Well I had a great day today at Localgovcamp in London catching up with my localgov Twitter friends and meeting lots of interesting new people.

Many thanks to Anke Holst and Hadley Beeman for organising and for all the sponsors and participants for making it such an inspiring and enjoyable day. Check out the Twitter feed from the day and also the timetable of sessions and photos.

Because my time is at a premium at the moment (and I really need to spend the weekend working on my dissertation), I decided to do some live blogging during the day. It was really a spur of the moment decision when the first session started and I’ve never tried it before. I set up a Posterous account there and then and it was pretty straightforward. Luckily I can type fast so hopefully I have captured the flow of the conversation, however I may have misrepresented some of the points made. If you have any comments/inputs do add comments.

I ran two sessions in the morning. One on embedding social media in your organisation which turned out to be a very lively and useful discussion. I hope someone has some notes as I didn’t make any! However we did note that embedding social media is a full-time role (and some councils have taken on social media officers). We also agreed that more social media case studies are needed as the use of social media is very contextual and depends on service area, service users and circumstances. It was suggested that we use the IDeA Knowledge Hub for sharing stories.

The other session was on usability testing tools and there was a good discussion around usability testing in councils. I’ve added the slides with links to the usability tools below for information.

A thought I’ve been bouncing around in the last few days is how the 2010 UK elections will play out through social media. Not only from a national perspective, but from a local campaigning perspective.

A number of blog posts have pointed to the fact that the two main parties have not yet managed to generate much positive user generated content online or truly harness the power of social media to build networks. There have been many reports that unofficial blogs are ranking highly in Google search results for terms like ‘David Cameron’ or ‘Gordon Brown’. I can vouch for this fact, as a friend’s rather excellent ‘unofficial site’ was ranking highly in Google search results for ‘David Cameron’ a few weeks ago. However within a day or two it suddenly dropped down in the rankings (bah!).

But at a local campaigning level there is still a huge disparity between those councillors who blog and tweet and those who don’t. Just recently I did a quick audit of the number of blogging county councillors in Cambridgeshire and found 17 blogs out of a possible 69 county council members, just under 25%. Now I may have missed a few, but those who do blog and tweet will definitely have the edge if they can communicate well online and use it to their party’s advantage, with the potential to reach a far wider group of constituents and potential voters.

It will also be interesting to see how the main parties deal with hyperlocal bloggers. How will they respond to stories at a local level that could potentially have a significant impact on the party’s reputation at a national level?

One thing is for sure, the 2010 election will bring the use of social media in UK politics into sharp focus. There will be lots to learn about how national and local politicians adapt to using social media and how voters are influenced by social media.

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

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

Wilcox’s participation levels

Arstein’s ladder of participation

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

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I went, I participated and I got the geek-tastic T-shirt!

At last I’ve made it to a gov barcamp! Yesterday I attended UK GovCamp 10 (or #ukgc10 on Twitter) which was organised brilliantly by Dave Briggs and generously hosted by Google at their HQ in London. As a barcamp newbie I really enjoyed myself and talked far too much. The best thing about this type of event has to be the diverse range of interesting and enthusiastic people from the UK gov webbie community who attend (on a Saturday). And I really appreciated the opportunity to meet and chat to the people I know through Twitter and those I hadn’t come across before.

It was hard to pick and choose which sessions to go to from so many good ones, but here’s a quick round up of those I attended.

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I’m pretty lame at blogging bookmarks, but I’ve found a few juicy things recently.

Promote the Vote is a fantastic site promoting the vote (obviously) for people with learning disabilities which has been led by Speaking Up in my home town Cambridge. Great design, content and videos. Designed by Easy Read Online.

On a similar theme of accessibility, it’s good to know that Google are sorting out automatic captioning for videos on YouTube.

Broadband NotSpots let’s you check broadband availability in your area. Not sure how accurate it is, but useful for a rural project I am working on at the mo.

Carl Haggerty wrote a very interesting post about whether Council websites should be more community based:

My key point here is, without any external pressure, would councils have taken a more community based approach to their websites instead of being forced to deliver services online that offered no value initially.

Philip John blogged a request asking for ideas about widgets for hyperlocal sites. This is a heroic effort to make democracy more accessible, which I take my hat off to (well I would if I was wearing one). I’m looking forward to seeing what gets developed.

Ok it’s not new, but I found some great articles on sketching on the Adaptive Path site.

Phew that’s enough for now.

