#HyperTalkAboutLocalCitizenScape

I have been very lucky over the past year as I have been able to be a part of the Public i  – CitizenScape Pilot project in an advisory capacity. To be honest I would say that I gained far more than i contributed from listening and learning from the experiences of the participating councils who were practically rolling out a very exciting product to improve the engagement and participation of citizens and to provide a filter for council employees and councillors to understand what is being said online about their communities and services.

Before I start sharing my views – I want to at this point acknowledge the vision and persistance of Catherine Howe (and many of her hard-working team) to get to this point.

Let me start by explaining what i think CitizenScape offers councils in very few words and then I’ll use the rest of the post to set some additional context as to why i think and believe we should all have CitizenScape or something like it at the very least. You can check out the Public i site directly for the official details.

1. It aggregates conversation and creates a single tag cloud across multiple sources of content
2. It doesn’t assume all conversations will be in a digital space and can incorporate formal conversations
3. It doesn’t have to be on the council website to offer value – the widget approach means it can be embedded on local websites
4. It creates a starting point for listening to community conversation online
5. It highlights issues that are relevant across all public service providers not just councils – Total Place style

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve seen a few blog posts referring to HyperLocal Websites and their value to the Local Council Websites as part of a wider Digital Strategy. I’ve also been reading with great interest the developments of Camden Council on their redesign and they are blogging some great insights over at the Camden Blog. Anyone interested in developing council websites should really check this site out.

They recently blogged about Hyper Local Websites and included some excellent video of Will Perrin from Talk ABout Local – They mention:

People don’t talk to the council, they talk to each other

The reality is people are the same online as they are offline. In the offline world, they talk to their neighbours, friends, family, at their local church or mosque and etc.  In the online world, this concept does not change.  People will be more open about their lives and the complexities they deal with in their everyday lives with people and in places they are comfortable doing so.

So the key thing for me here is that this is exactly what the CitizenScape model supports – no need for direct conversation with the council – Providing we know the conversation space exists we don’t require anyone to make extra efforts to inform us of local issues and need. We can simply use the tool to aggregate and consolidate and provide the overview.

If you are thinking about this kind of connection with local or HyperLocal communities then you should really find out about the CitizenScape project and look to see if this is something you can work with and if not, how you will address this gap.

Advertisement

Building the “reusable video” player

UPDATED: To include link to the dedicated Video Player website

I thought i’d share some pilot innovation work that I have been involved in with a guy called Bill Wells from 2 dot 0.

This all started from a conversation over lunch we had earlier this year.

The basic idea was that in my previous role as Corporate Web Manager, we always had conversations with people about video hosting options along side a video player tailored specifically for the local authority. Not a unique problem, in fact quite a common one i imagine. However the issue for me was that i couldn’t justify the costs associated with video storage solutions when sites like youtube, vimeo, blip etc offer pretty good solutions either free or very low cost. The other issue was that as a local authority it is unlikely that we are going to spend thousands of pounds on the creation of new video content regardless of the quality due to capacity and skills.

So the conversation went on for a good hour or so and ended up with me basically asking for a solution that did the following:

What i’d like is a player which has the ability to pull content from any source, youtube or vimeo or a traditional video storage platform – I’d also like to add value by providing a feature that allowed me to layer content, questions etc over the top to gain additional benefit from the original content. I’d like to be in a position to reuse our existing video archives and repurpose them, or use other public material from either central government or other local authorities providing the content was reusable”

I was keen early on to see how this could benefit and enhance the digital engagement offering as we could reuse community created content and layer questions over the top to gain some additional targeted feedback whilst someone was watching the video itself, instead of after the event.

So let me share what the early beta product looks like and how it might fit within a local authority situation.

Firstly it is worth checking out the original video offering that i suggested  – a video created by our road safety team on biker safety called “a day out in Devon”. The original youtube video is below:

NB: if you can’t watch youtube on your machine or via your network you will not be able to view either video.

Now as this is in beta, it isn’t yet available for embedding in other sites (to my knowledge). But this is the version which contains a number of questions at particular points as well as a scrolling “news” item which could be fed dynamically from the corporate site.  It is important to remember that this player is pulling the content directly from youtube when viewed and is simply providing a container for questions and feedback collection.

Below i a couple of screen shots of the video with a question displayed over the original video. (click on image to enlarge)

The following image explains the concept visually – it is also available as click through on the video at 1minute 17seconds in. (click on image to enlarge)

To see the video and questions in action, check out the link below.

• Video – a day out in Devon  – with questions

What we get at this point time is the data submitted by those who watch the video – This is complimentary to the “comments” section within youtube which could contain generic feedback and observations which could in fact drive the questions in the first place.

What is also interesting and in my opinion probably the killer application, is the statistics side  – What we are able to see is the actual behaviour of the viewer. So we can identify whether or not someone watched the whole video, part of it or none of it.  We are also able to tell whether or not they paused the video and when and layered with the questions, we can start to understand when in a video a good time to ask questions might actually be.

The following image is a graph from a single film view (click to enlarge).

• Green – 45 degree lines – normal play
• Yellow – vertical – fast forward
• Blue – horizontal – pause
• Horizontal axis – real time
• Vertical axis – time within the film.
• Content watched summary on the right – green = watched

The opportunities and intelligence this presents in terms of use and take up of video content is quite huge and the potential to reuse video content across the public sector means that we can start to see some content as shared services.

