Yesterday I came across a grubby copy of Society Guardian with a highly readable piece by Dame Julie Mellor on how the state and citizens have to work together to build communities. To my mind it was very apt and timely copy and rather surprising given that Ms Mellor works for PwC, an organisation not noted for its services to the public.

Apologies, but I quote Julie at length here because I think she makes some crucial points:

“A shift to services produced in ¬relationship with citizens will require not just communities to take on more ¬responsibility but also the state to change the way it works. In particular, increased citizen involvement in services should not be used as cover for the state leaving people to fend for themselves, or putting them in situations for which they are unprepared. Co-producing services demands a new relationship between the state and communities.

“At its heart, community empowerment is about developing a new set of relationships between citizens, the state, service providers and actors in civil society. It is a demanding agenda that requires citizens and public services to change the way they engage with each other. However, the benefits are considerable, and policy-makers need to understand how the barriers to advancing this agenda can be overcome.”

In the past I’ve mentioned how the media is changing as the industry and communications change. And this is also true of the public sector and the professionals who are running public services.

To build these types of communities you need state funding and agendas that set out how professionals should connect with the public. You also need professional communicators that can make sure the connections are made and, more importantly, managed.

You need stakeholder engagement programmes that bring all sections of the community together through common platforms – and this is then managed by communications professionals.

Regardless of all the best laid plans, if communities are not managed then they will wither very quickly.

Linking to all this, I interviewed Chris Pyburn, communications and engagement manager at Suffolk County Council, last week. During the next year my team and I will be working closely with Chris and his team to roll out a programme that comes close to all the points Dame Julie Mellor has written about.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/joepublic/2010/feb/10/policy

You’ll have seen a number of posts in this blog about the work we’re doing in Stockport on their Stakeholder Engagement programme. We’re pleased to be beginning work with Suffolk Adult and Community Services on an engagement programme for them. I’m particularly pleased, as Suffok is 15 miles up the road from where I live, whereas Stockport is about 240 miles across the centre of the country. So my carbon footprint on this project will be much smaller.

We met Chris Pyburn today, and my colleague Andrew interviewed him on the top floor of the atrium in Endeavour House in Ipswich.

You’ll be seeing the video interview Andrew took on this blog shortly. In the meantime, you can watch a short clip taken by me on my Kodak zi8 of the interview taking place. You can hear how good the quality of the sound is with a microphone plugged into the zi8, particularly in picking up the sound of someone walking past! (note to self : invest in a directional microphone).

Professional journalism is dead – here comes everybody.

Social theorists the world over are in a philosophical frenzy about how journalism is dying by a thousand blogging cuts. It’s now you and me making and creating news, not the guys in the grey macs with the notebooks.

True, we’re now all at it, but journalists still do it better.

Call me new old school, but I believe journalism’s time has finally come. We survived the shipwreck of dictatorial media moguls, failed publishing trusts and B2B cowboys to arrive washed up on the shores of web 2.0 social media and hyperlocal websites.

I know I’m guilty of hyperbole here, but I really do think that journalists have an important part to play in our communities going forward. It’s now not just about the printed article, it’s about ways of joining up on a hyperlocal scale. From your small community to the wider world, using video blogging and other media.

I say all this as a preamble to the work I’ve recently done with Shropshire on their Common Assessment Framework (CAF) project.

I’ve written about CAF before – so apologies if I’m repeating myself – but this time I’d like to fit the idea of CAF into a hyperlocal social media setting. Indeed, a managed interactive hyperlocal media setting.

In essence CAF is about joining up local services so everyone in the community can access information about the most vulnerable members of society. A benign big brother if you like.

For my part, I believe that if you start to introduce social media, particularly video blogs, into the mix we can then create something unique. Join CAF projects into hyperlocal media sites and we have a community genuinely looking out for itself.

