LocalGov2.0 Just another Work Together weblog

The LGA has just released a report on how councils are using tech to save millions. It features a number of examples on how geo-spatial data has been packaged up in apps to help local people access services more conveniently and save money. Whether it’s bin men working smarter, fewer phone calls to inquiry centres, freeing up staff from time-consuming checks or reducing parking ticket machine maintenance costs, making the most of modern technology and data sharing has seen huge cash savings across the country.

One of the examples is Gloucestershire which has the world’s first cashless parking payment via an iPhone app.

See the report here. Good stuff!

Most of the examples in my LocalGov2.0 example blog have been about the institutional use of social media or open data in local government. But there are at least as many examples of councillors who are using social media to engage with local people, and I’ve decided that I’m going to start featuring a few here, perhaps aiming for one councillor blog a week.

I’ve been put off this a little bit, not because there aren’t some great examples, but because I lay myself open (slightly and perhaps only in my imagination) to the charge of political bias. Too many Conservative blogs? Too many Labour? Since I take a slightly random approach to featuring stuff, as in- ooh, that looks cool, I’ll grab it – I could easily end up with a run of, say LibDem, blogs without meaning to.

But this blog is primarily for me. It’s my well of examples for training and talks and to include in papers and so forth. I’m just sharing it because I hope it’s useful for others. And I need some councillor examples in the lead up to a series of events. So, councillor blogs it is. I have put in place a Google spreadsheet though to help me keep track of who I’ve featured, what party and what region they’re from so I can try to achieve some balance and so it’s transparent who I’ve featured. And I’ve also added a Google form for people to submit examples of councillor blogs they’d like to see featured. You don’t have to use the form….

Anyway, enough of that. Let’s look at the first blog.

Councillor Andrew Wallis, an Independent from Cornwall County Council and a parish councillor, has the dubious distinction of being first. He’s been going for not quite a year and posts regularly. He uses Google’s Blogger platform, which is completely free – I used it for years and think it’s pretty good. It’s easy to get a decent looking blog up in short time, and Cllr Wallis’s blog looks pretty darn good. Clean and professional, with lots of images.

If I were giving advice for councillor blogs (which I have done), I’d say he ticks almost all the boxes. There are easy to find contact details, links to other his other online profiles (Twitter) and a clear statement of his role at the council. And lots and lots of references to the place he serves. (The only thing he does which is contrary to my loose recommendations is that he has the title cllr in his blog’s web address, which could make things tricky if for some reason he leaves the council but wants to continue blogging. But too late to change easily).

The blog is a mix of reportage on local fun stuff – events which haven’t happened yet and those that have and reflections on council issues – some of them pretty technical, but explained in easy language for the resident who wants to know. He even recently discussed what it means to be Cornish, which I don’t much about, but do know to be thorny. And importantly, he links to other local bloggers. Blogging without linking is speaking into a void.

Kensington and Chelsea have joined the growing number of councils that are exposing their expenditure data. Although there are only 20ish so far, that number is getting bigger all the time, so much so that I’ve made the decision that I’m no longer going to feature councils that just publish expenditure data in this blog. You have to be doing something a little bit different. RBKC is doing that.

Yesterday I featured them in a post about what format expenditure data should be published in – advocating for the time being both CSV and PDF – and if you have to choose only one, go with CSV. (XML even better, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves).

RBKC are publishing expenditure data in both pdf and csv, but they’re also placing the expenditure data in context. Not only does it sit alongside information about senior officer salary details and members allowances, but this rather nifty visualisation of their overall budget as well as making links to information on how the council manages money and its performance.

You can see the list of councils publishing open data in this Google spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is noteworthy on its own. It’s a collaborative effort between CLG, LG Group and Chris Taggart of Openly Local, and is now the master list – avoiding duplication of collation.

It seems like we’re miles away from an election right now, but the next local polling in England might just be the social media election we didn’t quite get in May.

Stephanie Noble describes a local election in Newark, New Jersey and the role that social media played in getting an ‘underfunded’, underdog candidate a place on the city council. Since she’s a social media consultant, we probably need to take it all with a teeny grain of salt and there are certainly questions I would ask about ROI of certain tools.

However, she does describe a whole array of social media tools including the first use I’ve heard of Foursquare (a location based game) in a local campaign. I doubt Foursquare would work in the UK, but since it began in New York it may have greater penetration in a city just across the river. She describes how they measured penetration of messages using link-shortening service (bit.ly) and includes certain measures of success on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube.

In the end, her candidate won by just 11 votes. A squeaker! In hotly contested races, social media may just provide the edge.

Dan Slee has blogged about how Walsall Council has used Flickr and its local community to spruce up its web pages. He has step by step information about what they did and what kind of things you need to consider as well as other helpful links.

If you’re proud of your area and proud of your local people, this is a great way to show that.

Flickr is an online image sharing website, that is as much about social networking around images as it is an image repository. Just about every area I’ve ever looked for already has a Flickr group dedicated to sharing images about that place.

As far as I can tell, Aberdeen City Council is the first Scottish council to release open data. They’ve released councillors’ allowances and leisure facilities as machine readable data. (CSV) A good place to start. The first is about democracy and transparency and the second kind of data release leads to the development of cool online things that help people have fun.

Congrats to them!

(More info and help from other practitioners in the Local Open Data Community of Practice)

(via Ian Watt, @watty62)

I’ve just seen in the Social Media Community of Practice that folks from four separate local authorities are collaborating on guidance on social media for the public sector in a wiki.

They’re only just starting off, but there’s already a fair bit of content there. Their primary focus is libraries, but there’s a lot there for all concerned.

Here’s what Helen Leech from Surrey County Council has said:

Four authorities are working together on a course aimed at raising staff awareness of social media, and confidence in handling public enquiries about it. You can see it at 23things.wetpaint.com.

It is written for library staff, but since it consists of introductions to things like Twitter and Facebook it can be used by anybody. It is, of course, free.

What a brilliant example of collaboration. No point in doing this separately four times over or for that matter the many times over that every council will be interested in.

Derbyshire is using both a wordpress blog and a Facebook page to support a reader development programme on literature in your local area.

I love seeing mentions of the places I lived and loved in books, so a really cool idea.

There’s a new case study on the LG Improvement and Development website covering use of social media in Kirklees for tackling obesity and unhealthy lifestyles which focuses on their use of Facebook:

Students in an area of West Yorkshire are turning their backs on takeaways and TV to become healthier thanks to an innovative social marketing project. The drive – a partnership between the NHS and Kirklees council – used a range of modern day media such as Facebook to engage and inspire young people to change their lifestyles.

Of all the age groups, teenagers and young adults are perhaps the most difficult to reach with health messages. While schools have become a hotbed of health promotion and older adults have been targeted through walking, gardening and dancing activities, there remains very little for young adults. But in Kirklees the council and local NHS have worked together to develop a social marketing project aimed at tackling the rising levels of obesity among 16 to 24-year-olds.

San Francisco has a showcase of applications using open data. And I’ve featured London’s before here, too. San Francisco has got lots of interesting and useful apps, including one I’ve been wanting for ages but which there just isn’t the open data for yet.

Maybe every city should have one these showcases – letting citizens know what’s on offer and highlighting the work of local (and perhaps not so local) developers. And maybe that’s the kind of thing we can expose through the Knowledge Hub, too.