm to me, I can. It is becoming a professional development learning curve. It is teaching me about the need for planning and for collaboration and learning to stop being independant all the damn time, and to trust in others and ask for help. It's teaching me that geography doesn't matter any more. I am learning about organisation, planning, being agile, moving on swift deadlines and timescales, reacting to problems and solving them, but also on a personal level, I am learning very many things too. Because what we learn on a personal level benefits our professional lives and vice versa. And nowhere is this more true than on social networks.
If the conversations which happened yesterday come to fruition, lgovsm will go from something small and local to something massive and sprawling, but also useful, with interesting outcomes and ideas. There is not necessarily any actions on anyone at the end of these proposed discussions, only greater understanding and little sparks which can be stored to be lit at some future point. Social networking allows us to learn from a very great number of people from all sectors and all interest areas - a great many number of stakeholders.
No matter happens from this point forward, I have learnt, both in the running and hosting as well as in the participation of lgovsm. What makes me more happy than I can say, is that one of the people I originally thought of when setting lgovsm up, is now enabling me to make it more useful, more relevant and of more worth.
Funny how the world turns, isn't it?
Someone once said to me, make a mistake, own up to it, take responsibility for it, learn from it, move on. This is an admission of the first, definitely the second, a step on the path to the third and most definitely the fourth. And this, also, is what blogs are for, because through sharing mistakes, hopefully someone else will learn to, and thus never have to write a similar really rather embarrassing blog post.
The first session involved about 20 people. A similar amount took part in the second session, and it grew a little more by the time the 3rd one came alone. The core attendance tends to stay the same, with people drifting in and out depending on the subject - Councillors and representatives from the voluntary sector have all wondered in and out as well as local government entrepeneurs.
When I first launched it, I anticipated a few people chatting and it take a while to get off the ground. I expected people to be well out of ideas and things to say by the end of the session. I didn't expect journalists and think tank bods to have it on their radar - I wasn't sure anyone would have it on their radar - this is social media and things tend to be unpredictable.
I first realised there was a problem when Ingrid Koehler from the LGID mentioned some people had been pushing for a space to continue discussions generated on #lgovsm throughout the rest of the week. This has now been set up on the Communities of Practice and I am very grateful for this assistance. As an aside, the Communities of Practice is a fantastic resource for local government bods of all disciplines, not just those of us in social media - you will need to sign up for an account to be able to see the content, but I can highly recommend it - it's a brilliant forum to discuss issues and problems but also celebrate successes.
So, last night I did something I should have done right back at the beginning. Firstly, after discussions with @kazwccsocialnet we decided on a topic which should have perhaps been the first one - using social media to support social media evangelists in their organisations'. That right there is going to help enormously, I suspect, because it can be a lonely old place in the face of barrages of 'what exactly do you do for a job again?', blank looks from your mother when you try and explain, glares from colleagues who are facing redundancy, accusations of being peoples pet projects and assorted other rather negative attitudes which it can be difficult to shake off. Add to this that some people are running under the radar of their management in order to even create a Flickr group and the need for this discussion can be plainly seen.
Then between @carlhaggerty, @808kate and @kazwccsocialnet something rather awesome happened. We decided what was wrong with lgovsm, then we decided how to fix it, and then we decided to have lunch on Saturday at UKGovCamp to iron out the details. And suddenly, a bunch of local gov bods have formed a bit of a team, across geographical distances which still boggle me (West Midlands, Devon, Lancashire, London), built entirely over Twitter.
And this is why we bother. This is why I set up lgovsm in the first place. This is what social networking was built for - cross county collaboration between professionals who want to do things better, want to communicate better, want better tools to do better jobs. Twitter is not just a place to chat or network - it's somewhere to sew the seeds of collaboration out in the real world,. which then are applied back again to the digital world. It's where people with similar interests and drives can come together and assist, and build support networks.
If you ask me the value of lgovsm to others, I cannot answer. If you ask me the value of lgovsm to me, I can. It is becoming a professional development learning curve. It is teaching me about the need for planning and for collaboration and learning to stop being independant all the damn time, and to trust in others and ask for help. It's teaching me that geography doesn't matter any more. I am learning about organisation, planning, being agile, moving on swift deadlines and timescales, reacting to problems and solving them, but also on a personal level, I am learning very many things too. Because what we learn on a personal level benefits our professional lives and vice versa. And nowhere is this more true than on social networks.
If the conversations which happened yesterday come to fruition, lgovsm will go from something small and local to something massive and sprawling, but also useful, with interesting outcomes and ideas. There is not necessarily any actions on anyone at the end of these proposed discussions, only greater understanding and little sparks which can be stored to be lit at some future point. Social networking allows us to learn from a very great number of people from all sectors and all interest areas - a great many number of stakeholders.
No matter happens from this point forward, I have learnt, both in the running and hosting as well as in the participation of lgovsm. What makes me more happy than I can say, is that one of the people I originally thought of when setting lgovsm up, is now enabling me to make it more useful, more relevant and of more worth.
Funny how the world turns, isn't it?
Thursday, 16 December 2010
There is no Undo button
You're not supposed to talk about emotions. But. This post does.
I deliberately haven't written about what it feels like to walk into a room, with the rest of your Department, stupidly missing the signals until noticing two union reps in the room and some very serious faces. The sinking feeling. The inappropriate laughter and jokes in the face of not quite knowing what else to do. The pin drop silence as the words arrive that you stupidly thought wouldn't be said. The numbers scrolling across the screen. The obvious discomfort of the person speaking. The desperate frantic effort of thinking of ways to mitigate the numbers, to do things differently, to avoid the inevitable.
I'm a girl. I don't cry easily. I'm a geek girl, we don't, I don't think. Sat in a room, a question asked, dangerously close to losing all composure.
I know, we know, we are the web team. A thousand words since from people who don't know the fragility of decisions within a Council trying to reassure, to rationalise, to comfort. Friends trying to understand and failing, I've been there before, I've made people redundant myself, why is it hitting so hard now when relatively it didn't then?
I got my 90 day at risk letter the day after. That was 3 weeks or so ago, now. Now I watch on Twitter as others are delivered the same news, sweeping waves of noticed presents for Xmas. Good people. Dedicated people. Committed people. I hear the whispers and the things I knew deep down would happen, now are. A sense of inevitability encapsulated in a moment as I think of all the people I have met who are good, so very good at their jobs, loved their jobs, could have been paid more somewhere else but didn't want to be, wanted to be where they are now. Friends. People I respect. People who have given freely support, kind words, laughter and received the same from me. In some cases, even surrogate dads.
How is it different? I don't know. But it is. I took voluntary redundancy shortly after making a man 30 years my senior redundant. It didn't bite me anywhere near as hard as it would have done him. And yet he took it with a grace and acceptance that I am failing to have.
I know, rationally, that there is 'at risk' and there is 'at risk'. I know, sort of, that should there be no place for me any more in our Department, I would find, somehow, somewhere else to be. So it is not for me, this shock or sadness. It is for others. If I am not permitted that, I think we live in a sorry world indeed. So forgive me my current irrationality, my ups and downs, the biting anger which shows through when I don't pay attention. It is the sheer scale of this thing. I would be the first, the very first, to acknowledge and accept that local government needed streamlining. I could have sat and explained to anyone who had asked, why and where. I could have and have suggested ways to mitigate that and some of those things, the practical suggestions have been implemented.
But, you see, it feels a little like a bulldozer to fix a problem which needed finesse. It has caused such sadness, anger, resentment and horrid words to be uttered. In some cases, the damage of this will never be repaired because some words said can not be forgotten. Situations like this bring out the very worst in people, as well as the very best, and I am not proud, not proud at all of the fact that I have veered wildly from one end of the spectrum to the other in the last 3 weeks - on the one hand it has motivated me to get off my behind and work as hard as I possibly can to tick off as many of my open projects as I can - on the other it has meant that some days I have done nothing but listen to others bile, resentment and anger.
Resilience is an often used word at the moment, as is emotional intelligence. Well, I know a lot more about myself than I did 3 weeks ago, I can tell you that for nothing. I'm not thankful for that, but I can acknowledge that. I have tried my very best to remain a credit to the Department within which are, frankly, some of the most inspiring and professional people I've ever worked with, and tried not to be an embarrassment.
I have failed. But in failing I have learnt a harsh lesson. I should have written this post 3 weeks ago. The cycle of acceptance says everyone deals differently. I was stupid - I missed the one thing which would have allowed me to coral my thoughts, vent my anger, and move on.
I work for Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council. I am proud to work for Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council. If I do not continue to work for Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council, I will still be proud that I did. If I am permitted to remain working for Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council, it will be a while, I think, before I can be proud again, but we will rebuild, we will reshape, we will absorb. It seems after todays announcement from our Finance Department, we have no choice.
But don't expect me to forgive this disproportionate bomb landing on a Borough which was just, only just, pulling itself out from the gutter. Don't expect me to rationalise it away. Don't expect me to forget, when the Borough in which I live, Hyndburn, and the Ward in which I live in, Scaitcliffe, are some of the most deprived areas outside of London you will see. As I walk out of my door each morning, opposite the house with its windows stoned in by the local 'youths', don't expect me to have a short memory. Someone made a deliberate conscious choice to ensure the people with nothing ended up in deficit. Anger does not come from seeing my friends made redundant, because they will find other jobs, because they are good at what they do.
Anger, sheer blinding white heat anger, comes from a financial policy which says exclusion will be compounded, that deprivation will be practically enforced and that neglect and abuse will go unchallenged and unnoticed. In a Council where shared services are already happening, where 8 Directors have been let go, where a Chief Executive post has been merged, where voluntary redundancies and early retirements have all already been cycled through, there comes a point, there really does, where you think, do they know the devastation they wreak? Do they understand what this will do on the ground? What happens if no one wants to run the libraries or the play centres or the creches or the thousands of other services which West Somerset, for one, will most definitely not be able to run any more?
