The crux of the debate seems to be around two main questions:

1. Is it reasonable or appropriate to expect our leaders to have a minimum level of knowledge with respect to digital in the wider social as well as technical sense?
2. If we do have this expectation does this change the type of people who we want to have in leadership positions or does it simply mean that we have to up skill to leaders (and potential leaders) we already have?

Steve Halliday has already answered this in part:

Just like in the analogue world, different people network differently. Just like they have different numeracy or literacy skills and aptitudes, they will have different digicate characteristics. Some, irrespective of age and experience will not be digital naturals. This does not make them bad persons, or even bad leaders. I have seen some wonderful leaders who, with a very small but precisely chosen and honed network of trusted people, deliver some inspirational leadership. And some absolute time wasters who seem to know everything about everyone.
So don’t be too harsh on the conservatively digicate. You will find them amongst “old” leaders and amongst youths who are turning away from social media (my kids classes are full of ‘em). The rich tapestry of a good team will require differently literate, numerate and digicate people. Some emotionally intelligent leaders will simply know how to gather the digicate around them – and some will be the digital ambassadors themselves

Digging into the detail of some of the comments there are some other issues being raised:

1. The current disconnection between where these skills might sit in an organization (the ones John Popham refers to as being “ sparky, switched-on people”) and the current leadership creates a greater and specific risk of organizational dysfunction around this area.  This could mean we risk not only failing to exploit digital but it also causes additional organizational problems
2. As Jonathan Flowers points out – as we rush to create digital and networked organisations with the right kind of leadership we need to make sure we are creating a way of measuring the impacts of these changes otherwise we risk missing our target.  Steve Halliday also touched on this with his comment about MyersBriggs
3. Simon Hughes pointed out the importance of getting people ready and building organizational confidence.  This could arguably be added onto the list of leadership skills in the post.  Its not specifically digital but digital does accelerate change meaning this is perhaps of greater importance
4. Tom Phillips made the point that these are skills that are relevant outside of work as well as within it – and I think started a whole new thread about how we use work to prepare people for their life after full time employment
5. Both Simon and Tom made the link back to councilors and I think this is extremely important – we need democratic leadership to have these skills as well
6. Clare and Paul both made links to other sectors which I think links directly in the points about collaboration – there is no point in talking about this stuff in isolation if the future is a collaborative one
7. Michael Coughlin specifically developed this with respect to the community – we have to make sure that we are meshing our pace of change with that of the community we are serving
8. A few people connects to the points about digital civic space – will pick these up in other posts!
9. I really recommend giving Phil Jewitt’s blog that was sparked by mine as he touches on the practical approach needed to get people working in these ways

There also were a couple of questions about the term networked power.  This is a term used in sociology literature (and other places) and simply refers to power (i.e. directed effort – though this definition is a longer post) being applied via a network rather than via a hierarchy.  There are of course lots of forms of power but I am using networked power simply as a contrast to the more familiar hierarchical power.  You could perhaps use the term authority in its place as this is really a comment on an individual’s ability to direct their organization.  One of the fundamental differences between these two forms of power is that feedback is built into the networked model.  Measuring networked power is really a question we want to address in the network of networks project which I will be blogging about when not blogging about this! Lots more on this if people are interested….

so…INTERESTING!…..still lots more to discuss I think….huge thanks to everyone who has contributed!

I have spoken at a lot of events recently and by accident or design I keep coming back to the theme of digital leadership skills and I wanted to unpack this a bit here. Part of my preoccupation with the topic is a personal need to reconnect with my own leadership practice – in the finish frenzy with the PHD I don’t think I have been as communicative or as open with my thinking as I could be with my own team (sorry folks – and thank you again) and I think focusing on it again makes me realise its importance. But enough about me….

But the main reason is a logical extension of the kind of conversation that I facilitated at Comms Camp which explored the real blocks in social media use within organisations – we need leaders who ‘get’ this stuff if we are going to move forward. It also links to the discussion at UKGovcamp about ‘what next’ which turned into a discussion about leadership.

I would also argue that we need to audit relevant skills throughout the whole organisation – but I have framed this post in terms of what resources leaders need access to to lead in a digital and networked context. Leadership is a topic which I think risks being more talked about that actually practiced and this is not intended as a wider debate of the literature around this. My own view is that we need to be developing relevant skills to lead through networked rather than hierarchal power and I’ve written about that elsewhere.

I have spent the last few years (at least at weekends!) immersed in ideas about Digital Civic Space – the online equivalent of our offline public realm. I’ve been thinking about the gap between the commercial spaces that ‘the market’ builds and the needs of civic and democratic society. Having emerged from this I am now looking for the people who are going to build it (this research is ALL about the action) and as I start to talk about these themes more widely I have started to come up against a skills gap. The first part of addressing this is in getting people to discuss that gap.

I use the term ‘Digital’ to refer to a set of behaviours as well as technologies and if this were a more academic article I would probably be talking about the shift to the network society and a participatory culture – both of which are enabled but not defined by the technology. However – in a less academic way this is about the ability of digital tools and behaviours to be a major driver of organisational and process change.

This is increasingly understood by Government (just look at what Carl Haggerty is cooking up in Devon) but this post is specifically aimed at people (elected or un-elected) in leadership positions. How many times have you heard someone senior claiming not to understand technology? The passive put down in terms of referring to twitter in terms of ‘twittering’? Or simply referring the whole digital ‘thing’ to someone else, more junior, in the organisation? My point, frequently stated to a sharp intake of breath, is that if you are not expecting to retire in the next 12 months then this kind of disconnection from such a significant subject area is not only poor judgement but also irresponsible. I believe that every senior team needs at least one person who understands the potential of digital networked technologies to transform their organisational model and practice and this person may or may not also be the person responsible for ICT.

This is a presentation I have been using recently (or variants of) to describe what I mean by digital civic space:

This presentation tends to trigger a variety of responses (including the need for a cup of tea and a lie down) but it does tend to connect the aspiration to create digital civic spaces with a discussion about the skills needed to do this.

