With Walsall 24 we told the story of what a council did across a borough in 24 hours.
With Walsall Town Centre 100 we’re looking to go a step further and tell a different story.
We want to tell a hundred things about the life of a town centre across seven days from May 17 to 23 2011.
It’s not just about litter getting collected this time. It’s the faces on the market, the people in the shops and what gets done to keep people safe and protect law and order.
In effect it’s the council, the police, businesses and other partners joining forces to tell people what they do. It’s also about letting residents speak with Q&A sessions for key people.
All these factors make up the life of a town centre.
In many ways, Walsall is a typical town. It competes against bigger neighbours in Birmingham and the Merry Hill Shoping Centre in Dudley 14 miles away.
There’s three indoor shopping centres, 400 shops, an 800-year-old market, a circa 1905 Council House, a New Art Gallery, two museums and a 35-acre Arboretum giving a splash of green on the edge of the town centre.
It’s a town with civic pride built on the leather industry and one that was once known as the town of a hundred trades – hence the name of this experiment.
What are the channels?
We’re looking to use the council website walsall.gov.uk, the Walsall police web pages, Twitter, flag up some locations on Foursquare and also keep people informed via Facebook. There’s even geocaching too and a Flickr group to celebrate the beauty of the town.
The purpose is not to use a whole load of web tools just for the sake of it.
It’s to talk to people on a platform they might want to use.
How can you follow it?
You can take a look at three main Twitter accounts as well as the #walsall100 hashtag.
There’s a web page on it to tell you all about it here.
Why more than one organisation?
Because what happens in an area isn’t just down to one. It’s down to several.
Why use social media?
Because it’s a good platform to communicate and listen.
What will it look like?
If you’ve seen Walsall 24, that was a barrage of information in real time. This is slightly different. There may be a background noise of tweets with more focussed on events this time.
For example, We’re live tweeting a pubwatch meeting, a day on the market and a Friday night with the police on patrol. All this is part of what makes a town centre tick.
What else?
There’s a Peregrine Watch staged by countryside officers, RSPB Walsall and the West Midlands Bird Club, a walk in the Arboretum and other things.
There will also be a chance to ask questions with Q&A sessions.
To show all parts of the town centre from Saturday morning shopping to a Friday night on the town to a regular weekday morning.
This is what linked social is about. It’s a range of voices from a range of places with input from residents and shoppers too.
Will there be resources from it?
With Twitter being the live action, we’ll look to pull together Match of the Day-style highlights with storify.com.
Hats off to the following for their role: Kate Goodall, Jon Burnett, Jo Hunt, Gina Lycett, Darren Caveney, Morgan Bowers, Helen Kindon, Kevin Clements and Stuart Williams.
Pictures:
Peregrine Falcon on Tameway Tower http://yfrog.com/hs90k9j
Walsall images from my Flickr stream http://www.flickr.com/photos/danieldslee/
It’s clear there’s been a quiet revolution. It’s not if we use social media, it’s how.
Old media is still here. But they’re now part of the landscape they used to dominate.
In the UK, 28 million are registered on Facebook, more than 5 million on Twitter and a village as small as Beer in Devon has 6,000 images of it on Flickr.
We’ve come a long way, baby.
But where are we going next?
I’ve thought a lot of late on the path we’ve taken and where we’re headed.
A few pieces I’ve read helped crystalise my thinking.
Firstly, an excellent, witty and well thought out piece in The Guardian on SXSWi the annual event that sees cutting edge geeks talk to other geeks and pitch for funding.
They took a wry pinch of salt to the current hot terms. It’s all gamification, apparently.
The internet where you actively go to do things will be. The web which is unthinkingly enmeshed in day-to-day lives is where we’re headed.
You call a friend because you saw they were having a bad time from a Facebook update you saw after you booked tickets online. All on your phone. That’s day-to-day. Twenty years ago it would be sci-fi.
But don’t let’s any of us fall into the trap that we’re all on the innovation curve frantically trying to gamify the wastebin experience. We’re simply not.
