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:

• 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

So what's the value of all this hard work and constant liasing and updating? Well. I guess this is where we find out.

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.

Revelations will be digitalised

Wikileaks. Who knows? Who cares? Out in the big wide world, who knows of Wikileaks?

Tomorrow morning, I expect to wake up to a BBC who have caught up. I expect there to be feet of commentary on the disclosed cables sent from Washington commenting on hiring hitmen, detailing dealing with defectors and endorsing and condoning the acquisition of passwords and encryption keys of UN officials. I expect analysis and investigation.

Half of me suspects I wont get it. Or, I suppose, fears I wont get it. The fact that the Guardian have been brave enough to pick the whole story up, publish detailed and useful analysis and make all of the cables available has staggered me - yes, they're a national newspaper, and yes, they've still got more credibility and clout than Wikileaks do, but still. Brave steps by the editor.

The sad fact is though, that reported or not, most of the BBC audience simply wont understand the enormity of the cables leaks. They wont understand that the Andy Coulson affair where newspaper reporters hacked voicemails to listen in on telephone conversations was nothing but a flake in a snowstorm. They wont be able to comprehend the jaw dropping audacity of a country encouraging diplomats to acquire intelligence that one assumes would have been used for eavesdropping and hacking UN officials. That's before we've got to the issues regarding embarrassing comments on 'teflon' German officials.

This isn't a revolution. But it is an entirely digital revelation. The enormity of this knowledge escaping into the big wide world will be lost, I think in the noise of the discussion about whether Wikileaks should be allowed to keep running. I think it will be lost in the hunt and the chase. I think distraction will be employed to bury the story by whatever means necessary.

But eventually, the elephant in the room for all governments is going to need to be acknowledged. The horse has bolted. Barn door not swinging any more, but tied on with bits of blue nylon string. Horse now galloping merrily down a beach through crashing waves. It's too late to stop Wikileaks. It's too late to wrest control back from people who don't like the way you do things. Democracy changed. The ways in which your electorate express displeasure with the way you use the power we accorded you, has changed. Scrutiny committees? Inquiries? They will still happen, but the true scrutiny, the real commentary, the ripping apart at the seems of the incessant need to dodge the difficult questions by people in positions of power, is no longer protected by the Official Secrets Act.

The simple fact is, I wont be reading about CIA and FBI indiscretions in 50 years time when Freedom of Information allows documents to emerge into the public domain. There is no buffer any more. No delay. No guarantee that the actions of the dinosaurs at the top will remain hidden until careers are ended and prayers are said for souls long ceded. No. Scrutiny is real time. Answers demanded in real time.

Revelations and revolutions. In real time.

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.

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.

15 minutes of brain

All it takes is 15 minutes.

• Go to data.gov.uk
• Look at the most recently uploaded dataset
• Happens to be Local police recorded crime data, a breakdown force by force, offence type by offence from 1 March, 2002 until 1 March 2010 or thereabouts.
• Download the .csv
• Open the .csv
• Filter the data by Offence Group (in this case Drug Offences)
• No need to filter the data by Offence Sub-Group in this case, but you can
• C & P out into another Excel tab the Offence data
• Filter the data byYear (in this case 12 months to 1 March, 2003)
• C & P out into another Excel tab the years data (still only showing drug offences)
• Delete 12 months to column
• Delete Region Name column
• Delete Offence Group column
• Delete Offence Sub-Group column
• Highlight the two remaining columns and all data
• Create a graph
• Make the graph look pretty
• Upload it to ScribD
• Embed it in your blog

15 minutes and I know Devon and Cornwall have a disproportionately high drug offence rate considering their population, in comparison to their surrounding neighbours of Dorset and Avon & Somerset (yes I know Avon doesn't exist as a county any more, they're slow to catch up down there).

Crime Stats From Datadotgovdotuk




You might need to download the spreadsheet or view it over at ScribD - I'm on a 10" netpad and it's not so great at displaying things properly.

This is why data.gov.uk is one of the best websites on the internet. This is why open data is a wonderful thing. This is what can be done when youn open up your data. When I've got more time, I'll cross reference this info with population info of each of the areas the forces cover. Then I might look at deprivation indices inside those areas. Or possibly, you know, someone else might who can make the data look prettier because, after all, this was a 15 minutes job. This is not me showing off. This is merely a 'this is what is possible in 15 minutes'.

My father always told me curiosity killed the cat. No it doesn't. It opens up whole new worlds of information and it kills no one to stick it in a .csv and give it to people like me to play with.

Illusions of transparency

In this digital world, it is very easy to give the illusion of complete transparency. You can chat on Twitter, post your holiday pics and general life pics on Flickr, if you're not careful you can broadcast every move through Facebook whether you like it or not, and you can tell people what music you listen to and what you like to watch via Last FM and YouTube.

All that information might make you think that if you looked hard enough you could find out everything about me.

You probably could. You'd need one key piece of information that you don't have because I have been very careful to keep my work life and the things which are not important, separate from the things which are, but if you didn't know that, you would think that I had laid my soul bare on the web.

I have not. I know that I have not because people reply to some of my tweets with such leftfield comments or assumptions that I splurt coffee everywhere in shock that someone could ever think such a thing of me. If people really knew me, then they'd never make that assumption at all. But here in the digital world, it's easy to think you do know someone, easy to think you have a working relationship or friendship, when all you have is shifting sand.

There are still some people for whom this is the case. I am one of them. I've met some wonderful people who I have chatted solely to using the internet prior to meeting them. The friendships have lasted years and still prevail, despite hundreds of miles seperating us on a weekly basis. Despite a suspicion of being odd for warming to someone before actually meeting them, I do not think I am in the minority any longer. I meet people I have been chatting to on the web who are not in any way 'fluffy' and there is an instant comfortableness, months worth of chat revolving around common interests providing a cushion against the usual initial unease of edging around new people met, trying to find common ground, trying to survive the small talk that I am so bad at it's not even funny. I think some of those will become something slightly more than acquintances and some of those will become firm friends. Some I might have become friends with if we'd never chatted online first, some perhaps not.

But it is easy to think that you know everything about someone. Easy to intentionally portray that you are being completely open about everything. But it is also easy to keep some sides of your life entirely private, locked off and off limits to all but those who know you the very best. We are all, perhaps, coming to terms with a new openess and a new way of working and relating to each other which seems to require a certain level of openess from us, but actually only requires us to be what we always should have aspired to be.

To be human.