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.

Yesterday I went up to Norwich to catch up with three of the Councillors who are working on the project. It’d been two months since I saw them last, when they were still finding their feet on getting their blog set up.

 I’d been keeping an eye on their sites which were slowly developing, but wasn’t sure how they felt about their blogs themselves.

The three of them were extremely positive about their experience and interestingly all for different reasons. Peter was please because he felt he had a space for him to speak out, and it was also bringing him in touch with new people and also some old contacts he’d lost track of. Tony found that he was getting interest in an issue by both comments and emails. Jenny, who hasn’t had much commenting feedback actually on the site, has had local people come up and tell her in person that they’d seen it and liked it.

I think in another month’s time they’ll have achieved even more. Interesting, none of them had thought of their blog as an archive, something I questioned them about, but thinking about it they realised it was a way they could track a particular issue.

Peter and Tony both have big issues being commented on their blogs, while Jenny is about to do a leaflet drop with the blog address on, so in another month I’m sure we’ll see huge changes again. 

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.

Nick Booth from over at Podnosh has tried to answer the questions of “Why leaders should blog?”.  He goes into some depth and backs his arguments with evidence from other sources.  Paul Caplan from Internationale is slightly more blunt summarising his arguments as if they don’t “they will be sitting in their corner of the party – Billy no-mates, talking to themselves.”

I left a comment somewhere in between:

I think the issue is simpler.  Leaders lead by being visible and inspiring.  It is a rare leader who hides away without communicating.

Take local Councillors.  They lead by being in their community holding conversations, doing radio and press interviews, writing letters, attending and speaking at public meetings.  It is their bread and butter.

They, and other leaders, are being left behind though.  Those conversations, those public meetings are happening online too.  In blogs, in forums on email groups.  Leaders need to participate in those conversations too or risk becoming half a leader.  It is difficult to participate fully without being there with your own blog.

Therefore leaders must blog or ignore a significant and increasingly important part of their leadership role.

Councillors, what’s your view?

Norfolk’s leading regional paper has picked up on the Cllr2.0 project. It tells us that we are creating “grassroots democracy at the click of a button”. A touch of hyperbole aside the article lets our councillors say why they are taking part and lists their blogs.

But you’ve got to question the paper’s internet strategy when a story like this isn’t on their website.

The Daily Telegraph writer Robert Colvile has written a cogent paper for the Centre for Policy Studies about the way the internet is changing politics and policy, and the current failings of the political parties to embrace the brave new world.

And while I largely accept his argument (that the internet offers the potential to create a faster more chaotic, but more open, world in which politicians will have to find new language or risk becoming even more bland - and so less likeable) it is the caveats that he puts around that that I find just as compelling.

These essentially are that the on-line conversation leaves out swathes of the population and as such skews the debate. So while he says “67% of Britons use the internet in one way or another” he also says:

• In the UK, in 2006, 51% of those earning up to £10,400 had never used the internet, compared to 6% of those on £36,400 or more.
• 71% of those aged 65 and over in this country have never used the internet.
• As we go down the age range, internet use grows rapidly - only 35% of those aged between 55 and 64 have never gone on-line, falling to just 4% of the digital near-natives in the 16 to 24 bracket.

So our on-line politics is likely to be dominated by younger, wealthier people; and I can’t help noticing that Colvile doesn’t talk about whether there biases around ethnicity or gender.

Which makes me think that, while he may be right in saying that the net savy MP (and for our purposes we can substitute councillor) will find that:

by inhabiting the same on-line spaces as their constituents on a day-to-day basis, MPs will interact with them in much more normal conditions - when the MP is not the privileged voice of authority, but merely one member of a conversation among many.

But the elected representative needs to consider how they’ll represent all of the views of all their constituents, not just those of us who are webheads, so the new politics will need strategies that reach beyond the net, even while they take the best of the net’s creative drive with them.

[cross posted on Someday I Will Treat You Good]

Tom Reynolds, Random Acts of Reality, shows the power of stories.  This post about one of his heart attack call-outs tells you more about the job of an EMT than any glossy recruitment advert.

Tom Reynolds works as a Emergency Medical Technician for the London Ambulance Service. He also blogs at Random Acts of Reality. A very gritty account of his very gritty job as a paramedic.

His blog works because you feel you are getting the full picture rather than some sanitised spun version of events. Sometimes these public sector blogs written under pseudonyms try to hide the authors and initially Random Acts seems that way because it doesn’t pull its punches and is free with its criticism of the Government.

According to Tom though, his employers are comfortable with it. In fact, so comfortable, he is speaking today at the Guardian Public Service Summit (at the opulent Sopwell House House Hotel in St Albans much favoured by footballers¹). His audience includes his big boss, the Director-General Workforce at the Department of Health, Gus O’Donnell and Ed Miliband MP amongst many, many others.

(¹At least Paul Gascoigne was there when I was a few years back)