Since I became converted to WordPress a couple of years ago, finding it easier to build new websites with it than using the Windows / .asp / vbscript-based content management system I’d actually lovingly handcrafted myself from scratch five or six years ago, I’ve never ceased to be amazed by its power and versatility – power and versatility which has only increased during the last two years, and for me increased exponentially since I learned how to create my own themes (and most recently, started learning how to create plugins).

I’ve persuaded Birmingham to use WordPress in-house for our own microsites (with apologies to my friends in the local multimedia agency community…) with reasonably successful results – our weather disruption site helped us keep people informed during the bad weather (though I’m still narked that you-know-what failed to notice it when they did their annual survey…), and our commercial property management division is now using a WordPress-based site in order to try to shift its offices and shops to let (sorry, I know the ‘browse properties’ menu has its usability faults – I’m planning on trying to fix that next week!). Our Birmingham Newsroom website has been so successful it’s won awards – real ones! Other councils (Lincoln and Shropshire councils were in the room represented, and the inspirational Staffordshire Hoard website is also running WordPress) have also used WordPress for microsites, for its flexibility, speed of deployment, and agility.

But could WordPress run an entire council website, with thousands of pages of content using a devolved authorship and publishing model of a community of a couple hundred web editors?

Regardless of what you might think of the content strategy of such a website, it’s a question which would need resolving before any council webteam or IT infrastructure team could remotely seriously contemplate taking such a bold leap. The obvious answer of ‘well wordpress.com runs off one single instance of the same WordPress multisite that you install yourself at home’ doesn’t really answer the question adequately – for one, we don’t know what kind of massive server farm wordpress.com is running on compared to what any given council’s site is running on, and for two we don’t know what extra hardcore security measures wordpress.com has applied to it which haven’t been – for good reason – open-sourced.

In the session we had a free-flowing discussion, with plenty of points made for and against. Although as a session we didn’t come right out with a complete agreement that WordPress could run a whole council’s website, we were clear that as far as we could tell as the hive mind, there’s nothing definite saying it couldn’t.

Things which occur to me to keep in mind if one is going to seriously consider such an endeavour include:

• Be clear about WordPress’ limitations before you start; specifically, accept that if you’re going to go down this line, you will need to fundamentally rethink your existing content model. If this is a good thing, go ahead! If that’s not such a good idea for your situation, then Jadu is still a very fine content management system, by all accounts.
• If you are going to proceed, then make yourself fully aware of how the WordPress content model works, and plan your content strategy around it – learn all you can about WordPress tagging, categories, ‘static’ pages, posts, etc; you’ll almost certainly want to make full use of the little-understood WordPress custom taxonomy feature which lets you assign multiple groups of tags to your pages / posts / articles / whatever you’re going to call them, sorted and separated sensibly rather than serving up one big bowl of useless tag soup.
• Make a decision early about whether you intent to go with one single WordPress site, or a network of sites using the WordPress Multisite feature, and plan accordingly before you actually start migrating content. It’ll only be a major pain in the bum if you want to change your mind later.
• Take advantage of everything WordPress offers in terms of agile development; rather than jumping straight in to designing your theme with all of its graphics etc in place, design your layout as a working wireframe theme first, testing and consulting, testing and consulting. Extend your wireframe theme upwards with its graphical elements after the layout has been finalised. Don’t forget to also design a much simplified theme which can be switched over in an instant if a major disaster occurs in your town putting extra load on the server.
• Share your development process along the way – start off internally, then share it with a few trusted external people (selected according to user profile criteria), gradually widen the net, maybe even run the two sites in parallel before doing the big switchover. That way you and your IT team should be about as confident as it’s possible to be that part of the answer to this post’s question has been found.

I don’t want to trot out a list of plugins to install on this post, but here’s a few things which have caught my eye just in the last couple days and, indeed, during the hour I’ve spent writing this post:

• How To Run A News Site And Newspaper Using WordPress And Google Docs – case study of how a newspaper went to a web-first workflow publishing model, very akin to many councils’ workflows, and information about and links to download the specific plugins they’ve used to adapt WordPress to work with that model.
• Network Theme for WordPress and Buddypress – a premium WordPress theme which will be invaluable to take a look at and rip the guts out of (disclaimer – I’ve not looked at the licensing situation for the theme so it may not be possible to rip the guts out of it itself, only ‘learn from it’) if you’re committing to the network of sites model, in order see how to share menus and content from one site to another.
• Site lister function – a quick little function shared by Steph Gray which can be used to list a network’s sites (and from there, feeds from sites and content, if your .php skills are hard enough).

