The public sector has been paying lip service to the idea of achieving ‘more for less’ for several months now, whilst in many cases conceding that the end result is inevitably less for less. This week, Neil Williams and his team at BIS showed that there’s a way to deliver something better whilst spending less than they did before. And they did it twice.

There’s clearly still enthusiasm in government for engaging citizens, service users and civil society in policy development, ensuring that people have an opportunity to comment and contribute. In the past, BIS would have met this requirement by developing new sites – albeit using low-cost technologies – sometimes in-house and sometimes using external developers. Each project cost was small, but the marginal cost was proportionately high. Wheels, reinvented.

Jenny and Neil commissioned me to update the work I previously did on a WordPress theme for commentable documents, Commentariat, but with the twist that they wanted a platform they could deploy entirely in-house not just for the project in hand, but for future projects,  without buying-in technical skills each time.

Commentariat2 is the result as seen in BIS’ Growth and Skills strategies. In Jenny’s words:

We’ve been making a selection of consultations and key documents commentable for while now for a variety of reasons: to engage new audiences, create debate, dialogue and awareness around policy changes, reach niche audiences who have a wealth of expertise to share with us and each other etc.. Seems to be working because policy colleagues now come to us with expectation that we can deliver this and they don’t ask “Why should I?” but “What’s the best way to do this?”

We were also feeling the pinch of the financial pressures not to outsource web development. I felt that on the one hand we had lost contractors and fixed term staff with technical skills and on the other hand we are expected to do more work in-house. So I feel genuinely empowered by this: conversations with colleagues are no longer slanted by whether they’ll have to pay for it or whether we can turn it around.

I won’t go into massive technical detail about the platform now, except to say watch this space. In a nutshell, using the user-friendly features of WordPress 3.0 and some customised extras, Jenny and colleagues now have a tool ready to go for almost any document that gets thrown at them, and can make the kind of changes to look and feel that previously required freelance help. It’s possible I’ve not thought this through…

But arguably the more significant launch of the week Neil has blogged about on his site. Quietly, Neil and his team have built an enterprise-strength shared hosting platform and commercial model for BIS and its extended family of partners using SiteCore and Eduserv. So when the Skills Funding Agency was launched, the marginal cost of their new website was tiny. And when the Export Credit Guarantee Department needed a new infrastructure, the BIS platform was a no-brainer. And so on, and so on, including this week the British Hallmarking Council perhaps the nicest looking of the partner sites so far. As I commented on his post:

[guessing] it cost the partner probably an order of magnitude less than a new standalone site would have done, and several orders of magnitude less than a site with that level of CMS functionality and hosting would have done.

When converging sites, it’s fairly easy to skin-and-link (as it’s known in the trade), or just hack an old site down to a few pages within the parent CMS, but this approach delivers a site with its own identity, which meets all government rules at low cost, and which gives the BHC folk a platform to do their own digital engagement.

It’s also nice because it creates a sense of partnership and common endeavour between a Whitehall department web team and its partners, pooling development and training costs, using skills more effectively and hopefully establishing a common respect for the different roles and styles of different public sector organisations.

Truly, more for less. Neil and his crew should be on commission.

No related posts.

Of all the projects I worked on at DIUS/BIS, the one I am still most proud of is still going strong, if quietly, today: the Mature Students partnership with The Student Room and Directgov. When I wrote about it in February 2009, I explained:

There have been some good examples of ministers engaging with online communities as part of consultations, notably Lord Darzi and Netmums as part his Review, as well as the semi-formal partnerships for discussion we set up alongside the New Opportunities white paper. But more sustained engagement with these forums is still a rarity, despite the fact that communities’ interests and those of government are often very well aligned.

Nearly 18 months later, I’m not sure much has changed, and that’s a huge missed opportunity. These big, interest-based communities are the yellow brick road to the Big Society – the epitome of cognitive surplus put to good use – demonstrating the kindness of strangers, the warmth and passion of human beings and the magnetic pull of experience every bit as strong as that of place. Dave Briggs, as ever, got there before me:

Those spaces which include forum-type elements are pretty much always the most popular. Think about the Ning sites you belong to, or the Communities of Practice. Try as you like to get people to blog, or contribute to wikis, it’s the forums they always gravitate to first.

