To move on to the areas covered though: this meeting followed an earlier session when TNA colleagues talked through work they were doing to capture websites. This was interesting (and deserves wider publicity – although from their quoted statistics of over a billion visits [think I heard that right?] – people are managing to find the archive!) – but as I was a member of the original working group, the mechanics were not new to me – I was more interested to hear about new initiatives, in particular what they might be doing to capture social media.  Hence meeting number two.

Use of social media by government departments has grown dramatically over the last 3-4 years. Main channels the National Archive team talked about here were flickr, youtube and twitter, and it was telling how much we also need to investigate facebook – as although this could be tricky, if it is being used for publishing original content, then surely it should be considered?

A diversion here to talk about the role of TNA in preserving content.  This activity is governed by the 1958 Public Records Act - which although it has been amended many times, webby people will already recognise it is unlikely to refer specifically to social media! Their role is described on their website as “ensuring the survival of the nation’s records” – and while this takes the form of advice and guidance, it also includes the very practical job of storing government information. The Act has led to a very clear process around identifying and storing material produced on paper, and this as extended reasonably smoothly to protocols covering the same sort of content as civil servants produce more and more ‘born digital’ submissions, reports, email exchanges and policies. However, there has been no general inter-departmental discussion as to how we might ensure that content such as photos, short films, and digital engagement activities such as webchats with ministers or twitter Q&A sessions is captured – and this of course would need to include a debate on what was important – what might future social historians or political commentators find valuable?

A simplistic answer might be that any of this material that is published on central websites, or stored in official records management systems, is already being captured – and that should do.  But I’m pretty sure that this would not capture the diverse richness of content that is being produced and engagement that is taking place in the digital environment across government.

In asking the question as to what the academics of the future might find interesting, I think we already have some of the answers – the colleague from the police mentioned that there are already some thoughtful and analytical reports as to how the police are evolving the way they are using social media and the impact it is having. Nb. There are many hundreds of twitter accounts associated with police forces now – real people, but also a handful of dogs, a helicopter and even a horse!

To start with the ‘simple’ examples. Flickr, Youtube and twitter. Unfortunately, early efforts to capture departments outputs have not really been successful – changes in interface, problems with links, volume of output – and inconsistencies or alternatives – did you know for example that the MOD have their own website with thousands of photos?! TNA have commissioned research, but I wonder if in the meantime there are some relatively simple, non-technical solutions?

One issue that hit all departments was the question of what could/should happen to all content published by government accounts in social media if there was to be a change of administration at the general election. Twitter wasn’t considered an issue – Departments continued. If they changed their name, or were re-shaped, this could be reflected in the account, and as it is clearly a continuing conversation, there was no concern about ‘deleting’old content. After all, have you tried searching for twitter comments that are over a year old? TNA are aware of the project that the Library of Congress is engaged in, working with the entire twitter archive – but it is not thought that this will yield results for some time.

The two channels that did cause internal debate though were flickr and youtube. As they reflect current activity, what most departments did (including my own) was to remove content which featured members of the previous administration.

This means however, that if you want an image of a particular minister in a remembered situation – eg meeting another head of state, or visiting your area, or to view a video of a specific individual speaking, then you wont find it attached to the official account. I wonder if this is an occasion where we might use the name and authority of the National Archives to set up accounts in those  channels, into which departments could transfer selected content? Thus all meta data, captions, permissions etc would remain, and they would be findable within those vast repositories, but they would be clearly identifiable as archive material. I’d be interested to hear others views on this, as it would not be resource neutral – in people time rather than straightforward cash terms, but it would mean access to this material wasn’t lost.

All of us asked questions about facebook. Departments are using it more and more to publish original content, carry out real engagement with communities of interest, and it appears to be forming an ever growing part of official communication. No solutions to the archiving question were apparent – but it struck me that the introduction of facebook timeline implies that they are interested in making it as easy as possible to see a person’s whole life – and this could relatively easily be extended to an organisation. Again, not resource neutral, but possibly a good way to see a timeline of highlights, significant milestones and changing business activities? Perhaps something to work with facebook to explore?

Conclusions? I dont have the specifics on what will actually be done, but it would be interesting to hear other peoples thoughts – and perhaps examples of what people in other countries are doing? Directions I can see include working with channel owners, not trying to establish hugely costly solutions to capture everything, rather introducing the  role of people in government departments acting as curators. When it is neither practical or even possible to store absolutely everything, someone needs to make a judgement on what it is valuable to keep – digital librarians??

First difference, I joined 3 different flickr photo a day groups – first: Photo a day challenge 2011, was the smallest, but the one I enjoyed most, as just like 2010, it meant I could almost get to know most of the group members through their photos, and share their years. This time, 2 people I knew also took part and I enjoyed seeing how Ann’s and Sharon‘s years unfolded – both of them experiencing many more life milestones than I did! The other 2 groups were the massive Project 365, which I dipped into occasionally, and the One pic a day 4 ever (again, small, as the qualification is that you have to have completed at east one 365 project). This latter group included one member from the 2010 group, and another who took some very intriguing photos, and blogged about the techniques

Flickr continues to confirm my main theory about social media – it helps you find people like you, whether you have a quirky or niche interest, or share the same passions as many.

Back to my project – aims were the same as last year really, record what happened, no particular plan beyond making sure I always had a camera with me and taking the photo when I thought about it, rather than miss an opportunity. One thing I mentioned last year as being bad at, is photos of people, and while this year is slightly better – 24 in total [up from 18] contain people, many of these are crowds, or performers (especially in costume, thanks to Rochester’s many festivals), and I just have 2 famous faces, 2 of colleagues, and 4 containing me (although none of those really recognisable – either in reflection, shadow or detail!) Other interests remained constant – scenery, the natural world, owls, libraries and a scattering of steam trains feature. I have continued to experiment with macro, tried to do more abstracts (9), and looking at the set as a whole, it struck me how many featured circles (15).

On to update the fairly random statistics I reported last year (with the previous year figures in brackets where relevant)

Total images posted in the diary: 365 [hurrah again, mission accomplished]

Most viewed – by a long way my most viewed photo of all time, and one that was completely unplanned.

