PDF Social Innovation Lab for Kent

The issue   

Members and senior officers foresaw the need to build capabilities and responsiveness to deal with changing demographics, rising resident expectations, tightening budgets, and the need for greater civic engagement and social capital. The philosophy was very much one of helping to shape communities that are resilient and self-supporting — while recognising that internal changes would be needed, not least in fostering a culture that values innovation and learning. 

Inspiration was taken from MindLab in Denmark, a cross-departmental innovation unit in central government which encourages key decision-makers and employees to view their efforts from the outside-in, from a citizen’s perspective. 

What Kent County Council did

SILK was set up to make the most of perspectives from service users and front-line staff in tackling the toughest challenges the county faces. It has sought to provide a creative environment for a wide range of staff to work together, and to draw on best practice from business, design, social science and community development.

At the heart of SILK is a small team that acts as a catalyst and helps to develop skills and capacity across the Council to work in person-centred ways, breaking away from institutional mindsets. Their work has developed in far-reaching ways and drawn national and international attention.

SILK principles

SILK maintains an important set of principles:

• Insights and ideas can and should come from anywhere and everywhere
• People are usually the experts of their own lives, their families and communities
• The more people we involve, the greater the chance of making it stick
• We need to provide platforms and tools for collaborative working (to step away from typical practices in working in partnership can be slow and tedious, with many meetings)
• There is a need for a ‘safe space’ to explore and test out creative solutions to strategic challenges 

SILK recognises needs for system-level challenge as well as front-line solutions. SILK uses its network of contacts and champions to ensure that emerging issues are raised and tackled at appropriate levels, removing barriers to successful implementation.

For SILK, ‘social innovation’ entails “the design and implementation of better ways of meeting social needs through participatory practices”. By “better ways”, they mean transformational improvements, not incremental gains. Their approach is to promote step changes in how services are delivered and in the scale of results. Changes may concern who is involved in delivering a programme or service; how they think about needs, users and methods; where and when it is delivered; what users experience – or any combination of these.

Where SILK started

SILK started with two projects, one focusing on families at risk (‘Just Coping’), the other on how people access information about social care (‘Ageing Well’). Each was taken forward by a different core team, drawn from across the Council and partner organisations, mixing frontline staff, unit heads and policy officers. Advice and facilitation was brought in from consultants, Engine (on service design) and GoddardPayne (on innovation), along with specialist expertise appropriate to individual projects, eg, anthropologists to help develop richer understanding of families ‘living on the edge’.

The projects tested hunches about what approaches might work, using methods to bring out people’s realities and to generate ideas for better ways forward. They posed challenges to convention through perspectives of service users. 

The early projects were followed by:

• work with Seashells (Sheerness Children’s Centre) to find new ways of engaging fathers in family life
• public health and intergenerational work in Betteshanger on the old East Kent coalfield, in support of the ‘Activmobs’ project which is about local residents organising their own physical activities
• involvement in the development of the Kent Gateway (on-line access and multi-agency service centres), including the co-design, with customer services staff, of a toolkit, ‘Insight to Idea’. This uses customer journey mapping to unpack customer issues and devise better service responses.
• Access to Healthy Affordable Food project, with a group of young mothers in Tonbridge
• ‘Houses as Homes: Rethinking resettlement’, exploring with offenders leaving prison their experience of housing

The SILK process

SILK developed a process intended to shift away from common practices, eg, in:

• allowing participants longer to explore and understand the issues
• involving users in defining the problem, prioritising issues and testing out possible solutions
• taking a wider view of evidence (qualitative and quantitative)
• adopting a range of new techniques, eg, observation, emotional timelines, and ethnographic methods to complement survey and administrative data
• using a more structured, facilitated approach to ideas generation 

“Sometimes where this complexity is reduced to hard data the reality of how things work in practice can sometimes be lost. Holistic thinking, rather than a reductionist approach, informs the SILK way of working.” Quote from SILK website 

The process is described in a three stage ‘diamond’ model (Figure 1), as participants work through defining and reframing the policy challenge, redesigning services, and testing them out in practice. SILK projects may concentrate on particular diamonds, or be worked through from one to the next.

• Future services (Diamond 1) relates to where there is need to clarify problems/ opportunities and consensus is lacking on how to tackle these (like the Families at Risk project)
• Service (re-)design (Diamond 2), to specific service improvements (like the access to care information project)
• Sustainable activities (Diamond 3), where the need is to build skills and confidence of service managers to engage users on a continuing basis and/ or help residents or front-line staff develop new activities for themselves   

Figure 1 The SILK process – from strategic challenge to service improvement

Figure 1 The SILK process – from strategic challenge to service improvement

 Four steps are set out for each stage (Figure 2) – Initiate, Create, Test and Refine’:

Figure 2          Components at each stage

Figure 2 Components at each stage

Source: SILK http://socialinnovation.typepad.com/silk/

•  The Initiate stage defines the focus, develops the project plan, identifies who needs to be involved, how the project will be communicated and how it will be assessed and evaluated.
• Create involves gathering as many ideas as possible from a variety of sources, typically through workshops which then cluster these into themes, challenges and opportunities. Facilitators seek to avoid a common desire amongst participants to move quickly into ’solution mode’.
• The Test stage refines and tests concepts with project stakeholders. SILK stresses the notion of ‘prototyping’, seen as a continuous activity of testing and refining – to ensure that when the time comes to make a commitment of resources there are fewer unknowns and a reduced risk of failure.  
• Define is the stage of determining what is needed to move the project forward, which may include further work with frontline staff. Final outputs may be a report capturing the service vision and opportunities identified, or project initiation documents for larger scale implementation.

Roles of the SILK team

The roles of the SILK team (core staff and associates) are to: 

• provide leadership for innovation, supporting decision making on programme direction, prioritisation and strategy
• manage the overall programme
• guide project teams through SILK processes of insight gathering, idea generation and prototyping
• offer expertise in qualitative methods and sources of quantitative data
• help build capacity across services to embed innovation and service improvement practice, maintaining and building the SILK framework and toolkit
• broker relationships with specialist suppliers (eg, designers, social scientists)
• provide administrative and design support, in support events, communications, etc
• disseminate SILK learning and materials (eg, through case studies, project reports– hard copy and online – and films) 

The team is based in the County Council’s Strategic Policy Unit. Project costs over and above the core staffing (2.5 posts) are found from other budgets and external sources.

