Tag: Local Government

Stuff I've seen August 4th through to August 19th

These are my links for August 4th through August 19th:

Government is a conversation – making friends with Git Citizen

Good government is supported by good conversations, that’s the key point I want to stress/explore after last weeks Local Government Communications Conference in Leeds.

I have always enjoyed trips to LGComms events.  This time I was the last speaker,  in the hangover fueled want-to-get-home-now-please Friday slot. I had been asked to speak on using digital technologies to collaborate with citizens so set out to share the story of much of the digital activism that has blossomed in my home city of Birmingham since the same conference a year ago. I wanted to show how people are trying to use the web to engage with government, but government needs to recognise that and talk back.

Better with More

I argued that if local government can get this conversation right it is not simply in a position of having to do better with less. If  government can share in the enthusiasm energy and passion of citizens – together they could do better with more.

This also emerged from the start of a Common Purpose and Be Birmingham programme on leadership and Total Place, where at least one person made the same case. It is also at the root of the government’s ambition for an informed, empowered and active citizens in the Big Society.   The continued opening up of government data is fertilising the ground in which such a movement might grow.

The rise of the Git Citizen

My presentation (slides here) began with this rather ugly film of me being a bit of a git citizen:

Our street had been coned over night because of a cricket match and the cars were then ticketed – without warning.  The normal comms reaction to something like that is to sigh, put their head in their hands and shake it.

Many eyes makes hypocrisy wither

But in the room of Local Government Communications a good number  could see the value of citizens as eyes and ears – people who’s natural sense of right and wrong expose the failings of organisations, the contradiction between what they say and what they do.

This is a natural part of how we govern social relationships.  Knowing that you can be seen and that you will be gossiped about tends to help keep us on the straight and narrow.   Digital media makes that process easier in larger communities than before – as long as government is willing to see, listen and respond.

In effect to recognise that this is one part of a conversation and join it. The examples I wanted to emphasise from Birmingham were the ones where relatively simple things were being done in an easily accessible way.

  • The neighbourhood manager telling the story of the work she does and the place and people she serves (for example Hands On Handsworth)
  • The citizens taking a clunky government service and making it easier to understand, (for example Big City Talk)
  • Not talking but doing – (for example BCCDIY or the pothole hunt)

In all cases they are lowering the barriers to communication,  which encourages conversation. After all one of the reasons we talk so much is that for many of us it’s very easy to do.

Imagine you are Equals

Here were some ideas I suggested would help them nurture such conversations..

  • Skill up your organisation and neighbourhoods
  • Get involved
  • Imagine you are equals
  • Share infrastructure with your community – keep it open
  • Free up data
  • Take risks
  • Believe in small things.

I wasn’t alone in exploring these themes. David Holdstock – Chair of LGComms summed up much of this at the end of that Friday

Simon Wakeman (extensive quoting coming here, thanks Simon) was taken by the presentation of Professor Stephen Coleman – which he outlined as asking communicators to consider:

  • Where do people find information – much council information is not demand-driven – organisations need to push information to people but this is a greater challenge in times when people have so many competing demands for their attention
  • The exclusive narrative of public sector communications – many communications “talk” in words or terms that people just don’t understand (and shouldn’t have to understand). Communications need to be framed in a narrative that people can related to – and in the conversations of social media we have a great window into those real-world narratives. We need to learn how to interpret them and fit our communications into those narratives.
  • The challenge of efficacy – the best single predictor of successful engagement is people’s belief in their ability to influence the world around them. As a belief it’s an entirely subjective measure but is really important – if people think they can make a difference, they will participate, and if they think they can’t make a difference, they won’t.

and suggested they concentrate on

  • mapping – taking a “from the bottom up” approach to how and what to communicate – rather than building from the current practice – because incremental, creeping growth of a communications landscape will invariably lead to less effective practice than a clean-sheet approach
  • storying – thinking about how communicators can take the day-to-day life narratives of real people, which are far more influential than council or council people’s narratives, and using them in communications. The next level would then be to connect these narratives together to tell a story of place grounded in people, rather than the physical aspects of place which form many existing communications.
  • production of meaningful, tangible consequences to feedback – or put simply, we need to be able to tell people what we’ve done with things they’ve told us. From Stephen’s research the lack of this is one of the biggest frustrations among audiences that have participated in public sector research or consultation. Making these links is key to sustaining and developing a culture of participation and engagement

Catherine Howe – the new(ish) chief exec at Public-i also picked up on Tony Quinlan’s analysis of how stortelling helps and hinders communications:

Finally – I was fascinated by the session on storytelling by Tony Quinlin.  I have always liked storytelling as a way of getting ideas and knowledge out of groups that are not comfortable with sharing or communicating and Tony really illuminated why this works and gave real substance to the session.  I also enjoyed chatting to him afterwards about complexity and narrative and would recommend checking out his blog at http://narrate.typepad.com/.  One thing really stuck in my mind:  once a narrative gets a critical mass you can’t combat it with facts – you need to tell a different story

And of course, telling new stories is a wonderful way to get conversation going

Public toilets and public interest and what it means for scrutiny

It was a toilet a bit like this, just without the sign. By Phinphonephotos on Flickr

This weekend I’ve had my head stuck on working out what I can do next on the digital scrutiny project. And then I remembered a toilet.