Reflections

A combination of smooth ripples and the colourful clothes worn by people on the bridge meant this shot of the reflections on the lake in St James Park captured peoples attention: 674 views, 47 favourites and 36 comments.  This photo also made it to ‘explore’ – one of the 500 photos flickr features each day, which I’m sure gave it more exposure. [last years top photo was Explore your library with 133, which has continued to be popular - reaching 216 views during 2011)

Number of diary images which appear in my top 20 all time most viewed: 4 [last year it was 2]

Number of diary images wich appear in the top 20 all time ‘most interesting’: 9 [last year it was 6]

Total views of photo diary images during 2011: 21,111 [8,680 in 2010]
Average views of each image:  58 [24]
Total views of all published photos during 2011: 49,791 [22,577 in 2010]

Categories include:
event/date specific: 54 [about the same, 41, although my definitions of this category are non scientific!]
local photos Kent) 48 [many fewer than last years 95 - guess I felt I'd already captured local views?]
London: 86 [more than last years 76, but this years figures are probably bolstered by 28 photos taken in St James' Park]

Travel related (including day trips and weekends away from home): 55 [43 in 2010]
This year, thanks to an amazing holiday in Sri Lanka, we visited a total of 11 unesco sites – 8 photos made it into the diary [up from 6 last year]

Owl related: 14 [11 last year]

No snow this year, and fewer sunrises: 4 [7] and sunsets: 5 [6]

The natural world continued to feature strongly:
flora: 49 [43]
while fauna saw huge growth: 41 [17]

Transport included:
more trains: 14 [8]
boats: 5 [6]
cars: 5 [none featured the previous year, although there were 5 planes - and none of those in 2011]
and other transport: 8 [2]

food and drink: 23 [12]

Two other notable photo/social media related anecdotes from my world last year, both are a credit to my colleagues (although one did tangentially feature in my diary too!). First Russell, and the amazing spider web photos. He tells the story eloquently in his own blog but it is a fantastic example of how the internet has made these stunning photos visible to a huge audience – over a million views that we can absolutely verify, and countless more via the many other galleries and channels in which they have appeared. It has received numerous accolades, not least being named recently as one of the Guardian’s “photos of 2011“. The second is the one I captured an example of  as my colleague is one of the founders of the Burgers and Nails blog.

Nail art

A simple concept – take a photo of hands with carefully manicured and/or decorated nails clutching a burger (preferably gourmet) and submit. This blog saw a huge rise in popularity when it was featured by the Huffington Post.

And finally, yes, keeping a photo diary is addictive, and yes, I have already started on Project 2012  – potentially an interesting year, and of course the difference already from my previous 2 sets, is that this set will I hope end up with 366 photos. Thankyou to all who have commented on or added my photos as favourites, I hope you continue to enjoy them!

Secondments happen quite a lot in government – offering people short term development opportunities in other teams, which help to meet a need, while hopefully giving the secondee useful experience they can take back when it ends. I confess this is the first time I’ve ever really experienced one, having been more often in the position of supporting junior staff as they move around, while planning frantically how to cover the vacancy they leave!

Having spent the last month working with the digital team in the Department for Culture, the Olympics, Media and Sport (DCMS) doing some thinking about government’s digital needs during the Olympics,  I’m now very definitely a convert – and hope department boundaries can become ever more porous so that when people have a need, people with the skills to meet that need can be released to help. The payback for the teams having to lose their colleague for a while will be both in the additional experience and ideas that person will bring back when they return, but also the knowledge that it should be reciprocated, and if they have a need, they can put out a call.

So – high points and challenges? High points have included working on a fascinating subject. I should confess I’m not really interested in the Olympics as an event – apart from being incredibly proud of my cousin and his achievements in 5 (yes FIVE) paralympics but have been intrigued to be involved at this stage of the planning, where an immense amount of work has already been done, but as 2012 approaches and the whole thing becomes more urgent, communications planning and strategy is turning into practical implementation. The main thing that has been brought home to me time and again is the sheer scale of the event – the numbers I keep hearing are huge, whether it be of journalists expected to descend on London, to potential audience of the opening ceremony. And the size is unsurprisingly mirrored by complexity. There are at least five big areas of responsibility (including transport, London – as represented by the Mayor’s office, and LOCOG – who are actually tasked with putting on the games) who all have a role to play, their own infrastructure and depending on what the issue is that arises, their own input and involvement in the solution.

To meet this challenge, those involved are taking part in a series of practise events  and another high point for me was taking part in the most recent of these. It was a curious event, as it meant we had to pretend we were actually existing during the start of the games – being fed with a series of scenarios that we then worked through to test the models created and the tools that people working during games time would have access to. However, as it was just an exercise, none of the normal digital channels that would be available were live, so for example when the scenario said that there were some finals of events happening (with the heavy hint that a Team GB medal might be on the horizon) there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing asking for the results – when in reality, every broadcaster, twitterer and of course the excellent LOCOG Games site  would have given us every detail we needed – no doubt with live photos and film.

A literal high point was a meeting over in the LOCOG offices in Canary Wharf, which offers wonderful views of the Olympic site:

View of the Olympic Park

Back to daily experiences – working in a different office has taken some getting used to. The whole team – both digital and across the whole news and communications directorate have been extremely welcoming and helpful – but absolutely everything is different in this office to my home department! A month is not really long enough to rewire your brain to different ways of working, so many thanks to people who patiently answered the same question several times, and apologies to people who tried to reach me, but I had forgotten to log in to my phone!

Working on anything related to the Olympics also necessitates learning a new language. I had thought international development won the prize for number of acronyms and specific terminology , but LOCOG, GOC, LMC and many more means I think there is strong competition. I guess the same could be said for lots of areas of specialisation – roll on my exposure to the military!!

Returning ‘home’ on Monday, I’ll keep an eye on how the things I had a hand in evolve: looking forward to seeing digital services to journalists delivered and will of course look at the social media offerings.

In conclusion: the last month has been fascinating, exhausting, extremely busy, but definitely worthwhile – the best way to gain an insight into the world beyond my home department. Also, it has confirmed my view that it could only benefit government communications if departments could become even more flexible, lending people between teams to meet short term needs.

And we're off........ Simon Dickson introduces Word Up Whitehall II

First on were the hosts: Stephen Hale and Francis Badayemi: Department of Health

In essence, pretty much everything new published on their main site is now on wp.

Stephen gave credit to last years wordup, which may have encouraged them to go further than thought at the start. Their initial premise was that the department did  a LOT of publishing,  especially a lot of letters. Thus approximately 60,000 documents form the DH legacy! The content of these is important, so people will probably persevere and find what they need …. eventually, but this type of site didn’t really meet all visitor needs.

Their transition has been gradual – they  started light, with blog-type channels for some content. Editors liked it,  better at publishing, and managing content. Gave them the ability to syndicate, send out alerts etc. Then, next step was to move corporate publishing to wp.  One decision that caused some technical challenges – there was  no migration of content. A lot was archived, then as material became out of date, new content was published in the new model.

