LocalGov 2.0

Fingal County Council, Dublin City Council and a range of other partners recently hosted Ireland's first Open Data Challenge. An 18 hour event using local open data to create useful applications and services for people in Ireland. The winning projects included one that could help business find optimum locations and another for data folk helping to refine and link non-standardised data sets. Nice.

Fingal County Council was ground breaking in its publication of open data and still has one of the most impressive local open data sets around.

Is there anything ickier than dog poo in your path?

Stirling Council has a print/radio/social campaign to remind people to bag it and bin it. And there's a great council web page which brings all the elements together.

Corrinne Douglas writes: "We wanted the message 'bag it bin it' to come from everyone, not just the Council so we got the national charity Dogs Trust to support us and designed the campaign around participation by dog owners and their dogs via a Facebook album that will eventually be replicated as a wall of honour in our next Council magazine. We also made a humorous film for YouTube to give our campaign a light hearted feel while getting a serious message across too."

All councils do campaigns to raise awareness and prompt action on everything from adoption to direct debit on council tax to what's on and more. And although details and branding change from place to place, surely there's opportunity to share.

Nottingham City Council have set up a nifty digital marketplace at http://portfoliocreative.org for the public sector to buy and sell campaigns and artwork. It's a way for some bodies to save a lot of money and others to recoup costs. Might be nice if there were some 'social' features to help promote new campaigns... a lot of comms officers and comms teams are on Twitter, for example, even if some they don't Tweet much.

I spotted this one as a great response to an asset sharing idea proposed on Simpl - the social innovation marketplace.

Lots of talk these days about 'gamification'. Turning mundane tasks into games, making them fun. Getting lots of people to do little bits and pieces of work, like tagging imagines in an archive. Or in the case of digitalkoot getting people to verify how good machine-read archive materials are.

This is an initiative from Finland, where they've done a lot of work on getting paper-based archives online. In this case, the materials are a little hard to read and the font is archaic. Oh...and of course the material is in Finnish, with a few Swedish borrow words. Think of the image quality as a bit like a 'captcha' - hard to read. And as an English speaker, I'm just looking at patterns, but I like it.

Right now there are two games, both involving moles. In one you tell the game - yes the computer read the archives or no, it didn't. By completing the answer, you 'whack the mole' from the screen. Too slow, too many moles on screen and you lose. It's hard. But it's fun.

In the other, you type the word based on the image that pops up to build a bridge from an amorous boy mole to the mole object of his affection. I was way too slow on this one, because I'm not used to the short-cuts for diacritical marks.

If you like word games, like BookWorm or the online Scrabble games...you'll like this. And they've made good use of other social tools. There's Facebook connect - which I've done. Payback time for all those bloody Scrabble scores in my stream. And there's a Twitter account (that's how I found out about this!). Although the tag line "By participating in Digitalkoot you are making Finnish culture more accessible for all us." may not attract a huge audience beyond part-Finns like me.

To be honest, I don't really understand why a councillor should have to do this, but it's good that one is.

Councillor Iain Roberts (Lib Dem) of Stockport council is republishing council agendas on his blog by using a 3rd party document publishing tool, embedding it on his blog, and highlighting relevant sections. Pulling out spending, budget or other data and putting them in context.

One thing we forget at our peril in the open data agenda is the information that's hidden away in PDFs on council websites in documents. When it's a PDF - that means it's pretty much NOT searchable, not re-usable and not commentable - that's digital information jail - not something we want in local democracy.

Councillor Roberts says "Although I'm just taking a document that's online in place A and copying it to place B, I think having it as an embedded document in a web page with commentary (rather than a dry meeting title someone has to download and search to find out what's in it) makes a significant difference. It allows me to report on what the Council's doing, whilst giving people an easy way to check on the source material if they want more information - or just to know whether I'm being honest or not!"

Updated: I should say it IS for councillors to highlight and add editorial comment, but it is for councils are corporate bodies to put the agendas and other open documents online in an accessible and preferable machine-readable format.

As part of a community reporters project, local people used a variety of social media to cover the local elections in Kirklees. Some really interesting coverage of election night, candidacy and the roles of the people who make elections run smoothly.

See it all at Election Tales

"NYC Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne today unveiled Road Map for the Digital City – a comprehensive strategy to make New York the nation’s leading digital City." 16 May.

This amazing effort and beautifully structured and designed report sets out examples of what has been done and where New York City will be headed in the future. It's a really fantastic mix of excellent basic web offerings, data and apps, and communication and engagement through social tools.

In fact, NYC will be partnering with social web companies like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Foursquare. Not only does this benefit New York City, but this is an amazing step forward for all of "digital municipal" as they work together and innovate in the civic sphere.

Anyone working in a strategic position in local government needs to check this out.

One cool thing I've seen on my hols in America is mobile phone tourist info stops. You simply phone the number and get the info that you might have had to get from one of those audio headsets in the past. You could charge for this, or in this case this one is sponsored by a series of organisations and there's nothing to stop you from including a commercial message.

This one is at the Historic Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta, Georgia. An awesome place to visit in a great town.

The London Borough of Sutton, like a number of other councils, is using an online engagement tool to get residents' views and ideas - Speak Out Sutton It's a dialogue app powered by Delib.

There's a nice little bit of voting/dialogue/crowdsourcing going on in the current open discussion - on the future of libraries (ever a hot topic, and now even more so). And can I just say that I love, love the idea of children's birthday parties in the local library. And judging by the comments, so do quite a few of the participating residents.

Normally, the LocalGov2.0 blog is reserved for matters local, sometimes state and regional. But never national! Oh dear, making an exception. But this is a good one, this is the kick off to Obama's 2012 campaign. And we know what a campaign2.0-er he is, so no doubt there will be lots to learn.

They've revamped the barackobama.com site today in time for the kick-off. And less is more in this case with a completely stripped back site, looking clean and ready for the fight. (I'm sure we'll see stuff added in over time.)

Already there's one cool feature...the prominent use of Facebook connect. Yes, you can sign up to the site with just an email address and a zip code (you'll be asked to provide more later) - but just as prominent is the Facebook connect button. And if you look at the graphic above, you'll see just how much information and power you'll be giving to the campaign. Which, of course, as a supporter - you'll be happy to do.

Are any local parties or candidates using Facebook or FB connect well in the UK? I can't feature you during campaign times, but I would LOVE to know so I can feature you in revamped Connected Councillors or I might know a friendly service that can share what you're up to. Tweet me or drop me an email at ingrid.l.koehler AT gmail.com