In early August (2010) with the help of Google and Rewired State we got in a room at Google UK HQ with a dozen developers, I explained a little about the 10m people who have never used the internet, a bit about the network of online centres around England, and a bit about ways in which we help people to get online through events like Get Online Week. Eight hours later some very lovely ideas and indeed some applications were produced, as summarised over at Rewired State.

The first (but not the last) application to be implemented and is now live is the SMS centre finder – send a short code (80809), the word ONLINE and your postcode to return the nearest UK online centre back to your mobile phone. This was developed by Prem (Premasagar Rose http://dharmafly.com), Sym (Sym Roe http://twitter.com/symroe), Tom (Tom Hume http://tomhume.org) and Dan (Daniel Morris http://danieljohnmorris.co.uk).

What Prem, Sym, Tom and Dan saw was that although people have never used the internet they usually had a mobile phone. If we can make using the internet compelling and then make it easy for someone to find a friendly (and usually free) place to help them via a text back service then we may remove one of the barriers to getting started. What had stopped us at UK online centres from doing this in the past is the cost, agencies had always quoted us a cost per text sent so success meant a bill we couldn’t afford. Prem knew of a small start-up in Brighton called Taykt who would remove the risk and put a small charge (25p) onto the person sending and receiving the text.

There’s some clever technical stuff that Prem talked about on his blog
and at http://dharmafly.com/ukonline-dataviz and Tom has blogged too.

This is the start of our journey with opening up our data and inviting people with skills and ideas to partner with us. We’ve just launched our beta Developers’ Page which has on it our API for all the UK online centre data. We’ve also put the RSS feed for the counter – counting up to getting 1m more people online.

SMS Centre Finder isn’t the only application to come out of the Developers Day, but it is the first to go live. I’m really pleased that we have been able to implement this simple but very effective solution to something that had been blocking us in the past.

Thanks to Prem, Sym, Tom and Dan; and of course to Rewired State and Emma (Emma Mulqueeny). I also want to include James Speake from the UK online centres team who helped to make this work from our side.

I’ll blog again as soon as the next output from the Developers Day is live.

I know everyone mentioned here would welcome to hear from anyone interested in what we’ve achieved.

Jack Pickard has a great post about policy on council staff blogging, which is sparked by Cambridgeshire making their Social Network and Blogging Policy publicly available.

He notes that it is mercifully brief and written in plain English but points out that the bit which relates back to the council’s general policy on how staff behaviour: it is full of hazy statements about ‘bring us into disrepute’ and ‘being libelous’.

There’s a slight difference in implication here. Some [definitions] seem to suggest that any negative statement may be defamation, but it would only become slander or libel under other circumstances (for example, it not being true). I would assume that the Council would be using the term ‘defamation’ meaning ‘untrue and negative remarks’, but this isn’t entirely clear.

After all, if they were simply using it in the ‘negative’ sense only, this would mean that if I was a resident and an employee of a local authority, then I would have less rights to complain about something the Council was doing badly than some other resident would have. And surely that can’t be right.

I agree, it’s not right. Council staff do appear to have less rights to voice their opinion of the council than other residents.

As a former journo I well understand that libel can indeed be read many ways and in practice it is the decisions of courts which set precedents.

There was a famous case in Australia where a fat rugby player successfully sued because being called fat would affect his income. I don’t know if this precedent was overturned by another Australian court decision (and Australian law has its basis in English law) but we’ve all seen the rich use ‘libel tourism’ in English courts to slap the bothersome down.

I also know from my own experience that the vagueness and lack of clear examples of where exactly the council draws the line has a chilling effect – as libel law can – and in practice can mean that council staff become expected to be a-political in their own time, much like civil servants, despite this not being part of the contract they sign up for.

This appeared to relate entirely to whether you could complain about the council in a letter to the local newspaper – like most councils I expect they had a neurotic co-dependent relationship with the local newspaper – and could easily be read as saying you couldn’t complain about the state of the flowerbeds.

This had a chilling effect on me because I could see how a manager could use it to threaten anyone who lived in the town as I did and took an interest in local affairs which they didn’t approve of.

In practice a couple of staff I knew were in fact involved in ‘political’ areas locally where clashes with the council happened and their manager’s were OK with it.

I’m certain – I know – that others weren’t either because the policy was so vague, or because it was assumed they shouldn’t get involved. And as almost any civic activity relates to the council in some way I’m sure it would put people off.

I’m sure staff thought of themselves as being policed and regarded in the same way that civil servants are when in fact that’s not what the contract is between a council and its workers. I know I did. I simply stopped posting comments on local issues on the bulletin board.

I did point out the problem with managers, the union and even a councilor but none of them understood it as a problem (It probably didn’t help that most staff didn’t actually live in the city) so as far as I know this vague ‘code of conduct’ still exists.

