The Guildhall, Hull

Last weekend I was asked by @WeLoveLocalGov if I could send them a sentence or two about why I love Local Gov for this post.

Absolutely, I thought; I know I love local government so surely I can send them 140 characters easily enough? Apparently not.

Whenever I sat down to muse and fire some letters in their direction it was really hard. And it wasn’t because I’d had one of those days where you’re reminded about the reasons why Local Gov is a frustrating place to work. No, it was because every time I sat down I remembered something else about why I love Local Gov.

And as the list got longer I thought the only way to do this justice is to blog.

So, why do I love Local Gov?

I love it for the visible reasons. For gritting streets and filling potholes. For tending parks and watering flowers. For planning and environmental health. For libraries and museums. For doing the stuff that most people think is the be all and end all of the local council.

I love it for the serious reasons. For protecting children who need looking after. For supporting the elderly. For standards in housing. For prizing education. For championing employability. For community cohesion.

I love it for its compassion. For working alongside and supporting the voluntary and community sector to stand in the gap and protect the weakest, the vulnerable and the hard to reach.

I love it for its diversity. The variety in what Local Gov does, and the collection of people who do it. The way different local politics and different local communities mean that we’re not all the same. And yet we’re all seeking similar things.

I love it for the public. Occasionally individuals can be pain but more often than not the involvement of the public can bring unexpected, and valuable, dividends. They’re why we’re here. Not as customers but as the principal actors in our democracy. It isn’t the leader of the council, or the chief exec, or even Eric Pickles who’s in charge; it’s the public.

I love it for its ambition. We come to work to fix problems, not to make do with them, not to settle for them but to try and find ways of meeting needs, and transforming circumstances, with finite resources.

I love it for bureaucracy. No, honestly. Not for the constricting and soul destroying excesses that bureaucracy can be but because groups of professionals committed to shared visions and working within effective and efficient processes can transform things. And I think that’s what Weber had in mind.

I love it for its inventiveness. Maybe it doesn’t feel like that’s always true (see bureaucracy) but there’s a long tradition of doing clever things to solve intractable problems (I particularly like Birmingham’s purchase of the Elan Valley). And the 21st century is keeping that up with innovative solutions and brilliant ideas in both digital, and real, spheres.

I love it for its camaraderie. We have a pretty good atmosphere in the office and my various travels around Hull City Council have been in warm and welcoming community. And that’s matched by the quality of company offered by local government people in various digital spaces. People who share what they’re thinking, demonstrate what they’re doing and lend their encouragement when you’re doing the same.

I love it for its history. It is a rich and varied past but the emergence of a professional and accountable organisation to hold the balance between national policy and local need is a compelling story and one whose narrative is crucial to the way our local communities function. You don’t need to appreciate its history to love Local Gov but you are missing out.

These 10 are worth more than a short paragraph each. It is only a dash through, and a skirt round, the reasons why I love Local Gov but WLLG wanted that one or two sentences so I had to settle with sending them this…

I love Local Gov because it’s full of unsung people who work tirelessly to do the mundane, the important and the seemingly impossible.

Bye bye conversations. You have been amazing. Thanks.

September 14, 2011 7:34 pm via HTC PeepReplyRetweetFavorite

@davemagill

Dave Magill

For those of us involved with Conversations the last two weeks have been something of a blur. The pace at which decisions have been taken has left our community pretty shell-shocked as we look to the future.

That future includes Sally, Scott and I joining the Steering Team alongside Ben, B and Adam. And we’re committed to the same reasons that motivated Dave to kick Conversations off in the first place. His stepping down as leader doesn’t alter our vision statement.

We will spur one another on to live worshipful lifestyles.

We will gather weekly to envision, encourage and restore one another for our mission through the week.

We will aim to be relevant to the culture we are part of.

We will always encourage people to take the next step in following Jesus.

Jesus is all we have, we are nothing without Him.

We will teach the Bible and its application.

We will form relationships with the intention of supporting others and improving ourselves.

We will develop our own and other peoples giftings.

We will be a compassionate community reaching out in word and action to those we know and do not yet know in our city and further afield.

What happens next is still falling into place but for now I just want to express my gratitude to Dave.

Dave is a wonderful leader and it has been an honour to be under his authority for the last four years and an incredible privilege to belong to the church he has been responsible for.

Conversations is more than Dave but the character of our community and the lifestyle he has modelled are inextricably connected. There are a lot of things that mark out Dave’s leadership and they’ve helped forge Conversations into a mature Christian community.