Enjoy your flight!

Stickers by Dave Briggs

They’re not just fab because I’m one of them; next time you hear of some politician or crappy journo talking about lazy council workers who do bugger all for their inflated salaries, consider that these people all gave up half their weekends – most of whom if not all not getting any pay, time off in lieu, or even train fare to be there – because we’re passionate about our jobs, and we’re passionate about learning from one another to do our jobs better, and thus provide you, the hard-pressed council tax payer, with a better service as a result of it.

What was also fab about the people and the event was – whilst everybody was appreciative of what everybody else had to share – I didn’t feel any evidence of what I have to admit I’ve started to become a bit… uncomfortable about when I read my Twitter stream. Charitably, some of what shows up can be described as groupthink, or uncharitably sometimes what manifests is a bit of a, um, how can I put this, don’t be offended when I, erm, say a… mutual backslapping society. There, I said it – oops. If you’re reading this as a member of the local government web community, you’ll have almost certainly often seen a Twitter post from somebody declaring they’ve just read an excellent blog post by the excellent somebody-or-other, which has an excellent comment on it made by the excellent somebody else.

Now I’m all for acknowledging excellence, but when everything which is said is excellent and everybody who says it is also excellent, where does that leave something which is even better? When everything is excellent, nothing is excellent; in fact, when everything is excellent, everything is in fact mediocre – if every link you tweet is excellent, the busy reader will probably end up following none of your links.

But more importantly, if everything we say is deemed by our colleagues to be excellent, heard uncritically and unchallenged, then that serves nothing but the very trend towards mediocrity which we’re all trying to work against. Nobody likes to be told they’ve had a crap idea, but sometimes clever people really do have crap ideas, and nothing’s worse than those crap ideas being turned into crap projects; few things are more career limiting than being associated with a crap project which wasted a whole bunch of public money, especially if the project could have been avoided or improved simply by somebody acting as a critical friend.

It also, admittedly, can be a bit disconcerting to see conflict within a close-knit group on the modern internets; when Dave Harte wrote a piece last week critiquing a statistic presented (off-hand) by Dan Slee at a conference describing social networking usage vs traditional media reach in his area, I think I’m not the only one who read it and thought ‘oo, ouch…’.

But we’re all grown-ups here, and even though some of us have digital footprints going back nearly 20 years it’s not like any of us are n00bs at this online discussion gig thingy.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying we should start behaving like arseholes to each other, arguing the toss for the hell of it like the very worst corners of Usenet used to be like. But we should feel more comfortable than we perhaps do to respectfully challenge each other, to be critical friends, rather than allowing everything to pass unchallenged, uncritiqued.

And perhaps have a little less of the excellent-ness?

More recently, after buying an Amazon Kindle device (which is an infinitely better electronic device from which to read text), I’ve learned how to actually create Kindle-format content, writing two books (with two more in the pipeline) culminating a couple of weeks ago with me co-leading KindleCamp, a one day workshop where I taught a group of people how to author content in Kindle format and go through the process of getting it into the Amazon shop for other people to buy.

So far pretty much all Kindle content is exactly what it was created to be – putting a piece of paper into digital form; not exactly a piece of paper on the internet, but a lots of pieces of paper into a small piece of plastic. In this form alone we could say that we live in the future, in this form alone we’ve effectively got The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Me, I want more.

As well as being an eBook reading device, the Kindle also has a rudimentary web browser – if you’ve got the cheaper version, you’ve got internet connectivity whenever you’re in an accessible wifi zone, and if you splashed out on the 3g version you’ve got free internet connectivity wherever you are in the world where there’s some kind of digital mobile phone signal. Because you can have hyperlinks within your Kindle book, you can link out from text within the book to external websites – maybe to a Wikipedia article about something mentioned, or to a blog post allowing people to discuss each chapter all within the same environment.

More interestingly still, the way Kindle content is created and published means that whenever a change is made to a book – which classically might be correcting some typos, or in my own case getting around to writing the colophon pages for my books to stick on to the end – those changes are automatically synchronised to everybody who has already bought the book. They might have bought the book, not yet read it, and be completely unaware of the updates – or they might have read to the end, and then receive your final bonus chapter some time afterwards.