The list below outlines some of the areas where I think we should be developing in future (and current leaders), based on the earlier definition of digital. Not all of these are needed directly – I am not an accountant but that doesn’t mean I can’t work fluently with my Financial Director. We need the skills to lead/manage these new areas of expertise not necessarily adopt them all ourselves.

• An understanding of networked power: One of the defining features of a changing workplace, and society, is the erosion of hierarchical power. Understanding how networked power operates in your own environment will be essential
• Collaboration skills: This is a natural corollary to networked power, while government has been taking about partnership and collaboration for a long time it has been against a backdrop of hierarchical power. Real collaboration requires a different set of skills.
• Co-design skills: In the networked councillor work (and other places) I have talked about the need for a more co-productive relationship with the public but to realise this we need to see more co-design skills, applied internally and externally, within organisations.
• Social media ‘social’ skills: This is not a matter of telling everyone to start tweeting but instead an acknowledgment of the fact that the way in which we create and consume information has changed and leaders need to have a contemporary view of what this change means.
• An adequate understanding of the basic lexicon of digital: Somewhere in your head is a fuzzy picture of how the Internet works, or your own organisational network, or the cloud, how accurate is that mental model? You will inevitably be managing people with this kind of lexicon and you may be spending millions of pounds of this technology.  In the same way I need to be able to talk balance sheets with my FD, leaders will need to be able to relate to discussions about technology.
• Horizon scanning and research: The wonder, and concern, of technology is its rate of change. Who is horizon scanning for you not in terms of what’s shiny but in terms of what’s useful? Don’t you need domain specialists who are able to do this?
• Data skills: Data is the byproduct of digitisation as well as the main ‘fuel’ for our online lives. Open data is a central part of any agenda of open government and something which is an established element of any discussion of ‘future government’. Organisations should benefit from the data that they are creating and in the case of open data be exploring ways in which local data could not only inform better decision making but also be driving local economic growth. Data and data sharing is also an important underpinning to any form of organisational collaboration. Do you have someone in your organisation who is thinking about how your data can work more effectively to meet your strategic objectives?
• Digital commissioning: Government has been very poor at procuring ICT solutions – we have to get better at this. Enough said.
• Agile project management: I have written about this elsewhere – but the ability to plan and manage projects in a more agile way is important both in terms of technological ‘fit’ but also with respect to working within complex and chaotic environments.

Many of these may, in the future, be embedded within the standard skill-set of different professions in the way that communications specialists are considering how to integrate social media into their practice. One question to ask of all of the professions is how they are managing their own skills renewal as this is not a technologists manifesto – organisational leadership may come from a variety of professional backgrounds but my point is that that team, however its made up will need access to these skills.

There is of course a link to the work on the Networked Councillor here as in a democratic leadership is also needed – but until our town planners are thinking about the augmented reality embedded in the high street and the senior team is able to reference technologies which barely exist today and might be transformative in 2 years time then there is a lot of work still to do.

As ever – comments and challenge are very welcome.

Ok then, slightly provocative title but it did get people’s attention. The question I put to the group was about the fact that, within the wider organisation, communications are often seen as the blocker with respect to social media take up – and I thought it would be interesting to explore whether or not this was a valid complaint. I was keen to look at the difference between good and bad blocking and also to see how people felt about the fact that engagement and communication are increasingly being seen as the same thing.

The first port of call for the discussion was looking at whether there were in fact alternative culprits – is someone else the blocker with communications getting the blame? We looked at four other areas:

• Human Resources: There was a consensus about the fact that often problems with social media use are in fact more appropriately addressed as performance management issues. There are two aspects to this; one is the need to ensure that managers are able to interpret social media activity and the other is the question as to whether we should ensure that communication goals are encapsulated in everyone’s performance criteria.
• Legal: It seemed as if in main issue with legal was a mythical one – people thought there were legal issues where none existed – a kind of legislative bogeyman. Where there were legal issues were around things like standing orders and this is where the problem is more likely to be political rather than practical.
• ICT: Yup – really no good answer on this one as ICT clearly are often a blocker. These objections seem to be in the area of security which really needs to be a management rather than a technical debate but in their defence ICT blocks seemed to often reflect legitimate infrastructure concerns. Tied up within this however were some comments that I think relate to the gap in technical knowledge between ICT and the rest of the organisation which I think needs more exploring – we all need to be better ‘customers’ of our ICT teams.
• “Management”: There were many complaints about ‘management’ – some of them were backed up with examples but others were admitted to be really a reflection of a lack of organisational confidence than actual management blocks. What was clear in the debate was the continued patchiness of the understanding of social media and inconsistent integration of this with management practice. This relates to the customer point above so will probably get its own separate blog post at some point.

This point about confidence connected us to the meat of the debate because the group did recognise a number of issues and discussed ways in which communications did act as a block for good and bad reasons:

• The lack of a business case for lack of a better word: No amount of social media evangelism will convince some people and this is not necessarily a bad thing. As the use of social media becomes more and more established within organisations then the benefits should become increasingly well understood. More innovative uses will always require something of a leap of faith but were we are replicating good practice from other places the evidence should be there.
• The lack of resource: This really boils down to the finite limits of resource in local government and indeed all parts of the public sector and a need to acknowledge that at some point adding something new will require stopping something old. This relates to the point about confidence and evidence – are we ready to stop resources flowing to something else in favour of them flowing towards social media?s
• Vanity publishing requests: Many of the practitioners in the room rolled their eyes at the number of times they had been asked to support vanity publishing from individuals rather than something that required communication support. In my mind this connects to the Networked Councillor work and how we help Members really get to grips with social media systematically
• Pace / Demand: There were some real concerns voiced about letting the genie out of the bottle – once a social media projects established then it has the potential to become a resource drain. It was generally agreed that this wasn’t a good reason not to do something but is a realistic response to resource constraint. The response to this was discussed as a combination of thinking about what to remove at the same time as adding new work but more radically to consider service redesign to incorporate social media and digital technologies. This is the point at which the group entered something of a loop – see below
• Inertia: In some cases it was acknowledged that it was simple inertia and a lack of desire/need to change that was slowing up adoption
• Loss of control: Loss of control wasn’t simply a concern about content, it was also a concern about resource (see above), process and also I think a fear of the unknown of embarking on projects in an environment that changes rapidly and unexpectedly

The final point raised in terms of objectives was the absence of a home or a specific brief for social media. In a number of cases there was no specific named responsibility for social media within the organisation. This was acknowledged as something which could be seen both positively or negatively but it was clear that at a certain point of adoption lack of clarity about ownership of social media meant that it was difficult to overcome blocks and problems as there was no obvious authority to appeal to.

