LocalGov 2.0

I had a phone call today from a council wondering if LinkedIn might be a good place to engage with the local business community, perhaps through a Group. Sounded like a good idea to me, so I quickly put out a call on Twitter and Dan Slee pointed me to Walsall's group on LinkedIn. There are nearly 100 members - a combination of people from the council (regeneration and economic development) and local business people. And there are range of discussions and the council is sharing information relevant to local businesses.

Earlier this year, following the snows in the beginning months, Dan Slee wrote up how Walsall council had been using social media to cope and communicate with the wintry weather. In the unusual Nov/December fall of snow, Walsall have expanded their use of social media to inform local people of changes to existing services and how winter services like gritting were coming along.

And Walsall is not alone in employing better web use and social media to help people in the snow. I've just heard from Vicky Sargent of Socitm Insight on their quick review of snow related web use (blog post here).

Unnecessary self-referral to Accident and Emergency departments costs the NHS. The NHS Coventry has launched a mobile app for iPhone and Android to help people find GPs and walk-in centres close to their current location.

And this is just the start, future updates will include information about access to free condoms and emergency contraceptives and stop-smoking clinics.

Find out more.

Lichfield DC has been doing some cool stuff with open data, but they understand that not everything has to be built by the council. But there is a role for working with developers and understanding how you can release your data and which data sets need to be released to make stuff for citzens and the council, too.

On the Lichfield site Build your stuff with our stuff they say:
.....
We’re always looking for new ways of making it as easy as possible for developers and website owners to access data held by Lichfield District Council in ways that they want – allowing you to remix, mashup and share data easily.

We’ve recently rebuilt this section to allow you to search for datasets, view data by category, as well as showcase work that people have been doing with our data. We’ve also added a blog, so we can share the latest news about our work in the world of open data!
....

And you can follow them on Twitter, too.

Dan Slee has blogged about how Walsall Council has used Flickr and its local community to spruce up its web pages. He has step by step information about what they did and what kind of things you need to consider as well as other helpful links.

If you're proud of your area and proud of your local people, this is a great way to show that.

Flickr is an online image sharing website, that is as much about social networking around images as it is an image repository. Just about every area I've ever looked for already has a Flickr group dedicated to sharing images about that place.

Coventry City Council - famed in social media circles for probably the most successful localgov Facebook page in the UK - has done some more groundbreaking work in online participation and collaboration.

According to 24dash - the council staged the world's first city-wide online conversation with nearly 900 local residents, businesses and public bodies. And the article has some frankly amazing user statistics, surpassing the usual participation levels of IBM's online collaborative Jam technology.

Martin Reeves, Chief Executive of Coventry City Council was quoted as saying "The IBM Jam brought out practical ideas. People know that we can't change overnight, that we need to take practical steps to being a smarter city with low-cost projects. I was really impressed with some straightforward ideas that people would like us to implement over the next few years."

The Social Media community of practice has an ongoing discussion about online engagement and consultation including doubters on whether you can get people to engage on things like "sustainable community strategies". But it's really a matter of how you do it, how you promote, how you integrate with traditional consultation strategies and most importantly whether you actually listen to and act on what people are saying.

(HT Dave Briggs)

Oh that Lichfield District Council, always doing very clever thing with data and transparency. I've featured their publication of food safety publications combined with user generated reviews before. But now you can do it on the move with an iPhone App

This isn't just fun and games, though. Food safety inspection is one of the little known things that councils provide, but that we all rely on. And it's one of the three key areas of core open data that councils will have to publish in January.

Warwickshire County Council is taking open and linked data seriously. They're opening up data and supporting the developer community to do something useful with it through a Hack Warwickshire competition (open til 25 June). And they're open to suggestions of what data should be open next.

You can follow developments at their Warwickshire Open Data blog

Many museums are using Flickr groups to help promote their collections. I love that some of the big museums in the UK (e.g. Science, British Museum, Natural History, V&A) seem to have a free for all approach to photography, that is generally allowed unless expressly forbidden. The V&A in particular has taken an active approach to managing images from their museum, inviting images to its Flickr group.

Smaller museums and those supported or run by local authorities actually seem to take a more controlled approach to photography, probably missing a trick in terms of promotion of its collections and special exhibitions.

Walsall Museums has recently held an event where it not only opened up its collection to local photographers (those already sharing their photos in a Walsall Flickr group), but opened up its stores as well. Dan Slee of Walsall Council outlines the agreements reached on copyright of the images and access on his blog. This is cool, because it's not only sharing images of the collection, but reaching the bits that most people never get to see.

Coventry has featured before on this blog for their grand use of Facebook (over 11,000 fans on their main Coventry page). But they also list all their social media use in one place on their corporate website. As a Coventry resident you can find out where you can socially comment on regeneration plans, library activities or follow Coventry on Twitter or see all their activity in FriendFeed.