2013 update Guest post: Public engagement: more customer service than comms

Today I'm featuring a guest post from Pia Waugh, former IT Advisor to Senator Lundy, convenor of the recent Canberra GovCamp and GovHack and one of the luminaries of the Australian Gov 2.0 scene.

As she plans to continue to update this post, for the latest version visit her blog at http://pipka.org/public-engagement-more-customer-service-than-comms/

Public engagement: more customer service than comms

I’ve been involved in online communities for many years. I’ve seen and been in projects that span every possible traditional barrier to collaboration (location, culture, language, politics, religion, gender, etc, etc). This experience combined with my time in government has given me some useful insights about the key elements that make for a constructive online community.

What I came to learn was the art and craft of community development and management. This skill is common in the technology world, particularly in large successful open source projects where projects either evolve to have good social infrastructure or they fail. There are of course a few exceptions to the rule where bad behaviour is part of the culture of a project, but by and large, a project that is socially inclusive and that empowers individuals to contribute meaningfully will do better than one that is not.

It turns out these skills are not as widespread as I expected. This is problematic as we are now seeing a horde of “social media experts” who often give shallow and unsustainable advice to government and companies alike, advice that is not rooted in the principles of community engagement.

The fact is that social media tools are part of a broader story. A story that sees “traditional” communications turned upside down. The skills to best navigate this space and have a meaningful outcome are not based in the outdated premise that a media office is the single source of communications due to the media being the primary mechanism to get information out to the general public. There will continue to be, I believe, a part for the media to play (we could all use professional analysis and unbiased news coverage, please). However, as governments in particular, we will have a far more meaningful and mutually beneficial relationship with citizens where we genuinely and directly engage with them on matters of policy, service delivery, democratic participation and ways that government can facilitate public and private innovation.

You might be lucky and have some media people who have adapted well to the new world order, but any social media strategy limited to the media office will have limitations in delivery that starts to chafe after a while.

It is when you get your customer service and policy people engaged online that you will start to see genuine engagement, genuine community building and the possibility to leverage crowdsourcing. It is when you start to get people skilled in community engagement involved to work alongside your media people and in collaboration with the broader organisation that you will be able to best identify sustainable and constructive ways your organisation can apply social media, or indeed, whatever comes next.

Below are some vital skills I would recommend you identify, hire or upskill in your organisation. Outsourcing can be useful but ideally, to do this stuff well, you need the skills within your organisation. Your own people who know the domain space and can engage with imprimatur on behalf of your organisation.

I’ll continue to build this post up as I have time, and would love your feedback

Herding Cats

In my time in online communities I came to understand the subtleties in what we in the geek world refer to as “herding cats”. That is, working with a large number of individuals who have each their own itch to scratch, skills, interests and indeed, vices. Individuals who have a lot to contribute and are motivated for myriad reasons to get involved.

I learnt how to get the best out of people by creating a compelling narrative, having a meaningful goal, uniting people over what we have in common rather than squabbling over what is different.

Herding cats is about genuinely wanting people to get involved, recognising you can’t “control” the conversation or outcomes, but you can encourage a constructive dialogue. Herding cats ends up being about leadership, building respect, being an active part of a live conversation, setting and encouraging a constructive tone, managing community expectations and being a constant presence that people can turn to and rely upon. Cat herding is about building community.

Finally, herding cats is about managing trolls in a constructive way. Sometimes trolls are just passionate people who have been burnt and feel frustrated. They can sometimes become your greatest contributors because they often care about the topic. If you always engage with trolls in a helpful and constructive way, you won’t miss the opportunities to connect with those who genuinely have something meaningful to contribute.

Community and Topic Research

You need to know the communities of interest. The thought leaders, where they are having their discussions, what one-to-many points (technical, social, events) can you tap into to encourage participation and to get your finger on the pulse of what the community really thinks. Community research is about knowing a little about the history and context of the communities involved, about the right (and wrong) language, about if and how they have engaged before and getting the information you need to build a community of interest.

Topic research means your community engagement person needs to know enough about the domain area to be able to engage intelligently with communities of interest. Your organisation is effectively represented by these people so you need them to be smart, informed, genuine, socially and emotionally intelligent, “customer service” oriented and able to say when they don’t know, but be able to follow it up.