I’ve been reminded recently that so many in local government are still on the starting blocks or filled with fear at the task ahead.
It’s fine to be worried about the Himalayan range of technology ahead of you. Everyone starts at the bottom of the hill. Just relax a bit. Do it a bit at a time. Chris Bonnington started small and got bigger. He didn’t start ice climbing. Maybe all you need to do is stroll up a hill rather than Everest.
We’re all learning. You don’t need a chartered qualification or a session with a socmed guru to start climbing the curve.
So where does this all leave local government and the web?
The public sector local government is beginning to actively put out a stream of information on digital channels.
Yes, there’s open data. This will grow but this has some distance to travel before it becomes an enmeshed part of my Dad’s life.
Our own Walsall 24 is another that I’m really proud of.
Southampton University hospital’s live tweeting of a shift in the children’s heart unit took it to another level by putting a human face on what they do.
Live tweeting and streaming a village cricket match is another fun example of real time updates. The Twicket experiment in the Lancashire village of Wray drew a worldwide audience.
A Philadelphia local government blogger Jim Garrow talked this when he described how things like this are changing communications.
Imagine a situation in local government where each department and each office had a social feed. That it would be as common as a telephone or an email address. That you could pick and choose the streams you wanted to tune into.
That an organisation could tap into those streams to tell people what it’s doing. That’s – for want of a better phrase – as linked social. As the number of smart phones in our pockets grow that’s where we’re headed in the long term. I’m sure of it.
Here’s what the local government social media evolution curve looks like to me. Because I’m fond of lists it’s in a list form and there’s eight steps.
The eight stages of local government social media evolution
1. Ignorance: We may have heard of the social web. Just. But we’ve never really heard of Facebook or if we have, we’ve not seen the film. We heard a caller to Nicky Cambell’s phone in saying it’s the worst thing ever invented. We agree with the Daily Mail. It gives you cancer.
2. Fear: We – or our boss – think we need to use it. We don’t know how to get started.
3. JFDI: The Dave Briggs rule of Just F***ing Do It. We’re experimenting. We’re not really asking much in the way of permission. It may grow into something bigger. We’re experimenting and innovating. In Dave’s axis, there’s a trade off between JFDI and being boring. You’ll get more done by JFDI but it’s far less sustainable.
4. Boring: It’s getting bigger. We need a social media strategy like this one from Wolverhampton Homes. It keeps people higher up happy. That makes people lower down happy too. We’re starting to mainstream things. Slooowly.
5. Lone social. We have a single Twitter account for the organisation. We have a single Facebook page. We’ve not heard of Flickr. Or Foursquare.
6. Chattering social. We’ve let others use digital platforms too. So long as they stick to the basic common sense advice. We have different voices talking about different things.
7. Linked social. We’re now talking on one offs about the same issue from a different perspective. Like Walsall 24. We’ve got something bigger than the sum of the parts.
8. Mainstream linked social: We’re doing this as routine. We have a stream on what the countryside ranger is doing at a nature reserve. And what the litter hit squad are doing at the same site. We’re using the same hashtag. Some of this is automated. For example, there’s an RSS feed linked to bin wagons. Ten days a year in the snow it really comes into it’s own.
That’s my map of where we’ve been and where we’re going. Feel free to disagree.
Creative commons credits:
Smiling man and woman http://www.flickr.com/photos/cyberuly/4742800632/sizes/l/in/photostream/
A hack day? That’s breaking into the Pentagon computer, right?
Why would normal people go to something like that?
Why stare at banks of geeks staring at laptops coding?
As a spectator sport it fails. Utterly.
But the potential of it is immense.
Why?
Because getting several talented people in the same room means better ideas surface.
But you simply MUST make it open for everyone. By that, I mean they must be space for non-tecky people too and I’m not sure that always happens.
A room full of geeks will come up with geek ideas.
A room full of the digitally unconnected won’t know where to start.