And here’s where journalists morph into a different type of media animal. They work closely with local public bodies and charities to link the hyperlocal media network to the larger CAF projects, which are in turn linked with the Department of Health and central government.

Social media is by its nature chaotic. So why not manage and organise the chaos so managers and directors from local services right up to central government know what’s happening in communities across the country. Seriously joined up thinking and all administered by savvy media-trained journalists or community managers.

Here’s Carole Lucas and Julie Edgington talking more about the CAF project in Shropshire and the workshops they’re running.

In the past year or so I’ve focused much of my working life on how to build engagement platforms for local government, based on video blogs rather than written materials, emails, newsletters and the like.

This video-style engagement programme is a huge amount of work involving directors, frontline social workers, community partners and service users. The process has to be meticulously mapped, champions need to be found and community boards need to be established. These will then help to build the programme and give it that unique sense of community.

These local government programmes by necessity have to be non hierarchical, so all participants have the confidence to speak out. There is an underlying corporate message – the personalisation initiative, for example – but this is often more a platform for participation rather than an order that requires a response.

If anything the programme relies on service users, partners and social workers to provide human interest stories that are at the heart of any community engagement. These are the stories people relate to and watch again and again.

Our two pilot programmes in Stockport and Suffolk are intimately linked with this sense of shared community, the idea of giving a voice to people.

But we also recently started a project with a private company, OLM Systems. This is a business that sells software to public sector organisations. So it’s inextricably linked with local government and the social care sector, but it’s very much a private concern.

The business wanted an engagement site so that staff could understand business initiatives, new sales propositions, new products about to be launched and get a feel for the overall direction of the company. The site also gives access to customers for any feedback – and staff are encouraged to be willing participants.

It’s a much more corporate-led engagement building exercise, but one that still has that idea of community wrapped around it. So maybe it’s not so different after all from its public sector counterparts. I suppose people live their lives in companies, just like they do in local communities.

Here’s Adam Ratliff, marketing manager, to explain what he’s looking for in the engagement programme.

My 10 year old went to a real-life Willy Wonka land with the school recently. Afterwards, he came home beaming, eyes bright and arms heavy with assorted chocolate bars and sweeties. He’d been to the Cadbury-owned Bournville factory near Birmingham and wanted to take us all back there soon.

Unfortunately, Cadbury sold out to Kraft for £11.9 million a few weeks later and on hearing about the takeover he asked: “Dad, why do Americans have to take Cadbury’s away from us?” genuinely mystified.

I replied: “Because lots of people will make lots of money.”

“Can we still all go there?”

“Probably not.”

At this point I don’t want to descend into an anti-capitalist rant about greed, big business, asset stripping healthy companies and not giving a toss about the little guy (although I just have), but what I find most distasteful is the £240 million the lawyers, accountants, bankers and PR agents have pocketed from the deal. The gadflies in a feeding frenzy round the cash cow’s arse, if you like. “It’s drinks all round and holidays in the Maldives, guys.”

Meanwhile, everyone living around Bournville will be fearful for their jobs, their livelihoods, their families and lucky if they get a break at Skegness this year.

Ironically, the Cadbury family first built a model village for the Bournville factory workers 100-odd years ago and it’s their descendants who will be the prime targets for impoverishment after Kraft start to apply economies of scale to its new investment.

So what’s all this got to do with CandE (communication and engagement)? Well, a lot actually.

Hyperlocal media involves people getting together to write blogs, film videos and generally connect with everyone in the local community about local issues. The idea is that if people get involved they can make a difference – and even change things for the better.

Recently, Niki Getgood spoke about hyperlocal media initiatives, including working on a local project for Bournville, at the Birmingham social media café (more on this in the next blog). Here she is talking about it.

I’ve also attached a quick commentary by William Perrin – who is part of the Power of Information Taskforce – talking about how hyperlocal initiatives can help to change your environment.

Of course, none of this will save jobs or mortgages in Bournville, but when communities engage they can help improve the lives of people who would otherwise be isolated and disenfranchised.

