Unpacking the world of digital in government

Recently, I was in a meeting of government communicators at the leading edge. The discussion was informed, and mature; the examples innovative and and impactful. Though the group had diverse backgrounds in Press Offices and Strategic Marketing, they were all in agreement that digital, and social media in particular, was the way of the future.

This happens a lot. For people looking to do more for less, digital offers a more cost-effective delivery channel. For people looking to reach younger or more mobile audiences, it offers new and engaging channels. For people looking to innovate, it offers exciting tools and techniques. All of this is possible, and I’d argue, desirable. But if we’re going to make it happen on the scale people envisage, we need to translate that enthusiasm into a deliverable configuration of people, suppliers and skills. And to do that, we need to unpack what digital means in the context of government.

Brian Hoadley kicked this off for me with a great post unpacking two contrasting approaches to social media: as a one-off campaign tool vs an enduring set of communities. In my mind, it’s also the difference between the digital marketing approach to social media, compared to the digital engagement or channel management approaches.

So here’s my attempt to do a bit more unpacking (click to expand, or download the PDF version):

I came up with eight groupings of professional disciplines within the digital realm, within which are a total of 47 activity areas – each of which is a justifiable professional specialism in itself:

Digital Marketing

- Email marketing
- Mobile marketing (SMS & Apps)
- Online display advertising
- PPC search
- Paid partnerships
- Social media campaign strategy (short term)

Online PR

- Social media news
- Influencer mapping & blogger outreach
- Earned (non paid-for) partnerships
- Social media monitoring
- Offline PR integration (including traditional media)

Digital Engagement

- Community management
- Social reporting
- Digital mentoring & internal guidance
- Social media engagement strategy (long term)

Digital Project Management

- IT project management
- CMS strategy & procurement
- Hosting strategy & procurement
- Agency briefing & management
- Wireframing & visual design
- Resilience & Disaster Recovery planning
- IT security and information assurance
- User Acceptance Testing

Digital Publishing

- Content strategy & commissioning (including social media)
- Web copywriting
- Publisher training & QA
- Multimedia commissioning/production/editing
- Online brand guidelines

Digital Channel Management

- Corporate channel management (i.e. core website)
- Web analytics
- Social media channel management (e.g. corporate Facebook, Twitter)
- Accessibility
- User Experience research/design
- Archiving and link management
- Microsite integration and branding
- Legal compliance with privacy, data protection, copyright regulation
- SEO
- Horizon-scanning (e.g. tools, trends, technologies)

Digital Government

- Website convergence
- Directgov franchise management
- Business Link theme management
- Workforce channel management
- Freedom of Information & Parliamentary Question responses
- Channel/efficiency strategy
- Cost, quality & usage reporting

Open Data

- Linked Data publishing (e.g. RDFa)
- Data visualisation
- API creation & consumption

What does this tell us? I think there are a few noble truths there:

• Digital needs go-betweens: just look at the overlaps. In a day’s work, webbies find themselves in discussions with IT, PR and digital agencies, lawyers, photographers, data geeks, half-trained web publishers and vocal online communities.
• It’s not just a technical or communications discipline: the old cliché of webbies being from IT, or more controversially being just a branch of Marketing, doesn’t bear out. It’s obvious from the scope of the work mapped out there that there will be tensions with people who see the aspects of digital that relate to Marketing, but can’t relate to the IT project management aspects; or who can relate to copywriting, but not user experience analysis or channel strategy.
• It’s demands a diverse team: the most important conclusion from this thought experiment is that government digital work is now such a vast, diverse and yet professionally specialised field, that we need to rethink who does digital. Either we radically scale up the late 1990s concept of a ‘web team’ from a primarily publishing operation to some much more sophisticated (you could easily see a Head of… each of the groupings above within much bigger digital operations). Or, someone needs to do a whole lot more engagement with people elsewhere in the organisation who work in parallel fields (IT service operations, offline marketing, training, internal comms, statistics etc) to help them become professional specialists in some of these fields themselves (of course, there are external agencies that offer many of these services, but they still need intelligent clients to work with).

So perhaps that’s the biggest challenge for government in using digital more effectively to listen, discuss, inform and deliver. Somehow, we need to find ways to increase skills and capacity across this enormous field.

How on earth are we going to achieve that?

The rules of Intranet Club

Yesterday at work, we hosted the first meeting of intranet club, bringing together intranet managers from 12 central government departments for a show and tell about design decisions, technologies, user involvement and project management. It was a fascinating couple of hours, with a group of people who rarely get together in that way, aside from via costly benchmarking forums.

It was Chatham House rules, so I won’t share the discussion here, but I will share the format, nay the Rules of Intranet Club:

1. You do talk about Intranet Club. Intranet managers are to be found in different departments in different organisations. Get the word out through various networks to track them down.

2. Only 8 intranets to a Club. OK, we broke that one, but it was our first time. 8 intranets x 15 minutes each would work really well, I think.

3. One intranet at a time. Presenters take turns to show and talk about 3 screenshots each (sent in advance) of their intranet:

• The homepage
• A page or feature that they’re proud of, or which works well
• A page or feature which is causing them trouble

4. Shirts and shoes mandatory. Trousers/skirts too, please.

5. Intranet Club goes on as long as needs to (or 2 hours, whichever is the shorter). There’s only so much we can all take.

6. If this is your first time at Intranet Club, you have to present. It’s not a keynote presentation, it’s a seminar all the participants take part in.

7. When someone goes limp, it’s over. Frankly, that’s just good practice in corporate meetings.

Thanks to all the Departments who came and shared – I hope you all found it as insightful as we did.

Happy Birthday YouTube

Happy Birthday YouTube, which turned five earlier this week. The site that started in February 2005 now apparently serves over 5 billion video streams each month.

