Looking forward to XJamGov

Flickr – Photo by Paul Clarke – http://www.flickr.com/photos/paul_clarke/

In the first week of June, I’ll be attending XJamGov, a global service jam event which will be hosted at County Hall in Exeter and organised by the awesome Simon Gough and Phillippa Rose of Redfront Service Design.

There are still tickets left so do check out the site and get yourself signed up.

The event is a public sector focused event and will follow on from the recent XJam event held at the University of Exeter in March (see Paul Clarke’s photos)

This event is part of a wider programme of events during the councils Create / Innovate Month and should help to get us off to a great start and will challenge people’s thinking and help develop ideas and capacity.

June is going to be fun and full of random ideas 🙂

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Reflections from Dubai and the #GSMS event

NB: This is a cross post from Re:Work Digital

A couple of weeks ago I received a very welcome but random message from Dan Slee, it basically said “Do you fancy an all expenses paid trip to Dubai” – “PS this isn’t a spam message” or something along those lines.

My response was obviously Yes, although it nearly didn’t happen as I’d already planned to attend a weekend in Cornwall with some friends. After some last minute flight changes, I was set to fly on Tuesday morning….

The GCC Government Social Media Summit

The event was the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) Social Media Summit, held at the very nice Ritz-Carlton Hotel and I was speaking on Day 3 following the topics that Dan had previously set but with a Devon Spin of course…

• What does Devon County Council do?
• How we won the internal argument
• How we took the first steps
• The broad set of principles we navigated by
• This is what we did
• This is what you can do

So after taking the night train journey, an hour and a half sat at Reading train station at 4am and a 7 hour flight I found myself in a very nice hotel room in Dubai (I stayed at the Ritz-Carlton as well), wondering what I was actually going to say, even though I’d created a few slides…

My aim was to be helpful and honest and to avoid the kind of humour i would normally throw in as it would simply be too local to Devon and the UK…I think it worked out ok!

It is slightly weird knowing that you are being translated live into Arabic and in the back of my head I kept thinking how would this translate? I received some positive feedback from people in the room so I am assuming it went ok…most people said they thought it was very practical compared to some of the other speakers.

I’ve included a link to my slides but I’d like to share some of my reflections from the event (I only attended day 3)

• The challenges faced by governments in the GCC aren’t that different from those faced by UK localgov and by sharing the learning from here it would make a really good input into our thinking back in the west.
• One of the interesting differences is that money is not primarily an issue, although it isn’t free flowing either but let’s just say there are no budget cuts…just think for a minute, what would you actually do if your budget was whatever it needed to be? I thought about this and struggled to think that we’d do things that differently to be honest…although getting additional equipment and a few extra people would probably be the most obvious
• When you are in a country where politicians are not elected, it makes you think very differently about why and how they would use it….it is more like organisational use in that listening, responding and acting is still very much the approach. But it does make you think that the “selling message” to politicians is a much harder battle than in the UK.
• Content Strategy got more than one mention and it’s link to the effective use of social media is critical and I’ve mentioned this before and believe that compelling content is essential…It was held as a core component in any future strategy.
• I found that most conversations around social media focused on the use of Facebook over twitter – Facebook was very much seen as the priority social media channel over others. I found this really interesting as in my view we have  few successes in the UK with Facebook, particularly around “good engagement”. In Devon we tend to use Facebook for a focused level of engagement, for example children’s centres, youth participation etc. The use of twitter and facebook are complimentary in my view and should not be seen as one or the other, but clearly use the tool which best meets the business outcomes and objectives you have set…it is likely that you’d need more than one channel and more than one approach
• No one has a silver bullet and no one has the answer to all of this stuff…but the more we connect people and the more conversations that happen the more solutions and opportunities arise – this event which had people from all over the world and GCC region speaking meant that they had local learning and best practice as well as external challenge and ideas from further a field
• Inspiration is inspiration no matter what language you speak
• Story telling is a very powerful way to share learning and when it is does well, it is very empowering

Here are a set of photos from my stay in Dubai

Here is a link to my slides

My reflections on #OpenSSW

So last Friday was #OpenSSW which was held at County Hall in Exeter.

In the now normal feedback approach here are my highlights as a set of bullet points

Different people came and participated – one of the great things for me was that the audience list wasn’t filled with the “govcamp and localgovcamp” crew, not that it would have been a bad thing, but one aim was to reach and empower a bunch of new people.

