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?

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!

“Plans to use energy from a crematorium to heat a council swimming pool have been approved. Redditch Borough Council voted in favour of plans to heat Abbey Stadium Leisure Centre using energy from the town’s crematorium. The council said it would result in savings of £14,560 a year”.

Picture credit: Joffey

At first glance, anybody could be forgiven for immediately having the thought of ‘eeww, that’s a bit icky’ – one has the immediate thought of some kind of Soylent Green scenario, or worse still, images of bits of ash getting into the water.

But that is, of course, silly – the person at the council register office is no more likely to be pushing bereaved families into a cremation rather than a burial (though it’d be interesting to know if they offer a discount) than do doctors suggest prematurely switching off life-support machines in order to get at the organs.

But anyway, why not make good use of the energy expended in cremation?

Regardless of the states of either the economy or the planet, surely the council has an obligation to you, the council tax payer, to make the best use of resources?

Even though about 85% of the residents of Redditch agreed with the idea in a consultation, and it’s a reasonably common practice in the rest of Europe, Unison, the public sector union, disagree:

“The plans had been attacked by Unison when they were first announced. The union said the proposals were ‘sick and an insult to local residents’”.

Personally I would have hoped that Unison would be concentrating on how it can best protect the jobs and terms and conditions of public sector employees rather than worrying about what happens to the heat from burning dead people.

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 announcements today are of course just the headline figures for each broad public sector area – it will be down to individual chief executives in each individual public sector organisation to decide the details of whose jobs are to go.

In the lead-up to the review over the last several months, politicians of all sides have made reference to the ‘back-office paper-pushing make-workers’ who should almost certainly be the first against the wall in order to ‘protect the valuable front-line services’.

So who are these back-room drains on the hard-pressed taxpayer, then? Let’s make a list:

Admin / filing clerks

Admin staff are perhaps the very definition of the back-office. But do you really want your highly paid professional staff having to spend their time doing their own photocopying or raising purchase orders for their own stationery? Admittedly, there is still something rather 1950s about the idea of a secretary printing out the email for their boss to read, scribble comments on, for the secretary to then type the reply to, but PAs do also fulfil a less obvious and more essential role – as gatekeeper, shielding the senior manager from having to deal with pointless sales calls from pesky private sector photocopier suppliers who are paid on commission, or fielding queries in the direction of the senior manager’s more junior officers who are actually doing the work and thus better placed to give a sensible answer to the question.

And, of course, even with modern computerisation of records, records still need to be filed, and require somebody with knowledge and experience to file them correctly – do you really want your doctor, surgeon, or dentist in charge of filing your medical records rather than the person who actually understands how the filing system works? Do you want your social workers to be spending their time looking into protecting and helping vulnerable individuals and families, or do you want them trying to decide (and changing their minds from week to week) whether the family with multiple surnames has its records filed under ‘b’, ‘f’, or ‘m’?

I.T. Support staff

If you’re reading this, you’re probably reasonably experienced at using computers, and like me cringe whenever you see somebody typing a URL into the Google search box (being their default browser home page) rather than in the actual browser address bar. But believe it or not, most people really are that thick! I once, some years ago, saw an occasion where an assistant director’s PA – of many, many years experience, predating the introduction of computers in the workplace – was having difficulty in opening a file off a CD. As I was helping her, it became apparent to me that she’d clearly never actually seen her computer’s desktop, didn’t understand the concept of the c: drive and the d: drive (so /dev/sda1 & /dev/sda2 would be a total non-starter), and thought you had to open a file of any given type from the file -> open dialogue of the relevant program, rather than just double-clicking on the file icon from the file manager.

Of course, those are particularly dumb extremes, but still the majority of people aren’t that further advanced in their computer knowledge. And annoying as it is for people like us, that’s why your computer at work is locked down preventing you from fiddling with it yourself, because you might know what you’re doing, but most peoples’ fiddling would almost certainly completely stuff it up. And that’s why you need I.T. support staff – to do the work of maintaining the I.T., because most people aren’t capable of doing it for themselves.

Middle-managers

I know I’m not the only person who has worked in teams where the favourite topic of lunchtime-down-the-pub conversation has been to moan about the management. It’s almost enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights! So of course they should be the first against the wall, since all they do all day is look at graphs and get on your case? Right?

In all the teams I’ve worked in where we’ve spent a lot of time bitching about managers, it’s not been about the concept of managers, but about how rubbish they’ve been – or at least how rubbish we’ve perceived them to be. Like it or not, managers are necessary. We complain about the rubbish managers because we need them to set targets for the team, build the framework in which we operate, and performance-manage our co-workers who are not pulling their weight (or indeed offer extra training and guidance to the co-workers who are neither lazy nor incompetent but just a bit inexperienced for their role). A well managed team is an effective team – a badly- or un-managed team more often than not flounders about; if it manages to perform well then that is testament to their particular and unique dedication and skill rather than evidence that managers are pointless.

