Tag: Local Government

22nd June 2009

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

13th June 2009

Stuff I've seen June 9th through June 13th

These are my links for June 9th through June 13th:

Local Works | Campaigning to implement the Sustainable Communities Act – You can only use the radical new bottom-up powers in the Sustainable Communities Act if your councils (district/borough/city and county) choose to use it too! See the map and list below for those who have. If your councils have not already done so please write to them (and urge others to write too!), this sample letter will help you.
The Open Rights Group – But with Lord Carter departing, there is a serious question as to whether the government will push the Digital Britain agenda forward at all. Who will pick up the brief; will they support and desire the completion of its recommendations; will they be able to build up the political will to see any proposals through Parliament, especially as its mood darkens?
BBC NEWS | Technology | Web creator job 'beyond politics' – The inventor of the world wide web has been asked by the prime minister to help open up access to government data.
I smell a government rat in my news | Online Journalism Blog – To help you measure the amount of government-funded journalism, Nicolas Kayser-Bril built this little app, I smell a government rat in my news. Just type in any query and you’ll see the share of articles produced with state funds.
Peregrine Falcons – Worcester Webcam – Great work from Worcester City Council to engage public interest and establish broader positive relations with folk.

8th June 2009

Stuff I've seen June 4th through June 8th

These are my links for June 4th through June 8th:

Socially Media, Birmingham – 24Randomthoughts.com – Birmingham is a huge hive of activity there’s stuff going on every single week if you just seek it out (it took me a while to find it but then I can be quite lazy). The people that come to these events are welcoming and friendly and I have had the most excellent introduction to this scene and I know its only going to get better.
socialstrategy:start [Practical Participation] – There are many small hurdles to effective use of social media and technology in public services. In democratic engagement and participation; communications and outreach; education; or just about any other area of work – the same soluble barriers hold up action.
Headstar E-Government Blog » Blog Archive » Birmingham Transformation Aided By Mapping Tools – The group hopes to make Birmingham England’s first “intelligent city” by creating an integrated, fully digitised transport network. Birmingham also uses digital maps in its contact centres, where staff can pinpoint the caller’s property on a map and quickly bring up information relevant to that location.
Convince and Convert Blog: Where Social Media and Email Collide » The 6 Dangerous Fallacies of Social Media – It’s about having a strategy for making your company or organization more like a person and less like a machine. It’s about humanization.
LocalGov.co.uk – Your authority on UK Local Government > LocalGov.co.uk – Your authority on UK Local Government > Council freezes Twitter account after insult gaffe – Croydon council has suspended the Twitter account of its 'newspaper' Your Croydon after it 'tweeted' a dig at an Evening Standard journalist. A local newspaper has reported that a member of the council's staff used the account to criticise the reporter, claiming 'a squirrel could have run rings' around her after she had interviewed TV personality Esther Rantzen.
As Dominic Campbell put it so beatly, get over it.
The council claim that the post was supposed to be a private message, but was instead published for all to see.

It was then forced to post a further message which said: 'A few have picked up on a tweet about Esther R interview that was meant to be a PM (private message). No offence intended to ES (Evening Standard) lady! Still learning here!'

11th May 2009

Interesting things including Quiet Riots and Social Network Analysis in Journalism

Community Consultancy « Sociability – there’s far more to Twitter (and Facebook) than brand awareness and self-promotion. In engaging with a community of peers, I gain not just a media channel but an educational resource too. Much like a guild or professional association, Twitter allows me to build my own network of specialists with whom I share knowledge and swap industry insights. It allows me to build my own personal “guild” directed entirely to the skills and industries that interest me. They can teach me how to do my job better, whatever my job happens to be today.
Online Citizenship for young people – e-safety project ideas : Tim’s Blog – Brent LSCB have long been leaders in the drive to encourage every local authority to have an e-safety group within their Local Safeguarding Children Boards – and in encouraging organisations working with young people to have e-safety co-ordinators. Refreshingly their focus has not just been on a narrow definition of e-safety and safeguarding – but they have pro-actively recognised the importance of supporting young people to thrive online and be active online citizens as a means to promote online safety. And they have been very kind in letting me share the project and strategy ideas we developed.So – here is Citizenship for Young People: promoting e-safety through promoting opportunity – proposals for positive project as a PDF download.
Regeneration – Cities and regions – Communities and Local Government – A clear definition of regeneration – ‘Reversing economic, social, and physical decline in areas where market forces will not do this without support from government’.
www.quietriots.com – With the technology we have at our fingertips there are new ways to organise ourselves to get change to happen. Being “Mad as hell” is often where it all starts. Quiet Riots is in development
Uncloaking Economic Terrorists: a Slumlord Empire – A small, not-for-profit, economic justice organization [EJO] used social network analysis [SNA] to assist their city attorney in convicting a group of “slumlords” of various housing violations that they had been side-stepping for years. The housing violations, in multiple buildings, included:1. raw sewage leaks
2. multiple tenant children with high lead levels
3. eviction of complaining tenants
4. utility lines of six figures

The EJO had been working with local tenants in run-down properties and soon started to notice some patterns. The EJO began to collect public data on the properties with the most violations.