Collaboration & Co-design

This skillset is about intuitively trying to include others in a process. Trying to connect the dots on communities, perspectives, skills and interests to draw people from industry, academia and any other relevant groups into the co-design of your project. By getting knowledgable, clever and connected people in the tent, you achieve both a better plan and a community of (possible influential) people who will hopefully want to see your initiative succeed. Co-design isn’t just about creating something and asking people’s opinion, but engaging them in the process of developing the idea in the first place.

A little thanks goes a long way. By publicly recognising the efforts of contributors you also encourage them to continue to contribute but whatever you are engaging on needs to be meaningful, and have tangible outcomes people can see and get behind.

Real outcomes of your online engagement are key in managing public expectations.

Monitoring, Analysis & Feedback Mechanisms

It is vital that you have internally the skills to monitor what is happening online, analyse both the content generated and the context around the content created (the community, individuals, location, related news, basically all the metadata that helps you understand what the data means).

By constantly monitoring and analysing, you should be able to identify iterative improvements to your online engagement strategy, your project, policy or “product”. Most people focus on one of these three (usually the latest toy with pretty but meaningless graphs spruiked by some slick salesperson), but it is by turning the data into knowledge and finally into actions or iterative improvements that you will be able to respond in a timely and appropriate manner to new opportunities and challenges.

2013 hot When the dam breaks...

It is amazing to watch how quickly things can change once a key leadership change - of mind or person - occurs in a government department.

In the last four weeks Australia has gone from having no digital diplomats, lagging the world, to having four (@AusAmbUSA, @AusHCIndia@AusAmbJP and @DubesAustralia) - hopefully with many more to come (selected strategically) as we still lag behind nations like the US in leveraging these tools.

This is being reported to me as happening in other agencies as well - sometimes as almost a collective awakening to the benefits of engaging online.

Of course this isn't necessarily all good. There needs to be care taken to understand different online channels and use the right tools for purpose.

It also doesn't necessarily reflect a culture shift. I'm still seeing governments, every day, using 2.0 technologies in 1.0 ways and attempting to insert barriers to limit 'conversational risk' that, conversely, frustrate people and increase risk (they go talk about you somewhere else).

If you're a communications professional, or a proponent of social media, it is a very good time to ensure that your skills are up-to-date and your social media policy and plans ready - in draft form - to go to executive when they ask.

As I've blogged before, Ignorance (of social media) is risk and it pays to ensure you have enough knowledge to make good recommendations, avoiding the known pitfalls through good planning.

For Communications professionals who refuse to consider the use of online channels, your effective career is shortening fast, as is the effectiveness of policy and program managers - however there's still time to expand your skills to all the new 'tools of the trade'.

Redesigning government: Does the terminology of government hold it back?

I had an interesting discussion last week with a colleague about the terminology of government.

We talk about politicians as moving the 'levers of power' and departmental restructures as 'machinery of government' (MOG) changes (sometimes used as a verb "we got mogged!")

Lack of progress in bureaucracy is called 'spinning wheels' (which often appears to be what's going on while officers are 'fine-tuning' policy), while government communications is often referred to simply as 'spin'.

So why are these machine-like industrial era metaphors still used to apply to government?

Yes, that's right - industrial era. The term 'machinery of government' is thought to originate from 1861 with John Stuart Mill in Considerations on Representative Government - who argues against the tendency to consider government as a controllable, predictable machine.

I've previously written of the difficulties inherent for a government, structured under 19th Century principles, attempting to use 20th Century technologies to govern in a 21st Century world.

in this respect, if governments are seeking to move forward, surely they need to consider the terminology they use as well.

Let's use the example of another industry, medicine. From the 16th Century doctors began to think of humans and animals as complex machines, first clockwork and then, from the 19th Century, as a powered machine, the heart as a pump, stomach as a factory (with food the fuel), nerves as wires and joints as pistons.

Through the 20th Century this view became more sophisticated as we built a better understanding of how the body operated. New post-industrial technology paradigms were used to help conceptualise and communicate this understanding. The brain was considered as a computer, the nerves as a network and with our face and limbs the 'peripherals' that allowed us to interface with the outside world.

