Today I was talking to several friends who have been, or are, involved in BSF (Building Schools for the Future) programme.  For anyone who’s missed the news the last few days, this was the former Labour Government’s plan to re-build every secondary school in the country, which has been put on hold and looks to be scrapped by the incoming Conservative-Lib Dem coalition.  This isn’t the first building programme cut either – we recently saw funding for a wellbeing centre in Leeds being axed and, during the Labour administration, we saw various college new build programmes cancelled.

This isn’t a political blog, so I don’t intend to comment on the politics of it all.  However, one thing is clear.  Whether your politics is that we need to save money and the cuts are justified or that this is a ideological attack on public education, you have to accept that we’re in a new place where throwing money at problems will not be tolerated and, for the foreseeable future, expensive building programmes are a thing of the past.

When BSF started is was kind of linked in with the whole extended school thing, a project for getting schools to be part of the community.  Indeed, the first rebuild I ever saw was designed to be not just a school, but a community hub.  So, with wellbeing centres, libraries and now schools facing the chop, where does this leave the community?

Well, in a move that will upset critics of the government and friends in the construction industry, I think it leaves it in a place where it can try something new.  Something that’s not been done before.  Something that doesn’t involve the buildings.

There are two stories I need to add in here.  One is one I often reference from a former colleague in community development who told me: “Why am I trying to build a community centre for a geographic community, when that community doesn’t exist any more?”  The second is more recent.  Social media marketing legend Chris Brogan told a recent conference I helped organise: “The difference between a community and an audience is which way the chairs are facing.”

These two adages are linked.  Firstly, because the idea of having community hubs, schools and community centres are very geographically based – they serve a community that is made up of where they happen to live rather than based on their needs, interests or what they have in common.  Secondly, because all of these geographically placed buildings assume a top down approach – a committee, a council or a management team running the building for an audience.  What if the chairs are turned, and the community take control?  What is the old school buildings don’t need to be replaced, because the classroom of the future isn’t a building?

I’ve long argued a concept I call “us, the classroom”.  I base this on the fact that learning takes place all the time amongst young people, chiefly through their collecting, editing, selecting, publishing and evaluating information through social networking.  I argue that, if young people are naturally using this method of learning, why do we ban that method from the classroom?  The real classroom, I’ve declared, is wherever and whenever the learner is.  It isn’t about giving the learner “ownership” because the learner, and the learner alone, owns that space already  So, let’s take this a step further.  Let’s look at this not in terms of the pedagogy but instead in the terms of the learning space.  Is the greatest space the personal space the learner occupies, rather than the building around them?  Open this wider.  Move away from traditional schools and look at extended schools.  Community Space.  Why are we consulting people on one, two or even three options?  Why are we insisting we need to build and construct space?  Some of the greatest spaces are online.  They are shaped, designed, maintained and developed by the users themselves.  Can we learn from this virtual idea and take it back into the real world?

I’m not a community designer, so I probably can’t answer that question.  But I was cheered recently to hear of a graduate whose landscape architecture project went along these lines.  It looked at concepts like gorilla gardening to get the community designing their own space.   Maybe, if we can take those ideas from the landscape designers, take the classroom theories from online learning and the community concept from Chris Brogan we can find some really innovative ways to move education forward – and really build ourselves some schools for the future.

Me and Ken were certain from the start that we wanted certain things from this event.  We chose a Saturday so that people who can’t blag innovation through their job role could come.  We wanted the involvement of senior management and frontline staff.  We wanted involvement from elected members.  Sadly, we failed a little on point 2 (more on that later).  However, the Saturday worked wonders and we had just under 80 people meet at York’s National Railway Museum, including a number of elected members who attended a parallel session facilitated by Cllr Tim Cheetham (Barnsley) and Cllr Simon Cooke (Bradford).  I certainly felt that the attendence of so many elected members really enriched the debate and the audience.  It was nice to break away from a techie/comms event and get more input.

This event’s timing was crucial.  The first LocalGovCamp since the election, we knew about the cuts and efficiency drives that lie ahead.  Innovation isn’t just something that will happen now.  It’s something that has to happen.

