Tag: Politicians

COI response on Metadata and Social Media Consultations

On Tuesday I wrote this blog post about the Central Office of Information beginning a consultation on the use of social media and metadata in government. The “consultation” was first spotted by Emma Mulqueeny. This morning the press office e-mailed this response:

“The social media guidelines are aimed specifically at Civil Servants and any informal consultation has been among this audience group.

“The Metadata guidance has also been subject to an informal consultation within government. However, we are planning a six-week formal consultation with a wider set of stakeholders shortly at which point the document will be made publicly available.

“We have amended our website to make this clearer.”

Emma spotted the COI site change mentioned above. It no longer says there is a consultation going on but that the work on metadata is “in preparation” and the using social media guide is “coming soon”.

First of all I’m pleased we got a prompt response. Thank you. But here are some more specific thoughts.
You don’t need to do this on your own as an internal thing. As Emma points out in this comment on Jeremy Gould’s post:

it is simply that there is SO much good will out here – we all want this to work – and I am pretty sure this is a rare occurance in any public/private/3rd sector collaboration. We so want these guidelines to be good, and we all want them to be exemplars, and there are many people who would freely give their time to making this happen, (some of whom I know, and I know how valuable and unique their ‘time’ is)… if time can be unique… I digress

Please, please can we have this back in consultation, and please, please can we be told how to contribute. We mean well :) we want to help!

So that’s my first point so eloquently made for me.

The next is a question: Are there enough civil servants with experience of using social media as part of their work to make such an internal consultation meaningful? Social media does have a slight chicken and egg problem because it is really understood through experiencing it and until you’ve had that experience you wont know that it might be of value to you. So I think it would be wise to find some way of ensuring there are enough people involved in this internal conversation who can help those being consulted experience what they are being consulted on.

Good to know the metadata work will be made publicly available soon. Will that be as a pdf – or will it be offered up in a more conversational way? If it is presented as a wiki we could edit it, there are other online mechanisms to allow comments to be made against specific sections of a fixed text or perhaps it could even be presented as a series of blog posts – perhaps a post per chapter, which would then allow us to comment and link. Working this way will make the consultation much more effective and hopefully mean that the resulting guidelines will be more realistic, ambitious and useful.

Many of us are already thinking along these lines. Paul Canning has already contributed a response to the earlier parts of the COI’s consultation on government use of the web and Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson actively courts collaboration with us outsiders to help develop policy on the use of social media.
Any more thoughts from the COI please don’t worry about e-mailing them to me – just make a comment below or any where you find the conversation happening!

Fair Play – a brief review of this partly online consultation for young people.

I’ve just played the online consultation game from the Department of Children and Families. You can find it here www.dcsf.gov.uk/playspace. Sorry to the folk at the department if I’ve slightly skewed the result. I ticked the over 13 button (which is true) as were the rest of my answers.

I expected to be very dismissive of the game but I was instead interested. It was an intelligent way to use a simple game to narrow down who was sharing their opinions. Allowing choices of things to go on the playground as a reward was a good idea (I immediately chose the treehouse, tunnel and den – why wouldn’t you!). The main problem with the game as a tool for consultation is I have no real incentive to work my way through to the the end. However it might work as a social object – to encourage a group of people to talk about what they want from play areas. It is also only one game – so inevitably won’t be well enough targeted for different age groups.

There is a separate online questionnaire, which I imagine is where the department is really expecting to get useful data. This, and all the other information could do with being more smoothly integrated. At the moment the game has it’s own set of pages, the rest simply appears on the web in a way which suits the department internal bureaucracy rather than the user. The game ought to have it’s own site with all the other information radiating out from that. It also would work best as w widget or some sort of onlne object which can be integrated into other people’s sites, myspace pages etc. Then the audience can distribute the consultation.

Summary:

  • A good stab
  • Not in the slightest web 2.0
  • Would have benefited from being executed with more conviction.

Downing Tweet: is this about the personal, celebrity or patronage?

10 Downing Street on TwitterThere has been a lot of interest in Downing Street joining Twitter. But does it really mean much, or anything, that’s new?

At the moment number 10 is using it predominantly as a means to feed us links to press releases plus the odd Youtube film. Very good.

Within less than 24 hours 178 people were following the updates and very sociably the Prime Minister’s Office has begun following fellow twitterers. Sorry if we’re a bit loud.

Simon Dickinson was very fast to blog it, as was Paul Bradshaw who treated it as a tweeting and blogging news exercise. Marshall Manson and Stuart Bruce wondered if this is the first Prime Minister(s office) on Twitter. If this is true it doesn’t seemed to have interested Twitter on their blog but has raised eyebrows in Holland, The US and Spain. Shane Richmond is sceptical about its true value, Steve Clayton treats it as a bit of fun while Matt Wardman has started laying claim all sorts of other twtiter/govt feed names.

This is not the first time the UK Government has ventured onto twitter.

I’ve been followingHMGOV on twitter HMGOV for a week or two now. Again it is quite literally a feed of news (as HMGOV sees news). What is interesting is that so far it has only attracted myself and 12 other followers (as I took that grab earlier today).

So what is going on?

Does being a top 100 follower give access to power? Glib I know but there was no equivalent rush to follow HMGOV. (Update – his was set up on the personal initiative of Justin as a personal tool for tracking news updates using twitter)
It is clear that Downing Street is potentially much more influential than a news feed from something called HMGOV (which doesn’t even have a link to a home page) and the social web is partly about patronage, attaching oneself to those with greatest/most useful influence. This is echoed by the fact that celebrities will often have the most ‘friends’ on any social network.

Is it also a minor indicator of how the web is essentially personal? Following HMGOV is like befriending the NHS – amorphous and meaningless. DowningStreet is smaller and one can imagine (just) that a known individual (called Gordon Brown) might see or even feed the feed from time to time. However I think the account might build more enduring relationships if it had a name behind it and not Gordon’s because that isn’t credible.
What other questions does this throw up:

    How do senior government figures use patronage as they extend their professional social networks online and will it differ from how they act in other networks?
    How far will their feeds, blogs, social network profiles attract such large audiences that they diminish the influence of mainstream media?

Any answers? Any other Questions?