It’s when you put them both you are beginning to be on the road to a winner.
Although not strictly a hack day, for me this pro-am blend is why something like Local by Social works as an idea. Or CityCamp. Getting real people in the same room as techy people to come up with solutions to problems.
After attending a couple of hack days and being out of my usual comfort zone and contributing little other than cups of coffee and a few – often bad – ideas here’s a few things that struck me.
WHAT’S NEEDED FOR A HACK DAY?
Some space. Some volunteers. Some time. The internet. Some people who know about stuff. Plug sockets. Coffee. Pizza is optional.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENT?
It means people actively re-using using data – or information – to produce a web application or an interesting new website. There are some that say local government shouldn’t be doing this themselves. It should be people in the open data community. I don’t buy that one. Outside the pockets of open data innovation in the country, there’s a role for local government to produce things using open data. If there are no coders in a small town or if the market hasn’t moved there, then why not?
Similarly, if there is a need to present information in a more interesting way than just a static website.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR PR?
Yet again, it’s more evidence that Comms 3.0 is upon us. That’s a subject I’ve blogged about before which you can read here. It’s more evidence that the old school press officer is not the gatekeeper to the message. But the forward thinking comms person doesn’t need to write script and eat pizza. They just need an appreciation of what’s going on. They can also contribute with ideas and inspiration.
WHAT CAN BE BUILT AT A HACK DAY?
On Twitter, Digital Birmingham’s Si Whitehouse made the point that a hack day doesn’t always need to have something working at the end of it to be a success. It’s a fair point. Sometimes it’s enough to try out a concept or a new approach that could be expanded and invested in at a later date. Or just make connections. Or create the data itself.
WHAT AREA WORKS BEST FOR A HACK DAY?
As far as I’m concerned, an area that is sitting on piles of data and is quite keen on people to come and build things with it. It’s as simple as that.
Here’s a few examples of things produced at hack days.
GO FISH: Something that makes you explore a museum archive and tell a story.
At the WAG Hack Day in West Bromwich staged by Black Country Museums the excellent Ben Proctor and others built this something useful that demonstrates it. It’s a way of pulling nine items from the collection and you building your own story about them. It’s creative. It also gets you to explore the museum’s stores.
WHO WANTS TO NOT GET STABBED? A way of comparing how safe you are in rural and city locations.
An excellent game that uses crime and Google street view data. You can play it here. You get certain scenarios put in front of you and you get to choose which is safer. You’d be quite surprised at what the actual safe places are.
LOOQUEST: A game that directs you to nearby public toilets.
With a retro look, this hack by Neontribe is really quite wonderful and makes you smile, is a help and raises the problem of a lack of public lavs. I kept getting eaten by the toilet. You can play it here.
EDINBURGH PLANNING APP MAP: Takes planning applications and puts them on a map.
WARD MAPPER: A tool to compare and contrast vital ward data.
At Hackitude in Birmingham, this rather fine model to demonstrate how data from data.gov.uk can be turned from something dusty emerged. You can read the blog from Stuart Harrison here.
SO, WHAT TOOLS CAN NON-CODERS USE AS A PLATFORM FOR SOMETHING INTERESTING?
There are scores of web tools you don’t have to be a coder at. You can be like me. Someone who dabbles and explores a bit.
Here’s a list I drew-up at the Black Country Museum hack day at The Public in West Bromwich. They had history data in mind but could as well apply to other areas of local government data and as a way to engage with residents.
Flickr.com – as a place to post images from museum stores and encourage people to submit new shots.
History Pin – a brilliant interactive site that you can literally pin old pictures onto contemporary Google Streetview images.
Sometimes you need to stop listening to geeks. Sometimes you need to start listening to people in pinstripe suits.
When it comes to open data there’s a gem of a report by Deloitte Canada. ’Understanding government‘ is a belter. It’s an assessment by suits for suits of what open data can achieve. It’s worth downloading.
Think of this post as a review. It’s worth reading the whole thing but here are some bullet points. The sub-headings are mine rather than from the report.