A few months back I blogged about getting the teams up to speed with user testing. Since then we’ve tried a few things out and learnt a bit along the way about planning and running the tests. We’ve expended a fair bit of effort in getting some processes up and running, but hopefully next time we do testing things will be much more straightforward and worth the initial investment of time.

Before we started our usability testing we did quite a bit of analysis of our Google Analytics and customer feedback data, to find out what the top customer tasks are on the site (i.e. the things our customers do most frequently). We’ve based our user testing around a selection of the top 20 customer tasks.

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I work in a team that manages local government web development projects. We work closely with applications developers in IT and we do most of our development in-house. A couple of years ago we realised noticed a pattern in the way we were working. Some projects had complex requirements and often involved working with new technologies. Bigger projects took 12-18 months to complete, which meant that work on the other web sites or applications had to be put on hold.

Early in the project the teams would have workshops and lots of meetings with colleagues in the relevant council services (i.e. business areas). The project managers would develop very detailed specifications to document the requirements. We would produce wireframes to show how we proposed the interface would look (and sometimes we tested the wireframes with the site users). We would send these lovingly crafted specifications to our development team who would spend a few days reading through our bloated documents, trying to interpret what we meant. The development team would then work up a detailed estimate for the work. Between us we would spend a considerable amount of time negotiating scope and estimates  before agreeing to proceed with development.

At last the developers could roll up their sleeves and start writing some code. The developers would work tirelessly to develop functionality that met all the requirements in the specification. Sometimes the developers weren’t able to complete all the functionality because they encountered problems they weren’t expecting because the technologies were new to us all. When the services got to do acceptance testing, they would ask for additional or different functionality, but by this time we’d used up the budget and run out of time to do any further development. If you hadn’t already noticed, I’m talking about the waterfall development methodology which follows a sequential process as follows:

We needed to find a way we could work more efficiently, improve communication with the development team and services and meet business and user needs more quickly.

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I’ve just started working on a project where we’ll be exploring digital engagement methods, using social media alongside offline forms of engagement such as neighbourhood panels. The aim of the project is to improve community cohesion in a semi-rural community. The project is being developed as a partnership between the County Council, District Council, community centres, a rural development agency, housing associations, the Police and the Fire & Rescue Service.

The partners are all relatively new to the concept of digital engagement but are aware that any form of social media (e.g. blogs or social networking sites) requires governance and moderation. In the initial meeting I presented what I think of as a ‘governance dichotomy’ which we, as public service providers, should be open to when we consult with the community. By this I mean that we may end up with either a community led or a partnership managed approach to governance, depending on what the community and partnership jointly decide will work best.

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Social Media and Networking

We’re doing a Social Media & Networking project at work. The aim of the project is to develop a ‘toolkit’ for staff. I found this online database of social media policies a starter for 10 – no point re-inventing the wheel.

Community Engagement

I recently started a project where we’ll be using social media to engage communities and improve community cohesion. For general guidance on engagement I found Engagement first five, the IDeA’s Practical ways to engage with your communities, Customer focus and community engagement and the older (but still useful) guide by David Wilcox The A-Z of effective participation. There is also lots of useful guidance on People and Participation

The community cohesion impact assessment and community conflict prevention tool has some pointers for planning and implementing a project which aims to improve community cohesion.

I read a couple of thought provoking blog posts by Dave Briggs and Tim Davies on the representativeness (or otherwise) of online engagement, which reminded me of a post I wrote a couple of months back about evaluating online engagement.

User research and design

I’ve also started up a project to improve customer experience on our corporate web site. We’re doing some remote testing with Loop11. I also thought the Five Second Test could be useful when we do the re-design. There’s nothing like an immediate customer response to make you feel humble ;D

I’m used to doing paper prototyping and using Visio, Dreamweaver and Powerpoint to mock up more interactive, hi-fi prototypes. I’ve not used any tools designed specifically for creating prototypes, but came across this great post on prototyping tools which opened my eyes to some alternatives.

This week I had the opportunity to present to senior managers in my organisation (a local authority) to explain what social media is, how it is affecting us and why we need to develop a social media strategy. The key message of the presentation was:

“People are having conversations about us online, but we are not part of those conversations.”

For me this was a great opportunity to get buy-in from the very top of the organisation to the development of a social media strategy. We already have a project underway to develop a social media framework (strategy, policy, guidelines and tools) which has arisen as a result of demand from services and growing awareness of the usage of social media tools by citizens.

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