Before you cry: “plagiarist, blogcheat, self publicist”, I’d just like to say sorry.

Well not THAT sorry.

But the reason for an upfront apology is that I’ve written about our Stockport project elsewhere in the blogosphere and even used the following video of Rob Powell and Natasha Howells, the leaders of the project, in a former blog.

Nevertheless, the Pav-I blogsite is a fairly recent one, so I thought I’d explain about Stockport in a little more detail and then let Rob tell the rest.

I sincerely believe we have started a communications programme that could make a real change for the better in local government, so why not labour the point a little.

About a year ago, we began a pilot programme with Stockport council to address their transformation agenda. They wanted a clearer message going out to staff, community partners and service users about what this “transformation” or “personalisation agenda” was all about.

Our idea was to set up a platform that would give the user a visual two-way connection that would involve ALL stakeholders. So everyone could understand the message and feedback their own contribution. The central tool to take make this happen would be small, handheld Flip video cameras.

Each online community has its own page; ie senior management team, direct payments team, workforce development, adults, mental health, learning disabilities, older people etc. It also has its own content manager. For example, the head of mental health is the content manager overseeing uploaded content (this also helps with governance issues). An editorial board meets regularly to talk about content going on the site each month. Each Thursday an email goes out to all registered users to give them highlights of the latest content that’s been uploaded. So it’s a managed, proactive network.

In Stockport much of the emphasis is on new ways of working via the transformation agenda. But the council is also using the interactive medium for workforce development and overall communications between managers and staff.

For instance, by addressing staff through a visual training portal, the engagement programme saves time and money, and provides regular policy updates helping to keep all staff informed of practice and procedures. Usage is tracked, so all areas of community engagement can be monitored and measured. So they can build on what’s popular and throw out things people aren’t clicking on to.

By adopting champions within the local authority, local health service and peer champions within the service user community, the programme is going some way to pursuing agendas on community participation, stakeholder engagement and empowerment in social care.

But, above all, I believe we have an opportunity to help people understand all the key issues that affect their lives – that’s inside and outside the council – by allowing them to talk directly to each other.

It’s THAT simple.

My little boy plays for an under 8s football team as a defender – and he’s pretty good at it. His team is chock full of highly competitive little boys, watched over by highly competitive mums and dads. And the relaxed Saturdays of old have now become a rather fraught, fractious and sometimes tearful affair depending on the fortunes of the team.

“So what of it?” I hear you mutter.

Well, this team has a website and after each match one of the dads writes up a small report about the game. Most kids’ football teams have this type of weekly reportage after each game. Outside the team it’s only of interest to the highly competitive mums and dads of other teams and is more often an excuse for a frustrated dad to try out his John Motson hat (not to mention coat).

Athough only a handful of parents and children read the match report, I still reckoned I could come up with something a little more interesting. So I took my little Flip camera along and filmed a rather bemused coach and manager after the game (see Grant and Richard below). I told them I wanted the to “do a Fergie”.

The day after I uploaded my experiment I had calls from other parents and children telling me how much more they enjoyed looking at the report.

Comments included:

“It suddenly comes to life.”

“I wanted to hear more from them.”

“Is this going to happen every week?”

“Never bring THAT camera to a game again!!” (that was the coach)

Suddenly people had become immediately more engaged. The small footballing community I belong to started laughing and joking and talking more.

Going forward I want to persuade a parent to comment each week after every match, taking the engagement idea one step further (altho the coach and manager are still in the denial stage). Simple really – and fun. Shows what you can do when you get a community talking rather than emailing or posting dry, humourless comments on a forum.

