A year ago today – inspired by the Open Rights Group – we launched Innovation Nation: Interactive, a commentable version of the Innovation Nation white paper using WordPress, Commentpress and our shiny new sandbox server. (Goodness knows how, given that Arthur was barely 3 weeks old at the time, but somehow it got launched.)

At the time, I wrote:

Policymaking should be an ongoing conversation between government and stakeholders, not a process where government stops listening when the consultation closes.

We’re not there yet, of course, but in the last 12 months, the digital engagement community (not just DIUS/BIS or government) has come a long way:

1. Power of Information Taskforce & Commentariat: William Perrin’s team supporting Richard Allan took commenting a step forward sharing the draft and final reports in commentable form using the DIUS ‘Commentariat’ theme we open sourced for the purpose. What’s more, the report’s own recommendations and the Government response to it steered Government strongly towards this kind of engagement. And lots of people took up the baton.
2. Write To Reply: Joss and Tony showed that you don’t need to be in government to make government documents commentable online, illustrating the shift in power which social media tools make possible.
3. New Director of Digital Engagement: Andrew Stott appointed to lead digital engagement across government,  getting Sir Tim Berners-Lee to extract raw data from departments. Not a bad way to start.
4. London Summit: a massive, and massively-sophisticated digital engagement project shows what a digital team at the top of their game can achieve
5. @lorddrayson: The (Cabinet) Minister for Science & Innovation taking to Twitter in a big way as a way of engaging with supporters and critics, as well as using Audioboo & Twitpic – and expects his civil servants to keep up with him
6. ConsultationXML: Harry Metcalfe’s development of a practical tool to convert PDFs into semantically-rich data. Phase 2 is underway, looking at what XML can be turned into for practical benefit (think: WordPress plugins)
7. RDFa for consultations and jobs: COI commissioning work to make consultation and jobs pages on government sites semantically meaningful and reusable via RDFa.
8. Civil Service Jobs online: a seriously useful government dataset getting its own API (and iPhone app)
9. Civil Service Live 09: the annual event getting the full social reporting treatment courtesy of some smart thinking by COI and the talented team at Amplified
10. Barcamp 09, Teacamps & Heads of Digital Engagement: a thriving community of digital engagement folk working across and around government coming together to share, learn and support each other through Twitter, blogs and events

There are so many more examples I could cite. There’s a long way to go, but we’re climbing the mountain.

Related posts:

1. digitalgovuk: Tracking social media innovation in government
2. Civil Service jobs, your way
3. The year of living (slightly) dangerously

Today DIUS and Becta held a conference hosted by Channel 4 in London under the banner “All Together Now: Delivering Further Education in an era of mass participation“. The event was for policy makers, FE professionals and providers to consider the implications and potential of this new wave of media and technology innovation, learn from the people who have been pioneering their use and network, debate and develop how they could be used to enrich the learner experience in FE. Props to  Michelle and Lucy in particular along with Steve and the Becta crew for their hard work putting together a great day.

It was primarily about immersion and challenge. As our minister Sion Simon put it, it reflected the fact that government should learn from the people who know better than we do what young people are doing with these tools:

Find more videos like this on All Together Now

The core online platform was a Ning group set up by Becta to share materials from the event and continue the discussion. Ning is a great and flexible tool, which served us well on the day.

For my team – under the expert tutelage of Dave Briggs – this event was a good opportunity to practice our social reporting skills, and apply a number of different approaches to see what works best for us. Specifically, we were looking at capturing pictures and video from the event, cover some of the main themes and sessions in blog form, try out some podcasting and cover the event on Twitter for those unable to be there. We’ll debrief as a team and review tomorrow, but my topline reflections were:

• practising the skills makes you think about the value and purpose of social reporting: ultimately there’s value in four areas: you’re creating an engaging record of a valuable event for the future; you’re widening the reach of the event to people who can’t be there; you’re providing platforms to extend the discussion for the participants, and providing a backchannel and way for participants to take part in the reporting too; and you’re facilitating (potentially) live interaction between the physical and online audiences. Phew.
• what to capture? Traditional event reporting focuses on the speakers, whereas social reporting is often about the audience. Capturing both the highlights from the speakers and the audience reactions is a tall order, even with a team of social reporters.
• discussion online: before, during or after? Tools like Ning come with built in commenting, blogs and forums. With an event like the UKGovWeb barcamp, the discussion was quite active online in advance of the event; the UKYouthOnline barcamp is still talking online six months after the event. Neither of those saw a lot of activity during the event itself; by dedicating a social reporter to the task of rapid editing and uploading (a social editor?) we saw a lot more activity on the site during the event itself, including a bit of discussion during the event too – plus the Twitter activity.
• production values vs speed: I think it was Adam Gee, a commissioning editor from Channel 4, who said in a Q&A session that production values of online media matter less to young people than the ability to access streams, when and where they want. Dave’s rapid video editing, and Rhys’ quick photo retouching, meant that we got stuff up quickly even if it had some rough edges. The value of this content is in having it available, not necessarily in very polished form.
• power of Twitter: like everyone, I’m finding Twitter more and more useful these days. But if you’re live tweeting, you realise just how powerful a tool it is. The ability to rapidly and simultaneously publish and send private messages, share content from others and provide background for readers in the form of extra links and Twitter usernames, is really amazing.
• audioboo podcasting: I’ve been an audioboo fan for about 36 hours now. The podcast I recorded was in a noisy concrete-lined room, and yet it came out really well. Definitely my favourite iPhone app of the moment, and I can see lots of uses for it in future.
• logistics: most of the social reporting posts I’ve read focus on the gear (netbooks, cameras, audio recorders etc), and it’s true that that’s a big part of it. But equally important are the little logistical things: having access to reliable wifi (we eventually fixed that around lunchtime, sorry guys), having lots of 4-way extension leads, assigning clear roles to make sure the important content got captured, and drawing on the varied skills of your social reporters. We were in the lovely position of having a speechwriter, an ethnographer, a press officer/photographer, a couple of geeks, a community manager and a couple of stakeholder/events people in our reporting team today.

Is social reporting just a rather self-indulgent pursuit in these straitened times? I don’t think it is – we did a lot of things right today and can learn some useful tips and tricks for the future to help ensure we get more value out of events like this, ensuring that more people can benefit both during and afterwards. And it’s rather fun too.

Photo credits: Rhys Stacker, DIUS

Related posts:

1. Scottish Government and social media
2. How to get started in social media
3. Is social media safe for work?

It’s been an exciting week, from Digital Britain (now commentable) to Directgov’s SchoolClosures.org.uk prototype, UKGovWeb Barcamp to the PoI Taskforce Report.

But right now, I’m personally the most excited about the new Mature Students campaign DIUS is kicking off in partnership with The Student Room and Directgov:

Recommendation 1 of the PoI Taskforce Report challenges public servants to involve themselves in user-led communities:

As a matter of course, public servants should be active in online peer support forums concerned with their areas of work, be it education specialists in parenting forums or doctors in health forums.

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.

DIUS’ new Mature Students campaign aims to provide information, advice and guidance to people considering returning to education but facing the challenges of childcare, finance or the cultural aspects of student life. Research shows that mature students are particularly likely to look for university options near home, so local options are important. Some of this information existed already on Directgov, but the softer peer support is not really in the scope of the Directgov brand proposition. Under web convergence rules, creating a new microsite was a no-no. Enter The Student Room.

TSR has over 100,000 members and some 8 million posts in its forums, managed by an crack team of volunteer moderators (n.b. eagle-eyed readers will raise an eyebrow at the banner ad for coursework essays; TSR work with exam boards to stamp out plagiarism). With so many users, a small but significant chunk of them mature students, they’re a great partner for the campaign. And with a platform more flexible than Directgov’s in terms of functionality and proposition based squarely on peer support, they provide the perfect companion to Directgov’s official, credible information.