Another decision was that all material was to be put up by professional communicators. As part of this move, they also put in place a series of channels which were less tightly controlled, including maps and apps – an innovative conversation site.

Over to Francis who described HOW they solved the challenges this approach presented. I hope others will cover in more detail, but examples included: for web continuity, they built a plug-in to transfers content between servers. So rather than looking in two places, the National Archives can pick up the whole lot. They worked out a solution for search,  using a free xml sitemap tool.

Now, the wp powered dh site is the main thing, but where there is historical content, it gets pulled from the archive store. The proportion currently stands at around 300 posts – all the high priority content – low on volume, high on traffic. The majority of content is still the historical stuff – low traffic but still valid material.

Outcome of the discussion that followed this – a lot of talk about HOW we can share all these useful things across government.

Next, Gavin Dispain: Department for Transport

Gavin talked about their corporate convergence project. Moving from alterian enterprise cms. 4 oracle db servers plus 5 application servers; changes had to be done by third party, and there were 7 agencies,  all using different cms and web hosting.

They had similar discussions to the Department of Health, but ended up with a more hybrid model.  wp ended up best fit for their solution. Working to a tight timeline, their wp build and implement was 10 weeks, and a lot of this time was spent re-reviewing content, navigation and search.

It proved impossible to get content out of their old cms [lesson: better not to migrate].

They went live on time and on budget – teething problems were mostly down to insufficient testing and most problems fixed within 3 weeks.

Now have 3,000 live pages – this is down from 20,000 in their old site pre machinery of government changes.

The slide that caused most sharp intakes of breath was on the overall benefits of the project. Substantial sums saved on cms licences, hosting reduced 70% per month, DSA – reduced by 35,000 per year.  They are using amazon S3 for assets – example given of 320,000 downloads per month at the grand cost of under $30 per month.

Worth taking a look at consultations – good faceted search to narrow down what you might be interested in. Filter by open, closing soon, closed. Set up via wp forms. all metadata included,  so it meets egms requirements.

Other points made: in total – around 12 templates; there is a small central team plus 2 people maintaining the statistics site, none previously wp users; search = google mini, however, within each site, just searches that site (using built in wp search).

Gavin was followed by Mizan Syed: Cabinet Office/Number 10

The Number 10 site has famously been on wp since 2007. Cabinet Office was developed on drupal.

I lost track of what we were or were not allowed to share of this talk, but in essence, the team is very small, yet they have evolved an impressively slick way of  implenting wp, using some custom plugins for what in essence is a 6 section site: news, transparency, history, policy, take part, and the coalition government.

Steph Grey:  Helpful Technology covered a project that is complete, but not live yet. He talked through the issues around creating a theme which will meet triple A accessibility.

The project team worked with nomensa – a good agency for accessibility.

The idea was to make a home page entirely widget driven – so therefore really easy to build simple site for commenting on documents – and to make this all completely accessible.  Also, the end result should not be that different once it has been made accessible.

Key principles are to make content which is readable, adaptable, predictable, navigable and compatible (validate, work on different browsers, with different software).

Triple A main challenges: enhanced contrast, user able to reduce line lengths to max 80 characters, link purpose must be identifiable out of context, and a sitemap or breadcrumb trail needed.

So, out of the box, how didn’t the theme work? Some of the problems and solutions Steph outlined:

• dont use hidden text, use positioning (eg position it way off screen)
• layout breaks when text size increased – solution is use relative sizing of blocks
• layout not resizable to shorten line lengths – use max-width
• no supplementary indicators of focus – highlight link in css – use that to highlight where you are in the site
• colour contrast – measure the contrast ratio – need 4.5 : 1 to pass – so use darker text on white
• in line styles – prevents screenreaders using their own – but – akismet does insert one – so that needs to be removed…
• no error message when empty search strings used – but you should give people an error message in this case. Solution – captured empty search screens and delivered error message
• no context for some links – so, add hidden text which explains the links if a custom menu takes them out of context [nb Mike L mentioned another solution within wp - menu walker?]
• links which say “read more” – again, added hidden text which includes unique description of where the read more links to
• add a stylesheet switcher – eg for contrast – yellow background, and reverse/high contrast version on black. nb dont worry about text size – can be done in browser

Steph's checklist. Picture credit: David Pearson

Finally, nomensa accredited the framework as AAA (nb its important to remember of course that the addition of content can make or break this!)

To cut a potentially long section short, and more to the point, add the correct coding solutions,  I’ll link to Steph’s presentation once published.

Next up was Peter Westwood – WP lead developer

He is one of the small team of wp core developers.  He described how the community works – from that small central team out to a wider community of contributors. Basically, most if not all start out small – people get responsibility by contributing, and their contributions being deemed valuable by other people.

The wp philosophy: design for majority, decisions not options (reduces amount of testing needed), deadlines are not arbitrary (aim for 3 releases a year), vocal minority (to be avoided… not necessarily the people you should be listening to!).  More can be found on site.

How can people contribute? [if you have developed something] use it, shout about it, help others with it, contribute code, contribute translations, contribute documentation. Start in the wordpress.org support forums – people move from helping out, to moderating – to more.

He added a word of caution regarding releasing plugins. If they are added to the core, there are support implications. If you can’t commit to that, better to publish the plugin on your own site, and then let others use – perhaps someone who CAN support it might take on that role.

The next version 3,3 is due end of November.

First session after lunch was Ross Ferguson: Foreign and Commonwealth Office

He talked about the evolution of how FCO has applied wp, through 5 different applications.

The first was Geneva Conventions at 60 – an engagement site celebrating 60th anniversary in partnership with British Red Cross. It went live in 2009. It was built completely in house,  but after this, all went quiet and key people left.

Next use was for the Human rights and democracy report 2010. This  report traditionally published as a glossy document – now looked for a digital way. A pdf version was available, but they also produced a site which would enable people to read, comment and share. They used helpful technology’s read+comment theme. This project served to whet the appetite for future wp use. Site still used to take comments on the countries of concern in the HR report.

Next project,  still read+comment was a site to support an event: UK Nordic Baltic summit – London 2011. Little commenting or engagement – but it presents people who couldn’t attend the conference with a way to access the slides. Site should probably now be archived! Very functional and flexible – site can stand without the slides.

Next: overseas territories consultation. This one done by policy team with a developer – no input from digital team. By now they had developed a strong set of guidance, and operate under the rule of presumed consent – teams CAN do this, as long as they follow the guidelines.

