80. Four ways to make council reports more digestible

This post is a further follow up from the excellent Notwestminster event.  Check out the website to see how other stuff is progressing.

Specifically this post is about the number one ‘something we need to fix’ from the User Stories for Local Democracy workshop:

As a local resident I need to see council reports in a form I can easily digest so I can understand the decisions that are being made

Here are four suggestions that we might want to work on and develop.  I would love to hear your thoughts.  I would particularly love to hear examples of people doing any of this already.

1. Use video for reports

This is a suggestion from John Popham who discusses it on video here in true ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ style.

2. A style guide for council reports

While style guides are a normal part of providing content for the web, it's less obvious that people refer to them when writing council reports.  Often we forget that we are writing for a public audience and instead have councillors and fellow professionals in our minds.

Common gripes include:

• Use of jargon (either unnecessarily or without explanation where technical terms do need to be used) -Councillor David Harrington mentioned this one.
• Acronyms (for some reason Education reports seem to particularly suffer from this)
• Saying ‘members’ instead of ‘councillors’
• An unnecessarily wordy of formal style (often people assume this is how reports should be written as it’s the way that they always have been)

There are corporate style guides that councils use but these but I'm not sure how widespread they are or how much attention people pay to them.  What’s needed, perhaps, is a consistent set of golden rules that are used when writing reports.  If these were visible then the public would be clear about what to expect.

As Sarah Lay suggests, we could build on the LocalGovDigital content standards to do this.

3. Short summaries

Linked to the idea of a style guide, a short summary at the top of every report (and agenda pack, letter etc) that explains in plain language what the report is about might help people to understand quickly and easily what is being discussed.  This was suggested by Diane Sims.

This is nothing new in terms of writing for the web but it’s not often part of council reports.

Following the Notwestminster event we have introduced summaries for all of our scrutiny publications in Swansea.  We write them all to the same format and place them at the top of the documents and on the webpage when they are published..  A couple of examples:

This is the review report by the Children, Young People and Learning Overview and Scrutiny Board about literacy in children and young people. It contains conclusions and recommendations. 

This is the agenda pack for a meeting of Schools Performance Scrutiny Inquiry Panel taking place on the 19 February 2015.  The main items are update on Casllwchwr Primary School, school categorisation, and how schools have used their Pupil Deprivation Grant. Background reports are included. 

This is a letter from the Schools Performance Scrutiny Panel to the Cabinet Member for Education following the meeting of the Panel on the 11 December 2014.  It is about Annual Education Performance.  It includes conclusions and proposals.

4.     Policy pages

Rather than simply inserting summaries into reports we could produce public summaries of entire policy areas making it easy for people to see what the issues are about and understand the decisions being made.  This was suggested by Ed Hammond from the Centre for Public Scrutiny.

This is something that gov.uk already do - you can see an example here.

The advantage of this is that we can cook up an appetising meal of reports rather than leave people to digest them one by one.

Whaddya reckon?

72. Online democracy: Seven questions for government

An unconversation at GovCampCymru

This is my write up of the online democracy session at GovCampCymru (and some other linked conversations).  GovCampCymru was in fact a thoroughly excellent day organised by Satori Lab and friends.  What? You couldn’t make it?  Then come to the next one.

This particular session was about online democracy, in other words the minutes, agendas, reports etc etc that local, devolved and national government make available through their websites.  The idea was simply to start a conversation about how this stuff could be improved, who uses it, what they want and so on.  What I really liked was the opportunity to bring a mix of voices to the discussion; policy types, democracy types, technical types, community types etc.  Thank you so much for all the contributions on the day or otherwise. This is very much my take so please, if  I've got it wrong or missed anything - just add a comment.  Also – sorry if this a bit long.  I didn’t have time to make it shorter.

At the heart of our discussion were the following seven questions for government about their online democracy:

1. Is it readable?

Seems pretty basic but actually this stuff is hard.  The language of decision making is not the language that people use in the pub. Perhaps the process itself needs a more technical language but, when governments share, they need to make sure people know what they are saying.  We talked about the way that the Government Digital Service approach language and thought this was worth using.

2. Are you clear about the purpose? 

Have you thought about why you publish this stuff online?  For information? To ask for people’s views?  To ensure politicians are held to account?  Just because you have to?  Once this is clear you can design what you provide.  You can also tell people why you are providing it so they know what to expect.

3. Do you know what the users want?

‘Users’ here means the people who actually look at all of those online minutes, agendas and reports.  Do you know who they are and what their needs are?  Do you know how they come to your websites and what happens when they do?  In service design this is sometimes called mapping user journeys – putting the citizen at the centre of what you provide. As someone in the group put it: 'If we want people to get involved, we need to open up and work from bottom up. Need to ask people'

I did some initial twitter ‘research’ on who uses this stuff at local government level and why.  Here are a few of the suggestions:

• Councillors to support their role and find out what is happening in their community
• Council officers to help them do their jobs and to know what decisions have been made
• Active Citizens / Citizen bloggers to hold politicians to account and to make sure people know how the democratic process is affecting their area
• Charities and communities groups looking for anything that affects the people they work with and to support ‘lobbying’ of councillors if they need to
• Journalists to find information about planning applications but also any policy related news stories
• Local campaigners who want to know what is happening about their issue
• People who just want to find out what is happening in their area
• Students because they have to for their assignments
• Auditors so they can check if the council is being run properly

It was great to hear that the Welsh Assembly have been talking to citizen bloggers about their needs – I’d love to learn more.

4. How will your content get to the non users?

Most people, of course, have nothing to do with online democracy and may never want to.  But the stuff going through the democratic process affects them so how are you going to reach them?  Have you thought about the mediators (many listed in the point above), the ‘civic sharers’ who can pass this stuff on?  Government is not very good at working with the ‘hard to reach’ (terrible phrase, I know) but other bodies are.  How are you going to make use of them?

