from the civil service to the west coast of Ireland and beyond

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.

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…