Finally, and this is due to launch any day, a project to update the FCO blogs. Initially, created using apache roller, but this is going to change: they are moving to wp. Really doesn’t look that different (deliberate – UX not broken). They plan to roll out in phases.  Its a standard installation of wp 3.2. One key issues for the FCO is translations. They have  c. 54 bloggers, c. 10 publish in second language eg arabic, lithuanian etc. So they intend to use the wpml plugin to associate 2 posts.

In a diversion from wp implementations, Ann Kempster talked us through work she has led to re-vamp the Government Communications Network – GCN – by migrating it onto buddypress.

Still the only install in government,  it is- used to power the GCN community, the online home for professional communicators across the civil service. This used to be fairly static site, it was custom built and resource intensive to manage. Now, using buddypress, it can be run by one person (not sure Ann 100% supports this side effect!).  Following 6 months of business planning and proposals, they then allowed 10 weeks for development and implementation. However, they actually needed 10 days for development – and a lot of this time was spent getting plugins working.

They selected the theme:  buddypress social (sort of based on facebook – to give people instant familiarity). Enabled all functions apart from private messaging – have blogs, forums, documents archives, calendars, for each group. nb there are c. 39 groups – one for all users, plus a variety of specialist.

Ann and Harry introduce buddypress

They launched March 2011, not with a splash, but gradually. The hands on approach of  encouraging people to re-register  actually resulted in more people here than were on the old site.

The implementation uses a lot of plugins. Its a fairly complex site and some plugins proved incompatible. Some worked off the shelf – but most needed some degree of modification. One or two had to be built.

Tons of features follow:

• For mailing, they used auto chimp, which links to mailchimp.
• There is also a plugin to take a feed from media wiki, which shows up when people make changes.
• Eventbrite powers the list of training courses and events and they would like to use eventbrite for end to end process, but its not possible yet.
• There is group auto join – when you fill in your profile, it assigns you to certain groups.
• And a plug in enabling group blogs.
• Plugins built from scratch include one to facilitate export of information on users, plus a password strength meter.
• How do they handle inactive users? System marks them as inactive, after period, then, when they decide to use it again, makes them re-validate, and then re joins them to all groups.
• There is single sign on between buddypress and mediwiki

Lessons learned? There was a buddypress plugin which should have allowed admin to email all members of a group, but it sent the messages 5-6-7 times – hence the decision to use an an external mail client. Buddypress not quite as flexible as wp yet – not as many hooks and filters. There were issues around patches and plugin authors – one worked, others not so successful. Idea of pushing patches back to the community – good in theory, not so effective in practice.

And a lesson from Harry – when making the decision between using off the shelf plugin or writing your own. If you find one that does ALL you want and/or more, then great, but if it does 80%, and the final 20% is something vital – better to write your own.

In a neat segue, next up was Paul Gibbs – buddypress developer.

His day job is at the Telegraph working on their blogs, plus myTelegraph – which is another wordpress site

He discovered buddypress about 3 years ago, following a long period of working together with a group of other developer friends and experimenting with bulletin board software. They did lots of work to add stuff,  but were looking for a better way.  They put wp and buddypress on their server and continued to experiment.

The story then was very similar to Peter’s earlier:  start with exploring,  spend time on forums – first asking questions, then helping people.

Paul talked a bit about how corporates can pay back to the community, when they are using these free software platforms and plugins: hosting events, and encouraging people to feedback is a good start.  Setting aside funds to actually pay plugin authors would be good too.

David Pearson: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs 

Following DEFRA’s presentation at last years event, when they had literally just launched their wp driven corporate site, David gave an update as to what has been happening since. (nb hope these slides are published, as David covered a lot of ground!)

So – what is their new structure? It consists of one master theme (which is structural – and actually not used anywhere on the site!), plus a series of child themes:

• home,
• news,
• general page,
• magazine/blog,
• non-core branded (customisable)

plus they can also do bespoke themes if required. But – the main ones can meet a lot of specific needs with relatively little work.

Core site consists of c 500 pages – news, consultations, publications, statistics etc. and they all look the same. The non core subsites are used for panels and 10 ndpbs. They all look very similar, but have different colours and logos.

Taxonomy is the glue which holds it all together, it defines the info architecture and reaches out to pull the subsites to the core. eg – if on a page about waste, can reach out to other sites and pull material together. Its nested – can auto index material from one site into another.

They used some use standard plugins: TinyMCE – to lock down editor controls (take away the buttons people wont use, add ones they do),  JetPak for social media buttons,  and google analytics.

They have developed a clever redirection package – to avoid sending people to the TNA just because something has been moved, they offer visitors a choice – giving them editorial judgement.

Updating content is delegated to individual business areas, allowing the central team to focus on high value high traffic areas – plus overall site management.

Enhancements planned include more home page customisation – to handle crises, displaying comments, “rate this page”, magazine theme, user surveys (quite gentle way of encouraging people to participate), and sitemaps.

In a final quick case study, he remarked that if people are given guidance, they do manage to run a site. Nevertheless, it is still best to automate wherever possible! The best way of getting these teams up and running is for them to come and sit by the web team at the start.

Neil Williams talked about Government  beta project

Should declare an interest here, as my department is part of the pilot, so I do have more of an insight than some as to how this project is progressing.

In essence though, there has been a bit of a stir, which Neil mentioned, but he focused on the many ways in which he sees that wp could potentially fit into the overall government digital landscape.

Josh Shindler introduced a soon-to-launch project from The National Archives

The Archives media player (not yet released, but about to go onto the labs site (also wp)) will contain all video and audio content from across the archives – including public information films and podcasts.

Currently, their podcast page gets 1.5 million downloads per year, plus they maintain a youtube channel.  A diagram showed that material currently is scattered all over the place (with many different designs): education, main series, news, records.

The project is a wp powered central location to contain and push out all different media.  Why wp? Their solution couldn’t be done using their existing cms. They wanted to include user feedback, comments, wanted pre-moderation, wanted it to be done quickly, and they recognised there was a  good level of support available from wp community.

Their project used the agile approach – and a technique/tool called sketchboard [hope thats the right youtube video] to get everyone involved in creating site, then moved to wireframes.

Following user testing and design, they created a custom theme 9which will be somewhat familiar to users of iplayer – probably no bad thing) and integrated longtail video player. This enabled videos to be brought into wp build. They used custom fields (good for structured style of media record). They used category templates rather than custom posts (and Josh admitted that probably developers would prefer the latter, so this might be changed).

They applied plugins for ratings, search, author image etc and went for a responsive design which will flex according to the device used to view.

I look forward to exploring it!