It’s not that government doesn’t want to engage with online forums, but rather that the different models of engagement aren’t very well understood yet. The Netmums ministerial webchat is almost a cliché now, but direct engagement with forum administrators to achieve something longer term, or as a source of insight or feedback, isn’t very widespread or sophisticated, at least from what I can see.

So it was lovely to catch up  yesterday with Jamie O’Connell, Marketing Director of The Student Room at his funky Brighton HQ (pool table – check; dartboard – check; guitar – check) to chew the fat about how the relationship between government and big forums like his can be deepened. And let’s be clear, it is big. This is no hyperlocal forum – the site has 2.8m unique visitors a month, with 500,000 registered members and around 27,000 new forum posts each day. To describe it as a forum is a bit misleading, as there’s a whole load more functionality including wiki pages of high quality user-generated advice on everything from homework to relationships, and a fully fledged social networking platform and insight service (@TSR_Insight on Twitter) in the pipeline for later this year.

Why try to rival Facebook though? Interestingly, The Student Room’s members have told the team that when they want to collaborate with classmates who aren’t necessarily friends, they’re forced to create duplicate profiles to separate the friends-only pictures from the more career-safe stuff. Conversely, in a forum on the scale of The Student Room with its team of volunteer moderators, the anonymity of abstract handles like bunty64 and doughboy actually allow for more frankness about personal experience, and willingess to engage constructively with strangers, and in fact don’t tend to lead to systematic trolling. There are dozens of these kinds of insights, drawn from the team’s willingness to engage with users when designing the platform. They’re also a fascinating bit of good PR for yoof in general.

There’s more in the slideshow podcast below that I recorded with Jamie:

But anyway. What really interested me was the kind of models that Government in particular might adopt to work more sustainably with big communities like The Student Room, Netmums, Patient Opinion, Army Rumour Service, BusinessZone, Pistonheads, Horsesmouth and the many others. Here are some:

• One-off webchat with a senior figure/expert (e.g. swine flu webchat with DH expert on Netmums)
• Asychronous Q&A by video (e.g. Yoosk.com on Army Rumour Service)
• Policy team watching a forum thread to get insight into issues (e.g. BIS Credit Card consultation)
• On-site sponsorship/display advertising (e.g. UCAS, Red Bull on The Student Room)
• Identifying key communities members and ‘sponsoring’ them to be ambassadors (e.g. Apprenticeships on Horsesmouth)
• Commission community platform, with some tweaks, to deliver a key policy programme (e.g. Patient Opinion Trust feedback, School of Everything directory of learning opportunities for BIS)
• Establishing online community as a distinct space for peer discussion at arms-length from government, but with reciprocal links to official information (e.g. financial support for mature students BIS/The Student Room)

but there could also be:

• Recruiting community members to tell their stories as bloggers
• Analysing data on topics discussed/anonymised member profiles as a source of customer insight/trends
• Using forum moderators’ expert skills to moderate other projects at low cost, e.g. government crowdsourcing websites
• Tapping into technical skills of online community teams, to create platforms and tools for government campaigns/projects
• Working with communities to host widgets encouraging feedback on government policymaking initiatives
• Getting moderators to kick off well-signposted discussion threads about new government strategy launches or proposals
• Recruiting community members to low-cost online focus groups or audience panels to help road test or co-design new services or policy options
• Running competitions to source stories, images, films, ideas or whatever from target audiences
• Equipping community members to become peer-supporters or buddies, e.g. about mental health issues
• Recruiting new staff via communities, getting existing staff to engage online with potential recruits to answer questions

… and so on. In short, there are as many ways to tap into and use these incredibly precious resources as there are facets to human nature. And it’s because of this humanity – and hopefully goes without saying – that communities need to be treated with respect. On the one hand, there is a strong current of volunteering and willingness to help good causes. On the other, there’s the need to eat. Sure, Government is strapped for cash, but there are lots of ways Government can help without spending much money:

• Reciprocal linking should be the basic minimum, ensuring communities who work with you get a prominent link and/or badge on your site back to theirs, sending them helpful Google juice
• Connecting front line staff or policy officials to the community so they become actively involved with the site and listening to discussions helps to cement the relationship and keep the feedback loop working
• Inviting community admins to government events and launches, Q&As with the Minister, press conferences and so on, helps demonstrate that they’re taken seriously as a route to important audiences
• Offering prizes for competitions, showcasing the creative work of members on a national platform, offering work experience, internships etc
• Making sure agencies are clear that you want to deliver campaigns/policies via existing online communities – they’re probably less constrained procurement-wise, but don’t necessarily have those community relationships
• Keeping in touch is often overlooked, but is the basis for keeping each other updated about potential opportunities you might not hear about otherwise

The next step: Meet The Communities

But there are many other ways to build relationships, and lots more experience to share. To help explore this further, I’m helping to convene Meet The Communities, a free, one-off event probably in Central London during September, bringing together some of the leading online communities with the government clients, PR & digital agencies for an afternoon of storytelling and speednetworking. It will be a chance to put faces to names, hear how other organisations work with online communities, and make some personal connections.

