Dissident

Civil Servant 'crap speak'

I was at a Policy and Performance event earlier this month, where one of the issues raised in my sub-group was the difficulty councils had in communicating with their citizens. This couldn't be better demonstrated by this snippet from a recent Public Sector Forums Newslletter.    

This comes courtesy of the West Midlands Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnership (RIEP), in a report of a recent workshop designed to see how it could best use £1.3m of funding being set aside to improve leadership and management skills in councils.

"Participants acknowledged that 'understanding the sectoral context' was a pre-requisite and that the full range of both personal and organisational capacities were required to underpin any focus and emphasis attached to a leadership intervention. ...[T]here are two themes that represent priorities for Local Authorities at the present time:
[1] Enabling and supporting community leadership through improved partnership and locality working to ensure the delivery of improved community outcomes.
Working for and with communities in order to understand and meet community needs, through effective community consultation; understanding, prioritizing, influencing and delivering improved quality of life indicators, and recognizing and working with the interdependencies required in place shaping.  Encouraging trust by engaging with and enabling service priorities to be shaped by all sections of the community.  Leading beyond the authority through effective partnership working; influencing others and building trust; understanding and mainstreaming integrated public services; levering in additional resources through partnerships, and performance managing partnerships which deliver improved community outcomes."

Or, effectively, in other words: "We need to make sure we involve the right people."

Apparently, this has been submitted to the Plain English Campaign Golden Bull(shit) Awards. I think it stands a very good chance of winning!

International ePaticipation and Local Democracy Symposium

I will be attending (and presenting) at the International eParticipation and Local Democracy Symposium on 28/29 February. I will be joining Diane Downey (Assistant Corporate Head of ICT - Delivery, Sunderland City Council), Richard Wilson (MD of Involve) and Matt Rhodes (Head of Research, FreshNetworks) in a joint session entitled "Citizen Empowerment: Where do we begin?"  Full agenda here. Download symposium_agenda.doc

I'm anticipating (nay - hoping) the session will stimulate some discussion on the apparent dichotomy between empowering citizens to engage with central and local government whilst at the same time disenfranchising citizens through lack of consultation prior to the introduction of bi-laws and regulations. The proposed increase to congestion charges in London is a typical example (and I have no hidden agenda here, since I neither live in or use a car to commute to London).

I will also touch on the success of the communities of practice in local government as an example of how staff working in local councils are empowering themselves to improve services - quite often without the knowledge or understanding of their respective Chief Executives!

It should be an interesting couple of days.

100 Banned Words - again

For anyone who may have missed my earlier blog - published 12 December 2007 - about the
Local Government Association's publication of 100 words that public bodies should not use if they want to communicate effectively with citizens - well, it seems this has sparked some heated debate (and vitriol)  from readers of the IDeA site that carried the original article.

The LGA's list of the tope 100 'non-words' included tortuous vocabulary such 'capacity building', 'improvement levers', 'place shaping',  and democratic mandate', as well as the more benign 'welcome', 'customer' and 'guidelines'.

A sample of some of the more heated exchange on this article includes:

"Perhaps if the LGA concentrated more on such words rather than knocking up patronising lists like this, then people would take them seriously", wrote another poster. "As it stands, the vast majority of the public and council officers take one look at the LGA and laugh."

"Has there ever been a more patronising missive from the LGA?!?"

"Excuse me whilst I doff my cap m'lud! I'd call it claptrap but that's probably a word "we wouldn't understand".

"The Plain English campaign (sadly aided and abetted by the LGA in this instance), I am afraid, is fast becoming a murderer of the English language"

"The variety, complexity and richness of the language is, in their eyes it seems, something to denigrate in favour of a utlilitarian approach. How very, very sad. May I suggest the LGA concentrates on educating councillors, quite a few of whom are functionally illiterate themselves?"

"Pathetic, as a person who regulary communicates with the general populace I Ihave found them to be very intelligent and on one or two occassions more informed than I. I suggest the LGA should find better ways in which to spend their time/resources and stop finding jobs for the boys."

If you haven't added your views to the original article I'm afraid it's too late - the IDeA have closed the  item for any further comments, but I'll be happy to collect any other thoughts/views/comments and forward to the appropriate people at IDeA and LGA.

If anyone feels particularly motivated to do something practical to improve communication and understanding between public bodies who like to hide behind jargon, look no further than the Local Government Glossary wiki - an initiative that Dave Briggs and I started last year to encourage some on-line collaboration between local authorities in providing plain English descriptions for some of the more obscure terms used in the public sector. You need to register on Wikispaces if you want edit rights to the glossary.

100 Banned Words

Oops, missed this event in my 'Days That Change The World' diary, but apparently it was National Plain English Day yesterday, 11 December 2007. To mark the occasion, the Local Government Association (LGA) published a list of 100 words that public bodies should not use if they want to communicate effectively with local people.