Rather than just making pieces of paper in a piece of plastic, how can content authors make creative use of the enhanced interactive features of the device?

The mobile internet is a marketplace not quite ripe for the pickings, but certainly fertile soil in which to sow the seeds of content delivery; it’s possible that as the number of Kindle users increases that may provide an audience which isn’t going to particularly take to mobile phone web access. Is there any mileage for Kindle content in local government? We’ve got the easy obvious wins of being able to use it to help with our content rationalisation targets, publishing policy documents and the history of the canals in Birmingham in this format, but is there anything more interesting we can do, taking advantage of the Kindle’s web connectivity and content updating and synchronisation capabilities?

I’ll be attending #localgovcamp in Birmingham – if anybody else is interested in talking about this to explore the possibilities, shall we do a session on it?

Now, being in the making-things-and-trying-to-sell-them game myself, I’m certainly not going to defend the big corporate borg with fancy expensive lawyers ripping off the little person who, if they making a living selling their work at all, they’ll only just be making a living and almost certainly unable to afford to take a multi-national to court over it.

However, we have been here before. In February 2010 the internet rip-off scandal was about how Paperchase had ripped off another indy designer‘s artwork to put on some notebooks and carrier bags.

But when the bottom of that story was reached, it turned out that Paperchase had done no such thing, themselves – instead, it was a designer in an agency contracted by Paperchase who had done the ripping off. And so it’s highly likely that Urban Outfitters themselves didn’t rip off tru.ch, rather one of their suppliers did the ripping off. This is how multi-national corporate retail works – just as Nike don’t actually make their trainers any more, Levis don’t make their jeans any more, Paperchase, Urban Outfitters, and all these similar shops don’t actually design and make anything – they just buy product in from third party suppliers.

So whereas of course Paperchase and Urban Outfitters should be the first port of call for the aggrieved designer to say ‘oi!’ to, immediately organising a mass internet campaign for a boycott is a bit silly – Paperchase and Urban Outfitters didn’t do the ripping off, they just accepted what they were given by their suppliers with the reasonable assumption their suppliers were providing them with legit product. In the Paperchase case, they – albeit after some time – investigated and pulled the product, which Urban Outfitters will almost certainly so do as well.

Now you might think it a bit off that both Paperchase and Urban Outfitters didn’t immediately pull the product after the first email from the designer, but let’s be realistic – how realistic really is it for a multi-national megacorp with hundreds of branches in nearly every country in the world and at tens of central administrative offices to receive an email from anybody off the street and just take action on the spot? Whoever receives the first email has to work out who to forward it to, then that person has to read it (in between however many meetings they have that day), then delegate it to somebody else to read again and possibly do some research to verify the truth of the original complainant, write a report making a recommendation to the buying committee, wait for that committee to meet (assuming the report gets on the next agenda), etc. You’ll be lucky to get just those steps achieved in a month, let alone whatever else needs doing.

And the tru.ch vs Urban Outfitters case turns out to contain more story than the original blog post let on – news and aggregator websites Apartment Therapy and BoingBoing took up the story, only for both articles to be filled with comments from people claiming to have seen stuff like the disputed items for five, ten, twenty years, suggesting that tru.ch was hardly selling an original idea in the first place. Indeed, Regretsy has even found examples of other people selling the designs before tru.ch did anyway.

The moral of this tale is – when somebody on the internet tells you to be outraged about something, always pause and check some facts first.

Here are the videos of the talks (with apologies for the sound quality in what was a rather noisy coffee bar):

Dan Slee talks about Walsall Council’s #walsall24 twitterthon event

Kate Sahota talks about the idea of a forthcoming transport data hack day

Andy Mabbett talks about GLAMDerby, Derby Museum’s WikiMedia collaboration

Part one:

Part two:

I was there, and thought that since I was there with my video-capable mobile phone I might as well video it, and indeed stream the video live to the interwebs for the benefit of the people who were inevitably seeing all this otherwise random commenting appear in their Twitter streams. Here are the videos!

Philip John talks about videoing council meetings

Simon Whitehouse leads a discussion on public sector redundancy

Darren Caveney talks about how Walsall Council has started using Yammer

All volunteers to transcribe the videos welcome!