If you’re interested in taking part either as an online community owner, potential government client or agency, leave a comment below or send me a private message via the contact form and I’ll put you on the list.

Related posts:

1. Going where the people are
2. More for less: three cheap ideas to do now
3. New Opportunities

I’ve been chatting to quite a range of folk grappling with the issue of what to do – on a shoestring – in the digital space with their Department in this brave and uncertain new world. It’s fair to say that digital plans in government right now have to take account of three realities:

1. There’s no money left, so to speak. An exaggeration of course, but all round central government at least, there’s appetite to do things at low or no cost – not just do ‘more for less’. Perhaps more than I predicted, the squeeze is accelerating senior leaders’ appetites to make strategic bets on digital channels as a solution now, instead of the mañana approach which has tended to prevail in recent years.
2. Like most leadership transitions in big organisations, there’s a change curve being followed, with the sense of pace and excitement in the early days, whilst still there, now being overtaken by the process of reviewing, reorganising and strategising, before the full weight of delivery really kicks in. It’s a crazy busy time in some parts of government, but still an uncertain, wait-and-see game in others.
3. Perhaps most seriously, communications and marketing especially as a discipline are out of favour politically. The freeze on advertising and marketing spend is as much mood music about the tone and purpose of communications under the Coalition as it is a way to save actual money.

Here are three ideas I would be looking at:

Build links with online communities

Everyone know Netmums, of course. But there’s a big wide world out there from The Student Room and Moneysupermarket to Pistonheads and Shooting People; The Poultry Keeper to Runners Forum – plus a thousand hyperlocal and hyperniche blogs some with suprisingly influential readerships.

Members feel ownership of these spaces, so it’s not good enough just to buy ads or spam a discussion thread (though buying a few ads might be a nice way of showing support). If your team feels comfortable moving away from broadcast messages and branded campaigns, working directly with online communities offers a way to talk directly with a highly-targeted audience and build a two-way relationship with them. That sounds like a cliche but it can really work, with discussions and links in these spaces living on longer than any PR agency retainer would have done.

Start to map out the forums and communities in your arena using good old search tools, Twitter lists and Facebook groups. Put out feelers to the admins and moderators, pay some visits their offices if they have them and buy some coffees. Find opportunities to work together so when something comes up, you can phone a friend. Will Perrin reports some good stuff from HM Treasury along these lines, supporting the Budget last week.

Help colleagues learn to tell their stories

A key element of achieving a more authentic tone in communications is giving voice to members of staff to tell their stories, within the constraint of remaining a cohesive organisation. DFID, UKTI and the FCO do it with their bloggers, fast-growing startups like Huddle do it on Twitter or like Abel and Cole on their blog. The Auckland Theatre Company’s Posterous blog lets interested audiences into a virtual green room to learn more about the company.

In times of austerity, encouraging staff to tell their own stories is paradoxically thrifty: it develops and extends their skills, it increases their engagement with their work, it helps them build new partnerships with people who can help on the outside, it helps the organisation make links between different areas of work, and become more comfortable collaborating with others. And of course, it presents a human, open account of what the organisation does to the outside world. Which in turn becomes more appreciative of what an ambassador, a policy official, a faststreamer or – gasp – a press officer, actually do.

Set up something simple with Posterous or Tumblr, or something a bit cleverer with WordPress.com. Recruit half a dozen varied interested amateurs to get involved, and expose them to how other bloggers think, write and respond. Help them film things on their phones or take pictures when the words aren’t coming easily, and channel their posts through someone in Comms who has the gift of common sense.

Put together a listening strategy

This is also a good time to develop a plan for how monitoring and feedback will be gathered and used – the scale of response to the Programme for Government and Spending Challenge suggest that Britons in their thousands are potentially willing to contribute their ideas to the Coalition.