Local government leaders say that unless councils talk to residents in a language that they can understand, then the work they do becomes inaccessible and reduces the chances of people getting involved in their local issues. The list can be found here, but is replicated below. For anyone remotely familiar with 'Govspeak', this is a timely intervention by the Plain English lobby. It's just a pity that something so obvious has to be published at all! (NB. Not quite sure why 'welcome' is on the list??)

The LGA's top 100 'banned words'

1. ambassador
2. agencies
3. beacon
4. best practice
5. bottom-up
6. CAAs
7. can do culture
8. capacity
9. capacity building
10. cascading
11. cautiously welcome
12. champion
13. citizen empowerment
14. community engagement
15. conditionality
16. consensual
17. contestability
18. core message
19. core value
20. coterminosity
21. coterminous
22. cross-cutting
23. customer
24. democratic mandate/legitimacy
25. distorts spending priorities
26. early win
27. empowerment
28. engagement
29. engaging users
30. enhance
31. evidence base
32. external challenge
33. facilitate
34. fast-track
35. flexibilities and freedoms
36. framework
37. fulcrum
38. good practice
39. governance
40. guidelines
41. holistic
42. holistic governance
43. improvement levers
44. incentivising
45. income/funding streams
46. initiative
47. joined up
48. joint working
49. LAAs
50. level playing field
51. localities
52. meaningful consultation/dialogue
53. MAAs
54. menu of options
55. multi-agency
56. multidisciplinary
57. outcomes
58. output
59. participatory
60. partnerships
61. pathfinder
62. peer challenge
63. performance network
64. place shaping
65. predictors of beaconicity
66. preventative services
67. priority
68. process driven
69. quick hit
70. quick win
71. resource allocation
72. revenue streams
73. risk based
74. scaled-back
75. scoping
76. seedbed
77. service users
78. shared priority
79. signpost
80. single point of contact
81. slippage
82. social contracts
83. stakeholder
84. step change
85. strategic/overarching
86. streamlined
87. subsidiary
88. sustainable
89. sustainable communities
90. symposium
91. synergies
92. tested for soundness
93. third sector
94. top-down
95. transformational
96. transparency
97. value-added
98. vision
99. visionary
100. welcome

HMRC loses personal details for 25million people

So, we wake up today to the news that our favorite government agency - Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has been responsible for the loss of personal data for 25 million people. The data included names, addresses, bank details, national insurance numbers etc., so possibly of mild interest to the criminal fraternity out there. What I can't get my head around is why the Government spends so much time, effort and money on developing standards such as e-GIF, which are meant to enable secure and accurate electronic data transfer between government departments, but relies instead on burning sensitive data to two CD-ROMs and then putting these in the post to the receiving department. If this doesn't already sound like one of those Brian Rix  farces,  consider also the fact that  (a)  the data on the CD-ROMs was not encrypted and (b) they were sent by ordinary mail, not registered mail, recorded delivery or courier.

Would you trust this government to run a national ID system? Answers on a postcard please to:  Gordon Brown, 10 Downing St.  London!

Communities of Practice in Local Government

The Community of Practice platform at the Improvement and Development Agency is an integrated set of Web 2.0 tools that is being used to support and facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing across local government communities. I produced the specification for the platform early in 2006, and the platform was launched in September 2006. I was encouraged by a recent news item on how the strategy continues to flourish, with the following quote from Marilyn Leask, the IDeA's Head of Knowledge & Learning:

"This is a terrific example of how the knowledge and learning of local government colleagues is being better harnessed. Having an avenue where peers can voice their opinion, share their problems and seek assistance on a national network is another step forward in the journey towards ensuring best practice is disseminated across local authorities. A benefit of these CoPs is that they are both secure and confidential. CoPs are part of the Knowledge's team's structured progress with web2."

"There are more than 110 communities listed at the website www.communities.idea.gov.uk. The CoPs have proven to be of assistance to councillors and senior managers who have used the medium to discuss issues of concern and use their collective knowledge to deliver the best outcomes for their community."

"At the IDeA we believe that the sector has within it the knowledge to support improvement but that this knowledge needs to be more easily accessible".

I will be working with Marilyn and my IDeA colleagues again in the near future, so looking forward to participating in the support and cultivation of the CoP's that have been established, and evangelising the benefits of the platform to those areas of local government that haven't yet grasped the benefits of this new way of working.   

Online Community Organizer

Reading Seth Godin's blog this morning I came across what was a very relevant item for me, about jobs for the future - the Online Community Organizer. The proximity of Seth's description of this role with the position I've identified and am currntly recruiting for the Information Authority couldn't be closer. I trust Seth will not mind me replicating the post here:

"If you want to hire a union organizer, you probably know what to look for. Someone with resilience, passion, persistence and excellent interpersonal skills.

