If you’re anything like me, you’ll have been paying lip service to the concept of ROI for years. I’m generally sceptical of the validity of most ROI calculations, but don’t have a credible argument for why we shouldn’t attempt them. I generally mumble something about ‘qualitative’ data and look a bit sheepish.

So in yesterday’s post on ten things to look for in a digital channel as part of a 21st century ‘beating the bounds’ visit, point 10 was about attempting a simple ROI assessment for the channel, to see whether it is worthy of further scrutiny with a view to making it more productive for the organisation. Here’s a quick suggestion for how you might attempt that.

Take three dimensions:

1. Significance: how important is this channel to the organisation? This might relate to whether people would reasonably question its absence (e.g. a corporate website), its role in delivering important goals for the organisation, or its importance to senior management (but don’t over-egg the last one if it’s just a vanity channel).
2. Resource: how much time and financial resource do we put – or should we be putting – into maintaining this? Just a sense of effort/cost, no hard numbers needed.
3. Value: what does it provide us with in terms of helping to meet the goals we’ve set for it? This might be a cash saving, it could be a sustained increase in useful feedback received to a consultation, or might be the enthusiasm from colleagues for the insights they get from it – be open-minded.

For each of those dimensions, give then channel a High, Medium or Low score – it’s more important to complete the exercise than generate numbers. Be honest, be decisive.

Then apply this matrix:

If anything scores 5 points or more, put it on a watch list of channels to be made more useful or less resource-intensive to maintain. 7 points or more? Put it top of the list. Anything score 3 points? Make a note of it for the business case next time you’re asked to demonstrate your team’s efficiency.

Finally, here’s a Google Doc version of the matrix, in case that helps (download the sheet to put in your own numbers):

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I really enjoyed a recent post by Tim Lloyd, head of digital at BIS, applying the principles of the ancient custom of ‘beating the bounds‘ to the process of managing a government department’s digital estate:

Like those dignitaries beating the bounds, I don’t think it’s about owning every part of the estate, but it is important to be aware of what’s going on:

• listening to relevant conversations
• re-purposing the things that aren’t working
• developing the better channels or ideas
• making sure there’s some kind of consistency of experience, for people passing through or visiting the fringes

It’s something I’ve approached from a different angle here before. That was very much about real-time awareness of what’s going on across the estate, but what Tim reminded me was that there’s an important role in doing periodic reviews of not just the what, but also the why.

So I started jotting down the kinds of things that one might look for on a modern-day bounds-beating tour of one’s digital estate, and came up with this list:

1. Vision and ownership: who is responsible this channel? do they have a coherent plan describing the goals and purpose it serves?
2. Audience insight: is usage tracked in some way? is there a mechanism for feedback – if so, what comes back? what is known about the audience?
3. Content: how much material is there here? What proportion is redundant, outdated or trivial? do the production values or style match the goals and audience?
4. Engagement: does the channel help achieve the intended outcomes – stimulating discussion, promoting take-up, enabling self-service or encouraging enquiries?
5. Compliance: does the channel meet requirements for government channels, particularly on privacy and data protection and accessibility?
6. Security: who has access to manage the channel, and is this done in a sensible way (strong passwords, over secure connections, access details recorded in a secure location in case someone is away or leaves?)
7. Consistency and design: does the channel reflect brand guidelines and/or provide visual consistency with the organisation’s other channels? Is it consistent in its messaging  with things being said on other channels?
8. Integration: how is the channel currently promoted? from where else is it linked to, and which other channels does it help promote? how does it perform in search engines?
9. Preservation: is the content of the channel archived in some way, e.g. via The National Archives? Is it a channel for FOI requests or a database to be searched for the purpose of answering them?
10. ROI: how does it score in a simple assessment of return on investment given the time and budget required to maintain it?

Point 10 deserves a little blog post of its own.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what’s missing from the list, and what might be on yours.

Update: in the comments on his post, Tim raises another point for the list:

I guess the only thing I might add is ‘sustainability’, which sort of falls between number 9 and number 1 (responsibility). I often find people are happy to ‘own’ channels – especially when the channel is working well – but it takes lots of graft to maintain an effective channel and keep it going over months and years.

