Last year we provided support to councillors at the Billesley Ward ctte for them to experiment with low cost live streaming. They tried it once as a learning exercise – 15 months later they back with this….
It’s just shows that patience and persistence pays off and something we find all the time: that the skills you help someone develop today can turn into fruitful activity much later. Bravo Cllr Alex Buchanan for taht persistence.
There’s a conversation going on in South Birmingham – led by Karen Cheney and Austin Rodriguez and others – about how to get more public democratic processes shared more widely. This builds on various work (including a Cllr in Billesley buying some kit to live stream for the first time their ward ctte meeting). At a meeting yesterday we talked a bit about equipment and platforms, but also that not all meetings need to be live streamed etc. So, I wondered, could establish stages of activity for digital open local democracy? I said I write up my thoughts as a blog post….
What are the principles?
In the mould of Tim Berners-Lee, I’m adapting his 5 stars of open data. I’m know I won’t be the first person to think through these stages, – I’ve searched but not found the 5 stars thing for very local public meetings. If you find it then please share. Update: this is where I’ve seen something similar before: http://www.comms2point0.co.uk/comms2point0/2014/6/3/proposals-to-improve-health-and-wellbeing-board-social-media.html/
This is a summation of some of our experience social reporting over the years and the following list applies to local processes, currently things like police priority setting meetings, patient forums for GP and CCG’s, council ward committee’s, housing association walkabouts, neighbourhood forum meetings or neighbourhood watch groups. This is the myriad of daily democracy that we have created over time.
1 star: Be seen and be welcoming. Put agenda’s and minutes somewhere where it is very easy to find them and where it is easy for others to share them. Make sure everyone knows they’re invited. (This could be a blog, just on google docs with a link or creating an Eventbrite to invite people to meetings. It can include putting invites through doors and agenda’s and minutes on public noticeboards.)
2 star: Talk about what you’re doing. This means that you have a #hashtag for your meeting and publicise it and also share what you know (make sure that background information to papers is publicly available). You are open to others live reporting or recording what you are doing.
3 star: Do it live. You do the above but you also do it during your meeting or event. This is where you can introduce a livestream of video or audio or live social reporting through twitter, facebook and or a blog. This also means you only hold meetings in places where there is good, publicly usable wi-fi or 3g.
4 star: Involve people outside the room in the meeting. This is a step change from being seen to be doing. This values the questions and comments made on the web as being as important to your meeting as the ones made in the room. They are incorporated though hashtags or services like cover it live, blyve or a facebook q&a as the event unfolds. This could also mean organising events specifically for talking to people on the web.
5 star: It’s a permanent conversation. This fifth step recognises that the civic conversation you’re having doesn’t just happen at times and places you decide. It can happen all the time. It means being responsive in between meetings when, for example a comment appears on a website or a hashtag.
There are other stages I could have added – using open data for example, but I’m trying to envisage stages by which we can help us develop from the familiar “meeting with 1 man and a dog in a draughty village hall”. So perhaps the 5 stars of “more” open local democracy.
Behind all this is another core principle:
Keep it simple:
If you can’t make it work without these then clearly start looking for other ways of doing but start with keep it simple, not with “we need to build a portal for that” .
Thanks also to our very own Steph Clarke for helping me think through this – she’s oodles of experience of encouraging public services to get involved with people online both at work and her volunteer efforts at www.wv11.co.uk
I’ve mentioned about how we’ve worked in South Birmingham in conjunction with the South Birmingham Community Safety Partnership when we wrote about what Austin Rodriguez , South Birmingham Safer Places officer had to say about the project.
What I haven’t said yet is that we’ve been working on a second phase of the surgeries with him.
Austin has been doing a great thing empowering the people he works with to use social media to talk to each other, to improve where they live and to build a stronger communities and with him we’ve continued to build on the momentum from phase one of the project.
In February we were holding a surgery in Bartley Green that Alex Buchanan – Ward Councillor of Billesley – attended. He came along with Austin with the idea that he’d like to trial live streaming his ward committee meeting . Birmingham City Council have been live streaming their meetings from the council house and he wanted to see how he could make that work locally.
Out in the community centres and church halls where community meetings are usually held there isn’t the infrastructure the council have – there isn’t high speed Wi-Fi or high definition webcams and high quality controlled audio. Nor is there a bespoke website to send the feed to, so we had to look at what was available.
Councillor Buchanan had invested in a laptop with a webcam and a decent microphone so we decided Google Hangouts would be the way to go, using the On Air function to stream to Youtube, which also meant it could be shared via other platforms and embedded into blogs – We spent about an hour looking at how this could work for them and then on the 20th February they put it into action.
You can see in the video above that while the camera was positioned in such a way that the whole top table could be seen – the microphone struggled to pick everyone up. As the people farthest away from the set up took their turn to speak at times the audio wasn’t very clear at all but then they weren’t using a multi-directional mic that can pick everyone up like at the council house. What they had was a small mic plugged into a laptop – but it could have been moved to pick up more voices.
This seems obvious watching it back but again it comes back to the fact this was a trial and a learning experience. What it needs next is just a bit of bravery, Bravery to do it again and to take what they’ve learned doing this and apply it. If during the meeting they were willing to pause proceedings by just a few seconds to re-position the mic before people took their turn to talk this would greatly improve the quality of the audio, make better use of the technology they have available and improve the experience for the community watching.
In saying that though it is fantastic that Councillors are looking at ways to open up the local democratic process to more people, and live streaming of meetings is definitely a good way to go. The fact that Councillor Buchanan was willing to even consider giving this a try is fantastic and who knows what could be next? What other public conversations could take place in – well – public?
Lynn Horsnett and Nick Booth at Kings Norton SMS
Over the last few years the social media surgery movement has spread further than anyone could have imagined at that first (and supposedly one off) event back in 2008. There are now surgeries held in 70 different towns and cities all over the uk, and further beyond, in Australia, Canada, Switzerland and even Nepal to name but a few.
But, in the birth place of the Surgeries, Birmingham, there has been another spread happening -less global and more local, into our communities. In the last 6 months we have been working with partners such as the local strategic partnership and the police across the city and with their support there have been surgeries in:
as well as the continued support for the Central Birminham sessions.
These surgeries have been able to support people where they live and work, to enable them to get online to support the good work that they are doing in their neighbourhoods.
Like Lol Thurstan for instance, he came along asking for help distributing his monthly Neighbourhood Watch newsletter and we helped him set up a blog. Lol is now already exploring the possiblilities of sharing more than just hisNeighbourhood Watch news with his community – taking the idea of a neighbourhood magazine and reproducing it online, and there’s Sandra Turner. Sandra wanted some support promoting her community centre and finding out what was going on in her area. We sat with her while she set up a facebook page and later a twitter account so now she can do just that – it’s enabled her to share information online and make connections with others in her area.
And we’re not done yet. There are more dates already set and hopefully still more to come. We’d love to see you there whether it to receive some support or to offer your help. You can visit www.socialmediasurgery.com to register to attend any of these sessions, or find one nearer to you.