Photo by Paul Clarke

The whole concept of unconferences and participant-led events is just so mind-bogglingly amazing that it’s hard to put into words – just to see people coming together and start talking to each other who possibly wouldn’t have before… that’s why I do it, and that’s what touched me most about the day.

About Ann Kempster

Ann Kempster is Digital Communications Manager for the Government Communication Network based in the Cabinet Office. She has worked in the UK Civil Service for the past 7 years. She is also co-organiser of CommsCamp13, an unconference for professional communicators in government, with Dan Slee and Darren Caveney of Walsall Council and Comms2point0.

Ann blogs (not enough as she’d like) at www.annkempster.com.  You can also find her on Twitter at @annkempster

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Episode links and resources

• CommsCamp website
• UK Government Communication Network
• Comms2point0
• Blog post by Kate Bentham on her CommsCamp experience

60-second snapshots

On the role of digital in the comms mix:

On the power of unconferences:

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With the emergence of new trends like open government and open data, there is a perception by many that eGovernment is yesterday’s news, and has largely been completed.

In a candid conversation, Barbara-Chiara Ubaldi, head of the OECD’s eGovernment unit, explains that there is much work still to be done to bring eGovernment into the daily work of the public sector.

In the real world, policymakers responsible for individual areas still don’t talk to each other, don’t work together – so, we still haven’t reached that level of interoperability, integration and coordination which is indeed essential for the implementation of larger interests like open government, for instance.

Barbara also highlights the ways in which the OECD is starting to connect the dots between national eGovernment policymaking and practical implementation by both the public sector and civil society.

About Barbara-Chiara Ubaldi

Since October 2010, Barbara-Chiara Ubaldi has led the OECD E-Government Project within the Division for Public Sector Reform at the Public Governance and Territorial Development Directorate.

Ms. Ubaldi has been serving the OECD as Policy Analyst since February 2009. In this capacity, she managed a number of thematic reviews on e-government and participated in several Public Governance Reviews, which include Denmark, Greece, Mexico, Italy, Estonia, Egypt, Spain and France. Ms. Ubaldi has been co-ordinating for the past three years the OECD work on e-government indicators and the analysis on the use of new technologies – such as cloud computing and mobile technology – to enhance public sector’s agility and mobility, as well as open government.

Prior to joining the OECD she worked for more than seven years as Programme Officer at the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs in New York where she was responsible for the full scale management of technical cooperation programmes targeting e-government and ICT use in the public sector, and for developing the content of online self-assessment and capacity building tools in the area of e-government and knowledge management.

Ms. Ubaldi is also a speaker at the ICEGOV 2012 conference – hear her sneak preview (5 mins) of the conference here.

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Episode links and resources

• OECD eGovernment Unit
• OECD report on M-Government
• OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation

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In this special live recording at the Mutinerie Coworking space in Paris, we speak with Christophe Tallec of Utilisacteur/Uinfoshare and Anne Marie Boutin, head of the French National Design Centre (Agence pour la promotion de la création industrielle) who collaborated on GovJam Paris, and are convening the Global Service Design Network Conference in October 2012.

Christophe and Anne Marie share their experiences with service design in the public sector, and explain how design thinking helps organisations to focus on asking the right questions before looking for solutions.

“What I find really interesting is that service design is a really good tool because one of the first things it does is to make people communicate through different hierarchies and structures.”

About Christophe Tallec

Christophe Tallec is the co-founder of Utilisacteur/Uinfoshare, both an innovative service design provider and a consultant, which gives users the opportunity to take an active role in their services by any means, product and service system.

He has been consulting for design promotion organisms, companies and think tanks for the past years, both at a national level in the finance industry, public sector, transport, for clients such as APCI, FING, La Poste and internationally by building pluri-disciplinar partnerships. Christophe holds the french equivalent of a master in design from ENSAD.

About Anne Marie Boutin

Anne Marie Boutin is the president of the French design promotion agency, APCI, which she founded in 1983.  She was also President and Director of the French national institute for advanced studies in design, ENSCI-les
Ateliers, from 1984 to 1992.

She is a member of advisory committees for several international art and design publications and the author of numerous articles and contributions to books and catalogues on design education, design management, design strategy, design-culture and technology. She was an elected member of the French National Commission for UNESCO till 1993, consultant to the OECD for the evaluation of innovation policies and education systems.

Senior magistrate in the Cour des comptes (French supreme audit institution) she was also Expert delegated to the Director of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (French Institute for Civil Servants) and responsible for international affairs from 1970 to 1979.

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Episode links and resources

• Agence pour la promotion de la création Industrielle (National Design Centre)
• Utilisacteur/Uinfoshare
• GovJam
• The Global Service Design Network Conference 2012

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From deploying Yammer for policy and program support, to creative use of YouTube for recruitment, and through to using QR codes to create the world’s first Wikipedia town, the UK’s Monmouthshire County Council is a leading example of how local government can move beyond social tech to social communication for internal and external engagement.

Helen Reynolds, Communications Officer for Monmouthshire County Council discusses a selection of these innovative initiatives, and also shares her experience with introducing these ideas into local government, and how influence rather than ROI matters for public sector use of social media channels and tools.

