Category: social media

Steph Gray – social media swiss army knife

If you’re not aware of his work, you should check out Steph Gray’s blog. Steph works at DIUS (the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills) and as far as I know is the first person in government employed to deploy and embed social media skills and techniques across the organisation. And over the last few months he has been quietly getting on and doing a bloody good job.

I’m a believer that there is never one online solution to a problem (which is why I don’t like enterprise or corporate ‘solutions’) especially considering how many good cheap or tools there are out there across the web. What we need to do more of is experiment, lots. If you’re going to do that kind of thing properly, you probably need someone like Steph – who is a pretty good blueprint of the ideal social media evangelist in government:

  • He’s not a designer, but has a good eye for design
  • He’s not a programmer – but has a working knowledge of programming languages and operating systems to set things up (including this wonderful tool)
  • He’s not a builder but knows how to deploy tools such as blogging platforms, customise them and make them work
  • He has a strong communications skillset
  • He has bags of common sense
  • He knows where his expertise ends, is honest about it rather than trying to blag it, and always knows someone else who can help.

All of these are crucial and frankly, without that mix of skills, it would be very difficult to do what he is doing in any organisation (that is unless you had bags of money to recruit lots of people to cover the bases above).

Most importantly, its his full-time job, not part of it or an add-on. So he has time and space to get things right.

Steph’s done an impressive amount of work so far in the last six months, some of which is visible, some of which is not. He’s written some great pragmatic guidance illustrating ways of explaining the benefits of all this stuff to the business, rather than blindly evangelising social media for social media’s sake. And he’s been good enough to share it around to colleagues across government.

If departments are serious about investing in social media, creating online engagement opportunities etc, here is a very good yardstick to measure by.

If you’re a head of communications in government, thinking of experimenting in this area, you could do a lot worse than speak to Steph. Better still get him to help you find the right person.

Debating the civil servants online engagement guidelines

Yesterday I was invited to a round table discussion at the Cabinet Office. The purpose was to talk about the recently published principles for participation online for civil servants – what’s good, what’s bad, what’s missing and how they can be applied in practice.

Around the table was a good mix of web strategists, practitioners, enthusiasts and those just interested to find out more. As we went round the table introducing ourselves and our particular interests it struck me that there is an awful lot of good stuff going on around me. There are plenty of implementations of social web tools happening – collaborative tools, using blogs for stakeholder engagement, social networks etc etc so plenty of shared learning developing that we somehow need to plug into and harness.

We were lucky that we managed to avoid falling into the trap of concentrating on blogs and bloggers, as I understand the first of these sessions last week spent much of the time discussing (Dave Briggs has a good round up of that session). But there was still, unsurprisingly, a focus on how organisations can deploy tools, rather than the simpler (but in my mind more powerful) opportunity of civil servants participating in exsiting online environments. As Justin put it succinctly in a tweet, “all I hear are broadcast models“

There was a recognition that, if we are to embed these skills and techniques in government organisatinos, then we need to invest in both training/ongoing support and in capacity. Simply mandating people to include online engagement in their already busy day jobs will not work. If we are going to take this stuff seriously its going to have to be resourced properly. We also need to be realistic about the potential scale the resource will require, particularly if we use online tools to debate a high profile or contentious issue (remember the road pricing petition?).

I think I heardpeople were asking how to translate the principles into more operational / organisational guidance. In other words, how they’d actually do this stuff. But its also clear that we are still in the very early days of experimenting with the technologies and tools. There is no correct way to do things or optimum tool or technology. This is not the time for mandated solutions but for encouraging innovation.

All in all a useful conversation. But like a lot of conversations about social web that I have nowadays, I can’t help thinking that there is still an awful lot of actual work to do to support and encourage the use of social web tools to support better policy engagement. Guess that comes next…

helping policy bods to use social web tools

Emma is asking for help to develop a social media ‘toolkit’ The word toolkit always makes me feel rather queasy, I keep tripping over ‘toolkits’ in government and they are banded around as if they are the panacea to all our problems, which they’re not.

But she’s got a serious point. Which creating resources to help civil servants take advantage of the opportunities that social web tools and applications offer them in their work.

So, the cause is worthwhile. Please help her if you’ve got anything to add.