I think the answer is no.
There's no Undo button.
I deliberately haven't written about what it feels like to walk into a room, with the rest of your Department, stupidly missing the signals until noticing two union reps in the room and some very serious faces. The sinking feeling. The inappropriate laughter and jokes in the face of not quite knowing what else to do. The pin drop silence as the words arrive that you stupidly thought wouldn't be said. The numbers scrolling across the screen. The obvious discomfort of the person speaking. The desperate frantic effort of thinking of ways to mitigate the numbers, to do things differently, to avoid the inevitable.
I'm a girl. I don't cry easily. I'm a geek girl, we don't, I don't think. Sat in a room, a question asked, dangerously close to losing all composure.
I know, we know, we are the web team. A thousand words since from people who don't know the fragility of decisions within a Council trying to reassure, to rationalise, to comfort. Friends trying to understand and failing, I've been there before, I've made people redundant myself, why is it hitting so hard now when relatively it didn't then?
I got my 90 day at risk letter the day after. That was 3 weeks or so ago, now. Now I watch on Twitter as others are delivered the same news, sweeping waves of noticed presents for Xmas. Good people. Dedicated people. Committed people. I hear the whispers and the things I knew deep down would happen, now are. A sense of inevitability encapsulated in a moment as I think of all the people I have met who are good, so very good at their jobs, loved their jobs, could have been paid more somewhere else but didn't want to be, wanted to be where they are now. Friends. People I respect. People who have given freely support, kind words, laughter and received the same from me. In some cases, even surrogate dads.
How is it different? I don't know. But it is. I took voluntary redundancy shortly after making a man 30 years my senior redundant. It didn't bite me anywhere near as hard as it would have done him. And yet he took it with a grace and acceptance that I am failing to have.
I know, rationally, that there is 'at risk' and there is 'at risk'. I know, sort of, that should there be no place for me any more in our Department, I would find, somehow, somewhere else to be. So it is not for me, this shock or sadness. It is for others. If I am not permitted that, I think we live in a sorry world indeed. So forgive me my current irrationality, my ups and downs, the biting anger which shows through when I don't pay attention. It is the sheer scale of this thing. I would be the first, the very first, to acknowledge and accept that local government needed streamlining. I could have sat and explained to anyone who had asked, why and where. I could have and have suggested ways to mitigate that and some of those things, the practical suggestions have been implemented.
But, you see, it feels a little like a bulldozer to fix a problem which needed finesse. It has caused such sadness, anger, resentment and horrid words to be uttered. In some cases, the damage of this will never be repaired because some words said can not be forgotten. Situations like this bring out the very worst in people, as well as the very best, and I am not proud, not proud at all of the fact that I have veered wildly from one end of the spectrum to the other in the last 3 weeks - on the one hand it has motivated me to get off my behind and work as hard as I possibly can to tick off as many of my open projects as I can - on the other it has meant that some days I have done nothing but listen to others bile, resentment and anger.
Resilience is an often used word at the moment, as is emotional intelligence. Well, I know a lot more about myself than I did 3 weeks ago, I can tell you that for nothing. I'm not thankful for that, but I can acknowledge that. I have tried my very best to remain a credit to the Department within which are, frankly, some of the most inspiring and professional people I've ever worked with, and tried not to be an embarrassment.
I have failed. But in failing I have learnt a harsh lesson. I should have written this post 3 weeks ago. The cycle of acceptance says everyone deals differently. I was stupid - I missed the one thing which would have allowed me to coral my thoughts, vent my anger, and move on.
I work for Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council. I am proud to work for Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council. If I do not continue to work for Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council, I will still be proud that I did. If I am permitted to remain working for Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council, it will be a while, I think, before I can be proud again, but we will rebuild, we will reshape, we will absorb. It seems after todays announcement from our Finance Department, we have no choice.
But don't expect me to forgive this disproportionate bomb landing on a Borough which was just, only just, pulling itself out from the gutter. Don't expect me to rationalise it away. Don't expect me to forget, when the Borough in which I live, Hyndburn, and the Ward in which I live in, Scaitcliffe, are some of the most deprived areas outside of London you will see. As I walk out of my door each morning, opposite the house with its windows stoned in by the local 'youths', don't expect me to have a short memory. Someone made a deliberate conscious choice to ensure the people with nothing ended up in deficit. Anger does not come from seeing my friends made redundant, because they will find other jobs, because they are good at what they do.
Anger, sheer blinding white heat anger, comes from a financial policy which says exclusion will be compounded, that deprivation will be practically enforced and that neglect and abuse will go unchallenged and unnoticed. In a Council where shared services are already happening, where 8 Directors have been let go, where a Chief Executive post has been merged, where voluntary redundancies and early retirements have all already been cycled through, there comes a point, there really does, where you think, do they know the devastation they wreak? Do they understand what this will do on the ground? What happens if no one wants to run the libraries or the play centres or the creches or the thousands of other services which West Somerset, for one, will most definitely not be able to run any more?
I think the answer is no.
There's no Undo button.
Sunday, 12 December 2010
#lgovsm
2 weeks ago I asked on Twitter if anyone was running the equivalent of #nhssm for local gov bods in the UK. I was very specific about the social media aspect of it - it's social media which it is becoming incredibly clear is still a bit of a massive mountain for some teams in local gov to climb, there's a lot of frustration and confusion flying around by DM and it seemed to me a time and place to moan/rant/share good practice/celebrate success was a damn good idea.
I didn't want to run it. I'll be totally honest. 2 weeks ago I felt like someone had found the valve in the inflatable me and pulled the stopper, letting all the confidence I'd been slowly building rush away. Work events have not helped with this, though as time has passed and I've dealt with the expected emotions (even understanding they were normal emotions to have helped enormously) and I'm back, pretty much, to where I was before the meteorite landed on our team.
Dave Briggs from Learning Pool very kindly offered to set up #lgchat (Wordpress) which would allow local gov types to talk about anything and everything to do with local gov. I will be in front of my PC every Thur at 3pm if I can be because I think the discussions which will inevitably happen will give me great insight into how people outside local gov see us.
However. There are a number of reasons why after much musing I decided to kick out on my own and go back to my original idea. Social media looks easy to everyone outside local government. If I were paid a pound every time someone said a sentence with 'but you just....' or 'why can't you.....' or 'it's free and simple, what's the problem' I'd be a millionaire.
It's not that simple. I don't care what anyone outside says, it's not that simple and that's coming from someone in a team inside a Council where social media is about to become as normal a way to communicate, I think, as picking up the telephone. There is a sea change, somewhere in peoples heads, a complete sea change in attitude. But anyway, there are barriers, there are still barriers, there will always be barriers. People outside don't know about GovConnect, don't know about the internal ICT project queues, don't know about locked down PC's which mean you can't install Tweetdeck, don't know, perhaps, that 5,000 people switching streaming Tweetdeck to on, could potentially impact negatively on aging WAN's (and LAN's). Then there's the fact that Flash updates are often stopped, that twinkly websites wont run, that lots and lots and lots of Councils don't allow their staff to use the web outside of their lunch time.
For these reasons and a thousand others, #lgovsm is simple. It's going to be kept simple. There's a webpage where transcripts of the chats will go so people who can't get on the web at all at work can come and read and take part in the discussion off Twitter. It'll be there for the people who are in meetings or out with the girls. It's at 1pm so people can go onto Twitter in their lunch breaks without getting into trouble. There's no complicated flash websites or anything involved. And if you can't get onto Twitter cos it's filtered under chat on the website blocking software, well then the blog on Tumblr is there too.
There is a place for both chats. But one is aimed very much at the bottom, while I think one is very much aimed at the top. And I am the right person to be running the one aimed at the operational people, the people who make things happen, who make things move, who run under the radar, who by whatever means necessary get the tech to work so other people can speak across it. That's me. The other isn't, not yet.
So, if you work in local government and you want to come and chat, see you on Friday at 1pm. The hashtag is #lgovchat. The Tumblr blog where the transcripts will be held is here. W'll be running for an hour, we'll spend about 20 minutes per question which will be put forward hopefully by all of you. You can submit questions to be discussed on the Tumblr. You can DM them to me if you want on Twitter @loulouk
Very most of all, everyone is welcome. Directors, CE's, Heads of Service, Officers, Managers, partners, voluntary sector who work with local gov, all Departments are welcome from Childrens Services to Environmental Services. There's no money for training, none for conferences, none for learning. Time to learn from each other and perhaps accept that the experts in local government social media are us. We're it. The buck stops with us.
See you there.
I didn't want to run it. I'll be totally honest. 2 weeks ago I felt like someone had found the valve in the inflatable me and pulled the stopper, letting all the confidence I'd been slowly building rush away. Work events have not helped with this, though as time has passed and I've dealt with the expected emotions (even understanding they were normal emotions to have helped enormously) and I'm back, pretty much, to where I was before the meteorite landed on our team.
Dave Briggs from Learning Pool very kindly offered to set up #lgchat (Wordpress) which would allow local gov types to talk about anything and everything to do with local gov. I will be in front of my PC every Thur at 3pm if I can be because I think the discussions which will inevitably happen will give me great insight into how people outside local gov see us.
However. There are a number of reasons why after much musing I decided to kick out on my own and go back to my original idea. Social media looks easy to everyone outside local government. If I were paid a pound every time someone said a sentence with 'but you just....' or 'why can't you.....' or 'it's free and simple, what's the problem' I'd be a millionaire.
