I’ve finally finished my MSc dissertation which is a massive relief. After four years of part-time study I am looking forward to having my weekends back! And I plan to get back to blogging, now that I’ve more time on my hands. My research study investigated: Attitudes and perceptions of Council officers and citizens to using social media to engage with local government. My research was driven from a human-computer interaction (HCI) perspective, as I’ve [...]

I noticed an interesting article in the Guardian today about the coalition Government’s recent crowdsourcing experiment. The article reflects on how despite thousands of suggestions being received from members of the public, the Government’s published responses indicate that no policies are changing as a result. The coalition asked the public to respond to its programme on government websites. It received 9,500 replies online. However, its formal responses, published on each website, shows Whitehall regarded the process [...]

I am intrigued by the latest mini site from MySociety. Launched today Brief Encounters is described by MySociety founder Tom Steinberg as: “a technology test-bed to help us crack a new design and data problem: how do you make it as easy as possible for users to pinpoint a specific bus stop, or train route, or a ferry port, as easily as possible? There are over 300,000 such beasties, and nobody has ever really tried [...]

For anyone that’s familiar with my posts on social media or usability this one is rather academic and self-indulgent, so bear with me! I’m making fairly good progress with my MSc research, having completed a few interviews and some of my literature review. Every so often I take stock of the approach I’m taking and re-evaluate my research question and approach. I decided that writing about the issues I come across would be a good [...]

I’ve been working on a project for the last few months up in the rural Fens of north Cambridgeshire. We’re piloting the use of social media by public sector agencies to engage local communities. I’ve blogged about governance and a digital engagement framework in relation to this project before. We’ve now set up a project blog so we can share what we learn with other local authorities and public sector agencies. Or anyone that’s interested [...]

I’ve got my first speaking gig at the Public Sector Transformation Summit in Birmingham on Thursday 18th March. I’ll be speaking about the impact of social media on customer services. I’ve decided to focus on 4 social media case studies within Cambridgeshire County Council, one of which is our Chief Executive’s internal blog. Dave Briggs has recently interviewed our Chief Exec Mark Lloyd about his blog, in his role as Community Evangelist at Learning Pool. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]