LocalGovCamp Roundup

LocalGovCamp was “an unconference for local government”, specifically those who are working with websites and social media tools in relation to local government. As such it should have been really dull and a tedious waste of a Saturday (yes, Saturday. From 10am – 6pm.) But it wasn’t. It was really good.

I went along partly because it was the brainchild of Dave Briggs who I have a degree of respect for outside of his work with government websites and because some of the areas I work in will overlap and at times butt heads with local government in some form. Specifically the local blogging stuff which is all about getting communities to talk amongst themselves in new ways which can involve contacting the council in new ways. If I’m encouraging this I need to know how those on the other side are working and whether they’re ready to deal with it.

Being an unconference run on the BarCamp model there wasn’t a major theme. And while I wasn’t the only one from outside the sector there it was certainly dominated by civil servant types. A few people mentioned it was the first time they’d been with a group where they weren’t seen as weirdos for thinking this social media stuff was important (“Me, him and her are the other people in Somwhereshire who get this” someone told me) so there was a sense of a distributed community gathering. This was interesting and something I’ll try and come back to later. But right now here’s my notes, scavenged from Twitter (these are my tweets tagged #localgovcamp), a Mind Map I was keeping, my notebook and memory. It won’t necessarily make sense as a whole but that’s unconferences for you.

Direct Democracy came up in an early session as an argument against promoting blogs as a way of communicating. The point being they amplify the “nosy, dogooder, unelected, self-interested, fanatical blowhards” who are time rich and motivated by single issues. We assume giving everyone a voice is a good thing but the loud voices will still remain loud. It’s a good point and, as folk like me often argue, social media tools are not going to cure society. All they do is rewire it differently. Two responses then would be 1) the tools help the time poor. You can post something, be it a blog post or comment, in a few minutes. 2) The blowhards are a symptom of the old system of two voices drowning out everyone else. By promoting other ways of expression outside the constraints of public meetings, etc you get a multiplicity of voices which may drown out the idiots or take them to task. An analogy I came up with was the London anti-war March in 2003 where hundreds of thousands of “normal people” drowned out the usual suspects (Furrow-browed CND veterans, Socialist Worker morons, etc). Anyway, that one needs more pondering.

Parish Councils were something of a revelation in that I’d never considered them before. As such I don’t understand the details but the concept of a level of governance beneath the city/county council, especially one for a small local area, is intriguing. If nothing else it’s a way of targeting people at a local level who care about their area and might be interested in adopting new ways of talking about that. Unfortunately it’s kinda theoretical in Birmingham as we don’t seem to have any but for smaller towns and villages in more rural areas it’s a potential go-er. NALC is the national association for such things and I came across them through Justin Griggs who blogs here.

I got talking to Tim Cooper and Paul Cole from Derby. They’d created a massive mindmap of social media presences in the city related to the council and made it public for a few hours during the unconference. It sprawls, especially when you look at Facebook which has groups and personal accounts from all over. Because of these personal accounts they’re keeping it under wraps (some of the senior figures in the council might not realise their personal info is so public so drawing attention to it might not be wise) but are planning to release a version with less links. It was a great graphical representation of the genie being out of the bottle.

Phillip John is a nice chap. He one of the team who runs The Litchfield Blog just outside of Birmingham. Probably worth investigating.

There was a talk about using a social network tool within a council. Most of it was council-specific but I did get a couple of useful things. 1) Make sure part of the training is helping people fill out their profiles and understand why putting in seemingly irrelevant info like hobbies is important. 2) Council’s suffer from a “silo” problem where people are locked in their departments and don’t communicate laterally across the organisation. This reminded me of an idea for schools where teachers don’t regularly contact teachers of their subjects from other schools except at training events and the like. Some kind of ambient, low-commitment network that allowed, say, Maths teachers from across a region to ask questions and share ideas would be really interesting. It’s that whole thing about social media breaking geographic barriers again.

Those are the big ones. The main thing was being in the environment and soaking it up. Thanks again to Dave Briggs and team for running it and for all the people who traveled for coming to our fair city. If you fancy a dig the #localgovcamp search on Twitter will have some gems amongst the chatter and I’m guessing roundups of significant bloggage will appear on the LocalGovCamp blog.