How good is the social web
That's a statement, not a question, by the way.
For anyone still wondering about the value of the 'social web' for professional purposes, you should know how helpful its been this week with the launch of Better connected 2010.
Better connected's publication on 1 March each year is anticipated with some trepidation. By web mangers of course, who judge their own performance, and are judged by their bosses, on how their council did. By CMS and other suppliers who look to the results for opportunities to promote the success of 'their' councils. And not least by the Better connected team, who put the report out and wait for the feedback (to put it politely) from web managers and others who think we got it wrong. This year someone even observed that we'd been overgenerous in our scoring of their site - a first I think.
Before the social web came along, there were limited opportunities for us to explain how Better connected was done - the evaluation process, the scoring system, how eventual judgements were arrived at, and QA of the results. The assessment criteria were, of course, published in detail in our publication Better connected: aiming high and every edition of the report described the process at some length. But not everyone with a view took the trouble to read all this and I think there was quite a lot of misunderstanding and scepticism about how scoring was done.
Then along came the social web. Last year we established the Web Improvement and usage community, for web managers and other interested parties, on the IDeA Communities of Practice platform. The opportunity to have an ongoing dialogue, much of it initiated by Better connected users, has been a huge help in de-mystifying Better connected and demonstrating the quality, thoroughness and objectivity of the assessment process.
During the summer, the existence of the web community enabled us to consult widely on changes we were proposing to the Better connected assessment and ranking system. In the old days we might have held a consultation meeting, knowing that participation would necessarily be limited to those with the budget and time to travel, and probably to one person maximum per council. With the CoP in place, everyone can make a contribution and see that shared instantly with everyone else. And with lots of CoP participants in touch with networks reaching well outside our own, the information and discussion published there gets broadcast much further and faster than we'd be able to do just on our own.
But the really, really, big benefit from the social web has become clear this last week, with the ability its given us to respond to people's questions and issues (and ok, some grumbles) about the assessments their council got in Better connected 2010.
We've always had questions on publication. Better connected involves 12 reviewers, 433 councils, a 120-question main survey, and numerous additional surveys, some carried out by third parties. Multiplying all those factors makes for a lot of potential issues and errors, just at a clerical level, even before anything involving reviewer judgement comes into play.
In the past, questions came in by email, and were answered privately. Sometimes there would be - generally pretty unhelpful - spillover into the media. Often there were disgruntlements that the Better connected team never even heard about. This year, thanks to the social web, we had the means to listen in to, and respond to, queries and issues raised in public from the word go.
Discussion of Better connected in Twitter started as soon as the report went out, at 8am on Monday morning. Most people using Twitter quickly adopted the hashtag #bc10 which meant most comment could be easily found in one place. By following Twitter (mainly) and some other blogs/forums, we were able to pick up on the discussion and respond immediately.
Obviously you can't respond to something complicated in the 140 characters Twitter offers, but we were able to use Twitter to signal to the local gov web community that we were on the case, actively following their issues, and would be publishing responses asap in the Web Improvement and usage community - which many belong to anyway. And of course, this information got around through Twitterers' networks, bringing a whole bunch of other people ('what's this #bc10 thing?') in to the discussion along the way.
As each query came up, some in Twitter, some in the web community, and some direct, we were able to respond right away (and be seen to be doing so). That provided the breathing space for us to investigate each issue, provide explanation and/or justification and in a few cases, agreement that an error had been made and what we would be doing to put it right. Every question asked, and our answer to it, meant we could explain more about the assessment process and the many complexities involved in judging whether a particular website had been useful/usable in dealing with a particular issue. Its still ongoing as I write.
The process has been fast and transparent and has brought lots of useful information, discussion and points of view into general circulation. It has also generated some good ideas about future of Better connected and how this major annual exercise can be further developed to bring even greater value to the growing numbers interested in development of public sector websites. I also think its further raised the profile, and I hope, reputation of Better connected, although that is for others to judge.
And thanks to the social web, that's really easy to do: its all out there for you to see for yourselves. Just take a look in the Web community and if you feel so moved, get involved. You might also want to look at the many blogs and press comments around Better connected (a Google News search on 'Socitm' for the last week ie since 1 March, will turn up many, and there are several links our newsfeed on the Socitm home page today).
One other, related, web 2.0ish thing: this year we decided to publish Better connected's headline results as open data, ie easily re-usable by web developers. We did it really because Socitm is backing the campaign for local open data, and we wanted to walk the talk. So we really didn't know what - if anything - would happen next.
What did happen was that Stuart Harrison at Lichfield DC mashed up the data and almost instantly we had a map of where all the different star-rated councils appear in the UK . You might like to take a look..........