I’ve been spending more time on YouTube recently, mainly thanks to Arthur’s compulsive viewing of classic theme tunes (seriously, like three hundred of those views are us). But the coverage of YouTube’s birthday got me thinking about the culture of YouTube and why it seems we haven’t yet found the right fit for it in government.

Frankly, there’s not much I can say, as everything you could want to know about the ethnography of YouTube is in Michael Wesch’s fantastic lecture, which itself has passed 1.3m views:

There are many great points Wesch makes about the psychology of the YouTuber, the intimacy of the relationship between user and webcam, and the backlash from the community against fraudsters. Strikingly, the most popular YouTube film of all time wasn’t about a celebrity, a famous telly clip or even a wardrobe malfunction, but this:

160m views. Boy bites finger. 160m times.

The way government has been using YouTube seems a long way from these finger-biting, funny, human heights. There’s been clever stuff, controversial stuff and some classic, pioneering stuff:

But on the whole, the basic man-in-suit format dominates, and the viewing numbers are generally in the hundreds even for quite major ministers and events. YouTube and film-making generally is taken relatively seriously by the participants and the subjects within government, but it doesn’t seem to be breaking through in quantitative terms at least. What can we learn from some of the big YouTube success stories?

1. The power of the how to
Lauren Luke built a profile and a business from sharing make-up tips via her webcam. She’s a natural presenter, sounds warm and engaging, and is seriously good at make-up. She offers viewers both a friendly face, an ongoing series and conversation, and practical, useful help in every film:

2. Video is a participative medium

There’s another lesson perhaps in the work done by the Home Office to tackle knife crime, which Ross first pointed me to:

Clever, and engaging. A film that reflects what I used to hear described as the ‘lean-forward’ nature of digital media, contrasting with the ‘lean-back’ legacy of traditional broadcast TV.

3. The darker side of human nature
Some of videos that have gone truly viral aren’t exactly… let’s say friendly to the subject. Viz the Numa Numa guy:

Now, it’s not exactly something I’d want to get my ministers doing, but there’s a lesson here. There’s a large part of YouTube which is about silliness and mockery, and maybe that’s where the really big numbers are. If you spend any time at all skimming YouTube comments under pretty much any film, you’ll likely come to Lev Grossman’s conclusion:

Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred

The intimacy between user and webcam, and between viewer and YouTube, and between teenager and comment box, can make YouTube a rather shady place at times, much like the world it reflects.

So let’s be more practically useful (like the DSA’s excellent channel). Let’s be authentic, unscripted and a bit wobbly. And lets use online video in the ways online video works best in 2010. But if it doesn’t go massively viral, that’s probably for the best.

One day, all this will be blogs

When DIUS launched its Science and Society consultation in July 2008, I took the opportunity to throw the kitchen sink at a consultation, digitally-speaking. Not all of it worked (in fact, hardly any of it did, you could argue), but I learned some useful lessons and the policy team have maintained their appetite for engaging online. My first proper WordPress site long outlived its intended lifespan, continuing as a blog with a bunch of pages for expert groups of scientists to continue their deliberations in public.

But as these things do, the limitations of one-thing-turned-into-another became more apparent over time, and it became clear it was time for a rebuild. We’re putting that live today.

Simon Dickson of Puffbox has done a nice job on the project, cleverly deploying WordPress multi-user to host a set of linked blogs for the groups, with a unifying homepage and RSS feed. It’s a good fit for the job, enabling the secretariats to the groups to manage their own presence, post up minutes and draft reports, and use WordPress widgets to promote special announcements.

But there may be the makings of a more profound point here – which Simon has made to me before with a curious smile – about government web platforms of the future. I’ve been asked a few times over the last month or so ‘How large can a WordPress site be and still be workable?’. I’ve tended to suggest, perhaps, 500 pages as a workable limit, unable to conceive of managing complex content trees and thousands of pages in a tool built for blogging.

But will the government websites of 2015 need to look like the behemoths of today? In departments where policy is key, stakeholders need to be involved and where ‘whats new?’ is the primary question users ask, could the departmental sites of the future be a series of linked blogs, written by enfranchised and enlightened policy officials, engaged with by stakeholders, and summarised on new lifestream-style corporate homepages supported by a meaty document and data library search and solid archiving?

I’m not pretending this site is the future here and now. But it’s an interesting thought.

Oh, and watch that curious blue bar at the top. There’ll be plenty more of that if Neil gets his way.

Update: Simon blogs his part of the story

Update 2: I failed to mention in the original post that Jenny project managed this project, keeping a tricky internal supplier (i.e. me) on course. Thanks Jen.

Public Appointments by RSS

In the words of Directgov:

A public appointment is an appointment to the board of a public body or to a government committee. Around 18,500 men and women hold a public appointment.

The public bodies involved are quite important, including health trusts, museum boards and regulators, some demanding specialist skills in law or social work, but many requiring general common sense and broad experience. So it’s important that the people who fill these posts are of the right calibre and reflect the diversity of our society.

The Cabinet Office has recently revamped its Public Appointments system, and you can now sign up to sophisticated email alerts about public appointments vacancies you might be interested in. As a publisher of vacancies, the central system also has an excellent API, enabling you to extract data feeds from the vacancy database to republish on your own site. There’s even some RDFa in the output should you wish to use that to mark-up the vacancy descriptions.

I’ve just created and added a dead simple RSS feed for the BIS-related public appointments to our homepage. But anyone can grab the code and set it up to generate their own feed, or indeed re-publish the vacancy data far and wide in any format compliant with its licence, in order to help spread the word about the interesting and varied positions available.

Hurrah for open data and APIs, and above all, hurrah to the Cabinet Office for building one in this case. Thanks chaps.