Category: Leadership

“Councils are no longer dependent on traditional media to communicate their messages”

This has come from Vicky Sargeant at the Socitm press office and I offer it to you verbatim simply because I don’t have time to fully digest it and add links just now, there doesn’t seem to be a apge to link too, but I don’t want to forget to share it with you:

News Release:

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 tolls like Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds and email alerts.

Figures from the Socitm Website Takeup service, subscribed to by more than half of all county councils show that on Friday 5th and Saturday 6th June, web traffic to county council websites was more than double that of the Friday and Saturday of the previous week.

This trend is bourne out by results from individual councils like Derbyshire, which last Friday saw the highest ever number of visits to its website in one day including more than 19,000 visits to its election section alone.

The sophistication of the election results coverage by councils through their websites has been captured through a survey by Socitm Insight, publishers of the annual Better connected report on council website quality. The survey looked at websites of county councils and new unitaries where elections had been held to see how the results were being reported. It followed a similar exercise carried out at the last county elections in May 2005.

The survey found that almost all councils were reporting results on their websites ‘live’ or as near to real-time as possible and were carrying very prominent links and features on the home page. Many included some form of interactive map, summary tables and charts or other graphics to allow visitors to follow the results as they happened and to access a summary in various forms. Some councils provided TV style graphics including ‘virtual council chambers’ filling up with figures in party colours as the results came in.

A few councils provided a live online comparison with previous election results, showing whether seats were being held, lost or gained. A number of councils stated when the count was due to start, but even better were councils who offered an estimate as to what time the first result was likely to be expected.

Nine councils were also promoting their use of RSS feeds and / or Twitter to publish the results, using these opportunities for to enhance their interaction with the public through these new channels. During the results period, fans on Derbyshire’s Facebook page rose from 22 to 73 and their Twitter account followers rose from 122 to 335. Derbyshire’s Facebook ‘fans’ were contributing comments, and responding to one another as the day unfolded. One said ‘Local newspaper site reporting recounts in Long Eaton while Twitter and @derbyshirecc knows its over. SO behind. V. poor compared to you guys. Many thanks for all the hard work pulling this together today’.

Other innovations noted on election pages included:

  • Norfolk County Council – featured its YouTube video on why you should vote
  • Lancashire County Council – offered the facility to subscribe to receive results by e-mail
  • North Yorkshire County Council – featured a video about how the democratic process works

Surrey County Council – charts included a summary of holds and a swing chart
‘Our survey provides evidence of the opportunity local councils now have to use their website and social media tools to engage with and inform local people as never before’, says Martin Greenwood, Programme Director for Socitm Insight. ‘Councils are no longer dependent on traditional media to communicate their messages and can outperform them anyway as a source of immediate, authoritative and totally up to date information – we have seen this with local emergencies like flooding, and now with elections. Councils should be seizing this new opportunity with both hands.’

More Socitm news here.

How can we help Andrew Stott as Director of Digital Engagement?

twitter.com/CabinetOffice/status/1782883295
twitter.com/CabinetOffice/status/1782883295

Andrew Stott is moving from being the Government’s Deputy Chief Information Officer to the new post of Director of Digital Engagement.  He’s just become key to the world of social media, data mashing, government and democratic shift.

Titles like Chief information Officer make me shudder a little. I’m not even a fan of knowledge management as a term – it seems to over formalise how we share what we know.  One thing that looks very promising is his depth of experience with geographical information.  The Guardian rather oddly described him as an “experienced Press Officer”.  Jimmy Leach at The Independent summed him up as:  “entering from the IT angle, rather than from the social media angle as others have pointed out.”  So I went looking for reassurance that he will also be a champion of people,  conversation, connection and collaboration: Dod’s interviewed Andrew last year and quoted him as saying:

The Treasury’s refurbishment, Stott says, with a big coffee area right in the heart of the department, “has created a culture of ad hoc meetings where you bump into other people. It is not just about smart IT; it is about getting people talking to one another.” The Information Matters strategy lists the new GCHQ building as another example of where communication, accidental meetings and face-to-face time have been made the norm. “It is compelling,” says Ceeney, “they have very consciously changed their whole culture from one of ‘need to know’ to one of ‘need to share’.”

The new job will be:

  • implementation of the Power of Information Taskforce recommendations
  • chairing the Government’s Knowledge Council and working with The National Archives to take forward the Information Matters strategy for Knowledge and Information Management
  • increasing the civil service’s use of internal digital tools to improve  cross Government coordination and collaboration as an aid to better policy development and service delivery
  • the civil service website

Can I help Andrew Stott?

My first thoughts are the most obvious.

  1. Join the conversation. Assuming Andrew wants to engage with us, take the time to give him useful help.
  2. Offer him a mentor or two? Is that cheeky? I hope not. Who would be ripe for that role?
  3. Make sure he knows he’s surrounded by a substantial community that wants POIT to succeed.

This extra tip came from Josie Fraser:

and there’s loads of other reaction here:  http://search.twitter.com/search?q=Andrew+Stott

Other blogs writing about this:

Puffbox. Andrew Lewin. Demsoc. Paul Canning. Emma Mulqueeny. Dave Briggs. Neil Williams. Harry Metcalfe: the next morning Andrew showed up at the office having spent all the previous evening writing a bunch of code to take the nasty XML and make it into useful data. Helen Nicol. Paul Evans.

Very Local Media blossoming in Lozells – but who should keep watering it?

I was really pleased to find the first bulletins from Lozells News – a new child led digital service, appear in my feed stream last week:

Lozells News Highlights from can uk on Vimeo.

This is a project from CAN-UK, who’ve been working from Ladywood for more than a decade. Lozells already has the very fine www.lozells.info and the South Lozells Housing Regeneration area is beginning to use the web to tell the story of how it is progressing, see vision-lozells.org.

A couple of things.

The first is the question of how to integrate these a little better and so seed more local story telling? Perhaps a local social media surgery might help? It is a certainly somehting I’d be interested in.

The other is that our own experience of creating local news with young people  in Frankley or Castle Vale (and others) tells us there remains a problem of how we keep things going once the project ends. There’s no lack of enthusiasm from the young people:  Comments like

this was the best week ive had at Frankley, and making this podcast was a great experiance!

and

can’t wait to see if we do anything else

show there is an appetite for more.  It’s rarely an issue of equipment or websites etc, these are now cheap enough and simple enought to leave behind.  I think the problem is often who will take the lead/ownership in your absence.

So thoughts?  How could we ensure that when the project dosh dries up the storytelling keeps flowing?