How social media helps open data…
“The social media culture in particular is driving governments to open up while offering the imagination and expertise necessary to improve public services.
“In response, government organisations are embracing the idea that public data should be broadly available in a re-usable format and that governing should be a collaborative enterprise between government and its citizens.
Open data can help…
“The good news is that open government initiatives can help engage the public in making the difficult budgetary choices governments are grappling with.
“It will place governments under an unprecedented level of scrutiny and accountability while offering the potential to improve public services.
Open data is not a threat…
“Rather than view the changing relationship between government and its stakeholders as a threat or an inconvenience ncreasingly see it as an opportunity to engage citizens, non-governmental organisations, businesses and other entities in the design of new services and the resolution of old problems.”
Open data may even have stopped the MP’s expenses scandal…
“If the UK had put its database of members’ expense re-mbursements in the public domain in the first place could the scandal have been avoided? Politicians who know that constituents are watching their activities are much more likely to be careful about how they spend public funds.”
The four benefits of open data…
Better inform the public;
Enhance accountability;
Strengthen communities;
Facilitate markets.
Make a noise about open data…
“Agencies should not quietly put data online. Rather, they should tell the public what they are doing and why, while seeking their participation and engagement. Data that sits in a file are not worth much. Information becomes powerful only as its consumers start to apply it in ways that create value.”
Let people build things…
“Let the users design.
“This form of user-driven application development, also known as crowd sourcing, user innovation or open sourcing provides governments with an unprecedented opportunity to engage citizens in unlocking the power of public data.”
What to do with user-generated content…
“Encourage users to create applications. Incorporate or adapt user-designed applications into publicly hosted sites. Seek and maintain a dialogue with apps developers. Create methods and channels for listening and responding to user demands for data.”
Don’t just let citizens analyse data. Government needs to be better at it…
“Government leaders recognise that in addition to leveraging community resources to analyse public data they must get better at analysing vast stores of public data – in addition to online resources.
“Leading governments are investing in building a core competency in data analytics.
“This involves acquiring the software tools to manipulate vast stores of public data – often provided by more than one agency – and investing in the people and processes to drive analysis and take action.”
Isn’t data a bit vast? Where do you start to look at data as government?
“Focus analytics on your core mission. Approach data analytics as a new core competency not a new tool set. Enlist key partners inside your agency. Leverage the online community.”
Closing thoughts…
“In an information-driven age, the ability of governments to seize the opportunity may ultimately determine whether a government fails or succeed.”
Some things work better on social media than others.
Parking wardens and council tax collectors struggle.
Libraries, parks and countryside can work brilliantly. Why? Because people love them.
There’s several good librarians using social media. Not least the excellent @orkneylibrary.
But there isn’t many examples of good countryside and park use I’ve seen.
Until now that is.
Countryside ranger Morgan Bowers is doing some truly great things at Walsall Council. She works for the same authority as I do. But I’d be saying it whichever authority she was working for.
Morgan has set up @walsallwildlife on Twitter and tweets as an real person.
She is leading a team of volunteers recording wildlife across Walsall. I don’t get newts. But her enthusiasm for her subject I do get.
She tweets about her subject and celebrates a newt find in the same way a football supporter celebrate a 93rd minute winner.
She also talks to people. How refreshing is that?
Rather wonderfully, it works across several platforms. She has also set-up a Facebook page to share her work and also has a lively Flickr stream.
All three are really good examples on how to use each platform. Morgan isn’t alone in Walsall Council’s countryside team in using social media.
Countryside manager Kevin Clements is gradually taking a more active role with Twitter too as @countrysidekev.
Their approach is similar in many ways to @hotelalpha9, the tweeting police officer in North Yorkshire.
A personal face and real time updates that are conservational. It’s a blend that seems to work.
Often, people who work in the public sector think their day-to-day job isn’t that interesting to people.
The fact is any job that you don’t do yourself is interesting to people. And in 2011, in the public sector why not fly the flag for what you are doing?