But it goes without saying that there’s no point inviting comments unless you can review them properly, and even then, it’s better to be able to point to a timescale and process for responding in a way which makes the exercise worthwhile for all concerned. So it’s good to see the Spending Challenge team setting out that they will monitor blogs, social networks and WikiLeaks (excitingly), and provide some indication of how ideas will be filtered. But to save yourself time and pain later, put together a short listening strategy now, setting out:

• The organisation’s goals in reaching out to new/different/larger audiences online
• The key principles that will guide online discussion and listening (openness about scope, any constraints on debate, moderation policy, commitment to review feedback and so on)
• Some of the channels and tools that the organisation will use to listen to its audiences, how these will be listened to and by whom across the organisation
• How listening will be followed up by the people who can do something about the feedback, and what help is available to those team

This isn’t just another notorious Twitter strategy (fine as that was). By thinking some of these challenges through now, Ministers and policy officials will get better advice not just on what tools to use, but on how to make digital engagement something sustainable and credible in the coming years.

Photo credit: Here’s the thing…

Related posts:

1. How to work with online communities
2. The pieces of the digital engagement puzzle
3. Building on the Barcamp buzz

I’m trying to work out why I’m uneasy about the recent announcement of the transparency revolution sweeping Whitehall. It’s not as if I’m a civil servant any more with a vested interest to conceal. As a developer, and an SME hoping to win public sector work, and a taxpayer, you’d think I’d be cock-a-hoop that I’ll be able to hold officials and politicians to account more easily from now on.

But I’m uneasy, and I think that’s because I’m troubled by the nagging doubt that the unintended consequences of transparency are often unpleasant and I’m not hearing much about their mitigations in public policy and discourse on transparency at the moment.

Let’s separate out four examples of transparency:

Opening up state-managed, non-personal datasets for wider use at low or no cost is Good Transparency. Too often, officials publish or simply file away useful datasets – lists of postboxes, recipients of New Years’ Honours, public sector vacancies and so on – in formats such as PDF that make it harder to turn that data into useful services for public good or commercial enterprises. We should make this data more readily-accessible, in flexible formats, and happily, that’s exactly what a Cabinet Office team has been doing very successfully for a year. That’s not really transparency per se, it’s just good publishing practice. (Yes, the fight to open up Ordnance Survey maps was a struggle, and is arguably a cross-subsidy by the taxpayer for work previously funded by the users of OS products. But I’d argue the wider social benefits of free mapping data outweigh this).

Opening up government contracts to a wider range of bidders, and so that smaller bidders in particular can win work, and understand how the labyrinthine government procurement machine works, is clearly a positive example of transparency too. It’s more controversial, in that what might on one hand drive down costs, might conceivably make it easier for cartels to develop, or inhibit the willingness of bidding companies to be frank and detailed in their proposals. And without reform to the very process, risk appetite and above all length of government procurement, simply being able to read more of the documents won’t entice more SMEs to get involved. But those problems are fixable, and greater transparency in this field is likely to secure real economic benefits.

Opening up performance data – timesheets, civil service salaries, government spending, MP’s expenses, whatever it is that enables rankings and comparisons in individual or institutional performance to be determined – isn’t such a clear-cut positive. We know that setting targets or criteria, and above all publishing data on performance against them, inevitably focuses effort on those, and risks distorting job performance in other areas (there are better sources on that, but I can’t find them right now).

Let’s take Joe Harley, now infamous for being one of the Whitehall high earners, with an annual salary of £245,000-249,999 for his work as CIO at the Department for Work and Pensions. Nice work if you can get it for buying a few computers, the media will say. Now, I don’t know if Joe does a good job or not (I don’t hear much about DWP IT failures – so he’s doing OK, right?). In fact, I don’t really know what Joe’s job is, or what the challenges are in delivering IT to support 120,000 people and managing a roughly £856m budget. I don’t even know what CIOs in other sectors earn, or how well they do their jobs relative to Joe, or whether someone better would be found to replace him if he were to go elsewhere, given the civil service recruitment freeze. All I know is that Joe works for DWP and earns just under £250k, and that that is quite a bit more than the Prime Minister.