Dave is himself. And as a result Conversations is a place of integrity, of vulnerability, of truth and honesty. We are not somewhere full of fakery, of pretence. The things we talk about, the struggles we share and the questions we ask are real and they’re relevant. Conversations isn’t a place where we can shy away from difficult stuff and as a result it’s a place where things get dealt with and moved on from.

Conversations is a place of safety and we all know that. So it’s a place we can be broken and restored but it’s also somewhere that takes risks and isn’t afraid of failure.

Dave has trusted and empowered people to lead. And when they do they do so with authority and are given true responsibility. As a member of this church I have seen people given opportunities to lead – whether hosting, playing music, offering prayer, or preaching – that would have been out of the question elsewhere. It’s just a natural part of how Dave acts. He has encouraged with his words and has invested with his time. As a community we have seen the fruits of that, and far from failing, people have flourished.

Dave is passionate about York and about the heritage of this city in seeking God and being a place that inspired and rehabilitated. As a church we are united around the value of the place where we live and by a shared desire to see people’s circumstances transformed. And that’s something active, not passive. Join us on Saturday to raise some money for Tommy.

Dave is also paassionate about the experience of church being something that makes sense. He also knows that churches mess up and people get hurt and their relationship with God is often coloured by their experience of The Church. That’s the reason why we have church at Vodka Revolution. It’s also the reason why we’re low key. We don’t feel out of place, it is entirely natural and somewhere both Christians and non-Christians feel at ease.

But, above all, Dave has always pointed to Jesus. His preaching has always focused on God’s desire for relationship with us and the first move Jesus took in stepping into our world and giving up everything for us. There is no form over substance when it comes to Conversations. We might lack stained glass, liturgy and dog collars but the substance of our meetings is rooted in those 9 statements at the top of this post.

Dave won’t want us to talk about his legacy, or his contribution. He is definitely much more interested in what God is up to and how we as a community continue to glorify Him. Being part of Conversations feels like being together as family. We are a servant-hearted, welcoming and generous place – it is unrivalled in my experience of church. But times have been good. At the moment they’re not and it’s hard. Last night was difficult because there are unknowns, and concerns, about what happens next so we’re going to be talking with St Mike’s about that but I’m hopeful about what will follow this uncertainty because we’ve been trained well. And Dave has been integral to that.

I hope we can repay his commitment to us by being a source of advice, support and friendship during his time away from leadership. And, when he’s ready, back him in whatever is next on the agenda.

—

After Ben had given a brief summary of what was happening, Dave commissioned the new steering team and we fielded a few questions. I then kicked off our 14 week series on Nehemiah with the first chapter. It’s a helpful bit of scripture to be studying given the emotions that result from a situation like this. You can read my sermon notes, or grab the (very bog-standard) slide deck if you want to see what they saw.

Tomorrow the new Lord Mayor is getting installed and beforehand all 59 councillors have got the opportunity to press the flesh with the different directorates and service areas that make up Hull City Council in a marketplace event.

It’s a pretty good idea – councils are massive and it must be pretty daunting for any newly elected councillor to get a handle on what it is we do. And there’s value in taking a similar approach for communicating that breadth to the public (Walsall100 is a practical demonstration of that).

Anyway, in preparation for this event the different service areas and directorates have been pulling together briefing notes. In the Regeneration Directorate are two services: Economic Development & Regeneration and Physical Regeneration. And that covers a further 11 distinct areas of activity (BSF is part of Physical Regeneration). So putting together something brief that communicates everything from new schools to museums with European funding in between is not straight forward.

What we’ve ended up with is succinct and (hopefully) helpful in giving a nice overview of the directorate. It was the result of three different people working on it in their own spheres of influence – someone from the Economic Development & Regeneration wing, someone else from the Physical Regeneration arm and also the BSF team. In the end it’s come to us to wire the different bits together and produce a single document.

There’s no trouble in doing that but I yearn for a day when we might together, in our three separate offices, have been co-authoring a shared document and discussing the amends in real-time rather than the slightly delayed and cumbersome fashion that has seen slightly different versions of the same basic document flying about whilst different additions ping into inboxes; there is a better way to do this…

Even for those of us who’d been using IRC and ICQ, or the Messengers of Yahoo and MSN Myspace represented something very different: a website, not something you installed.

You might have been invited, in which case you’d have a friend. Or you might know what you were doing and be confident. But neither of those were guaranteed, there was every chance you’d be joining this strange and alien world without any friends.

With nobody to hold your hand or guide you through it Myspace did something very clever. Everybody who signed up was welcomed, hosted and befriended by Tom.