Having been through the ways in which projects get blocked we turned to discussing ways to address this and move things forward.

The service redesign loop mentioned above was a big part of this discussion – it was acknowledged that at some point social media (and other digital networked technologies) would need to be ‘mainstreamed’ but there were concerns about colleagues skills and ability to take these on. This is a tricky one – clearly there are professional communications folks have skills and experience which is not necessarily going to be present outside of those teams. However it can also be argued that communications is not all about the professional practice and that social media is closer to the skill level needed to communicate in any job rather than tied up in a profession. The question is how to break the impasse and my personal view is that this needs strong leadership and a commitment to co-design of services involving all relevant groups inside and outside of the organisation. So much of this is about going beyond framing social media as just another communication channel. In accepting is ability to drive wider behavioural and process change we need to also accept that its more complete scope is beyond the remit of just the communications teams.

That being said, there was a well argued challenge from the group asking what are the other professions are doing to address the increased use of social media and its effect on their professional practice? There seems to be a gap with respect to professional frameworks and impacts, for example, on what it means to carry out planning consultations in a digital networked society, that leaves the communications teams currently filling a gap in other practitioners professional standards. I’d like to have a discussion about this at the next LocalGovCamp if anyone is interested.

Beyond what was discussed as the current state of play, looking forward social media clearly creates some interesting challenges /questions specifically for communications specialists and we only started to pose rather than answer these:

• How do we create a robust evidence base that means we don’t have to keep having the same discussions again and again?
• Should everyone be responsible for reputation management?
• What does a multi voice brand look like?
• How do we ensure that all staff share the organisational values and understand that our brand is our message

These questions require us to look beyond the immediate and horizon scan to some extent – to be more confident in our approach to social media in order to explore the opportunities rather than simply focusing on the risks.

We didn’t have time to poke these questions in much detail so I hope to come back to them again (perhaps next year!) but I think it was interesting how difficult it will be to take these next steps without some kind of organisational debate about the nature of the relationship that it wants with the public and also the role which elected representatives will play in this.

Interestingly the group concluded that as communication experts their role may well develop into becoming the voice of the public – a switch from talking to listening and while this conclusion is I think evidenced from the discussion I think it needs to be considered alongside the role of the elected representative in this mix. This connection is perhaps a result of the parallel networked councillor work which has been occupying my thinking recently.

The most fundamental question for organisations might turn out to be a discussion about how open they want to be with the public and whether their goals are simply communication or a more fundamental shift towards collaboration or co-production.

What is the point?
I think the discussion was valuable for those of us there and hopefully this write up is useful. As ever with a good session there are more questions than answers but that perhaps reflects the fact that the group were very much focused on the future. I think we have to conclude that communications are often blockers to social media activity but that they have good as well as bad reasons for acting this way. As the use of social media becomes more entrenched then I would speculate that this will become increasingly a question of organisational leadership rather than any specific practitioner groups and that it will be important to start discussing where that leadership should come from. If we want to start to see social media operating outside of comms then arguably that leadership needs to be external as well.  The question of being good organisational customers of digital projects will perhaps be the next challenge we have to collectively face in taking some of the excellent best practice we see around us into more mainstream use and out of the ambit of a single team.

Please shout if you were there and disagree with my conclusions here!

Thank yous

1. Thank you Sasha, Mark and Clare , Angus and Simon for a fab event. Really interesting mix of people and as ever with these things lots and lots of interesting discussions.
2. Extra thanks to Sasha who is a complete star in creating and supporting all kinds of unconferences
3. There are huge benefits just from being in the same room as people you interact with on twitter – really adds to the richness of those online interactions.

Research questions

1. The question of anonymous tweeting and blogging by police officers is a complex one – and one which I think needs some systematic study in order to understand what it might be telling us. I’d like to start this by trying to measure whether the volume of this activity is (as it seems) greater from the Police than other public sector organisations.  If this is the case then I think I would start with a review of some of the sites and then try to do some interviews.  If this is work someone else is already doing then can someone point me at it?
2. The Network of Network idea is intriguing other people as well and there are a number of ways of addressing it – I need to remember that we start testing things and keep the thinking open
3. Its interesting to see how different people react to an idea like that – the range from ‘create a database’ to ‘let it sort itself out’. In trying to design something we are undoubtably trying to impose our world view on people – but I am ok with that as long as we are transparent about it and open to new ideas.
4. I would like to get involved in the discussions about the ethics of open data in terms of its commercial use but also with respect to how it can effect the public/private data choices that people make
5. We may be destined to keep trying to build big platforms if we don’t start engaging with standards, formats and underlying architecture – I am not sure this is a good thing
6. Can we talk about crowdsourcing without understanding the nature of the relationship we have with that crowd?  Sorry, that one is rather gnomic but I have heard a few references to crowdsourcing and I think we need to take a social rather than a big data view of this – might blog more on this another time.

What is the future of social media and policing?