Finally, Simon Wheatley – wp developer

He talked about further possibilities, but I confess although he explained very clearly, I dont trust myself to report on  synchronising custom post types – other than to say that the project he used as an example – a  system for managing events for the Princes foundation for children and the arts, was extremely impressive – I think people would be surprised to discover it is running on wp.

His second item was about “dealing with the request….” Again, beyond saying that it is about what happens when a url is called, I got a little lost! (sorry Simon).  Again though, the project to which his work is being applied is impressive: babble. This is a multilingual plugin which sounds as though it will give the wpml plugin the FCO mentioned earlier some competition.

My conclusions? This second event showed us how far things have come since last year:  lots of departments now have wp firmly established as part of their digital offering. As several people commented, the next step should be a more systematic way of sharing the many ingenious plugins that have been developed and the different solutions worked out for different departments needs. Something like a wp app store – a catalogue of widgets and models – could be an extrmely useful thing for central and local govt – and beyond. And just when I went to hit ‘publish’ on this post, I saw the Steph has blogged in exactly the same vein – think we might be on to something?

Thanks to @simond for putting together another interesting event – here’s to Wordup Whitehall III

Note – any errors are of course entirely down to my misunderstanding – if any presenters would like to correct the record, please get in touch! Also, I’m happy to add links to any presentations that are published – again, please let me know.

Hard to know where to start with the Facebook hints – but in essence, the room was probably split between people who have already some experience with pages, and this half was nodding in agreement with most of the examples given – and the occasional “oh, I wish I’d known that was possible….”, while the other half were there to absorb and ask lots of questions. Overall it served to re-affirm a lot of the things we are doing and it was good to hear from colleagues who are in the same situation.

Working with Pages

The advice centred on making use of ‘pages’ – and we saw lots of useful examples of what can inform your choice. NATO, for example has a page for the organisation, the Secretary General  and for heads of specific sectors (e.g. Dr Stefanie Babst).

If you have a high profile person as your head, especially if that person has a political role, it is advisable to keep that separate as it is easy to link the two together – and it will enable visitors to decide whether they want to follow the organisation or the person.

Regarding personal pages – Facebook’s policy is to create landing pages for significant figures, usually by linking to their Wikipedia entry. This will be removed and replaced as soon as Facebook are notified that the individual has created their own. It was interesting to hear that this is also how Facebook deals with historical figures – go have a look at William Shakespeare. It’s unlikely to offer much interaction but does have over ¼ million fans!

Hints for raising the profile of your pages include tagging wherever possible, including photos, and using one high profile page in a sector to tag another. A useful reminder for page admins was that they can log in to Facebook and switch profiles – carrying out activities as their page.

Moderation

Facebook has a profanity filter for inappropriate comments and it is possible to ban members from posting comments (although in the examples round the room this has actually been used infrequently in practice). Many organisations may also choose to remove the ability to initiate comments (e.g. post directly onto their page) whilst retaining (and indeed encouraging) visitors to comment on topics the organisation initiates.

Page administrators were reminded to look at Facebook’s straightforward guidance. Facebook will always post updates about changes that are made. There are also pages on safety and security – which should answer many of the most frequently asked questions.

Exit Strategies

An interesting question was around exit strategies- what do you do with a community once the campaign that sparked it off has run its course? If there was a new, similar page then the admin could post a few times and point fans to this new space – advising them to follow that too if they were still interested. Then, after a time, proactive activity could be ceased. An alternative would be to set up the page with a very broad title so it can be used as a platform for a series of activities allowing you to take your growing community along with you.

Coventry’s experience with Facebook

Both Coventry and the Staffordshire police showed how addressing a local audience can really benefit from a specific event. In Coventry’s case this was meeting a need for information during last winter’s unusually heavy snowfall which resulted in schools and public services being reduced. For the police it was how they were able to respond to the recent riots.

Coventry council made a conscious decision in their foray on to Facebook  to make their pages as inclusive as possible while building on earlier conversations about specific council business. They named the page simply “Coventry” and while they didn’t hide the fact it was council initiated (if you looked closely) the main branding was more general-images of Coventry instead of the council logo.  There is a team of people behind the page – no automated posting of material, and they aim to stimulate conversations and answer questions.

Echoing our own experience at DFID, when there is a critical voice or bad natured comment their first reaction is not to block it or step in with a counter comment. Instead they watch and wait and very often other members of the community will step in.

Their key period of expansion was during last winter’s heavy snowfall: they went from just over 500 fans to 11,000 in 2 weeks! They had direct links with schools and quickly became the official source of information on which schools were closed – in one instance countering the cheeky initiative of a young pupil who managed to convince a local radio station that he was a headmaster and got them to announce his school was closed! They quickly confirmed and broadcast that the school was open.

Ally confirmed the value they find in Facebook insights, (Facebook’s inbuilt analytics package). The ability to find out a lot about their fans, how they find the page, what interests them plus a raft of demographic data, is hugely useful in helping to inform future focus and communications. She confirmed that sport, employment and potholes are their star topics!

Staffordshire Police

Key points from David Bailey echoed many of Ally’s. Fundamental was that social media formed the bedrock of their communications during the riots. They placed a notice on their website which directed people to Facebook for detail, and Twitter for up to the minute alerts. Key for me was their evidence countering the view that quickly spread in the mainstream media, that social media was somehow to blame for accelerating the riots – with calls that it should be switched off at the height of problems. Examples such as this demonstrate strongly that it is an equally, if not more valuable, part of the solution.

Elements included members of the team being highly alert to potential problems and quickly drawing up a communications plan with issues such as 24 hour working agreed so that the team could respond immediately. Senior members of the force were involved, including being interviewed for podcasts which served to reassure members of the public that the police were on high alert and ready to act. These podcasts were rebroadcast by local radio. The police, in a similar way to the Coventry team, experienced an unusual turnaround in that local media recognised their direct connection to a local audience and called them to ask them to publicise announcements!

Another notable element of their communication plan was to make sure their own colleagues knew what was going on. Families were reassured via the social media updates, and colleagues heard via a series of “news from the chief” emails. A nice touch was the creation of Wordles to illustrate the tone of online coverage – overwhelmingly positive and appreciative.

An evaluation of their activities has been published – worth reading.

DFID

DFID on facebook

Last but not least, Simon shared some thoughts on DFID’s Facebook activities. Key points for us are a move away from purely signposting content published in other places (primarily the website) and creating content specifically to publish on Facebook. We are focusing on creating a community where interaction is frequent. The most colourful evidence of this is a series called “Changing Lives”. This is the banner which introduces a whole series of stories about how aid has made a difference in people’s lives. We used a tool called thrusocial to create a landing page which we switched to be the default when people find us on Facebook.

