Tag: engagement

6th May 2016

Droney McDroneface

Mike Rawlins sent me a link to the Boaty McBoatFace public consultation on Faceboook, probably a day or two before it became front page news.

I chuckled. For hours. It’s one of those things that made me randomly burst out laughing for days afterwards. It hit my funny bone, and it hit the nations.

Today we’re told that the ship will be called RSS Sir David Attenborough. According to the minister responsible, Jo Johnson, the underwater unmanned vehicle (submarine drone) on the ship will be called Boaty McBoatyface. What a bore. Perhaps it should be called Droney McDroneface.

There’s something else about this that isn’t funny…

Hello #BoatyMcBoatface! The name lives on as the remotely operated vehicle aboard RRS Sir David Attenborough pic.twitter.com/o05NByBFhd

— Jo Johnson (@JoJohnsonUK) May 6, 2016

Besides the obvious, that you asked our opinion then ignored it, it’s how glib government is about consultation. Formal government engagement or consultation with the public has long been mostly a lip service exercise.

So the one clear lesson from this is: ask us about things that matter! If you consult us on something essentially trivial, we will either ignore it or quite likely have fun with it. If we do, respect that. Better still, why not preserve our attention for things that matter?

24th March 2014

Why public meetings are the rocky-bed of the public talking to public services.

A very honest piece from Delib called Why Delib Has Given Up on Police and Crime Commissioners has given me an opportunity to pull together a range of things about the bleedin’ obvious.

Delib is a business which helps public services with digital engagement – much like us but a bit different. They’ve spent months trying to get Police Crime Commissioners talking to them about better ways to talk to the public about policeing and crime and safer communities. They’ve now given up. Why? Because they keep being told that the Police Commissioner holds public meetings, and that’s good enough:

You wouldn’t walk to a phone box to call a friend in Australia anymore. Equally you wouldn’t walk to a draughty town hall, at an inconvenient time, to ask a question of a PCC you’ve never heard of.

Public meetings have moved from the bedrock of local democracy to the rocky-bed. A place that only seems still comfortable for those used to a diet of lumpy and cold communications – or those who would rather not share their bed with anyone.

This has been recognised in Birmingham with an impassioned report from Cllr Lisa Trickett and her scrutiny colleagues on public engagement. (I gave evidence to the ctte). In it they conclude that the traditional Cllrs meeting with residents in a hall doesn’t cut it:

7.3.10. Overall our conclusion is that Ward Committees are not currently fit for the purpose set out in the Leader’s Policy Statement (2012) as the major means for citizens to engage on issues affecting their area.
Its recommendation opens the door to radical democratic alternatives.

7.3.13. Some strong pioneering effort should be promoted across the city for radical experimentation with new and different formats.

We are about to start working in Kings Heath and Moseley to support that shift. There the aim is to create a fledgling partnership. How this will happen in detail I’m not yet clear. That’s a good thing. It is very easy for those who organise one process to replace it with another which they in turn have organised. Doing that misses the opportunity to involve new people in change, but there’s a tricky balancing act between the open and involved and the organised enough for people to appreciate how it might help them.

That’s the core of it: it’s better to meet people where they are – very few people are in draughty halls and more and more people are on the internet.

—– Some extra stuff…

but, there are also wider changes for the council centrally to

1. to improve the Council website
2. for an improvement plan for how the Council deals with citizens as customers
3. for a ‘cross-cutting improvement plan’ for consultation
4. to ‘bring forward a plan that addresses the key concerns raised and opportunities set out in the report and take on the fundamental step changes set out in Chapters 5-8.’

Number 1 is actually about the core problem that for years the democracy section of the council’s website has been unusable – you can’t link to an individual document. I found the report on the Centre for Public Scrutiny and the Birmingham Against the Cuts website – I couldn’t find it on the council site through a google search. A google docs accounts with some folders in it would have been cheaper and better – and that, or dropbox, still might be the best solution.

As for two -when given evidence I bashed on a bit about this thinking of us as customers. I’m very keen to encourage officers to be thought of and act as citizens – not as shop assistants. This report talks of people as citizens (although recognises that often all we do really want is a simple and effective service from the council).

Our job is to encourage a wider participation in local civic conversation on the web – encourage people to use the web to say what they want to say and try and help public services learn how to listen to that – join in and make what comes out of the conversation useful for the community. Of course Moseley and Kings Heath already has plenty of that. Which is why some people still stick to their public meetings – because they can be fairly confident of what will happen.

5th April 2012

Engaged Communities – Social Media Improving Neighbourhoods

The above exchange took place recently between Wv11 a hyperlocal blog in Wednesfield (*disclaimer* I am the co-founder of Wv11 – but this wasn’t me tweeting this time), Wolverhampton Parks and Wolverhampton Homes, the ALMO (Aram Length Management Organisation) that looks after housing for Wolverhampton Council. It was a simple and common complaint involving litter. There wasn’t an immediate solution as someone had to physically get out to the park to deal with it but because the message was not only acknowledged positively but there was also a response given about the planned action, any other residents following this exchange knew something was planned to get the litter cleaned up and later on when it was dealt with they could see that the promise was carried through.

This wasn’t the first conversation of this sort to take part online and it surely wont be the last but to my mind at least this kind of engagement can only improve communities.

It may start as small as getting rubbish collected from the park put just imagine the possibilities. If lots of people can take part in a wider conversations with service providers and local partners, if they are responded to as individuals and if they can see that not only are things are getting done as a result, but also see the processes in place that get them there they are more likely to engage in the future and feel part of the bigger picture that makes their neighbourhood tick.

14th February 2012

Community building through social media – how police building relationships online can get you support when it really matters

Recently I was having a conversation with Nick about the value of social media, the community links you can build using Twitter and blogs and the value this has in the real world, when I remembered the story of PC Richard Stanley’s blog.

PC Stanley is a blogging police officer and Twitter user from Walsall. He uses these platforms to talk to the “locals” about his job and help give plain English examples of how the police work and why things are done in a certain way sometimes. I read his blog, follow him on Twitter and have personally never found him to be anything less than factual and informative with some nice humorous banter, creme eggs, #foxwatch and competitions thrown into the mix.

A couple of months ago he wrote a piece in response to a news article in the national press where a suspected burglar was shot during an incident and the property owner who had shot him was arrested.

It was a factual piece that explained, from a policing point of view, why sometimes the “victim” of the burglary can also end up being arrested along with the burglar in cases like this. It was written so that it would be easy for the public to digest – and I felt it was. It was informative without being patronising and a good insight into how a decision to arrest someone could be made.

However, what wasn’t easy for regular readers to digest was what happened next. His blog’s comment section exploded with anonymous commentators condescending and, in some cases, outright insulting PC Stanley. It wasn’t an argument about the accuracy of any details in the blog but an inference he was doing something wrong by engaging in this way and “toeing the party line.”