In-house capacity for change

Developing in-house capacity for innovation has been seen as crucial to achieving SILK’s purpose. This has had three strands: Products, Process and People: 

• ‘Products’: the development of over 40 tools and approaches. To help users access these, they are presented as a ‘Method Deck’ which uses cards to set out key aspects of each tool, grouped under applications for planning, communicate, insight, design and facilitating workshops.
• ‘Process’: the methodologies relating the SILK diamonds (Future services, clarifying problems/ opportunities and consensus on how to tackle them; Service design and redesign; and Sustainable services, ways of building skills and confidence amongst service managers for user engagement)
• ‘People’, instigated through capacity building workshops (six modules: introducing Social Innovation and SILK; the methodology and toolkit; Insight into people – using qualitative user research; Tools for participation and engagement; Managing and evaluating complex, multi-stakeholder projects; and Principles of people-centred service design)  

SILK has facilitated or designed workshops and presentations with a variety of groups and services from across KCC Directorates. Themes have included Sustainability and Climate Change, focusing on understanding and influencing behaviour change. SILK also ran a workshop for the latest intake on the Kent Graduate Programme, and seeks to involve such staff in SILK projects. 

More about the SILK projects

Just Coping

The Just Coping project with families led to deeper understanding of factors in daily family life which adversely affect children’s development – and helped shape policy thinking within the Children, Families and Education Directorate. The then Kent CC Chief Executive, Peter Gilroy commented in an article on the significance of this project: “There was no real insight before the project into the importance of family and friendship networks, the desire to avoid many public services, and the impact of a very poor physical environment on accessing those services. It quickly become apparent that the public service assumptions about empowerment, independence and personalisation would have to be rethought.” (from “People’s lives as sources of innovation”, with Sophia Parker) 

The project also drew greater attention to financial inclusion, leading to a feasibility study then roll-out of a Kent-wide credit union, Kent Savers. 

Engaging Fathers

Just Coping also led to the work with Sheerness Children’s Centre sought to find new ways of engaging dads in family life. At the start of the project, only a dozen or so fathers were engaged in activities at the centre, compared to over 800 mothers. SILK worked with a co-design team of fathers to understand better the barriers that they face in trying to spend quality time with their children. This led to the appointment of a Dad’s Worker, engaging fathers in developing and participating in range of sports, leisure and other activities and helping to ensure that they could inform Children’s Centre services.

Ageing Well

This work investigated new approaches to service user engagement, including, for instance, filming members of the Women’s Institute undertaking on-line searches. The research highlighted the extent that many people do not know how to find information about services, facilities or support at the point they need it, despite considerable efforts to make this information available. It contributed to the business case for investment in the Kent online social care directory, important in the context of the shift to personal budgets in social care.

Activmobs, Betteshanger

Activmobs involved residents in Betteshanger, a coalfield community, in developing ways in which they could become more active and improve their health. A co-design team was formed including a local community support officer and youth club leader. They spent time with local residents to find out what they did in a day, using timelines and flashcards as prompts – which helped bring out the range of barriers to activity for many residents. Activmobs is about people organising activities that suit them best, not being ‘done to’ by public bodies. Activities vary from dog walking to ballroom dancing, aerobics to allotments.

An obvious divide between older and younger residents was tackled; both groups had issues but were unsure about how to communicate them. SILK used participatory filming to communicate to the older residents of Betteshanger how the younger people felt about living in the area and the disconnect between the generations.

Access to Healthy Affordable Food

The Access to Healthy Affordable Food project emerged from work with a group of young mothers at YWCA West Kent in Tonbridge on the theme of Food for Families, which sought to help them learn about a healthy diet and how to cook. This also used a participatory film approach.

Bulk Buying

SILK has been working in Parkwood in Maidstone with local residents to set up a bulk buying scheme. This project was chosen by Parkwood residents as their favourite idea  in the course of a public event in November 2008. A core group was set up with residents, local shop owners, representatives from Maidstone Housing Trust and Parkwood Healthy Living Centre. Innovative use is made of a Facebook profile (‘Parkwood Bulk Buy’) which promotes the scheme and enables its 160 members to converse and say what products they want. More recently, the group have been given an old kitchen at Bellwood Primary School to turn into a community room with a range of goods on sale (nappies, washing powder and meat being the top requested items).

Houses as Homes

‘Houses as Homes: Rethinking resettlement’ looked into the resettlement of offenders when they come out of prison. ESRO (Ethnographic Social Research Options) were commissioned to work with offenders to learn their stories and experiences of the resettlement process. Research findings were used to stimulate workshop discussions, including exercises which considered the timeline of an offender’s life and discussing the points at which services could have been  provided differently, in ways that could have changed the individual’s course. The project has informed the draft Kent and Medway Housing Strategy, currently out for consultation A wide range of partners have been involved including County and District Councils, Primary Care Trusts, Mental Health Trust, Supporting People, Prison Service, Probation, Registered Social Landlords, St Giles Trust and Kent Police.

Kent Gateway

Kent Gateway is a new model for providing citizen-centred services under one roof, with eight centres across the county. In each Gateway, customer service advisors provide a range of services to residents: from benefits to registration of births and deaths, from housing to library loans, from Citizens Advice Bureau to occupational therapy. 

Staff were involved in developing the ‘Insight to idea: a guide to linking customer insight to service improvement’ guide through a workshop which brought together Gateway staff to examine needs of users, identify gaps and spot opportunities for service improvement, making use of use of ‘personas’ of types of customer and mapping customer journeys. The aim of the guide is to encourage staff to see customers in the round and in relation to different services. It is now used as part of the training of new staff. 

Involvement with SILK has also influenced the approach to designing web-based services.  

The impact

These examples illustrate a range of benefits and outcomes from the work of SILK, which has now become an established part of the KCC strategic policy function. It has helped to ready the Council to work through what the Big Society could mean in Kent – offering evocative examples such as the Parkwood Bulk Buy project for  their forthcoming visioning exercise, ‘Bold Steps for Kent’ (out for consultation in September 2010). 

More generally, SILK is beginning to shift the culture of the County Council, encouraging officers to reflect on what ‘social innovation’ means for their own roles, and providing resources to help them engage in meaningful dialogue with citizens and do things differently. SILK is currently looking to identify where amongst KCC activities it could achieve greatest leverage and speed this process.    

