July 2008 – Page 2 – Whitehall Webby

Show us a better way – not just for real people

I’ve been following the show us a better way competition – asking people to come up with ideas about making better use of public data – with great interest over the last few weeks. The scale of ideas has been seriously impressive, in fact its so much so that its seriously messed up my RSS reader.

One thing that has bothered me though is that the competition isn’t really being promoted around Whitehall, partly because civil servants are not eligible for the prize for the winning entry (£20,000 if you’re interested, and why wouldn’t you be?).

Earlier today I was at a workshop to discuss the recently published principles for civil servants participating online (I’ll post something about it separately soon) when it was mentioned that a separate prize has been put up for the best suggestion from a civil servant, a Macbook Air. That’s right a Macbook Air.

That’s not a shabby prize by anyone’s standards. We should be shouting this from across the rooftops of Whitehall because there are a lot of ‘owners’ of data sets in government and I bet a fair few of them have ideas about how they could make better use of them. Now they have a pretty good incentive to do so.

Now, how about mashing up blue flag beaches with bus routes, GPS coordinates for buses and health inspected ice cream parlours? Might be able to fit another tutti-frutti in before the last lift home. Mmm ice cream…….

Enabling staff conversations online

Last Wednesday we ran our first online staff webchat, allowing anyone in the organisation to put questions to representatives from the senior management team (including our permanent secretary).

Hardly revolutionary you may say, after all webchats aren’t exactly new and in the current ‘social media’ excitement in government, where everyone is trying to be the first to do something cutting edge, webchats look decidely old hat.

But there were very good business reasons why we did what we did and didn’t get diverted by something more vogueish.

Depending how you count them, we have between 80,000 and 100,000 staff, making us the third largest government department.

Reaching out to the them is difficult. We are a mish-mash of organisations that have come together, all with different cultures, different ways of working, different ways of communicating, and – crucially in this case – different IT systems.

Attempting to use web engagement tools across our intranets couldn’t be guaranteed to work. So we took a gamble and ran the webchat on the public internet. Unsurprisingly some people were very nervous about this, but you know what? People behaved themselves and the discussion went well without any technological or conversational difficulties.

Because of the variability of kit on people’s desks we went for a lowest common demoninator solution that performed nicely on older browsers and without any need for plug-ins or cool ajax-y functionality.

This wasn’t about the tools, it was about the need to communicate and the opportunity to use technology to attempt to solve the problem.

Its difficult from an initial look at the stats to know exactly how many staff participated in the webchat, partly because of the way our IT firewalls tend to use a small number of IP addresses for each physical location. But we know it was well over 1000 people, and maybe significantly more (we’re still working on digging into the data). That might sound like a small number but many of our staff across the country don’t have ready access to PCs and internet access

We had over 40 pre-submitted questions and 130+ asked during the one hour chat. 52 got answered on the day (not bad going in one hour!), with the rest being published on the intranet shortly.

All in all, a good first crack at reaching staff online. Proof of the pudding – we’ve been asked to run one each month from now on.

Teacamp tomorrow afternoon

Quick reminder that its the regular teacamp get-together tomorrow afternoon from 2pm to 4pm in Cafe Zest (which is on the top floor of House of Fraser in Victoria Street, London) for government web type people.

I missed the last one, and only floated around the last few due to pressure of work, but I am conscious that we are almost at the beginning of the summer holiday season, so it would be great to see as many of you there tomorrow as possible.

I know that some are coming along to have a natter about how we can turn Digital People from a name and an idea into something real and worthwhile. But whatever is on your mind, come along for a cup of tea or coffee and a chat with like minded souls.

Governance of Britain – an update

There is so much going on at the moment that I completely forgot to point you to the fact that we have updated the Governance of Britain campaign site that we launched last December. I say we, but I have personally had very little to do with it this time round.

Luckily Simon Dickson is still involved and the refreshed site looks much more like the kind of thing we envisioned first time round (when we only had a few days to lash it together). Well done Simon for making it happen.

We’ve now got two new elements on the site designed to engage users – prominent use of video and a deliberative discussion area. The idea is that both will be updated regularly and will feed off each other, video representing the real world conversations and events, the site for online. Be interesting to see how it works out.