I mentioned a couple of posts back the UKGovCamp2010 and the session on Social Internal Communications, which I ‘helped’ with. I feel a bit guilty now, as what with Kim from COI facilitating the session, Sharon O’Dea has put together an excellent summary of the session on her blog.  You will see reference in her summary of mentions to Knowledge Management – I was pitching in there for Social Media to be seen as something that works well within Knowledge Management frameworks that may already be in place in organisations. So rather than putting the frighteners on organisations by using the phrase ‘social media’, and them seeing it as people twittering and ‘friending’ each other, within a KM framework of making the most of the expertise of staff, it seems less frightening, and a case of building on existing investments, rather than throwing out the old to make way for the new.

I was pleased to be able to chat to Simon Dickson on the UKGovCamp2010 last Saturday, and contribute to his session which looked at WordPress as a platform for communication and engagement websites for government. He works primarily in central government, and he has just posted on his blog about the lastest enhancements to the Care and Support website.

He’s added the functionality to upload pictures to the site – (similar to Flickr) – and he reports that it is being taken up by visitors to the site, perhaps more than he expected.

WordPress offers the opportunity to develop innovative websites quite quickly – in contrast to the usual model of contracting the work externally and having something delivered sooner or later (later, and at much more cost, in the case of Birmingham City Council recently), that may or may not be what you wanted, and which will be a bugger to be enhanced in the years to come. Simon is a case in point for the alternative – WordPress gives you a huge amount of functionality at no cost. But you do need someone who knows that they are doing, and is able to cover functionaly, design and delivery : there -are- many bad WordPress sites out there!

UKGovCamp2010 was held on Saturday 23rd January 2010 at Google HQ, and I was there.

I’ll have to do a bit of explaining, and apologies if I get anything wrong, as a lot of the following is new to me!

As you will see from the wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcamp BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences (or unconferences) – open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants. They are very much tied in with the concept of Web 2.0, the participatory, user-generated-content led model of the Internet. And they are about as different as possible as the traditional conference model, which takes a long time, and costs a lot of money, to set up, and generally features ‘The Great and the Good’  standing at the front of the audience, presenting information.

I’ve been going to social work conference for 25 years now, and after a while there does come a sense of deja vu, as the latest Minister for Social Care is ushered in with a couple of civil servants and other colleagues, s/he dispenses some words of wisdom, often makes ‘an announcement’, takes on or two questions and heads of. And then it’s a case of The Usual Suspects being wheeled out to make contributions.

UKGovCamp 2010, was the third event, and it was arranged quickly, with comparatively much less effort, and was much, much more participative.

The whole process was facilitated by an online network, and Twitter. The online network was the route by which I became aware of the group, and the event. I’m a member of http://connectedpractice.ning.com, a social work network set up by Neil Ballantyne some while back . It’s a fairly inactive network, but through that network I became aware of David Wilcox’s Social By Social network (http://localcommunities.ning.com/), and through that network, I found out about the UKGovWeb (http://www.ukgovweb.org/) network, also hosted on Ning, and which was set up to support the UKGov BarCamp.

Still with me?

The event happened primarily due to the co-ordinating efforts of Dave Briggs, to Google, who hosted the event at their HQ near Victoria Station, and contributions from of a couple of dozen individuals in the lead-in to the day. A small number of commercial sponsors also chipped in.

The journey in on Saturday was a bizarre contrast of technologies. I got to Colchester train station to hear those horrible, horrible words – ‘replacement bus service’. So part of the journey was spent on the top deck of a 30 year old double decker bus, making a stately journey down the A12 at little more than 50mph. Fortunately I was on a train for the latter part of the journey, and was able to pickup on twitter, through #ukgc10, that I wasn’t the only one with transport problems. And once at Liverpool Station, it turned out that about half the underground network was offline for engineering works!

Fortunately, I wasn’t late, and  found my way through the impressive portico of Google Towers. Here’s Dave Briggs thanking Google.

After those introductory words, there was a quick introduction from each ‘delegate’ – who you were and what you did, and you had to provide three words about your work or what you wanted to get from, or contribute to, the event.  (In may case, the three words were ‘video’ ‘engagement’ and ‘social work’). A great ice-breaker, and it enabled you to identify people you wanted to nab for a conversation during the day. (Certainly beats peering at name tags, especially when your eyesight isn’t what it used to be!)