Each paradigm helped the doctors of the time to build a conceptual framework on which to view and understand the body and address its ills. Each was a partial model of what was really occurring, but was sufficient (based on the knowledge at the time) to provide a foundation for decision-making and treatment.

Government is still using industrial era terms and concepts, 150 years after Mill's book.

Our understanding of government and society has changed. our technology has changed. The outcomes that government is expected to deliver has changed.

Does industrial-era terminology still provide the right models for government? Are politicians still 'pulling the levers of power', or negotiating equitable solutions in partnership with other organisations and communities?

Should departmental changes be considered 'machinery' - moving parts from one department to another,  like moving parts from one machine to another, or considered within a context of matrix governance, where departments do not exist and public officials work across silos and functional in ad hoc teams to meet specific objectives and goals?

Can we conceptualise a 21st Century model of government using 19th Century terminology, or do the words, and the shape they lead our thoughts into, limit government to outdated modes?

To use a final industrial-era phrase, how do we 'break the mould' for government, unleashing new forms of governance that suit modern society?

What modern day terminology should and could we use to reshape our own models of government and describe a new collaborative, open, governance web suited to modern day society?

How nine year olds can now reform governments, one bite at a time

With the tools available today, influence over government policy is no longer the preserve of the wealthy, the well-connected or those people with a significant TV, radio or newspaper presence.

While traditional media and interests still have significant influence, social media has allowed individuals to become far more influential.

Blogs, forums and social networks give individuals and small groups the ability to have a national or global public platform, at little or no cost, that can be used to tell their stories and present different views or facts.

This is both challenging and an opportunity for governments. Governments, including politicians and officials, that seek to ignore, marginalise or otherwise discredit individuals for standing up for their beliefs or reporting facts are much more likely to be publicly exposed, their reputations damaged and any hypocrisy cast into the public eye.

Governments that embrace the opportunity to bring more people inside the tent, balance well-connected interests with individual views and question whether traditional lobby and representative groups actually represent the groups they claim to represent, are likely to find their work more complex but ultimately more effective, with better policy and more relevant service delivery outcome.

A great example of the influence of individuals due to social media (bolstered by traditional media once the groundswell grew) has occurred over the last week.

NeverSeconds
Some of you may be aware of the NeverSeconds blog, and the struggles its 9-year author has had with the Scottish council, which banned her taking photos of her school lunches until convinced otherwise by online public opinion, celebrities and the Scottish Education Minister.

However if you're not, here's the story in a nutshell (referencing Wired's story NeverSeconds shuts down).

In April this year nine-year-old Martha Payne in Scotland, with some technical help from her father, started a blog as a writing exercise to document what she ate each day for lunch in her school, Lochgilphead Primary.

Martha's lunch on 18 June

Before starting the blog, she and her father (who is a local farmer), encouraged by her mother (a GP), surfed foodie blogs for inspiration. Martha decided as a result that she wanted to photo each of her lunches and provide a report including how much she liked the food, the number of bites each meal took to eat, the health rating (from a nine-year old's perspective), the price and the number of hairs in the food.

The blog was approved by the school and was written entirely by Martha under supervision from her father.

Over the first two months of the blog's life, Martha attracted a huge audience from around the world, with more than a million views of her posts.

Her blog started driving good outcomes. Her local council 'remembered' to tell the school that students were entitiled to unlimited salad, fruit and bread, she and her father were invited to participate in a workshop on school lunches, other students from around the world began sending her photos of their lunches (which she posted in her blog too). A newspaper sent her some money for use of her photos, which she donated to a charity (more on this later).

The media caught wind of her blog and began writing articles about it, including Time, the Telegraph, and the Daily Mail. She was interviewed on the BBC and also attracted the attention of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, who has crusaded on the topic of healthy school lunches in Britain.

This, however, is where bureaucracy stepped in.

Martha's lunch on 30 May

An article in a newspaper used a throw-away headline, "Time to fire the dinner ladies", while discussing Martha's involvement in a thinktank on health school meals.

The local Council, Argyll and Bute Council decided that this criticism was too much, and claimed media coverage of the blog had led catering staff to fear for their jobs.

They promptly decreed on 14 June that students would no longer be allowed to take cameras into their school canteen.

Martha was accordingly called out of maths class and told that she could no longer photo her lunches.

