UKGC10 – What went down…

Okay, I’ll come clean. At 5.30 on Saturday morning, while sat on a train between Lincoln and Newark I had a little moment of doubt. Why. Why was I on a train, heading to London, on a Saturday, to talk about work stuff. Sure, I was going to see some of the brilliant people I’ve been keeping up with on Twitter at UK GovCamp ‘10, but really, what was I going to get out of it. Halfway through the first session of the day that doubt lifted and I realised that this was probably one of the best work related events I’d been to. The agenda was fresh (narry a “What can Social Media do for me?” in sight) and the content was all relevant to the current climate of gov related web.

Here’s a run down of the sessions I attended. It’s not as detailed as some of the write ups out there but it should give you a flavour of the days discussions.

SOCITM Web Professionals

Coming from a private sector background as a web-dev, I am particularly interested in the concept of this initiative. I feel that there is a serious place in local gov for web professionals. We are all expected to implement big, big changes into both the web and general IT infrastructure, from ePetitions to GovConnect security to making our data accessible, all while trying to do our day jobs of maintaining our respective systems.

In a lot of cases (as far as I can see) there is not sufficient knowledge, particularly from the point of view of website development, in local gov to help push these systems through. This can lead to massive expenditure and delays as officers have to learn or consultants have to be brought in to develop and deploy systems.

Vicky Sargeant from SOCITM led this session to give some background on the Web Professionals initiative and take any suggestions on how to drive it forward. It is my view that this initiative needs to focus on both education from a skills and standard setting viewpoint and on promotion of existing professionals working in local gov. I would be more than happy to help out other councils in looking at their systems, suggesting changes and helping implement those changes; in a climate where we are having our budgets cut more and more, we need to be aware of the steps we can take to add value to our websites and improve the customer experience on the thrift.

I’m hoping to write more about SOCITM Web Professionals going forwards.

Data sets – creation and delivery and How can we make data more available

Two sessions here both of which have connecting concepts.

Following the launch of data.gov.uk last Thursday, there is now a subtle push from London to get local data online in a reusable, easily digestable format. These two sessions kind of bolstered that by, in the first session, discussing how that data can be created and delivered, from something as simple as hosting a XLS or CSV file on your web server, to using my preferred choice of Google Docs to convert the data into a number of useful formats (I’ve actually got a third option as of today but more on that later).

The second session was an open discussion to try and kick off a project to pull some local gov data into a standardised format by using global ID’s to allow, for example, ward data to be easily compared. As a strong supporter of open data, I am very eager to get as much of Lincoln’s data sets into an easily digestible format as possible so I’m hoping to keep up with this project. More info as it becomes available.

Council websites – making them cooler

A nifty session hosted by Liz Azyan and Martin Black from Camden council. They are currently undergoing a project to redesign the Camden website and this session pretty much took the form of a focus group looking at current council sites, how they are good, how they are bad and how they can be improved. Great discussions and some interesting ideas taken away which I won’t dwell on too much for fear of backlash!

By this point I was pretty drained after my 4am start (I’m THAT dedicated) so sat out the last session to catch up on the days tweets on my laptop. The camp ended at 5pm when we took the party to the Plumbers Arms, a pub round the corner. The beer and snacks flowed freely thanks to the sponsors and a good time was had by all.

I’ve taken a lot away from this GovCamp, probably moreso than previous ones, and I am looking forward to some of the potential projects I’m hoping to get involved in.

UK GovCamp ‘10

Well it has been a long time since I’ve updated! I am a bad boy. Truth be told I’ve got a lot of projects in the pipeline, some related to this blog, some related to my other blogs (check them out in the right hand navigation).

Today I’m at UK Govcamp ‘10 in London. I’ll hopefully get some posts up about the stuff we’ve been discussing later today so stay tuned!

Google Docs as an easy document library

Regular readers will know how much I love Google’s online tools. I recently blogged about how Google Docs can be used to create open data formats and today I’ve taken this further by using Google Docs recently released Share Folders to prototype an easy document library. As usual I’ve used some public documents from City of Lincoln Council and you can find the results here.

What’s basically going on here is that I’ve created a root folder within Google Docs which I have set to be shared globally. Any folders and documents within this then automatically inherit this share permission, allowing them to be accessed by anyone. Simple. What it basically does is enable an organisation, be it a local authority, some business or anyone, to store all their public documentation online and logically categorise it for easy consumption. Combined with the fact that it’s all being delivered through Google Docs via embeds and therefore does not really require download by the end user then this becomes a brilliant way to distribute documents. It’s also very easy to keep updated and any changes made to native Google docs are reflected in real time.