1. It can’t be a coincidence that I keep coming across this question
2. I think we need to do something to join up and capture the learning that is already in the sector – to ‘normalise’ some of the social media stuff so that it is repeatable by forces who may not yet have taken the plunge in the same way
3. If we do this then we have to make sure that people understand the way these things actually work – that they are not simply blindly copying
4. We need to be build confidence in social media use – this means some kind of shared discussion about evidence
5. When I say we need to start taking social media more seriously it is a reference to the need for this kind of systematic evidence gathering that I am not yet seeing happening. We are good at collecting best practice but I am not seeing the accompanying evidence base – please can someone tell me if I am wrong!
6. My suggestion: start by making sure that the leadership of any organisation is considering their relationship with the public in terms of being networked and digital and is considering what this means.  Then connect them to the skills and information they need to translate this into action in the organisation.

Random stuff

1. @huxley06 is excellent company even if she does think its ok to combine lime marmalade and peanut butter on toast.
2. Decent wifi makes a HUGE difference
3. Coleslaw has no place in a tortilla
4. Collaboration and shared data requires a deeper discussion about decision making protocols when you are considering this in real time
5. I talk too much – I really need to be better at listening – apologies to anyone else who came to the same conclusion

• The network of networks project that was discussed at CityCamp Brighton
• The Citizenscape projects we are in the process of getting up and running (will write more about this really soon)

In both cases the proposition is based on the idea that it is a ‘good’ thing to have more networked and connected communities. At the moment we are looking at communities of place but the thinking could apply to communities of interest as well. The benefits from more connected communities might be varied:

• greater community resilience
• greater shared assets and resources
• improved awareness and more efficient flow of information
• amplified civic ‘voice’ in the decision making process

There is also something within this, I think, about connecting communities to the emergent participatory digital culture that brings future relevant skills that I want to tease out / mull more.

The session at bluelightcamp was a chance to try these ideas out on an informed group of people and as ever there was some interesting challenge / enhancement of the ideas so huge thanks to people who participated. The main points discussed in the room and online were:

Do we need to do this? Ben Proctor raised the question of ‘if people wanted this wouldn’t they do it for themselves?’. This led to a discussion about an example in Cockermouth where the community created this kind of network of networks in response to disastrous local flooding and the effect has persisted after the immediate crisis was passed. I think there is a really good point here – do we need this kind of network of network outside of times of crisis or campaign? Will people invest time in these activities (whatever they turn out to be!) in order to have access to this when they need it or is it best considered a spontaneous network effect that can be made more likely in times of need but can’t be manufactured without that clear need? From initial discussion we have had with content and network creators they see a value in being further networked but we will have to see whether this value is sufficient to get them to act on this – or if we can put tech in place that makes these connections very low in friction and easy to accommodate.

There was a further discussion around social capital vs network analysis that I think I need to work up from a more theoretical point of view. I moved away from social capital analysis as I am very action oriented and I find social network analysis a much more practical analytical approach but there is undoubtably useful measurement data in social capital.

This leads to the question from Ann about the way in which we are planning on measuring impact (and therefore describing value) and we currently have three measures we will look at developing (and measuring in Citizenscape):

• Reach – how extensive is the network
• Representativeness – how representative (based on demographics) is the network of the geography or topic it is concerned with
• Impact on decision making – can we trace ideas from the network into the policy making and decision making process of the organisations involved

There is a further issue of measurement which how we use the knowledge we have about the networks transparently to show them relevant information about themselves – this is participation not surveillance.

Clare added a very thoughtful point about treating people as members of things not as outsiders and I think this captures what we want to do very well – we want to connect people through the groups and networks that the are already members of. This is very much aligned with an asset based approach to community engagement and simply shows respect. This leads to the question of how do we connect to the groups/individuals who we see are not present in the initial network of networks and our intent is that this becomes a shared endeavour across the whole network – but this is something I will pick up when we start discussing specific interventions for the Network of Network project.

There were some interesting comments from the online audience when James shared his notes from the last session (you can see these here twitpic.com/cmd29g) and some great examples from some West Mids folks which brought some discussion about the varying strength of connections in a network which is something I will need to think about – not sure how we measure this (reciprocity? proximity? intensity??) but its an important point.

So – what next? I’m going to start capturing some of these challenge points in order to share them with the project teams as we work with them – its important to keep an alternate view of things in mind to avoid the missionary zeal one can fall in to! I’m also going to start properly designing ideas for interventions and also companion measurements.

As ever please shout if I have missed anything or if you have ideas I should have considered. Thanks all!

1. What is the simplest thing we can do to connect all the many excellent civic networks we can find in Brighton?
2. How can we give that network of networks a stronger voice?
3. Is the process of connecting these networks repeatable in other places – what can we learn?

These questions form the basis of a research project that a few of us are interested in kicking off over the next couple of months – how do you network the networks? Given the time constraints we didn’t get past question three but the other are important context setting for the debate because  I think these are critical questions for anyone interested in civic participation or community engagement and arguably for politicians as well – if we are living in a more networked society then how do we ensure that this is strengthening the civic fabric of our communities?

The main reason for these question is that I have become increasingly aware over the course of my research of the fragility of the digital civic space. While something like CityCamp Brighton reaffirms my belief in the ability of the social web to connect and organise like minded people to change the places where they live for the better the facts show clearly that digital civic activists are in the minority.

Dig a little deeper however and you can, I believe, illustrate that though not active many more people – the majority of people – are civically connected. We are connected through sports clubs, schools, clubs and networks and in dozens of other ways. There are many ways in which we connect to civic society and we increasingly use technology to make that connection easier even if that connection is weak. Each of those civic networks could have within it people who are connected to other networks – the bridges or weak ties of network theory – and these people are vital to the fabric of the overall network of the place – the network of networks. Those connectors have the potential to be a vital element of a more connected society.

There are so many brilliant websites and networks out there – my question is how do you connect them together so that they can collaborate more effectively?