It’s not that opening up performance data is a bad thing per se. But in opening up what will only ever be a selected few datasets which describe characteristics of an individual or institution’s performance, it’s human nature to draw inferences about quality and appropriateness which the data in front of us don’t justify. It’s a lesson MPs and MySociety learned a while ago, which is why they add a spurious statistic – how many times an MP has used alliterative phrases – to MPs’ profiles on TheyWorkForYou, as a gentle reminder that rankings don’t tell the whole story. Next time the civil service top earners list appears, I’d love to see an inside leg measurement data column (though I suspect this might show some remarkable, if somewhat spurious, correlations).

Opening up the decision-making process – ministerial and senior officials’ diaries, campaign contributions, voting records, lobbying, policy documents and briefings – is similarly troubling. Lawrence Lessig, in his essay ‘Against Transparency argues strongly that the ‘naked transparency’ movement risks applying undue cyncism to politicians’ behaviour, ascribing motivations to actions which don’t take account of why politicians make the choices they do:

I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement–if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness–will inspire not reform, but disgust. The “naked transparency movement,” as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.

On one hand, I don’t like the idea of policy being bought, if it happens. But I’m not sure that knowing which industry groups a politician or civil servant has met is necessarily enlightening in itself. In my experience, a Secretary of State’s chance meetings with ‘real people’ at constituency surgeries and visits influence their thinking pretty strongly too, but the data would be unlikely to show that.

Government is a fascinating study in unintended consequences. Its scale and diversity, and the interplay between ministers and the civil service, the centre and the frontline mean that things often don’t go to plan. Broadly-speaking, government is a risk-averse organisation in many ways, sometimes to the extent that on occasion it has preferred ineffectiveness to perceived impropriety, waste to uncertainty.

The coming wave of transparency could transform this in a hugely positive way, using open data on costs, opportunities and performance to become a much more creative, cost-effective and agile institution, mindful of the money it spends and the results it achieves, and ensuring individuals are accountable for their work.

But it might make things worse, frightening senior managers into becoming more guarded, taking fewer ‘risks’ with even small amounts of money, and focusing on the process to the detriment of the outcome. It may also make public service less attractive not only for those with something to hide, but for effective people who don’t want to spend their time fending off misinterpretations of their decisions and personal value for money in the media. And to mirror Lessig’s point, it may push confidence in public administration over a cliff, in revealing evidence of wrongdoing which in fact is nothing of the sort.

Two cheers then for the revolution sweeping down the corridors of Whitehall. But let’s be mindful of its consequences as yet unseen.

Photo credit: Da Goaty

Related posts:

1. Cui bono? The problem with opening up data
2. The year of the 4th Sector Pathfinders

So, a week into a new kind of government, what does the outlook for digital look like?

In terms of public sector IT at least, it looks broadly as through the principles and plans outlined by the Conservatives over the last six months are being brought into effect, with added emphasis on civil liberties.

Looking at the speeches, publications and campaign style of the Conservatives – and in particular Francis Maude (Cabinet Office, focus on efficiency & IT strategy), Jeremy Hunt (DCMS, dot com entrepreneur), George Osborne (Chancellor and open source fan) and Grant Shapps (digitally-engaged MP) – there seem to be three big ideas about the role and potential of the internet:

• Transparency: the internet as a publishing medium for government spending and Parliamentary expenses, to unleash ‘armchair auditors’ on government and politics to rebuild trust and promote consumer choice, e.g. publishing all government spending over £25k;
• Collaborative individualism: the internet as a decentralised network enabling individuals to come together as civil society to support their communities both altruistically and as an alternative mode of service provision to traditional state-run models, e.g. Wikipedia, the open source movement, involving the public in a ‘public reading stage’ of new Bills in Parliament;
• Efficiency: the internet as a lower-cost approach to delivering government IT programmes effectively including through smaller and more modular approaches, e.g. hosting health records via Google or Microsoft, increasing procurement from SMEs, and prohibiting the signing of very large (>£100m) IT contracts.