We are experimenting with frequency of posts, but in general we aim for a steady flow – interspersing announcement of policy updates with lighter touch material such as a “Where in the world” photo competition and quick quizzes on news-prompted issues – for example an item on new research into ways of tackling malaria.

When we introduce links to material from other organisations, we will frame it as a question – again with the intention of stimulating debate, rather than simply directing visitors away from our space.

The first was a more informal session where Peter shared some of the many tools that Google makes available, and talked about some of the fascinating projects the organisation has supported. He also then participated in a lively question and answer session which I hope I have captured the flavour of.

The second was a more structured meeting, where Richard talked about how government can use facebook, and his colleague then gave a more detailed presentation on specific, practical issues. This was followed by fascinating presentations by Ally Hook, a representative of Coventry Council, one from David Bailey from Staffordshire police, and finally my own colleague Simon Davis.  I’ll blog notes from those sessions very soon.

Back to Google. The first tool we took a look around was insights for search  – something I faintly remember playing with a while ago, but not something we have used in earnest. It makes available all search traffic anonymously in a form you can interrogate – fascinating to see trends over time, or to compare two terms. Could provide really useful evidence to schedule timings around publishing material, or even to support search engine optimisation. If the majority are searching using particular terms, we should at least ensure they appear in our content, even if development professionals prefer to caption items with their own preferred terminology. Nb we have been using the Google adwords tool to gain similar insights recently, but I was impressed with the flexibility of insights.

Next up was Ngram viewer which arose out of Google’s massive book digitisation programme. It simply would not have been possible in the past to check the frequency with which certain terms appear in printed literature, but the vast amount of text now available via this programme, and the Ngram interface mans you can carry out quick searches for example which illustrate that the term ‘feminism’ started to appear in the 1920s and while ‘chivalry’ is not dead, it has certainly decreased significantly in popular usage.

Another tool which uses Google’s access to huge volumes of search data looks at which terms are being searched for around the world is Global Market Finder (and this one is linked to the adwords tool, giving an indication of what it would cost to purchase adwords in different countries).

On to more familiar ground, we had a quick tour of Gapminder – which I remember seeing a fascinating TED talk about a while ago – and is perhaps a sign of what might emerge from our own efforts across government to release masses of raw data. There was also mention in this context of Google Refine – a tool which helps clean up inconsistencies in datasets (eg when fields may contain UK, United Kingdom, and a number of other variations. I remember this being enthused about by several of the speakers at this years OpenTech event – so it certainly has its fans in the developer community.

Next up was Earth Engine – another tool which illustrates a key Google philosophy which is to make masses of information available to all. In this case it is satellite data, and the link above includes links to videos on YouTube which show how this can for example bring into sharp focus the real changes in forest cover around the world. You could imagine it could also be useful in disaster response situations.

One of the projects which raised a ripple of interest around the room – and a follow up link to a Guardian article about the project was ‘Life in a Day’ . A showcase for the functionality offered by YouTube to enable people to share films – which were then edited into a feature film which documents life around the world on one particular day.

As mentioned above, there was a lively question and answer session, during which many other tools were discussed.

A question about whether the oft quoted fact that Google employees are allowed 20% of their time to work on projects that interest them was confirmed as true (although this is not a mandatory activity – proposals do have to be discussed with managers and progress is monitored). One project that has resulted from this encouragement is the Art project http://www.googleartproject.com/

Another question was around reputation management – as a company gets bigger and more successful, do the criticisms get louder? Familiar to all of us, the answer was that a lot of effort is put into fixing problems as they arise, and being public about how they are fixed and progress of the issues.

Hard to believe, but all this was covered in a session lasting less than an hour – an excellent way to spend a lunch hour!

Note : A lot of the tools mentioned are also listed on google itself : http://www.google.com/publicsector/

Next post – the Facebook event.

I have attended every previous event, but a combination of circumstances conspired to make me miss yesterdays session, so I have to make to with trawling through tons of tweets (check the hashtag #yrs2011), looking at Paul Clarke’s excellent photos, and reading the blog posts of others who did manage to make it. The best source which brings together all the tweets, videos of the show and tell, and links to all the centres is YRS’s own website: youngrewiredstate.org 

Looking forward to the event in 2012 already – no, not THAT summer 2012 event….. YRS2012. Although there may be some competition for column inches in August 2012, wonder if there will ever be a day when young coders get their own dedicated transport lanes and venues created specially for them!)

First was Claire Melamed from ODI. She introduced herself as a technology optimist, but pragmatic about the challenges and importance of realising benefits for everyone. She spoke about the rollout of mobile phones and how they fit the poverty reduction picture. Benefits include: more efficient ways of doing what people are already doing, and doing new things. She quoted a statistic that is already probably out of date, that a 10% deeper spread of mobile leads to 1% economic growth.

But, she then said that as we were likely to spend the rest of the day hearing about the amazing possibilities and opportunities offered by new media, she felt she should be the voice of gloom (or was it doom?!) She listed the huge challenges facing Africa:

• geography – the continent is vast, and mobile coverage is still small
• literacy – rates are climbing, but slowly
• money – even if mobiles are getting cheaper, there is still a cost – and she quoted a contact as saying that an MPESA transaction costs the same as a bag of maize – so some people still face difficult choices

However, she also drew some important conclusions for what needs to happen, and perhaps a role for government: markets cannot do this on their own – incentives are needed to reach remote areas, other interventions such as cash transfers and education can encourage spread, and finally (definitely a role for government) they can step in to regulate competition. Governments have a key role in making sure benefits are spread. She ended on a positive note: now is the time to do something about this – so that we dont sit here in a couple of years talking about the huge problem of digital exclusion.

One follow up question was whether anyone knew examples of telecoms sharing infrastructure, as this can help spread availability. The example quoted was of Helios towers – known examples of tower sharing in Nigeria and South Africa.

Next to speak was Faith Karimi, CNN news editor. She spoke about how social media has revolutionised news coverage. She said that ANY big story will have a social media tie in – but stated that social media shapes coverage, rather than determining it.

At CNN, a service filters and distils online coverage three times a day and sends an overview to editors. If an issue is being talked about, that might influence them to run a story, even if that had previously not been planned.  Twitter is a good starting point for them – eye witness accounts of events mean the journalists get to hear about it, but they will always verify before broadcast.

She listed the benefits of social media as being eyes on the ground – especially in places where there was no bureau, an elimination of middlemen – both sources, and in a few cases, in official response. She mentioned that the governments of  Rwanda and South Africa are both active on social media – providing a quick response when issues break.

