Remember years ago when Tomorrow’s World (BBC TV) told us how amazing the future would be, that we’d all have robot cleaners and loads more spare time because computers would handle everything for us? It all seemed, and still seems so far away. Computers have largely resulted in people spending a massive proportion of their time on computers.

I’m helping to organise a conference for the Local Safeguarding Children Board. Anyone who’s ever organised such a thing knows that one of the time consuming challenges is the administration involved in people registering for the event, especially dealing with reserve lists and cancellations. 

We’ve all been there. Dull conferences, where row upon row of plastic seats face plastic speakers intent on reading their slides verbatim, turning their backs to the audience at intervals, inadvertently producing the effect of one of those old fashioned rotating Leslie speakers. We have to resort to minor forms of self harm just to stay awake.

Later, you might get to participate in a workshop discussion where everyone needs to qualify their attendance by announcing their job titles. This really helps people to filter out the little folk and ignore you, based on your insignificance in the hierarchy. Yawn.

It’s all an endurance test. Corporate psychological warfare.
Everybody is bored stiff but that’s how we do these things, right ?

Step aside, there’s a new kid in town. The UnConference wants to shake things up.

Unconference ??

If you told your boss you wanted to go to a conference where there was no agenda and you didn’t know who was going to be speaking, or even what specific topics would be covered, you might get some strange looks. Your request to attend might well be refused.
So what’s so amazing about an Unconference ?

On Tuesday April 19th 2011, I popped my Unconference cherry at a little gathering called ShropCamp. The overall focus of the day was “How can we use social media and open data to help service providers to work more effectively at a local level?”. After a charismatic introduction by organiser Ben Proctor, the equally dynamic Andy Mabbett took over to help us all collectively shape the agenda for the day. Any participant can run a workshop at an Unconference, and at Andy’s request, around a dozen people put themselves forward. Compared to a traditional conference, the next bit was rivetting.
One by one, each person made a thirty second pitch – timed with a stopwatch, no less.
Fast and punchy, and with such a flow of diverse ideas, we were hooked from the word go.

The workshop titles are then written up on post it notes and assembled onto a 4×3 grid. In a nutshell, it’s as simple as that. As an attendee, you check the grid to see which sessions you’re most interested in.

Clearly, the presenters of the workshops had come prepared, so there’s obviously a lot of planning and preparation involved. You couldn’t organise an Unconference without knowing that you had a bank of reliable people who would be willing to come and pitch.

The quality of the ShropCamp presentations and speakers was excellent, and the emphasis was on collaborative participation. This was about a group of people with a shared passion for improving services being open with each other to see what connections could be made.

Why does it work?

Like social media itself, the power behind an Unconference is that the best ideas and concepts rise to the top, not necessarily people or roles. Old hierarchies are flattened and everyone can contribute meaningfully. It’s precisely this self organising aspect which keeps everyone engaged and contributing. Like a flock of starlings, the group appear to have form and direction, yet no individual is steering. The flock could disperse at any time but something keeps them cohesive and on the fine line between chaos and order. There’s a lot of Systems Thinking and Complexity theory stuff been written about this kind of idea. I heard it described by @NoamKos at a recent event as the “Chaordic” principle – finding the perfect balance between order and chaos, to provide the most fertile ground for creativity and innovation. That’s what the Unconference does.

Everybody is in control, and nobody is in control.
We can all steer the flock.

More about ShropCamp…

This post has been mainly about the Unconference format itself. If you’d like to read more about ShropCamp, the best place to start would be http://shropcamp.tumblr.com.

Here are a few post event blogs from people who attended.

Paul Nash from Penval http://www.penval.co.uk/news/shropcamp-report

Jools Payne http://biscuitbunny1.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/shropcamp-beyond-brilliant/

Ben Proctor’s post-event analysis http://www.benproctor.co.uk/2011/04/shropcamp-how-it-was-for-me/

Anyone who has ever worked in a large organisation knows that one problem raised at almost every brainstorming session about anything is – Communication.

It’s always there, and nobody is ever surprised by its presence. It’s the elephant everyone’s ok talking about, because everybody knows internal communications suck.
Corporate centres continue to cling to traditional top-heavy formats, and have probably convinced themselves they’ve already made the transition to the digital age because they now spam everyone with pdf newsletters.  Another box ticked.
There is a time and a place for top-down dissemination of certain kinds of info, of course, but what has been lacking for so long is a method by which information can freely flow upwards and sideways as well as just down from the top. This is nobody’s fault really, and if anything is to blame, it’s the lack of appropriate tools or mechanisms to enable this kind of networking.

But wait, this is 2011, surely there are clever new tools to enable this sort of thing?
One such contender making waves in some organisations is Yammer.

Yammer is marketed as a social network for your workforce, a way for people to share information about what they’re doing, and connect with people across the organisation to build better cooperative links.

There are many positive reports from people within local government using Yammer effectively, and I’ve put together a few quotes picked up from some of the CoP fora.

Alongside the positive reasons for wanting to use Yammer, there is lots of advice about how to implement it effectively.
Following these 5 basic tips should increase your chances of getting a successful Yammer network going.

1. We all love a bit of JFDI, but check with your IT/web/comms teams first to check if there are any plans to implement anything similar.

2. Sell the idea based on the advantages it will bring in terms of helping to meet business objectives. It’s not just for staff to chat about their holidays, it’s to enable people to quickly connect with the right expertise, and for the right links to be made right at the early stages of a project. It will cut through silo working and optimise project teams.