It's not that simple. I don't care what anyone outside says, it's not that simple and that's coming from someone in a team inside a Council where social media is about to become as normal a way to communicate, I think, as picking up the telephone. There is a sea change, somewhere in peoples heads, a complete sea change in attitude. But anyway, there are barriers, there are still barriers, there will always be barriers. People outside don't know about GovConnect, don't know about the internal ICT project queues, don't know about locked down PC's which mean you can't install Tweetdeck, don't know, perhaps, that 5,000 people switching streaming Tweetdeck to on, could potentially impact negatively on aging WAN's (and LAN's). Then there's the fact that Flash updates are often stopped, that twinkly websites wont run, that lots and lots and lots of Councils don't allow their staff to use the web outside of their lunch time.
For these reasons and a thousand others, #lgovsm is simple. It's going to be kept simple. There's a webpage where transcripts of the chats will go so people who can't get on the web at all at work can come and read and take part in the discussion off Twitter. It'll be there for the people who are in meetings or out with the girls. It's at 1pm so people can go onto Twitter in their lunch breaks without getting into trouble. There's no complicated flash websites or anything involved. And if you can't get onto Twitter cos it's filtered under chat on the website blocking software, well then the blog on Tumblr is there too.
There is a place for both chats. But one is aimed very much at the bottom, while I think one is very much aimed at the top. And I am the right person to be running the one aimed at the operational people, the people who make things happen, who make things move, who run under the radar, who by whatever means necessary get the tech to work so other people can speak across it. That's me. The other isn't, not yet.
So, if you work in local government and you want to come and chat, see you on Friday at 1pm. The hashtag is #lgovchat. The Tumblr blog where the transcripts will be held is here. W'll be running for an hour, we'll spend about 20 minutes per question which will be put forward hopefully by all of you. You can submit questions to be discussed on the Tumblr. You can DM them to me if you want on Twitter @loulouk
Very most of all, everyone is welcome. Directors, CE's, Heads of Service, Officers, Managers, partners, voluntary sector who work with local gov, all Departments are welcome from Childrens Services to Environmental Services. There's no money for training, none for conferences, none for learning. Time to learn from each other and perhaps accept that the experts in local government social media are us. We're it. The buck stops with us.
See you there.
Wednesday, 8 December 2010
Tracing a road around the world
I've always loved maps. There's a 'joke' about a certain kind of kid swallowing the dictionary. I wasn't ever that kid. Nope, I was the kid who read the atlas instead. We actually had one, which attentive readers will perhaps understand was something of a win.
Atlases, and a love of maps, all kinds of maps, playing with maps, drawing maps, interacting with maps is something that I used to be a little bit shy about admitting. No more. The world has changed, or perhaps rather the circles I move within have changed, I'm not sure. But regardless, the simple pleasure of getting a system to place a marker in the right place, then colour it depending on pre-determined requirements still fills me with glee. It will always fill me with glee.
So, I guess we start at the beginning again, bearing in mind that the best holiday I ever had was navigating off a Michelin map through the Pyrenees as my partner got arm ache from driving around all the hairpins, that I can comfortably navigate people through the centre of London with the aid of an A-Z, in our house we don't use Tom Tom, we use Lou Lou and that I don't ever have to turn the map the right way round to orientate myself. I'm not boasting here, simply pre-empting the inevitable 'but you're a girl, girls can't read maps/can't navigate/can't read signs/can't read maps without turning them around'. This one can, just so we're clear. I am not alone in this, just so we're clear. They're not pre-requisites to being able to map data onto a map, just so we're clear. But loving maps, so intensely, understanding their power but also their restrictions? That really helps, I think.
There are two kinds of maps in the world. One comes as a photograph, a picture, a jpeg. We call them raster images - they are simply images and nothing more. They cannot be asked questions of, you can't search them, if you zoom into them, the points on the map ( the distance between your house and the local pub, for example) will move, but not in relation to each other to any kind of scale. Flat, 2 dimensional map. They've got their uses, of course they do, they're great as a print out on some water resilient paper to take out on the hill with you. They're great for printing out and taking into London with you on a sight seeing trip.
But. You can't move anything, change anything, search for anything, update anything. It's static. A snapshot in time of the way things were, because the second you printed it, it's out of date. History.
The second type of map, we call vector. What it actually means is, 3 dimensional. Sometimes quite literally with the help of some funky tools and as this lovely map of Hong Kong shows.But more often than not, it's 3 dimensional in an entirely different way in that it's searchable, scaleable and interactive. You can drop pins on it, move around the map and the pin will stay in the right place - over the top of the house you dropped it on. You can search by street name and you can plot a path on it - well draw one actually, you don't have to plot anything at all.
There are 2 kinds of mapping tool The first kind are the ones like Google, Bing and the previously linked to 3D Hong Kong map. They're useful to a point, but the point quickly becomes limiting. You can search it, and it will take you to the street you were looking for. But it will be a rough approximation of a street. Put the satellite layer over the top and you'll see what I mean - they're ever so slightly out of sync.
Next, try dropping a pin somewhere on a Google map with the zoom level not zoomed all the way in. Now zoom all the way in. Pin isn't quite on the corner of that junction that you dropped it on any more. It's moved. Fine if you trust that people are capable of spotting a bright yellow bin full of grit from 20 feet away. Not good if that pin represents the something you need to be accurate. Next, search for Witton Park on Google maps. Zoom in to the 2nd from last setting. Note that Witton is spelt as Whitton - right next to each other. One of those spellings is right. One is wrong. Do you know who I can report that to? No one.
Finally, embedding Google maps is a complete nightmare. If you have more than 30 things or so to map, then it will trip over to page 2. And then page 3. Which is fine if you're viewing a map in Google and you realise that that's what happening (some people wont and will think, for example, that you've only mapped the grit bins in Darwen and ignored Blackburn completely). When you come to embed the map into a webpage, the fact that there is more than one page of information you've mapped isn't mentioned. In order to get all the points to display in your embedded map, you have to go to Google Maps, hit the RSS button, get the RSS url of your points and chuck it back into Google Maps again. Then you are graced with a map which you can embed which will show everyone all your points.
I could go on. I think you get the point. You might ask why on earth anyone ever uses Google Maps. I'll explain that at the bottom but over the next few paragraphs, I suspect it will become clear.
The second kind of map is Ordnance Survey built and oh boy is it accurate. Need to know where a set of steps is or how wide a pavement is? OS mapping can tell you. Until April 1st this year (2010) the maps were acknowledged to be so accurate that people paid a lot of money to access that data. Witton gets spelt the right way. If it weren't I'd know exactly who to speak to to get it corrected. They not only provide line maps, they also provide maps with door numbers on to help you orientate yourself (or check your co-ordinates are correct). There is still a bit of a zoom problem, in that if you draw on the map at a certain zoom level, it will move slightly when you zoom in, say from 5km to 1km. But under 1km where you switch to a more detailed map, it's accurate. Points dropped don't wander off. It's accurate, it's reliable.
More interestingly, it can also be fed into Geographical Information Systems (GIS). GIS is a loose term for the set of tools which allows you to place massive amounts of points onto OS mapping, quickly and reasonably simply. Most people have done a degree in these systems and are can make them dance. I've taught myself almost entirely and so am a little behind. To add insult to injury, GIS systems are enormously expensive and so I don't have access to one any more because it's not part of my job. Which is where Open Space comes in. Open Space allows you to do similar things to what you historically could only do with an expensive GIS tool.
So, why, I hear you ask, have I mapped our grit bins and gritting routes using Google?
Ordnance Survey have made a big big deal of their Open Space tools. This 'path' map is an amazing example of what can be done - entirely for free. Except. There's always an except, isn't there. In the bottom left hand corner, you will note a little column which depending on the time of day you view it, will either be green or red. Hover over it with your mouse and you will see "XX% of daily map tile limit used". Open Space, when publicising their wonderful new tools, seem to forget to mention this. You get 150 'views' a day unless you pay for more. We'd go over that in about 3-4 hours, I'd guess. What happens after you exceed that 150 views? Well, we don't know but we're assuming that no information is served at all. Which isn't going to look very good now, is it?
And we're skint. Utterly and completely broke, as a Council, with £48 million of savings to make before 31st March 2011. So I didn't map the routes/bins in anything but Google, because Google was free. Which is why they can afford to ignore complaints of spelling. Why inaccuracies can be forgiven. Why display errors meaning suddenly my screen shows 10 markers all on top of each other practically, for no reason whatsoever, must be simply ignored.
It's free.
So, in true Brit style, we make do and mend. In the meantime, I've bought myself a book and will hopefully be teaching myself how to code so I can make Google behave a little better, so I can code around some of the things which are causing a problem. But (I may be wrong here, but I don't think I am) even then, once you start to code and hack about with Google in anything more complicated than what we've done already, Google control access to their maps with something called an API key. And once again, imposes limits for page views.
So what's the answer?
I don't know. This is where I hope someone else picks it up and passes it on - back to me. Can anyone help? Is there an open source way of displaying a map, inside a box, with a zoom in and out tool, a search tool and is accurate, which I can embed in our web pages and will cost me nothing, be entirely reliable and not melt my brain in the process of trying to work it out?
So. To summarise. There might only be 2 different kinds of map. And only 2 different ways of seeing those maps and interacting with 1 kind of those 2 different kinds of map. But when you start to delve a little further, it's really rather more complicated than it might first appear. And free is free for a reason.
Atlases, and a love of maps, all kinds of maps, playing with maps, drawing maps, interacting with maps is something that I used to be a little bit shy about admitting. No more. The world has changed, or perhaps rather the circles I move within have changed, I'm not sure. But regardless, the simple pleasure of getting a system to place a marker in the right place, then colour it depending on pre-determined requirements still fills me with glee. It will always fill me with glee.