Underlying this question is the assumption that these networks want to or ‘should’ collaborate. For the purposes of this work I am assuming collaboration to be at a minimum information sharing and dissemination and I am also assuming that even if the networks do not collaborate better connectivity will not result in excessive competition. These are fairly big assumptions but I am going to park them for now and come back to them at a later date if we manage to get question 1 off the ground.

We used the CityCamp session to kick around these questions with a group of people who were in the main part connectors themselves. In general terms the group formed three different positions:

1. People who believed that this would all sort itself out – we just need to be more aware of the need to make networks open
2. People who wanted some kind of external solution – a directory or role responsible for connecting things together
3. People who felt that some kind of intervention was needed but that it needed to be sustainable with an emphasis on behaviour change rather than external input

Given a lot of consensus was reached around the benefits of connecting different networks together we spent some time discussing what stops it happening. Some of the ideas put forward included:

• Time – connecting networks involves participating in more than one network and that takes time
• Visibility – finding other networks is not always easy and even with good intentions we can miss connections
• Laziness – how often do we cut and paste an invite rather than actually asking someone to attend an event?

We also asked whether or not it was something that people were aware of and it was generally acknowledged that organisers need to be consciously focused on widening reach in order to connect to other networks. This brought us to a different articulation of connectors as gatekeepers and the need to ensure that connectivity is with the whole network and not limited to or throttled by the connecting individual.

The aim of the project will be, as a starting point, to experiment with some techniques and approaches to ‘network the networks. The ideas discussed to do this included creating visible networks in the form of notice boards and community space or common branding or exploring how we could create a citywide hashtag – something like a connecting bat signal.

The idea that we spent most time on was the suggestion that we creating a network of people and not rely on technology to create these connects. The discussion the turned to whether this was something that could be curated – control of such a network being considered to be out of the question.  This turned into a discussion of the potential of a ‘City curators network’ which would connect both physical and digital networks. The curators would be charged with ensuring that participation is widening access and would be asked to curate not filter of censor. They would also be charged with ensuring that the network remains open to new participants.

This seemed like a lovely construct but we saw considerable issues with consciously constructing such a network. Even if we could envisage how to make it self-sustaining there were substantive questions about how we might build trust in these people as well as concerns about the risks of creating a new gatekeeping elite and whether this group should also be responsible for the representativeness.

At this point we were some distance from the lean ambition of finding the simplest way of connecting the connectors together.

In the end the discussion polarised around two ideas; either we need to encourage behaviour change or we need provide better support. In the end the lean ambition dominated and the discussion became one about behaviour change and in effect how we could ‘nudge’ people towards tending towards openness and connection.

One of the final points in the discussion was around the need to create a sense of personal responsibility – should we not want to make networks open and connected? So much of this statement is I believe related to the inherently pro-social and active stance that you are going to find in a gathering such as CityCamp but there is also something here about the online participatory culture with its affordances of openness and connectivity ‘infecting’ the way in which offline networks function. If this is the case then this once again becomes all about people and not technology and we will be taking this thought forward as we experiment with some of the ideas discussed in the session.

If you would like to be involved then please get in touch.

Any post about UKGovCamp needs to start with a huge thank you to Steph Grey and Dave Briggs and this time to their Govcamp makers as well – it was great. An extra thank you this time to IBM who hosted us. While Microsoft have been very welcoming in the past I thought that the wider participation from IBM staff was a good thing.

I started the day with a now traditional breakfast with Stefan Czerniawski  where we attempt to briefly put the world to rights. This turned into a philosophical and fascinating session on identity which I will write up separately. I then pitched a session to create a discussion about the social layer within the smart cities arena which will also get its own post. In the afternoon I went to a great session on innovation run by Saul Cozens. Some of the thinking from that infected my feelings about the last session I went to – a discussion of ‘what next for govcamp’ convened by marvellous combo of Hadley Beeman and Ann Kempster.

Future leaders?

We started off by discussing ways in which we might widen access to or create more strands within the Govcamp model.  However the discussion was challenged by Tom Steinburg and taken in a slightly different direction.  He asked how we were going to make sure that the future leaders of Councils and Central Government were picked from the people within the GovCamp ‘family’ because a sophisticated understanding of digital in a cultural and strategic rather than strictly technical sense is now an essential leadership skill. I can’t argue with that. It is alarming how frequently I am working with clients who do not have these skills at the top table and even where there is an awareness of the need for these skills there is a struggle to find the right people. I have written previously about this and I think Tom is right – if those future leaders aren’t amongst the people attending things like govcamp then were are they? They are not going to be found simply in the ICT department which I fear is the belief of current leaders. I believe that they instead exist in the spaces between disciplines and are the people who are pushing their own areas forward digitally at the same time as having the ability to see the bigger picture *.

They exist but we are not spotting them well at the moment and that means that we are not able to support them. This is a problem across all public services and it needs to be solved. Its a challenge that needs to be made to organisations like SOLACE, the LGA, the College of Policing and beyond. As was said in the session – its a bad assumption to think this can all be left to GDS – however good they are.

There was a tension in the session between the view that we should be ‘doing’ something along these lines with Govcamp and the view that GovCamp was valuable as an open space for thinking and forming these ideas but was not a vehicle for this kind of campaigning.  This question as to whether you are running an event or creating a movement is one we have considered with respect to CityCamp and my feeling is that you have to leave space for both – open spaces should be about opening up possibilities to act and while the two aren’t mutually exclusive I think the two kinds of participation compliment each other.  I really admire the fact that Steph and Dave are motivated by the desire to simply and powerfully create that space but I think its important that others can take it forward in different ways if that’s what they choose to do.

I think there is a real need to make sure that this topic – the need for digital to be at the top table in a meaningful way – needs to be debated widely and I will be agitating a bit to make sure this can happen – please shout if you are interested in being involved or have any ideas for the best way to do it. We may find out we are a movement after all.

*We might say this is a kind of disintermediation of professional practice !??!