Today Myspace is in terminal decline but there’s a legacy worth recognising. It planted the seed for ideas that Facebook has written large and increasingly the benefits of web based, workplace communities are being explored. That business application might seem like a logical progression but for many it’s another strange new alien world.

One of the popular internal social networks is Yammer. In design it has a familiar Facebookesque feed at its heart asking you the Twitterstyled question ‘what are you working on?’ and there are plenty of other features to play with (groups, polls, share files, etc). It’s free to set up and that meets most needs but there are benefits to the full version (albeit for an eye-watering $5 per user per month). Some councils have been using it to good effect.

Yammer has been in Hull for a couple of years with a current network of 420 members (although over 70 of these have left the council). As you can see, growth hasn’t been steady – after an initial surge at launch only 11 people joined between 06/2009 and 08/2010. The growth of the last 9 months has mostly come from within Streetscene.

Social networks rely on viral growth – people need to invite their friends, who will invite theirs ad infinitum. When someone new joins the Hull network they’re usually followed by one or two from their team and although their automatic joining post might generate a few ‘hello, how are you’ responses it quickly peters out.

Three people have sent 600 messages between them, which sounds promising, but the total for the two years is 1,826. Even though I’m in the minority that sees its potential I’m not using it as effectively as I might – for all I believe in shared dialogue I’m mostly broadcasting things I’ve seen elsewhere to prompt discussion. Sometimes they do: one notable example was sharing Dan Slee‘s post on how to innovate in the winter which resulted in our being on Tumblr, Posterous and Facebook.

It’s difficult to engage in a vacuum and the truth is that most of our membership isn’t thinking about Yammer any more. Even though they might have signed up they won’t be getting messages, they won’t be thinking it has any relevance and, thus far, nobody has been supporting or encouraging people to use it in any structured way.

So can Yammer work in the public sector? The experience of those councils linked to earlier suggests yes. But I doubt they’re acts of spontaneous creation, no doubt they’ve been started by a group of people who think it makes sense, who have built a vibrant and active community having conversations, being provocative, inviting discussion and providing a model to emulate.

It’s good that Yammer wasn’t imposed by corporate edict but brand new green shoots need to be nurtured rather than simply left to their own devices. Familiarity in design makes Yammer understandable but its habits are not those of Facebook. Its peers – Flickr, YouTube and Twitter – don’t create content for you to enjoy, they host what you share with others. Remove the individual images, videos or updates and they would be rendered as barren as Hull City Council’s Yammer.

If you leave Yammer as a wasteland without investing time and trouble to cultivate a community then nobody will care. And in Hull nobody does.

Hence the need to remember Tom.

He didn’t leave you alone when you joined, he messaged you and gave you an introduction to MySpace. Such hand-holding paid dividends for newbies who got the confidence to explore.

If internal social tools are a shock to the culture there’s a lesson in this about being deliberate in building community. Having not seen success I can only make a guess at how you’d do that:

• make a point of welcoming people who join
• ask them why they’ve joined and what they expect from it
• and listen to what they say so you can suggest things for them to do with it
• and when people start sharing, encourage them with recognition (and use global emails or other internal communication to highlight these things off-Yammer)

And for those who stop talking? Email them, or give them a call. Find out how they’re using Yammer, not to berate them but to find out whether there’s any way of enticing them to get more involved.

You could even go over and talk about it face to face because this isn’t a global website where your ‘friend’ Tom is a distant and aloof CEO. You’re a colleague who can build real world rapport with people.

Doing that for everyone would need a massive resource. So don’t do it for everybody – the hope must be to ignite a viral expansion.

I wrote earlier this week about the resources Stoke and Hull have committed so that digital sits at the heart of their organisations. As important as considering what that means for public-facing activity top of their priorities must be spreading enthusiasm internally. Maybe the litmus test for whoever gets that job here is whether they can rescue our relationship with Yammer?

This prompted a discussion on Twitter (Storify here).

Brief conversations like these are one of the great side effects of using Twitter. But not everybody will see those tweets. So I thought I’d try to start capturing interesting exchanges in case there’s some value to those outside the conversation (the Alpha(Local)Gov post was originally prompted by something similar).

So what follows is my adding a bit of flesh to the opinions communicated in 140 characters. As you might have seen if you’ve looked at Storify, the discussion asked whether Communications is the right location for ‘social media’ (although neither role is Twitter Tsar).

First up the reasons why comms is the wrong place…

Cons?

Public sector comms teams receive their share of criticism around being focused on marketing, clinging onto a broadcast mentality and being risk averse in the name of reputation management. The conclusion is that such teams will never achieve the benefits that are obvious to the choir because these are alien cultures to the ones needed when encouraging listening and engagement.