So, I guess we start at the beginning again, bearing in mind that the best holiday I ever had was navigating off a Michelin map through the Pyrenees as my partner got arm ache from driving around all the hairpins, that I can comfortably navigate people through the centre of London with the aid of an A-Z, in our house we don't use Tom Tom, we use Lou Lou and that I don't ever have to turn the map the right way round to orientate myself. I'm not boasting here, simply pre-empting the inevitable 'but you're a girl, girls can't read maps/can't navigate/can't read signs/can't read maps without turning them around'. This one can, just so we're clear. I am not alone in this, just so we're clear. They're not pre-requisites to being able to map data onto a map, just so we're clear. But loving maps, so intensely, understanding their power but also their restrictions? That really helps, I think.
There are two kinds of maps in the world. One comes as a photograph, a picture, a jpeg. We call them raster images - they are simply images and nothing more. They cannot be asked questions of, you can't search them, if you zoom into them, the points on the map ( the distance between your house and the local pub, for example) will move, but not in relation to each other to any kind of scale. Flat, 2 dimensional map. They've got their uses, of course they do, they're great as a print out on some water resilient paper to take out on the hill with you. They're great for printing out and taking into London with you on a sight seeing trip.
But. You can't move anything, change anything, search for anything, update anything. It's static. A snapshot in time of the way things were, because the second you printed it, it's out of date. History.
The second type of map, we call vector. What it actually means is, 3 dimensional. Sometimes quite literally with the help of some funky tools and as this lovely map of Hong Kong shows.But more often than not, it's 3 dimensional in an entirely different way in that it's searchable, scaleable and interactive. You can drop pins on it, move around the map and the pin will stay in the right place - over the top of the house you dropped it on. You can search by street name and you can plot a path on it - well draw one actually, you don't have to plot anything at all.
There are 2 kinds of mapping tool The first kind are the ones like Google, Bing and the previously linked to 3D Hong Kong map. They're useful to a point, but the point quickly becomes limiting. You can search it, and it will take you to the street you were looking for. But it will be a rough approximation of a street. Put the satellite layer over the top and you'll see what I mean - they're ever so slightly out of sync.
Next, try dropping a pin somewhere on a Google map with the zoom level not zoomed all the way in. Now zoom all the way in. Pin isn't quite on the corner of that junction that you dropped it on any more. It's moved. Fine if you trust that people are capable of spotting a bright yellow bin full of grit from 20 feet away. Not good if that pin represents the something you need to be accurate. Next, search for Witton Park on Google maps. Zoom in to the 2nd from last setting. Note that Witton is spelt as Whitton - right next to each other. One of those spellings is right. One is wrong. Do you know who I can report that to? No one.
Finally, embedding Google maps is a complete nightmare. If you have more than 30 things or so to map, then it will trip over to page 2. And then page 3. Which is fine if you're viewing a map in Google and you realise that that's what happening (some people wont and will think, for example, that you've only mapped the grit bins in Darwen and ignored Blackburn completely). When you come to embed the map into a webpage, the fact that there is more than one page of information you've mapped isn't mentioned. In order to get all the points to display in your embedded map, you have to go to Google Maps, hit the RSS button, get the RSS url of your points and chuck it back into Google Maps again. Then you are graced with a map which you can embed which will show everyone all your points.
I could go on. I think you get the point. You might ask why on earth anyone ever uses Google Maps. I'll explain that at the bottom but over the next few paragraphs, I suspect it will become clear.
The second kind of map is Ordnance Survey built and oh boy is it accurate. Need to know where a set of steps is or how wide a pavement is? OS mapping can tell you. Until April 1st this year (2010) the maps were acknowledged to be so accurate that people paid a lot of money to access that data. Witton gets spelt the right way. If it weren't I'd know exactly who to speak to to get it corrected. They not only provide line maps, they also provide maps with door numbers on to help you orientate yourself (or check your co-ordinates are correct). There is still a bit of a zoom problem, in that if you draw on the map at a certain zoom level, it will move slightly when you zoom in, say from 5km to 1km. But under 1km where you switch to a more detailed map, it's accurate. Points dropped don't wander off. It's accurate, it's reliable.
More interestingly, it can also be fed into Geographical Information Systems (GIS). GIS is a loose term for the set of tools which allows you to place massive amounts of points onto OS mapping, quickly and reasonably simply. Most people have done a degree in these systems and are can make them dance. I've taught myself almost entirely and so am a little behind. To add insult to injury, GIS systems are enormously expensive and so I don't have access to one any more because it's not part of my job. Which is where Open Space comes in. Open Space allows you to do similar things to what you historically could only do with an expensive GIS tool.
So, why, I hear you ask, have I mapped our grit bins and gritting routes using Google?
Ordnance Survey have made a big big deal of their Open Space tools. This 'path' map is an amazing example of what can be done - entirely for free. Except. There's always an except, isn't there. In the bottom left hand corner, you will note a little column which depending on the time of day you view it, will either be green or red. Hover over it with your mouse and you will see "XX% of daily map tile limit used". Open Space, when publicising their wonderful new tools, seem to forget to mention this. You get 150 'views' a day unless you pay for more. We'd go over that in about 3-4 hours, I'd guess. What happens after you exceed that 150 views? Well, we don't know but we're assuming that no information is served at all. Which isn't going to look very good now, is it?
And we're skint. Utterly and completely broke, as a Council, with £48 million of savings to make before 31st March 2011. So I didn't map the routes/bins in anything but Google, because Google was free. Which is why they can afford to ignore complaints of spelling. Why inaccuracies can be forgiven. Why display errors meaning suddenly my screen shows 10 markers all on top of each other practically, for no reason whatsoever, must be simply ignored.
It's free.
So, in true Brit style, we make do and mend. In the meantime, I've bought myself a book and will hopefully be teaching myself how to code so I can make Google behave a little better, so I can code around some of the things which are causing a problem. But (I may be wrong here, but I don't think I am) even then, once you start to code and hack about with Google in anything more complicated than what we've done already, Google control access to their maps with something called an API key. And once again, imposes limits for page views.
So what's the answer?
I don't know. This is where I hope someone else picks it up and passes it on - back to me. Can anyone help? Is there an open source way of displaying a map, inside a box, with a zoom in and out tool, a search tool and is accurate, which I can embed in our web pages and will cost me nothing, be entirely reliable and not melt my brain in the process of trying to work it out?
So. To summarise. There might only be 2 different kinds of map. And only 2 different ways of seeing those maps and interacting with 1 kind of those 2 different kinds of map. But when you start to delve a little further, it's really rather more complicated than it might first appear. And free is free for a reason.
Monday, 29 November 2010
BWD winter - one Council, two people, a lot of determination
Lots and lots of blog inches have been devoted to bemoaning the direness of local governments reaction to the winter weather we are currently experiencing. I can't rebut them all. I'm tired of rebutting them all, frankly.
So, instead, I'm going to explain what happens when a Council has a Director of Communications who understands social media and lets his staff have free reign (within reason), a Head of Communications who is supportive, endlessly patient and relentlessly cheerleads when needed and a PR Officer who just wants residents to understand exactly what happened last year, why it happened, that we've taken steps to ensure it doesn't happen again this year but acknowledges that if it does happen again, being in an arena where people are discussing that failure is perhaps far more of value than sticking fingers in ears and singing la la la.
Essentially, though, BWD Winter is a labour of love for two people - the PR Officer and me. I know it for what it is - a beautiful opportunity to demonstrate exactly what a combination of digital, social media, mapping, Flickr and YouTube can do when all resources are thrown at it and no punches are pulled. It's definitely love, because it's taken a lot of work and determination to circumnavigate our somewhat elderly Content Managenment System. It's definitely love because the PR Officer is frequently speaking to Highways and Grit Control at 8pm on a Sunday evening. Services between 9-5pm? Not in winter. So the communications systems have changed to reflect that.
It started with a Winter Services hub page on our website. Just, you know, bog standard really. Info about gritters somehow made interesting, awesome pics of gritters doing their thing (if you're into that kind of thing, some people are, who am I to comment). Then an internal email newsletter appeared, keeping Directors and Members up to date with developments and concerns to forewarn them of incoming issues, but also to celebrate successes. Lovely internal comms but no use to the residents.
Then, one morning, the PR Officer came bouncing up to me and asked if we could have a Facebook page. Yeah, course, I said. 48 hours or so later, we'd got a BWD Winter Facebook page. And no Likes. So off we went, all of our team, merrily commenting and throwing it into our friends streams. I'm sure there is a better way of seeding a new page or group into peoples consciousness - but we were experimenting. It snowballed quite quickly (ha ha ha) and 100 Likes later, in the middle of September, when snow was but a distant cystallised twinkle in the eye, we thought we might be onto something. The grit got delivered, pictures got taken, up they went. People talked and chatted and commented between themselves, and our PR Officer replied every time a question was asked. She still does. If she doesn't know the answer, she asks Highways. If she doesn't have any pictures she wants, she asks the gritters to take some. No professional shots here, just staff taking two minutes to pop outside with their 5 megapixel snapper. Content, magically appeared.
Then we figured tying it to Twitter might be an idea. It's tied to the FB page because we're broadcasting, of course we are, but we check for replies. Check for questions. Make sure no one is missed. But Facebook is the hub of the dynamic content, which in some ways considering the demographics of our area, is exactly the way it should be.
So, what else are we publishing on our Facebook page? Pictures aren't information, pretty as they are. So there's Met Office updates, school closure updates. There will be service updates on refuse and recycling collection should we get to the point, as we did last year, where the Head of Environment decides at 7am to pull the service. We'll explain that decision, we'll explain alternative collection points if we need to implement them. We'll also map them. We'll come back to that later. We'll explain about burst pipes in schools, we'll relay traffic hotspots and accident blackposts courtesy of the Gritter Control who will receive up to the minute traffic information - from the people driving up and down the roads - the gritter drivers.
It's not all data though. Not all boring stuff. There's a call for scenic photographs on the Facebook page at the moment so we can share the pretty. When the snow comes down properly, we'll hopefully be holding a best snowman competition - no monetary prizes though, only that all submissions will be published on the Council Flickr page in a specific set, and that the winner will go in a simple frame and be displayed in the Town Hall foyer. Momentary fame but a reward for bothering, nevertheless.
