Running a project has lots of high points: coming up with a brilliant idea; getting the funding in place; starting the actual production; seeing the bits coming together; getting feedback; publishing the evaluation report.
“publishing the evaluation report”. A high point? It’s not exactly an adrenaline rush and if I’m being perfectly honest it isn’t exactly fun. But we, at Gallomanor, do recognise the importance of fairly evaluating the work we do. Of working out where the mistakes were made, figuring what the real strengths of a project are and deciding what we’ll do better next time.
As part of the funding from the Ministry of Justice for CivicSurf we were obliged to write an evaluation report and in the interests of openness they’re going to publish it and are happy for us to publish it here. Click on CivicSurf Evaluation Report to view it [PDF, 60k.]
I can’t claim it is a masterpiece of evaluation, but on the plus side it only runs to five pages.
For those who don’t want to open the pdf the key learning points are below the fold.
Before you go there though, a few things:
The report could be read as being critical of the councillors from Norfolk and in general. This is not intended. We appreciate the workload for which councillors volunteer and we appreciate that amognst all the calls on their time participating in a “project” might not be that high on their list of priorities. So let it be said again. The councillors from Norfolk, Tony, Jenny and Peter, are brilliant. They were generous with their time and feedback and they have persevered with their blogs and, I hope, are still finding them useful tools for doing their “jobs” as councillors.
This isn’t the end of project. The site will continue and expand. We want CivicSurf to be a place for councillors, civic leaders and officers to come to for advice and resources on becoming an effective civic leader blogger. We’ll continue to support any organisations that want to arrange a viewing of the documentary. We still have copies of the DVD and booklet. And we’ve produced a blog coaching programme that is proven to help civic leaders become more effective leaders through blogging.
It’s a fairly important part of the DCLG White Paper Consultation process for CivicSurf. The Code of Practice on Local Authority Publicity has been blamed by many as a major obstacle to helping councillors use blogs. This consultation is a chance to make your views clear on the matter.
I’ll be reading this over Christmas and posting some thoughts and responding in the New Year.
Part of what we are trying to with this blog is provide resources for partner organisations to promote the CivicSurf project. These resources are all stored under the CivicSurf promotional resources category.
This pack shot of the main physical elements we send out: DVD, Booklets and the case they come within, has been shot for an advert appearing in January in Government Technology Magazine.
We need to submit a final report to the Ministry of Justice in the very near future and we want to include a snapshot of what you the people who have accessed the project think of it.
You’ll see a very short four question survey below. Please take two minutes to complete it. Thank you.
When I was part of the launch of Computeractive magazine we discovered that explaining computer jargon to novice PC users was very important. Despite strenuous attempts to avoid jargon it simply wasn’t possible. We then developed a JargonBuster box-out which appeared by all articles with the relevant jargon explained.
As part of a forthcoming revamp of this site and the CivicSurf offering we’ve put the Glossary from the CivicSurf booklet online and we are going to build upon the small start to provide some simple plain english explanations of the terms that might not be clear to novice bloggers.
We’ve also included a form on the page to allow novices to ask for explanations and for experts to submit or improve explanations. I hope those experts out there can start to contribute - perhaps a succinct explanation of Trackbacks would be a good starter for ten.
You can find the Glossary here or by following the link in the menu above.
Tom Reynolds blogs at Random Acts of Reality. He writes authoritatively and authentically about life as an Emergency Medical Technician (Ambulance paramedic type). Today’s post goes straight for the tear ducts.
Bloggers are enthusiasts who care about their jobs and do it in their own time because they have a genuine desire to improve the organisations they work for.
Individuals are generally considered to be more trustworthy than faceless organisations and readers of blogs invest in the writers. The personal neature of the relationships that develop as a result of this bypass the corporate PR ‘filter’.
The value of blogging about your job for the public is that Individuals can tell great stories that humanise faceless organisations (who shouldn’t worry about bloggers on their workforce, their passion for the job is itself generally enough to prevent them saying things that would bring the organisation into disrepute).
The value of blogging about your job for the organisation is that they can find out way more about what employees think than annual staff surveys (Tom told an excellent anecdote about ambulance workers whinging on an unofficial forum a few years back during a heatwave about not having time to stop to buy drinks when on shift. Two days later the management delivered pallets of bottles of water to the depot. The impact on staff morale was immediate because management had listened, and demonstrated that they had listened).
The value to an organisation of senior managers blogging is that they can easily and quickly debunk rumours from the top of the organisation right to the bottom without layers of chinese whispers.
Work blogging is the ultimate in transparency and openness, it needs to be embraced by more organisations. Bloggers are the best advocates and advertisements for their employers. They are evangelisers for their employers. Their reputation is their currency and bloggers will generally fact check each other.
Tom Harris until very recently was the Rail Minister at the Department for Transport. He was and is also one the most engaging political bloggers currently writing. His style is informal and personal, yet he manages to be very political and informative about the workings of government.
He wrote an article about getting sacked as a minister and addressed the obvious question of whether his blog had contributed to it. He isn’t exactly unequivocal, but interestingly uses his blog to point the finger subtlely at what he believes is the real reason. Surprisingly out of the 27 comments so far only one person picked up on it, but the support for his blog is unsurprisingly unanimous.
I was asked by the PA newswire last week for some stills from the documentary and in the hope that others might want pictures to illustrate a blog post I have uploaded them to Flickr and embedded a slideshow here.
One week until Blog Action Day, the day in the year where bloggers are encouraged to post about a specific subject. This year the theme is poverty.
The Blog Action Day site helpfully gives some examples of what various types of blog might post about. Strangely enough it doesn’t mention Civic Leader blogs so here is some advice for blogging councillors about what to write on Blog Action Day - Poverty.
Highlight the work that has been done /needs to be done to alleviate poverty in your area. Even the richest boroughs of London such as Kensington and Chelsea have very deprived areas. The ranking of neighbourhoods on the DCLG Deprivation indices varies from the 1390th most deprived neighbourhood to the 32440th (out of 32,482). I’m told the difference in life expectancy between parts of K&C vary by ten years.
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