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1. An overarching vision for how government or a particular organisation intends to use social media to advance its aims, with a sort of set of ‘design principles’ to guide how it will be practiced.
2. Some descriptions of how an organisation will manage its different social channels, why it has them, who controls how they’re used, and how their value will be measured. It helps people inside and outside be clear on what to expect, and is a source of answers when someone asks, which they invariably will.
3. Some examples of how to use social media effectively as a team, and as an individual whether that’s the Head of the Civil Service or a countryside ranger.
4. A minimal set of rules for an individual to follow, by their very existence providing some reassurance that it’s OK to engage online while also clarifying which rules apply. I don’t underestimate how tough these are to get right – as a Teacamper joked, people who use social media don’t read social media guidelines, and people who read social media guidelines don’t use social media. The existing bullet points aren’t enough, and it’s hard to know just which existing staff policies apply to social media. Without this, it’s easy to slip into paranoia and feel the world is out to get you. Sure, some folk are and the Daily Mail always has pikestaffs needing heads. With some sensible rules, it’s more likely a press officer or line manager will defend a colleague under attack, as defend they should. As a taxpayer, I want to deal with a civil service of interesting, helpful human beings, not a humourless bureaucracy.

Still, my contribution to #4 is Helpful Technology’s first venture into infographics, in the form of this eight question flowchart to help you work out whether the pearl of wisdom you’re about to tweet or post is le mot juste or beyond the pale. It’s a minimum set, and would allow people to tweet about bad days or things that they’re struggling with, while avoiding the things that harm the ability of government to work. See what you think.

I’m a Civil Servant: Should I Post This Update?

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It might be a tougher challenge if we were to try to put some definitions around this, to describe what sort of digital engagement we’re talking about, and where the boundaries lie. For instance, is digital engagement about having a corporate Twitter account? Having an open data store? Does the ghostwritten intranet blog to all staff from your Chief Exec count? If your boss said to you: ‘Who’s been doing creative things with their consultations in government?’ or ‘What’s an example of a really good social media policy for staff?’, how would you answer her?

Of course, the truth is that social media and Twitter in particular is a human network more powerful than any single source, however encyclopaedic – and it’s where I get answers to those sorts of questions all the time. But I think there’s a role for something less ephemeral than a social network and more structured than a forum, which can be a trusted port-of-call when you’re hunting for the good stuff. So that’s what I’ve tried to create.

The Digital Engagement Guide I’m launching today is part bookmark collection, part reference manual, part Q&A site about how public sector organisations can use – and are using – digital engagement as part of their work. A free-to-use service, it’s intended to be a place to get inspiration, shortcuts and answers, and hopefully be something we can all dip into as part of our work to spark ideas and provide context. As well as stuff from my own bookmarks, I’ve involved Dan Slee and Al Smith to provide some wider and especially local government examples – we’re up to over 150 items so far between us.

The site is organised in four parts:

1. Techniques: are descriptions of tools and ways to use them, maybe a 5-step guide to setting up a Facebook page, or a screencast of getting started with Google Alerts or Netvibes.

2. Strategies: are about the process and documentation you might need around successful digital engagement – corporate policies, moderation rules, risk assessment templates and so on.

3. Examples: are short case studies of good uses of digital for engagement (i.e. not just broadcast or campaign-oriented social media).

4. Questions: are an experimental Agony Aunt area, building up a library of FAQs to some of the common worries and challenges people have, and some potential responses or solutions.

It’s all WordPress, as you might imagine, tagged up to the hilt, intended to help people find examples involving Twitter, or just the ones from local government, for example. WordPress also brings with it opportunities like comments (to help tell the back-story to the case studies) and RSS feeds, which I’m using to power an illustrated weekly round-up email from the site, using Campaign Monitor’s new RSS-to-email functionality.

In addition to the mobile-friendly WordPress site, I’m excited to be using my new Tag-o-tron, which I’ve recycled from an old, abandoned project. It’s a bookmarklet – i.e. a button on my browser toolbar – which enables me to quickly publish examples or strategies I come across, automatically grabbing a decent screenshot and publishing straight into WordPress, thanks to the magic of WP’s XML-RPC interface. Dan and Al have been using it to contribute their material, and while I’m not intending to open the site up for contributions wholesale right now, there’s interesting potential.

In the meantime, I’m hoping it turns growing a knowledgebase-style service into a by-product of the reading and writing I already do. I’m also hoping it helps with the digital engagement training and support work I do with the Government Communications Network and others. By making this into a public, shared, Creative Commons-licensed resource, I’m intending this to be a contribution to the community which has provided help and support (and more recently, commissions) over the four years I’ve worked in this field.

I’m really interested to hear your thoughts on whether it’s the kind of thing you might find useful and if you can suggest any good examples or templates that should be incorporated. Similarly, if you find any bits of it confusing or misleading, I’d really appreciate that feedback too.