3. Don’t force it. Let it grow organically, and it might spread in a viral way. It’s about ownership – if people choose to participate in it, they’ll be more emotionally invested than if it’s the latest corporate fad being pushed on to everyone whether they like it or not.

4. Cherry pick a group of people to get it started who you know will chip in with positive posts and be generous in their replies. Let it spread outward from these people to whoever shows an interest. This pilot group could be cross departmental in its makeup.

5. Monitor the activity, as people will be watching. The Yammer question “what are you working on? ” should help avoid too much personal chat, but sooner or later you might need some juicy examples of some real benefits that have arisen from the use of Yammer, that couldn’t have come about any other way.

I’m sure there are many other points I could have included here. Please feel free to add your own experiences in the comments section.

What are the CoP groups saying about Yammer ? A selection of views…

I think it is important that networks like Yammer are viral and fairly non-hierarchical.  We already have hierarchical modes of communication in big organisations – cascade briefings, the occasional consultation – but Yammer scratches in itch in between inter-team comms and allowing conversation and communication outside the top down.
Ingrid Koehler, Improvement Strategist, LG Improvement and Development

Yammer enables people who may never have crossed each others paths to collaborate. people feel empowered to share
Karen Ramsay-Smith, Information Development, Warwickshire County Council

..amount of email they were having to deal with reduced significantly, needless meetings were avoided as discussions took place online instead, and it was much easier to find someone who could help them
The fact is that more often than not, because projects like deploying comms or collaboration tools involve technology, they are managed by the IT department. This is a serious mistake
Dave Briggs, Community Evangelist, Learning Pool

Grow it virally in the organisation, don’t impose it. Allow groups to grow and manage themselves without central control.

Tom Phillips, A Community Engagement Manager, Kent County Council

It’s peers who drive it, not the senior management. The outcome is far better.
Dan Slee, Press and PR Officer, Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council

Yammer is promoting an open conversation.
allows for a sense of what is happening in areas you may otherwise never encounter and so can make connections at an early stage in developments.
Matthew Dodd, Web / Intranet Manager, Nottinghamshire County Council

I work for a local authority adjacent to the one I live in. Just recently I’ve been trying to promote the use of tools like facebook pages and twitter accounts within my own  organisation, but sometimes it can seem like some people think social media means sharing a copy of your newsletter with a friend.

I’ve just signed up to take part in a series of consultation/feedback sessions with the customer services team of my ‘home’ authority, and I’m wondering if I’ll have more influence as a service user, than I do as a keen employee in my ‘work’ county.

We shall see.
I’ll blog about the process here.

Actually – I signed up two weeks ago and still haven’t heard back from them.
Great customer service guys!

Please feel free to share any comments or advice about the best approach to take to influence the powers that be!
thanks

This is the first part of a series of posts about how to set up a simple website which you’ll be able to update easily by yourself.
It’s aimed at non-techie people who realise the benefits of having a website, but don’t have the time to get into the technical side of things, or just aren’t that interested!
If this sounds like you, read on, I’ll try to make this as painless as it can be.

I’m writing this as I am developing a real site for a local charitable group, and I hope this guide will be useful to other similar groups of people who have thought about getting online but never really knew how to go about it or where to start. The site I am developing is www.conwykidsmatter.org.uk

What’s in a name ?

The first step is to decide what name you want for your site. This is called the domain name. Ideally a domain name should be short and sweet and, if possible, say something about what the site is all about.

To come up with the Conwykidsmatter name, we did a quick brainstorm session with members of the group, and simply got people to shout out keywords or phrases about the group and its reason for being. We ended up with a flipchart pad full of words like children, support, families, poverty, enable, etc.

We knew we wanted to end up with something that was only two or three words, and started stringing together different combinations from the flipchart. As soon as someone said “Conwy kids matter”, it just felt right. We’d found our name!

Register it!

I host all my sites with a company called 1&1, I’ve used them for years and they’re very reliable and always excellent if you need any support.

Domain names are unique – you can’t have two with exactly the same name. So if you have decided on your perfect domain name, the first step is to see if it is available.

You can use the form below to check if your chosen domain name is available!

Notice that you can choose the .com or .org bit yourself, and there is some reasoning behind which should be more appropriate.

.com, or .co.uk  is generally for commercial sites
.org is generally used by non-profits

There is a list of these so called “top-level” domains on this wikipedia page.

Once you’ve registered your domain name, you need to have some webspace to actually host the contents of your website.
I mentioned that I use 1&1 internet, but there are many providers out there, so do your research to get the best deal for you. If you want to be able to run WordPress, the blogging platform, then your web host needs to include access to a SQL database, and have PHP 5.

For www.conwykidsmatter.org.uk , we needed to be able to host some ordinary static webpages plus have the ability to post regular updates. A blogging system like WordPress would be perfect!

WordPress is open source software. It’s continually being developed, has gazillions of useful plugins to do whatever you need, and did I mention the small fact that it’s free?
Please don’t be fooled by IT people trying to convince you that you need to buy expensive software. It simply isn’t the case these days.

Download WordPress here, and next time, we’ll go through how to install it.

Having been granted permission from our corporate overseers, I am delighted to be able to blog about a social media project which I’m now involved in developing.

The work is being kindly supported by the CYP partnership, with the added aim of producing a toolkit of guidance for partner agencies and vol orgs, to share the learning and provide a useful resource.

As a more in depth guide to the techie aspects, I’ll create a series of blog posts outlining how to get started with your online presence.