Council staff can potentially have all sorts of comments they make online used against them due to the vagueness not of blogging policy but the age-old and undoubtedly identical contractual ‘conduct’ policies which they refer to.

As Jack says, yes, having a blogging policy is a great step forward but unless a lot more work is done most council staff simply won’t feel free to express themselves online let alone talk freely about their work lives.

Using Twitterfeed I’ve set up a new Twitter account which will be updating with new posts from UK Public Sector Bloggers.

These are the bloggers which are on the page which Dave Briggs set up last year. He says:

The bloggers I have used so far aren’t just civil servants, or local government officers, but anyone who works for or in the UK public service, and who write about it now and again. This is an inclusive kind of thing!

A lot of people I know now get their info from Twitter. I know I now get a lot of traffic to both my blogs via Twitter, and I just don’t use my RSS Reader anything like as much as I used to.

So if you follow @PubSecBloggers, you’ll get notification of any new posts from this collection of bloggers.

NB: Had to pick an icon and went with Stimpy (of the Ren + Stimpy cartoon series fame), just ‘cos I loooove it :]

Please do get involved and let us know what more we need to do to finalise the digital engagement manifesto and how you want to help to get more done.

So, please visit the manifesto, and tell us what you think!

Sample Twitter reaction ‘IT ROCKS!’

I am reminded of the Mac o/s interface though :] (which, woods’n'trees, apparently hadn’t crossed their minds).

Immediately appealing, the just redesigned utah.gov site has very strong usability – this was the central aim of the redesign. Behind the scenes it makes use of – I think unusually – a wiki as a platform for adding and maintaining new content.

It aggregates 27 blogs, over 100 Twitter accounts (separately, they are building a Twitter aggregator), a Flickr group and more than 120 online videos. It has a successful 24/7 chat feature which was launched last year and this success has already resulted in the closure of state offices on Friday due to web redundancy.

The state of 2.7m inhabitants outsources it’s web work. Utah.gov is managed and operated without tax funds through a public-private partnership between the state and Utah Interactive, the Salt Lake City-based official eGovernment partner for the state of Utah. Utah Interactive is a subsidiary of eGovernment firm NIC, Inc.

The new site has a full tool set, including, I was very pleased to see, widgets such as ones for the latest sales available online from the State Surplus Property Program and air quality measurements. The widgets are built using the Sprout tool.

See www.utah.gov/connect — and www.utah.gov/data for the data resources they make available and www.transparent.utah.gov, a transparency portal which aims to be “the most detailed transparency site around”. The latter has massively grown as legislators add more and more legal requirements for information to be made available online.

About the data portal, they say “by allowing public access to this raw data, Utah.gov is encouraging citizens to utilize and merge it in new and innovative ways – giving citizens the ability to participate in making government services more effective, accessible, and transparent.”

It also has integration of emerging geographical detection technology to estimate the location of the user and display relevant location-specific information, including local meetings, local government Web sites, local school and library information, local park information, and available local online services. The site is optimised for mobile – see this presentation by Rashmi Sinha for more about that.

After tweeting about it a question came in to me about accessibility, so I asked their Chief Technology Architect Bob Woolley and he told me that apart from a few minor browser issues, “the site is engineered for low speed connections, and non-flash users, many accessible choices.” Here’s their policy on accessibility.

It makes great use of Flash – the State looks stunning from the animated photo choices – which followed from the finding that 97% of users had it installed. Looking at tweets about the flash banner it has succeeded in branding Utah as both a beautiful place to live and as a tech leader.

The site has enormous legislator buy-in and engagement (but, nevertheless, technology investment has suffered budget cuts).

David Fletcher, Utah CTO, has been measuring and says “the impacts of Utah’s egovernment efforts .. amount to at least tens of millions of dollars in savings to the state, its businesses, and its citizens. It has also had a large impact in lowering unemployment, improving the business climate, and promoting entrepreneurship.”

“There are some challenges in quantifying this impact, but even for some individual online services, the numbers are surprising.” They have some services being provided nearly 100% online.

On doing all they have despite budget cuts he says (something UK egov could perhaps identify with) “like always, we [had] to get more creative and find ways to get what we need done for less.”

Utah.gov is like every egov person’s dream come true and, very interestingly, the site has been noted as way in advance of other US states — perhaps in part because, as Fletcher notes, some of the ideas driving it have come from the UK!

Here’s their video about the new site.

HT: Ari Herzog

John Steed from Cheltenham Council talked about how the massive flooding of the town a few years ago gave a kick-start to their social media efforts – and quickly won top level support after a brief hesitation.

They used a free blog service, Flickr and YouTube to keep residents and others informed during the crisis. They couldn’t rely on the website alone and this allowed them to help residents help themselves – posting photos of what was happening for example.

John talked about what’s been going on since then and they are making some great use of social media, being innovative and implementing some good ideas. Their Flickr content has evolved into a ‘go to’ place for local photos as local photographers get engaged. Their videos are useful in being visual and showing some beautiful parts of the town.