Feedback is sought from participants on SILK projects and training, for instance:

“I’ve never done anything like this before – and from now on I’ll do things differently.”

“I thought we worked on the ground, but this has shown me that we really don’t… the approach here has challenged our assumptions about what’s needed.”

both quoted in ‘The Social Innovation Lab for Kent: starting with people’ 

Communications are maintained with contacts on a database of over 500 people. There are various examples where members of this network have been inspired by their involvement with SILK to develop new projects (eg, a community food growing project).  

The work of SILK has informed staff and management development programmes and the County’s community engagement strategy. It has also highlighted the need for the local authority and partners to get much better at gathering and using customer insight to improve services. 

Lessons 

SILK points to two important lessons around innovation and public bodies:

• not everyone is a natural innovator. SILK reckons that their best projects have been led by people most willing to deal with the complexity and confusion that innovation work can generate – referred to as ‘constructive disruptors’.
• embedding innovation capabilities will never be accomplished by tools, seminars and workshops alone: “People are our best conduits for spreading new ways of working”. SILK are developing a SILK Pioneers Network with this group of officers, seeking to grow innovative capacity organically, SILK refers to this as a ‘viral’ approach to capacity building. 

The experience of SILK has borne out the validity of the SILK principles, including:

• valuing the contribution that everyone has to make
• creating the conditions for productive relationships amongst all those taking part
• providing space – and recognition – for staff to try out new approaches and engage with residents in different ways
• putting ‘co-production’ into practice and seeking to take this to the next level, of ‘co-transformation’: working together to transform experiences 

The SILK team stresses that the model is not suitable for every challenge, for instance, back-office efficiency reviews. That said, it offers techniques for service user and staff engagement which potentially have wide ranging applications. 

Looking to the future, SILK has seen the need to team up with activmob as part of a pioneering social enterprise that works alongside communities in turning thinking behind the Big Society into reality, with citizens driving new projects and services of community benefit. 

Data / evidence

SILK is intended to make ‘downstream’ contributions to LAA targets as a consequence of changes and improvements made by participants in SILK projects, rather than being judged directly on their impact on these targets. 

SILK projects have variously related to Kent LAA targets such as: 

• NI 3 Percentage of residents involved in civic participation in the local area
• NI 6 Percentage of residents participating in regular volunteering
• NI 21 Residents’ perceptions of dealing with local concerns about anti-social behaviour and crime issues by the local council and police
• NI 110 Young people’s participation in positive activities
• NI 117 Percentage of 16 to 18 year olds who are not in education, employment or training (NEET)
• NI 120 All-age all cause mortality rate – all persons
• NI 125 Achieving independence for older people through rehabilitation/intermediate care
• NI 141 Percentage of vulnerable people achieving independent living
• NI 188 Planning to adapt to climate change 

An evaluation has been carried out on SILK in 2010, using participatory evaluation techniques such as learning histories. Outputs from this will appear on the SILK website. 

Further information  

SILK http://socialinnovation.typepad.com/silk/

SILK process: http://socialinnovation.typepad.com/silk/2010/02/methodology-how-we-work.html

Method Deck http://socialinnovation.typepad.com/silk/silk-method-deck.html 

MindLab, Denmark http://www.mind-lab.dk/en

Downloaded materials available on the SILK website include:

• reports on SILK projects such as Engaging Fathers
• the article ‘People’s lives as sources of innovation: the story of the Social Innovation Lab for Kent’ by Peter Gilroy (Chief Executive, KCC) and Sophia Parker
• Introducing SILK
• Insights into Community Engagement in Kent – four short films on community engagement http://socialinnovation.typepad.com/silk/silk-downloads-2.html
• ‘Insight to idea: a guide to linking customer insight to service improvement’ guide http://socialinnovation.typepad.com/files/i-to-i-guide.pdf 

Kent Gateway features in IDeA publications on Customer Insight and service transformation. See, eg, FOSS case study http://www.idea.gov.uk/idk/aio/10011270

NESTA/IDeA (2009) More than Good Ideas: the power on innovation in local government www.idea.gov.uk/idk/core/page.do?pageId=9505863 

Contact

Emma Barrett

01622 694657

emma.barrett@kent.gov.uk

Download as PDF: Lichfield District Council – Open Election Data Project Case Study

In central, regional and local government there is an increasing desire to share data more widely to improve transparency and accountability and to reduce duplication. An early adopter Lichfield District Council has been actively sharing a range of local data for some time. In March 2010 the Council was the first authority to make its local election results openly available as part of the Open Election Data Project. By making small changes in how their local election results are displayed local authorities can jointly work towards creating a free national database of local election results and undertake a low risk, low cost pilot in implementing the open data agenda.

Background to Open Data in Local Government

Like the open source movement in software development, open data as a practice and philosophy proposes that non-personal public data should to be freely available to everyone without any control mechanisms.

The Government is committed to making much more public data openly available. On 22 March 2010 the Prime Minister announced that the Government was going to ‘use digital technology to open up data with the aim of providing every citizen in Britain with true ownership and accountability over the services they demand from government.’ Current and planned initiatives include:

• data.gov.uk which is a single, easy-to-use website for access to 3,000 public data sets
• Office for National Statistics (ONS) opening up access to over two billion data items at the local neighbourhood level
• In March 2010 the Department for Transport and the transport industry shared the datasets for all 350,000 bus stops, railway stations and airports in Britain
• On 1st April 2010 a substantial package of information held by the Ordnance Survey was made available to the general public
• From Autumn 2010 the Government plans to publish online an inventory of all non-personal datasets held by departments and arms-length bodies, with the programme managed by the National Archives.

Open data in local government involves, as a first step, local authorities putting raw data such comma-separated values (CSV) files, database dumps and data feeds online to improve access to the information and transparency. The next step, known as linked data, involves using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI’s) web addresses to identify items and link to related ones, making it much easier to combine data from different sources.

Why should it matter that local authorities make their data available? There are philosophical and practical reasons.

Firstly, much local authority data is about local residents and local issues and paid for by taxpayers. There is wide consensus that making public sector data more widely available will aid transparency and accountability. Access where possible should be free to allow better access and permit the use and re-use of the data.