Another criticism relates to the future of the web in an organisation. To be fit for purpose digital activity needs to be considered equal to the traditional, offline, access channels. In focusing on this issue as part of the debate on channel shift, SOCITM have called for the web to be embedded within customer services rather than placed into a Comms (or ICT) silo. After all, who is better equipped to answer queries or communicate information than those on the front-line?

Pros?

On the flip side you could argue that these roles have been created in comms teams because that’s a very logical place for them to be. Communications teams have historically been at the heart of their organisations for both internal and external purposes; they have cultivated relationships and have an appreciation of the council in macro rather than micro. As a result they are well situated to be the people providing the lead and the steer on a better use of the web.

And evidence suggests they already are providing that lead. Many, if not all, of those officers who are trailblazing and providing sparks of inspiration are drawn from Comms teams with successes that show it is possible to work in comms and not focus on broadcast or marketing.

It shouldn’t be a surprise! Although the web is clearly useful in giving cheaper transactions and providing clearer information it’s also a great opportunity to vocalise the often under appreciated narrative of the public sector. 24 hour experiments in Manchester and Walsall have used Twitter to paint their pictures and now Walsall100 will attempt to stand on the shoulders of many platforms to weave a richer tapestry. Story telling is a natural fit to the skills of a Communications team, would any of these have happened without their leadership?

Does it matter?

The jobs in Stoke and Hull could be important steps for these councils but the ambition could (should?) be that much of what those roles look like today are rendered obsolete. Success for these jobs would be making digital the default and embedding social media and web tools into service delivery across the organisation so that such discrete roles are no longer necessary.

In that world the reacting to customer service related queries via the relevant web channels becomes part and parcel of the job. Such operational activity is different to the strategic need these jobs are advertised to meet. In asking for an ‘on-line champion’ they’re looking for someone to build the necessary relationships and explore the possibilities with themto create a more future proofed and digitally effective organisation. They’re looking for a leader to facilitate culture change rather than simply someone who can tweet.

But that leadership will only be possible with the right mandate. It doesn’t matter where this job is located or how it is structured if what’s lurking behind the scenes are organisations committed to a marketing focused, broadcast heavy, tightly controlled digital presence. If they’re working for someone who is committed, supportive and enthused themselves then maybe these roles have a chance of putting the web at the heart of their organisations?

April saw the demise of Flip. Despite being the leading camcorder brand in the US, parent company Cisco judged the marketplace to be unsustainable in the face of the competition posed by our mobile phones.

Given that they paid $590m for the technology two years ago it’s a bold move. Equally, their quitting from a position at the top is shrewd because of the inevitable future of hand-held video recording.

I really like my Flip camera and when the product was first introduced it disrupted the market but I expect to get similar functionality from my next mobile phone without having to carry something else in my pocket. Whilst convergence is not good for the 550 employees at Flip, the rest of us benefit – we get one thing where once we might have had to use more.

It’s that sort of approach which lies behind Martha Lane Fox’s vision for a single government domain and over the last three months it has been brought to life by 11 people somewhere in London. There had been glimpses of what they were working on and The Telegraph had featured a couple of screenshots as well as some interviews but this week we were able to get our grubby mitts on this “proof of concept prototype“.

This 261k investment is the start of something greater with Chris Chant, the (interim) executive director for digital government telling SOCITM’s spring conference “it’s not perfect and it could be significantly different when we go live with the real deal, which will probably be in about a year” and Tom Loosemore (who is heading up the project) calling it a three year project in his interview with The Telegraph.

Unlike the world of mobile technology the public sector doesn’t have disruptive companies redrawing the playing field for market advantage and the lack of impetus that can cause provides a barrier for innovation. So it’s good to see the drawing board being dusted off and a team starting from scratch to explore how you might transform the way we do stuff with central government. But taking that approach centrally has repercussions for the things we access locally and perhaps even the role of local government websites full stop.

There’s nothing the British public love like a good postcode lottery debate and local decision making and local priorities can often lead to sometimes large differences in very similar policies or services. Normal people don’t tend to visit any council website other than their own so this particular postcode lottery debate doesn’t come up very often. Even a brief consideration of how different Yorkshire councils approach the web highlights the fact that where you live determines the quality of relationship you might have with your council online.

As a result, some councils are limited in their use of the internet to save money by getting people to do stuff online but there’s also an increasing democratic impact on our ownership of local decisions and access to opportunities to participate in place shaping discussions.

