Welcome to the machine

I spent an interesting hour in the company of a long-serving colleague today, as part of a project we’re doing to look at the baseline skills and awareness of social media in the organisation. Peter (not his real name) first worked in the Department for Education in the late 1960s, and painted me a picture of what life was like:

“A letter would come in, and would go to the Registry. There were three sets of files: Policy, Premises and Correspondence. The Registry folk would work out which set of files the letter belonged with, and file it. Then I’d receive the file, together with a note about the letter. All the information about the matter would be kept in the file. Sometimes, if the file related to a school that had been established for decades, the file would be enormous. So they would send me a form asking which portion of the file I needed, and I’d send that back to them in the docket, and then back would come the file. I’d read the letter, maybe telephone a colleague to check something if I needed to – bearing in mind the cost of telephone calls – and then I’d write my response in longhand and give it to the typing pool. It would come back within 24 hours, and I’d check it. If corrections were needed, I’d send it back and have it redone. And then the letter would go out.”

I’m sure in some ways the basic process of civil service work is much the same today – I remember the manila registry files myself from when I started, just five years ago. But it made me stop and think about the scale and pace of change. Twenty years ago, few civil servants would have regularly worked with a computer. Ten years ago, email would have been a novelty for most. Now, we’re wondering why it’s seeming so tough to embed a blogging culture amongst a workforce of whom over 30% (PDF) started work in the 1970s and 64% of whom were filing their first dockets before Tim Berners-Lee’s vague but exciting idea was even conceived.

Douglas Adams was right:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn 35 is incredibly exciting and creative and, given opportunity, you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really

Later in the day, between spells of digital docket-filing, I stumbled across the Civil Service values, namely integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. We live in a performance-driven world, where it seems everyone is judged on results and targets achieved, deadlines and service agreements delivered. The what, not the how. And yet those values describe a different type of organisation: one in which the credibility and trust of the public rest at least as much in the processes it follows as in the results it produces. Rigour, transparency, independence. Curiously, I think social media, with its potential to expose organisations to scrutiny from passionate outsiders can help deliver as much on these process objectives as on the delivery ones. So maybe we shouldn’t just make the case for the adoption of social media by government from the perspective of quicker/faster/cheaper but also argue the potential for greater transparency, scrutiny, reflection and independence.

I think that’s one for the registry file.

Social media is poop scoop, not turd polish

One day, when I can retire from all this social media stuff and become comfortably rich on the conference circuit, I’ll pepper my sell-out keynote speeches with colourful metaphors like the following:

Social media is poop scoop, not turd polish.

Accept that sh*t happens
So much communication today – from the public and private sectors – is predicated on the belief that silence, rebuttal or defensive lines will be enough. It won’t, not these days. Even if it makes the issue die down for a bit in the mainstream media, in the long run it will blow up again or gnaw away at your brand corrosively to make you look foolish, dishonest or even mildly unhinged. Similarly, social media quickly exposes fabrication and humiliates those responsible, so if you have skeletons in the closet then you’re best off coming clean. Try using the tools of social media to polish turds at your peril.

Lesson #1: expect sh*t, and go equipped with the tools to deal with it.

Take responsibility for it, and for clearing it up
Scoopers accept that it’s up to them to clear up the mess, even if there’s nobody looking and even if it’s not easy. It’s not that you couldn’t just leave it – you might get away with that a few times – but eventually it will catch up with you, or you’ll find yourself in a community which is overrun with the stuff. In practical terms, that means it’s your responsibility – as customer service agent, a press officer, a policy official, whatever – to engage in the process of helping put the screw-ups right when you find them. That doesn’t necessarily mean whistleblowing (but there’s a role for that too), but it does mean being prepared to muck in yourself and recognise that you can help to fix it.

I’d love to see more public sector organisations using services like GetSatisfaction to help identify and address problems in service, harnessing the passion and ideas of our customers to help us solve the problem. Social media helps big organisations to turn frustration into solutions, and to spot the holes in customer service or policy more effectively than mystery shopping, market research or even [sharp intake of breath] classic consultation. But it means being seen to stoop and scoop, which we’re often not ready to do.

Lesson #2: own up to mistakes, and use some of the tools out there to help people help you put things right.