But what does that mean for jobbing webbies in the public sector? (n.b. of which I am no longer one, but more on that on a future occasion) Here are my predictions:

1. Government IT will become more agile. Big IT is in a weak position right now, with unhappy customers having to work around the straightjacket of long-term contracts, and a Treasury review of all big contracts signed since the start of the year. There are serious and repeated suggestions of a government skunkworks as part of a more radical rethink of the recently published Government IT strategy. Sure, big desktop contracts and the planned gCloud are not likely to go away soon, but underneath their feet, there will be a strong expectation from the centre of government that digital should move fast, be cheap and learn from its own (small) mistakes. Likelihood of happening: 60%.
2. Departments will begin to involve civil society in delivery, as well as policy. The ‘post bureaucratic age’ concept is a provocative label for a concept with much broader agreement: that addressing the deficit demands a slightly smaller State, and that this can be achieved in part through the enabling power of technology to convene individuals and civil society groups to help deliver public policy outcomes. Though rejecting the notion of a post-bureaucratic age, a great man once summed up the challenge to the role of government in terms of the need to become a collaborative state, working more closely with the civil society organisations – the Netmums and Horses Mouths – that the internet has made possible:
   

   The collaborative state still requires leaders and enablers, doers and thinkers. It still requires public services but services with boundaries porous to external ideas… The future of government is to provide tools for empowerment, not to sit back and hope that laissez-faire adhocracy will suffice.

   The Office for Civil Society in the Cabinet Office, and the fact that the first summit of civil society social entrepreneurs took place within a week of taking office, imply that this is going to be high priority, even if the shape of the programme is in its infancy. The challenge for still-bureaucratic government will be how to re-engineer procurement, commissioning and communications to support this kind of voluntarism, in place of traditional command-and-control. Likelihood of happening (in some areas, at least): 95%.

3. We’ll see less enthusiasm for social media and digital engagement for its own sake amongst ministers. The last couple of years saw an explosion in the interest of politicians across the spectrum in using innovative technology to been seen to consult and to raise their own profiles online, frequently (but with honourable exceptions) managed by a member of their staff. The new political masters will be fewer in number (BIS seems to have shed three ministers, for example), more focussed and less keen on tools like Twitter, for example. Where tools deliver practical value – like Grant Shapps’ famous email list to 10,000 of his constituents, or short pieces to camera which extend the reach of a speech – they’ll be used. Likelihood of happening: 50% (politicians remain, after all, personalities in public life)
4. By contrast, we’ll see a lot more online policy engagement and idea generation. Today’s Coalition Programme announcement (itself intended to be a commentable document, I understand) ended with a clear commitment from the Prime Minister to involve the public directly in shaping the new Freedom Bill, as well as establishing a new Public Reading stage for Bills in Parliament before they become law. Administrative government has always been keen on the process of consultation; but it seems as though political government may be willing to make a firm commitment to take the wisdom of online crowds on board (and there’s still the prospect of the £1m prize for a suitable online platform which makes it possible, maybe). Likelihood of happening: 95%
   
5. Power will shift in central government at least from Communications & Marketing teams, back to Policy and the front line. There is always talk from politicians about reducing the cost of marketing, but with a public plan to reduce the COI budget to its 1997 level (£163m down from £391m) that’s starting to look like it might happen; the previous government had already committed to a 25% cut in marketing spending across the board [PDF], albeit on a leisurely timescale. Government comms teams have seen these threats come and go over the years, but this time it looks serious, with money (and influence) moving back to policy teams delivering the major programmes of the new administration and a disinclination to be seen to be ‘spinning’. Whether smart, targetted digital marketing helps save the credibility of government marketing as a whole in a post-TV advertising era will be an interesting story to follow in the coming years. Likelihood of happening: 80%.
6. There will be renewed interest in how digital can save money by enabling new forms of internal collaboration. Thoughtful people have long argued that the real potential of social media in the public sector is in internal collaboration within and between public bodies. As CIOs and Finance Directors look to reduce travel expenses and improve staff productivity, expect to see more interest in tools like Huddle and Basecamp to support remote working beyond the GSI and on e-learning packages to deliver training. If smart folk can make the case internally for the productivity benefits of LinkedIn or Twitter, expect to see more strategic use of social media tools too. Likelihood of happening: 70%.
7. The rise of the open data movement will accelerate. Commitment to opening up government data has already been publicly affirmed, but expect to see a shift in emphasis from the potential benefits of open data to expose poor performance and motivate improvements in public services, towards the two other pillars: transparency in spending and lobbying; and perhaps especially the potential commercial benefits in providing the material for new enterprises and civil society groups (watch out for the the promised syndication of Directgov content in the next month or so). Likelihood of happening: 100%.
8. The rethinking of government structures and programmes will introduce new opportunities for lightweight and social digital approaches. It’s a truism that a new government will have new priorities and – even though most central government departments escaped without too much immediate reorganisation – that it will inevitably set up new organisations with a sense of mission and desire to do things differently: the Office for Civil Society and Office for Budgetary Responsibility seem like two such examples. New organisations and teams tend to be more open to creative approaches, and supportive of pilots of lightweight digital tools to help them engage staff with the new mission and create a strong public profile. Likelihood of happening: 80%.
9. There will be a renewed focus on digital skills. For all the talk of Government 2.0 and 3.0, there’s some bug fixing of 1.0 still to do to meet the needs of users who aren’t upgrading anytime soon. Use of email, search optimisation and strategy, accessibility, basic digital marketing, mobile integration and usability will all emerge as the drivers of more productive and efficient IT – without which more ambitious ideas such as personalisation or engagement will struggle. Government digital teams have suffered from outsourcing over the last decade or more, but look out for a renewed interest in the skills and activities really needed to optimise digital tools. Likelihood of happening: 70%.
10. The number of contractors and consultants working on public sector digital projects will grow. What? This is a more speculative prediction, but with pay and recruitment freezes imminent or already in place in many organisations, as people leave teams they will leave skills gaps which need to be plugged, if not by management consultants, then by freelance and contract staff with lower overheads or based outside the organisation – hopefully with a clearer mandate to coach and mentor civil servants to help transfer knowledge in key areas.  Likelihood of happening: 50%.