She was asked who the audience of CNN Africa was – the west of Africa itself? She responded that common feedback is that the west does a bad job of portraying Africa, and CNN does try and reach out, especially to a younger audience. She mentioned a scheme they support to encourage and promote african journalists.

Finally she emphasised that verification is an issue. Social media might trigger a call, but they wont use what you say unless they can verify it.

Next up was Alan Cocks,  billed as an Ubuntu software advocate. I’d go a step further and say he was an enthusiast. He extolled the benefits of using Ubuntu, confirming that money is made not from selling the software, but from selling services. He also made the point that it can run from a memory stick, thus meaning it can work on computers even if they dont have a functioning hard drive.

Ubuntu fan

Elizabeth Ford gave an introduction to the Guardian Global Development site. She described its status as a work in progress (something that really should apply to all websites!) and talked about the lessons the team had learned from the Katine project, which was their partnership with AMREF to chart the development story of a village in Uganda. The Global Development site is funded by the Gates Foundation and its aim is to move away from the ‘Africa as victim’ story and show the full and diverse reality of life in developing countries. She talked about issues around community participation – especially for people new to online fora. Examples from Katine included how surprised some were by the aggression of some commentators. Global Developent does offer lots of opportunity for comment and debate, but she said perhaps it is a ‘nicer’ space than the ‘comment is free’ space. Nevertheless, there will always be people spoiling for a fight! Following the examples set by the BBC team earlier, and what is known about Frontline SMS radio (detail to follow later in the afternoon) perhaps their next development might be to expand the platform to invite interaction via SMS or calls.

Two speakers followed: Alex Reid from the Gates Foundation and Carolina Rodriguez from the Africa Progress Panel. They both have a focus on policy and advocacy work, and talked about their use of social media to get a consistent message out. My colleagues worked with the Gates team during the recent GAVI pledging conference – and our main theme from that event was that if planning starts early enough, so people have time to share each others plans and unique descriptors can be agreed, then at the time of the actal evant or announcement, you can achieve much wider and deeper coverage, as people see that consistent approach. It was also nice to see they had used an example of their collaboration with us in their presentation.

Carolina Rodriguez presents

My photo is a bit fuzzy, but their example showed how they produce content to reach different audiences, from the general public to development specialists and policy makers, and the example I mentioned is a blog post Bill Gates wrote that we published as a guest contribution to our development debates section of the DFID bloggers community. One comment that resonated with things we are discovering is the power of infographics. When trying to convey complex figures or concepts to busy people, a clever visualisation to catch their attention and draw them in is worth many carefully constructed statements.

The discussion whic followed built on a comment that there is a sense of talking to ourselves, or talking in a bubble and there were questions around how to bring in non-traditional participants. One strongly worded comment was “innovation cannot come from the people who are part of the problem – we need to ask new people to contribute”. Carolina though gave a powerful reply in saying that the voices of extremely senior people suc as Kofi Annan, even if no longer in power, are valuable in ensuring issues are covered in the media. They can be used as a megaphone, so it was important to get specific concerns onto their agenda, and ensure they were thoroughly briefed.

Change of pace and style next to Linda Raftree  – and the first presentation of the day to provide a real sense of activity on the ground in Africa (es, before I get reminded, The BBC Africa have your say team is definitely working in Africa, but it somehow had a more familiar, polished, corporate feel). Linda works with Plan USA and the project is being implemented in Mozambique, Kenya and Cameroon – she focused on the latter. It aims to support youth empowerment through media – and she told an interesting story of how what was perhaps assumed at the start wasn’t necessarily what was ended up with. It wasn’t a project about seeking funding, the local councils had resources, but the community – and in particular young people – were not involved in how it was spent. The first activity was to map their community, which they first did in a traditional way with pen and paper, then teamed up with some experts in digital mapping to capture a rich picture of the things the participants deemed important to decision making: not just where the schools were, but how many children enrolled, how many girls/bys, how many teachers, and not just how many hospitals or clinics, but how many nurses, what kinds of diseases were prevalent etc.

Then, once they have collected that evidence, young people are encouraged to use that to advcate what they need. They also talked about issues that perhaps adults didn’t know, or knew, but didn’t want to talk about, such as drug use or rape. They are given encouragement and support to document their concerns through video interviews, or, when dealig with sensitive subjects, through artwork or drama. This collected evidence and ability to influence policy decisions is truly empowering.

During the questions that followed, Linda also described an example of  something that happened in Kenya. The group of young people there were encouraged to use an online space to debate government policy.The group also took some of that space to comment on and criticise Plan – which is something an organisation needs to accept when empowering people to use these channels.

Tami Hultman was introduced next. She is one of the co-founers of AllAfrica.com a news aggregator which takes content from local papers throughout Africa and is one of the largest sites with news from, for and about Africa. It has existed since the early 90s and is now nearly self-sustaining through advertising and royalty revenue. Their traffic is fairly evenly split between the US, Europe and Africa, with the latter just haveing taken the larger share. A new venture is MyAfrica, which has not been promoted, but already has thousands of inputs. One example is when they had the opportunity to interview President Obama before his visit to Ghana, and they invited people to submit questions. They received hundreds (and also some valuable audience data, as to submit a question, people had to fill out a form).

Gemma Ware presented Africa Report, which is a traditional printed publication that also now has a web presence. They do not yet make use of social media, and are watching the developments at the Guardian with interest. Their aim is to stimulate debate, and the format of a monthly publication means they focus on high quality analysis rater than breaking news – although their web presence does allow for more immediate reaction.

The penultimate speaker was Kevin Anderson, a journalist who has previously worked with the BBC and the Guardian. He spoke about some training he did last year with Al Jazeira journalists (and yes, he agreed that was very timely!) and introduced the formula: information – noise + content = accurate reporting. Social media is noisy, so don’t try and amplify everything. Its more important to use it to identify contacts and key people around an issue, then work with them. He talked about how creative people can be, especially in situations like those across North Africa at the moment – using audioboo when broadcasting is disrupted, licensing content through creative commons, plus all sorts of ways of getting around barriers – such as the slang evolving in China to get around firewalls, and in Syria, people burning files onto CDs and physically sending them over the border to AL Jazeira journalists. He talked about a kiosk set up in the capital of Moldova, were people were encouraged to come and literally write their concerns onto the walls. These were later transcribed and published on the web. In Poland, where internet use tends to be dominated by the under 25s, the views of older people are gathered by printing forms in newspapers. He enthused about the social side of social media – building a social experience around ANY media channels.

