I like it. A lot. It puts our content and our relationships first. Can the design push the publicity desires of the app makers into the background without leaving them disillusioned? We’ll see.
Tag: Social Networking
Review of the new Local Priorities web service from the Dept of Communities and Local Government
I do like the idea behind this new web service from the Department of Communities and Local Government which tells you about your Local Area Agreement.
Local Area Agreements (LAA) are negotiated between a local council (plus the local strategic partnership, like BeBirmingham) and central government. Together they create a list of key improvements and sign a three year deal to hit some key targets – that’s the LAA. Every local authority will have a different set of priorities – Birmingham will include tackling gun crime, Boscombe wont.
This new website uses a map to help us find out what the priorities are for where we live. This is good. In the simple sense information empowers people. If I know what the council or police force’s priorities are I can negotiate with them better. I can improve the way I influence them. I can also decide whether to challenge those priorities and make the case for new priorities. It all helps focus and clarify the conversation between citizen and those who serve the citizen.
So the principal is great but execution has shortcomings. First of all the information isn’t very usable. If I go to the Birmingham part of the site I can’t create a permanent link to this information. Instead I get the link which generates the data from the database:
http://www.localpriorities.communities.gov.uk/LAAResults.aspx
This means that a local newspaper or a local community group can’t link to the Birmingham part of the site to share with others what the targets are for the neighbourhood. Without permanent links the whole web service is based on the assumption that people will come to your site rather than the more realistic idea of letting your information go to where they are on the web.
Next the information lacks detail.
It tells me Birmingham has 35 targeted priorities. I have to presume they are not listed in any order of importance. For example NI (national indicator?) 001 tells me that we have a target called “% of people who believe people from different backgrounds get on well together in their local area”. What it doesn’t say is what that percentage is in Birmingham at the moment and or the percentage we’re trying to achieve. Likewise NI 154 tells me nothing more than one of Birmingham’s 35 agreed priorities is called: “Net additional homes provided”. That’s it. No more place specific detail.
Is this a question of time? Will the extra information about specific numbers for Birmingham be added? If not why not? If so how is this happening?
The whole process could be streamlined if individual local authorities have their own login to add the specifics of their targets.
They could further update it when/if those targets have been met. They could add links to evidence of the achievement, whether text, video or audio. Alongside that residents could leave their comments, a little like public comments on parliamentary debates on TheyWorkForYou. Local residents, newspapers, businesses and communities group could also keep track of this and share it if you provided an rss feed for every local authorities set of targets.
The information could also be used to create a game or competition to encourage local authorities to keep the data refreshed. Politicians like to keep track of who’s on top. They might even respond to a widget which rings a bell every time a target is hit – either in their region, or nationally.
One last thing – it isn’t really local enough. Many people don’t know which local authority area they live in. If we want everyone to easily access the LAA priorities then a postcode or map based search system would be better – integrating perhaps google maps with the site. This is something already done by others (notably mysociety with fixmystreet), so technically is now quite straightforward.
The bulk of these things would be relatively easy to do through ning or perhaps wordpress multiuser – all on the same url as now.
To sum up it’s a good idea but I can’t see many people finding it very useful in its current form.
Civil Service Principals for Online Participation – Be Responsive.
After the suspension of a civil servant for blogging Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson has finally got some guidelines up to help civil servants join the online conversation. They are based on the civil service code and a big conversation which was encouraged by Tom on his blog and evolved into Richard Allan’s task force on the Power of Information. I like the simplicity and clarity. For me the advance is number 3 “Be Responsive”. Encourage constructive criticism is good but is also going to exercise some civil service structures and perhaps liberate others:
1 Be credible: Be accurate, fair, thorough and transparent.
2 Be consistent: Encourage constructive criticism and deliberation. Be cordial, honest and professional at all times.
3 Be responsive When you gain insight, share it where appropriate.
4 Be integrated: Wherever possible, align online participation with other offline communications.
5 Be a civil servant: Remember that you are an ambassador for your organisation. Wherever possible, disclose your position as a representative of your department or agency.
Other feedback from bits of the web:Brilliant in their simplicity.
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!