Category: Local Government

17 things I picked up at #commscamp16 – oh and one biggish thing

vwicecreamvan

Emma Rodgers and Dan from comms2point – with a huge amount of help from others   – always turn on a fab day for commscamp each year. Thank you.

I was there yesterday and here are somethings I picked up:

  1. Not everyone has been to an unconference!  Comms camp is an unconference for comms people.  A lot like govcamp and localgovcamp and bluelightcamp, hyperlocalgovcamp (I kid you not ) and..  well you get the gist. For about half the people there  it was their first unconference . And on the whole the newcomers loved it.
  2. There’s a VW campervan ice cream van called Polly that is fab – their newest competitor painted their van in the same colour and calls themselves dolly. (I’m not going to link to the competitor because I’ve already decided that polly is better than dolly )
  3. Twitter is commonly used as a way to create the appearance of doing something by comms teams.  “I’ll just bash out a few tweets” rather than winning the argument to say “we shouldn’t be communicating that in this way”.  So it can become a broadcast channel polluted with the passive aggressive product of internal disputes.
  4. Some people in public services have serious disdain for middle managers.      
  5. Us as citizens can get talked about as commodities.  In one session which covered laws around e-mail lists  the language was very much about e-mail addresses as a commodity.   Language like harvest gets used.  It made me think that someone’s email address is their attention – their personal world. Perhaps we should talk about a  “group of people”,  if we send this e-mail  we’re interfering in someone’s world.
  6. I can get a bit snarky about public sector comms (well I didn’t strictly pick that up yesterday).
  7. Trust is a thing
  8. 3 years is ok – ten years is excessive for keeping data.
  9. Don’t just have an unsubscribe link when you send bulk e-mails – add some information on where you got their e-mail address from to improve confidence in you.  
  10. Brexit will mean we lose a critical directive that protects you from all sorts of legals problems on comments sections of your Facebook page or blog.  At the moment the EU provides for protection is your comments are not pre-moderating, include a flag this button and your respond to someone’s objection in good time.  Without the EU lawyer David Banks thinks that protection will go. 
  11. David has also given some thought to why social media and politics is so toxic. He says there appears to be tacit permission that when it comes to political discourse people can be “absolutely vile to each other”. For him it’s a psychological phenomena – previously you’d say something a bit strong in the pub, and people would go quiet – showing they disapprove.  Social media exposes people to the likeminded – so reinforces  the excessive views. This normalises what could be called creeping malevolence – people start with something mildly abusive but because nothing happens to them, it creeps.
  12. All threats of physical violence on social media should always be sent to the police. Any message intended to cause “harassment alarm or distress” is a criminal offence.    Signing social media messages with a name (which we always suggest) stops this being a faceless organisation – reduces the amount of abuse.
  13. Language is a powerful thing  and discourse analysis is a way to recognise how that power is being used.
  14. It takes tenacity to change how people talk about places.  One person explained that their hospital was always referred to as a “basket case”.  Patience and persistence means the media now describe it as a “teaching hospital”. Small victories hard won
  15. The word remain was a problem in the referendum campaign because it is not not part of normal vocabulary for a lot of people.  (Update: thanks to Erica Dariks of Aston University for pointing to her source for this) That reminded me how sometimes appearing clever (there was a poor visual pun here – because the word IN appears in remain)  gets in the way of doing the best you can – like use the word stay.  
  16. The samaritans have some very good media reporting guidelines on suicide.
  17. Cake – I picked up several pieces of cake.

Oh and one biggish thing

If algorithms are encouraging the creation of bubbles then we should stop doing traditional comms.  This was a conversation I had just after the session on a fractured nation and post factual politics with a comms person who may not want to be named. We chewed around the problem that algorithms in both search and social media can tend to exacerbate self regarding bubbles.  They need to do that to create concise clear groups of people that advertisers can target.  If that’s what’s going on using them for more comms risk feeding this tendency to organise people in self serving bubbles. To break out of that we need to stop inflating the bubbles, get of our backsides and go and talk to people instead.  

 Updates

Other blog posts

Francis Clarke.

Bad manners, blockchains, open data, government as a platform and and Birmingham pigs in muck.