Secondly, access to data gives people the ability to improve their lives and for government to reduce duplication (e.g. re-presenting data in many forms).

Thirdly Local Government will struggle to keep up with an online world that is changing rapidly where there is a risk making poor investments. Increasingly people are using smart phones, widgets, social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and desktop applications that rely on online data or web pages that look like desktop applications. The data is used not just in the new smart phones but in creating new applications that make the data useful and relevant to the user’s location. For example this has included innovative ways of displaying complicated data (e.g. WhereDoesMyMoneyGo) and sites that bring the data together (e.g. OpenlyLocal). OpenlyLocal assembles data from council and government websites and then makes the data available to very local communities, through Google gadgets (small applications that can be put on other web pages) and other websites.

And finally, there is the potential to transform internal processes and the sharing of information between organisations, and between local government and central government.

Lichfield District Council’s Open Data

An active supporter of the open data agenda, Lichfield District Council already makes a wide range of their local data available to developers and website owners. By being able to access the data easily their local data can re-used, linked and shared. Provided in various formats the data that Lichfield District Council makes openly available includes:

• News: the latest news including comments (RSS feed).
• Planning and development: the latest planning applications (widget), locally listed buildings (GeoRSS) and listed buildings (XML file).
• Food Safety: the latest food safety inspections (GeoRSS feed) and food safety inspections (Comprehensive API)
• Council and democracy: current and archived committees (XML file), committee details (XML file), list of councillors (XML file), polling stations (KML [Google Earth] file) and parish councils (XML file)
• Leisure: local sports clubs (XML file), leisure centres, parks, libraries, tourist attractions (all KML [Google Earth] files) and events (iCal format)
• Education: primary and secondary schools (KML [Google Earth] file)
• Recycling: recycling centres (KML [Google Earth] file)
• Miscellaneous: car parks (KML [Google Earth] file)

By making this data available a local resident is, for example, able to find the library that is closest to them regardless of the council boundary and to find out who their county councillor is. The next milestone was when Lichfield District Council made their election data from 2007 openly available through their website at the end of March 2010.

Open Election Data Project

In contrast to the general elections there is no central or open record of local election results in the UK. As a result it is not possible to compare voting over time or to compare turnout between different areas. A commercial database is held by Plymouth University but the data has to be entered manually. Local Authorities already publish election data online but in a wide range of formats, some of which are restrictive (e.g. PDFs ).

With support from the Local Public Data Panel, SOCITM, the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) and the Local eGovernment Standards Board the Open Election Data Project involves local authorities making some small changes to how their election results are presented on their website so the data can be openly accessed Rather than using HTML or PDFs the authority uses HTML with machine readable information added using RDFa, a format that gives the information meaning and structure. It should be a straightforward technical task for any Local Authority webmaster to mark up their HTML in their Content Management System, taking no more than a day’s time. By drawing all the individual area results together over time it is possible to develop a national database of local election results. Authorities can put past results online as well as the forthcoming results from May 2010.

To mark up their local election data a Local Authority has to do a simple series of steps:

1. Mark up the Election Results landing page. Each election has to be marked up as data and the links correctly annotated.
2. Mark up the Individual Election Results that are to be exposed as linked data. While the focus is on the 6 May 2010 other elections should also be marked up.
3. Mark up the Ward Result pages before election day leaving blanks for votes cast and making sure the political parties are uniquely identified from the Open Election Project database.
4. Make sure the Election Results landing page is listed with LocalDirectGov in its services directory.
5. Check what the data looks like (using the RDFa Parser).
6. Get the Open Election Data Project to check the pages.

What are the benefits of the Open Election Data Project?

There are a number of benefits for a Local Authority that wants to take part in the Open Election Data Project:

• By working together Local Authorities will create a free national database of local election results and help to support democratic renewal.
• A Local Authority has the opportunity for a small, cheap and easy experiment in providing local data more openly. The election results are already published in different formats and there are low risks if they make errors. After taking part the local authority will have a better understanding of the technical and organisational issues with providing open data.
• A Local Authority will be able to review the adaptability of their content management systems including the responsiveness of their vendors and any IT outsourcing arrangements. A Local Authority will be able to learn from their experience when commissioning the next content management system or outsourcing contract.
• Many Councillors are highly supportive of the improved provision of local election data as a way of improving engagement with the local electorate.
• Councils will be able to explore ways of making efficiency savings by learning from the open data project. Tendering and scoping of tightly defined IT systems remains an expensive activity. Having a more flexible system that allows small projects to be implemented rapidly can save money in the long run. Additionally, providing the same data in different formats for different periods (e.g. calendar year, financial year and academic year) for different organisations is expensive. Open data can reduce these data provision costs as well as stimulating the development of innovative applications that use the local data, often from within a Council’s local business and academic community.

Some Local Authorities may have problems with their content management systems if they are linked to customised databases where there is no access. Plug-ins are being developed for the content management systems that are commonly used by Local Authorities (such as Jadu and Moderngov).

The Future: How the Knowledge Hub could help with Open Data

To further develop their online learning facilities IDeA proposes to develop a Knowledge Hub that builds on the success of IDeA’s Communities of Practice platform which has over 55,000 members. The Knowledge Hub will allow local government to produce and capture its own knowledge more directly and bring together more relevant content sources including blogs and twitter feeds.

There are a number of ways that the Knowledge Hub could help Local Authorities to implement the open data agenda. Firstly, the Knowledge Hub could help to develop awareness of open data generally and the open election data project specifically as well as providing the necessary free tools, plug-ins for various content management systems, examples of code and templates. Secondly, the Knowledge Hub could be used to help to develop data standards across Local Authorities. And thirdly, the Knowledge Hub could be the location where one Authority is able to share its solution to a problem with other Authorities (e.g. a customised modification to a specific content management system).