We learned some valuable lessons from the process of working together:

• User-led communities aren’t agencies: at some points, we made the mistake of treating TSR like a delivery agency, trying to specify too much of the detail. User-led communities are much more valuable than agencies if you give them the space to be creative, partly because they think as their members think (‘childcare is coming up as an issue – let’s talk to Netmums’) and of course because they bring their own audience to the campaign. Incidentally, communities may be more used to an ad-funded rather than a design & build business model, which may need to be reviewed if this kind of thing takes off.
• Co-creation can be more than just a fancy idea: it’s one thing to do audience research and/or do lip service to the idea of developing something with the target audience. But when the audience in question is on tap via a forum thread, why not just ask them? Sourcing case studies became a dream.
• Play to your strengths: Directgov is credible, well-written, definitive and robust. The Student Room is personal, frank, independent and nimble. PR agencies are good at sourcing stories and setting up opportunities. I rather enjoyed writing my first screenscraper to extract name, URL and postcode information on universities to help save the TSR guys a bit of time building their lovely searchable Google map. We struggled at first to get our collective heads around the right fit of roles and brands, but after some conference calls and wireframes I think the end result – Directgov pointing to The Student Room for moderated peer support and local area information, TSR pointing to Directgov for definitive funding and support information – is a great one and hopefully a model for the future. We’ll certainly be watching the stats.

The project came in on time, on budget (four figures rather than five for the web components), and from where I was sitting, was one of the most painless web projects I’ve ever been involved with. Kudos to Jamie and Warren at The Student Room, Sam, Justin & Jacq at DIUS, Stephen & Graham from the DIUS Education & Learning Directgov franchise and the team at Consolidated PR.

Related posts:

1. How to work with online communities
2. New Opportunities
3. What machines think people do: a basic primer on web analytics

At Barcamp on Saturday, Harry Metcalfe of TellThemWhatYouThink and I presented some work we’ve been doing to build a web application which makes it easier to turn PDF versions of consultation documents into structured XML. Before you click on to something more interesting, give me a chance to explain in plain English why this matters.

Image: lotyloty

As Harry says in his write up:

Typically, a formal consultation is a pretty tedious process: a department will write up a big PDF document, print it, send it to some people, stick it on their website and wait for people to respond. The whole process is pretty dated: it doesn’t really take advantage of the web, and is pretty inaccessible to most people.

We’re not going to get away soon from the reality that the final, definitive versions of these documents live in PDF (well InDesign/QuarkXPress, then PDF) formats. Somehow, they need to be turned into something which can ‘live’ online, stimulating a conversation and real two-way interaction about policy. They need to be documents which help people get into the issues, discuss and share them, relate them to their own situation and provide feedback on the aspects that concern them.

There are a couple of nice examples of this in practice right now:

• In Birmingham, a group of Concerned Citizens took what they perceived to be a jargon-heavy consultation document from the local authority, translated it into plain English, and posted it in commentable form on a website, to help ensure that local people had a chance to meaningfully engage with the proposals. I imagine this took some laborious cutting and pasting and some hairy-chested technical skills, but what if the council had published its document in a way which any group could easily dissect and interpret in this way? What if all councils did so? Might the proposals and the ideas become more important than the jargon, and might the quality and extent of the debate improve as a result?
• The Power of Information Taskforce Report, published in beta via a WordPress-based tool on Sunday, also publishes a parallel RSS feed of all the sections of the document, and all the contributed comments. Within 12 hours of appearing on the web, the document had already been converted – not by the publishers, but by interested third parties looking to widen the debate – into a wiki and a special XML dialect for strategy documents known as StratML.