A few week ago, it came to my notice that people were publishing lots of gritting route info down in the West Midlands. @danslee and @sarahlay being the prime suspects. So off we went on an epic journey through 2 Departments and assorted meetings and negotiations, to get permission, get them hand drawn, get them to display properly using basic Google maps and get our aging Content Management System not to throw a complete hissy fit on loading something other than text, image or documents. It took relentless negotiating with people and tech to get those maps up. They're up. By any means necessary took on a whole new meaning. Mapping the grit bins has been simplicity itself in comparison, but a shining star in Transport still needed to run 3 revisions before being confident that most of the markers were in the right place, if not on the right side of the road. It's certainly brought asset mapping and tracking into the forefront of Highways mindset, which perhaps is a good thing? Certainly the bins will be numbered cheaply next year, and thanks to a discussion spawned by that, lampposts will be QR coded too, quite probably. Because perhaps the magic of social media collaboration between Communications and other Departments is not the actual conversation, but that the conversation on such things has been started at all. Bridge building.
So, now, our web hub has:
With thanks to the PR Officer who started all this, @luciehigham, the Head of Comms who's been immensely supportive, @marcschmid, the Director who allows us a bit of lee way, @tomstanard and most of all to @leejorgensen, the bloke who puts up with me sitting at my desk clapping my hands excitedly when it works, and who helps me fix it by being calm when it doesn't. And whose righteous google maps hack means those grit bins are all on the same map instead of being paginated.
Teamwork. Even when we're heading towards having no money at all, that costs nothing at all. And some days, some times, on things like this, we've got it in spades. Cost of doing above = nothing. Happy residents feeling informed? Around 4,000 but we reckon word of mouth might mean just a few more.
So, instead, I'm going to explain what happens when a Council has a Director of Communications who understands social media and lets his staff have free reign (within reason), a Head of Communications who is supportive, endlessly patient and relentlessly cheerleads when needed and a PR Officer who just wants residents to understand exactly what happened last year, why it happened, that we've taken steps to ensure it doesn't happen again this year but acknowledges that if it does happen again, being in an arena where people are discussing that failure is perhaps far more of value than sticking fingers in ears and singing la la la.
Essentially, though, BWD Winter is a labour of love for two people - the PR Officer and me. I know it for what it is - a beautiful opportunity to demonstrate exactly what a combination of digital, social media, mapping, Flickr and YouTube can do when all resources are thrown at it and no punches are pulled. It's definitely love, because it's taken a lot of work and determination to circumnavigate our somewhat elderly Content Managenment System. It's definitely love because the PR Officer is frequently speaking to Highways and Grit Control at 8pm on a Sunday evening. Services between 9-5pm? Not in winter. So the communications systems have changed to reflect that.
It started with a Winter Services hub page on our website. Just, you know, bog standard really. Info about gritters somehow made interesting, awesome pics of gritters doing their thing (if you're into that kind of thing, some people are, who am I to comment). Then an internal email newsletter appeared, keeping Directors and Members up to date with developments and concerns to forewarn them of incoming issues, but also to celebrate successes. Lovely internal comms but no use to the residents.
Then, one morning, the PR Officer came bouncing up to me and asked if we could have a Facebook page. Yeah, course, I said. 48 hours or so later, we'd got a BWD Winter Facebook page. And no Likes. So off we went, all of our team, merrily commenting and throwing it into our friends streams. I'm sure there is a better way of seeding a new page or group into peoples consciousness - but we were experimenting. It snowballed quite quickly (ha ha ha) and 100 Likes later, in the middle of September, when snow was but a distant cystallised twinkle in the eye, we thought we might be onto something. The grit got delivered, pictures got taken, up they went. People talked and chatted and commented between themselves, and our PR Officer replied every time a question was asked. She still does. If she doesn't know the answer, she asks Highways. If she doesn't have any pictures she wants, she asks the gritters to take some. No professional shots here, just staff taking two minutes to pop outside with their 5 megapixel snapper. Content, magically appeared.
Then we figured tying it to Twitter might be an idea. It's tied to the FB page because we're broadcasting, of course we are, but we check for replies. Check for questions. Make sure no one is missed. But Facebook is the hub of the dynamic content, which in some ways considering the demographics of our area, is exactly the way it should be.
So, what else are we publishing on our Facebook page? Pictures aren't information, pretty as they are. So there's Met Office updates, school closure updates. There will be service updates on refuse and recycling collection should we get to the point, as we did last year, where the Head of Environment decides at 7am to pull the service. We'll explain that decision, we'll explain alternative collection points if we need to implement them. We'll also map them. We'll come back to that later. We'll explain about burst pipes in schools, we'll relay traffic hotspots and accident blackposts courtesy of the Gritter Control who will receive up to the minute traffic information - from the people driving up and down the roads - the gritter drivers.
It's not all data though. Not all boring stuff. There's a call for scenic photographs on the Facebook page at the moment so we can share the pretty. When the snow comes down properly, we'll hopefully be holding a best snowman competition - no monetary prizes though, only that all submissions will be published on the Council Flickr page in a specific set, and that the winner will go in a simple frame and be displayed in the Town Hall foyer. Momentary fame but a reward for bothering, nevertheless.
A few week ago, it came to my notice that people were publishing lots of gritting route info down in the West Midlands. @danslee and @sarahlay being the prime suspects. So off we went on an epic journey through 2 Departments and assorted meetings and negotiations, to get permission, get them hand drawn, get them to display properly using basic Google maps and get our aging Content Management System not to throw a complete hissy fit on loading something other than text, image or documents. It took relentless negotiating with people and tech to get those maps up. They're up. By any means necessary took on a whole new meaning. Mapping the grit bins has been simplicity itself in comparison, but a shining star in Transport still needed to run 3 revisions before being confident that most of the markers were in the right place, if not on the right side of the road. It's certainly brought asset mapping and tracking into the forefront of Highways mindset, which perhaps is a good thing? Certainly the bins will be numbered cheaply next year, and thanks to a discussion spawned by that, lampposts will be QR coded too, quite probably. Because perhaps the magic of social media collaboration between Communications and other Departments is not the actual conversation, but that the conversation on such things has been started at all. Bridge building.
So, now, our web hub has:
- Basic information on gritting, why we do it, when we do it and how we do it
- Maps showing the locations of all grit bins within the Borough which people are encouraged to feedback on if we've got it wrong
- Maps showing all our gritting routes as a term of reference for those bothered to find out when we say on our Facebook page which routes we're gritting, primary or secondary
- A link to a Facebook page with over 450 likes and 4000 impressions a day on busy days, where conversations, two way conversations are happening
- A link to a Twitter stream being checked regularly for feedback
- A Flickr gallery of gritters pictures, which will shortly be updated with residents scenic photographs
With thanks to the PR Officer who started all this, @luciehigham, the Head of Comms who's been immensely supportive, @marcschmid, the Director who allows us a bit of lee way, @tomstanard and most of all to @leejorgensen, the bloke who puts up with me sitting at my desk clapping my hands excitedly when it works, and who helps me fix it by being calm when it doesn't. And whose righteous google maps hack means those grit bins are all on the same map instead of being paginated.
Teamwork. Even when we're heading towards having no money at all, that costs nothing at all. And some days, some times, on things like this, we've got it in spades. Cost of doing above = nothing. Happy residents feeling informed? Around 4,000 but we reckon word of mouth might mean just a few more.
Tuesday, 9 November 2010
90 minutes (and the rest)
Social media, I am told, is for telling stories. So here's a story about what led to a 90 minute meeting played out through many media and communication channels, but which ultimately was about something as simple as asking a question, and receiving an answer.
It started with curiosity. Someone at work mentioned there would be a public consultation meeting on Monday evening (8th November). I asked our Director on Twitter if it might be okay if I went, because as someone who shall rename nameless correctly identified, us digital geeky types tend to understand the most complicated technology easily, but boggle when it comes to the vagaries of local government and democracy actually in action.
In the process of discussing this, @marcschmid popped up and asked me if I'd like to tweet from the event. I agreed, it's something I've wanted to get done from our official account, @blackburdarwen for ages.
In the midst of this #gab10 happened and I didn't really think about the mechanics of what we'd be doing, simply that we were doing it. I finally got around to mentioning we would be doing it on Sunday evening.
Monday came, and in the absence of @sturgey I attended the final planning meeting. The meeting might have been shouted about by the Communications half of our Policy & Communications Department but the planning, intricacies, paperwork, research, challenges, agendas and minutae were the responsibility entirely of the Policy half. It's the first time I've had the pleasure of working with them on something and it was a pleasure. Well organised, everything dotted and crossed - I left the meeting a little in awe, but also a little sad to find that tweeting was perceived to be a frippery, an irrelevance.
Time passed. Policies noise levels (we share an open plan office) rose throughout the afternoon to a crescendo and then fell away as the organisers drifted across to King Georges Hall to ensure everything was in place and look after the details.
5pm suddenly crept up. Wielding nothing but an iPhone (mine) and a mifi (using 3G) off I went. Arrived. Plugged in the iPhone. Plugged in the mifi. Watched the yellow flashing light. Watched the red flashing light. Experienced that sinking feeling which comes from tying to get a 3G signal in the basement of a Victorian building. Went outside, sat on the bottom step. Watched the lights, watched the Apple spinning circle. Time passed. Mild panic reared its head. Someone nabbed a technician working for the theatre. He couldn't help, radio'd someone who could. Time passed. I paced. Time passed. Got introduced to Tom Moseley from the Lancashire Telegraph. Stress levels slightly too high to be attempt anything other than briefly charming. Wondered off muttering about relays and network cables. Later discovered Tom had managed to find the only corner of the Windsor Suite I'd not tried for signal and set himself up comfortably. Time passed. Technician arrived. Found a network cable. Plugged it into the back of the mifi box in a vain hope. Hope dashed.
