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.

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!

The Groundswell site provides an interactive profiling tool which is based on demographic and behavioural data, to help companies define their commercial social technology strategies. However I think the tool has some transferable relevance for defining citizen participation profiles and assessing the propensity of certain age groups and genders to engage. What would be really useful would be to overlay this behavioural data with the type of profile data that some local authorities have access to, either through OAC or Mosaic, along with other data layers, e.g. Council survey data, Place Survey data.

Li and Bernoff suggest various activities which the Social Technographs participate in. I have adapted these along the lines of Catherine Howe’s recent ‘long list’.

Lastly I thought about what type of roles might be involved at each level and drew inspiration from Steph Gray’s digital engagement roles. I have added other roles which are more relevant to local government, where communities are likely to play a more active role in engagement. Particularly where there are active hyperlocal sites in existence.

So, voilà! An adapted digital engagement framework for communities and local government. It’s a first draft so any comments welcome.

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.

Localgov group hug

The group hug never quite materialised, but this was an opportunity to meet up with fellow local gov webbies and find out how different authorities are using social media and tackle how you get Senior Managers on side (which I have blogged about previously). Some of the things we discussed included:

• An example of using social media in Adult Social Care in Stockport in a secure area of the intranet (not sure I noted that bit correctly). The project used blogs and video ’stories’ with service users as a way to engage staff and facilitate internal culture change.
• Sometimes it’s better to ask for forgiveness not permission – try something out and demonstrate the success to senior managers using statistics to back you up, rather than trying to explain the tools themselves. E.g. Derbyshire’s very successful social media campaign for the 2009 elections. We debated that not everyone felt in a position to innovate and take this kind of risk.
• The importance of showing financial implications, where there might be savings in traditional print and marketing budgets.
• Getting a collection of good quality case studies together – Liz Azyan noted how her PhD research had resulted in being able to collate several good examples from different authorities.

Socialising Internal Comms and Change

This was a brilliant session. I was surprised at how few central or local government organisations are adopting social media for internal comms. We discussed various barriers to adopting social media for staff engagement including fear of the unknown, loss of control, security and information governance risks and blocking staff access. Whereas actually implementing the technology seems to pose less of a problem. We discussed continuing the work on tackling these barriers by providing good case studies and the potential for updating Tim Davies’s Social Strategy 50 hurdles wiki. The discussion included the following points:

• Social media provides a way to share knowledge between old timers and new starters.
• Internal social networks can enable staff to network, find out who has the knowledge/skills/influence to help you get things done.
• It is unclear how to link social media with existing knowledge management systems, but it was generally felt to be worthwhile.
• What are the measurable benefits? Carl Haggerty talked about an internal social networking pilot in Devon County Council using Blue Kiwi. They have been able to estimate considerable non-cashable savings in terms of productivity. Carl also mentioned that whilst they had been disciplined in their team, the volume of emails being sent had reduced significantly and they were no longer solving organisational problems via email.
• Carl also mentioned that they quickly learnt to change the terminology to ‘business networking’ not ‘ social networking’. In management’s view social = Facebook = time wasting.
• James Gardner talked about the Ideas forum at the DWP. There had been massive take up internally. They identified a risk that people would spend too much time on the Ideas forum (which is the case!) so it has proved important to work with middle managers so they understand the benefits of staff using the forum. Staff vote using an internal trading ‘currency’ and the best/most popular ideas are taken to internal review boards.
• It’s important to have a very clear policy for staff conduct.
• Identity can be an issue. Anonymous forums can encourage staff to make negative comments, but when using real names staff need the confidence to be able to find their voice but with safety.
• If using internal social networks to share information there must be security around safeguarding service user details (either by using a secure area of the network or having a clear code of conduct).
• It can be challenging to get internal networking and social media adopted. It was suggested that the way forward was to start with a small pilot (like Devon CC), although interestingly this contradicts what was discussed at a later session led by Steph Gray.
• There are pro’s and con’s toYammer and in some organisations it hadn’t taken off due to concerns about security, regulation and FOI, whereas other organisations were using it successfully.
• It was suggested that tracking conversations with social media would actually make FOI requests easier because finding conversations in email is time consuming and difficult.
• Staff are using social media outside of work, which raises their expectations about technology at work.
• It is essential to identify the business need rather than focusing on tools and technology (a recurrent theme!).
• Whilst many organisations have HR policies they are not being enforced by Managers. Instead there are still knee-jerk decisions to block staff access to social media sites, without understanding that social media can be accessed on iPhones.

Because of the huge interest in this area Phil McAllister proposed a barcamp focused on social media and internal comms.

User Involvement in Service Design

After lunch I attended a session led by David Wilcox on user involvement in service design in relation to a project he has been working on for Consumer Focus. David proposed a framework for involving users in the design of digital public services.

