However, the first comment here was from LouLouK at Blackburn & Darwen Council, just up the road from me, who pointed out that some councils have got it right.

I need to be clear that a lot of good work is going on and that, especially in these times, it can be really hard to get people motivated to try things.  Where this stuff is going on, it needs to be shared.  Maybe it is being, and I’m out the loop.  When you’ve read my post, stick to my action plan….or just skip past it and read LouLou’s comments….what they are doing there seems to be better than any action plan I can produce!

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It’s getting cold out there.

I don’t know who reads this blog in terms of location. I’d like to think we have a readership in exotic places like Hawaii, California and Walton-on-the-Naze. Those people may well not be aware that we’re approaching winter and have snow heading our way, apparently before the end of the week. If or when the snow does come, we’ll inevitably ignore the fact that this happens every year and, in a wild panic, close the schools, shut down the shops and make worried calls about whether we should attempt the journey into work.

Last year, this joke wasn’t even as unfunny as it is now. A heavy covering all over the country left everyone frozen to the spot and local government, schools, colleges, public transport and every other public body scrambled to find the resources to cope. In the mess, everyone realised there was a lot to gain from social media in a crisis and many of the commentators had got it right in predicting this.

In the wake of snow, there was much reflection. Some great examples of the use of technology emerged, some lessons in how not to use technology were learned. Alastair Smith, then a comms man at Newcastle Council, ran a workshop about this at last years UKGOVCAMP and I followed that up with another at LocalGovCamp YH. The details were compiled in my “Told you Snow” post.

So, as the snow approaches again, it’s interesting to see more people on board than last year. Just the other day, Leeds City Council announced that they would be running a feed similar to Kirklees Councils’ “Kirklees Winter” feed (dubbed The Gritter Twitter), giving out information about the closures. It’s fantastic that more councils are looking to social media now and they are right to do so; I certainly use Twitter and Facebook more than ever in emergency situations, and we’ve seen some great examples of Twitter’s use in crisis since then.

What’s disappointing, though, is that many of the lessons have not been taken on board. Again, Twitter is being used like an RSS Reader to roll out news releases that could be on a website.

In many council approaches, the conversations element, where people can ask questions and get responses via twitter extremely quickly is missing. Isolated, cold, damp and fed up people don’t need to know details about every school closure.  They do need cheering up.  A bit of conversation, when time allows, is as valuable as those road closed details.

The strategy for incorporating information into general twitter feeds and facebook pages is missing. This is particularly worrying if an inexperienced person has to update all the social media because management can’t get in.

The social media mashup element, where tweets can be placed on a google map to chart disruption hasn’t materialised. The lessons about wider access to open / mobile working to prepare staff for working from home have, amazingly in a time of austerity, been ignored.

There were some great Twitter stories last time. Newcastle Council’s Twitter worked with Sky News while Sarah Lay got Derbyshire Council working with volunteer 4×4 drivers through social networking. Part of the reason this worked was because, rather than inventing their own hashtags, they used existing conventions like #uksnow. It wasn’t just social media either. A huge percentage of people accessing school closure information did so using games consoles or television compatible browsers…how many councils test their web space with those?

It seems that, as the cold returns, councils are just rolling out the Twitter gritter with the traditional ones and no one is listening to the innovators who tried this last time round. So, what should local authorities do?