I’m not going to try and summarise everything that happened on the day.  There’s plenty about it on the website and we’ll be adding a lot more very soon.  You can also check out Dave Briggs summary here.  I think I’ll keep this blog the way I like it and make it all about me.

I ran two sessions on the day.  The first, run with Al Smith and Ben Proctor, looked at emergency planning and the role of social media in this.  Ben has some background in the emergency planning process and Al led a similar workshop at UKGovCamp, so we were off to a good start.  We didn’t just talk about social media – we spoke about the role innovation could have in mapping resources, mapping crisis points and giving staff the opportunity to work from home.  The conclusions were that emergency planning chiefs really need to take the role of social media more seriously – a hard challenge when so many heads of communications and chief executives seem to ignore it, or treat it as a novelty comms issue.

I thought this workshop would be the bright one of the day.  However, I never expected my session on “Just a game?  Do social and geo-dependant games have an impact in local authorities”  I based it on my recent blog post and the response I’d received from it.  The workshop was very popular and the discussions from it spilled over into the after event drinks and then into the twittersphere.  It’s clear that this is a can of worms that’s been opened and that gaming can, and is, having an impact on local authority activity.  Additionally, there was talk of developing gaming content for local government engagement processes.   However, progress was hampered.  Firstly, there were concerns expressed about security in some games and, more importantly, the perceived security risks that many council gatekeepers might have in allowing their implementation.  The final point was asking how we could expect council chiefs to take games seriously when they don’t even really take social media seriously.

See the theme here?  I was disappointed that we hadn’t managed to get the chief execs and directors we hoped for along – it’s their drives that shape the organisation.  I was also disappointed that we didn’t have many frontline workers there – the people who can tell you what works and what doesn’t on the ground.  Social media, social gaming, innovation, mobile devices, mobile working and new models of communication simply have to be taken more seriously, not just be enthusiasts, but by the people that really matter.

We’re already looking at how we can put our heads together to plan the next move.  Its clear that, in Yorkshire & Humber and beyond, there are real issues and that the debate is starting to move forward.  However, as the situation becomes urgent, the debate needs to reach the senior areas of local authorities.

I’d be interested to know ideas people might have of how we move this forward – post them here, on the LGCYH website or in any other place you think people look.  The key message for me is this:  Look what we can achieve working together.  Now let’s widen that net so that everyone can get involved.

One of my gripes with e-safety policies is that they often only look at e-safety from the safeguarding side of things.  Obviously, this is by far the most important area, however corporate reputation and liability is another angle which is often ignored.  So, you might expect that I was fairly excited to hear this week that a school for the 11 – 19 age group had put in place such a policy.  However, I’m afraid I wasn’t.

The school, which I’ve decided not to name (for reasons that will become apparent), has decided to tackle the issue of videos of teachers in school head on.  Its publicly accessible policy states that anyone posting comments or videos on public websites that show bullying of staff or harm the school’s reputation might be expelled.

Initially, this seems like a good idea.  However, the bit that had me worried was the whole “anything that may harm the schools reputation” bit.  See, I remember that, when working for the council, we had a clause in our contract that we would “not bring the council into disrepute”.  This kind of clause is vital for public sector workers to protect impartiality and confidentiality of public records and integrity, but it is also a get-out-clause that allows someone to be disciplined or sacked for anything that can be deemed “harming” the reputation.  For example, while council officers not on a politically restricted scale are technically free to express their political beliefs, it would be very easy to argue that political beliefs, in particular controversial ones, harm the council.  Thus, arguably, this clause prevents any political discussion by council staff.  I’ve certainly known of cases where union activity was interpreted in this way.  The same could be true of the clause in this school’s safety policy.   The only way to be sure you don’t harm the schools reputation is not to talk about it at all.

A further rule, again issued in the spirit of e-safety, requires all students to sign a “contract” which includes a clause about not identifying that they attend this school on any postings they submit.

Again, it is simple common sense that giving out your school details could breach your security and I’m not arguing in any way that these policies should not be in place.  However, they become far more worrying when you actually see how students are instructed on or interpret them.  One told me that they are not allowed to discuss anything relating to the school, at all, on any social network.  Clearly, the implication of this policy is that the school is not mentioned on social networking sites.  Indeed, a quick scan with Google shows that it’s worked.  There are no identifiable groups set up by students.  However, there are several set up by former students, one of which calls the school “prison-like” and “draconian” amongst many other things.  How can students make use of technology to communicate effectively if they cannot use it to discuss the issues that matter to them?