Even without surrendering quite so much control over the words themselves, there is much that becomes easier to do once the core document is structured:

• Convert it easily into HTML which can be loaded into a big enterprise CMS and published on the corporate site, linked to and/or read on mobile devices
• Build a tool to attach a comment box to each paragraph or section, for people to comment in detail on the proposals
• Automatically generate an online response form, which picks up all the questions asked in the document, and sends the results to a database, spreadsheet, analysis package, discussion forum or whatever
• Generate ‘widgets’ or mini-questionnaires based on a few of the questions raised in the document, for bloggers and social networkers to embed in their sites and profiles, like we attempted for the Science and Society consultation
• Publish out information about the consultation, like the closing date, summary and so on, to services like Directgov to aggregate across government, or to third party user-generated sites like TellThemWhatYouThink – like we’re doing at DIUS using a simple Atom feed.

The fact is, PDF files of consultations are a big soup of paragraphs, pictures, case studies and questions. To help build the kind of labour-saving tools which might encourage debate around them, we need to describe the content of the documents in ways which machines can work with (“this bit’s a question”,”that bit’s a case study”,”the consultation closes on date X” and so on). And that’s what Harry’s tool sets out to do. It’s a proof of concept for now, designed for a user community of quite knowledgable web publishing teams, and understandably still has some rough edges. But he’s overcome an impressive array of technical challenges to illustrate how investing some time in marking up a consultation document this way could open up an exciting world of potential applications. The next phase of the project is to start to build some of those applications.

Harry’s set up a sandbox environment so you’re welcome to have a look at the tool as it stands, and give us your thoughts and ideas on where we should take it next.

p.s. If you want to pick up some quick tips on how to structure website data from someone who knows what they’re talking about, read Jeni Tennison’s fantastic guide to what government should do to facilitate data reuse.

Related posts:

1. Cui bono? The problem with opening up data
2. Open data on the cheap
3. Your starter for ten

Image credit: Neil Williams

Like Simon and Andrew (watching from afar), Saturday’s Barcamp left me feeling optimistic about the state of digital engagement in and around government. The Power of Information Taskforce followed this up with the launch of their draft report which sets out an exciting, ambitious and refreshingly specific agenda for what we need to do and on what scale.

Scale, for me, is the crux of this now.

Simon rightly characterises Barcamp 08 as being about possibilities, whereas this year’s event saw an array of demos from Directgov’s nascent innovation platform to MoJ’s nearly-public social media kit for press officers; DFID’s blogging platform and the Twitterers of CLG & No 10, to my own project with Harry on a tool to publish consultation documents in structured XML for reuse.

The other sense I picked up was one of much greater connectedness. Last year, with relatively few of the participants blogging and even fewer tweeting, it felt like a conventional conference with lots of new introductions. This year, it felt like one big tweetup, with people buzzing to pick up conversations started online with people they were meeting in person for the first time, me included.

Having plugged away in a central government department on these issues for nearly a year now, I’m struck by the opportunity we now have – thanks to the seismic shifts in the US and newfound interest of mainstream politicians here – to transform the way government engages with the public. To make this happen, we still need to:

1. Build a proper business case and fight the argument for a strategic approach to digital engagement. The enthusiasm of colleagues and ministers is a big help, but in persuading whole organisations to change their practices, we need decent examples of large scale, unequivocal successes where digital engagement improved policy. Not just pilots, not just a few dozen comments, not just qualitative evidence. And we need to be firm with those who see digital engagement as the cherry on the cake – why do you want a blog? who on Twitter will care about this? is Second Life a truly innovative way to achieve that?

2. Take a big tent approach. It’s time to reach out to policy colleagues, press officers, marketing teams, customer insight specialists and stakeholder managers, with help and skills which enable them to spot the potential of digital engagement for their work.

3. Be more assertive, not just content publishers and pixel colourers. I value digital craftsmanship, but too many skilled digital people are still seen as web publishers rather than decisionmakers. Unless we argue the case for digital engagement from the outset, as part of a proper strategy, we’ll be forever tinkering at the edges. Sure, our skills are specialist, but we need to assert our role in campaign planning, in media strategies and event design, in ideas generation and customer feedback, to get the most from the social media tools we use. (Aside: but beware the ‘What can we do that uses cutting edge social media?’ brief: a strategy means having real-world goals, and the medium really shouldn’t be the message).

