Whitehall Webby - digital media in government

As I’m going through one of my (reasonably regular) “neglecting the blog” phases at the moment I failed to recognise that somehow Whitehall Webby has made it to the ripe old age of one.

I started writing here on 29 April 2007, when I was helping the Cabinet Office to produce a report on government communicators’ use of social media. It was an experiment to demonstrate the opportunities of civil servants blogging (jury’s still out on that one I think…)

Since then I’ve published 91 pieces on the site, not bad considering I find it all so difficult, and had 336 comments (some of which, admittedly, are mine… ).

The most popular post over the last year has been the ‘about me‘ page, with over 1,100 views. However the posts I wrote on the civil serf affair got the most interest at the time (as most other government web related blogs experienced).

Over the last twelve months I’ve tried to to publicise examples of good government use of web, particularly innovative stuff. This includes the launch of the Ministry of Justice website, the Wales Office wordpress site, the Foreign Office’s social media big-bang, and more recently the excellent experimentation coming out of Number 10.

A common theme throughout my musings has been the role of webbies in government, and how we can organise ourselves into a group of experts who are recognised as such in Whitehall.

This thinking led to what has been my highlight of the last year - setting up the UKGovWeb Barcamp and bringing together civil servants, consultants, freelancers and others with the intention of encouraging the building of a community of committed people around government online.

So far thats bearing fruit. Many of us meet regularly at “teacamps” and colleagues in several departments are beginning to create self-organised groups in their organisations with the intention of working together to offer networking and training opportunities.

So, the future looks bright, and this blog has actually made it through a whote year - something I often thought wouldn’t happen.

End of term report completed, lets hope there’s another one next year.

When Jimmy Leach left Downing Street last Autumn, after the changing of the guard, many people thought that the raft of innovation he had overseen (including the introduction of online petitions and webchats) would come to an end. I have to admit that I was one of those people.

But in recent weeks, coinciding with the arrival of Jimmy’s replacement - Mark Flanagan - the web team at Number 10 has been on a bit of a roll.

First, a neat little wordpress microsite build to support the Progressive Governance summit at the beginning of April. The project included a live video stream of the event and online chat between officials and viewers. Considering the event took place on a Saturday, and the subject matter, it got a pretty good audience.

Second, an even cleverer wordpress microsite to support the prime minister’s recent visit to the United States. As well as the goodies above, this project incorporated Google maps to track the progress of the visit across the country.

Third, the launch of a Downing Street Twitter feed a few weeks back. Initial suspicion that this would simply tweet links to official announcements on the Downing Street website were allayed as the team found their voice, using the tool to support announcements, events (such as the two described above) and engage in dialogue and banter with the geek ‘twitterarti’.

All this activity has attracted attention elsewhere. Last Friday, the Guardian published an article on their homepage, sorry frontpage, about Downing Street’s use of Twitter. Now that is some coverage and encouragement.

Downing Street’s innovation has always been of help to other government webbies to justify investing time and effort in using new tools and applications for communication and engagement.

This isn’t playing with technology for the sake of technology. Its about piloting new methods of engagement, at little or no cost, in an attempt to improve transparency and dialogue.

Please guys, keep it up for all our sakes.

Apologies for the radio silence around here but I’ve been away on holiday for the last week or so.

I promised myself that I would make up for my recent lack of decent posting while I was away. But instead I actually enjoyed the break and kept away from the web as much as possible (not entirely of course as my family kept reminding me to ‘put that computer down’….).

Anyway, thought I should update you about what happened at the Social Innovation Camp a few weeks back.

For reasons I shan’t go into here I wasn’t able to get to London for day two of the weekend. So without me as a distraction the prison visits team managed to come second in the competition at the end of the two days.

This is great news. It means we have won a small sum of money (£1000) to try and develop the project further. It also means that the project has a bit more momentum behind it so hopefully we can make some good come of the idea.

To recap, the initial identified problem was that peoples’ experience of visiting an inmate in prison can vary greatly from establishment to establishment. The challenge was to try and make it better.

The solution we came up with is to provide a method of allowing visitors to share their visit experience. Thereby letting other visitors know what to expect and also to feedback to the prison authorities - hopefully so that they can take comments into account to improve future visits (kind of like Patient Opinion for prison visitors).