Local authorities have expended time, energy and money developing online solutions for very real and present local needs. Each council has a mapping solution, they’ll tell you when your bin should be collected,  publish their £500 spending data, provide mechanisms for paying council tax or renting social housing. But they don’t look the same and they’re of varying quality. Andy’s post calls that perplexing and it’s hard to disagree. He goes on to wonder

if local authorities open their data up, share it in easily consumable formats that Alpha can suck in and push out via location to their users, why do we need distributed websites?

That’s a threatening question for all those whose livelihoods depend on the local government web because it questions their existence. It suggests that myriad council websites are a layer of complexity too far when a single, location aware portal could aggregate what’s relevant and unify the experience of being a citizen.

Such an experience sounds attractive and I think he’s asked a good question because there are clear merits in the convergence of local government’s best web tools. When it comes to local information, or local transactions, the most important thing has to be the quality of experience for the public. At the moment that quality varies wildly. Perhaps you can achieve that from scraped content within whatever AlphaGov becomes. That’s already been in the public consciousness as Stef Lewandowski‘s involvement with first BCCDIY and then DIYcouncil (the site was down at the time of writing) attests. That approach does little to resolve the fun and games with back office systems which is the Holy Grail in terms of both experience and savings.

There’s another aspect to a local web presence that could get lost in this convergence. And that’s participation. Local issues are shaped by our local needs, by our local characteristics and our local politics. Strengthening local democracy is important and that’s part of a local council’s responsibility (obviously without being partisan).

There is already a disconnect between the services people receive and their relationship with local government. The life of the council, so effectively demonstrated by Walsall24, is a rich story that deserves to be told. The efforts of local people whether elected, employed or volunteering their skills warrant being heard. I don’t like focusing on the ballot box as the sum of democracy but it helps highlight the issues. Last week the balance of power in York shifted, apparently decisively, but the new council’s mandate is 16.5% of the city’s electorate because a majority of people didn’t vote.

The nature of the relationship between citizen and state is beyond the remit of AlphaGov. It’s not attempting to recast democracy, its focus is on creating an effortless experience of the services our tax pays for. It’s a prototype that showcases a very different approach. That approach may be reflected in future designs from across the country. It will definitely change expectations, particularly in 12 months’ time if the central government experience is so different to things locally.

I think it would be a mistake for the local response to be “how can we adopt the best bits of AlphaGov?”. That’s the status quo – web teams trying to achieve the same outcomes in a myriad of different ways. That’s localism but it isn’t the best use of limited public funds. Cisco decided their model was no longer sustainable. They’d invested a lot of money in buying a product and even though it was still good they recognised it was not the future of hand-held video and took a decision.

It’s probably overly naive and simplistic to ask whether local government can do something similar. Humour me. Could there be a proactive, shared response to what’s happening centrally? Instead of waiting for the fruit of AlphaGov to push local government towards a single portal (not entirely unexpected as Gordon Brown suggested this last March) can local government pool its talent and test whether a common platform, an Alpha(Local)Gov, could work? Instead of suffering under the weight of rubbish technology or wrestling with archaic attitudes could those involved with the local government web be freed to invest in things that enhance local participation and involvement instead?

Like I said, naive and simplistic.

First up, the makeup of the chamber before (taking into account the by-election results since 2007):

After:

And you can see from a quick glance how the vote changed from 2007 to 2011

Labour recorded 18,000 votes more on Thursday than they did in 2007 and increased their share of the vote from 27% to 37%. Much has been said about Thursday representing an incredibly bad night for the Liberal Democrats but in York the result was not down to the complete evaporation of Liberal Democrat support. The ruling Liberal Democrats (only) lost 5,000 votes across the city, a similar figure to that dropped by the Conservatives. The other party to shed votes was the BNP whose support shrank by 70%.

Swing is a favourite statistic to work out and in order to calculate it you take the increase in votes from one party, add it to the fall of the other and divide it by two.

This means a swing to Labour from the Liberal Democrats of 8% with a similar figure for the swing to Labour from the Conservatives of 7.7%.

But there are some more nuances to what actually happened in the city. Although the Conservative party vote fell by 5,000 this is more connected to a reduction in candidates from 47 to 33. In 3 wards, which had contributed 3,724 votes in 2007 there was no Conservative candidate at all. Despite their share of the city’s vote falling to 22% their average vote per candidate increased to 994, more than any other party except Labour.

In contrast, the Green party’s significant improvement overall comes from their fielding an additional 15 candidates. In Clifton, for example, they tripled their candidates and secured an additional 10% of the vote (although their leading candidate only increased her votes by 33). But, apart from Skelton, Rawcliffe and Clifton Without (the neighbouring ward) where they picked up almost 12% more of the vote their performance across the city was fairly static with the average number of votes each candidate received falling by 74.

