John’s Idea

Social networking, Web 2 etc, provides a really exciting opportunity for an organisation like the IDeA. As local government’s improvement agency we exist to help the people who lead councils, and work in them, help each other to do better. In a nutshell this means helping everyone in local government share experiences and talk to each other. Web 2 was made for us!

Our Community of Practice website is our attempt to bring Web 2 into the improvement world. So far so good. The platform supports over 300 communities and with 11,000 participants already registered new registrations are growing at over 1,000 a month.

While things are moving forward the challenges are also apparent. Web 2 is painfully transparent. Unlike the traditional publishing approach associated with Web 1 you know if people are listening and participating - you can really hear the silence. As “local government” is to an extent a pre-defined “community” you can also tell whether you are hitting or missing your target participants. While the management information generated by the CoP site is brilliant, it does mean that there is not so much hype to hide behind.

So what are the challenges - loosely you can categorise them as supply and demand.

On the supply side the IDeA is trying to make Web 2 an integral part of the way we try and make improvement happen. This is challenging our existing portfolio of techniques for encouraging improvement. Of course we know that learning by doing works and that “action learning” is a really powerful way of sharing practice and encouraging change. Our approach to developing and distributing best practice however is much more traditional and developed in the context of the tools we had to do it. For example like many similiar organisations we have a prediliction for “case studies” which we research and publish (in hard as well as soft copy). Of course what we need to get to is real time experience, generated at source, which provokes real time feed back on its value from “users”.

On the demand side we have to accept that there are constraints on both the pace and extent to which people in local government will take advantage of this sort of approach. There are the general issues associated with the adoption of a new means of communication (this is my first ever blog) and there are specific issues associated with local government. In particular, lets be honest, the demographic doesn’t help. As a smug baby boomer I did feel that having similar cultural tastes meant that the generation gap I had with my parents didn’t exist with my children - given the fundamentally different approach they have to communication I’m no longer so sure. The age profile of local governments (councillors and employees) is significantly older than the population as a whole and the adopters of this style of communication in particular.

So, having taking my own personal plunge into this Web 2 pool with this my first blog, I’m hoping I can encourage other local government staff and councilors to use this medium as an additional channel for dialogue and debate, and that the transparency will serve to illustrate that we are all working towards the same goals of better government and improved services for our citizens.