If you’ve also just got yourself an Android phone, then my list of these essential apps to download and install straight away may be of use in hitting the ground running. You’ll see though I’m not listing any games – mainly because I barely play them myself, so I wouldn’t know what to suggest.

Multimedia

• Vignette
  This is the nearest Android gets so far to the iPhone-famous Hipstamatic app, for taking pictures which look like old-skool cameras which leak in light badly. Oodles and oodles of configuration options, and particularly good is the fact you have the option if you want to take the picture first and then choose your effect afterwards, choosing the one which best fits that specific picture.
• Retro Camera
  A much simpler to use Hipstamatic clone, with just five different options. There’s been some discussion in the market comments about whether one of the settings – ‘Ghetto Bug fix’ – is racist; it’s not clear whether this is a specific or general term widely used referring to a specific or general Android bug, or a made-up term by the developers of the app for the specific effect they’re referring to – if the latter, it’s clearly racist and the developers are a bunch of scum-sucking bogeys of Satan who should be kicked off the market.
• Photoshop Express
  A basic photo editor; if you’re expecting Photoshop you’ll be disappointed. That said, it’s a bit disappointing there isn’t a basic photo editor deployed as standard with Android anyway.
• andLess
  If you’ve got music saved in .flac format, this app will play it (and it also recognises accompanying .cue files); also can play music by browsing the file-system to play by folder, if you haven’t got the ID3 metadata applied to some of your music.
• AudioTagger
  Let’s you add and edit ID3 metadata on your music files, if you like that sort of thing.
• Cover Art Downloader
  Does what it says on the tin – searches for cover art for your music so you get a nice picture in your media player.
• iMPlayer
  Video player which can play the .avi divx / xvid etc video files you’ve downloaded without needing any further conversion.
• Last.fm
  Scrobbles your media player listening to your Last.fm account, and also lets you easily listen to The Winterval Conspiracy.
• RD3
  Lets you make bangn techno drumanbass loops on your phone!
• VidTrim
  Top and tail edit videos you’ve made on your phone.

Misc

• QR Droid
  Scans those nifty 2D barcode weblinks you used to see two years ago…
• Open Office Document Viewer
  Because you’ve seen the light and don’t use MS Office anymore, haven’t you?
• Google Sky Map
  Point your phone in any direction, and get a star map on the screen!
• AK Notepad
  Basic notepad app; another thing you’d think would be included by default.
• AndroZip
  Yet another thing you’d think would already be there – a file manager for you to browse your device’s file system.
• ES File Explorer
  Another file manager; I’ve included both on the list because I’ve still not decided which one I like better.
• AutoRotate Switch
  A widget you can include on one of your home screens which will turn on and off the auto-rotate facility – useful when you’re trying to use your device when laying down in bed!
• CamScanner
  Take pictures of things and bundle the whole lot into a .pdf for easy sharing; sadly no OCR function in it, though. That would be ace.
• App 2 SD Free
  If you don’t get any other app on this list, then this above any of them is a total must-have – let’s you move apps you’ve installed from the phone memory to the SD card, so you have space for many, many, many more.

eBooks

• Adobe Reader
  The default .pdf reader (that’s included in HTC phones, at least) is a bit pants – this does a much better job of the job.
• Amazon Kindle
  Needs no further explanation!
• Laputa
  Another eBook reader – this one can read eBooks published in the .epub format, which Kindle can’t read; has links in it to many sources of free and paid for compatible eBooks.

Internet

• Andricious
  Delicious client for Android; it appears Delicious isn’t being shut down after all.
• Dropbox
  Let’s you access the files you’re storing in the cloud.
• Dolphin Browser HD
  The default Android web browser is very good, but it’s always handy to have the option to use another one too, for those occasions when you’ve got two separate logins for the same website etc. This one seems the best alternative, incorporating tabbed browsing and a selection of plugins.
• Google Reader
  Syncs with your ordinary Google Reader account, for reading those blogs whilst #onthebus.
• RssDemon
  A local RSS reader, which is good for podcast subscriptions – it can stream them live of the server or download to your device.
• Seesmic
  I tried various Android Twitter clients, including Tweetdeck and Twidroyd, and whilst all of them had irritating omissions compared with the desktop version of Tweetdeck, Seesmic I found to be the least irritating in its omissions.
• tTorrent
  That’s right, a BitTorrent client for your mobile device! Not much use if you’ve just taken out a T-Mobile, Orange, Vodaphone, or O2 contract unless you move amongst lots of wifi…