By this time Martha had had 2 million views of her blog and had raised £2000 for charity, including £50 from the newspaper mentioned earlier.

However, as an obedient nine-year old, Martha wrote a goodbye post on her blog.

At this point her readers became activated, and the media coverage exponentially increased. She received 2,370 comments on her goodbye post and over 200 articles were posted in newspapers, plus radio and TV stories around the world. She received celebrity support from Jamie Oliver and Neil Gaiman.

Twelve hours later, the Argyll and Bute Council published an official statement (now removed from their site, but still visible online thanks to @peterwalker99 at http://www.twitlonger.com/show/hrom1r).

This statement, in part, accused Martha of misrepresenting what was on offer in the canteen,

 "The Council has directly avoided any criticism of anyone involved in the ‘never seconds’ blog for obvious reasons despite a strongly held view that the information presented in it misrepresented the options and choices available to pupils"

Martha's lunch on 16 May

It went on to state the Council's dedication to good food standards in school canteens, said they'd not received formal complaints about the food in the last two years other than from Martha's family, and that the blog had, and would have, no influence on what they served students anyway. (It is interesting to compare the quality of the statement's writing with the quality of Martha's writing.)

Around this time the charity Martha was supporting, Mary's Meals, reported that they'd now received over £40,000 in donations from her blog - more than enough to build a new kitchen at Lirangwe Primary School in Blantyre, Malawi, to feed its 1,963 students. The kitchen is to be named 'Friends of NeverSeconds'.

Three hours after the Argyll and Bute Council published its statement, the council's leader, Roddy McCuish, told the BBC that he was rescinding the ban on photos in school canteens, and the council issued a statement commending Martha's blog and indicating that the council would be involving students in their efforts to keep improving school meals,

We need to find a united way forward so I am going to bring together our catering staff, the pupils, councillors and council officials - to ensure that the council continues to provide  healthy, nutrious and attractive school meals.  That "School Meals Summit" will take place later this summer.

 I will also meet Martha and her father as soon as I can, along with our lead councillor on Education, Michael Breslin to seek her continued engagement, along with lots of other pupils, in helping the council to get this issue right.   By so doing Martha Payne and her friends  will have had a strong and lasting influence not just on school meals, but on the whole of Argyll & Bute.

Martha has resumed her blogging, and has now raised over £87,000 for the Mary's Meal charity - see her total, and give to the charity here.

Meanwhile the issue of healthy school lunches is being more widely discussed and debated, and the council has learnt it needs to more closely consider the views of its constituents and the children it serves. Shutting down debate is no longer an option for successful governance.

And the children of Lirangwe Primary School in Malawi are extremely happy, with the short video below a fitting tribute to the impact individuals can now have on governments - one bite at a time.

Mapping Australian Twitter discussions

Associate Professor Axel Bruns, who has previously done marvelous work mapping Australian blogs and tracking social media activity around the Queensland bushfires, has released his team's latest research on mapping the Australian Twittersphere.

Drawing (slightly paraphrased) from the joint CCI and Queensland University of Technology media release:

With as many as two million Australians now using Twitter to exchange news, views and information, the internet phenomenon has become a focal element in the nation’s social discourse, say Axel and Dr Jean Burgess.

By analysing topics of interest and concern to Australians the researchers built a ‘network map’ showing the connections between different issues and areas. “Just as newspapers have circulation reports and TV has its ratings, it is important to understand the role which new media are playing in our society,” they say.

“The map offers us a completely different way to view Australian society – not by where people live or what job they do, but by how they connect to each other through Twitter,” said Professor Bruns.

“You can use the map to study developments in Australian politics, natural disasters or trends in public thought and opinion,” Dr Burgess says. “It offers us a completely fresh way to view the discourse that is taking place between Australians or different groups.

“It shows there are multiple, overlapping publics, interacting and interweaving in time and space across Australia.”

The map also revealed which Twitter networks are isolated from the Australian ‘mainland’ tending to connect among themselves more than with other networks. These include evangelical groups, cities like Adelaide and Perth, followers of pop stars, and various sports and beer lovers.

The researchers based their map on data from 950,000 Australian Twitter accounts, but say that the national Twitter population is estimated to be as high as 1.8-2 million. The world Twitter population is now thought to be around 200 million – about a quarter that of rival social medium Facebook.