What if you want to hire someone to build an online community? Somebody to create and maintain a virtual world in which all the players in an industry feel like they need to be part of it? Like being the head of a big trade association, but without the bureaucracy and tedium...

It would help if that person understood technology, at least well enough to know what it could do. They would need to be able to write. But they also have to be able to seduce stragglers into joining the group in the first place, so they have to be able to understand a marketplace, do outbound selling and non-electronic communications. They have to be able to balance huge amounts of inbound correspondence without making people feel left out, and they have to be able to walk the fine line between rejecting trolls and alienating the good guys.

Since there's no rule book, it would help to be willing to try new things, to be self-starting and obsessed with measurement as well.

If you were great at this, I'd imagine you'd never ever have trouble finding good work."

The problem for me (and anyone else seeking this skill set) is that we're fishing from a very small pond, which I can verify from the very few applications I've received to date.  However, if you're out there and see something of yourself in this role description, please apply via the Information Authority web site. A more detailed description of the role is included in the attached PDF document.
Download lsc_ia_ia_community_and_stakeholder_management_sd_final.pdf

               

What if you want to hire someone to build an online community? Somebody to create and maintain a virtual world in which all the players in an industry feel like they need to be part of it? Like being the head of a big trade association, but without the bureaucracy and tedium...

It would help if that person understood technology, at least well enough to know what it could do. They would need to be able to write. But they also have to be able to seduce stragglers into joining the group in the first place, so they have to be able to understand a marketplace, do outbound selling and non-electronic communications. They have to be able to balance huge amounts of inbound correspondence without making people feel left out, and they have to be able to walk the fine line between rejecting trolls and alienating the good guys.

Since there's no rule book, it would help to be willing to try new things, to be self-starting and obsessed with measurement as well.

If you were great at this, I'd imagine you'd never ever have trouble finding good work."

The problem for me (and anyone else seeking this skill set) is that we're fishing from a very small pond, which I can verify from the very few applications I've received to date.  However, if you're out there and see something of yourself in this role description, please apply via the Information Authority web site. A more detailed description of the role is included in the attached PDF document.
Download lsc_ia_ia_community_and_stakeholder_management_sd_final.pdf

               

Job vacancies at The Information Authority

I thought I should make the most of this blog to publicise a number of job vacancies that will be advertised in the Guardian this coming week. The positions have been created as part of the strategy I'm developing for the Information Authority Secretariat. The Information Authority has been established as an independent body to set and regulate data collection and reporting standards for all organisations involved in further education and training in England and Wales. A key component of the strategy will be the creation and development of communities of interest and practice across the further education sector to enable a more open, collaborative and transparent environment for information and knowledge sharing.  A community platform is planned, utilising Web2.0 technolgy and social media applications. The community platform will be available to all data providers and users across the further education sector, including schools, colleges, training providers, agencies and non-government department public bodies.

Quite an ambitious plan, and hence why I'm recruiting the key individuals make it all happen. A copy of the job adverts that will appear in the press and in various web site this week, including Jobserve, Gurteen and TFPL is attached to this posting.  Anyone interested should apply through the information authority web site where an application form will be available from Tuesday 17th July.

Download info_sec_lsc_x126.pdf

Government report: The Power of Information

The Cabinet Office have commissioned a report - The Power of Information - from Ed Mayo (chief exec of the National Consumer Council) and Tom Steinberg (the man behind mySociety and PledgeBank) to look into the ways government can benefit from user-generated sites, particularly with a view to creating APIs to allow mash-ups with public sector data (like the Ordnance Survey). Press announcement here.

Good to see the that the power of Social Media has penetrated to the heart of UK Gov. But can they resist the urge to regulate it?!

Local Government Glossary of Terms

If you've ever wondered what the  acronyms and 'civil service' speak actually mean on the letters you get from the council, or you need some help interpreting the latest government policy initiative, check out the Local Government Glossary over at Wikispaces. The Glossary was the initiative of the Social Media & Collaboration community of practice over at the IDeA, and it is hoped that the Glossary will attract some further contributions from anyone in local government (staff and contractors) who may be working on a project or initiative not currently mentioned in the Glossary.

This is also an excellent opportunity to explore the  the effectiveness of social media for bringing together the collective knowledge of staff working in the public sector.  I don't think there is any expectation that this will be the 'Wikipedia' of local government, but it's a small acorn, and will be given every opportunity to grow. So, if you want to add your favourite bit of civil service speak to the Glossary, go and register your details at Local Government Glossary, or just use it as a reference the next time you get some gobbeldygook from the council!