• Look at whether they need a separate Twitter feed for the winter or whether their existing feed with a hashtag can cover the job
• Find out existing hashtags and conventions for Twitter (so for snow use #uksnow followed by a postcode followed by any information or a number out of ten to rate severity of snow fall eg. #uksnow bd22 Hebden Road closed or #uksnow bd22 9/10
• Put together a communications plan.  Ensure that the social network tools are accessible from the office and from home, that people know the passwords, how to use them and conventions for using them
• Make sure that as fewer updates as possible are needed.  For example, updating a page with an RSS feed can automatically update twitter (using something like HootSuite), a facebook page and a website at the same time.
• Check that your website updates don’t rely on flash, java or other technicalities that could make it unusable from some smart phones and games consoles.  If it has to rely on these, make sure there’s a link to something that doesn’t
• Think big – this isn’t just a tool for you to roll out news releases, it’s a tool for people to report things to you, for people who’re stuck to talk to you, for the media to keep in touch with what you’re doing.  The feed isn’t just about you locally, it could be used nationally to paint the picture
• Use the right hashtags on Twitter.  Use you own by all means, but make sure you use the nationally trending ones, so that others can pick up on your feeds
• Have a plan – if you need to rope in emergency services, volunteers, community wardens etc, can you get information from them onto social media quickly?  How?  Maybe they have their own feeds you can re-tweet or share on facebook.  If not, is there a comms number/email accessible outside the office to keep the information up to date.
• Above all, make sure if you start this, you finish it.  There’s nothing worse than a twitter feed that shuts down at five when the snow starts at 4.  Make sure you don’t use the feed one day and not the next.  If using separate feeds, don’t neglect your original feeds. Have plans in place for how to do this.

With the right thought processes, another snow crisis could mean some real innovation in local authorities….I just hope it’s not a snowman that melts with the thaw, but one that stays with local government for a while, because, let’s be honest, it’s getting cold out there.

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.

So, I’ve put a list here together of all the posts I’ve found on the subject, so that this can be a one-stop-shop for cases studies about technology could, or did, help the public sector respond to the recent snow “crisis”.

The list is a bit small – please, send me links to yours (tweet them to @kevupnorth) or leave them in the comments section

My recent post on social media in a crisis, my guest post on NOMAD about mobile working in the snow , a round-up of the snow discussion at UKGovCamp on and older posts on snow and emergency planning

John Popham from DIGITAL 2020 on how the internet could be used through twitter or learning platforms

Tim Hobbs, director of Bartec on how Twitter can get the word out in the snow

Dave Sugden from Village E-Learning on how the education sector could prepare for snow days

Donald Clark from UFI LearnDirect on the problems of closing schools (personal blog, not technology related)

James Clay on closing schools – should it matter – and when will we learn?

Ingrid Koehler from IDeA on examples of how councils used social media in the snow

Sarah Lay on how local gov snow-sites were not just accessed via the PC, or even the iPhone

Not too long ago I did a post about how Twitter and other social media being used in emergency situations.  Now, I don’t claim that millions of people in local government read this blog, let alone act on it, but very few people could have failed to notice the phenomenal rise in social media this year – and local government, along with the media, now think they are on board.

The first problem is that social media is a 24/7 media.  It doesn’t just work within working hours.  The second is that social media is not simply a new hi-tech version of old media.  Both of these problems were highlighted over the first weekend of 2010 and in the week that’s followed.

Firstly, a week ago, when a huge gas explosion ripped through a shop and flats in central Shrewsbury.  Like most news these days, I found out through social media, or facebook to be exact, when a friend living nearby changed his status to “WTF WAS THAT????  It sounded like a bomb”.  The media was on board too, with BBC Radio Shropshire and their presenter Jim Hawkins, amongst others, using Twitter to keep people informed of the situation.  The council’s Theatre Severn also made good use of Twitter, explaining the cancellation of the closing night pantomimes and the injury of one of the cast members in the explosion.  However, the main local authority twitter feed remained silent, a single Tweet from Friday warning people to avoid a bad batch of chick peas.

Meanwhile the people of Shropshire, or certainly those I follow on Twitter and Facebook, began talking about the story.  Photos started appearing and the BBC snapped them up and put them on its site.  Citizen Journalists fed out the story.  However, there was an issue.

Citizen Journalists, unlike their professional cousins, do not always filter news based on fact.  Rumours of deaths and exaggeration of facts spread quickly.  Luckily, the BBC provided sanity in this conversation, however the local authority, whose buildings were damaged, whose roads were closed, whose citizens needed reassurance, remained silent.  Wy have a twitter feed if you don’t want to join the conversation?  This isn’t an argument AGAINST local authorities using Twitter – it’s an example of why they need to think about how they use it and use it effectively.