The Liberal Democrats don’t seem to have simply lost seats due to dissatisfaction with the national political picture. In Strensall, Haxby and Wheldrake they lost seats to their coalition partners (Christian Vassie’s loss of Wheldrake compounding a miserable 12 months in politics after last year’s general election when he was unable to dislodge Hugh Bayley).

So the convincing nature of Labour’s victory seems to be much more down to getting people to vote rather than seeing a massive drop in support for either the way the Liberal Democrats ran York or in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in Westminster. In 2007 the turnout was 41.8% (approx. 136,000 voters) but this year the extra 10,000 voters in a turnout of 44.7% seems to have made all the difference rather than disgruntled voters switching from one party to another. Edit: of course, I’d failed to think about the aggregating effect of wards where individuals got more than a single vote. The difference between 2007 and 2011 was actually closer to 4,500 voters.

Mind you, given that the majority of York wasn’t voting last Thursday I wonder whether any of these thoughts are in any way relevant.

If you want to pick over the data and point out any of the flaws in my data literacy there’s a spreadsheet on Google Docs.

I effectively spend 12 hours of every weekday on the way to, or at work. And I realised that I wasn’t happy with either the commute, or my role. I was summing myself up in two words – stagnant and lost.

But on the back of this evening I’m reclaiming myself and rejecting those words.

I’ve just got home from a prayer meeting where it became apparent that God was gently mocking me. Five things neatly coincide in a way that has reset my thinking.

1. Dave Burton

Our best man works for an amazing NGO in Bangladesh. This despite an MA research focus on Zimbabwe.

He lives in Dhaka. We visited him last Easter. I can say from first hand experience that it’s not a wonderful place. In fact, the Economist recently ranked it the second least desirable place to live in the world. Dave blogged about this on Tuesday.

Insofar as I have the right to talk about development anywhere, I can talk about it in Zimbabwe. One might expect, therefore, that rather than living in Dhaka right now, I could be living in Zimbabwe. In Harare in fact.

Which is the only city in the world ranked lower than Dhaka for liveability.

I feel the affectionate but raucous laughter of God at this point, and will remember it whenever I feel inclined to complain about the city he has sent me to.

If I’d have followed my own path, it would have led me to the only city in the world which is worse.

2a. Conversations

My church normally meets in York Revolutions’ new Rum bar Revolucion de Cuba on aWednesday evening but this week we split the sexes. The women stayed there and the men went to a proper pub with a theme for our discussions of ‘success’ (great tag team from Bomba and Dave using CVM’s excellent Codelife resources).

One of the things we were doing was talking about aspirations and I really struggled to vocalise mine. Out of character. Not good.

2b. Carl Haggerty

One of the reasons I’m such a fan of Twitter is the excellent people it connects you with. Carl is one of those excellent people and on Wednesday afternoon he posted ‘What motivates you, I mean really motivates you’ on his blog.

I didn’t see it until today but there was a significant overlap between what he wrote and some of the things Bomba and Dave had spoken about last night in terms of understanding our ambitions and our criteria for success in light of our faith. Good food for thought, especially if you’re thinking about the here and now let alone the future.

3. ‘praise God for placing us where we’re placed’

When I got to church I bumped into a couple of guys who were unfortunate enough to have me unload my word related head-space onto them (they asked the wrong questions). Poor them.

Sometimes there’s a disconnect in the life of a church between those involved with the ministry of the church and those of us who do jobs in the murky ‘secular’ world. Not tonight. Tonight there was a chunk of the evening devoted to us.

I wasn’t over the moon, I didn’t want to come home and dwell on how I felt about work if at all possible (and yet I’d had to do that on Wednesday as well).

We spent a chunk of time in personal prayer but I didn’t want to talk about it with God so my mind wandered. When we broke into small groups it was easier, praying for the needs of others people always is.

And that meant I was being prayed for too. Because prayer is effective, this is always dangerous. And it had an incredible effect. As much as I might want to do something else I am where I am. If I don’t celebrate that then I am on a hiding to nothing.

4. Restore

Homelessness is something that’s been on my heart for ages. Those men and women sat on the sides of our streets are often hurried past. Very rarely do people stop, make eye contact and treat them like actual people even if it is to say “no, I’m not going to give you any money”.

In the 8 years I’ve been in York I’ve got to know a few of the homeless community. Five years ago a friend of mine shared his dream for providing actual homes for the homeless, somewhere to call their own and supporting them relationally there.