Do what people do in civilised society
Nobody wants to live in a world of polished turds – it makes for a more cynical, frustrated, insular community. Social media can restore some of the sense of community where we give and take, praise and criticise, and earn a reputation based on the contribution we make, not the image we try to manufacture. The civilised organisation, the collaborative state, behaves honestly in the social media ecosystem, whether that’s introducing yourself, crediting the work of others, admitting mistakes or being up front about what you’re doing and why.

Lesson #3: be nice.

I’m so gonna regret writing this when someone picks me up me in the future for polishing a turd of my own. But for now, wish me luck next week as I work with some colleagues to broach one of the hardest topics in social media: scoop, don’t polish.

Image credits (from top): Minor Prophet, Johannal, Robertotostes

Blessed are the developers

This week, I took a trip down memory lane and revisited a (non-government) project I last worked on nearly five years ago. The ‘temporary‘ system I built back then is still going – amazingly – but the team wanted some changes made. Various people had dabbled in the code since 2003, most recently the organisation’s team of Romanian programmers.  The problem was, my former colleague complained, though cheap those guys didn’t really understand the project, moved onto other stuff and ended up delivering a half-upgraded system which was worse than what was there before.

Today, I had lunch with some proper government techies. This social media stuff is all very well, they said, but what about accessibility, and security, and data protection, and support? To paraphrase their argument, the dabblings of people like me trigger an avalanche of expectation which people like them are then commanded to deliver on. Frustratingly, it’s not that those guys aren’t innovating – just that the incredible stuff they’ve been developing hasn’t managed to see the light of day.

So I’m starting to think this means two things:

• If we want to be creative in how we apply technology to the problems of government, then we need to draw a line under the extent to which we outsource IT. Though they’d beat you to a pulp with one of their white papers for saying it, you’ll never get real innovation in web communication from the big outsourcers. For that, you need a guy in the corner who does this stuff out of pride, not for money and doesn’t need a spec to tell you how it should be built. It comes from leaving just enough breathing space in the day job for the in-house techies to build the stuff they think is cool, and ensuring it gets in front of the right people. It comes from the developers still working on the project their boss told them to stop working on six months ago. Like Spolsky says, we need to treat our good in-house developers like the superstars they are and recognise just how much talent we have sitting within government if only we could – dare I say – unlock it.
• Social media tools lower the barrier to entry, but only so far. WordPress.com, TypePad, Ning and SurveyMonkey are great. They let people like me take our meagre knowledge a long way. But we have a responsibility to stop others who understand less about these tools than we do from running away with the idea that this means government webbery has fundamentally changed: it hasn’t. More than ever in a converged, transformed, empowered world, we need the enterprise CMSes, the resilient hosting and the focus on making stuff that’s accessible to everyone. A swiss army knife might save you on a camping trip, but it’s not exactly the tool of choice when you’re refitting a kitchen, and quite right too. We need to understand which of our projects are camping trips, and which are kitchen refits, and choose our tools and teams accordingly – making sure the senior decisionmakers understand the distinction too.

To a non-techie, it can feel like your grumpy developers are just being obstructive when they tell you that they can’t just deploy that blog site you wanted overnight when that guy at the conference said that you could do it yourself on WordPress.com in half an hour. But chances are – if your techies are any good – it’s not obstructiveness at all: it’s professionalism.

Hassles and Handycams

“Let’s do some video case studies”
“How about a little montage of the Minister doing the visit?”
“We could do something on YouTube – you know, liven it up a bit”

There’s something compelling about film, which is why so many events and launches open with an uplifting compilation to a jaunty soundtrack. They set the scene, tell real people’s stories, bring events to life, make the conceptual personal.

Expectations seem to be changing. In a YouTube world, I think it’s fair to say that the assumption is now that effective government communication online will incorporate video, whether it’s formal, informal or full-blown interactive.

But it’s easier said than done.

A number of recent projects have brought me face to face with the world of video and the practicalities of making it happen:

• You need the gear to record video, or access to people who can do it for you (at a significant cost)
• You need to find a way to look after and manage any in-house gear
• You need people to project manage each shoot, getting the people lined up, the venues arranged etc
• You need release forms and briefings (speeches, bullet points, background notes, whatever)
• You need to manage the expectations of Important People who are used to being interviewed by the BBC with autocues
• You need some way to edit what you shoot
• You need a grasp of aspect ratios and codecs, video formats, frame rates and embeddable code
• You need somewhere to put it and process for getting it OK-ed
• You need rules about what you publish and how you moderate comments
• You need an answer when someone says: “So why exactly are we doing this?” and when someone says: “So how come the YouTube ‘related videos’ show a girl in a G-string?”