5. Is you content shareable?

The advantage of social media is that it is easy to share.  But online democracy is not particularly shareable.  Content captured in lengthy pdfs is hardly likely to go viral.
We talked about the short form / long form approach that many use in central government.  If every meeting item, every report was captured and published as a shareable summary it would be much more likely to get people engaged.  I also like the point that was made about making digital democracy digestible ‘like john Craven's Newsround’:)

6. How will you make your content relevant?

People want to know about the stuff that affects them yet government publishes only in a way that suits the process.  People in the group pointed out that:

• The content of politics is generally vague and/or boring 
• People shouldn't have to consume the whole damn process 
• Our democratic content is nothing then everything i.e. There is no warm up
• We need to work on how to get to the right people - digital democracy is not necessarily about getting lots of hits or likes 

There are lots of new platforms springing up (like vocaleyes) that might make the process more relevant and meaningful and relevant for people – how are you going to link with these?

7. How will you respond?

Finally, and perhaps the most difficult point is what are you going to do as a result of engagement?  If online democracy is just about informing then be honest and say so.  But if you tell people that you want to engage - then what does this mean?

The view in the group was that the culture of government is not a responsive one:

• The importance of having a responsive back end to go with any fancy front end for digital democracy
• We need to create organisations / democratic structures that care about what people say in consultations because generally they don’t
• There is a difference between disseminating information and starting a conversation

What can we do?

At the end of the session we identified two prices of work that would thought would really help:

• A style guide for online democracy to help ensure it is readable and shareable
• Research into what users want from online democracy – some user journey maps that government can learn from 

Ok, let’s get started then...


 

20. Social Council Decision Making

This idea follows a few tweets I exchanged with @davebriggs, @ingridk and @acreoandy.  I've left it a while before getting all this down so apologies for what I've left out.  I should also point out that I am highly non-technical so risks of errors in that department are high.  I write this from the perspective of a local government policy person who has been increasingly interested in the way that social media can help with the day job and increasingly impressed by the many supportive people out there who have been willing to help.

The starting point of this idea is the generally poor state of online agendas, minutes and reports on UK local government websites.  More often than not you are presented with a list of pdf files, pages organised by date rather than content, reports hidden away in a larger 'agenda pack' documents and layers of pages that have to be waded through to find what you want.  If you want a metaphor then think of the final scenes of the first Indiana Jones film where hard won and precious treasure is lost forever in a massive warehouse.  Ok, maybe this is a bit harsh but you get my drift.

It seems strange, given the importance of this stuff to local democracy, that it is so badly presented online.  After all, those agendas, minutes and reports tell the story of local democratic deliberation and decision making. Its even more surprising given the availability and diversity of online tools that something clever isn't being used (as far as I know).

So, by way of giving some clever techie developer a start out there, here are my 10 essential features of social council decision making - in other words how to better present agendas, minutes and reports on local government websites, based on what I've seen on Facebook, Twitter and the Communities of Practice Site:

1. Everything should be broken down into bitesize chunks to look like status updates or tweets.  This makes things easier to share.  Instead of agendas, minutes and reports we should be talking about discussions, decisions and documents.  In other words, no more collecting everything into single agenda pack and minutes documents. 
2. Discussions and decisions should be taggable so its possible to easily find anything linked to a particular subject.  If I want to find out everything my council has discussed and decided about wind turbines I should simply be able to click on the wind turbine tag and find out.  Tags will also allow everything relating to a single geographic community to be found instantly.  This will be useful for citizens but also for councillors and for the officers supporting them.
3. Discussions and decisions should be shareable.  If I see something I'm pleased or angry about I should be able to share it on facebook or twitter quickly and easily.  Similarly if I want to bookmark something for future reference I should able to do that. 
4. Discussions and decisions should be commentable.  Just like a status update on facebook it should be possible to add comments.  It's an easy way to get people's views before a decision is taken and to find out what they think afterwards.
5. A well designed widget would be a great way of embedding discussions and decisions onto blogs and other sites.  Tailoring the RSS feed (yes of course there would be one) to specific tags would allow hyperlocal sites to only feature content relevant to that community or special interest bloggers to only pick up on the issues relevant to them.  Here is an example of Kirklees Council doing the sort of thing I mean.
6. Every committee and councillor should have their own dynamic homepage.  As well as providing for 'manual' updates each home page would automatically feature content relevant to that committee or to that councillor.  This would make it easy to see what your councillor was involved in and how they voted.  They could add their own commentary on to what they had done which would also be open to comment.
7. Reports should be stored in a searchable, taggable library just as with the communities of practice site.  Presentations and any other relevant media could also be included.
8. Of course it would also be nice to include a metrics page so people could see what activity was taking place and how many people were actively engaged.  Again, like they do on the Communities of practice site

All of these seem perfectly reasonable to me.  These last two features are perhaps a little more ambitious.

• Everything should take place in real time.  This is straightforward for items on agendas - these can just be published when they are normally published.  Points made at meetings and the decisions made may be a little more difficult to do.  The process of writing minutes is currently a formal one which takes place after the meeting where different people are consulted about what they should contain.  Minutes are not formally agreed until the stat of the next meeting.  Having real time decisions means a change in way this is done.  You can follow Kirklees Council (#kirkcouncil) on twitter to see what this might look like in practice.
• The platform that supports all this should be national.  The advantages are that information could be gathered across all of local government on a particular topic, say wind turbine applications, and work could be borrowed between councils saving time and resources.  This article about using the communities of practice site to do research explains much better what I mean.. 

There we are.  That's all I want.  Now go away and make it for me :-)