It’s worth keeping our feet on the ground here. There was a nice piece in the Guardian earlier this week by Mark Davies, former Special Advisor to Jack Straw:

When the change took place that brought forth the Lib-Con coalition, all that happened in my own department was that six ministers and two special advisers left the office, and new ones arrived. The other 90,000 civil servants remained. Any minister or adviser who wants to be effective needs to work with that in mind, and recognise that progress will only be achieved by harnessing the departmental machine.

It will be fascinating to watch things unfold over the next few months.

Photo credit: Number10Gov on Flickr

Related posts:

1. Unpacking the world of digital in government
2. Defining the roles within digital engagement
3. What should the Director of Digital Engagement do?

So, it’s official – the General Election has been called for 6 May.

As previously pledged and in the spirit of the Cabinet Office guidance, I’m intending not to post anything new here, on Twitter, or reply to comments here or public Twitter replies until the new Government is announced. Goodness knows how I’ll use the free time.

Since I wrote that – and in a bit of characteristic bad timing – I’ve also made the decision to leave BIS shortly after the election. Thanks to everyone who’s sent me their good wishes – and yes, I do very much hope to continue blathering on here about much the same stuff wherever I end up.

I’m still not sure where this leap in the dark will take me, so if you want to get in touch in the meantime about anything – and especially future collaborations, contracts or jobs – you can contact me via this blog, DM me on Twitter, or contact me via LinkedIn.

Toodle-oo.

Photo credit: Johannes Pape

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It’s Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science, and I’ve taken the pledge to write about a female heroine of science or technology.

My everyday heroine is Marilyn Booth, a civil servant, working in Science & Society policy in a central government department not a million miles from my own. To my knowledge, Marilyn’s not discovered any new elements, won many Nobel prizes or authored many W3C specifications (though I could be wrong). But she’s at the forefront of a revolution that should and must happen if government is to start engaging online in any meaningful way.

Marilyn tweets, about her work and her life. She retweets eminent scientists and stakeholders, including the minister and the department’s official channels, and has built up a 600-strong following. She runs a Facebook group, helping promote the work of her team, long after its original intended purpose was concluded. She sets up stakeholder events in Second Life that would terrify me, logistics alone. She uses low cost web tools like Eventbrite to manage events, saving taxpayers thousands of pounds a time. The bottom line is, she has her ear to the ground, knows her stakeholder audience well, thinks laterally and courageously about how to use the new tools, and won’t be thwarted by the limitations of corporate IT.

It’s great for government departments to set up social media channels and talk to their audiences in new ways. It’s even better when ministers and senior officials take the plunge personally. And it’s critically important that people in my kind of role walk the talk.

But we’ll only change the way government works when bureaucrats deep in the bowels of policy departments take the step of using them regularly and for professional purposes. When they know who’s influential and interesting beyond the formal steering group, and informally involve them in solving public policy problems in the open. Soon, that won’t be the difficult and at times brave step that it is today. For now, three cheers for the Marilyns showing us the way.