Further Information

Stuart Harrison (Lichfield District Council)
T 01543 308779
E stuart.harrison@lichfielddc.gov.uk

Chris Taggart (OpenlyLocal)
E countculture@googlemail.com

• Open Election Data Project
• Lichfield District Council
• Open Datasets provided by Lichfield Council
• OpenlyLocal
• Local Government Data Panel Blog
• SOCITM
• WhereDoesMyMoneyGo
• Building Britain’s Digital Future – PM Speech 22 March 2010

Download as PDF: Kent County Council – Knowledge Hub Case Study

Over the last two years Kent County Council has been developing a number of meaningful digital techniques including social monitoring, communities of practice, an internal microblogging pilot, Twitter and Facebook pages and a data sharing mashup platform with some specific local applications. Service units have to obtain a social media licence and staff undertake training to use social media on behalf of the Council. The level of knowledge sharing across the authority has increased and connections have been made to new external business groups. However Kent County Council has found that the use of social media does mean that the culture of the organisation has to continually evolve and be comfortable with the external challenge that comes with using these new communication tools.

Background to Knowledge Hub and use of social media in Local Government

Social media allows users to share information and opinions and to interact online in a many-to-many model of communication. Social media applications involve the building of online communities to encourage participation. A number of new media applications have emerged in the last five years including social networking sites such Facebook and Twitter and content sharing websites such as YouTube. Usage has grown very rapidly. To exploit these new opportunities for communication and interaction Local Authorities are increasingly using social media tools with one third now using Twitter (35%) and RSS news feeds (32%) and one sixth using Facebook (17%) and YouTube (16%).

To further develop their online learning facilities IDeA proposes to develop a Knowledge Hub that builds of the success of IDeA’s Communities of Practice which have 50,000 members. The Knowledge Hub will allow local government to produce and capture its own knowledge more directly and bring together more relevant content sources including blogs and twitter feeds.

Kent County Council’s use of digital technology

Over two years ago, Kent County Council formed a unit which examined strategic issues where digital technologies and innovation could assist in improving community outcomes. The general philosophy of the unit has been to start small and to avoid over-hyping the potential of innovative solutions.

One of the team’s first projects was to pilot the development of Communities of Practice at Kent County Council. With about 25 Communities of Practice across 700 staff, these have now grown to become an established part of their internal toolkit.

Kent County Council completed an internal micro-blogging pilot with 400 to 500 staff using Yammer, an enterprise version of Twitter. As a more dynamic tool this has been well used and the pilot a success. With over 600 users usage is continuing to grow but the principles of the pilot remain: allow people to use it if it is helpful for them alongside other channels. The content is very much driven by the users and not corporately led.

Corporately Kent County Council use Twitter actively and it has some 1,250 followers. Twitter has proven to be very useful for communication during emergencies such as snow disruptions and school closures. Via the licensing arrangements, other units with specific audiences have also created their own Twitter feeds, which link to and from the main Kent County Council Twitter feed (e.g. www.twitter.com/explorekent).

As an organisation, Kent County Council does not have a Facebook presence. The Council has considered this type of platform but after research and trial usage they concluded that people tend not to be ‘fans’ of a local council. However Facebook has been used for specific initiatives such as promoting the Kent Freedom Pass to school children which allows unlimited county-wide public bus travel for £50 per year. However, Kent County Council will continue to seek out specific projects or events where Facebook can be a useful tool.

Kent County Council has also been using social media to find local digital media innovators and companies to meet and collaborate with online and offline.

Kent County Council received £50,000 from Communities and Local Government (CLG) to develop a mashup platform. Known as “Pic and Mix” the site draws together content from many different sources including the increasing amount of data that is available openly. A number of different but very specific applications have been developed including websites about haunted places in Kent, tracking local Green Belt issues and how to identify where potholes need to be fixed. This initiative has given a deeper insight into what users want from local information.

Kent County Council now considers social media channels as part of their overarching communication strategies alongside other, more traditional channels.

What have the impacts been?

Kent has found that people are sharing knowledge much better across boundaries and at all levels. This has started to reduce duplication and enable users to make better sense of a wider range of information from hard data to conversations. New communities of interest for joint working have been identified. For example Kent County Council has been able to connect to groups of local creative freelancers, IT professional and entrepreneurs. As a result a deeper range of business interests have been engaged and Kent has been able to work with local digital innovators on ideas and prototypes.

Twitter has also allowed residents to ask questions and raise issues directly. Twitter offers a new channel to communicate with what can seem an enormous and impenetrable organisation.

What have been the barriers and challenges in using social media?

To address the skills requirements of using social media Kent County Council undertakes monthly training for staff and members (Councillors). The events are successful and always oversubscribed. The sessions aim to give a thorough overview of social media tools and to understand how local government and community campaigners use social media for innovation, engagement and improvement. They also outline the basis for building a social media strategy for a local government project and know how social media complements and supports the work of Kent County Council. Delegates are all asked to fill in a questionnaire to assess their knowledge of social media.

A key barrier has been the perception of risk and the normal model of communication control used in many authorities (e.g. control of press contact and the sign off procedures). In response Kent County Council’s Communication and Media Unit has developed social media guidance and a social media licence on a service area basis. The licence is granted when a unit has completed training and has identified a clear business need for their social networking activities. Most of the social media tools used by Kent have been free so offer good value for money. The licensing process allows some governance of social media use on behalf of the Council to ensure what is provided makes sense to their audiences. Kent County Council accept that there are risks in using social media but recognise and plan for those risks rather than let the fear of the risks stop innovation.

The culture of the organisation does need to continue to develop with an increased use of social media. Social media does result in increased levels of challenge and requires an organisation and their staff to be more open to challenge. For example, the Technology, Research and Transformation Team has found that they need to be more modest when engaging with their stakeholders and spend more time listening rather than broadcasting messages even when using these channels. Kent County Council try to ensure that the uses are authentic and meaningful and assist with improving local outcomes.

How is learning and sharing of good practice undertaken?

Alongside formal training Kent County Council are in the process of setting up open social media surgeries. Anyone will be able to attend if they have questions or ideas about how to make their services ‘social’. Various units have also organised outside speakers and facilitators to run workshops focussed on specific issues.

Online Yammer is a key knowledge sharing tool for those involved and a new online staff suggestion scheme (known as “My KCC idea” and provided by Talk Freely) will allow colleagues to create and comment on ideas, further sharing knowledge and experiences.

The Future: How the Knowledge Hub could help Kent County Council

One result of Kent County Council developing a number of different approaches to using social media is that staff now have to go to each individual social website or tool. The future challenges for the Knowledge Hub is to bring together data, information and social conversations from many sources to show how specific services are being designed and delivered successfully in local government. There is a need to be able to search intuitively and have different visualisations of the data and information provided. This has to apply across Kent County Councils 45,000 staff (including those 15,000 in schools) and their 300 services.