The Guardian event was excellent. Some amazing speakers and an introduction to the diagram of doom BEYOND Barnet’s graph of doom – who knew there were scissors of doom??? The content will be covered on the Guardian website so I’m not going to into it in detail here – instead I want to highlight themes and gaps.

There were two main themes for me:

• The need to embed transparency at a cultural level. Most of the speakers mentioned it and the Chairman of John Lewis gave a really great description of the simple expediency of being more transparent with staff. I think transparency is one of the simplest (note simplest not easiest) cultural changes to bring about as we can do a lot by engineering change systemically rather than behaviourally and this could be a good place to get started – as long as you are ready and braced for the inevitable unexpected byproducts of this shift. We perhaps talk about this more than simply working through the system changes that would start the ball rolling. I know I can be accused of oversimplification here but I am thinking back to a recent conversation with Simon Cole which made me reflect on the pointlessness of over thinking the destination when you already know the first stage of the route you want to take. Perhaps one of the aspects of a more co-productive set of relationships is that we let go of the destination a little bit more.
• Collaboration as the new norm. Everyone said this – and a brief discussion on twitter afterwards highlighted the fact that this is more than partnership working. Partnership can be argued to be a structural response where collaboration is a cultural one. Michael Coughlin expressed this as the difference between salad and soup (I liked this analogy but on reflection and as I have a visceral dislike of lettuce soup – so slimy – I will not be using it – sorry Michael!). It was good to hear this repeated so many times but personally I feel as if we have a really long way to go on this and perhaps the biggest shift we need to make is to accept that until we embed collaboration in the culture then we are going to be overly dependent on key individuals who currently make this happen. We will need to work on how we highlight and incentivise these behaviours before this will be a systemic shift. Part of this should be supporting people to collaborate internally as well as externally and also looking outside of the public sector.

Its impossible to talk about collaboration without also talking about power – and I think you can argue that more collaborative working shows a shift from established hierarchical power to more networked power.  One final reflection is that the room ‘felt’ like old power not new power to me.

And now we move onto to what I felt were the elephants in the room – things we didn’t talk about.

The first of these was any kind of real discussion about the political process and the fact that our adversarial political culture, and perhaps our politicians, are the one of the biggest barriers we have both to radical change and in particular to more radical collaboration. Now – I am at the radical end of change with respect to democratic reform but I think we have to deeply consider how we might reinvent politics to make it relevant for a networked and digital world with a far more participatory culture. This is a tall order for a one day event but I hope that this is a discussion which goes ‘mainstream’ this year as I don’t think its reasonable to have public sector workers fight to manage radical disruption with one hand tied behind their backs as the politics fails to change. The kinds of question we could get started with are:

• Do we need to make political reform a priority? Or at least a high profile narrative to give people confidence to innovate?
• Does our political process facilitate collaboration?
• Are we ready for staff to be citizens?

This doesn’t apply to all politicians by any stretch – I work with many exceptional ones – but the system as a whole needs a rethink.

I also felt that we didn’t touch enough on the potential of digital to support and even accelerate behaviour change. This is perhaps partly a result of my own ‘lens’ on the world but its absence concerned me as it perhaps indicates something that I have seen about the place which is an absence of someone who can articulate digital strategy at the top table. We need to treat technology as a driver of long term change and not just leave it hidden in the ICT department. This discussion of technology needs to be from the perspective of how the public and industry are using it not from an internal prospective as we need to understand the world as it is in order to reform how we deliver services.

This leads me to another observation which is driven by a number if conversations I have had recently about the role of technology and the laziness with which we come back to using twitter as ‘the’ example of what is possible. As I have said before, Twitter is not the network. Its of immense relevance to the media and also beloved by many professionals for its immediate access to information but its not representative and it is just one tool with a business model that will only last as long as it has our attention. There will be many highly effective networked representatives and organisations who don’t choose to use it because people are creating all kinds of alternative networked and collaborative tools and applying these to civic issues. We need to look beyond twitter firstly to build strategies that take advantage of the full disruptive power of social technologies in a positive way but secondly because you can’t build a strategy on the back of a commercial platform over which you have no control and who might change the rules of engagement at any time.

And this leads me to my final point. If we all think that procurement is so central to driving real change and collaboration then we really do need to get together and fix it – delegating this down will not get this done. Anyone for #commissioningcamp ??

I am just neurotically tweaking (with heroic help from the amazing @GeorgeJulian and others) my thesis which does two main things:

• Describes and describes a method for reliably finding informal civic activity online
• Suggests some design criteria for creating Digital Civic Spaces which would enable this participation

I hasten to add that at 90000 words I sincerely hope it does a few other things as well but we shall see…anyway

I define informal civic activity online as being content which is created with an intended primary audience of the wider community as opposed to informal social activity which has an intended primary audience of friends and/or family. I use the term ‘primary audience’ as the publicness of the online world means that this content will also have unintended secondary or further audiences as well. Community might refer to community of place or of interest but my work focuses on community of place. In more practical terms I am talking about community websites, hyperlocal sites, Facebook groups or active individuals who are using the Internet either to talk about or organise in their local area. One of the points I make is that we can’t just frame this content as being citizen journalism – while some content creators fit this description there are more who are using these tools without any intent that they are creating an authoritative record or commentary on events and are better described simply as community activists or active citizens.

This ambiguity about audience for informal civic activity creates a dilemma for policy makers and politicians. While this content is in the public domain it is not necessarily intended as part of any political or democratic process. We can argue that because we should all be aware of the publicness of the social and the possible existence of secondary audiences that this information is in the public domain but without the active intent to participate its role in public debate is – well – debatable.  This debate is around the nature of Social Media with respect to the concept of the public sphere and its role in political communication – will pick this up separately.