So, you may be wondering, where is my gripe?  I’ve said that e-safety policies should be taking reputation into account and this one does.  I’ve said that it’s silly to open yourself too much online and this policy prevents that.  Well, my gribe came to me this week as I was looking at a new project that a friend of mine was involved in.  It’s called “The nation thinks”, is part of Crowdworks and is a new forum for political discussions around the forthcoming budget, encouraging users to submit their ideas.

Obviously, this will spurn a lot of political debate.  Useful political debate.  The kind that we want to see more, not less, of.  However, as I registered, I found myself wondering how many people would be put off by clauses in their contracts, vague wording in policies and rules presented as safety being interpreted and enforced as draconian?  In a world where our schools have policies like this and many of our public networks have even stricter ones, where is the room for free debate?

I, and probably most of the readers of this blog, will have argued for some time that the solution in terms of infrastructure is not to lock down systems but to foster awareness of safe and proper practice.  The same is true in terms of reputation.  We need to have a world where we can freely discuss, without worrying about whether we will get into trouble for what we say.  That means policies that are flexible, but make clear what is and isn’t acceptable, rather than simply relying on interpretation.  We need to educate and inform users about the good practice of discussion and debate, the laws of libel and the consequences of sticking your neck out.  But at no point, surly, should we be telling people that they cannot talk about their time at school, or work in any way without fear of disciplinary action?  If we continue on this route, we’ll have a very safe world….but not a world of active citizens.  We might then all be sorry….but we won’t want to say anything about it.

Part of my dislike for this is born from the fact that I love that social networking gives us the chance to share real things with real people and these “social games” seem to trivialise so much of that. Maybe I take life a bit too seriously.

So, when I first saw FourSquare I dismissed it as a game. The network involved gaining points, claiming prizes…it all sounded a bit trivial to me. However, I noticed more and more people using it. Suddenly it seemed like I was the only social media geek not on it, so I thought I’d better give it a try.  What’s more it’s soaring in popularity.  According to the founders, it had 175,000 users last December and, say the LA Times, it has just under 1million users as of last month.  That’s growth on a curve that’s close to the one Twitter had in its early days and only a few 100,000 less (that’s just a drop in the ocean) than facebook had back in the day.

FourSquare is a social game and geo-located service for mobile devices.   When you go somewhere, you use your phone to pinpoint your location and a list of nearby places, such as the park, are shown. You can then “check in” to these places. Once there you can add tips about the places for your other friends (or the wider public) to see. If you go to one place more than anyone else (and at least five times) you become “the mayor” of that location. You collect points for the distances you travel, the new places you add, etc and get trophies. So, how is this different from farmville?

Well, firstly it’s about real places. The next addition is that you can “shout” from locations (basically, tweet, about what you’re doing) which is handy if your friends are there as well and you want to meet up. Thirdly, FourSquare tell us, businesses such as cafés are starting to offer “mayor deals” where to mayor of their café gets a discount.

So, armed with my iPhone and new FourSquare app, I started checking in everywhere I went.  I noticed that many businesses, such as local cinemas, had a presence on there already.  Councils, meanwhile, had none.  I’m not suggesting that people would want to check in with their council.  But they might at their libraries, sports centres, community venues and theatres.  Many of these venues have already been added on FourSquare – but without the council having any kind of control, branding or any other association with it.   They are missing a trick.

Maybe it’s not suprising that council’s aren’t looking at social games like FourSquare.  After all, many are still struggling with Facebook and Twitter.  However, we can see from social games popularity that they are here to stay and the popular ones may well become the household names that facebook and twitter have become.

What this teaches us is that social media strategies need to be built to change.  In 2006, I’d have told you the we needed MySpace strategies.  a few years later we were talking about Facebook, Twitter and social bookmarking.  Just a few months ago, I would have dissmissed social games as being just that  – games that had no community benefit.  Today, maybe we should be thinking about their impact however, along with geo-located services and augmented reality.

In summary, strategists need to be looking beyond the individual tools and looking at the wider vision – how can local authorities keep on top of social media practice and react to new apps and programmes. Are these kind of applications the next big thing for people….or really, are they all just a trivial game?