The Knowledge Hub should look at building on the learning from what already exists in local government and elsewhere. Many government funded projects that focus on knowledge and digital media require the sponsored Council to ensure that the technologies developed can be used by other local authorities. Applications developed through these projects could be built upon where suitable to complement the Knowledge Hub.

To be successful the Knowledge Hub has to be useful and authoritative enough for Chief Executive Officers to understand and use it. As the approach aims to offer a new way of sharing knowledge the benefits from uploading content have to be clear and help to change the way Local Authorities see each other. Addressing the cultural issues that affect the sharing of knowledge is likely to be a far more important challenge than the technology constraints.

The Knowledge Hub should start small and then scale up rather than trying to build a perfect model. This would, for example, involve providing a way to stay up to date about the changing legislation affecting children and family support. Any approach should allow quick reflective learning and accommodate ‘smart failures’.

Kent are currently working with a local university to explore the potential of social gaming as another way of improving interaction and influencing behaviour between the council and its users, in this case students around recycling.

During its two year pilot Kent TV delivered a wide range of services for the community and enabled Kent County Council to reach those who traditionally have limited interaction with the Council. The channel was able to use video media to emphasise messages, for example the Hollywould…series, which highlighted to young people the dangers of Chlamydia, staying safe on the internet and drinks spiking. Whilst the decision was taken not to award the Kent TV contract, Kent is still pursuing the digital agenda to engage with citizens. The wealth of content generated during the pilot will now be available through the Kent.gov website under the banner of Digital Kent.
 
Digital Kent will enable Kent residents to access video content which will contain information about local services and attractions, allow them to find out ‘How to’ and give them new opportunities to engage with local democracy. The small in-house team are working on a number of initiatives including allowing Council Members to upload their own Video blogs to keep constituents up to date with issues in their local area. As well as engaging younger people, by facilitating a video website made by them for them, giving them a creative outlet for the work they are producing in their schools and youth groups.
 
Digital Kent also allows content to be embedded on to other relevant sites to ensure that the content is available where the citizens are already accessing information.

Further Information

Noel Hatch

T: 01622 696830

E: noel.hatch2@kent.gov.uk

Kent County Council website
Kent CC on Twitter with links such as explore kent
Freedom Travel Pass on Facebook
IDeA’s Communities of Practice
Yammer
Talk Freely
Pick and mix
Knowledge Hub

Download as PDF: Devon County council – Knowledge Hub Case Study

Starting with the development of a social media policy Devon County Council has been using social media to innovatively engage with young people including pregnant teenage mothers, to enhance their corporate and library websites and to improve internal collaboration. An internal business networking pilot project that is estimated to have made savings of £15,500 and significantly reduced the volume of email traffic would, if applied across the Council, save £750,000 each year. While Devon have been improving the social media skills of staff, they would like to use the Knowledge Hub to further improve learning across the organisation (which has 23,000 staff delivering 800 different services) and to provide aggregated information for specific professional groups such as social workers.

Background to Knowledge Hub and use of social media in Local Government

Social media allows users to share information and opinions and to interact online in a many-to-many model of communication. Social media applications involve the building of online communities to encourage participation. A number of new social media applications have emerged in the last five years including social networking sites such Facebook and Twitter and content sharing websites such as YouTube. Usage has grown very rapidly. To exploit these new opportunities for communication and interaction Local Authorities are increasingly using social media tools with one third now using Twitter (35%) and RSS news feeds (32%) and one sixth using Facebook (17%) and YouTube (16%).

To further develop their online learning offer IDeA proposes to develop a Knowledge Hub that builds of the success of IDeA’s Communities of Practice which have 55,000 members. The Knowledge Hub will allow local government to produce and capture its own knowledge more directly and bring together more relevant content sources including blogs and twitter feeds.

Devon County Council’s use of social media

Devon County Council aspires to make the best use of the available technology and innovations to improve the way they do business. This includes the use of social media to communicate, reach out and interact with the different communities they service. While their approach to date has been experimental, the Council is now in the process of developing a corporate communications and engagement strategy that includes social media.

While Devon County Council have taken a bottom up, active learning approach to piloting the use of various social media tools, the starting point has been the development of a corporate social media policy and user guidelines. The guidelines help managers and employees to consider a range of issues before participating in or developing any new social media application and help them to make the most of the tools available while protecting themselves and the Council. The guidelines cover:

• The personal responsibilities when making use of social media
• The professional responsibilities when making use of social media as a Devon County Council employee
• How to act as a contributor or publisher
• How to act as moderator for an online community

Working with a youth participation worker Devon County Council undertook research and completed an initial pilot using Facebook and Bebo to improve their interaction with young people (see below). As well as developing new ways to promote their youth services and engage with young people the learning from this pilot was used to reinforce changes in corporate policy.

Devon’s Approach to Youth Participation using Social Networking

As many young people were already networking using social media Devon County Council wanted to explore whether this was a new way to engage young people in the promotion and evaluation of the Council’s youth services.

To research young people’s views on participation through social networking sites, Devon County Council attended Kongomana, an annual youth festival. Some 94% of young people said they would be interested in engaging with a social networking site for participation and 80% said they would be likely to share opportunities with their friends. While young people would welcomed social networking participation opportunities they wanted safe, formal and official websites. In the end Devon County Council developed a new website, Get Ur Voice Heard which was linked to Facebook and Bebo pages and connected to the local Youth Parliament.

As part of the youth participation project Devon also operated a private Facebook group for teenage pregnant mothers. Rather than having to meet in a more formal setting at a specific time the approach allowed flexible engagement around parental commitments with time for reflection outside the confines of a meeting. As the approach was in many ways a meeting that could go on for a week it was found to be liberating and empowering for the users.

Devon County Council has also used social media in a number of other ways:

• Devon County Council has integrated their website with Twitter and Facebook, use Vimeo to share their videos and offer RSS newsfeeds for planning information, news and webcasts.
• Devon’s libraries use Twitter, flickr and Facebook to promote their services and run an annual competition to identify images from their archives.
• Devon County Council’s CEO produces an internal blog and podcasts.
• Devon County Council has also completed an internal pilot of business networking and collaboration using social software (bluekiwi) to consider the business case of the product as a learning tool.