Its fairly standard practice for communications teams to monitor sentiment and significant influencers online and this is part of the advertising tax we all pay in different ways to keep social media free in the main part. I am amazed that more politicians don’t do the same thing. However this kind of monitoring, while useful, does not seem to me to be a solid foundation for a different and more co-productive relationship with the Public – something I would argue strongly that we need. (There are some interesting parallels with academic research ethics around social media here which I might pick up at a later date).
The existence of informal civic activity online speaks of the potential for a more meaningful role for this in the democratic process as it opens up a connection to community groups and networks which are often outside of the ‘usual suspects’ of community engagement and political campaigning. However on the other end of things we don’t as yet include social media content which has not been created in response to a specific question in consolation or engagement processes and this means we are closing down the potential for agenda setting and proactive engagement in the policy making process other than by traditional routes.

So, we have meaningful activity online and no clear route for how we actively rather than passively include it in the democratic process.

This is where the design criteria for digital civic space come in (sorry folks – this is repeat from other postings):

• Design Criteria 1: The purpose of a digital civic space to is to provide an environment in which any citizen who chooses to can observe, audit and participate in democratic debate and decision making – it is a Public and open space that is available to any interested Citizen.
• Design Criteria 2: The space should facilitate a co-productive relationship between Citizen and Government. This should extend to the content curation and management of the space
• Design Criteria 3: The geographical reach of the space should be self-defined by users with administrative boundaries being subordinate to ‘natural place’ described by the Civic Creators.
• Design Criteria 4: The space should support the principles of open government with respect to data, process and transparency
• Design Criteria 5: The space should be able to authenticate the identity of participants to a standard which makes their contribution available to consultation and policy making processes.

The thesis will (I hope!) tell the story of where these all came from but we (at Public-i) have been working on creating Citizenscape on this basis (this is where the action comes into the action research!!). We are about to be ready to beta the next version of the platform and this post was triggered by a need to really think about the point of connection between the informal civic spaces created by citizens (as described above) and the more formal but still open space which is described by the criteria above. We will be testing this thinking as well as the UX in the beta tests so I will report back at some point.

We can (and do with Citizenscape) take a step forward from the surveillance scenario described above by making sure that anyone whose content is being used is informed and by ensuring that the platform ensures that platform shares the same metrics and measurement with both the audience and the administrators. However in terms of creating a democratic space the key is I think in active participation – which is linked to criteria 5 – identity. While a Digital Civic Space might draw on ambient or passive activity which has the wider world as a secondary audience some act of active participation is needed in order for this to be included in democratic debate. This might be a response to a specific questions (as is the case with online consultation) or it could be the sharing of identity with the Space in recognition that you want your content to be ‘counted’. I don’t see any issue at all with making it clear that democratic debate needs to understand how representative the participants are and also have a degree of accountability which is not possible without a sense of who is participating (note: this doesn’t mean your identity needs to be public – it just needs to be known).

So – I am proposing that the that missing connection between informal and formal digital civic activity must be a conscious act of participation. We cannot consider media monitoring to be a substitute for democratic participation – even though that is the more straightforward approach. In practical terms this means inviting people before including their content and being completely transparent about how its being used – I don’t think either of these points are either difficult or unreasonable.

Government can learn a lot from monitoring activity online – but it can gain a lot more by collaborating with the content creators.

One other thought – if therefore we are going to ask people to identify themselves to the Digital Civic Space in order to participate in the democratic process then we are going to have to ensure that there is some kind of democratic promise in place. If we want people to be actively participating then we need to be actively listening. The nature of that listening is another post – perhaps a discussion about Networked Councillors as well as a discussion about new forms of Policy Making.

1.  Not all networks are created equal: Networks are being used in very different ways in different academic disciplines and if we are going to do this kind of multi-disciplinary working then we need to be mindful of this. Two areas of tension of this point are firstly in the description of the nature of the connections between nodes. Broadly,  those of us from a more sociological background were keen to understand the types of relationships being described, while the  Economists were more interested in the overall behaviour of the network. And this is the second point of tension; where those from a more quantitative background are looking at the overall properties of a network, putting forward quite rightly that one of the interesting things about networks is that they can survive the removal of a single node the social scientists ‘knew’ that some nodes are more significant than others to the networks nature. Neither answer is ‘right’ but a better appreciation of this might have made a few of the sessions less tense. We were each frustrated by a perceived lack of precision from the others with respect to definition of terms and concepts and a bit of time spent clearing this up would really have helped

2.  Why does this matter? It was clear that policy makers and academics use the term ‘evidence’ in different ways – we knew that already (excellent piece from Martin Reeves on this on the Guardian has week). In using a relatively new evidence base then we need to make sure that policy makers are clear on the methodological considerations and the differences described above. The cautious route – and the one adopted below – is to consider network analysis as a tool for discover and exploration rather than normative measurement.

3.  Multidisciplinary working needs some rules: We perhaps fell between the conference and unconference formats a little too much – I think next time I participate in something like this (and I hope I do – it was great!) then I think that some ground rules need to be established in advance to make sure that basic differences in approaches don’t take up too much time.

4.  Was I mansplained? It was unfortunate that the methodological divide I described above broadly fell along gender lines – but the experience really outlined for me the different ways in which men and women work in groups. I don’t want to call gender on this kind of thing as its often not relevant and also doesn’t accurately representative the personal views of any of the individuals participating. However we did seem to get sucked into breaking the group up along gender lines more acutely than I have experienced before and I still can’t work out how we failed to fix that when we all wanted to. I wondered about whether or not to blog this point but as this is essentially my action research diary I wanted to note it as it had a notable effect on the group dynamics and perhaps did lead to us having a fairly polarised qualitative vs quantitative methodological debate than I think we might have done otherwise

5.  Millie Begovic is doing some fascinating things at the UN – recommend you take a look when the presentation is available.

6.  Twitter is not the network – there is a HUGE temptation to do ‘big data’ analysis of behaviour on Twitter because we can. However this is very dangerous when considering democratic questions – and by implication policy making – as we can be fairly sure it is not an audience which is demographically balanced. Just because its easier doesn’t make it representative and if we want to be looking at networks online in this context then we need to develop better approaches.