GPS

• Vespucci
  An Open Street Map editor for Android – though I’m not totally convinced about detailed mapping using a podgy finger on a capacitative touchscreen rather than a stylus on a resistive one…
• Compass
  As well as being what the name suggests, lets you store points of interest so you can easily get back to them. Never lose your car in the Motorway service station again!
• 3D Compass
  An augmented reality compass using your phone’s camera, so you point it in the direction you’re facing and you see what you’re looking at with the compass overlaid, plus a Google map of the location alongside. Bit of a toy, really, but cute nonetheless.

Widgets

As well as those apps, there are a few essential widgets you’ll want to have on a home screen giving easy access to settings – mostly in the name of saving your precious battery life, because Android phones do seem to be a big weak in that regard. Some of them may be included with your phone, others you may have to search for in the Market.

They are: a widget to turn on and off your 3g internet connexion (Mobile Network in HTC), the Airplane mode widget, the sound settings widget (to easily change to silent for when you’re in that meeting), the GPS / Location widget (unless you’re actually navigating, you don’t need the pinpoint accuracy of your current location, especially if you’re indoors), the Wifi widget, and the Bluetooth widget. Basically, keep everything turned off, and only turn it on when and whilst you’re actually using it – for the first week or two you’ll keep forgetting, but you soon get the hang of it.

So now you’ve got all these basic functions sorted out, you can spend your first few days searching for all the really cool toys you can get for Android!

The design inspiration is taken from the look of classic broadsheet newspapers such as the New York Times; I’ve gone for a layout which is fundamentally three colunns, flexible width, with the home page (and archive pages) middle main column split into two further columns below the first post.

The theme is widgetised galore – the left column is a thinner one, for eg category navigation, and the right column being wider for eg the list of recent comments, tag clouds, and other content widgets. As with many WordPress themes there is the footer widget area. The home page also supports four further widget areas – an area at the top of the centre column for eg introductory text, with two further areas in left and right columns below the WordPress Loop for whatever you might want, and a final widget area full width at the bottom of the centre column – you could perhaps add a slideshow widget in there.

The Loop (home page and archive pages) is configured to show the most recent post on the page in full across the full width of the middle column, with subsequent posts shown as excerpts (including Featured Image thumbnails) in the two columns below – for this reason, you will always configure the theme to show an odd number of posts rather than an even number (so change the WordPress default from 10 to either 9 or 11!).

The theme is designed to be good for both accessibility and for search engine optimisation – any areas in which it falls short of these goals, then please do politely point that out in the comments below! As with most WordPress themes, it was developed by building upon core files in a skeleton theme – in this case, Automattic’s Toolbox. Accordingly, it is also HTML5 (though what you choose to put in the widget areas may almost certainly break the semantic purity of the HTML5) and also has some built-in microformat compatibility. CSS3 KurvyKornerz(tm) and a blog nameplate delivered using a dynamically downloaded font (Cloister Black) complete what might be described as modern web features.

The changelog for the theme will be included in this article, and questions and comments can be put in the comments; at this stage, the only theme updates I have planned are minor variations to get the layout pixel perfect (such a state as is actually possible to exist on the interwebs, of course) and to tidy up the css to remove the redundant classes which have crept in, but I’m open to suggestions within the skills I have – and, of course, as with all GPL work feel free to fork it into something of your own if you like.

At Birmingham City Council we have for a long time had a page on our website detailing information about school closures due to snow, but this year we felt it would be good to go a bit further, and provide information (in as near real-time as possible) about other disruptions to services – including traffic and travel on buses and trains actually outside the council’s responsibility – to try to create a one stop shop for people needing it; the target customer profile we adopted for the service was somebody either about to leave for work in the morning or thinking about when to leave for home in the afternoon, needing to get all the information they can get as effortlessly as possible in order to help them make their decision about what to do.

Although we have our main content management system solution for our website, for this service we chose to use one of our corporate WordPress installations – partly in order to spread the traffic load between this subsite and the main site, and partly because WordPress, at its core a blogging engine, is particularly ideal for providing constantly updating information, and allowing intuitive navigation of content through categories and tags.

