I will be attending (and presenting) at the International eParticipation and Local Democracy Symposium on 28/29 February. I will be joining Diane Downey (Assistant Corporate Head of ICT – Delivery, Sunderland City Council), Richard Wilson (MD of Involve) and Matt Rhodes (Head of Research, FreshNetworks) in a joint session entitled “Citizen Empowerment: Where do we begin?” Full agenda here Symposium Agenda.
I’m anticipating (nay – hoping) the session will stimulate some discussion on the apparent dichotomy between empowering citizens to engage with central and local government whilst at the same time disenfranchising citizens through lack of consultation prior to the introduction of bi-laws and regulations. The proposed increase to congestion charges in London is a typical example (and I have no hidden agenda here, since I neither live in or use a car to commute to London).
I will also touch on the success of the communities of practice in local government as an example of how staff working in local councils are empowering themselves to improve services – quite often without the knowledge or understanding of their respective Chief Executives!
It should be an interesting couple of days.
For anyone who may have missed my earlier blog – published 12 December 2007 – about the
Local Government Association’s publication of 100 words that public bodies should not use if they want to communicate effectively with citizens – well, it seems this has sparked some heated debate (and vitriol) from readers of the IDeA site that carried the original article.
The LGA’s list of the tope 100 ‘non-words’ included tortuous vocabulary such ‘capacity building’, ‘improvement levers’, ‘place shaping’, and democratic mandate’, as well as the more benign ‘welcome’, ‘customer’ and ‘guidelines’.
A sample of some of the more heated exchange on this article includes:
“Perhaps if the LGA concentrated more on such words rather than knocking up patronising lists like this, then people would take them seriously”, wrote another poster. “As it stands, the vast majority of the public and council officers take one look at the LGA and laugh.”
“Has there ever been a more patronising missive from the LGA?!?”
“Excuse me whilst I doff my cap m’lud! I’d call it claptrap but that’s probably a word “we wouldn’t understand“.
“The Plain English campaign (sadly aided and abetted by the LGA in this instance), I am afraid, is fast becoming a murderer of the English language”
“The variety, complexity and richness of the language is, in their eyes it seems, something to denigrate in favour of a utlilitarian approach. How very, very sad. May I suggest the LGA concentrates on educating councillors, quite a few of whom are functionally illiterate themselves?“
“Pathetic, as a person who regulary communicates with the general populace I Ihave found them to be very intelligent and on one or two occassions more informed than I. I suggest the LGA should find better ways in which to spend their time/resources and stop finding jobs for the boys.”
If you haven’t added your views to the original article I’m afraid it’s too late – the IDeA have closed the item for any further comments, but I’ll be happy to collect any other thoughts/views/comments and forward to the appropriate people at IDeA and LGA.
If anyone feels particularly motivated to do something practical to improve communication and understanding between public bodies who like to hide behind jargon, look no further than the Local Government Glossary wiki – an initiative that Dave Briggs and I started last year to encourage some on-line collaboration between local authorities in providing plain English descriptions for some of the more obscure terms used in the public sector. You need to register on Wikispaces if you want edit rights to the glossary.
Ed Mitchell over at Platform Neutral picks up on the issue of Return on Investment (ROI) for on-line communities, quite rightly identifying this as growing topic for debate and argument over the coming months. In Ed’s words:
"ROI
for ‘communities’ is going to appear on our horizons for proper this
year. We will have the debate from the sponsors asking if it’s worth
it, and another one about which way around it should be – ie: ROI for
whom? The sponsors, or the participants. Likewise there is much talk
about the ROI of ’social media’, and all of the projects I am working
on have measurement built into them at the strategy level"
Personally, I haven’t quite cracked this nut for the virtual communities using the IDeA platform (240 of them at the last count). Since many of the communities are closed, self-organising networks, I only really see the platform-wide metrics. So, for example, I can see:
- Total number of communities
- Total registered users
- Total contributors
- Members per community
- Total topics
- Threads with responses
- Responses per thread
- Participating users
- Total number of blogs
- Total posts
- Total comments
- Total number of Wikis
- Total edits
- Articles per community
- Total number of documents
- Total number of document comments
- Number of Documents per community
- Total number of messages
- Number of users sending messages
- Number of users receiving messages
- Total events posted
- Events per community
I can get the same raw data from each
individual community (but it’s a tedious process doing this for 240 communities!)
- though this does at least give a more accurate indication of the health of
the individual community (where my definition of ‘health’ means
‘activity’), but none of this information can provide me with
a ‘value’ or ROI – no matter how I slice and dice the data.
Hence the need for a more qualitative approach, in the form of membership and user surveys etc. Picking up on Ed’s comment that all of his community projects have measurement built into them at a strategy level – which sounds like the right approach – it should also be noted that even this can be difficult to quantify in terms of an ROI. The IDeA community strategy was developed to "improve local government services". I can infer from the platform statistics that the communities appear to be active, but I cannot yet connect a specific output (service improvement) to the work of any individual community.
So, allowing for the subjective nature of user surveys, I still think they are more likely to give an indication of ROI if not an absolute measure. If I’m right, the next step is in asking the
right questions!
The Online Community Research Network are doing a survey on this, so please have a read, fill it in, and pass it on. The more responses the better.