Since the camp. members of the team have been working together to identify ways of taking the project to the next stage. Some of us are due to present our work at London Minibar next Friday (25th) to see if we can raise any interest and/or funding to develop the project further.

I’ll keep you posted how it goes.

I’ve been at the Young Foundation in London all day today (barring the disaster that is South West Trains this weekend) participating in the Social Innovation Camp.

Social innovation camp is an unconference (and competition) exploring how technology can assist in solving societal problems or making life easier in sometimes small, but significant, ways. The participants are a mix of geeks, designers, coders, and thinkers (and then me - who is none of these things, but wishes he was). A real gathering of minds, ideas and energy.

I’m part of a team looking at how we can improve the experience of prison visits for all concerned - the prisoners, their visitors (relatives, friends, supporters etc), the authorities, support groups etc.

I should point out that, though I am employed by the government department responsible for the Prison Service, I have neither no operational relationship with that agency, nor am I attending the camp in any official capacity. I just sounded interesting.

So what have we been up to so far? Well, we’ve tried to unpick and map the process of visiting a prison from start (incarceration) through to the actual visit and beyond.

Then, we’ve looked at how technology might make the experiences gathered through that journey better. Could an internet enabled booking system, accessible via the web, handsets, kiosks etc help? (probably).
How can visitors feedback their experiences of the event - both to help other users of the system and to enable the prisons to improve the processes. Is there a way of harnessing the collective knowledge of prison visitors for the benefit of others?

The pot is still melting on this and other ideas and we have until 2pm tomorrow to try and make something of all the good ideas.

Its not often that I get a chance to spend time with people who possess such a wide variety of backgrounds, skills and experience in one place to work on problem solving. The team I worked with today includes freelance designers, web coders, the publisher / editor of an ethical magazine, the production director of a digital agency, and two members of PACT (a charity that helps families of prisoners) amongst others.

Equally, the mind boggles at all the variables involved in prison visits - different visiting times, methods of requesting visits etc etc (some times for good reasons - like levels of security).

Its a seriously daunting challenge. We have a short period of time to try and come up with a solution to ease these problems in some way. We are competing with the other five teams (you can find out more about the other projects here) for modest cash prizes to take the ideas to the next stage.

If you’re interested in finding out how we get on, why not come along to Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood tomorrow afternoon at 2.30pm where each team will be presenting their idea to a panel of judges.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the group, or community, of people within government who manage websites, intranets, blogs, wikis and other digital communications channels.

There aren’t that many of us around considering what we actually do.

We’re also not very good at organising ourselves so consequently we don’t have the representation we need - we and our work are often overshadowed by other groups who have louder voices and / or are better organised.

Its one of the reasons why I set up the barcamp and, subsequently am trying to make the afternoon tea gatherings regular events (described by David today as ‘Teacamp’ - I quite like that) - so that we could get to know each other better and start to interact as a group of similar interests. Not just civil servants, but the people on the periphary or outside who can assist us in making what we do better.

This problem of relative obscurity has been highlighted to me over the last few days. Downing Street launched a twitter feed, a great idea and a good example of low cost piloting to test the value of an emerging digital channel.

But coverage has focused on the fact that ‘Gordon Brown is now on Twitter’ - he’s not its Downing Street that runs the feed, not the Prime Minister (in fact, he is sort of, but that is by the by).

This illustrates for me the problem of our role and profile in egovernment and the challenges that face us both day to day and in the longer term.

We’re not IT, we’re not e-democracy, and we’re not politics online. Each of these groups are important to us, and we need to work with them, but them we ain’t.

But some people do think that one or more of these are what we do - hence the confusion over the ownership of the Downing Street twitter feed.

The IT profession in government is a powerful group - they provide both the infrastructure and the applications that help us deliver procurement big contracts. They’re well organised (they did invent Prince 2 after all) and have senior representation in most government departments.

The e-democracy crowd are also quite a well self-organised group - academics, social hackers etc who have an important role in challenging government to do better in its interactions with citizens.

Then there’s politics online - the parties, representatives and the bloggers. They obviously make a lot of noise, and gain exposure for what they do.

We are none of them - not partisan or political, not technical, not edemocracy.