The quality of speakers was fantastic – i’m lucky enough to know them all and feel honoured that they gave their time so easily and it makes a huge difference to the following conversations when people have been inspired and challenged by those speakers – although a change in format slightly in the future to better harness those conversations would be required. Perhaps related unconference sessions after a couple of speakers to keep it moving and inclusive

Events are hard work – Organising events is not a profession I’d like full time, but I’m so passionate about making this an annual event and supporting the network to grow and mature

We still need to pitch to senior mgrs – I still need to work on encouraging a greater attendance from service heads and councillors as the diversity in conversation needs those views.

Support for challenge – Thinking differently isn’t easy for some people and we probably need some kind of informal mentor / coaching network to help connect those people with others who can help and guide – this should be across different organisations so those mentoring can also learn about new situations and environments

Ask real people – Simon Gough and Phillippa Rose kept it local by actually videoing real people on the street in advance of what they thought localgov could do better and what digital local government should look like, the fact that not many people knew was also very interesting – a huge challenge ahead for all localgov if we wish to shift and transform the relationship with citizens

IT came up trumps – Council wifi can work if you find the people in IT who think outside the box – a massive thanks to them as I didn’t have an complaints about wifi all day…

It felt local #properjob – Keeping the event local helps to keep the conversations whilst generic focused on issues which people in the region can identify with more quickly

I need to learn so much – Andrea Siodmok is such a wonderful and clever person and I’d love to find out more about how her brain works and how she approaches issues and problems

Two days could work – Next time we should actually look at making it a two day event with actual camping

So many ideas – Carrie Bishop has a wonderful mind and I could listen to hear all day, although the way she waves her arms about it maybe better to dance with her 🙂

You don’t always need tech – Catherine Howe is awesome and her presentation (without slides) was very thought provoking and the issues of disintermediation is something which is really fascinating right now

Open by default, digital by design – this should be our core values and when you unpick it it can change the way we think about everything we do

Localgov is awesome – Justin Griggs is a great advocate of the real local government and we need to work out ways in which we can collaborate, cooperate and network better

Maintaining humour keeps things real – Only Dave Briggs can use the word foreskin and make it relevant to social without it being inappropriate – well that depends on your view of course

Know your audience – George Julian really understood the audience, mentioning a mass of stats based on the data collected on eventbrite…now she really is a geeky researcher and she is also a very nice person who I have great respect for

Photos are essential – I’d like to thank my colleague Sam Freeman for taking photos which you can access here

Localgov innovation doesn’t just happen in London – My final point and most important one is that the South West is doing amazing things as are all the other regions – London isn’t the centre of the innovation universe and we should promote the work happening at a local level more often. I’m obviously keen on helping in the south west

Overall I really enjoyed the event and I want to thank everyone who helped, contributed, challenged, shared, inspired, empowered, tweeted and gave up a Friday.

#DCCSMF – telling the story

Last Friday we held our social media forum which went very very well.

It was attend by about 80 people from a variety of organisations and this year we had quite a bit of twitter buzz throughout the day which was great.

Anyway, if you are interested we’ve created and published a storify of the day and included the presentations over on the re-work digital blog [ Please note the storify doesn’t display correctly in IE6, but then what does 🙂 ]

DCC Social Media Forum 4 – #DCCSMF

At the moment, It feels like organising events are something I’m involved in quite a bit, which isn’t a problem when the events are Open Space South West and now the DCC Social Media Forum 4, although this time, I’m getting one of my team Russell to help out and take more of a lead.

I announced the tickets a couple of weeks ago and it has almost sold out which is reassuring to know but also demonstrates the increasing desire from colleagues across the council and our partners to learn and share learning around social and digital technologies. If you work in the public sector in Devon and want to come along get in touch via the comments and I’ll pass the details on. I’ve started to collect names of people who want to be on a distribution list for these kinds of things.

The development of the social media forum has been interesting and is something that has already become a critical way of maintaining an overview on the projects which are going on across the council.

It is through this event you start to get into the details of the projects you previously only heard about at a high level and thought “that sounds like a good idea, wonder how that will work”.

The pace of social projects means that you never really have to wait a long time to learn from the outcomes and experiences from the people who were involved, although some benefits and outcomes won’t be seen for some time.

The event is on Friday 13th July (lucky for us) and I’ll blog about the day and share any presentations and insights afterwards.

The previous events summary and presentations can be found here