Author: Nick Booth

Derbyshire County Council elections – a social media experiment.

Above is Sarah Lay from Derbyshire County Council talking about her recent experience of using social media to tell the story of  the council elections of 4th June 2009.  As SOCITM the organisations which represents the folk who run council websites, puts it:

County Councils saw their web traffic double last Friday and Saturday thanks to their provision of a sophisticated online election results service coupled with use of social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds and email alerts.

Sarah describes how the council announced the results straight onto twitter (followers trebled), plus offering an election map and a virtual council chamber.  They also used a Facebook fan page (yes 74 people claimed themselves fans of a local election) where people were able to have their own conversation about the results.

In effect they by-passed mainstream media.   This system treats journalists just the same as any other citizen, offering us all the same information at the same time and space to talk about it.   However this is also good news for journalism, because it allows the professionals to spend increasingly precious time checking for truth and getting to the bottom of the implications of the election, rather than simply shoveling fact.

Sarah has written in much more detail on her own blog.  In the first of two posts, on election day itself, she wrote with great passion about preparations:

All of this has been going on for a number of months (not full time) and has been a learning curve and exciting project for this team to get into. For the first time we have had a significant presence internally in promoting and reporting on elections. It’s provided an opportunity for us to raise awareness of our work internally and work with colleagues in other departments to enable everything to happen.
Our results system will hopefully be the jewel in the crown of what we’ve done so far. We won’t know until the dust settles tomorrow and we have some feedback from Derbyshire voters, councillors, other officers and colleagues in the public sector who are kind enough to take the time to have a look.

After the elections she said:

I am still a little emotionally charged from the adrenalin of working at such pressure yesterday and giddy with the joy of how well our team worked together on the day and in the run up. Now we just need to decide what to tackle next!

Simon Wakeman at Medway Council was one of a number of people who gave support and encouragement to Derbyshire and other councils embarking on this path. He has written about how a variety of local authorities used the social web on election night.  Also on Sarah’s list of supporters was Al Smith in Newcastle.

All the above was recorded at the truly wonderful localgovcamp, held here at Fazeley Studios in Brum

Stuff I've seen June 16th through June 19th

These are my links for June 16th through June 19th:

  • Helpful Technology – New Ministry new website – From idea to live site took less than 72 hours, including signoffs – a thoroughly enjoyable collaboration between former DIUS and BERR people, led by Neil.
  • The Guardian’s tool to crowdsource MPs’ expenses data: time to play | Online Journalism Blog – So here’s The Guardian’s crowdsourcing tool for MPs’ expenses. If you’ve not already, you should have a play: it’s a dream. There are over 77,000 documents to get through – and in less than 24 hours users have gone through over 50,000 of those. You wonder how long it took The Telegraph to get that far.
  • Birmingham Social Media Cafe – Flick to page 29 of this month’s copy of Wired UK and you’ll see we got a mention as part of an article looking at free-form workplaces. Which was very nice of them.

    The next meet-up is on 10am to midday, Friday 26 June downstairs at the Coffee Lounge. Feel free to just turn up on the day but it’d be nice if you could sign up on one/all of:

  • Councils of the country unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! « Policy and Performance – The essence is that councils challenge and help each other to help them get out of difficulties or ideally prevent it before it happens. We do a lot of that already through peer challenge and review, mentoring and ‘loaning’ staff to authorities in trouble. However, taking this to the next level where it’s not just a ‘nice to do’ but the whole of local government is committed to it, is a major challenge.
  • BBC – The Editors: Social media in Iran – What really stands out is the range of sources, voices and angles to be looked into. There's no hierarchy: everything's on merit, and there is of course a new set of challenges for our staff – chiefly editorial challenges, as well as a kind of chase as social media services appear and disappear in what The Times' Judith Evans describes as "an electronic game of cat and mouse".

Digbeth formally called Birmingham's Digital District

Whenever a minister comes to call it pays to have something to announce, so later today Birmingham City Council’s deputy leader Paul Tilsley will tell Lord Carter that:

I am pleased to announce that Birmingham will create a ‘Digital District’ that brings together the innovative, learning and creative sectors enabled through a next generation hi speed broadband infrastructure. Spanning several hundred acres from the creative industries in Digbeth, our science and technology sectors at Birmingham Science Park and our world class developments at Eastside, it will provide an exciting environment for our creative industries and young entrepreneurs. The digital district will act as a showcase and business demonstrator to attract new businesses and inward investment and offer a strategy for economic recovery. It will provide a digital infrastructure that captures the ambitions of the Digital Britain Report, where the creative and digital media sectors and knowledge intensive businesses are able exploit the potential that high bandwidth conveys through the creation of new and exciting media content and job opportunities.

Very nice. That’s where I work! Does that mean that Digbeth will get better mobile phone reception and something as high tech as a cash point?

"Government of the web, not just on the web" Digital Britain Report

“Government of the web, not just on the web”

is a critical sentence in today’s Digital Britain report.  Digital Britain is udoubtedly wide ranging, but if you’re interested in how the internet affects how we gover ourselves then you’ll want to skim through the Executive Summary (pdf -why?) until you hit point 74 and then spend some time reading Chapter 8: The Journey to Digital Government (also pdf).

So what does “Government of the web” mean?

1 Transactions: first it’s how we use the internet to do business with government (CH 8 point 16):

We propose starting a Digital Switchover of Public Services Programme in 2012. We will need to consider in more detail the ramifications of switching each service to digital but an initial list might include:

  • Student loans
  • Companies House registration
  • Personal tax returns for higher rate taxpayers
  • Electoral roll registration
  • School registration
  • Redundancy advice processing
  • Debt advice

It’s not a list that leaves my heart  a flutter.  Many digitally literate folk will already do some of these (which suggests, as ever, literacy is core).  However to force people to do some things that are core to many lives, such as school registration, only online will also encourage digital literacy.  Such ambitions are  only possible because of the policy to ensure everyone has access to broadband by the same time (even though it’s a very modest 2Mbs speed).

2 Procurement:  sounds dead yawnsome, but the paragragh 26 (CH 8) of the report wants to make it easier for smaller more innovative businesses to win government IT contracts. If that works it may accelerate the use of open source software and faster development and encourage the growth of some fine small businesses.  The simplest example of this is the 10 Downing Street website, built on wordpress at far lower than expected cost.

3 Data: Let me just quote the report.

Government has accepted the vision of the POI report, and set out in its paper of 13th May 2009 a series of initiatives aimed at achieving the principles of Open Information, Open Innovation, Open Discussion and Open Feedback as outlined below. Government is still working on some of these recommendations and an update on progress is planned for the Summer.  The Cabinet Office will take a leadership role in catalysing this change.

That’s progress, the interim report didn’t even mention the Power of Information Task Force.

That’s about it.  The report has moved slightly beyond an understanding that Digital and Government is simply about transaction, but no far.  It is fundamentally about democracy.