It strikes me we need a voice to represent us and plug us into these other groups somewhere closer to the top of the pyramid. Perhaps COI’s Digital People will draw us together. Perhaps Tom is that person?

Somehow we need to draw ourselves together - the people around government who are really passionate about improving the way government conducts itself online - and speak as a group.

I’ve been remiss in not publicising this event, partly because the last one fell away due to Maundy Thursday which put me out my ‘rhythm’.  But anyway, is anybody up for  a geeky cup of tea or coffee tomorrow afternoon?
I will be tiied in the quarterly Whitehall heads of ecommunications group from 2 (reporting back on the barcamp as it happens), so will be on a little later, but I will be there  but will pop along a little later. Hope to see some of you there (more details here)

Time flies, and suddenly I realise that I haven’t posted here since the excitement of the civil serf affair. Rather than the usual (unintentional I assure you) long essay, here’s a few things that have interested me over the last few weeks - and might be of interest to you too:

• Networking Democracy - really interesting debate beginning over at Our Kingdom about how government can use the internet to assist a national debate. This is related to the Governance of Britain programme, which I have talked about before.
• Andrew Brown’s been busy using Del.icio.us to create a feed of cabinet papers from Lewisham Council. What a brilliant idea! - and an easy way to syndicate content if you’re not all RSS enabled. Hoping to use this idea shortly.
• The BBC has published some guidance for its staff engaging in social networking. Its thorough but succinct and most importantly its out there for everyone to see. (I have had some involvement in the development of similar guidance for civil servants but that’s not published yet. Frankly, the BBC guidance and the civil service code cover the bases for any civil servant unsure about what they should/n’t or could/n’t do online).
• Almost as a companion piece, Colin McKay has published a great piece of guidance on how to do social media ’stuff’ in large organisations. Worth reading for tips on getting people onside and stuff in ‘under the wire’ (according to Wikipedia, Colin is a professional skateboarder - you kept that quiet!)
• I saw Clay Shirky speak at the RSA last week about his new book ‘Here Comes Everybody‘. David Wilcox has a good video clip of part of the presentation. Can’t wait to read the book.
• Some more public sector blogging - nine members of the house of Lords have launched a team blog. Be interesting to see how that develops.

As this story will be digital fish and chip wrappings tomorrow, I thought I’d just clarify my position in light of continued interest in the story from the media.

Civil Serf is an individual who expressed her personal individual thoughts. She is not a corporate PR machine attempting to control the ‘message’ and shouldn’t be treated as such.

She made a mistake.

She realised her mistake and did the right thing - protected herself.

Nobody died.

Leave her alone.

I hope she’s okay and safe (and feeling safe).

Tom Watson, the MP blogger and cabinet office minister responsible for e-government, spoke at a conference yesterday about how technological change will redefine government’s relationship with the citizen. Its well worth a read.

Interesting to note his thoughts on the civil serf story - a very promising approach and much more measured than the scare headlines that have been knocking around in the press (have they learnt nothing from last time?)

Looks like there will be interesting times ahead for us working in and around government online.

There’s been a lot of discussion across the blogosphere, and in the press, about the disappearance of the Civil Serf blog yesterday. The Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph both published articles about Civil Serf and shortly afterwards the blog disappeared.I’ve been quite taken aback by the response. You’d think some terrible contravention of human rights had occurred the way people have been talking about it.The facts are simple, Civil Serf crossed the line. The Civil Service Code is clear about integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality being critical to acting as a civil servant. Even if all she’s guilty of is being indiscreet, then she’s certainly not acted in the spirit of the code.

If you work for an organisation, any organisation, and choose to criticise it anonymously (but leave enough clues to identified) you are asking for trouble (this isn’t the first time I said that). End of.

The fact that the person in question is a civil servant does not make it in the public interest to ‘lift the lid on Whitehall’, because a civil servant is more aware than most of their terms and conditions of employment and why they’re important. So they have less excuses if they do cross the line.

For the record, I enjoyed reading the blog. I recognised the tone but 1. although its not my experience, I know some colleagues sympathised more and 2. Working in any large bureauocracy (public or private) is frustrating. Its easy to single out the public sector but its a pretty obvious target.

Obviously I think civil servants are absolutely in their rights to blog their thoughts, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing what I do here. But that right needs to be placed in context whoever you work for.