What have the impacts of social media been?

Devon County Council believes that the use of social media tools has been valuable but they have not yet been able to fully quantify the impacts and the benefits. In terms of usage Devon County Council has nearly 1,600 followers on Twitter, has 69 fans on Facebook and has uploaded 9 videos to Vimeo. The Council has noted positive responses from residents around the conversation developed using Twitter and the local elections increased usage of social media.

With about 800 different services the Council has concluded that they need to engage users around specific services or initiatives so not to overload users with information. For example Devon’s libraries have their own Twitter, Facebook and flickr pages.

The Council has found that externally their use of social media has been complementary to their existing communications channels rather than replacements. Additional staff resource over and above that required for just publishing website content has been required to maintain these new channels and the conversations that often take place outside office hours.

However, internally the Council believe that social media tools can replace current ways of working. For example, the Council’s internal pilot of a social media platform replaced the outlook distribution lists that were used for sending information to teams and groups. The new approach allowed staff to keep track of a conversation, join and leave when they wanted to and to be able to see the entire chain of comments. As a result the volume of emails fell from 400-500 to 70-80 across a team of eight people and the quality of the conversation was improved. Further savings were also achieved by the team due to a reduction in physical face-to-face meetings. The Council has made a conservative estimate that the reduction in email and meetings helped the team to save £15,500 a year. If applied across the whole Council the time saved when looking for information is estimated to be worth over £750,000 each year.

The Council also believes that these tools can help with Freedom of Information requests as, for example, searching is much easier across the social media platform than across many individual mailboxes, where information has often been archived or deleted.

By using externally hosted software Devon County Council has been able to minimise the requirements placed on their internal IT team. For a social media pilot that lasted 11 months and included 250 users there were no calls to the IT help desk.

By working with their service directorates Devon County Council has been learning about social media applications and changing policy to become more explicit about the business risks and issues. They are also learning about what values, measures and outputs are required for a sustainable engagement and what are the resource implications of using social media.

What have been the barriers and challenges in using social media?

The biggest initial challenge was developing the skills and competencies of staff so they were able to have a conversation on a site like Twitter. To get value from using social media the Council have been developing an online corporate voice and persona for their different services. Online participation skills have been developed internally first to identify the training needs before engaging in a more formal and external civic debate across a large county.

Other barriers and challenges have included:

• The limitations imposed by the use of Internet Explorer Version 6 as the default corporate browser. To make effective use of all websites staff have had to be given access to other browsers such as Firefox and Opera. In the longer term if some of the piloted social networking software was adopted by the Council there would be a need to integrate login and authentication approaches.
• The need to raise awareness of the potential for social media in some service directorates and across their management teams.
• The need to have the staff resource to maintain the new channels such as Twitter to make them sustainable in the long term.

How is learning and sharing of good practice undertaken?

Devon County Council would like to improve their sharing of good practice and learning. They would like to have a better formal documentation of learning points and use business networking as a way to learn while they are doing a project rather than through reflective learning at the end of the project. Real time access to learning from, for example, other social workers around the country would be a huge benefit for the social care workers in Devon.

The Council’s approach to social media training was organic. An informal “social media forum” was set up to allow staff to share learning and to ask each other about the best ways to use particular tools. There were no formal social media training packages available at that time.

The Future: How the Knowledge Hub could help Devon County Council

Currently it is difficult for an officer to get hold of the latest news, connect to other councils, obtain Local Government analysis and source industry issues for their specialist area (e.g. Corporate IT Management). Devon County Council would like the Knowledge Hub to bring together a diverse collection of information from a wide range content sources such as blogs, bookmarks, news cuttings, video and online conversations and filter them on to a dashboard. It is about bringing together the wider body of knowledge for specific professionals.

A challenge for the Knowledge Hub will be its ability to engage a organisation which is the scale of Devon County Council with 23,000 employees but with only 6,500 on their corporate network. The software will need to cope with any email address and be available through other mobile devices and outside work hours.

For the future Devon County Council are looking into how they could develop an online Digital Passport training package which would cover risk management, online media training, community management and online facilitation/moderation, evaluation and measures and social media tools (such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, flickr and blogs) all with a focus on business usage. Linked to the training but also available separately, Devon are considering whether they should develop good practice guides around particular social media sites and tools.

Further Information

Carl Haggerty,
Enterprise Architect, Business Solutions and Innovations,
Devon County Council

T: 07971 322968

E: carl.haggerty@devon.gov.uk

Devon CC website
Devon CC on Twitter
Devon CC on Facebook
Devon CC’s videos on Vimeo
Devon libraries flickr site
Bluekiwi
Get Ur Voice Heard and linked Facebook pages
IDeA’s Communities of Practice
Knowledge Hub

Download as PDF: Brent Council – Knowledge Hub Case Study

Focussing on specific applications Brent Council have been proactive in experimenting with the use of social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to advertise events, give short alerts and share videos more effectively. Linked to more formal communication channels such as their website and press releases, the impacts have been growing steadily but there have been challenges in developing practical social media usage policies for staff and in the resources to manage and monitor online comments. Going forward Brent are seeking to continue their learning approach and to make their web presence more interactive, to further develop their use of IDeA’s Communities of Practice, to draw together and filter the many sources of content and to make more information available through mobile phones.

Background to Knowledge Hub and use of social media in Local Government

Social media allows users to share information and opinions and to interact online in a many-to-many model of communication. Social media applications involve the building of online communities to encourage participation. A number of new social media applications have emerged in the last five years including social networking sites such Facebook and Twitter and content sharing websites such as YouTube. Usage has grown very rapidly. To exploit these new opportunities for communication and interaction Local Authorities are increasingly using social media tools with one third now using Twitter (35%) and RSS news feeds (32%) and one sixth using Facebook (17%) and YouTube (16%).

To further develop their online learning offer IDeA proposes to develop a Knowledge Hub that builds of the success of IDeA’s Communities of Practice which have 55,000 members. The Knowledge Hub will allow local government to produce and capture its own knowledge more directly and bring together more relevant content sources including blogs and Twitter feeds.