Sit. Think.
Call the other half of the web team. He delivers a laptop, summoned from someone somewhere. @tomstannard appears while I'm waiting in the foyer for team member to turn up. Try not to babble. Try to convey everything under control while quietly fretting. Team member turns up, saving me from acting as a temporary theatre usher. Set up laptop, plug in network cable. Start talking to the laptop, practically begging it to work. Tap in wrong password. CLONK goes the laptop. Cringe. Am sitting in the sound booth at the back of the room. Hunch down in my chair so no one sees me. Tap in right password. Watch it load. Watch it load. Time passes.....
Try and log into Tweetdeck. Nope. No joy. Finally concede that twitter.com in old mode is my best friend. Finally start tweeting, hot, bothered and slightly hyper, 3 minutes after the meeting starts.
25 tweets and 30 minutes, possibly 40 minutes later - I lost track - I'm exhausted but it's working. A new found respect for the media team who sit behind us in the office, as I realise how hard it is to hear words said, pick out salient points, ensure no skew or bias, distill to 140 characters, add the hashtag and hit the tweet button. On a track pad. Later find the mouse in the bag. Smile quietly to myself. Sit back. Watch. A room full of people engaged and discussing. Yes, discussing hard, deeply depressing, difficult cruel subjects. But here. Talking. Engaging. Discussing. Involved. Democracy.
The point of this post is that perhaps it is not the post you expected to see. It is the post of one tiny little cog in a massive machinery. Many people contributed to one girls ability to sit at the back of a room and watch, observe and listen and then pass it on to the big wide world. It is the mechanics of a process. It is teamwork (I saw some of our team members in Communcations actually doing their jobs in the wild yesterday for the first time), it is thinking differently, it is management at senior level having faith, it is Leaders saying yes and having patiemce, it is persistence and relentlessness, it is planning and foresight, it is acknowledging that people who cannot attend physically might want to attend nevertheless. But most of all, very most of all, it is simplicity itself. Document what you see, what you hear - and pass it on.
With thanks to The Guardian Society daily for quietly and unobtrusively making my day.
It started with curiosity. Someone at work mentioned there would be a public consultation meeting on Monday evening (8th November). I asked our Director on Twitter if it might be okay if I went, because as someone who shall rename nameless correctly identified, us digital geeky types tend to understand the most complicated technology easily, but boggle when it comes to the vagaries of local government and democracy actually in action.
In the process of discussing this, @marcschmid popped up and asked me if I'd like to tweet from the event. I agreed, it's something I've wanted to get done from our official account, @blackburdarwen for ages.
In the midst of this #gab10 happened and I didn't really think about the mechanics of what we'd be doing, simply that we were doing it. I finally got around to mentioning we would be doing it on Sunday evening.
Monday came, and in the absence of @sturgey I attended the final planning meeting. The meeting might have been shouted about by the Communications half of our Policy & Communications Department but the planning, intricacies, paperwork, research, challenges, agendas and minutae were the responsibility entirely of the Policy half. It's the first time I've had the pleasure of working with them on something and it was a pleasure. Well organised, everything dotted and crossed - I left the meeting a little in awe, but also a little sad to find that tweeting was perceived to be a frippery, an irrelevance.
Time passed. Policies noise levels (we share an open plan office) rose throughout the afternoon to a crescendo and then fell away as the organisers drifted across to King Georges Hall to ensure everything was in place and look after the details.
5pm suddenly crept up. Wielding nothing but an iPhone (mine) and a mifi (using 3G) off I went. Arrived. Plugged in the iPhone. Plugged in the mifi. Watched the yellow flashing light. Watched the red flashing light. Experienced that sinking feeling which comes from tying to get a 3G signal in the basement of a Victorian building. Went outside, sat on the bottom step. Watched the lights, watched the Apple spinning circle. Time passed. Mild panic reared its head. Someone nabbed a technician working for the theatre. He couldn't help, radio'd someone who could. Time passed. I paced. Time passed. Got introduced to Tom Moseley from the Lancashire Telegraph. Stress levels slightly too high to be attempt anything other than briefly charming. Wondered off muttering about relays and network cables. Later discovered Tom had managed to find the only corner of the Windsor Suite I'd not tried for signal and set himself up comfortably. Time passed. Technician arrived. Found a network cable. Plugged it into the back of the mifi box in a vain hope. Hope dashed.
Sit. Think.
Call the other half of the web team. He delivers a laptop, summoned from someone somewhere. @tomstannard appears while I'm waiting in the foyer for team member to turn up. Try not to babble. Try to convey everything under control while quietly fretting. Team member turns up, saving me from acting as a temporary theatre usher. Set up laptop, plug in network cable. Start talking to the laptop, practically begging it to work. Tap in wrong password. CLONK goes the laptop. Cringe. Am sitting in the sound booth at the back of the room. Hunch down in my chair so no one sees me. Tap in right password. Watch it load. Watch it load. Time passes.....
Try and log into Tweetdeck. Nope. No joy. Finally concede that twitter.com in old mode is my best friend. Finally start tweeting, hot, bothered and slightly hyper, 3 minutes after the meeting starts.
25 tweets and 30 minutes, possibly 40 minutes later - I lost track - I'm exhausted but it's working. A new found respect for the media team who sit behind us in the office, as I realise how hard it is to hear words said, pick out salient points, ensure no skew or bias, distill to 140 characters, add the hashtag and hit the tweet button. On a track pad. Later find the mouse in the bag. Smile quietly to myself. Sit back. Watch. A room full of people engaged and discussing. Yes, discussing hard, deeply depressing, difficult cruel subjects. But here. Talking. Engaging. Discussing. Involved. Democracy.
The point of this post is that perhaps it is not the post you expected to see. It is the post of one tiny little cog in a massive machinery. Many people contributed to one girls ability to sit at the back of a room and watch, observe and listen and then pass it on to the big wide world. It is the mechanics of a process. It is teamwork (I saw some of our team members in Communcations actually doing their jobs in the wild yesterday for the first time), it is thinking differently, it is management at senior level having faith, it is Leaders saying yes and having patiemce, it is persistence and relentlessness, it is planning and foresight, it is acknowledging that people who cannot attend physically might want to attend nevertheless. But most of all, very most of all, it is simplicity itself. Document what you see, what you hear - and pass it on.
With thanks to The Guardian Society daily for quietly and unobtrusively making my day.
Wednesday, 3 November 2010
GIS is to #opendata as.......
GIS (Geographic Information System) is to open data as Microsoft Word is to a bunch of incohesive words and letters. Or at least, when you've been working with GIS for a bit, that's how it looks. A slightly distorted view of course, because GIS wasn't involved in the 15 minute dalliance with some data I danced the other night, but nevertheless, data and GIS is intrinsically linked for me and so I thought I'd try and explain why - with a diagram!
Look ma, no hands! Now, as regular readers will know, I'm not very good at diagrams. Or data visualisations or mash ups or whatever the cool and funky kids are calling them these days - I'm not a cool and funky kid either so I wouldn't know. But this is a pitiful attempt at an explanation, nevertheless because letters are boring and pictures are shiny.
Open data is the end of the story as I hope I've made clear here. Operations is the start. Operations is what generates all the data to go out into the open. Operations means childrens services, it means street scene or refuse collection and street cleansing with some park maintenance in there as well depending on what you're calling it this year, it's the actual day to day stuff like how many fly tips we collected or how many parking tickets we issued or how many library books we lent. It's our bread and butter, it's what we do, it paints a picture in numbers of the service we provide to everyone on a day to day basis.
The data from all that operational activity currently goes in one direction but eventually, one day, will go in two as shown here. At the moment, it goes into management information and in a lot of cases it gets fed, if appropriate and in most cases it is, into the GIS server and processed by our GIS software to make easy to understand visual representations of the data which our Managers can use to make informed management decisions quickly and easily, because the data is not 64,000 rows of ascii (raw letters), but instead thematic mapping, showing them where their hotspots and notspots are, where they need to focus more resource and where there was a problem 12 months ago but now isn't and so they can move resource. It's done more often than 12 monthly, but for the purpose of this, we'll call it 12 months.
The appropriateness of the information going into GIS software is generally whether it's spatial. Spatial means, relational, means does it have a latitude or longitude on it, does it have GPS data attached to it, will mapping it spatially make sense for the data to mean something. In a lot of cases, well actually, in most cases it does, from school catchment areas crossed with deprivation indices crossed with academic achievement levels to a thousand and one other 'mash ups' as they're now called.
Research and intelligence and policy actually have a two way relationship with GIS. They pull data out of the datasets parked there by ops and they crunch it, create 'mash ups' and provide it to Directors and Heads of Service to inform them. They do trend analysis and many other complicated and funky things. Policy take this crunched data too and they build our strategic advice on it. They tell people in words of one syllable (and yes sometimes more) where we were, where we are and where we will be if things continue as they are, but also where we will be if they do not. They don't hold crystal balls, they assure me, but I'm not so sure. GIS and much other non-spatial data is their bread and butter, I think (someone will correct me if I am wrong here, I'm sure).
The datasets which drive all this, will one day go straight onto data.gov.uk once signed off too. INSPIRE says they will. Please read the link, if you've got this far, you need to know about the existence of this Directive.
Which brings me to the other side of open data and the things in data.gov.uk which will sit next to the Operations generated stuff. The cost of satisying Freedom of Information requests was quoted at me by someone at a conference recently from their Authority and I will not post here what it was but it was enough to make my jaw drop. If we are transparent where it comes to information, if we are open, the assumption is that we will actually never receive FOI's ever again, because it will all be easily found, therefore cutting out the middlemen of the poor Administrators and Officers tasked with fulfilling these requests and instead leaving them to do their main job roles. But for the moment, perhaps it would be a nice interim policy for people to put the results of FOI's onto the web automatically, in the assumption that if one person wants to request the information, then perhaps a second will too? It's obviously of interest to someone, right?