Pigs in muck

Image cc leeturner.

Is the real barrier to open data good manners?

There’s honest open truth in the blog post Over Politeness is the fatal flaw in the open data movement.

Anything Tom Steinberg writes on Open data needs to be taken seriously. It was he who was one of the key people behind the power of information task force report which got government starting to understand why it’s important to free up information.    Never a natural insider, now he writes:

So, how do I feel about it all now, eight and a half years on from the Open Data Principles? Not good. I’ve watched the government of the country I live in sell off our national addressing database, a breathtakingly moronic move that more than undoes the sum and total of good works done in the same time period. And I’ve watched that same government tacitly endorse attempts to kneecap our Freedom of Information law, whilst simultaneously grinning and waving a flag labeled ‘most transparent government in the world.’

I’ve not seen any meaningful attempt to systematically overhaul procurement rules to ensure that new government computer systems produce decent open data by default. This omission is especially important since building open data feeds into new government computer systems remains the only way that most government data will ever get released cheaply, quickly, and in appropriate formats. Factories and power stations only pump out less rubbish when the law says they must, and the same is true of government computer systems. International progress on that front so far? Somewhere between dismal and undetectable.

and

Transparency laws are like babies: There’s no way to get a real one without someone somewhere having to go through a very unpleasant experience that they’d really do almost anything to avoid. And as a consequence, meaningful transparency laws don’t get implemented except in situations where legislators fear something even worse than the effects of more transparency.

If you don’t believe me, consider the following examples.

In Britain, we did not gain the right to see our Member of Parliament’s expenses untilHeather Brooke forced out a scandal so enormous that four MPs were actually sent to jail. Just in the last two weeks we appear (in a vaguely codified way) to have won the right to see our leaders’ tax returns—but only after a week in which the press savaged the Prime Minister daily over his connections to off-shore finances co-ordinated by his father. The pain required to produce this concession could literally be seen on David Cameron’s face as he was forced to face the issue.

I agree.  I’ve sat on the Local Public Data Panel at the Department of Communities and Local Government. Rarely did I feel I was being much use, often felt stifled by process and internal political demands. This stifling of what people on the panel wanted to achieve was usually tolerated because we were over respecting  convention and frankly being polite (or weary).

Government can and does co-opt,  in part to control change and bog things down.  I do though only partly agree that being combative is the whole answer. Government also needs to invest in sharing information. We’ve benefited from that investment.  It needs to be a combination of a will to change from within government and impatience for change outside.  But then I’m probably still being polite.

Bitcoin for Volunteers and blockchain for government.

Bitcoin is the digital currency that is being fussed over at the moment as  Australian Craig Wright says he invented it.   It’s important because it is a way of creating currency that doesn’t require a bank.  It allows us to trust each other with who owns which money –  because we can all share the same cash book – or ledger.

HullCoin allows people in Hull to create a new currency with the time they put into volunteering. It is similar to the =Bristol Pound or Timesharing in some senses.  What’s interesting, in part, is that it uses a blockchain.  The technology behind Bitcoin.

Blockchain is, rightly, also on the minds of government.  Why?  If this technology helps us trust each other with money, it can also help us trust each other with much more besides: who has voted, who owns which house, who is entitled to which services and who is qualified to deliver them.

In his speech last week, Digital transformation in government and blockchain technology,  the Cabinet Office minister Matt Hancock, said:

To make real progress, we have to be much smarter.

That’s why we started building what we call ‘government as a platform’. That little catchphrase sums up a huge amount of work building many different things – not just actual technical platforms, but also standards, design and service patterns, data registers, and the skills and capability of the people who deliver digital services, and indeed the whole business of government.

All those things – the platforms, the standards, the legacy technology, the service design – come together as an ecosystem of interconnected components that departmental teams can use to assemble their services.

They will only do that, though, if they actually trust those components in the first place. So delivering transformation is just as much about fostering a new culture of trust across government.

The old culture depended on departmental silos, and services designed and delivered within them. Instead we’ve got to work across those silos. And that depends on trust.

This brings us to the benefits of the blockchain.

Blockchains – distributed ledgers, shared ledgers – are digital tools for building trust in data.