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Shortly after the forthcoming General Election, I’ll be leaving the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

Tomorrow will mark my second anniversary of working at BIS, and its predecessor, DIUS. It’s been a fantastic couple of years, which has introduced me to some phenomenally talented and creative people in and around government. I’ve been privileged to have the time, space and trust to experiment with how a policymaking department might use social technologies, though I’m conscious we’ve barely scratched the surface.

But it’s time for a change. I have virtually no idea what I’ll do next. I appreciate that this is, in the words of a long-time colleague, insane. For those curious: my departure is at my own behest, is on good terms, and isn’t a result of civil service cuts, linked to my own use of social media or in any way politically-motivated (I’d be happy to serve pretty much any government).

I’m optimistic that it’s a good time to be a general purpose webby. There are exciting opportunities for digital engagement around government, and lots of clever folk drumming up new ones. It would be interesting to step back into the private sector world of digital marketing, or the fast-developing world of digital campaigning in the third sector, and learn more about how things are done there. Or maybe it’s time to go back to my roots as a market researcher. In PR and digital, there are some smart young agencies and startups doing exciting things. And I’ve always been a bit of an entrepreneur manqué, so perhaps this is the moment to listen to Lord Sugar, take the plunge and turn some of those crazy tools and techniques into grown up products and services myself.

If you have a project or venture you’d like to discuss with me, I’ll be all ears for the next couple of months – I’m hoping not to rush into anything too quickly. You can contact me via this blog, DM me on Twitter, or contact me via LinkedIn.

Thanks all for your support over the last couple of years. I’m looking forward to whatever comes next.

Photo credit: Kisforkate

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It’s been a busy couple of weeks for the BIS webbies (not for me though; I’ve been putting my feet up for the last week in rural Suffolk). A quick round-up of some of the highlights:

A new website for BIS: Neil’s team, working with our corporate IT unit and EduServ, have been working ferociously hard, at times uphill, and for the last umpteen weekends, to merge the old DIUS and BERR websites into the new site which launched over the weekend. Neil has the skinny. There’s a huge amount of work and care gone into the site, some really clever technical touches and some solid planning to help us adapt to whatever Providence throws our way. As Neil explains, we’re aiming for some fairly radical openness about the site going forward – you can easily see what it cost, (and what it will save), what its predecessors cost, what customer insight it’s based on, and what our real-time web traffic statistics are – and tell us what works and what doesn’t in a new GetSatisfaction forum. Fantastic work, chaps.

Like Simon, I’ll admit to waving a bittersweet farewell to the interim, WordPress-based site which helped us manage f0r 9 months. I’ve got a future blog post brewing on the pros and cons of lightweight tools, and plan to say more there.

Who Gets The Tip? We’ve kicked off a little campaign to encourage hospitality businesses to be transparent in how tips and service charges are divided, by encouraging consumers to ask the question ‘Who Gets The Tip?’. It’s a very brief, rather unusual project combining social media and traditional PR as equal partners and working with the excellent Diffusion on the online aspects. I particularly love the intro video, made in-house by, and starring, the team. Top stuff, led by Jenny. When you’re out and about, ask your waiter; and if you know someone who runs a hospitality business, suggest they generate a pie chart of how they split their tips, and add themselves to the Google map.

Company Charges consultation: We’re still experimenting with formats for online consultation, and the latest project is a niche consultation on changes to company regulation. We could have just whacked some PDFs up there and had done with it, but the policy lead was keen to offer more scope for online interaction between respondents (who don’t tend to dabble in mainstream social media). So the interactive response site built entirely by the talented Alistair Reid is an interesting WordPress/Scribd hybrid, which hopefully makes a big document more navigable and, well, interactive. We’ll see how it goes. It’s a sad consequence of the tightening of public sector finances that we’re having to say goodbye to Alistair at the end of his contract. He’s a fantastic all-round webby, social media maven, copywriter and colleague. For goodness sake, somebody hire him, quick.

Social Media channels survey: back in the autumn, we conducted some popup-survey and focus group user research into corporate site visitors – but what about our social media channels? With audiences consuming our content through RSS, email subscriptions, desktop clients and web interfaces, how can we get quick, cheap, useful feedback to help us evaluate those channels? Alistair and team have come up with a neat approach to promoting the survey: make a video, take a picture, send some tweets. Give us your thoughts.

As you can tell, I’m hugely proud of the team. They’re awesome.

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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?

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