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Six weeks on from UKGovcamp, you’d be forgiven for thinking the only thing 2012 has left to offer us is those silly running races in the summer. But oh no.

MailCamp returns for 2012 on Thursday 17th May, this time hosted by the lovely folk of the National Audit Office.

If last year’s event is anything to go by, it should be a fascinating afternoon of show+tell, pizzas and conversation about what works in the crucial field of public sector email marketing, newsletters and alerts. I’m hoping that we’ll hear from people doing it well, people struggling with knotty challenges, and people with tools and ideas both technical and content-related.

We’ll be opening ticket bookings soon, but in the meantime, sign up to the mailing list to be the first to hear more.

Maybe even more excitingly, we’ve just kicked off the 2012 round of UKGovcamp Grants. Last year, we used some of the surplus sponsorship from UKGovcamp to support a series of other Govcamp-style events around the country, from BrewCamp to ShropCamp, PodCamp to ‘We Are What We Tweet’. We called it ‘moreopen’ but that was just confusing, so this year, we’re calling them what they are: UKGovcamp Grants.

UKGovcamp Grants is a small grants scheme to help get these events off the ground, with small contributions towards catering and logistics costs. You can apply anytime*, via a simple form, for any amount up to £500. If you meet the fairly broad criteria, and we like the idea, we’ll send you the cash (and maybe even help you promote the event). Interested? Apply here.

Tell all your friends!

Photo credit: Paul Clarke for MailCamp 2011

* sooner the better. When the money’s gone, it’s gone.

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Over the last year, one of the toughest but most rewarding areas of work I’ve been doing is training, mainly with central government communications staff, and often through the Government Communications Network. Our team of Simon Booth-Lucking, Dave Briggs and Giles Field, with occasional invited guests such as Dan Slee or Tim Lloyd, run soup-to-nuts courses for people generally fairly new to digital and social media where we talk through the tools, culture and examples of this unfamiliar world. People bring many, many questions, challenges and concerns and we do our best to unpack them and work them through, either in the room or afterwards, online.

Take last week’s course on working with online communities. We started from a discussion about the changing landscape of trust in communications, the shifting trends in media especially at local level, and the diversity of forum-style communities from Mumsnet to Kiva. We talked about the different ways communicators might engage with communities – from listening, through to engagement, customer service and even co-production of resources initiated by those communities. I’ve banged on about examples like the BIS partnership with The Student Room for long enough, but I still think it’s the future. (It’s great to see the crew are still at it, as are Number 10.)

Engaging within an existing forum isn’t always the right approach, so we also look at the pros and cons of community platforms from Ning to GetSatisfaction, via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. As part of our final session looking at what Community Managers do, we played the first outing of the Online Conversation Starters game. If you’re familiar with the Social Media gameor Dave Briggs’ digital engagement version then you’ll get the idea. Participants have a deck of 24 cards, each with a ‘points’ value correlating to the effort required to implement them, and are set a budget to ‘spend’ on the selection of cards that best fit their objectives. I should acknowledge the huge inspiration of Richard Millington’s Feverbee in their development – a man who knows community management inside out.

We had a team trying to get parents to talk about holiday travel plans, another looking at community views on a troublesome bottleneck road, and another getting a segment of drivers to be more considerate at roadworks. They came up with some great ideas, including ‘hotseat Q&A’ sessions, getting community members to share their own tips, and even running photo competitions. I’ve tidied up the artwork for the deck of cards in a ready-to-print format via Moo.com’s business cards service (tip: they look nice in the rounded card format), and released them under a Creative Commons licence for anyone to use. If you’d prefer me to send you a ready-made set, please drop me a line.

Download Online Conversation Starters cards (PDF, 182kb)

Use them as part of your own sessions, make money from them, improve them – please just share your enhanced versions and don’t just pass them off as your own.

Look forward to seeing how they’re used and improved.

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There’s been a lot of buzz about the G-Cloud today and over the weekend, and rightly so. It’s a potentially exciting development, and a real achievement for Chris Chant and his team. Not only have they set out, aggressively in Civil Service terms, to get a better deal for taxpayers, but they’ve also managed the process with truly impressive openness and frankness.

It’s exciting to see little ol’ Helpful Technology alongside the likes of CSC and Capita on the newly-announced G-Cloud Store (we’re under Specialist Cloud Services, offering digital engagment support, training and integration of tools such as WordPress).