All of which can be done. But the hardest bit – and why I have newfound respect for graduates of media studies courses – is that you need to know how you tell a story through video. Talking heads are fine, but often dull. Proper film-makers know about finding interesting locations, putting interviewees at their ease, which bits to keep and which bits to chop, how to do intros, transitions, titles, splicing clips together, fixing the sound and colour balance, storing and converting the footage and lots more. And too often recently for me, it’s just been a cheerful civil servant with a Handycam and an Important Person wondering why the outputs aren’t a bit more polished.

The answer might be to leave this to people who know about video – just brief it out and leave it to the professionals. But I think video is becoming like typing: one day soon, the practical skills to communicate through video are going to be as normal as being able to put together a Powerpoint presentation – you don’t bring in an agency for that. In the same way that bullet point slides look dated these days, fairly soon the smart kids will be making their points with vox pops, Qik streams and mini-documentaries, and we’ll see film-making skills creep into person specifications and CVs for people in communications roles.

I think it’s worth it: the prize will be a much more engaging and authentic way of communicating.

Adventures in social consultation

Some consultations are basically dull. Some are politically-charged. Some are hurried. So when the Science and Society consultation came sauntering along, it was clear this was an opportunity too good to miss. It’s a genuine call for ideas, casting the net wide to improve the way that science is communicated, understood, taught, and recruited for. What can we do to improve trust and confidence in scientists? How can we get more high quality science broadcasting and more intelligent media coverage of science issues? How can science be taught in school in more engaging ways? Interesting stuff.

These issues are ripe for a more interactive, distributed approach enabled by social media – a truly ‘social consultation’ – where the issues are conveyed in an engaging way and people can respond in whole or in part through a number of channels, whether in our space or theirs.

Inspired by the truly groundbreaking Governance of Britain site that Puffbox developed for Ministry of Justice, we pitched the idea of a ‘hub’ site to the policy team, as a focus for the debate online and a technology solution to the challenge of harnessing the activities of stakeholders in a manageable way.

Like most consultations, the full document runs to 50+ pages with 34 meaty questions. Whilst virtually everyone has an interest in some of the issues, virtually nobody is interested in all of them. So our big experiment with this project is the idea of ‘widgetising’ the consultation questions so that bloggers or website owners can easily host a debate about the few issues which interest them and their network.

Complementing this is some truly remarkable content. My phenomenal new colleague Georgia – originally in the office for a week’s work experience – stayed on for more, organising the interviewing and filming of ten eminent scientists, broadcasters and policymakers you can watch on the site talking about the consultation. We’ll be aiming to keep the blog area fresh with these personal perspectives over the summer.

There’s the second outing of a CommentPress-powered ‘commentable’ version of a document, allowing visitors to leave public comments on specific questions or paragraphs. It’s not a panacea though: the CommentPress theme out-of-the-box needs a bit of work to make it robust and accessible, and we’re hoping to smooth some of the rough edges over the next few weeks.

Tracking the wider online debate is where we’ve borrowed most liberally from the excellent work of others: bringing in Parliamentary mentions from TheyWorkForYou as originally demonstrated by TellThemWhatYouThink; a Deli.cio.us account to publicly share links on the site as pioneered by Governance of Britain; and an internally-focussed Netvibes-based dashboard to help officials keep track of online coverage.

A bit of a kitchen-sink approach? Maybe, but we’ve tried to apply some strategy to our choices:

- Yes to a Facebook group (we’ll be running events later and want to widen our network)
- No to liveblogging or streaming the launch (it was a fun event, but the online audience would be too small and frankly we’ve got more engaging content)
- Yes to Twitter, but owned by Rhys – our dynamic, hip-to-the-Flickr Press Officer – and explictly corporate, science-oriented, and low volume
- No to forums: with a comment-enabled blog, CommentPress document, widgets and Del.icio.us roll we think we’ve got more applied channels for feedback

As a result of all this, I’ve spent a lot more time in the guts of WordPress than I had done before, and it’s been a positive experience virtually all the way. Believe the hype – there’s much more to it than a blogging platform – especially when teamed with the excellent SimplePie for RSS. Creating a theme from scratch is easier than it seems, honest. We’ll put the code we’ve developed into Google Code’s repository after the project in case others can benefit from it.

With so many virtual plates spinning, we’ve undoubtedly made mistakes and missed some tricks – please do help me out by showing us where the holes are.