He’s been working with the homeless since he left university and it’s five years later and now there’s a group of people from churches across York whose vision is to solve homelessness. There are 400 people on the at risk of or homeless. They’re going to buy houses and create homes for them. It’s an incredible goal. It’s the fulfilment of that dream.

It has required patience.

5. My words

And it was that word, patience, which leapt into my head as I sat rejoicing in their love for the unloved.

And I remembered a blog I’d written two years ago. It came almost from the same place as where I am at the moment! ‘Inertia, or the noble art of waiting on God‘ is long but seems to contain wisdom. Not a great deal has changed, I’m still would-be impetuous, I’m still torn between two places, I’m still frustrated to be so far removed from the public. But equally, I can’t fault my conclusions from then…

I can’t hack it sometimes. I fear that all this explaining away of waiting is simply an excuse for inertia, a reason not to do something, a justification for prayer not action yet all the time the world is crying out to know its Saviour. I worry that I’ll wind up in 50 years having sat on the sidelines taking each experience and ‘learning’ from it but completely missing the point in what God is saying.

But maybe that’s what waiting for God is all about. Moses had to be well and truly broken before he was blessed; Abraham was an old man but God told him he’d father a great nation beloved of the Lord; Joseph had a dream as a boy but it wasn’t for years and years that it was fulfilled.

I’ve realised something as I’ve written this. I’ve thought of this as inertia, and that really means I don’t trust God to come through for me. It means I reckon things are slipping away without my control and that surely, something different to this would serve Him better. Waiting on God means that you know that God knows best. It means that you trust him to take you by the hand because he knows where you’re going. He’s drawn the map, and he’s not going to fast track you along shortcuts because he knows the snickleways. The journey might be slower but taking that route is much more enriching.

Kick back, enjoy, I’ve got all of eternity with Him, for now Lord grant me patience to wait on you, to seek you and to serve you where I am.

It’s very annoying when God uses your younger self to give you a kick up the arse.

Words are powerful, I used the words stagnant and lost. I bought into that. That was a stupid thing to do. I am neither of those things.

Now, this evening didn’t change my working circumstances. It hasn’t answered the question of whether I could be more effective doing something else somewhere else. It hasn’t grappled with the ridiculous and expensive commutes in opposite directions Christine and I are about to start.

I might think it’s time for a new challenge, I certainly did earlier this week but I’m going to be confident in letting go and letting God be in control. I might have lost sight of what I knew 2 years ago but hopefully this time it will stick.

It’s good to be back seeing the blue skies and not the clouds. What’s next? Bring it on.

Photo by Hungarian Snow

Twitter is still evolving but thus far nobody seems to have come up with a clever way of combining the thread of a discussion on Twitter with contributions from elsewhere.

It’s something that has come up in looking after Vital Bradford. I’ve found Twitter an excellent companion to supporting my football club and there’s a very active community with considered opinion and not the sort of stupidity that can plague footballing message boards.

One of the reasons it’s a pleasure is the way you can capture a sense of the match in real-time from all corners of the ground. But even though we are the most followed #bcafc account it’s only a fraction of those who might be interested.

Whatever the subject matter we need to be careful that the coverage of any event doesn’t get stuck inside Twitter. Your updates can get missed by your followers so it’s good to keep them on record somewhere. But it’s actually quite hard to record and curate a specific time-bound period of activity, especially if it involves many voices.

To try and overcome that I’ve used match specific hashtags (#bcvxx when we’re at home and #xxvbc when we’re away) and have then embedded a twitter feed into pages on the site. And to that I’ve added What the Hashtag to build archives of those transcripts.

But it’s a bit clunky and it can be temperamental but most significantly it doesn’t provide a very good way of inviting those who aren’t tweeting to participate or to follow up a thread of discussion later on.

It’s a problem that hashtags struggle with. Whilst you can broadcast an already completed conversation or push self-contained discrete messages elsewhere there’s no magic solution for opening up discussions taking place on Twitter to people who don’t tweet.

Cover it Live does mash together external comments with tweets, can be recorded and then played back later. I think the p2 WordPress theme can probably solve this conundrum but my tinkering got swamped with retweets and didn’t keep responses threaded together.

Photo by yakanama

Maybe Storify can help bridge the gap? I saw it being used somewhere, it piqued my interest so I followed the links, entered my contact details and waited patiently for my invite to arrive. It did earlier today and I’m definitely intrigued by what’s on offer.

You’re able to call up content from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, other Storify stories, Google searches, RSS feeds, Delicious bookmarks, and specific URLs before dragging and dropping the most relevant into your story’s timeline. Once you’ve grouped different elements from different places you can add free text for context and comment.

