Mary Reid has pointed out that David Buckle, CEO of South Oxfordshire District Council has started a blog to keep people informed about the by-election caused by the standing-down of Boris Johnson.

Hats off to David for starting a blog at a time that will no doubt be busy and very high profile.

Rob Rees from Gloucestershire Trading Standards has started a blog to lead the debate on food.

Fantastic! At last one central point for the county to have a say about all the food issues of today and the future.

This is civic leadership even though it isn’t senior management or an elected representative doing it.

As part of the changeover from Cllr2.0 to CivicSurf we’ve moved the blog to the civicsurf.org.uk domain and changed the design to fit in with the other material we have produced.

There will be a lot of new material appearing here over the next few weeks so please do subscribe by RSS (using the nice orange icon to the right) or by email (using the box on the right) to ensure you don’t miss something useful.

Cllr Tony Tomkinson, from Clavering in Norfolk, started blogging in January 2008 as part of the civicsurf project.  His main objective was to use his blog to maintain communications with the 25 parish clerks in his constituency.

He used the blog to inform readers of developments from Norfolk County Council that affected his area.  In March he wrote about the possibility of a gravel pit in the village of Haddiscoe. He had been to a public meeting the night before attended by over 100 people from the village.  Over the following week Tony had 400 people visit his blog and within four weeks 37 comments had been left on the post.

I’m sure some of the people leaving comments had been to the meeting but by using the blog they are able to ensure their views are in the public domain.  Possibly some had not been able get to speak at the meeting. Also of interest is that people from outside the village were able to contribute including those with experience of gravel pits.

The post is a superb example of how using a blog a civic leader can gather considered and in-depth views from a wide range of people with a wide range of views.  The blog hasn’t replaced the village public meeting but it has complemented it very well.  Although Tony is prevented by his position as a councillor from expressing an opinion before the Planning committee meeting, he is providing leadership by encouraging discussion and opinion through having a place for that discussion to take place.

I’ve added a page to the site to describe “What is CivicSurf?” The page includes a downloadable PDF (single page A4). Hopefully this might be helpful to any officers wanting to discuss the project with colleagues.

We asked the opinion of the people on this site and a few Gallomanor friends in local government and the response was strongly in favour of civicsurf.

We’ve even started developing a logo and soon this website will transfer to www.civicsurf.org.uk with a fresh new look.

One of the reasons I particularly liked civicsurf was that it gives a label to something important that was previously undefined. civicsurf is the aggregate of online local information about a town or area. It is comprised of blogs, sites such as fixmystreet.com, local press and public bodies. In essence the civicsurf is like a public meeting occurring online all day everyday. Our project will inspire civic leaders to get involved in that meeting, those conversations through contributing and hopefully leading.

I’ve been following the Lord (Clive) Soley instigated group blog for a few days now and despite the awful design, name, and technical set-up it is working well at the moment. In my opinion it is because the blogging Lords are writing in a very natural language.

Of the nine participating peers only two were previously MPs and perhaps this helps contrast them against my particular perception of the House of Lords. And, since one of their stated aims is to change the image of the Upper House, they are succeeding.

Congratulations, Lords, keep going, but please do ask someone to do some work on the design and techie side - you’d have thought a title for the RSS feed would be right up your street. Boom boom.

[cross-posted from gallomanor.com]

This project has been called Councillor 2.0 for the last 9 months. We love the name, but ultimately as a project we are aiming to engage civic leaders who are not Councillors. We want to get police chiefs, NHS Trust board members, and senior council officers all using the internet to engage their communities. That’s why Councillor2.0 is too limiting.

So what name to use? We’ve been through a few.

How about Councillor2.0, Police2.0 and NHS2.0? But the expense and time to manage separate identities was too much.

We rejected abstract names like Greenfrog because we have a short time to get through to our audience of member services and communications managers.

What we need is a name that could pique the interest of busy officers and members and combined with a strapline describe the project, which is a series of events showing a film and distributing booklets to get officers and members blogging.

We’re considering two options for the moment.

Reaching Out
Leadership blogging in the Public Sector

or

CivicSurf
Leading through blogging

Why those two you might ask. Reaching out came from the idea that the civic leaders we spoke to who blog most commonly gave one of their reasons as wanting to reach new people, people with whom they wouldn’t normally have contact.

The more eagle-eyed of you will know the source of inspiration for CivicSurf. For me the name emanates from the idea that the first step for civic leaders about to blog is to go online and read what others might be saying online about your area and topics of interest. It is about the online local conversations in which they as local leaders need to be participating and leading. We’re calling those conversations the CivicSurf.

We need to decide what name to use when marketing this project to local authorities and public bodies across the country. We need your input. Which name and strapline do you prefer? Let us know through the comments or via email .

Colin McKay, a Canadian Government communicator and blogger and social media pioneer extraordinaire, has written The Secret Underground Guide to Social Media for Organisations. It is not a technical guide. More a cultural, managerial guide to avoid the roadblocks set by IT and legal departments. Colin has blogged about it himself.
At 23 pages it is a quick and enjoyable read.

I don’t suppose this project can really ignore the Civil Serf saga. In short, Civil Serf write eloquently, but disparagingly about the govt department in which she worked and about the ministers she worked for indirectly. It was an entertaining read and contained some quotes ideal for consumption in the national press. And last weekend the national press wrote about it and the blog disappeared as Civil Serf presumably fretted about keeping the job she didn’t really seem to enjoy.

Inevitably it will make some senior officials worry about letting staff blog about their work, but I hope that we don’t end up as far as some fear in that the Civil Service Code will be amended to specifically ban blogging.

Most people seem to agree with Jeremy Gould, the Whitehall Webby, in that Civil Serf “crossed the line”. It wasn’t so much that she was blogging but that she wasn’t abiding by the spirit of the code and bringing the civil service into disrepute.