What I learned at LocalGovCamp

A couple of weeks ago I spent the day at LocalGovCamp, a barcamp-style unconference for people interested in how local government can capitalise on, and overcome the challenges of, the evolving online landscape.

Given some of our work with the public sector, and broader interest in helping government engage with people through social media, NixonMcInnes part-sponsored the event and I had the pleasure of going along to listen and join in some of the discussions.

Some of the highlights of the day for me…

Dave Briggs and others talked about how councils can absorb and learn from internet culture, turning the IT guys from the men (and women?) who say ‘No’ into the people who facilitate and deliver on cool and innovative ideas.

Much of this resonated with some of my experiences with the private sector, but the answer, according to Chris Coplin from Microsoft, is to draw them in to your projects, get them on board with what you’re doing and make their job more interesting in the process (I think the phrase he used was hug them, but I don’t think they’d like that).

Chris Taggart, founder of openlylocal.com, showed how he’s trying to change the way councils share local election data, helping local government fulfill their duty to make this information public, but make it more efficient by storing it in a central, publicly available database. The result is a brilliant resource that they and anyone else can manipulate as they want, ripe for mashups.

Co-design and collaboration came up a few times over the day, the idea of local government organisations tapping into the community of publicly-minded designers and developers (Kent County Council’s Transformed by you a particularly good example of this). It’s something I’m passionate about and builds on the great work done by organisations like Rewired State and their hackdays.

But, the biggest recurring theme for the day for me was how Councils can make the most of social media in the face of impending spending cuts.

Social technologies offer a wealth of opportunities to innovate but how can this be done in a cost-effective way? The public’s perception of how they should be talked to or with has changed – mass, one-way broadcasts are increasingly shunned and people expect a much more immediate and personal-response. It goes without saying that this sets a pretty scary precedent for a small comms team.

One of the answers discussed was to foster collaboration internally, opening up social media to anyone who’s interested and who could contribute. This spreads the load over a much wider set of people and allows those responsible for a particular service to pick up relevant issues. As a result, this also reduces the response time to the public.

The bottom line was that councils can’t afford to have social media on its list of threats and instead need to use it to help them deliver services better or deliver better services.

There are still a lot of questions to answer but given the calibre of discussion over the day, and obvious passion the people attending had for trying to achieve this, I’m confident that this is in hand.