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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Since finishing my MSc exams in May I’ve been busy researching all things social media and gov 2.0. I’ve built up quite a collection of RSS feeds in Google reader and have been collecting bookmarks and resources via other sources like Twitter, so I thought I would start to share some of the links I have found useful. Social by Social book – I highly recommend this free, downloadable book for any local gov officers [...]

I’ve been looking around at quite a few emerging ideas and practise for public engagement recently. At the moment consultation processes in local government are generally still fairly archaic and ‘having your say’ might mean filling out a survey or attending a public meeting, exhibition or focus group. The Power of Information report highlighted a few good examples of online consultations and made a sound recommendation as follows: Implementing the tools – readily available elsewhere [...]