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). Updated 10/02/10 – Mark Watson has added a comment on this post to note that the Stockport content resides on a secure area of http://www.careknowledge.com, which enables external stakeholders to access it as well as Council staff. 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!

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