I’ve known David Wright MP for many years.  I’ve met him in a professional capacity as well as in a personal capacity, having lived and worked in the Telford area for many years.  As someone who is vocal on local and national issues, I’ve often approached David and always found him to be a responsive MP.  By and large I’ve agreed with him or seen his point and he’s always struck me as honest, so when he says his twitter account was hacked when the message was posted, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.  I should point out here, by way of a disclaimer, that I’m not connected to any political party nor am I endorsing that people vote for David….I’m simply putting forward my opinion as a former constituent.

My worries about the story were confirmed when I tuned into the media today and realised that the anti-twitter stories that seem to fill the media daily had reached the political stage.  David’s comment, be it a misjudged throwaway comment or malicious hack, had thrown him into the political spotlight and, with it, the use of twitter by politicians trying to engage our interest.

Local BBC radio was quick to pick up the story and keen tweeter Jim Hawkins did a fascinating phone in show about the use of Twitter by politicians.  It kicked off with an interview with Steve Molyneux (@profontheprowl), a fellow social media buff and learning technologist, who has seen the dark side of Twitter himself.   Steve rightly pointed to the dangers of making sure your social media site isn’t compromised.  He also questioned, however, the use Twitter is as an engagement tool for politicians.  More on this point later.  A later  caller summed up my feelings sting: “it isn’t Twitter that’s at fault here – it’s how people use it.”  Another few stated that twitter was simply a “trendy” tool of the moment and that they would “rather see their MP” than hear them on Twitter.  Meanwhile, Conservative HQ, keen to defend themselves against the comments, claimed that: “This is exactly the sort of politics that voters are so sick of”.

What I wondered, looking at all that, was whether this was the sort of politics people were sick of, or whether people were also sick of the politics where a throwaway comment gets blown out of all proportion.  Anyone who reads David Wright’s tweets can be in no doubt of his dislike of the Conservative party.  No one takes issue with this.  He is, after all, a Labour politician.  Even if he had posted his controversial “scum sucking pig” comment, it would not have shown him as a hypocrite, nor devalued his opinion on any policy.  It may have shown him to be juvenile but, if the British public are so sick of juvenile comments, why is it that we crave the controversial guests on Question Time and why is it that Jeremy Kyle still gets such high viewing figures?   Actually, in terms of the latter, why is that?

My worry here is that there are a large group of people who do not engage with mainstream politics but do engage with social media could be engaged in the political process through the use of Twitter.  David claims to be and, to my knowledge is, the only Shropshire MP using Twitter.  Even his critics were quick to congratulate him on using Twitter on Jim’s radio show.  But maybe, as that caller had said, it was how he used it.  Politicians need to maintain some decorum on twitter.

Problem is, when I was recently asked what one piece of advice I’d give to someone starting out their brand in social media, I said: “Think of your brand as a person – a social media account that does not have personality is worse than none at all.”  So, how do you justify this if you can’t make the odd throw-away comment?  After all, we all do this, all the time.

I’m not sure what the answer is, however I do know that, in a world where people are getting on social media, comments will come back to haunt people.  Sometimes, rightly, when they expose that person as someone who is not being honest.  However, when they simply go a bit over the top, I think we should simply demand, and accept, an apology.  If politics becomes about who said what to whom and when, in a world of social media, it will descend into a farce and the tweeters and facebookers, like their “real life” cousins, will join the apathy club.  Maybe I’m not the normal mainstream.  But I want my politicians online.  I want them to make mistakes.  I want them to be human.

It’s taken a long time for a lot of the smaller charities and community groups to cotton on to these ideas, and a few still haven’t. However, it’s at this point that social media comes into play.

Social Media is a branding exercise. Brand has stopped being something that is the domain of the multi national. It’s stopped being the tools of large organisations. It’s even stopped being a sidethought by grassroots campaigners. Brand is now truely in the domain of the individual.  Even the most open facebook user needs to recognise that they are not really sharing everything about themselves – they are sharing select information with the intention of influencing people and affecting how they are perceived.  Like the great multi-nationals, logos, reputation and crisis management are needed.  The logo is the facebook profile picture, the reputation is the groups you join, the photos you comment on or the wall posts you make and crisis management is what you do when someone posts a negative comment on your photos.