That was the end of that story, but it wasn’t the end of my week of local authority let-downs.  Over the following weeks the snow really took hold and I was surprised to see how badly twitter and facebook were used by local government to put out information.

There are lots of issues around technology and snow, I’ve outlined them before and Digital 2020′s John Popham has also done an excellent post on the subject, so I won’t repeat it.  However, there were some points raised that do require further commentary.

John refers to mobile working practices being a solution to the snow.  It’s true that this would have alleviated many businesses problems and, as someone who is able to work flexibly, I was able to carry on close to normal working from home.  I say close to normal because mobile working is currently a fledgling idea and, in the way local authorities have often jumped into social media without a strategy some organisations have used the snow to do the same with mobile working.  We work from all locations and are used to it, but people who are used to the social banter and processes of the office can’t simply be told to work from home…it’s a major culture change that, while productive in many cases, can be damning if implemented without thought.  That’s not an argument against it, and, like John, I think a link to project nomad is needed to show where that thought and planning is taking place.

John also mentions being irritated by “heroic” attempts to get to work.  While I’d agree that it is always stupid to put lives at risk and that many people try to get to work when they don’t need to, I think that many people could easily have got to work if they tried.  This would have kept the systems of this country running better and meant the snow was far less of an “emergency”.  I went to work on the days I could and was very grateful to social media for keeping me informed about bus and train delays and closures.  Social media from other commuters and West Yorkshire Metro, I should add, not my local Bradford Council.

However, elsewhere, parents were panicking about whether their schools were open.   They weren’t as lucky in terms of social media help.  Back in Shropshire a local independent radio station got some school closures wrong and facebook was full of discussions and questions.  A conversation among citizens where everyone participated, except the local authority. Luckily, some inspiration was at hand in the form of Kirklees Council, whose Twitter feed (@kirkleeswinter) kept people informed about school closures and gritting and, in a pretty innovative approach for local authority Twitter, actually interacted and responded to questions citizens posed.  A great example, which I hope they’ll follow with a KirkleesEmergency so people can follow it for any crisis.

There will be sceptics reading this who wonder whether this is just the voice of geek, telling local authorities how communities work when really no one is reading social media.  To that end, I’ll put up this that I noticed on facebook from family in The Wirral.  I’ve blanked out the names and schools, but this gist is clear.  A teacher walked round the estate to tell parents when the school was open.  Why, one the parents enquires, couldn’t they have just put it on facebook?  Why indeed.

However, now that I’m back here, I thought it time I put key to computer again and got a blog up  – so maybe it is a bit odd that I’ve chosen the same subject as last time.

As a commuter and new parent of a very young child, I am naturally paranoid about Swine Flu and have therefore been following the stories closer than I normally would.

Today’s call to close schools to curb the spread of the flu is not a shock and I fully expect the closure of other public offices as the virus spreads.

So, now is perhaps the best time for organisations to be sorting out their online presence.  With the aid of social media there is nothing stopping this country continuing to function without any major disruption even if the vast majority of office staff are at home.

In a recent meeting through work, the developers of an online learning platform told me that they are receiving more and more enquiries in light of possible swine flu closures – so what’s stopping the rest of the public sector looking at the same?

If this pandemic does reach the epci proportions predicated, we’ll have a lot of people staying at home who want to be kept informed – and social media will be the west way for that to work.

This isn’t rocket science – but it doesn’t seem to be happening in the UK.  New York City recently looked at how facebook could be used in an emergency - and it would be good to see plans like that over here in the UK

Birmingham City Council have recently completed a great wordpress powered site to put all their new output in one place, providing breifings for journalists and other interested parties to keep them informed.  Similar sites could do the same with Swine Flu (or indeed other emergency) information.  Here are some other features I think they could add:

• Find a flu-friend (sign up to volunteer to drop off food or medication to someone hosuebound by flu – or sign up to locate a flu friend)
• Online chat room to support people with expert advice or a place for a chat if you’re bored indoors
• Links to national support websites.

It should olnly take moments to set up – so let’s hope someone sorts it.