4. Describe the roles and define the skills. Our collective experimentation is helping to build a picture of the kinds of skills we need across government to embed this thinking. We know what Community Managers can do and how they work best; we’re learning what skills Press Officers need to have and how to train them; and we’re quietly building up ‘soft’ skills in writing for the social web, online PR, using blogging and microblogging tools, and building relationships with online communities. To scale things up, we need to describe what these skills are and the kinds of job roles they fit into, and make sure that cross-government skills programmes, recruitment agencies and supplier frameworks offer them. We need mechanisms to sift the good people from the charlatans, and more importantly, for colleagues less familiar with these approaches to be able to do so for themselves.

5. Recognise that our opportunity isn’t just better engagement, but better civil society. A minister or senior official who blogs or tweets isn’t just a better communicator, but potentially a fundamentally different kind of public servant, one who’s much more connected and responsive to ideas and feedback. If we can develop and popularise tools and processes for large-scale, deliberative engagement with consultations then we’re opening up the possibility not just of getting more responses to our questions, but of mobilising teams of advocates and champions around policy areas who start to solve the problems for themselves that we don’t have the resources or imagination to solve on their behalf.

At Barcamp, Tom Steinberg of MySociety argued that we need the opportunity for something massively disruptive which reshapes how government engages, but it needs to be a on a large scale in order to break through. I agree. Maybe that platform or opportunity will come along of its own accord, or maybe we’ll reach that point through more evolutionary change driven by the five themes above.

As I see it, it’s our job now to work relentlessly, ambitiously and creatively to make it happen. Let’s see how far we’ve got at Barcamp ’10.

Related posts:

1. 2009: The year of Less
2. Building Britain’s Future: the next step to better policy discussion online
3. Defining the roles within digital engagement

Sadly, I missed Jenny Bee’s session titled ‘Why I love Twitter’ at the UKGovWeb Barcamp back in January, but if I were ever to run one, I’d have to call it ‘Why I love Social Bookmarking’.

Let me count the ways:

1. It frees your favourites. I have a computer at home, and a computer at work. I find interesting websites using both machines. Previously, I had separate, messy bookmarks on each machine. Now, I have access to my favourites from wherever I am, using my toolbar buttons. (n.b. IT won’t let you install toolbar buttons at work? Set yourself up a bookmarklet instead)
2. It lets you multicode, with tags. Previously, I had folders of favourites. A website was either ‘funnies’ OR it was ‘web design inspiration’. Now it can be both, and easily searchable.
3. It lets you send interesting stuff to other people. Find something interesting, copy the URL, email it to your friend with a quick comment. So last century. Now, I just tag it as a social bookmark for:username and it will pop up in my friend’s list of bookmarks to review as and when they want, keeping their email inbox uncluttered. (In the real world, this only works with real social bookmarking geeks but I live in hope).
4. It can generate the most relevant RSS feeds you’ll ever read. My latest approach to the challenge of tracking the comments I’ve left elsewhere, is to bookmark the comments section of those posts with a specific tag. I can then pipe the RSS for that tag into my blog sidebar to bring together all the blurb I’ve been saying, whether it’s on my blog or someone else’s. At work too, we’re using a similar technique to keep track of useful content on specific subjects and pipe this into Netvibes-based dashboards as a sort of ‘Editor’s Picks’ from the web.
5. It generates content, all by itself. A list of links and short descriptions that you’ve compiled might be of interest to other people. NESTA’s research group use social bookmarking to collate and share links as a team, and then simply publish them as an email newsletter digest each fortnight. Or you can track interesting online debates and feature them on your site. Or you could just publish your interesting finds as a daily blog post (I pick up all kinds of interesting stuff from Dom that way)

And I don’t even use it the way it was intended to be used: to discover interesting things others have tagged in similar ways.

So, if you aren’t doing it already already, kick start your reflection of the web: start social bookmarking.

Related posts:

1. digitalgovuk: Tracking social media innovation in government
2. How to get started in social media
3. Is social media safe for work?