Here’s why I think this approach works:
Twitter
A human voice helps put a human face on an organisation.
A niche Twitter stream can appeal to a cross-section of the population.
Responding and listening are good things for an organisation to do. It can drive traffic to other web pages.
It can work in real time.
Facebook
It can connect with people who use Facebook and no other network.
Because half the population are on Facebook in the UK.
It’s good to post pictures here as people can connect with a strong images
Flickr
It’s a good way to showcase images and connect with a wider community. Remember, there’s five billion images on Flickr.
It’s a good way to keep a record of images of what a project has discovered.
It can can act as a bulletin board to the group and a wider community.
It’s a good way to map the changing of the seasons in an accessible way.
There are a few things that can work in parks and countryside and it’s fascinating to watch innovation in a corner of local government that people have a real connection with.
Infobesity. Such a brilliant word for digital overload.
It’s true using the internet is like taking a cup to a fire hydrant.
Think you’ll get on top of everything?
You won’t.
So pace yourself.
Relax.
It’s dawning on me that I need to make some time to get to know a small area well.
It’s also clear to me that switching off from digital tools from time to time is vital. To recharge. To think. Heck, even to take your six-year-old to the Stoke City club shop to buy him a scarf.
Here’s two excellent pieces that made me stop and think.
In the first posted on the superbly titled Think Quarterly, Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist talks of the amount of digital content. You can read the original here.
In 2010, the human race created 800 exabytes of information.
To put that into context, between the dawn of civilisation and 2003, we only created five exabytes; now we’re creating that amount every two days.
Data is like food, says Varian. “We used to be calorie poor and now the problem is obesity. We used to be data poor, now the problem is data obesity.”
For businesses that are gorging on a surfeit of information, Varian says the fix is clear. It’s the same for data as food: “You need to focus on quality. You’ll be better off with a small but carefully structured sample rather than a large sloppy sample,” he says. More locally sourced fine dining, then, less all-you-can-eat buffet.
A related danger of the merging of online and offline life, says business thinker Tony Schwartz, is that we come to treat ourselves, in subtle ways, like computers.
We drive ourselves to cope with ever-increasing workloads by working longer hours, sucking down coffee and spurning recuperation.
But “we were not meant to operate as computers do,” Schwartz says.
“We are meant to pulse.” When it comes to managing our own energy, he insists, we must replace a linear perspective with a cyclical one: “We live by the myth that the best way to get more work done is to work longer hours.”
Schwartz cites research suggesting that we should work in periods of no greater than 90 minutes before seeking rest.
Whatever you might have been led to imagine by the seeping of digital culture into every aspect of daily life – and at times this week in Austin it was easy to forget this – you are not, ultimately, a computer.
Both are themed around the seasons and the figures themselves are quite impressive. Spring had 80 images from 80 people within three weeks of it being launched. Winter 450 from 170.
Flickr as an image library
At less than £20 a year for a Pro account, it’s staggeringly good value for money.
It can also be used as a repository for images both with a public setting and a restricted private one which limits who in your network can see them.
With a liberal re-use licence residents, media and blogs can re-use images without you having to take a phone call, dig out shots and email.
With 390,000 page views in 10 months those are serious figures.
They post stock images and shots connected to press stories, like the pictures that show a till receipt for two rings shortly before a sham wedding. Brilliant.
Flickr as a way to celebrate
Dawn O’Brien from Wolverhampton Council is an unsung hero. Using JFDI (just flipping do it) she has done great things to celebrate parks.
Morgan Bowers from Walsall Council’s countryside team is doing some really great things with digital tools. Not least the group Walsall Wildlife Recorders which aims to capture images of newts and other interesting things snapped by members of the public.
The Walsall Leather Museum Flickr meet
Acting at the suggestion of a Walsall Flickr group member, the very generous Francesca Cox allowed open access to the museum on Saturday.