Our first task was to sort out a WordPress theme for the site. Although we’d already made the decision in advance to take this route, the snow still managed to come earlier than we expected, right in the middle of another workstream we were engaged in! So I plumped for the basic – and currently default – Twenty Ten theme as a starting point, to then customise for our own needs: curvy corners and changing the header image into a background image in order to make the subsite in keeping with our main site’s branding, and re-organising the layout into two equal-width columns – the left hand column being the widgetised area for more or less static content, and the right hand column holding the main WordPress Loop for each individual information update aka blog post, whilst at the same time my colleague organised the subsite’s graphics. Because of the nature of the information, I also modified the portion of the theme which renders the posted time to make a much more prominent date and time stamp. There are other tweaks which I know I’d like to make – they will come in due course as time allows. Particularly important on a heavy traffic site such as this is the installation of the WP-Super-Cache plugin, in order to ensure performance under high load is as good as it can be.

Theme installation and customisation sorted, it was then time to organise content. Although generally the core of the information to be provided would be school closures, the worst of the snow started falling after the end of term, allowing us enough time to think about expanding the service outside of the particularly fast moving world of schools rather than having to do that thinking in the middle of already hectic activity. Over the course of a few days we built up a library of information source websites, keeping open a dedicated browser window with them all open across a series of tabs. So, for Birmingham, they are:

• The Met Office severe weather warnings page,
• National Express West Midlands (the main local bus company) service alerts page,
• BBC Birmingham travel news page,
• For train information, London Midland, Chiltern Railways, CrossCountry Trains, Virgin Trains, and National Rail Enquiries,
• Birmingham Airport, and
• The Birmingham Newsroom (the council’s own press office subsite).

Working to a fairly loosely organised shift pattern, between the members of the team updating the site we got into a habit of going across the row of tabs refreshing them on roughly an hourly or two-hourly basis to see if anything had changed, and posting that information over into our site where there was significant new news to convey – crediting the source accordingly. A bit of editorial judgement comes into play here – thinking about which piece of information is most likely to be most critical to the most people, we opted to generally make the bus information the most recent post to be added each time in a batch, so that stays at the top of the page. We’re also aware that having multiple similar posts appearing on the front page can be quite confusing, so have got into habit of e.g. with the bus update post, deleting the previous one which the latest one supersedes.

As well as information updates from other sources, there are also our own pieces of information to convey – such as rubbish collection disruption, information about how the housing emergency repairs hotline is responding, and other pieces of advice that between us and our partners we think of offering.

As a metadata structure, we’re using categories to organise our content into the types of information offered – Advice, Other closures, Other information, School closures, Travel, and Weather warnings, and tags according to locations – by Birmingham’s urban towns and villages rather than wards and constituencies – plus Citywide as the catch-all.

When the service went live there was a feedback comments page – initially conceived for people to provide feedback on this specific information service, it very quickly starting being used by the public as a platform to ask questions about why hadn’t their road been gritted. With the best will in the world, fielding comments and queries like these is well outside the scope of both the subsite and the team operating it, so instead the link was changed to point to the main council YourViews form, so that customer complaints can be properly processed by the relevant people.

It has been most satisfying to see the service being used and appreciated by citizens – since the snow started falling on December 13, at the time of writing 10,008 people have visited 14,780 times clocking up 28,416 page views – that’s 10,008 people who’ve hopefully found invaluable information which they otherwise wouldn’t have found at all, or would have had to make a phone call to find. Whether that’s a phone call to the council or a phone call to the bus company that has been saved (‘avoidable contact’ in council-speak), it’s money saved which will help keep other council services running or help stave off bus fare price rises in the future.

We might not have been able to stop the snow from falling or the water from freezing, but at least we’ve tried our best to keep people informed about the impacts of the snow and the ice on their daily lives.

If your council hasn’t been able to offer this service themselves and you run a hyperlocal blog, why not give it a go yourself? Hopefully this account of how we have done it shows that for comparatively little effort you can provide a lot of extra useful information for your locality, thus driving up your own site’s traffic and reputation.