And then there's spending data. Generated by Operations but kept by Finance. This is left to last, because Government have almost wrapped this one up. All spend over £500 will be published by local government in January 2011. All NHS PCT spend over £25,000 is already online.
Here ends the tour of data within local government. If you got this far, you know as much as I do, almost. Which in the interests of openness, is exactly the way I believe it should be.
Look ma, no hands! Now, as regular readers will know, I'm not very good at diagrams. Or data visualisations or mash ups or whatever the cool and funky kids are calling them these days - I'm not a cool and funky kid either so I wouldn't know. But this is a pitiful attempt at an explanation, nevertheless because letters are boring and pictures are shiny.
Open data is the end of the story as I hope I've made clear here. Operations is the start. Operations is what generates all the data to go out into the open. Operations means childrens services, it means street scene or refuse collection and street cleansing with some park maintenance in there as well depending on what you're calling it this year, it's the actual day to day stuff like how many fly tips we collected or how many parking tickets we issued or how many library books we lent. It's our bread and butter, it's what we do, it paints a picture in numbers of the service we provide to everyone on a day to day basis.
The data from all that operational activity currently goes in one direction but eventually, one day, will go in two as shown here. At the moment, it goes into management information and in a lot of cases it gets fed, if appropriate and in most cases it is, into the GIS server and processed by our GIS software to make easy to understand visual representations of the data which our Managers can use to make informed management decisions quickly and easily, because the data is not 64,000 rows of ascii (raw letters), but instead thematic mapping, showing them where their hotspots and notspots are, where they need to focus more resource and where there was a problem 12 months ago but now isn't and so they can move resource. It's done more often than 12 monthly, but for the purpose of this, we'll call it 12 months.
The appropriateness of the information going into GIS software is generally whether it's spatial. Spatial means, relational, means does it have a latitude or longitude on it, does it have GPS data attached to it, will mapping it spatially make sense for the data to mean something. In a lot of cases, well actually, in most cases it does, from school catchment areas crossed with deprivation indices crossed with academic achievement levels to a thousand and one other 'mash ups' as they're now called.
Research and intelligence and policy actually have a two way relationship with GIS. They pull data out of the datasets parked there by ops and they crunch it, create 'mash ups' and provide it to Directors and Heads of Service to inform them. They do trend analysis and many other complicated and funky things. Policy take this crunched data too and they build our strategic advice on it. They tell people in words of one syllable (and yes sometimes more) where we were, where we are and where we will be if things continue as they are, but also where we will be if they do not. They don't hold crystal balls, they assure me, but I'm not so sure. GIS and much other non-spatial data is their bread and butter, I think (someone will correct me if I am wrong here, I'm sure).
The datasets which drive all this, will one day go straight onto data.gov.uk once signed off too. INSPIRE says they will. Please read the link, if you've got this far, you need to know about the existence of this Directive.
Which brings me to the other side of open data and the things in data.gov.uk which will sit next to the Operations generated stuff. The cost of satisying Freedom of Information requests was quoted at me by someone at a conference recently from their Authority and I will not post here what it was but it was enough to make my jaw drop. If we are transparent where it comes to information, if we are open, the assumption is that we will actually never receive FOI's ever again, because it will all be easily found, therefore cutting out the middlemen of the poor Administrators and Officers tasked with fulfilling these requests and instead leaving them to do their main job roles. But for the moment, perhaps it would be a nice interim policy for people to put the results of FOI's onto the web automatically, in the assumption that if one person wants to request the information, then perhaps a second will too? It's obviously of interest to someone, right?
And then there's spending data. Generated by Operations but kept by Finance. This is left to last, because Government have almost wrapped this one up. All spend over £500 will be published by local government in January 2011. All NHS PCT spend over £25,000 is already online.
Here ends the tour of data within local government. If you got this far, you know as much as I do, almost. Which in the interests of openness, is exactly the way I believe it should be.
Thursday, 28 October 2010
Just numbers?
Read the emails. All the emails. The ones explaining in clear terms what had been calculated. The kind ones warning us of what we'd read tomorrow morning. They helped. I read them. I couldn't comprehend.
I talked to my other half. He didn't understand, but in the process of talking, I slowly did.
Then I read The Guardian and I wished to go back to this mornings oblivion.
There is nothing I can write here. Nothing I can say. Not because I'm self censoring because I think everyone knows whose side I am on and whose I am not, but simply that there are no words to describe the sheer enormity of those numbers and statistics.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I believe they do all the talking for me.
{void}
I talked to my other half. He didn't understand, but in the process of talking, I slowly did.
Then I read The Guardian and I wished to go back to this mornings oblivion.
There is nothing I can write here. Nothing I can say. Not because I'm self censoring because I think everyone knows whose side I am on and whose I am not, but simply that there are no words to describe the sheer enormity of those numbers and statistics.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I believe they do all the talking for me.
{void}
Monday, 25 October 2010
Quantifying community cohesion
This is a wonder in the other direction, I freely admit, but it ties into social media quite closely, I think.
One of the biggest potentials often quoted for social media is improving community cohesion. I don't like buzzwords, so lets call it.....getting people to talk to each other a little bit more without any of the barriers in the way which the recent evolution of society has created.
Putting it that way makes one of the things I've been musing over today a little easier. You see, thinking of ways to quantify community cohesion is a little difficult. Or rather thinking of ways to measure the effeciveness of social media as a tool to increase community cohesion is a little difficult which is where all of this stems from as I attempt with some determination to wrestle all my thoughts, hopes, aspirations, doubts and questions on social media and its use to us into something approaching a professional document.
It's taken 5 hours of background processing but I'm finally at least at a place where I can understand that talking about community cohesion isn't terribly helpful, but that encouraging people to talk to each other and understand where each other is coming from actually is. So where does that get me? Well, if conversations are happening in places I don't know about, then chances are I wont be measuring those conversations. So the obvious answer to me is to bring the conversations into an arena where I can see them, which involves asking the right questions, providing some house rules and then listening very carefully.
But the other thing which I am wondering about is how you measure a sense of community within a town or county or country. In fluffy terms, it would be obvious - are people being nice to each other, do people help each other on and off buses or across roads, do people grit their own drives and the rest of the street be damned or do they grit the road as well, do people knock on their next door neighbours door to find out if they need a hand with the weekly shop, do people share information regarding dodgy people randomly loitering in the neighbourhood, do people investigate when they hear smashed glass at 3am............
None of this is quantifiable, measurable, put a finger uponable. It's all wavy hands stuff. I'm not interested in wavy hands stuff for the purpose of this exercise, I'm interested in real world outcomes.
Which I suppose is where big society comes in, isn't it. It's where it's come in all along. You can take the temperature of a towns sense of community by the amount of community projects which spring up inside it. By the amount of volunteers registered within it. By the amount of free time people donate on a daily/weekly/monthly basis in order to help someone they don't know out for no other reason than that they felt like helping someone. It's about people helping to build things physically, like youth clubs and church halls, but it's also about the more ephemeral stuff, the time spent leading the youth groups, leading local walks and bike rides, teaching people how to do the fundamental things in life like read and write.
If you wanted to measure community cohesion, which I think is less about people talking to each other, than perhaps about people practically helping each other, then I think I would map the community projects, efforts, outings and outcomes of the local community. It would be an interesting temperature to take in Blackburn with Darwen.
Of course, what I've actually done here is talk about community. Because talking about cohesion is a whole other post. What I wish, more than anything, is that I could march up to certain people within our Department and sit down and ask them if they'll talk to me so I can pick their brains. But I just don't know that it's appropriate, that it would be welcomed, that I am brave enough to do that without some kind of introduction or preamble. So the question then becomes, how on earth will I ever understand cohesion, or rather where people are and aren't talking and why and why not, unless I do.
One of the biggest potentials often quoted for social media is improving community cohesion. I don't like buzzwords, so lets call it.....getting people to talk to each other a little bit more without any of the barriers in the way which the recent evolution of society has created.
Putting it that way makes one of the things I've been musing over today a little easier. You see, thinking of ways to quantify community cohesion is a little difficult. Or rather thinking of ways to measure the effeciveness of social media as a tool to increase community cohesion is a little difficult which is where all of this stems from as I attempt with some determination to wrestle all my thoughts, hopes, aspirations, doubts and questions on social media and its use to us into something approaching a professional document.
It's taken 5 hours of background processing but I'm finally at least at a place where I can understand that talking about community cohesion isn't terribly helpful, but that encouraging people to talk to each other and understand where each other is coming from actually is. So where does that get me? Well, if conversations are happening in places I don't know about, then chances are I wont be measuring those conversations. So the obvious answer to me is to bring the conversations into an arena where I can see them, which involves asking the right questions, providing some house rules and then listening very carefully.
But the other thing which I am wondering about is how you measure a sense of community within a town or county or country. In fluffy terms, it would be obvious - are people being nice to each other, do people help each other on and off buses or across roads, do people grit their own drives and the rest of the street be damned or do they grit the road as well, do people knock on their next door neighbours door to find out if they need a hand with the weekly shop, do people share information regarding dodgy people randomly loitering in the neighbourhood, do people investigate when they hear smashed glass at 3am............
None of this is quantifiable, measurable, put a finger uponable. It's all wavy hands stuff. I'm not interested in wavy hands stuff for the purpose of this exercise, I'm interested in real world outcomes.
Which I suppose is where big society comes in, isn't it. It's where it's come in all along. You can take the temperature of a towns sense of community by the amount of community projects which spring up inside it. By the amount of volunteers registered within it. By the amount of free time people donate on a daily/weekly/monthly basis in order to help someone they don't know out for no other reason than that they felt like helping someone. It's about people helping to build things physically, like youth clubs and church halls, but it's also about the more ephemeral stuff, the time spent leading the youth groups, leading local walks and bike rides, teaching people how to do the fundamental things in life like read and write.