It’s a fabulous place and a celebration of the town’s most famous trade. Scores of good images emerged and several photographers generously allowed shots to be re-used for marketing.
Flickr as a way to supply user generated content
English Heritage have hundreds of buildings, burial places, landmarks and other sites to look after. Bright people there have twigged that people like taking pictures of them. They link from their website to images contributed to their Flickr group set up partly for that purpose. Everyone wins in that.
An unexpected spin-off. Social bunch they are they’ve created a Flickr group for those people. Even better than that, they ask that if people post to that group it means they don’t mind seeing the images on their website and a link from that site to the original image. It’s a great way of tapping into Flickr in a way that everyone benefits from.
The Asda catologue from 1985
Okay, so this isn’t local government. But you have to simply doff your cap to someone who scans the entire Argos catalogue from a quarter of a century ago.
Clunky boombox? We got them. Pocket calculators? That’ll be £4.99, please with more than 9,000 views of that one page alone.
Inspired genius. Or the work of a twisted loner. Can’t make up my mind which.
But it shows the single minded passion some people have.
Funny how an unremarkable Spring day in the West Midands can go down in history.
From 6am on March 4, an audience of 116,273 on Twitter got to hear about the Walsall 24 experiment staged by Walsall Council.
Those figures are tweetreach.com, by the way. Not mine.
Historically, this was the first time a council had tweeted a snapshot of what it was doing in real time in the UK. Quite possibly this was a world first. That’s worth a ‘woot!’ in anyone’s book.
Yet, every day local government does tens of thousands of things for its residents.
Trouble is, we rarely tell people about the bread and butter things leaving some people ignorantly thinking ‘all I get is my bins collected.’
It was this lazy myth we looked to explode with Walsall 24.
There’s a blog post one day in the brass tacks of how the event was done.
By the way, this is an idea I’m proud to have played a role in amongst quite a sizable cast.
Statistics
1,400 tweets
116,000 potential audience
10 per cent rise in @walsallcouncil audience
9 Twitter accounts used
But there’s also in the days after 12 things that struck me:
1. The tipping point has been reached. It’s not about whether or not local government should use social media it’s how.
2. The internal battle has been won. People who 12 months ago were sceptical were keen to get involved. How do we channel that?
3. It’s not about network access. In the opening minutes of Walsall 24 we tweeted on a Blackberry because the network decided it didn’t like Twitter.
4. It’s ALL about network access. ‘This is great,’ one member of staff said, ‘but I couldn’t log on to my PC to follow it.’ Opening up social media internally would have been a powerful way to tell the story to the staff.
5. This could only work through collaboration. It was a neighbourhoods officer Kate Goodall that did much of the groundwork to get people on board and head of comms Darren Caveney that secured very top level buy-in. Without this it would have looked threadbare.
6. People like being told how their council tax is spent. No matter how routine. One person said that they didn’t like the updates. That was after the event.
7. Having people in service areas savvy with social media is a good thing. Spread the joy. Don’t hog it.
8. Getting people together in a common cause makes a bigger noise. The noise made by more than a dozen is more than an individual.
9. Innovation is a good thing. It makes you look at things in a different light. In the old days something like this may have been bought in from outside. Not any more.
10. This is the future. It’s not a hypothetical theory. It’s real and it’s here.
11. Free is good. Doors opened because there was no charge to this.
12. I never knew local government had people out at dawn investigating noisey cockerels. But we do.
There’s also more than half a dozen Twitter streams from service areas including the New Art Gallery, Walsall Museum and the Walsall Local History Centre.
It’s important to stress that this won’t just be for Twitter. It’ll be flagged up on Facebook and we’ll post pictures to Flickr too.
It’ll also be highlighted on our website with tweets curated after the event.
In 2011, there is a burning need to tell these stories.
Walsall 24 doesn’t aim to be definitive or exhaustive and not everything we do will be listed.
But this does aim to nail the urban myth that all we do is bins.
Disclaimer: I’m one of several helping organise the event but colleagues right across the council have made this happen.