• The group had quite diverse involvement in co-production and user involvement within the public and private sector and we wrangle with whether we were dealing with ‘user’ or ‘citizen’ involvement.
• Some of the participants in the group were interested in the way service users can have greater involvement in the way services are delivered, participate in the democratic process or have more specific involvement in web usability.
• We talked about various models of user involvement e.g. involvement up front (initial research), at the design stage only, at the end of the process to get feedback or iteratively throughout.
• Barriers we discussed ranged from cultural to financial.
• There were anectodal reports of dealing with service managers who have been in public service for many years, think they know the service best and won’t involve users in service re-design.
• User involvement methods such as focus groups, interviews and usability testing can be costly and time consuming, so resources and funding may be an issue for local and central gov.
• Social media can be used to incorporate user voices/stories in service design e.g. Patients Opinion.
• How do we identify which groups to engage? And how do we recruit them? I gave an example of tapping into existing user groups which voluntary sector organisations consult with.
• Are there low cost methods/tools we can use? I suggested a remote usability testing tool Loop11 which we have been using for usability testing our website.
• We discussed some existing services in Health like Patients Know Best which enables patients to have more control over their health care provision by giving them access to their patient records and discussing their care with the doctor.
• David Wilcox proposed a further workshop to discuss user involvement in service design.

After the session I had a really interesting chat with Adam Bailin about the potential for developing an affordable panel of user testers for central government agencies.

At this point my computer battery ran out of power, so I stopped taking notes temporarily and skipped between the Data.gov.uk session and the session on the Future of Journalism which was rather oversubscribed for such a small room.

Localgov Digital Engagement with Social Media and Business Change

The last session I attended was the one I proposed with Paul Henderson where we did a show and tell about a project we are working on in Fenland, Cambridgeshire. In summary we are using social media to engage communities and in particular hard-to-reach groups such as migrant workers and we’ve done quite a bit of research with communities to find out their perceptions towards social media.

I’ve put our slides up here:

David Wilcox has posted a video interview with Paul and I here:

The session rounded off with an interesting discussion about approaches to governance and moderation. We also discussed how local gov community engagement relates to hyperlocal activity (local blogs etc.). The key points I noted were:

• It takes patience to build hyperlocal involvement. Nick Booth and Paul related their experiences of running social media surgeries for local communities in Birmingham.
• It may not be appropriate for local gov to try to manage/control online spaces. But having a central space where discussions can occur does mean it is easier to monitor conversations.
• Those managing and responding to online communities need to distinguish between constructive criticism / suggestions and complaints.
• You can encourage positive feedback by responding quickly and sorting peoples’ problems out.
• There are existing examples of best practise in moderation and how to manage conversations without damaging the organisational ‘brand’.

So that’s my round up. All in all a truly inspiring day and I also enjoyed the pub session afterwards (thanks to Hadley Beeman for organising) which provided further opportunities to catch up over a pint or two.

Many thanks again to Dave, hosts Google and sponsors 4IP, Boilerhouse, Timetric, Learning Pool, Opportunity Links and everyone who attended for making #ukgc10 happen!

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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An enthusiastic gardener friend mentioned a local initiative called the Foodshare Network last weekend. I think it’s a brilliantly simple idea. People who grow their own food can join the network, form groups (e.g. at their local allotment) and donate surplus home grown produce to local charities.

The network has been developed on Ning, the free social networking tool, by Cambridge based Mark Desvaux. There is also a wiki of Foodshare guidance for groups joining the scheme. Since launching a few weeks ago I gather the concept is really starting to take off. I really hope the simplicity of the idea and the ease of using setting up a group on a social networking site will mean it scales out. Foodshare has a goal to deliver one million hampers to charities around the world. Go Food Philanthropists!

This is just the motivation I needed to make some time to get down to the allotment and clear the weeds…

Earlier this week I attended a workshop in London led by the authors of a new book entitled ‘Social by Social‘, which provides practical guidance about using social web technologies for social good. The workshop brought together a number of people who work in central government, social enterprises or charitable foundations who are developing programmes to support the use of social media by local communities. There were also several practitioners present, a few academic researchers and a fellow local gov web manager. It was a very useful opportunity to make contacts, map some of the projects that are going on, discuss some shared issues and work out how to share knowledge and learning from projects in future. Hopefully the conversation will continue on the Local Communities network.

I got stuck into reading Social by Social (which was commissioned by Nesta) as soon as it became available as a free PDF download, under a Creative Commons license. The timing couldn’t be better as I’m about to start a project in a rural area of Cambridgeshire working with a local community, voluntary sector organisations and public service providers. We’ll be trying out some of the new technologies described in Social by Social with the aim to improve community relations and improve links with service providers.

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