But I’m keeping my feet on the ground. I won’t be rolling out the new Universal Credit transaction or equipping police forces with BlackBerrys (nor would I want to). I may not even get much of a sniff at contracts for things I do do, like helping public sector people develop the skills needed to work in social media and cloud technologies. And that’s OK, because the G-Cloud is really three things:

1. It’s a way to buy IT-as-paperclips

Plenty of IT services are digital commodities, pretty much – things like compute cycles and storage space. Amazon demonstrated that you could sell them as such, and now the UK Public Sector can more easily buy them as such. Servers are servers, and it’s about time the cost and speed of provisioning servers for government projects, for example, was subjected to some harsh competition.

2. It’s a sensible model for 2.0-style subscription services

While the G-Cloud store still features the likes of Capita, CSC and co pretty prominently, it’s awesome to see friends like Huddle, Learning Pool and Delib (for which I’m an associate), on the framework too.

What they offer really does transform government IT, but until now they’ve faced real headaches getting procured on a subscription model, rather than as bespoke, fixed-price projects. I remember my own experience bringing Huddle in to DIUS in 2009, and the hoops that helpful COI chums had to jump through to help me save taxpayers’ money on them. Times have changed.

3. It’s a state of mind

Chris clearly thinks it’s big news:

Every aspect of gov and the public sector will be affected, things will never be the same http://t.co/dcFolZAU @G_Cloud_UK #CloudStore

February 20, 2012 5:26 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@cantwaitogo

Chris Chant

I might not go that far right now, but as much as anything, G-Cloud symbolises a willingness to tackle procurement barriers preventing SMEs from winning government work; a new ethos of easy come, easy go relationships with suppliers; and an endorsement for cloud services offering better quality and value than the alternatives, including no-nonsense accreditation.

"You should not ... run a mini-competition between suppliers" Can see that for *AAS. but for specialists? Is eg @lesteph fungible? #GCloud

February 20, 2012 7:53 pm via MetroTwitReplyRetweetFavorite

@pubstrat

Stefan Czerniawski

There are some things that niggle me, and one or two deeper worries. The Govstore is a good first iteration, but maybe highlights the dangers of free. The foolish and short-termist abolition of COI has taken with it a number of relevant frameworks for digital communications services, and perhaps even more importantly the savvy and experienced brokers who managed them. G-Cloud is often posited as the replacement, but COI didn’t really trade in commodities, and Helpful Technology isn’t really fungible. And maybe my deeper worry is that underlying cultural barriers will still tend towards larger all-in contracts with bigger players.

@marxculture Someone in the room accused me of "Having my head in the clouds when I need my feet on the ground" when I mentioned #gcloud

February 20, 2012 4:03 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@icerunner

Philip McAllister

Oddly, all within the same week, I heard that I’d been set up as a preferred supplier to one of the big Systems Integrators, and been turned down from the DfE’s Creative Choice ‘black box’ service company.

As with all things in government, a wise SME will hedge its bets. Look up at the sky, keep your feet on the ground.

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In May last year, alpha.gov.uk emerged blinking into the limelight. It was the product of a true skunkworks operation – a few guys (and they were mainly guys) – tucked away on a disused floor of a government building in south London. The site had rough edges, but it pointed in an exciting direction:

• Satisfy common requirements first
• Use fewer, better words
• Hire developers, don’t contract systems integrators
• Know – better still, create – your tools and technology stack
• Think about design and typography
• Engage with feedback as intelligent human beings

Tonight, its successor, (beta) gov.uk was revealed. While it looks different, for sure, it’s still closer to alpha.gov.uk than direct.gov.uk in scope, and you’d be forgiven for wondering what’s really changed in eight months. But lots has, even visible from the outside.

First, it’s not a skunkworks project. The Government Digital Service team responsible for gov.uk now is unrecognisable from the team in Hercules House even three or four months ago. It’s a proper organisation in a nice building, led by someone with clout, and staffed with headhunted external expertise and carefully-winnowed survivors from the projects it has taken over. There’s pace and optimism and pride in the air over there, in more concentrated form than I’ve encountered in any other part of the public sector in the last year or so.

Second: Alpha, the team behind it, and the political context into which it was born, determined that this new approach won the three-way battle of influence, leaving Directgov/The Club and Business Link/Serco effectively knocked out for the count. That victory wasn’t a given, by any means. But it matters hugely, as the internal debate switches from whether to how.