If you wanted to measure community cohesion, which I think is less about people talking to each other, than perhaps about people practically helping each other, then I think I would map the community projects, efforts, outings and outcomes of the local community. It would be an interesting temperature to take in Blackburn with Darwen.
Of course, what I've actually done here is talk about community. Because talking about cohesion is a whole other post. What I wish, more than anything, is that I could march up to certain people within our Department and sit down and ask them if they'll talk to me so I can pick their brains. But I just don't know that it's appropriate, that it would be welcomed, that I am brave enough to do that without some kind of introduction or preamble. So the question then becomes, how on earth will I ever understand cohesion, or rather where people are and aren't talking and why and why not, unless I do.
Tuesday, 19 October 2010
IP blocked
I'm going to ask my partner to IP block this blog tomorrow. Self censorship entirely, no one has asked me not to blog. Call it a hiatus of respect. Respect for the people, perhaps myself included, who have given blood, sweat, tears, determination, single mindedness, enthusiasm, innovation, passion, heart, fire, honesty, love and belief to our jobs in the public sector.
I suspect tomorrow is going to be bad. But the soul wrenching will not be for me. It will be for friends. For the time they have given freely, for the extra hours and the 'extra miles'. For the stress endured and the smiles given freely to customers. For the straight talking and the talking around the edges. For the inspiration and the 5am starts. For the sometimes ridiculously abusive working conditions. For the endless patience and the being caught on the back foot, rallying and turning things around. For the hard budget decisions which have already been made, for the posts which haven't been filled and the people who have stepped into those gaps, often with little training or guidance. For the street cleaner who used the water in his sweeper to put out a car fire, for the gritters out until 2am, 3am, 4am. For the Officer who makes us more carbon and energy efficient meaning we save money, to the Recycling Manager who reduces our expenditure on Landfill Tax. For the determination to provide a good service despite the snow and ice, to the people who commit to communicating who we are and what we do, 24 hours a day when it really matters.
I love my job. I know very many people who love theirs too. They grump and they moan, as do I. But fundamentally, they too are militant optimists, believing in the service they provide and the difference that it makes. Their voices are never heard digitally, but they are there and they are many. I don't presume to speak for them, only to acknowledge them, to point in their direction, to say 'this is what we do, this Local Authority I work in, this is what we do and we are proud of it'.
I am afraid. Change is scary. But, ultimately, I guess I can always go back to data entry, right?
I suspect tomorrow is going to be bad. But the soul wrenching will not be for me. It will be for friends. For the time they have given freely, for the extra hours and the 'extra miles'. For the stress endured and the smiles given freely to customers. For the straight talking and the talking around the edges. For the inspiration and the 5am starts. For the sometimes ridiculously abusive working conditions. For the endless patience and the being caught on the back foot, rallying and turning things around. For the hard budget decisions which have already been made, for the posts which haven't been filled and the people who have stepped into those gaps, often with little training or guidance. For the street cleaner who used the water in his sweeper to put out a car fire, for the gritters out until 2am, 3am, 4am. For the Officer who makes us more carbon and energy efficient meaning we save money, to the Recycling Manager who reduces our expenditure on Landfill Tax. For the determination to provide a good service despite the snow and ice, to the people who commit to communicating who we are and what we do, 24 hours a day when it really matters.
I love my job. I know very many people who love theirs too. They grump and they moan, as do I. But fundamentally, they too are militant optimists, believing in the service they provide and the difference that it makes. Their voices are never heard digitally, but they are there and they are many. I don't presume to speak for them, only to acknowledge them, to point in their direction, to say 'this is what we do, this Local Authority I work in, this is what we do and we are proud of it'.
I am afraid. Change is scary. But, ultimately, I guess I can always go back to data entry, right?
Tuesday, 5 October 2010
A whole lot of heart
Intelligence and heart. And social media, that's here too. But. Intelligence and heart.
I've hidden behind a computer for a long old time. I've kept beneath the parapet, never telling anyone what I thought, never venturing an opinion and sometimes I think never actually having one. I contributed to discussions only when others were drunk so they'd forget the words I'd say in the morning but grabbing the fleeting opportunity to test the water in expressing something. Anything.
Then someone asked a question. I knew the answer to the question. I knew I knew the answer but still I hesitated, because the person asking the question was a Head of Service and whilst I was entirely comfortable with expressing opinions with my then HoS, because he was my mentor and I trusted him and worked so very well together, I didn't know the person asking the question at all.
But I knew the answer. So I wrote the answer in an email. I didn't send the email for 48 hours. I came back on Monday morning, retrieved the draft and reread it. And I sat at my desk in my portakabin and I looked at the words I wrote, and I wondered who'd written them and then pressed Send.
The person I sent it to was @marcschmid
He forwarded the email to @tomstannard - I use their Twitter names because the conversation started on Twitter. A job became available in their team. I was told I had an interview over Twitter. I was told I had the job over Twitter. We still sort work stuff over Twitter too. And email. And face to face. It's as natural to all of us as breathing to use the right channel for the right time in the right way to get hold of the right person at the right time, depending on many different factors.
I explained this today. It got the usual reaction 'wow sounds like you lot have got the hang of this social media thing'. Well yes.......and no. But today I learnt that we can hold our heads high. That we are innovating in company, ever growing company, but we are still ahead some. That I was wrong in my assumption that everyone else was ahead of us. They're not. That we are using social media well and in the right way and I cannot take credit for that, all those foundations were built way before I came along.
But I also learnt that I know what I know. I think what I think. And it is the same as others think, I am not alone, I am not an army of one. I learnt that women can stand in front of conferences and speak and people will listen. I learnt that intelligence and heart are not things to be hidden, but things to be shown with no consideration for those things being unusual or strange.
I learnt. So much. I have 6 pages of notes thanks to the NWEGG social media conference I attended today. I talked and learnt from people, I discussed and enthused, and was enthused at. And oh, but there is nothing I love more than someone enthusing at me. It's the fuel that I need to continue to think, to continue to brainstorm, to continue the epiphanies. These are my dreams for the future, tell me yours, tell me yours, please tell me yours? What do you see? What would you want if there were no barriers at all? Imagine a world built from the ground up, what would you wish for? Can we create that, can we shape that, can we, is it possible? Why must we be constraind by what we've always done? I. need. that.
I need to wrap this feeling up and take it with me. I need to not forget. I am not stupid. I am not leading us down the wrong path. I am not speaking alone. I am not alone, I am backed up by research, great minds, innovative people, shiny people.
Intelligence with heart. Be smart and care. Don't be ashamed of having a brain which you enjoy thinking with and don't be afraid to admit that you care. These are the things I learnt from many many awesome people today.
For the sending of an email, for the pressing of the Send button, for the asking of a question, I am grateful.
I've hidden behind a computer for a long old time. I've kept beneath the parapet, never telling anyone what I thought, never venturing an opinion and sometimes I think never actually having one. I contributed to discussions only when others were drunk so they'd forget the words I'd say in the morning but grabbing the fleeting opportunity to test the water in expressing something. Anything.
Then someone asked a question. I knew the answer to the question. I knew I knew the answer but still I hesitated, because the person asking the question was a Head of Service and whilst I was entirely comfortable with expressing opinions with my then HoS, because he was my mentor and I trusted him and worked so very well together, I didn't know the person asking the question at all.
But I knew the answer. So I wrote the answer in an email. I didn't send the email for 48 hours. I came back on Monday morning, retrieved the draft and reread it. And I sat at my desk in my portakabin and I looked at the words I wrote, and I wondered who'd written them and then pressed Send.
The person I sent it to was @marcschmid
He forwarded the email to @tomstannard - I use their Twitter names because the conversation started on Twitter. A job became available in their team. I was told I had an interview over Twitter. I was told I had the job over Twitter. We still sort work stuff over Twitter too. And email. And face to face. It's as natural to all of us as breathing to use the right channel for the right time in the right way to get hold of the right person at the right time, depending on many different factors.
I explained this today. It got the usual reaction 'wow sounds like you lot have got the hang of this social media thing'. Well yes.......and no. But today I learnt that we can hold our heads high. That we are innovating in company, ever growing company, but we are still ahead some. That I was wrong in my assumption that everyone else was ahead of us. They're not. That we are using social media well and in the right way and I cannot take credit for that, all those foundations were built way before I came along.
But I also learnt that I know what I know. I think what I think. And it is the same as others think, I am not alone, I am not an army of one. I learnt that women can stand in front of conferences and speak and people will listen. I learnt that intelligence and heart are not things to be hidden, but things to be shown with no consideration for those things being unusual or strange.
I learnt. So much. I have 6 pages of notes thanks to the NWEGG social media conference I attended today. I talked and learnt from people, I discussed and enthused, and was enthused at. And oh, but there is nothing I love more than someone enthusing at me. It's the fuel that I need to continue to think, to continue to brainstorm, to continue the epiphanies. These are my dreams for the future, tell me yours, tell me yours, please tell me yours? What do you see? What would you want if there were no barriers at all? Imagine a world built from the ground up, what would you wish for? Can we create that, can we shape that, can we, is it possible? Why must we be constraind by what we've always done? I. need. that.
I need to wrap this feeling up and take it with me. I need to not forget. I am not stupid. I am not leading us down the wrong path. I am not speaking alone. I am not alone, I am backed up by research, great minds, innovative people, shiny people.
Intelligence with heart. Be smart and care. Don't be ashamed of having a brain which you enjoy thinking with and don't be afraid to admit that you care. These are the things I learnt from many many awesome people today.
For the sending of an email, for the pressing of the Send button, for the asking of a question, I am grateful.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)