In the lead-in to the event (and we’re just talking about a few days in advance) there were discussions on the ning group around subjects for workshops at the event. I volunteered, as did Sharon O’Dea of the UK Parliament, to support Kim from COI to run one on internal communications and social media. And this is where the event differed markedly. Other than that there were going to be a number of workshops, arranged on the day, that was it – no guest speakers, no plenary sessions, it was going to be entirely user-driven on the day.

In the picture below, on the left, you can see Dave Briggs in front of the blank conference timetable on the morning of the event. There were five time slots, and seven rooms of different sizes. The event planning was simple – people stepped forward, pitched their workshop proposal, and gaugued from feedback just how big the audience was likely to be. Then it was a case of filling in a sticky post-it. In about half an hour, the event was finalised, as you can see on the right of the picture.

The first session was a ‘group hug’ event for local government social media types. The event had a strong contingent from central government, and a slightly smaller one from local governmnent. How the delegates were introducing social media into their authorities was the main focus of the discussion, and barriers, and tips (just do it!)

The second session was the internal communications and social media one Kim facilitated. That was well attended, with yours truly pushing in particular the  need to get social media tied in with knowledge management and other initiatives, rather than as a bolt-on ‘new thing to do’  (hence my Twitter tag #MarkWatsonKMWeb). And there was a proposal for another barcamp, purely on internal communications in government, which may well take off.

Lunch was a great chance to network, both face to face, and making use of Google’s famous high-bandwidth guest wifi.

One issue that didn’t quite sit that comfortably with me, and I’m guessing it’s possibly a generational thing, was the extent to which people had laptops and iphones out and were taking notes, and also twittering during workshops, with their tweetdecks open.  Although I’m now thinking it is about time I got some mobile computing sorted out, and I may well be twittering away at the next barcamp.

Interestingly, #ukgc10 was in the top 5 ‘trending topics’ in the UK web during Saturday, with lots of participants posting notes and quotes onto Twitter throughout the day to reach that exalted status.

The highlight of the afternoon session was being part of the session led by Simon (http://www.puffbox.com) who is a leading proponent of WordPress as a platform for government. He argues that you do not need to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds, (or millions!) on commissioning websites for government, and his website showcases a number of his projects. And Pavilion Interactive is a prime example of a website running on WordPress. There was debate about at what size a website is (generally speaking in terms of pages, rather than blog posts) before it becomes too big for WordPress – with Simon yet to be convinced that there is any case for this.

In conclusion – a very interesting day, informative, and with lots and lots of networking. I even got filmed by David Wilcox, who spent most of his day interviewing people.

So, what have I learnt?

1 – unless there is no alternative (there wasn’t this time) going to a beer festival the night before an early start travelling up to London is not a good idea, and becomes increasingly not a good idea the older you get!
2 – public transport can be a real pain at times
3 – barcamps/unconferences can work really, really well, and with support pre-event through the web, and with twitter helping out, there’s a new paradigm for events – organisers of traditional conferences take heed!
4 – if you think trundling down the A12 on a bus in the morning isn’t much fun, try the journey in reverse when you’re sitting behind a very solidly built bloke who has clearly spent his life honing the art of being paralytic (for older readers, think WC Fields in terms of huge nose, blotchy purple face) and who has not idea really where he is, and decides he fancies a fag
5 – there are a lot of enthusiastic, talented people in central government working within the system to move the government (central and local) forward on the web in a much more cost-effective – agencies who rely on getting big website development contracts take heed!
6 – I’m going to see what I/we can do to make an internal communications in local government barcamp a reality. These things happen because people make them happen (kudos to Dave Briggs)
7 – use #ukgc10 on twitter to pick up on other people posting blogs etc on the event