I’ve experienced personal brand myself.  At various meetings of the past six months, I’ve found people don’t know me or who I am, but do follow and know about “kevupnorth” (my twitter name).  So, kevupnorth is a user that is known beyond Kevin Campbell-Wright, someone who has his own reputation and on whom people have made their own judgements.  I can’t help but wonder, if I put particular effort into it, whether I could build up a totally inaccurate portrait of kevupnorth, or manipulate his reputation without effecting my own.

The problem is that brand management has been a skill used for decades (or possibly centuries) by incredibly clever operators who we now call “spin doctors”.  It has been honed by exchanges of practice and education.  Yet now, everyone needs to have these skills to make good use of their social networking presence.

To bring this back round to the point of this blog, how is this relevant for communities?  One of the questions in the discussion today was whether I felt every brand would one day be represented via social media.  While I said that they would, I also emphasised that brands would change.  In a world where we are all brands ourselves, it will stand to reason that every community group, every community activist and even every community problem and challenge will be a brand, which will require its own ideas around reputation management, key messages, logos and PR.   If we’re going to tackle digital literacy seriously and support communities in acheiving what they want to, we need to do more than just teach them how and why to use the net and tools for safe usage.  We have to allow them to develop their brand – and give them the skills to manage it.

There were lots of sessions on lots of topics and I can’t even begin to cover every thought and idea that passed my way.  The best thing to do it read the Twitter stream and see all the hundreds of comments.  There were lots of people to meet too, some people who I knew from Twitter and some new faces too.  I won’t list them all, partly because I can’t remember them all and partly because I want to get to the core of this blog post.

My running theme for this GovCamp was, unintentionally, the three Cs:  Community, Crisis and Communications.

Alastair Smith ran a really productive session around social media and the response to the recent snow.  The conversation strayed off into emergency planning as a whole and the role of local and national government alongside the role of media and volunteers.  There were some great stories of how local government had responded using social media, how local government had rallied volunteers and how the media had used council social sites like Twitter to gather information.  Despite a general feeling in the hierarchy of many local government bodies that social media is something for the kids, the snow showed huge hit counts of web media.  One posting even reported 21,000 hits.

However, these great stories were also diluted with the inevitable ones around social media failing during the snow.  There were calls for a greater consistency in the way councils used things like twitter – for example using a #schoolclosure hashtag nationally, so that media organisations could follow everything (which SkyNews did).

In terms of planning for future emergencies,  there was a definite consensus that web officers, ICT professionals, comms officers and emergency planning officers need to work together more to plan for these eventualities.  Somehow a 24/7 approach needs to be agreed.  Other questions raised were:

• What is an emergency – what defines a time when it’s ok to get the boss out of bed to get a tweet?
• How do press staff respond – are press releases the way forward, or is a twitterfeed more useful?
• How does the organisation respond – some schools give their closures to the BBC, not the council PR team
• How does the comms team work with the emergency services, roadwatch and other external agencies around this?
• How is web content updated?  Can key staff access the CMS from home to make web updates?  How do they plan for Twitter or Facebook crashing under increased demand of a major emergency?
• Most importantly, how do they respond to customers?  Obviously emergency queries could be answered online, but is it over the top to assume a 24/7 conversation can take place?  What if someone replies to a school closure with “well that school would close, it’s rubbish”.  How do comms staff avoid engaging in debate?  Should they avoid engaging in debate?

Following on from this nicely, I went to Eve Shuttleworth’s session around how journalism is changing and, more to the point, how comms should relate to the media via social media.  There was strong feeling that video and youtube type content submitted with press releases needed to be in keeping with the spirit of the medium.  There was little point making corporate videos for YouTube.  A lot of doubt was raised that content like this would be used at all, especially as many media bodies won’t use content developed by a council because it’s weighted.  Jim Hawkin’s, from BBC Radio Shropshire, joined in the debate via twitter, suggesting that media releases should remain as text and that actually linking to other content was largely irrelevant – it was a quick, accurate and simple product that journalists wanted.  Despite this, one local newspaper had already agreed that they would take YouTube content for their website.