Woo hoo! Social media guidelines for civil servants finally published

Goodness me, hard to believe that civil servants finally have a published set of guidelines on how to participate online. This is a piece of work I really hoped would come out of the GCN social media review I was involved with last year.

Since then, a great deal of effort has gone into drafting guidance on participation online generally, and using social media / web2.0 tools specifically. But as time has drifted, so the guidelines got more and more complicated to the point where they threatened to become unhelpful.

A recent sense check around Whitehall, with support from the egovernment minister has resulted in a much slimmed down set of principles for participation. They’re not perfect, they’re not comprehensive – but its a jolly good start and much welcome.

I understand that some of the denser draft guidance will soon find its way online as supporting information, perhaps on wiki, to allow organisations to develop operational guidance that support the principles. I look forward to seeing that.

In the meantime, the Power Of Information Taskforce are seeking feedback on the guidelines. Please help them to improve this first crack at creating the conditions for civil servants to communicate online safely by letting them know what you think.

Social media in government – can’t we lead by example please?

There’s been an amusing series of posts published over the past few days about the status of various pieces of government web guidance being developed by COI.

First Jack Pickard noticed that the Delivering Inclusive Websites guidance, for which he had valiantly led a response on behalf of the embryonic Public Sector Web Management Forum, had been published – after six months of radio silence from COI (though to be fair, they did take on board a fair number of Jack’s excellent points).

Then Emma noticed that some of the other guidance documents were ‘in consultation’ and mused how one could become involved in ‘consulting’ on the drafts.

Nick Booth pointed out the faint irony of describing something as being out for consultation, without indicating how any kind of conversation could take place (I’ll ignore the double irony that one of the documents in question is social media guidance aka participative online media).

So Nick put a call into COI’s press office asking how he could respond to the consultation.

Oh dear, today Emma checked the COI site again. Guess what? The documents in question are now simply marked as being ‘in preparation’.

It would be easy to laugh, cry, criticise or bitch about this situation. I’ll do none of them.

I will point out this: government webbies have been waiting a long time for these different sets of guidance to see the light of day. Some of us have been involved in helping to put them together even. But the pace of development has been tortuously slow (the previous guidance was published in 2003 if I remember correctly and work on their replacements has been going on for over a year). The fact that some of them are still ‘in preparation’ is very disappointing.

I’ve said this before to some closer to the work than I – and I repeat it here – why or why didn’t someone take the previous version of the guidance, upload it to a wiki, and invite anyone who wanted to contribute to producing a new version to do so (within reason, perhaps requiring them to register or even restrict it to those whose work would be subject to the guidelines).

I’ve been given a couple of answers:

  1. They want to have something produced that they can upload once they are complete.
  2. Various mutterings about developing cross-government social media platforms that could host this content.

Both of these answers seem a bit misguided to me. Take the second one first – Steve Dale nailed this the other day when building on a post from Euan Semple: there is no one technical ‘solution’ that will work for all requirements. The reason why there are a myriad of wiki and blog platforms is that they all have different functionality and ways of working that suit different needs. Waiting for the magic ‘enterprise’ solution is not only costly, but misguided and wasting time.

In terms of producing the guidance, then publishing it in some kind of controlled collaborative environment – isn’t this rather missing the point? One of the greatest benefits of the social media/web2.0 bandwagon is the ability to collaborate and draw on the ‘collective wisdom of the many’. Trying to backfill ‘collaboration’ onto something signed off and published doesn’t really send the right signal.

Here’s my two’pennth: before anyone drafts any more guidance, take out your credit card and head over to Wikispaces (or a similar hosted wiki service). $1000 (pretty reasonable given the current exchange rate) will buy you a nice hosted wiki which you can rebrand and give a dedicated sub-domain so its nice and official (about half a day’s work?). Upload the drafts as they are now and invite anyone who wants to to help make those guidelines as good as they possibly could be. There are plenty of people out there, right across Whitehall and further afield the wider public sector, who are itching to contribute for everyone’s benefit.

If us webbies in government cannot demonstrate the amazing benefits of social media by our own actions, its a bit rich of us to go round telling anyone who will listen how great the latest online innovations are. Please, lets demonstrate our competences by our behaviour.