I used to be a local reporter in north London. Each week, after we’d put the paper to bed, I’d walk round my ‘patch’. It was a picturesque place called Highgate. I’d often need what one might euphemistically refer to as a ‘comfort break’. There was only one public toilet in the middle of Highgate Village, so it became a er, regular calling point.

Sadly for me, it didn’t take all that long before the local council announced its closure as part of a series of budget cuts. This led to a few protests from locals who were unhappy to be losing a treasured local service, but no one seemed to think it was that interesting a local newspaper story.

A bit of a story I and another reporter wrote about the toilet, taken from teh Ham&High website.

Well, that is apart from me. I was enraged. My own personal pit stop had been taken away. Where would I be going to the toilet now? I furiously filed story after story about the loo closure. I think at one stage I got the nickname ‘toilet boy’. I even filed a Freedom of Information request asking for any correspondence about the lost loo.

Splash
The mickey-taking, however, stopped when my toilet-based Freedom of Information request got a reply from the council. Contained in a bundle of papers was a gem: a letter from the councillor in charge of Camden Council‘s environment department pleading with Mr Livingstone to give him the money needed to keep the toilet open, for fear its closure would hurt his chances of being re-elected. It made that week’s splash, if you’ll pardon the appalling pun.

Flushed with pride
I was obviously chuffed: a story I’d chosen to work on that others felt wasn’t important had ended up being quite, well a little bit, important. The councillor did lose the next election – along with quite a few other Labour councillors. The loo earned a reprieve, when the new council was elected and, under the name Pond Squre, is still in the list of Camden Council loos.

But, in truth, I didn’t deserve that much praise. I’d only pursued the story because it mattered to me. Its closure was a pain in the arse and I was annoyed. The moral of the tale, of course, is that it doesn’t take much at all to find out what’s going on, if you care and ask the right questions.

Bog standard
Sadly, local reporters are rarely the people who can do this stuff. They have to worry about deadlines, filling pages of copy and often don’t even live in the area they report on (I didn’t). That doesn’t mean they can’t do important work, but it’s citizens, the people affected, who need to take the lead, because it really matters to them.

So the next bit of the project will be to try to isolate a question – almost certainly about swimming pools on Where Can We Swim? – and pursue it with similar vigour to the toilet issue. I’ll have to care about it, but – importantly – I need to find others who do, too. There are a few that spring to mind – not least whether Birmingham really needs a 50m pool – but I’ll be trying very hard, very soon to work out what it is. Then it’s a matter of applying the skills I’m picking up through the project to see just how well this sort of stuff can work.

What is scrutiny and how can it get better?

Scrutinising scrutiny
I’ve just spent the larger part of my day reading about the scrutiny processes of local councils. Of course, this is the sort of thing I do for fun, but there was a serious purpose at hand. As part of my MA in online journalism, but also as part of my work at Podnosh I’ll be looking at how the web can be used to improve scrutiny processes in local government.

How are you going to start?
There’s a lot to do, but I’ve started by trying to answer a simple question for myself: What is scrutiny? That’s what all the reading is about. As someone who worked as the local government correspondent for a pretty decent local newspaper, I should have a fairly strong knowledge of this, but if I’m being honest I don’t. And if I don’t know then I imagine I’m not alone.

Shut up and tell me what scrutiny is
Scrutiny – means ‘to search’ and apparently originally meant to ‘sort rubbish’ (hmm… interesting!). In its local government context scrutiny is the business of examining and holding to account the decision-making process. The Local Government Act of 2000, required all councils to make decisions through an executive group of councillors, or cabinet. It also set up an overview and scrutiny process so councillors outside the executive could overview the council’s decisions to ensure they met the requirements of the budget and the council’s policy framework. I learned all that from Wikipedia and the Centre for Public Scrutiny’s Introduction To Scrutiny. Whoppee!

I’m going to be writing about this a lot, so I won’t dawdle, but I already have a few thoughts:

1. Scrutiny’s bloody important, because it goes to the heart of the democratic process. It’s how decision making (what government does) is overseen and checked and everyone should be interested in it, because it’s the crucial bit of democracy: we elect people, they do stuff. We need to know about it.

2. Scrutiny is difficult to understand and it isn’t, well, sexy. Which is weird, given point one.

3. I’ve singularly failed to answer how it can be made better. But it strikes me it might be a bit early for that!