It has a lot of potential for collecting the many voices talking about a particular issue. It’s given me something to chew over about in relation to covering football matches. I can see it as a great way of summarising an evening spent at @stmikesyork or @cnvrstns. I’m also pretty sure it’s a worthwhile addition to local government’s armoury.

On that final note it was #lgovsm today. I wasn’t able to participate so needed to catch up and thought I’d see what Storify might make of it. The experience of using it was a breeze. Fast, simple, effective. I could filter out retweets and quickly remove anything non-essential tweets. It’s made for a nice, clean transcript embedded below.

What do you think? Has Storify got legs? If it has, how would you use it? If it hasn’t is there something better?

It’s a mighty peculiar way of developing your staff but local authorities are reluctant to not attend the conferences.

After all what if something is missed?

And more importantly how else will this good practice get spread and learning take place?

I think I was musing about what I’d do for my dissertation when I first hunted for conversations about the internet, public services and democracy. I’m pretty sure that’s how I stumbled upon Liz Azyan’s Twitterati.

A little knowledge is definitely a dangerous thing.

Without that little bit of knowledge the last 18 months would have looked quite different. I’m once again reminded of my good fortune in coming across the digital community of people who are passionate about the nature of public services and the shape of democracy. They’re a diverse bunch who think and scheme but, crucially, they’re also doing and teaching; collaborating and sharing.

And my experience from that suggests that a lot of what you’d achieve by paying to attend a conference can take place at your desk (although, as I have never been to a paid conference I can’t present a balanced judgement, you’ll have to account for my bias).

So, 4 things about which I could wax lyrical but for now I’ll try to be brief.

Communities of Practice probably exist across different professions but for the public sector LGID’s platform is very effective at supporting different groups of people with blogs, forums and wikis. It has lots of useful information held within it and in evolving into the Knowledge Hub it sounds like it will become an even more powerful tool for the public sector.

Twitter is powerful, really powerful, when it comes to sharing information and building knowledge. It’s a melting pot of ideas and discussions. You can throw out a question and get a response, make a request and someone can meet it, ask for advice and have plenty offered.

It’s also a wonderful means for connecting with people in a very gradual way. You can find out who they really are and that makes for far less fear when it comes to the dreaded networking (if you don’t like that sort of thing).

I’ve had regular interaction with a lot of people who I’ve met in real life less than 3 times. And many of those have contributed massively to my learning and development.

There’s clearly something about these digital relationships because they have a nasty habit of breaking into the real world. It can happen quite informally but sometimes they also take place with more purpose. Outwardly they might look like conferences – lots of people together in one place around a common theme. On the inside, an unconference is a very different beast.

'The Programme' by London Looks (@ingridk)

They’re free, paid for by sponsors who are given profile but don’t get wall to wall dominance of subject matter, sessions or planning. And that’s because the breadth and variety of content is dictated and contributed by those who attend. Sponsors get the chance to show their wares, there may be polished presentations from people who feature at expensive conferences but they’re just as likely to be juxtaposed next to discussions kicked off by ‘nobodies’ who have a question and want to get to the bottom of it.

But it’s impossible to listen to everything and capture everything. And we return to WeLoveLocalGov’s question – we have to attend because what happens if we miss something? And how do we disseminate what’s learnt afterwards?

It’s all very well for discussions and presentations to happen in person and face to face. It’s great that we can share tweets about ideas and questions. It’s great to see conversations taking place on the Communities of Practice that are kicked off by someone blogging about it. But there’s a danger it gets stuck in conversations or kept in a walled garden. Often it does break out into the real world, and when it does, that’s how we can help to make sure it doesn’t get missed and that good practice is shared.

Blogging

That’s the fourth thing.

I am so impressed by the government focused blogosphere.  They put their thoughts online so it’s all findable. They’re enabling us to join the dots, to see both trees and wood and to take their work as inspiration for our own activity. They share their slides, their notes, their pictures, their videos, their ideas and as they distill issues and suggest solutions they kick off great discussions and debates.

And eating up the good stuff people write is important.

The thing is that I know I’m just consuming the efforts of others. In fact, making sure knowledge is captured, brilliance shared and questions asked is a responsibility for us all. It falls to those who go to events, it falls to those with ideas, it falls to those with stories to tell and it also falls to those who lurk and jealously watch the bright lights of activity waiting to half-inch them and put them into play.

I can say that I’m good with 75% of this post. But I want to write more. Because it can pull these individual parts together. When I read WeLoveLocalGov’s post it might have been guilt that drove me to write because I knew I’d failed to do so since UKGovCamp, and the sessions I went to are worth writing about.

Time to start contributing.