Finance people

I’m not afraid of numbers – I understand that budgets, no matter how many noughts are involved, are simply a matter of sums and guesswork; I understand that when a budget or a financial forecast is put together, it represents the ‘best guess at the time with the information to hand’, which is a goal for people with budgetary responsibility in the organisation to work towards – but where overspends on any given heading occur, it’s not the end of the world, but almost certainly an underspend will have occurred on another line to balance it out. I’m also very good at noticing where a supplier is frankly taking the piss with their quote. Finance is not just about numbers, though – it’s about personal administration, which I’m utterly lousy at. So lousy at it am I that in my now-behind-me freelance life it’s been months before I’ve got around to sending an invoice, or claiming back the overpayment on a loan which actually was paid off six months ago.

Most people are rubbish at numbers, and although better than me at personal administration, still not hot at it. Finance people, however, love the lot – they love creating, adjusting, and balancing budgets. They love finding and logging the receipts for every last Mars bar, and tracking down every last pound owed to the organisation. Who do you want looking after the budgets – somebody who absolutely hates the very notion of numbers, somebody who is happy with them but has more interesting things to occupy their day than phoning up to chase the outstanding invoice, or somebody who has as their raison d’etre the job of accounting for all of your hard-earned taxpayer’s money?

Press and communications staff

OK, I’ll fess up – if you’ve come to this article via a search engine you won’t know that my job is in press and communications, or rather that favourite bête-noire of the local newspaper, the ‘town hall spin doctor’. My job has always been less dealing with the words you read and more the media you read them on, but I have had more responsibility in the past for the words than I have now. You wouldn’t believe the rubbish text I’ve been given to put on websites over the years – text that has gone beyond lacking what we in the bizniss call ‘Plain English’, and barely resembling what we call English-as-we-know-it entirely – sad fact is, most people who are even reasonably educated and with whom you can have sensible conversations can’t write English if their lives depended on it. When I was in a job with more direct control of the content of the part of the website I was responsible for, I’d got my content providers well trained to accept that they just needed to provide me with the facts, and I’d take it from there.

Where you do see rubbish communications coming from your favourite public sector organisation, more often than not it will have been because the service area has bypassed their communications team, rather than because the communications team is unnecessary. Get rid of your communications staff, and you’ll see a lot more blue-sky thinking run up the flagpole of integrated performance targets.

So, do you still think you need to get rid of the pointless paper-pushing back-office staff who suck the life from the front-line services?

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?

Once the discussion got going, conversation settled around the use of Yammer, as an internal communications tool. Yammer is sort of like a combination of Twitter and Facebook (if you use the desktop app you get an experience very like using a Twitter desktop app, but the website interface has a more Facebook-like experience), but restricted to organisations using the blunt instrument of email address domains.

The value to an organisation of using a tool like Yammer is that staff in one part of the organisation can very quickly get feedback from staff elsewhere about ideas, projects, work-in-progress, whatever. Organisational downsides for organisations using Yammer include the fact that the organisation’s private data is stored externally by a third-party organisation (in the USA), and whilst it’s free to use for the basic package, there is nothing to stop Yammer suddenly deciding to charge for its service – as Ning controversially did – effectively holding the organisation to ransom. Looking more closely at the service it appears that much of the functionality could be replicated – and hosted internally – using the classic WordPress + Buddypress combination. More critical is how effectively it scales from a user perspective. Within the organisation I work, I follow ‘a few’ people on Yammer – chosen broadly because they’re people I know and have a working relationship with. But there are only a small number of those people currently using Yammer – many more and I would be unable to have any meaningful interaction with them.

The discussion then moved on to more traditional modes of social media – forums and blogs – and a perception of their limited usefulness as an organisational tool for internal communication. I suspect much of the experience of this has been of internal social media which has been set up on a Field of Dreams ‘If you build it, they will come’ basis, without much thought about strategy or focus. But if you think about it, a workplace blog is effectively a hyperlocal blog – or depending on the nature and size of the organisation, a series of workplace blogs.

An internal blog which is just a series of communications from the chief executive might fulfill a basic communications purpose, but really will be barely more interesting than those same communications sent out globally by email – and will probably be read by fewer employees anyway because they don’t have it forced upon them. This is effectively the internal communications equivalent of a Livejournal blog – the organisation’s online Dear Diary site, where they unload their woes about having been dumped by their boyfriend, they’re listening to the latest Coldplay album, but really looking forward to the weekend. The better way to do it is to think about what makes a really good blog as a proper piece of actual social media – it has an angle, a purpose, a topic beyond just talking about itself. So for example, a webteam blog might be articles about the latest things we’ve found out about web accessibility, or the really good conference we went to the other week, or the latest hints and tips for the content management system; a transportation strategy blog might include information about upcoming projects, or employee travel discounts or whatever; basically, information which although focussed on readers in the same work area, may have relevance to workers in a different work area – articles posted to a transportation strategy internal blog may also have some relevance to people working in planning, or articles posted to an education internal blog may also have relevance to people working in a library service.

Intelligent use of tagging will make it easier for employees to filter in or out information which is or isn’t relevant to them – by learning about relevant developments outside their direct work areas they become more effective employees, and by learning about what’s going on in the same organisation generally, they become better employees generally. Which is better for them, and for the organisation itself.