When asked a question about how to protect people – again, in the sort of situations Al Jazeira journalists find themselves in, and he talked about using closed facebook groups, or skype to talk with contacts.

The final individual speaker was Sharath Srinivasan, one of the founders of Frontline SMS radio \~/ This took me back to the first Africa Gathering meeting I attended, where I first heard about Frontline SMS \o/ This latter product has been downloaded over 16,000 times, and it allows people to turn a laptop, phone and modem into a push hub for SMS/text communications. It has many uses – constrained really only by peoples imagination. Uses include monitoring drug availability in the health sector, price monitoriong in the agriculture sector, or job advertising. It has spawned a whole community of parallel products: Frontline credit, Frontline legal and Frontline learn (I was too slow to record their logos!) but the aim of Frontline SMS radio is to turn radio interactive. How? – local stations can use it to communicate with listeners, who are invited to submit a question or comment via text. The presenter receives the text in a large font for imediate use if needed. Texts can also be tagged and sorted, adn stored for future use (eg to pose as questions to a later visitor). Its useful for live polling – graphics can be generated and simple yes/no results used easily in the context of a programme. Sharath is part of a research programme running in Cambridge, and talked a little about how they are investigating how social media impacts on engagement in public debate and how it can change citizen/state relations.

And on that final note, I was left to reflect how while this is a meeting to focus on questions and issues that relate specifically to Africa, several times during the day I was struck how the questions raised were equally valid here at home. This last one in particular made me think – we are all really at the beginning of this period of change. Perhaps some have done more investiation and experimenting than others but we all have a long way to go.

Africa Gathering QR code

UPDATE: Kevin Anderson has blogged his session, and Linda Raftree has shared her thoughts – both posts are worth reading – and emphasise how much was packed into that day.

Africa Gathering 2011

This year the theme was social media, and I guess unfortunately that might have constrained some of the presenters.  While there were lots of interesting ideas discussed and good ideas described, for me, what I have really enjoyed from previous events has been the deluge of examples of all sorts of innovation – and this time, while there were flashes of that, there were also more theoretical sessions about social media – and most presenters took us through what they were doing in that space. While this was interesting, it didn’t provide the range I had been looking forward to.

Thats a minor niggle though – as I hope the following notes show, there was a lot covered during the day.

First session was in the form of a workshop, introduced by Alex and Myriam from the BBC Africa Have your say radio programme.  They use all channels available to gather feedback as part of their programme making – they seed ideas and also source topics online, and invite people in to answer questions posted by the public. They also talked about how to broaden their inclusion – eg how to give a voice to people who may not have internet access to participate.  Once they are made aware of an issue via whatever means, they do send out freelancers or stringers who can visit villages and talk to people.  They also talked about how difficult it can be to find the right people to talk to from official channels, to provide a balanced view or response to questions. They have had some success in finding people via social media, eg the policeman who was able to give them some useful numbers to ring.

One interesting question posed was whether they have seen the emergence of hubs – for example when there are groups of people without net access, does the one person in a village who may have a mobile become a source or gathering point for others. They didn’t have evidence of this, but one correspondent did say that he was using their programme as a trigger to teach friends and others about social media in general – so perhaps there are many as yet un-tracked consequences.

We were all invited to discuss our thoughts around the question: how do people find out about what matters to them? Groups then fed back,  and it was clear there had been wideranging discussions.  Issues included:

• the need to raise general awareness – social media literacy is low
• projects like iHub Kenya are interesting – could that model be useful elsewhere?
• the importance of empowering young people
• the importance of connections – put pilot projects in touch with each other – they will often reach solutions based on shared problems and challenges
• the value of social media in humanitarian response (and there are of course many blog posts, reports and articles already about this!)
• social media and the feedback/interaction it stimulates is a way of finding out that someone is actually listening to you
• while mobile is undoubtedly spreading widely, people’s primary use is (not surprisingly) for their own immediate needs – they wouldn’t necessarily know there were wider issues to get involved with
• the role that corporates could play in opening up access
• building on the idea of hubs as physical presences, to look for human hubs – key leaders who people trust (someone later mentioned iChiefs and iPriests) – find people who are already respected and listened to and give them the tools and training
• the challenges of moving beyond comments on a forum, which is often a closed conversation, and how that virtual debate can be turned into action

One thought that occurred to me – there is no cause for complacency here in the UK, many of the thoughts expressed above in relation to Africa are valid here (maybe not to the same degree, but valid nevertheless). We hear talk of the digital divide, we have the race online initiative, and online advocacy and participation in democracy may be growing, but is still relatively small.

One final thought-provoking comment which came up several times through the day, was the fact that much of African culture is still rooted in the oral tradition – not so much about writing which forms the basis of much interaction via social media. Alex (BBCAfrica) commented that while many of his first contacts may come via twitter, SMS or facebook, they often quickly progress to “call me”. My response would be that in no way is any invitation to participate online intended to replace that tradition – but my belief is very much in the social side – people like to find other people like themselves – similar interests, similar concerns. Social media enables you to reach way beyond the communities you would previously have had access to – thus finding more people to talk to. In particular, if you have a niche issue or question – whether it be medical, social, agricultural or other, the web can bring answers and solutions that simply were not possible in the days of just talking to your neighbours.

The session ended with a roundup of ideas, including:

• make space for the market. If a business can be convinced that there is a market for a service, then they will often deliver an appropriate solution (this was expanded by a later speaker, but I agree there is a germ of truth here)
• it is important to understand the purpose of communications initiatives – the ones that meet peoples needs can be supported, shared and encouraged
• look at ways to give specific groups the motivation to engage – is it a question of new platforms, or showing people the benefits of sharing and engaging
• strong feeling that people should decide for themselves – but I firmly believe that there also needs to be catalysts – its hard when people want to carry on as they always have, and simply dont know that something completely different might be possible. Innovation might spring up in surprising places with no apparent trigger – but sometimes it needs help.

One anecdote that stuck with me was a comment from one of the researchers, about how a business he works with (no names, but I think it might have been in the telecoms sector) is now making an awareness of digital a primary factor in their recruitment process. This doesn’t have to be evidenced by something the applicant has done in a work role, it could be a hobby or voluntary activity, or simply the fact that they have an established online persona. Once this is proven, suitability for their role within the organisation comes next – whether it be in sales, business analysis or technical.

It struck me that if we are to achieve digital by default* across the public sector, it could really start to become completely second nature if a similar approach were to be taken with new recruits.

* the oft quoted description for the aim that services will be designed first to be delivered online, with the intention that the majority will be able to use them, and only then will alternatives be worked out for those who for whatever reason cannot.