Awareness event for Councillors

June 23, 2010 in Project updates by micheleidesmith | No comments

We are getting close to the launch of the website ShapeYourPlace.org which RuralNet Futures have been developing for the project, using WordPress MU, YouTube and Flickr.

Yesterday we held an awareness event at Wisbech Library to show local Councillors around the site, talk about the project and explain how the site can be useful to them to find out what issues are important to people locally.  I enjoyed the opportunity to show some of the local Councillors how to use the site and encourage them to get more involved.

Cllr Steve Tierney (County Councillor for Roman Bank and Peckover ward) has written a very complimentary post about the website. As Steve admits, he had some very valid concerns about the project when he first heard about it. As one of our most active blogging Councillors, it was very useful to get his feedback and input to the project.

I also spent the morning deliving moderation training for volunteers at the Rosmini Centre, a local community centre who were successful in winning a contract to moderate and manage the site day to day.

I will upload our moderation guidance and other documents to the  Communities of Practise to share with anyone who is interested once they are finalised.

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Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service & Facebook

May 17, 2010 in General by heidiweight | No comments

Hello,

Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service (CFRS) has embarked on a social media journey over the last few months, creating a Facebook and Twitter presence.  None of this happened before we did a lot of research to gauge the pros and cons, wrote a Social Media Policy and generally learnt how to use the sites a bit better.

We use social media as another communication tool – it does not replace anything.  However, it does allow us to engage with our customers in a new (and some would argue) exciting way.

Take for example, the recent spate of fires in Wisbech.  The morning after the Phoenix Hotel Fire we were tweeting and posting on Facebook about road closures, the extent of the damage, possible causes etc and directing people for more information to our official website.  This increased our web stats and allow us to provide up to date, accurate information to people.

As I am sure you are aware there have now been a number of fires in Wisbech.  We quickly realised that as public speculation increased, as did the number of people on Facebook sites such as ’Lets find the Wisbech Arsonist’ and ’The Wisbech Arsonist’ . These sites were a useful way for the community to communicate with each other.  We kept an eye on the sites and when rumours of more fires emerged, we checked our logs and confirmed them to be untrue.  Again we saw a dramatic increase in the number of people visiting our site and our Facebook site. 

By using Facebook in this way we communicated with local people whom normally we would not necessary have heard from.  The feedback from the community is incrediably positive – people are pleased we have made contact.  Partners are also very support of this approach, in particular the Police who have welcomed us posting messages.

We have learnt a lot from this experience.  It is certainly something we will be using again for major incidents, we see social media as a valuable tool.  Something that may seem trivial, but something we need to change is that when we post something it comes from our official profile.  The official profile is Rick Hylton, Head of Community Safety.  It quite clearly states that the profile is run by the media and communication team, however because the photo on the profile is a man in a white shirt and black tie, people wrongly assumed he was from the Police.  We will be changing this picture!  We will also as a matter of course now be doing routine searches after a big incident on social media sites.  If we have another incident or incident that runs over a period of time we will use social media to keep people up to date, and to connect them to accurate information on our website and partner websites.

Facebook is a great tool, which allows us to engage and communicate with people who we doubt would normally visit our website.

Moderation and the law

April 1, 2010 in General by micheleidesmith | No comments

Moderating social media is something of an art and requires skills in managing and nurturing online communities. But understanding your organisation’s legal responsibilities and liability can be a rather grey area. There is potentially more risk to moderating than not moderating at all.

This week I’ve found some great resources on this subject.

Tempero have produced an excellent, free downloadable document which provides guidance on the law in relation to key areas like liable, privacy, defamation, data protection, safeguarding and child protection, abuse, hate and race crimes, obscenity, copyright and much more.

Catherine Howe has written a thoughtful post about a training course she attended on social media and the law.

EModeration have developed some more general guidance on moderating social media which discusses moderation of specific social media sites like Facebook and YouTube.

I’ve bookmarked all these with our project Delicious tag. If you have any other good examples please let us know!

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Inspiration from SeeClickFix

March 21, 2010 in Related projects by micheleidesmith | 2 comments

In thinking about how the project in Fenland might work I’ve been hugely inspired by SeeClickFix. The site has a fairly simple premise which is similar to the site we have been working on. As a citizen you can report issues and local service providers and politicians get them fixed.