The final session, run by Robin Grant, looked at how we use the data we can get for consultation.  There were lots of methods suggested and ways of analysing the results were also debated.  My favourite, though, was the feeling that consultation could be crowd sourced, ie that, as part of a formal conversation, we should be tapping into where peopel are talking about the issue already.

I’ll finish this post on a note that really summarised the day.  The first session I attended was a “Local Authority Group Hug”, just a session to catch up where local government was in terms of technology.  There was a real mix form the very innovative to those with complete lockdowns.  The session was facilitated by someone I won’t name, who had come unofficially.  Social media wasn’t recognised in their organisation.  Innovation wasn’t  encouraged.  But that didn’t matter, because staff came from all over the country to see how they could make the change in their organisation.  How they could innovate past the barriers.  It’s that passion for the future that really makes UK Gov Camp.  I’ll certainly be booking my ticket for next year.

There are many arguments for and against having these restrictions and I don’t really want to open the vast can of worms that those debates would involve.  Additionally, I don’t want to go over the whole “your employer, the council, might search for you on google” debate, which has been done to death.  However, having read a recent article re-posted on Twitter by community development consultant Mike Chitty, I did have to think about how this could apply to social media.

The article, from Montana in the United States, revolves around a City Council asking job applicants to submit usernames and passwords for all their social media sites as part of the job application.  They’ve taken legal advice on this and apparently they can do this.

This is an extreme example of councils probing into people’s private lives.   The legal implications of asking people for passwords which, as the article points out, they are bound not to give you by the terms of service, probably means this won’t go any further.  However, I doubt it’s the end of the social media fit for office debate.

Currently, most public bodies I’ve experienced ask you, on application, for the following information:

• To declare any criminal charges or, if relevant, any accusations that have been made against you
• Submit to a CRB Disclosure (police check)
• To declare (and normally to cease) any business interests you have
• To declare any membership organisation you belong to (such as the freemasons)
• To declare (and if applicable cease) any political office you may be involved in

So, would it be that surprising if they started asking you for lists of your online presence?  Do you have a website, are you a member of facebook , what does your LinkedIn history say about you?

There’s always that argument that if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to hide, but the fit for office argument gets tricky here.  What if you’re a member of the facebook group  “I was born in the UK so why don’t I have as many rights as immigrants“.  To some, this is a legitimate, humanitarian debate.  To others it is a political, right wing, cause.  To others still it is an unfounded, racist and prejudicial statement.   If you went to a physical rally around this subject it would be quite easy to determine if it was political or not, based on who had organised it.  You’d be able to judge the tone of the rally and decide if your presence brought the council into disrepute.   However, on a facebook group it isn’t quite so simple.

The standards board ruled some time ago that a politician who posted arguably racist comments on a facebook page had not violated standards because it was a personal account.  So where does this leave public bodies?

Looking back at the guidance from Darlington Council, I note that even politically restricted persons can display a political badge on their person or vehicle…so what about on their facebook account?  What if they also conduct some council business over facebook?

The answers to this, sadly, are policy and guidance.  Applicants, staff and political members need to be clear about what they can and can’t do politically via social media – otherwise we’ll end up with job application forms asking the questions that they do in Montana.

So, I’ve put a list here together of all the posts I’ve found on the subject, so that this can be a one-stop-shop for cases studies about technology could, or did, help the public sector respond to the recent snow “crisis”.

The list is a bit small – please, send me links to yours (tweet them to @kevupnorth) or leave them in the comments section

My recent post on social media in a crisis, my guest post on NOMAD about mobile working in the snow , a round-up of the snow discussion at UKGovCamp on and older posts on snow and emergency planning

John Popham from DIGITAL 2020 on how the internet could be used through twitter or learning platforms

Tim Hobbs, director of Bartec on how Twitter can get the word out in the snow

Dave Sugden from Village E-Learning on how the education sector could prepare for snow days

Donald Clark from UFI LearnDirect on the problems of closing schools (personal blog, not technology related)

James Clay on closing schools – should it matter – and when will we learn?

Ingrid Koehler from IDeA on examples of how councils used social media in the snow

Sarah Lay on how local gov snow-sites were not just accessed via the PC, or even the iPhone

Not too long ago I did a post about how Twitter and other social media being used in emergency situations.  Now, I don’t claim that millions of people in local government read this blog, let alone act on it, but very few people could have failed to notice the phenomenal rise in social media this year – and local government, along with the media, now think they are on board.