Brent Council’s use of social media

Rather than having an overall strategy most of Brent’s use of social media has come from individual initiatives, often driven by middle management who are part of a web steering group. The Council corporately recognised that social media was important and set up mechanisms to manage the use of social media including the development of a social media policy for staff. The approach has been to build social media requirements into other service strategies as they are developed and reviewed. The Council has been using social media applications in a number of different ways including:

• Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are integrated with their Council website and operate as additional channels for sharing information. For example videos about fire safety for tenants have been added to You Tube. The content is actively managed by Brent Council’s Communication Department.
• Involving their IT, policy and communications teams Brent have completed internal trials using Yammer, a social networking and micro blogging tool similar to Twitter but with access restricted to council staff only.
• Brent Council have set up a blog as part of their corporate web development process. While trialling a more minimalist home page Brent Council used the blog as a mechanism to capture the feedback from users. Brent’s CEO also has his own blog and discussion forums are operated on the community forum website.
• Brent Council hosts the e-Government Register website which is the authoritative source for usage of social media tools by UK local authorities.
• In a new project Brent Council are planning to use social media together with online energy monitoring to influence the attitudes and behaviour of groups of citizens who, in the past, have been less active in responding to the climate change message (e.g. black and minority groups, faith groups).

Access to social media tools is reasonably open at Brent. An employee can have their own blogging site if they are contributing in a personal capacity but need the approval of the Communications Department if they are writing in their capacity as an employee. Web filtering blocks the access of Brent Council employees to social media and other sites as the default position. But this can easily be lifted at a line manager’s request.

What have the impacts of social media been?

Brent’s corporate Facebook (124 fans), Twitter (629 followers) and YouTube sites (more than 9,000 views of uploaded videos) are all moderately well used as additional channels of communication. YouTube has been a particularly useful mechanism for publishing videos (e.g. the Respect festival was filmed and put online). While the number of Twitter followers has been growing steadily rather than dramatically it was particularly useful as a quick news channel for providing advice about the disruptions from heavy snow and for following up press releases more generally. Facebook is used to promote events such as the Respect Festival and for engagement with Brent’s Youth Parliament.

There has been less usage of Yammer as an internal microblogging tool. Part of the challenge has been building Communities of Practice of sufficient scale, even across a Council with a few thousand employees. Similarly the blog for the website development has only moderate use and needs to be marketed more.

What have been the barriers and challenges in using social media?

A barrier for adoption of social media has been the challenge in developing a practical usage policy. The dividing line between personal and corporate comments is reducing all the time.

As the level of spamming increased and with it the potential for libel and defamation as well as abusive and crass comments, Brent’s public forums have had to be moderated more actively. Though moderation takes place after publishing this does require additional staff time.

There have been few hardware impacts from the use of social media. In fact videos streamed to employees’ desks are more bandwidth friendly than sending large media files by email as was the case before the use of the YouTube. However, there is a challenge in planning for hardware and software in what is a fast moving area of technology. For example Brent offers the ability to video weddings and stream the audio and video so overseas families can watch the proceedings online. On one occasion when the streaming stopped working Brent staff provided an iPhone which allowed the event to be videoed and uploaded in real time to the Internet via the 3G network.

Assessing the benefits of social media in terms of efficiency and customer satisfaction is challenging. Brent Council’s Communication Department are still to be fully convinced about the benefits of social media. There is a risk that social media becomes just an additional channel rather improving and/or replacing other channels. However the Council have seen an increase in website usage when Twitter is used in conjunction with a press release (e.g. promoting St Patrick’s Day events).

How is learning and sharing of good practice undertaken?

To support internal communication Brent operate an extensive intranet with various tools such as discussion forums and a write back to the CEO function. While, unlike a wiki or a blog, the content is managed, the intranet has been becoming more open over time.

Brent also use e-learning systems such as the IDeA Learning Pool and Course-Source which are more formal and include a Learning Management System (LMS). An employee needs their manger’s authorisation before enrolling on an online course. This is supplemented by standard training courses delivered in classrooms (e.g. use of the email system, use of Word and Excel, Health and Safety training and performance management).

Appropriate staff have been to conferences or workshops about the use of social media but there as yet has been no specific requirement for the general training of staff in social media applications and usage.

In terms of websites as sources of solutions Brent Council make the most consistent use of IDeA’s Communities of Practice. Other important sources of information include info4local and various Communities and Local Government subscriptions.

The Future: How the Knowledge Hub could help Brent Council

As the social media world is fickle and new services can emerge very rapidly planning for the future is tricky. For example following initial very high growth in users MySpace was overtaken by Facebook in early 2009. However Brent expect the short text functions of Twitter to stay for good as a corporate tool and plan to make their websites more interactive through the use of feedback facilities and features such as Google Sidewiki which will allow users to add comments to any webpage though these will require ongoing monitoring. Improving access to content and tools through mobile phones is also an important aim for Brent for the future.

Brent Council are looking at developing ways of integrating other social media streams to link more widely to other parts of the “blogosphere” and to build on the benefits of Communities of Practice. For example the ability to deploy Communities of Practice tools very rapidly allowed Brent Council, and UK local government more generally, to be ready for the EU Services Directive by December 2009. The EU Services Directive aims to make it easier for service businesses to set up or sell their services anywhere in Europe through online registrations for various licences and taxes with common form formats.

Brent Council see social networking to share information increasingly as an alternative way to achieve some of the benefits of attending a conference. Increased sharing of PowerPoint slides at a central source will help with the dissemination of information, perhaps through the proposed Knowledge Hub. As a result the emphasis on conferences may need to change to focus more on social interaction which is then supported by online applications. Social media can also feel much less formal and more interactive than a traditional conference structure.

Brent sees potential for the Knowledge Hub to draw together structured information from various Communities of Practice and social media across those local authorities who use it as well as data from ONS, Total Place and the various emerging open data applications. The challenge will be maintenance of the content and a degree of inaccuracy may have to be accepted.

While IDeA’s Communities of Practice have been successful, Brent would like to see the Knowledge Hub further improve the communication between Local Authorities and provide more help with decision making. Certainly Brent expect their future communications strategies to include social media more explicitly.

Further Information

Dane Wright,
IT Strategy Manager, Brent Council
Telephone: 020 8937 1404

Email: dane.wright@brent.gov.uk

Facebook - Brent Council
Twitter  - Brent Council
YouTube – Brent Council London
E-Government Register – Brent Council Social Media data
Brent Council website
IDeA’s Communities of Practice
Yammer
Knowledge Hub
Info4local