7.  Big brother may or may not be watching you:  With respect to Social Media we need to be clear on the differences between monitoring and participation and make appropriate judgements about both the research ethics of using content in the public domain in this way and also its validity with respect to informing policy. This was an interesting discussion from both an academic and policy making point of view

Related to both these final points is something which I tweeted and got RT’d a fair amount:

@curiousc: Participatory democracy is not representative democracy but we need representativeness to be participatory to make sure these don’t diverge

And this is perhaps the elephant in the room – talked around and not about – Why are we not turning our representatives into more effective nodes? I have an increasingly urgent feeling that we need to start bringing politicians into these kinds of discussions and the previous model of developing policy and presenting it to policy makers is not fit for purpose in an increasingly agile fast moving context.

Democratic Networks
The session was based on the earlier blog post but also on this initial proposition:

• We want more participation in our representative democracy
• There are Policy Makers who are prepared to change their process to achieve this
• We can find relevant – if informal – civic participation online
• A network analysis of relevant communities via social media – digital networks – are an appropriate starting point for this

These points all withstood some debate with the most contested being the usefulness of looking at digital as a starting point. This is reflected in where we ended up as we decided to test this point. We then went on to debate these questions:

• What are the practical difficulties with generating a network analysis across multiple social networks?
• How can we connect this to offline networks?
• What do policy makers need to know about ‘nodes’ in order to include them in the process?
• What do we need about the network as a whole to include it in the process?

It was this discussion (and the one from the preceding day) which highlighted the methodological differences in approach to ‘nodes’ with the social scientists developing the idea of the ‘Doris’ as the person in a community network who everyone knows / is most central. We then talked about the different qualities of ‘Doris’ who might function either as a Gatekeeper or a Connector and might be active or passive within either of those two designations.

This highlighted another distinction in the group between the creation of a participatory process – where the objective was described as seeking to turn collective complaint into collective action – and those looking for an effective information gathering approach.

In both cases it was clearly important to understand the actions of these nodes and not just their connections and our final observation was that there was as yet no generalisable learning with respect to these individuals – we might actively look for a ‘Doris’ but each individual will be unique in their position within that specific network.

When asking policy makers what they felt they needed to know about both the networks as a whole and also specific nodes there were a number of points:

• It was felt important that we could understand any bias or political values – and this discussion contributed to the point about participation/monitoring above
• There was a need to establish authenticity – is this a ‘real’ person – however different people have different views on the degree to which this needed to be authenticated. Generally those of us more comfortable online where happy with the idea of identity being a social construct that we could judge though social signals – others wanted to hold identity to a higher standard of evidence
• This led into a discussion of anonymity with no clear consensus as to whether it was or wasn’t appropriate in a policy making context. The introduction of the Slashdot example was extremely useful in this (thanks Matteo). I can’t find an article on this which isn’t beyond the paywall but the wikipedia article is useful  as is the FAQ page for the site.
• There was an agreed for an understanding of the reach of messages and discussion as a counter to what was felt as the imperfect feedback offered by the traditional media

This led onto a debate about how we might increase democratic participation and what were almost two opposing views:

• People will come where you give them feedback and where you are willing to listen
• We need to go to the places where the discussion is already happening and participate there

This was interesting with respect to different cultural contexts as in the UK the debate has clearly moved to position two and it was useful to realise that this is not universally agreed with (there is a real language tyranny at these things with native speakers having an unfair advantage in debate – apologies to those participants who were frustrated by this).

However there was consensus with respect to an unmet demand from the Public for increased opportunities for participation and a needed for government to increase supply in a way which actually meeting the actual demand rather than a simple increase in volume and efficiency of traditional participation methods.

We then moved on to debate whether there a relevant experiment which we could design to test some of these ideas:

• How do we create a baseline in order to understand what we mean by ‘increase’?
• Testing ‘better ‘information’
• Testing better ‘participation’

We came up with two ideas which we would like to move forward:

Information experiment
We need to do some basic analysis and comparison of some ‘policy relevant’ networks in order to understand what is easily knowable and useful to policy makers. While the underlying tenants discussed here were agree to be useful the policy makers felt that they needed a more concrete sense of what could be demonstrated with respect to information rather than participation.

Participation experiment
Rather than a community engagement experiment (some examples of this here) we decided to look at how network analysis might effect a more formal deliberative tool. We selected Citizen Juries as being something where the selection of participants was important but also where the extent that the experience of the participants was communicated within the community was also of interest (You can read some background on Citizen Juries in this UK Parliament briefing paper). We want to look at three cases:

• Jury selected on the usual basis of random selection from a pool of volunteers
• Jury selected based on high levels of centrality based on network analysis
• Jury selected based on low levels of centrality based on network analysis

In each case the network analysis would look at online and offline networks in a geographical area and we would then track the ‘reach’ of the experience of participants through the network after the event. Our objective is to look at:

• How do the results of the Jury differ based on selection methods
• How does the impact of the Jury in the wider population differ based on selection methods.

Volunteers now come forward!!!  Form an orderly queue!

Conclusion
I had a really fascinating and thought provoking couple of days so many thanks to all concerned and particularly to Alberto Cottica who did an outstanding job of bringing a diverse bunch of interesting people together to discuss something that I think will have major significance to government as we acknowledge the social shift towards a more networked society.

I think that these kinds of events are really important.  If one of the effects of a more networked world is the blurring of boundaries between roles and disciplines then we all need to become better at this kind of multi-disciplinary working.  To do this we don’t just need the social media skills (thought their lack in government was repeatedly mentioned) we need to have collaboration skills that make us quick to understand the difference between semantic and fundamental disagreements and the ability to quickly understand the value of a contribution from a field you don’t know anything about in the same way as we can smell out a troll on twitter.  I’ve written about the need for networked leadership before but perhaps we also need to be considering the skills we need for networked collaboration.

Thanks everyone for a fascinating couple of days – comments, disagreements and corrections are all welcome below!