Third: the tentacles are spreading. The tweets of people like Paul Annett and Stefan Czerniawski suggest that GDSers aren’t just building the core information site now. They’re starting to get out there in the government buildings across the UK where online transactions get built for real out of monstrous Oracle databases and J2EE middleware. It’s there that the money gets wasted and the user experience for millions of people gets sacrificed, even more so than in the convoluted circumlocutions of Whitehall press releases. It’s not visible on gov.uk yet, but it’s coming.

So, it must be a fantastic feeling for the GDS team to have got this far, having built something truly elegant – designed, in the real sense of the word – in a way that government’s digital presence often hasn’t been.

But they’ll know too just how far there is to go:

• it has to scale, assimilating more of the online experience end-to-end,  for businesses as well as citizens, somehow providing an elegant solution for edge cases as well as the popular ones. Revolutionising how news and policy content is created and opened up for public participation is in itself a huge challenge.
• it needs to practice selective deafness, smiling at but ignoring those with apparently reasonable but ultimately harmful requests to pull the project in a thousand different directions.
• it needs to box clever, now there’s a big target painted on its rear, and find ways of persuading those in and around government’s existing online services that the vision can include them, will benefit from their experience, and that they’ll benefit from being involved (with judicious use of a bit of my-road-or-the-high-road)
• it needs to turn digital by default from a slogan to a fact of life within government, overcoming decades of reliance on advertising, grid-led communications and reluctance to let daylight in upon magic both in terms of process and policy. I’m conscious of straying close to cliché there, but ultimately GDS needs to show that decisions based on analytical data and user-centred design lead to better outcomes than those based on seniority or consensual expediency, and that alone is a huge challenge.

Gov.uk is a stake in the ground – a signpost to something better and some examples of what that looks like, as much in terms of process and culture as in terms of pixels. If it can manage the transition to the next stage, it’ll be onto a winner and we’ll all be the better for it.

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Dan Slee’s  excellent suggestion of a ’20 thoughts’ format for reflections on UKGovcamp seems to have caught on, so here’s mine – more about the format than the content, in many cases. That I think Dave Briggs and Lloyd Davis are the very finest of fellows goes, I think, without me saying.