In its simplest form it adds value to existing content as it allows the owner to obtain additional statistics and seek specific feedback about particular parts of a given video.

I’m not a sales person, nor do i have any personal or vested interest in this succeeding, however I do personally see many opportunities within the public sector for this and i’m not going to pretend i know your business and tell you how you could gain value, but what i will say is, if you have video stored somewhere and you want to know how to gain extra value out of it now, this is something you should explore.

I’m probably not doing this any justice at all, but it isn’t my role to sell this, i am simply sharing something which i am personally quite excited about and can see this transforming how local government and the public sector use video content online to gain feedback and engage with people.

I’m going to continue to look at how this can be integrated into some of our digital engagement offering, but at the moment we are still in the early stages and as such don’t have any real life “live” examples. Fingers crossed.

In the meantime, i’d be interested to hear what you think of this idea.

UPDATED 10th February 2010 – 2 dot 0 now have a dedicated website for this video player.

Consumers vs Citizens – Democratic Society, Four rules for councils’ democratisation work

I’ve just seen an excellent presentation by the Democratic Society on “Four rules for councils’ democratisation work”. It has got me thinking about a few things so i’m going to share some random comments and observations:

First and foremost, we need to remove these “titles” (Consumer, Customer Citizen, Service User etc) and start to focus on PEOPLE. We can use the titles only to help guide us in our method and approach, but we should stop referring to People in those ways as it only confuses us and the people we engage with.

In Local Government we need to recognise (and most of us do) that People have different roles when interacting or engaging with us. They can be either be a consumer of services via websites or contact centres, face to face etc OR they can be citizens who we need to involve  in the design and shaping of what those services look like and feel like in the first place.

Organisations need to refocus to ensure that People to People connections and relationships are understood. This will inevitably have a huge transformational impact on the way we structure our services and how we involve people as well as the internal structures and networks that exist, not just in a single organisation but across the public sector as a whole.

Ok, random thoughts over – check out the presentation and see what you think?

 

 

Getting my head around Digital Engagement

I have been thinking for some time now what digital engagement could actually look like, so i thought about creating an approach to firstly help me understand what i actually go on about most of the time in real practical terms, plus allow others to see how it could work and what things people would need to think about the way in terms of skills and equipment etc.

Now before i start, this is not rocket science, this isn’t revolutionary, it is one of many approaches and i have created some visuals around it to help explain this further to my colleagues.

I am starting from a point which assumes that a given organisation is already planning an “offline event” of some kind, as this tends to be my first entry point with colleagues. This approach merely adds value and potentially increases the chances of involvement, participation and most importantly feedback and opinions (well i believe it would anyway).

The following diagram illustrates (simply as it is) the steps involved and i will explain it as well just to add some additional context.

(If you click on the image it should go full size)

Now the reason i needed to create this very simple diagram is to help me explain the steps or stages and the process involved in adding value to existing events or even community events.

1: The Offline Event
This could be anything, the key challenge is to create an environment which allows people to talk and have conversations. The biggest change though is to proactively encourage social reporters to video, take photos, live blog etc about the vent itself and then publish those online either via sites like YouTube, Vimeo, twitter, Facebook, Flickr, WordPress etc.  If you are unsure what a social reporter is or does then take a look at David Wilcox’s Blog who does excellent stuff in this area.

Another key aspect to this bit is promoting discussions through the use of hash tags (e.g. #theevent), promoting the reuse of the content that had been created and encouraging people to talk, discuss and devise opinions around it in their own online networks. This may require some council staff to join new groups as individuals to listen and or feedback relevant information (based on a social contract with the group).

2: Online Communities
This isn’t about the council or a particular organisation creating new online spaces for conversations to happen, this is about allowing people to have the discussion wherever they feel comfortable.  Their own online Ning networks, or Facebook groups or local NetMums forum. It really doesn’t matter providing they can access and reuse the content from the event. Now the challenge is listening and collecting this conversations that happen across the web. There are many ways in which this can happen and i’m not going to cover the details in this post, but using RSS, google alerts, Facebook search etc can support this task.

3: Social Media Sites
Providing content via the social media tools and sites that exist will allow others to reuse it, discuss it, provide feedback on it and encourage their friends to do the same.

This approach is about adding value to existing offline activities and or events. I would recommend that once your organisation develops good practice and learning around online engagement and you build a relationship with communities online you can start to reduce offline activity or perhaps get to a point where you can stop doing it for some engagement altogether.

Google Wave – are we “waving” goodbye to the old school

The much talked about Google Wave will be available later this year and the preview demonstrated at Google I/O event has got me thinking and after watching the video (below) there are a number of opportunities for the public sector, here are three areas where i feel we could gain real benefit, with this type of new functionality.

• Emergency comms – with email, web publishing and IM all interconnected. Communicating to a wide audience goes beyond your “contacts” list and can essentially reach the world in an instant.
• Community engagement – comments/conversations on blogs or other sites will be sent to me in my inbox and i can reply via my inbox. This would help those people who want to re-use content on various platforms and enable those people to capture all feedback and collate these and pass the conversations from one platform into another to facilitate wider community or network involvement (this coupled with the conversation playback facility will transform collaboration)
• Integrated access to colleagues / people on mobile devices (mobile and flexible working) this changes the landscape of mobile and flexible working in my opinion.

I for one am really excited by the prospect of seeing how this can allow people to work, collaborate and communicate more effectively……

It won’t solve everything, but it can teach us a new way in sharing and collaborating together.

Well done Google.