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.