SeeClickFix logo

SeeClickFix have some great ways to engage the community. They promote the opportunity for volunteers to get involved and become a ‘SideClick‘ – an Ambassador or advocate of the site. This is similar to what we are trying to achieve with the role of ‘Community Champions’ in the Wisbech pilot. They suggest that SideClicks might be community leaders or politicians, or simply citizens who want to be more involved in their local community. A neat feature of the site promoted to the SideClicks is the ability to set up ‘watch areas‘ (see screen grab below) and monitor what is being reported, discussed and fixed. You can define a specific geographical area on a map by drawing an area linked by points. SeeClickFix have also introduced the concept of active citizenship by awarding ‘civic points‘ for activity such as joining, reporting, commenting, voting etc. on the site.

Setting up a watch area on SeeClickFix

Setting up a watch area on SeeClickFix

The site appears to be very popular and this is probably because it has been well designed and developed using web 2.0 principles. There are various social and crowdsourcing features like voting, commenting and following. The activity map brings all the issues together in an easy to use interface. The site has a function to generate widgets to use on other sites. And as a citizen you can report issues via your mobile or use smartphone apps.

I had an idea to do develop a community engagement site very much like SeeClickFix back in 2008. My original idea was to enable citizens to report issues, encourage more joined up partnership working to address issues and help to engage the local community in making their local area a better place to live. It has taken two years to make our project a reality. What SeeClickFix has achieved is something to aspire to, but in the meantime we are focusing on using existing technology where possible, building a strong partnership working model and developing citizen and partner skills to encourage engagement.

BBC documentary on Wisbech migrant workers

February 24, 2010 in News by paulhenderson | No comments

06/12/2009

On February 24 at 9.00pm on BBC1 there is a documentary about Wisbech called “The Day the Immigrants Left”

From the BBC:

Since 2004 this once prosperous market town has received up to 9,000 immigrants seeking work – the majority from Eastern Europe. But with nearly 2,000 locals unemployed and claiming benefits, many of them blame the foreign workers for their predicament.

To test if the town needs so many foreign workers, immigrant employees are temporarily removed from their jobs, and the work given to the local unemployed. Now the town’s British workers have a chance to prove they can do it.

As well as the ‘reality tv’ element, it promises to look at the effect of migrant workers on the town’s public services, which has obvious overlaps with this project and it will be interesting to see how the mainstream media reports the issues of Wisbech.

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Talking about the project at UKGovCamp10

February 14, 2010 in Events by paulhenderson | No comments

We attended UK GovCamp 10 (#ukgc10 on Twitter) which was organised by Dave Briggs at Google’s London HQ. Barcamps are usually fairly hectic, with no set agenda until the day and the open space arrangement using hi-tech post-it notes, never seems to fail to work.

Michele has blogged about more of the day itself, but we had a slot towards the end of the day to share what we had learned so far during the  project. Our slides are up here:

Local Gov Digital Engagement – in at the deep end!

And we were nabbed by David Wilcox afterwards to say a little more

The session rounded off with an interesting discussion about approaches to governance and moderation. We also discussed how local gov community engagement relates to hyperlocal activity (local blogs etc.). The key points were:

  • It takes patience to build hyperlocal involvement. Nick Booth and Paul related their experiences of running social media surgeries for local communities in Birmingham.
  • It may not be appropriate for local gov to try to manage/control online spaces. But having a central space where discussions can occur does mean it is easier to monitor conversations.
  • Those managing and responding to online communities need to distinguish between constructive criticism / suggestions and complaints.
  • You can encourage positive feedback by responding quickly and sorting peoples’ problems out.
  • There are existing examples of best practise in moderation and how to manage conversations without damaging the organisational ‘brand’.

As usual the most valuable part of the day was getting to meet enthusiastic people doing similar things up and down the country, comparing notes and sharing ideas.

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Digital engagement governance – a dichotomy between hyperlocal or partnership managed

November 1, 2009 in General by micheleidesmith | No comments

I’ve just started working on a project where we’ll be exploring digital engagement methods, using social media alongside offline forms of engagement such as neighbourhood panels. The aim of the project is to improve community cohesion in a semi-rural community. The project is being developed as a partnership between the County Council, District Council, community centres, a rural development agency, housing associations, the Police and the Fire & Rescue Service.

The partners are all relatively new to the concept of digital engagement but are aware that any form of social media (e.g. blogs or social networking sites) requires governance and moderation. In the initial meeting I presented what I think of as a ‘governance dichotomy’ which we, as public service providers, should be open to when we consult with the community. By this I mean that we may end up with either a community led or a partnership managed approach to governance, depending on what the community and partnership jointly decide will work best.

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