Yesterday I had the absolute pleasure of spending the day with an inspirational group of people at UK GovCamp 2010.  UKGovCamps, for those who missed it, are informal “un-conference” get togethers of people with a passion for public sector technology and/or social media.  This one took place at the, frankly, inspirational offices of Google in central London.

There were lots of sessions on lots of topics and I can’t even begin to cover every thought and idea that passed my way.  The best thing to do it read the Twitter stream and see all the hundreds of comments.  There were lots of people to meet too, some people who I knew from Twitter and some new faces too.  I won’t list them all, partly because I can’t remember them all and partly because I want to get to the core of this blog post.

My running theme for this GovCamp was, unintentionally, the three Cs:  Community, Crisis and Communications.

Alastair Smith ran a really productive session around social media and the response to the recent snow.  The conversation strayed off into emergency planning as a whole and the role of local and national government alongside the role of media and volunteers.  There were some great stories of how local government had responded using social media, how local government had rallied volunteers and how the media had used council social sites like Twitter to gather information.  Despite a general feeling in the hierarchy of many local government bodies that social media is something for the kids, the snow showed huge hit counts of web media.  One posting even reported 21,000 hits.

However, these great stories were also diluted with the inevitable ones around social media failing during the snow.  There were calls for a greater consistency in the way councils used things like twitter – for example using a #schoolclosure hashtag nationally, so that media organisations could follow everything (which SkyNews did).

In terms of planning for future emergencies,  there was a definite consensus that web officers, ICT professionals, comms officers and emergency planning officers need to work together more to plan for these eventualities.  Somehow a 24/7 approach needs to be agreed.  Other questions raised were:

• What is an emergency – what defines a time when it’s ok to get the boss out of bed to get a tweet?
• How do press staff respond – are press releases the way forward, or is a twitterfeed more useful?
• How does the organisation respond – some schools give their closures to the BBC, not the council PR team
• How does the comms team work with the emergency services, roadwatch and other external agencies around this?
• How is web content updated?  Can key staff access the CMS from home to make web updates?  How do they plan for Twitter or Facebook crashing under increased demand of a major emergency?
• Most importantly, how do they respond to customers?  Obviously emergency queries could be answered online, but is it over the top to assume a 24/7 conversation can take place?  What if someone replies to a school closure with “well that school would close, it’s rubbish”.  How do comms staff avoid engaging in debate?  Should they avoid engaging in debate?

Following on from this nicely, I went to Eve Shuttleworth’s session around how journalism is changing and, more to the point, how comms should relate to the media via social media.  There was strong feeling that video and youtube type content submitted with press releases needed to be in keeping with the spirit of the medium.  There was little point making corporate videos for YouTube.  A lot of doubt was raised that content like this would be used at all, especially as many media bodies won’t use content developed by a council because it’s weighted.  Jim Hawkin’s, from BBC Radio Shropshire, joined in the debate via twitter, suggesting that media releases should remain as text and that actually linking to other content was largely irrelevant – it was a quick, accurate and simple product that journalists wanted.  Despite this, one local newspaper had already agreed that they would take YouTube content for their website.

The final session, run by Robin Grant, looked at how we use the data we can get for consultation.  There were lots of methods suggested and ways of analysing the results were also debated.  My favourite, though, was the feeling that consultation could be crowd sourced, ie that, as part of a formal conversation, we should be tapping into where peopel are talking about the issue already.

I’ll finish this post on a note that really summarised the day.  The first session I attended was a “Local Authority Group Hug”, just a session to catch up where local government was in terms of technology.  There was a real mix form the very innovative to those with complete lockdowns.  The session was facilitated by someone I won’t name, who had come unofficially.  Social media wasn’t recognised in their organisation.  Innovation wasn’t  encouraged.  But that didn’t matter, because staff came from all over the country to see how they could make the change in their organisation.  How they could innovate past the barriers.  It’s that passion for the future that really makes UK Gov Camp.  I’ll certainly be booking my ticket for next year.