Rather than a single central authority demanding trust and declaring: “I say this data is correct,” you have the distributed consensus of everyone in the chain, saying in unison: “we agree that this data is correct.”

They bring with them built-in integrity and immutability. You can only write new data, nothing is ever removed or deleted.

It does sometimes get touted as a wonder solution. In time institutions that we rely on to manage trusted processes – planning departments, banks, local authorities – will be changed by technology like this. The most important first start for government though is to recognise that many of it’s structures are a barrier to better ways of working, to focus instead on what needs to be done to solve a problem.

That is what Mark Rogers – Chief executive at Birmingham City council – has been thinking about in what he calls a

Pig in Muck moment…

His blog post Tapping into Brum’s talent and innovation expresses his  pure pleasure of spending time with a group of people passionate about finding new routes to solve problems:

Hosted by that hotbed of forward thinking grooviness, the ImpactHub, a small number of fellow travellers sat down for a couple of hours to make my brain hurt on the subject of an ‘open innovation system’.

Pretentious? Hopefully not.

Under discussion was actually something very straight-forward; how we might further encourage and accelerate a progressive, welcoming and applied approach to convening interested parties from civil and civic society to tackle the city’s wicked – and not-so-wicked – issues.

Those of you who have been following my ramblings for the last couple of years will know that I am (very) interested in working out, among a number of things, how the council can itself become more innovative, whilst also being more enabling of others across the city to do the same.

It’s important that people like Mark take the time to have their head hurt.  It’s much more productive than the sort of polite government meetings that stifle change in areas such as open data.

The future of local government: being human.

In the past few days I’ve been fortunate to meet some fine people thinking about public services and democracy.  On Saturday I was in Huddersfield thanks mainly to Carl Whistlecraft of Kirklees Council for  #notwestminster.   Last week – thanks to Pete jackson of  IEWM WM-ADASS  I was at a session with senior social services officers run by Cormac Russell. Yesterday I had a cup of tea with Darren Canaan.

These have all helped me crystalise a thought or two.

Notwestminster16 (134 of 135)

(Image Anthony Mckeown.  cc)

If it doesn’t require empathy why would we have people doing it? At notwestminster Matt Clack of Hackney Council ran a session called “Emotion, empathy and urgency – personal experience in public narrative.”  It was wide ranging conversation, which started with how can public servants use personal stories to help develop and improve their work.

I know that government can be very slow to change, but in a decade or two it will be much easier to have software perform processes and robots performs actions.

The work that can’t be done this way is the work that requires empathy. So the future of public servants is about their humanity.  This is also reflected in the work at Birmingham University (which we’ve worked on a little in the last couple of years) on the 21st century Public Servant, which identifies a number of qualities including:

  • The 21st Century Public Servant engages with citizens in a way that expresses their shared humanity and pooled expertise
  • The 21st Century Public Servant needs organisations which are fluid and supportive rather than silo-ed
    and controlling
  • The 21st Century Public Servant is rooted in a locality which frames a sense of loyalty and identity

If people are to be robust they need good networks – so lets help them make them.  Cormac Russell’s mantra – if he has such a thing – is ‘just connect’.  That is our experience too – that connecting help things happen and keep happening.

Darren Canaan used to be a pure connector for a fascinating organisation in Coventry,  Grapevine. “Grapevine does practical, hands-on work that tries to connect those of us who are isolated with the good people and good things in their communities.”  He told me of how his work was to understand someone’s strength and then help them meet people and groups that might benefit from those strength.

One young person was a little socially awkward and tended to sprint ahead of people whenever walking anywhere.  This strength turned him into a walk leader – he was valued for what he helped others do, rather than judged for his awkwardness.

Connecting is human work and it is core to how we increase the opportunities for people in their own neighbourhoods, which in turn (I think) can be expected to reduce the demand for formal services.

Update –  this appeared on twitter this morning (19th Feb 2016)

 

More from Notwestminster:  (update – a full round up of blogs from the event can be found here:

Paul Mackay’s round up

Notes from all the sessions.

Dave McKenna on re-designing the council meeting.

Francis Clarke on digital and local democracy.