Tag: Birmingham UK

Podnosh is based in Birmingham in the UK, so often we write about exciting things that are going on near us.

Flickr for Government Jobs.

Recruitment for government jobs is a great opportunity to demonstrate how letting data free can improve the quality of government. Why do I start with such a blunt statement. This post pointed me to the growing discussion here on Tom Watson’s site about how recruitment in government might be given the Power of Information (pdf) Task Force treatment.

Some thoughts:

Treat all jobs for public bodies as your data set.

Don’t get distracted by a big recruitment website. A number of comments suggest a single jobs.gov.uk website. The opportunity here comes from allowing information about jobs to flow into all the little cracks of the web, to be placed under the eyeballs of those with the skills, knowledge, passion and ideas to be brilliant at the jobs. This does not mean we necessarily need a single website where all government vacancies are presented. However we would need a mechanism for standardising information about vacancies and attaching that to a myriad of rss feeds. To do that we might require something on the web where jobs are submitted… How about a government jobs equivalent of flickr – where descriptions etc can be reasonably standardised, those submitting the jobs can add them to groups they think are relevant, tag them as they see fit but critically important others can further group and tag the jobs. Obviously all tags, groups etc should have their own rss feeds to allow sites across the web to bring the jobs to the attention of their niches.

Social media requires social objects. Can the culture of writing job ads change so they become more of a social object, encouraging people to share them around the web? With that in mind services which widgetise government jobs and make them embed-able should be encouraged. (Did I just write widgetise a government job! Wince.)

Geotag. Place is also a niche. Almost everybody has a geographical constraint on where they will work so all jobs should be geotagged. (imagine how developers/economic regeneration experts/community advocates etc might use such data. Think of the opportunities for schools/colleges/adult ed to monitor required skills and meet them).

Crowd Source Job Descriptions/Person Specs. Most work cultures suffer from recruiting the type of worker they already understand to fill roles they already recognise. The government jobs version of flickr could also be used to seek suggestions of what skills would be needed to solve particular problems. Before recruiting pop up a description of what needs to be achieved (tagged etc) and ask people what type of person could nail that. Sort of a recruitment sandbox.

Don’t stifle competition for employees. Government departments, NHS trusts, local councils should be encouraged to present jobs on their own websites in their own context. It’s partly there that they begin selling themselves to potential employees and this competition should be encouraged, not hampered.

One final thought is that a single rss feed containing all government jobs would be political dynamite, a satirists Nirvana.

The outriders of society…

This extract on skating over ideas and invest in some deeper thinking comes from a speech to new graduates at The Pacific Northwest College of Art. Susan S Szenasy , editor of the Metropolis Magazine told the students:

As artists and communication designers you can choose to be the
outriders of society. Like the scouts in the old western films, you can
be in the position of surveying the horizon and alerting the rest of us
to the dangers and surprises ahead. But I worry about you. I worry that
while you have evolved the use of your thumbs to work at phenomenal
speeds, you are not as interested in developing the habits you need to
accumulate knowledge, knowledge that can inform your vision as artists.
I mean knowledge of the world—science, literature, and
history—knowledge of the great contributions others are making or have
made to our rich understanding of humanity and the earth which gives us
life.
It is not enough to find information instantly and use it
opportunistically to support your argument. To be able to analyze and
synthesize you need to delve deeply into a subject, build up your
understanding incrementally, and own that knowledge. Own it, so you can
call it up when you need it, without turning to your PDA, and use your
amazing brain-power to interpret what you know when critical analysis
is needed. What I’m asking of you is what I have always asked of
myself: To be endlessly curious about everything, to search for facts
when you need them, but more importantly, to search for ideas and
meaning. Read a book, look at a building or a landscape, drink it all
in—make it your own.


For more read here. Hat tip to Canufluck.

Community Docking

Unity-Zarya-Zvezda_STS-1061.jpgWhen I speak to council officers and civil servants about community engagement the conversation often conjures up mental images of docking space stations.

The officers are sincerely trying to picture interesting ways to approach the community, connect with it, create an airlock where they and the community can talk and then back into their own orbiters, reseal the doors, flush out the airlocks and return to business.

The conversation is so often based on the assumption that ‘services’ are separate from the people they serve. They have things to get on with regardless of what the folk around them do. The service is in its own orbit and conversation with the community is a nicety, not a necessity.

This mind set is riddled with contradictions which were exposed at last weeks fab Comunities & Local Government meeting to discuss social media and the forthcoming Community Empowerment White Paper.

The reason why this view perpetuates is because services are rarely delivered by the community they are intended to serve. They are rarely delivered by those who are already ‘engaged’. As one of the participants so elegantly put it – the government is trying to retail services when it should step back and structure itself as the wholesale part of the delivery chain. That would create huge opportunities for empowerment in the people led retails sector.

Of course local government has always been part of the retail arm of central government and increasingly local government is looking to create neighbourhood operations to push the retailing closer to the ground.

But these are organisations that still have a very different culture, or perhaps atmosphere from the groups of people they are designed to help. And until that atmosphere is breathable by both the service and served we will continue to dock when we should be engaged.

See Also:

Dan McQuilan’s excellent post on how the social web will make greater empowerment inevitable, the questions for government is how to relate to it.

Dave Briggs explanation of how social media will do this.