The first problem is that social media is a 24/7 media.  It doesn’t just work within working hours.  The second is that social media is not simply a new hi-tech version of old media.  Both of these problems were highlighted over the first weekend of 2010 and in the week that’s followed.

Firstly, a week ago, when a huge gas explosion ripped through a shop and flats in central Shrewsbury.  Like most news these days, I found out through social media, or facebook to be exact, when a friend living nearby changed his status to “WTF WAS THAT????  It sounded like a bomb”.  The media was on board too, with BBC Radio Shropshire and their presenter Jim Hawkins, amongst others, using Twitter to keep people informed of the situation.  The council’s Theatre Severn also made good use of Twitter, explaining the cancellation of the closing night pantomimes and the injury of one of the cast members in the explosion.  However, the main local authority twitter feed remained silent, a single Tweet from Friday warning people to avoid a bad batch of chick peas.

Meanwhile the people of Shropshire, or certainly those I follow on Twitter and Facebook, began talking about the story.  Photos started appearing and the BBC snapped them up and put them on its site.  Citizen Journalists fed out the story.  However, there was an issue.

Citizen Journalists, unlike their professional cousins, do not always filter news based on fact.  Rumours of deaths and exaggeration of facts spread quickly.  Luckily, the BBC provided sanity in this conversation, however the local authority, whose buildings were damaged, whose roads were closed, whose citizens needed reassurance, remained silent.  Wy have a twitter feed if you don’t want to join the conversation?  This isn’t an argument AGAINST local authorities using Twitter – it’s an example of why they need to think about how they use it and use it effectively.

That was the end of that story, but it wasn’t the end of my week of local authority let-downs.  Over the following weeks the snow really took hold and I was surprised to see how badly twitter and facebook were used by local government to put out information.

There are lots of issues around technology and snow, I’ve outlined them before and Digital 2020′s John Popham has also done an excellent post on the subject, so I won’t repeat it.  However, there were some points raised that do require further commentary.

John refers to mobile working practices being a solution to the snow.  It’s true that this would have alleviated many businesses problems and, as someone who is able to work flexibly, I was able to carry on close to normal working from home.  I say close to normal because mobile working is currently a fledgling idea and, in the way local authorities have often jumped into social media without a strategy some organisations have used the snow to do the same with mobile working.  We work from all locations and are used to it, but people who are used to the social banter and processes of the office can’t simply be told to work from home…it’s a major culture change that, while productive in many cases, can be damning if implemented without thought.  That’s not an argument against it, and, like John, I think a link to project nomad is needed to show where that thought and planning is taking place.

John also mentions being irritated by “heroic” attempts to get to work.  While I’d agree that it is always stupid to put lives at risk and that many people try to get to work when they don’t need to, I think that many people could easily have got to work if they tried.  This would have kept the systems of this country running better and meant the snow was far less of an “emergency”.  I went to work on the days I could and was very grateful to social media for keeping me informed about bus and train delays and closures.  Social media from other commuters and West Yorkshire Metro, I should add, not my local Bradford Council.

However, elsewhere, parents were panicking about whether their schools were open.   They weren’t as lucky in terms of social media help.  Back in Shropshire a local independent radio station got some school closures wrong and facebook was full of discussions and questions.  A conversation among citizens where everyone participated, except the local authority. Luckily, some inspiration was at hand in the form of Kirklees Council, whose Twitter feed (@kirkleeswinter) kept people informed about school closures and gritting and, in a pretty innovative approach for local authority Twitter, actually interacted and responded to questions citizens posed.  A great example, which I hope they’ll follow with a KirkleesEmergency so people can follow it for any crisis.

There will be sceptics reading this who wonder whether this is just the voice of geek, telling local authorities how communities work when really no one is reading social media.  To that end, I’ll put up this that I noticed on facebook from family in The Wirral.  I’ve blanked out the names and schools, but this gist is clear.  A teacher walked round the estate to tell parents when the school was open.  Why, one the parents enquires, couldn’t they have just put it on facebook?  Why indeed.