His talk inspired a lot of people on the day and – as one twitterer noted – why we don’t seem to applaud any longer at these sorts of events is a mystery.

Montpellier, Cheltenham, UK

After casting around for a good Twitter client for the desktop I have settled hard on Twitzap.

It:

• updates automatically (and you can set how often it does this)
• allows tweets even when Twitter is down
• allows you to set up channels really easily to follow one person or a group or a search term / hashtag

I tried Tweetdeck but it kept fighting with my Firewall and their website offered little help. I also really wanted something running in my browser and not eating up more resources. Plus I really didn’t like the interface.

Another service I really like is twittertise. Ostensibly an advertising client (gulp) it does allow you to ‘pre-tweet’.

As I’ve noticed that people can miss tweets (I do), it’s useful if you need to throw out a question or promo something to be able to set up a retweet over a few days or at different times. It’s obviously a tool for abuse as well but like most things it has it’s angel side as well it’s demon one :]

• Birdsall has a enormous list of Twitter sites and tools

• Paulie draw my attention to Mashable’s list of tools for managing multiple accounts

So, the announcement has been made, and the new Director of Digital Engagement is Andrew Stott.

Andrew is currently Government Deputy Chief Information Officer. He has had director-level oversight within the Cabinet Office for the Power of Information work from its inception and was a member of the Minister for Digital Engagement’s Power of Information Taskforce.

The reaction to the appointment has been mixed, some pleased that a guy with clear ability at driving stuff through government has the job; others less pleased that the director isn’t someone from outside the Whitehall bubble.

Here’s some of the reaction from the blogs:

Paul Canning asks ‘Did no one qualified want to be the government’s digital director?’

However another insider confirmed to me privately that the real reason Stott may have the appointment is simply that strong candidates from outside Whitehall with web 2.0 experience didn’t apply.

Simon Dickson wonders where the inspiration lies:

There’s…general (but for the record, not universal) consensus that Stott will be a ’safe pair of hands’. Of course he meets the criteria of having ‘the authority to be credible with Ministers and senior officials’ and ‘experience of the workings of Government’. But there’s little evidence – and I stress, evidence – of his fit with some of the other supposedly essential criteria. If he has ‘run a public facing web site of significant size’, or ‘innovated in web, beyond web publishing’, the web itself doesn’t have much information about it.

Emma Mulqueeny is more positive:

To be honest, I rather thought that this would be given to some super clever bod from outside government, who would come at the job with a wealth of experience, challenging ideas and determination to ‘make stuff happen’. Then, as so often happened before, said person would begin to flag in the face of the enormity of the expectations of the job, burned out within a year to 18 months and left to go and do something else, broken.

Well… that won’t happen now; so this job that seemed a bit of a ‘nod in the right direction, but basically impossible’ is actually not that at all. If they wanted it to be that, they would not have appointed Andrew.

Nick Booth asks what we can do to help Andrew in his new job:

My first thoughts are the most obvious.

1. Join the conversation. Assuming Andrew want’s to engage with us, take the time to give him useful help.

2. Offer him a mentor or two? Is that cheeky? I hope not. Who would be ripe for that role?

3. Make sure he knows he’s surrounded by a substantial community that wants POIT to succeed.

Andrew Lewin is rather pleased:

I think many – including myself, if I’m honest – expected a new face from the private sector to make a bold splash and shake everything up. Which, to be honest, wasn’t a very appealing prospect to those of us who have been plugging away at this for a while now and thinking that we were finally getting some real progress on many fronts. To suddenly change direction and start all over again would have been both irritating and time-consuming, just when there is no time to waste. This appointment means we should be able to get on with things, but with a high profile person at the head of things to drive it forward still faster.

I’ll be watching the Digital Engagement blog (why didn’t they just use this one? ) and Twitter feed to find out what the new Director will be doing.

My advice would be to seize the initiative, set out some small but important things to achieve and make them happen, to get the doubters back onside as soon as possible.

Cross posted from DavePress

“If you want to do it quickly, do it alone. If you want to do it well, do it together.” – African proverb.

Join the Social Collaboration Game on day two of SHINE. Everyone’s
talking about the advantages of collaboration, open-source working and
social technology to drive through social change. But how do you make
it work in practice? Based on real life problems that SHINE
participants are facing, get ready for a two hour game where you’ll
have to crunch problems, make quick decisions and find ways to work
together to get the job done. You will be doing that within the
framework of an imagined but realistic neighbourhood where people are
trying to tackle problems innovatively as recession bites. There’ll be
competing interests to balance, barriers to getting what you need from
partnerships,…

I’ll be facilitating the session with colleagues Drew Mackie, Andy Gibson, and Amy Sample Ward. We are planning to develop further versions of the game so that it can be used “for real” in local neighbourhoods, just as we did with the Regeneration Game a few years back. More details here on the event and the game.