By being in social spaces where people are, and by being relevant and providing information that’s timely and worth engaging with – that’s how we build our influence as government.

About Helen Reynolds

Helen works for Monmouthshire County Council and is responsible for the council’s social media programme.  She has also advised a number of other public sector organisations on making the most of new technologies for better engagement. As a result of the work she’s done Monmouthshire Council has taken a number of innovative approaches to engagement, won UK social media and PR awards and the authority has become a vastly more approachable organisation.

She’s particularly passionate about making government accessible and easier to understand.

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Episode links and resources

• Helen Reynolds’ blog 
• ROI of social media in public service
• Social media for social care: how Monmouthshire foster carers support each other with Yammer
• Monmouthpedia including Monmouthpedia Day
• Monmouthshire County Council social media page and guidance for staff (linked at the bottom) and council blog
• Some feedback on Twitter 
• Facebook and youth services
• Opening up social media access to all staff
• Recruiting on Youtube

Videos

On Monmouthpedia

On the foster carers Yammer community

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Amanda Eamich from the US Department of Agriculture joins us to share some insights into her approach to including new media as part of the communications mix for the Department.

I always stress that we have an “And / Also” approach – we’re not going to throw out talking to newspapers and radio – these channels are extremely important, particularly in the agricultural industry and communities.

Amanda also talks about how to infuse innovation, open government and new media channels into the broader activities of the Department:

We definitely think through the entire lifecycle before jumping into any new tool or service, just to make sure we understand it fully and how it will help us achieve whatever the particular objectives are.

About Amanda Eamich

Amanda serves the U.S. Department of Agriculture as the Director of Web Communications, Office of Communications. Here she manages the Department’s web site and new media operations and strategic planning. The policies and programs of the USDA impact the lives of Americans every day – from food, agriculture, and science to natural resources – and there is an ever-present opportunity to communicate our mission effectively using new media. New media provides an outstanding opportunity for USDA to connect with consumers, customers and employees in new and interesting ways on a wide variety of topics and issues.

Recent efforts include the Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food social media outreach, MyPlate, Apps for Healthy Kids competition, Open Gov efforts and developing overall strategic guidance for a wide range of communication campaigns throughout the Department.

Prior to joining the Office of Communications, Amanda served as a press officer for the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.

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Episode links and resources

• USDA New Media Channels
• Energy Investments Map, Matrix and Tool
• USDA at 150 – information and sign up for the Historical Facts and Photo series
• Recipes for Healthy Kids Challenge
• Apps for Healthy Kids Challenge and Game Jams that extended the conversation and expanded community of solvers
• Farmers market directory (also mobile optimized)
• USDA Results – example of “And/Also” approach of the standard 2-page PDF documents where key data points and accomplishments were extracted and paired with compelling photos from our the USDA catalog. Photos used throughout the Department, as Facebook cover, Flickr gallery
• “Think through the lifecycle” and “be prepared” – official one-page request form (AD-3022) that the USDA team requires that people think through before submitting new channel or tool requests
• Celebrating successes – a 2011 countdown with some favorites – new tools included!

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Tune in for a conversation with Gwynne Kostin from the U.S. General Services Administration about new innovations in m-gov and the programs being developed by the GSA to support agencies in delivering of government services using mobile devices.

The focus of the Mobile Program Management Office is to help Federal agencies to make government information and services available to the public any time, anywhere and on any device… it’s critical for government to try to figure out how to move into this [mobile] space and make government make more sense to where people are.

About Gwynne Kostin

Gwynne Kostin is Director, Mobile in the Office of Citizen Services & Innovative Technologies at the U.S. General Services Administration. She is working with federal agencies to clear a citizen-centric path for mobile access to government.

Gwynne previously was director of GSA’s Center for New Media and Citizen Engagement, where she worked to make it easier for government to engage with citizens and citizens to engage with government through the development of cross agency tools, policies and services. There she launched the government’s free, policy-compliant “build-a-blog” platform apps.gov NOW and the contest platform challenge.gov.

As Director of New Media for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, she drove the use of new technologies to solve business problems creating the department’s first social media strategy, developing a cross-agency web communications model for disaster response, and leading new media communications and strategy for the department’s 22 agencies.

Prior to joining public service, she spent ten years in new technologies, including founding a successful Internet start–up in an association and leading strategic Web communications in health care and education. She enjoys talking to interesting people and figuring out how things work.

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Episode links and resources

• Mobile Gov Community of Practice to support agency practitioners in delivering mobile services
• Making Mobile Gov Project
• Apps gallery inside apps.data.gov which gives agencies some good ideas for mobile apps
• Mobile Gov Wiki to share knowledge
• Mobile Gov Wikithon #5 – a focused gathering to develop the knowledge on the wiki
• Post from Gwynne Kostin on Govloop on the challenges of Gov 2.0 – “Doing Gov 2.0 backwards in high heels”

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Join us as we chat with Lucy Chambers from the Open Knowledge Foundation in London.  As well as the work of the Foundation, we discuss the  Warsaw Open Government Data Camp, a festival of open data with more than 400 participants from more than 40 countries around the world.

Join us as we chat with Pia Waugh, the organiser of last weekend’s GovCamp Australia, held in Canberra.  The gathering brought together a range of government practitioners and open data enthusiasts to talk about topical issues