The discussion very quickly descended into a slanging match between representatives of the blogging community and representatives of the local government communications community; and to be frank, neither side particularly distinguished itself well as holding the moral high ground. My comment to the room at that point was that both sides here need to cut each other some slack: local government press and communications officers – recognise that not only are your local blogging community members your organisation’s customers, but also realise that far from being a bunch of annoying geeks they could be powerful advocates for your cause, as most of them do care passionately about raising the profile of the council and stimulating a healthy local democracy; local bloggers – recognise that sometimes, the press office really does need to prioritise dealing with a local radio query about the serious incident which happened in a school yesterday rather the dead badger at the end of your street.

My advice for how you might achieve this increased respect for each other:

Council Press and Communications officers

• Your main local paper may indeed have a circulation of x,000, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all of those x,000 people are reading the utterances of your favourite public affairs correspondent – indeed, just because the circulation is x,000, don’t forget that almost certainly y,z00 of those purchases are by the council anyway! However, the w00 reading any given local blog are w00 who read every single article – that’s guaranteed influence, rather than notional influence,
• And of the remaining v,000 actual readers of the public affairs correspondent’s articles, u,000 probably think they’re just as idiotic as you do. However, chances are the overwhelming majority of the readership of a local blog – if not entirely in agreement with everything written – will have respect for the writer. You ignore that channel at your peril.
• Don’t let your own instinct for a news story (since most of you may well have been (trainee) journalists before you started working for the council) get in the way of what really might be of more interest to your own customers as a council; sometimes, the dead badger really is more of a priority for local residents than the big story which will be on the local news later.
• Always be open and honest – your local bloggers aren’t stupid; many of them will also have a journalistic background and be capable of spotting bullshit (and commenting accordingly) from half a mile away.
• Be proactive about releasing information – the original aim of the Freedom of Information Act wasn’t that there would be a string of FoI requests every day, the point was to encourage public bodies to release the information before somebody asked for it under the FoIA. It costs you considerably less effort and money to proactively release the information than it does once somebody has made a formal request. And you get to enhance the reputation of the council in the process. If you don’t answer queries asked of you, the bloggers will make a formal request.
• Taking a walk in your opposite number’s shoes is always a highly effective way of building mutual respect. Are you a blogger yourself? Why not give it a try? Consider giving the local bloggers a chance to walk in your shoes – invite them into the press office on work experience programmes! Let them shadow you for a day or two – let them discover first hand the pressures you’re actually under yourselves!

Local Bloggers

• The ‘don’t you know who I am’ attitude never makes anybody look good. Just because you might be a local blogger who’s built up quite a following over the last four months you’ve been at it, you’re not automatically entitled to be granted the same level of credibility as the served-20-years public affairs correspondent of the local regional newspaper. You have to earn your credibility – earn it with the quality of your writing, don’t undermine it with the quality of your complaining about being ignored.
• Do understand that your council press and communications officers do need to prioritise the queries they receive; in an age of cutbacks, where ‘paper-pushing back-office staff’ are being sacrificed ‘in an effort to protect front-line services’, many councils are cutting back on the number of press and communications staff they employ. Think – is your query really necessary? Are you being reasonable in expecting your query to be answered within the hour?
• Take the time and effort to understand your local council’s communications structure. Some councils have combined press and communications offices, some have them as separate functions, and some have press offices which are centralised with the communications officer functions devolved throughout the council’s departmental structure. Is the press office the right place to ask your question in the first place? Might contacting the customer services department be the better route to getting your query answered?
• Before you ask for that piece of information under the FoIA, have you made a polite request for it straight to the relevant person (be that press office, customer service office, or even having checked by searching on the website to see if it’s already published) first? Often your council press officers (or whoever) will be happy to just give you the information you want if you ask for it directly, within a reasonable time – if you make a formal FoI request then that invokes a whole massive procedure which is both time-consuming and expensive. That’s time taken which could have been spent fulfilling other queries or carrying out other work, and money which could have been spent on – for example – improving the council’s website or employing more people to answer your queries more quickly. Only take FoI route when you’re not getting answers by being polite.
• As above, try taking a walk in your council press officer’s shoes. Ask them if you can come into the office for a day or two to shadow them – or even work with them. What, you have a full time job? How committed are you to your local blog – by taking a day or two of annual leave to spend some time working in the press office, you’ll demonstrate that you’re serious about what you’re doing – and will be taken more seriously as a result.

And whether you’re a local blogger or a local government press or communications officer, there’s a wealth of advice and assistance available from the fine people at Talk About Local and Social Media Surgeries.

What have I forgotten to add?