There are, however a few niggling problems with this. The shared  folders do not have a search on them which would be fantastic, especially if they were to be used to store lots of documents. Also, there is no easy way to download the native Google documents in their “whizzy” open data formats (RTF, RSS etc) without “opening” them, despite the fact that they’re already open. This system will also be somewhat detached from an organisations main website, i.e. not easy to link in using traditional CMS commands (for basic CMS publishers) or included in search results. It would also be top if the shared folder generated its own RSS feed.

But, all in all, I think that this is a very good application of Google Docs, once again. The more Google adds to these cloud based services, the more we can look at using them creatively.

I’ve also started using this for myself – look down the right navbar and you’ll see a link to my public Google Docs. Anything I want to make public will go in here so check back often for new additions. Again, would be good if I could RSS it but – hey ho

LocalGovCamp Lincoln – Post thoughts

The Think Tank in Lincoln - host to LocalGovCamp

The LocalGovCamp in Lincoln last friday was an awesome day made even more awesome by the top people that we had attending. There was a palpable level of entusiasm and excitement in the Think Tank that really came out in the quality of the sessions and the level of discussion. There was emotion (@davebriggs and @ShoeButt are now required to have a make up hug) and above all everyone was open to sharing their views and opinions (because, let’s be honest, we’d all be boring if we thought the same way) on a number of subjects ranging from mapping and e-petitioning to social media usage and hyperlocal communication.

Personally I was massively pleased with the turnout (although there were some notable exceptions who I hope to see at future events), the location at the Think Tank, the quality of the catering and the fact that everyone went away with new ideas and contacts.

The stylish unagenda chart, filled with pretty post-it's for the sessions

 @Liz_Azyan asked me (as did a number of other people) what I thought the purpose of LocalGovCamp is. I think that, at its most basic level, it is an opportunity for likeminded people working in or with an interest in the public sector, whether they are web professionals, comms guys, councillors, contractors – to get together, share ideas and keep up to speed with the ideas and developments of their peers. It is so important that we endeavour to work together and share our findings; we’re not in a competetive industry and we should all be ensuring that we’re on a level playing field. This kind of thing also breeds creativity, allowing us to look at the technology available, take what others are doing with it and put our own slant on things. And the current technology gives us the power to do this.

But then, if you’re reading this, you most likely don’t need me to tell you that!

A big thanks, once again, to all attendees; friends and long distance colleagues all. There wasn’t a pledge wall at the camp but let’s all take away ideas and try and make a difference. See you at the next camp!

P.S. I’ve got some notes from the sessions I attended that I plan on writing up over the next few days so keep them peepers peeled. I’ll also be aggregating all the information to flow from the event on the LGCLincoln blog so go sign up for the RSS there if you haven’t already…

(photo credits to @iamadonut)

Using Google Docs to free your data

Councillor Allowances, published to the City of Lincoln Council Website via Google Docs

I’m very pleased to announce that a project long in gestation has been released to the public today; the first heavy integration of Google Docs into the City of Lincoln Council website. I’d previously dabbled with this to publish usage metrics on our website here, but the page we launched this morning displays details of councillor allowances; more mainstream, public data.

The process is simple – copy and paste your XLS spreadsheet into a Google Spreadsheet, hit the big blue “Share” button and select “Publish as a Web Page”. Select the sheets you wish to publish (if you have many), tick “Automatic Publishing” and then select the flavour you want. First off I used the “HTML to embed in a page” option – this gave me the iFrame that allows the user to read the document in the page without downloading a PDF or navigating away from our site. I then grabbed links for CSV and RSS flavours to encourage reuse and resyndication, and finally provided links to a PDF version and standalone web version to allow the user choice.

But why is this better? Here’s some of the benefits of this approach:

• We don’t force the user to download a document to read it – the information is presented to them right there on the page.
• Google will automatically convert the document to reusable flavours – we can publish these and encourge reuse.
• It’s easier to maintain – instead of having to upload a new version of the document, change links on the site, remove the old document etc, etc, all we need do is update the remote file on Google Docs.

There are a few cons, however:

• There has to be some consideration on how this is managed – as an organisation we do hold sensitive data which could easily be leaked through something like Google Docs so…
• …Google Docs is banned across most of our network (not boasting, but as web guy I get special access). This makes it a problem for officers to get on board and help republish this data.
• There could be accessibility issues – I need to do some testing in this area but I’m not ruling it out as yet.

On a whole, though, this integration should work to make data more accessible and make it easier for users to read documents on our website that they would have had to download in the past. I’m hoping that we can move to integrate this across the website and will be keeping this blog up-to-date as this moves ahead…