1. No royalty: we’ve been queasy about ‘keynote’ slots for the likes of Chris Chant or Mike Bracken, and while they invariably deliver interesting stuff and I’m glad they made the effort to come, I’m coming to the conclusion that format isn’t what UKGovcamp is about.
2. Leave the crowd wanting more: two days was a fun experiment. One would keep up the energy levels more, and make it a more manageable endeavour.
3. There’s a right size: it’s a great venue, and while we weren’t physically squashed, 260 people is a very big Govcamp. 130ish on day 2 felt quite laid-back. 200-220 would be just right.
4. The grid needs managing: if it’s a one day event, with that many folks, we need to think about the grid a bit more. Tim Davies getting it online was a masterstroke, but we still had sessions in the wrong size rooms, and avoidable clashes. Thinking caps on, there.
5. Talking is doing: the ‘doing day’ concept on Day 2 wasn’t quite right, even though some great things did get done. What makes UKGovcamps special are the serendipitous conversations and real-world encounters of online friends, not apps built or hard skills learned.
6. Porous boundaries are what really matter: ditto, those serendipitous encounters are possible because the normal barriers between central and local government, supplier and commissioner, senior and junior, don’t intrude. So it’s a shame the name badges had organisations and not Twitter handles on them, for that reason alone.
7. Moral support matters: we don’t put enough emphasis on the value of Teacamps, Brewcamps, Govcamps etc in just bringing likeminded folk together and winding up their their springs. Of course it’s a worth a Saturday if it gives you the courage to face the next 12 months with a grin and Twitter-stream of encouragement. Talking in small groups beats listening in big ones, mostly.
8. More kids please: thanks to Maya (4) for being our youngest (and frankly, best behaved) govcamper. We need to find ways to make it easier to bring kids along; they suffer us checking Twitter at home when we should be playing with them, after all. Kids should never be barrier to govcamping.
9. We’re building up some lovely oral and visual history: five years on from the virtually pre-hashtag #ukgc08, we’re building up a phenomenal archive of govcamping on Flickr (this year’s special thanks to David Pearson, Ann Kempster, Harry Metcalfe and AShropshireLad) and in the last couple of events, audio, thanks to the splendid Cathy Aitchison, who was quietly interviewing folk throughout – her lovely 2011 interviews are here.
10. Govcampers change: from the very start of day 1, some seasoned govcampers set up camp in the corridors, and barely ventured into sessions. For them (me included), we got a huge amount from chatting to friends old and new, without necessarily doing the full grid-sessions-timetable thing: “a year’s worth of meetings in a day” as I heard someone describe it
11. There are plenty of (better) places to hack: UKGovcampers are a different crowd. We didn’t really expect a hackday, and we didn’t get one.
12. Microsoft have ‘got’ it: whilst SharePoint and IE are tough to forgive, Microsoft’s UK Government team in Charles Eales, Ian McKenzie, and Dave ‘Mr Bing’ Coplin, have got behind the event in just the right way. They’re spending thousands supporting UKGovcamp, approaching it with humility and good humour, and I for one salute them.
13. You can’t go wrong with retro sweets: I’m no affiçionado, but our supply of Maoams didn’t last long, and elicited some squeeing.
14. The Govcampers are way ahead of the politicians (and policy officials?) on open data: while the consultations and speeches are talking in vague generalities about the commercial potential of open data and the political imperative of transparency, it looked like the debates at Govcamp 2012 had moved on to data cleanliness, real-world semantics and public engagement with data and data portals.
15. WordPress is a way of life now: There wasn’t the traditional Simon Dickson session from what I could see, but there were sessions throughout the two days which touched on WordPress – from its role in ‘radical’ website deployment, to how to make it mobile. It’s out there, people are getting on with using it. I didn’t even get to present my slides on ’5 strategies for managing WordPress multisites’, which I’ll have to blog here at some point – but we’re at that sort of level now, I think.
16. We need our own pub: Saturday’s whole-pub experience (admittedly with smaller numbers) was a lot more pleasant than Friday’s. Bravo Hadley for finding us such nice places, and we need to bargain on almost everyone turning up to Govcamp (a free event, on a workday… truly remarkable).
17. The rules of Open Space are there for a reason: time is limited, and when I found myself in sessions which weren’t quite doing it for me, I exercised the Law of Two Feet now and again. We should make really sure all Govcampers and session leaders are cool with those rules, so everyone gets to the end of the day feeling in control.
18. There are still some tyrannical bosses out there: a sad but spirited email I received on Friday morning read: “I’m sorry, I’m not going to make it today. I will see you tomorrow though: luckily the boss can’t dictate what I do on Saturdays”. If Fridays remain part of the programme, maybe we need an alternative prospectus for use by such Govcamping heros to persuade recalcitrant bosses that it’s the most productive day out of the office they could possibly spend.
19. We need more govcamps: and there’s going to be another healthy pot available, as there was in 2011, for people to run their own events either based on an area or an interesting theme. More details about how to access it soon.
20. We’re growing up and calming down: I didn’t expect the brainstorm on a digital maturity model/assessment tool to be as well-attended as it was. We came up with a load of stuff, from digital literacy and organisational engagement to staff policies and the basis for decision-making. But as Shane has remarked, the crowd this year didn’t feel as nervous or angry as we did back in 2008. Happily, things have moved on.

Photo credit: David Pearson

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Hands up who says they work in ‘new media’? Me neither. While we’re not quite in a digital by default world, this stuff has been around for a decade and a half. Even in the public sector.

One topic I’d like to think about at this week’s UKGovcamp on Saturday (the ‘doing’ day) is whether we can come up with a way of thinking about public sector digital activity in terms of a maturity or capability model, that could be applied to help teams and individuals set goals and maybe even benchmark their effectiveness. For instance, it might:

• Help teams to think about how sophisticated the organisation is at adopting and managing social media as part of official Communications and day to day communication
• Provide some material for people thinking about their CMS features and procurement, to factor in the kinds of activities and processes those tools should be supporting in 2012
• Offer insights into team size and structure, what the roles are in managing digital projects effectively (I’m deliberately not saying ‘digital communication’, for now)
• Give everyone some ready-made benchmarks to help evaluate impact, and if not hard numbers, then at least an open-source process for getting to an assessment of digital effectiveness

I’ve got a small commission – a day’s paid time – from the digital team at the National Audit Office to contribute towards managing the process of collating this, writing it up and sharing it for the benefit of their own team and others. We’d really appreciate input from a wide group on what a maturity model might look like – and indeed, whether it’s the best approach to take.

The idea would be to brainstorm at UKGovcamp, take the ideas away and write them up into a draft structure, get more feedback on them here, and then publish a methodology or framework of some kind under a Creative Commons licence for anyone to use and take forward. Hopefully we’d make it flexible enough to work for anything from a Whitehall department to a district council, and something that anyone who’s reasonably switched-on digitally can deploy without needing to bring in an expensive consultant (or even a reasonably-priced one).

Who’s up for helping with that?

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