Pending a FOI request to find the exact number comments generated by the Council’s consultation methods (which also included two large-scale facilitated consultation events, a number of smaller ones and a “consultation bus“) the local paper reported:  “more than 1,600 people express views, including over 500 opinions online in the city’s blogging community.”. Whether they’ve been confused as to where blogging comments came from, or have overestimated both, it doesn’t matter — 274 comments out of a total of 1600 is a good amount.

Had we not had to follow the structure of the Big City Plan “Work in Progress” document, or had to provide direct “translation”, or expend a lot of effort making the purpose of the BCT site clear — had we been able to have the site available for the full eight weeks (it took  around four to make the plain English, commentable version) — then the number of comments and the standard of them would have been higher. That is not to mention the effect of the expensive advertising campaign pointing to BigCityTalk.org.uk rather than BigCityPlan.org.uk, or the kudos gained from being the official site — who knows what effect that would have had.

My Conclusions

The resources needed to produce the Big City Talk site were only time (the domain name cost £2.99, and I used existing hosting), the skills we used would have been readily available within the council structure — and experience if needed is already in the city. The only thing stopping Birmingham City Council running a “social” online consultation was the organisational will. I think there may be more of that now.

The Big City Plan is still a long process, having finished this consultation period the next step is to write a final plan — which again has to be put out for consultation.

I will consider the Big City Talk project a success if that consultation’s online component is a lot more like our way — and I won’t hesitate to repeat the exercise if it isn’t.

These are only my conclusions and views, and the “organisation” that produced the BCT site is a classic case of “organising without organisations” as Clay Shirky puts it — everyone will have thier own opinion. I’d love to see as many opinions and views, and constructive comments on how this sort of thing should work — please leave them here, blog yourself, or link to any you find.

See Also:

• Part 1 – Constructive Activism
• Part 2 – Why?
• Part 3 – How?

It quickly became clear that we would need to produce a site that was independent from any current web presence — to counteract any fears of us attempting to unduly influence the process. I had already quickly produced a WordPress site to use — intending that “we” (whoever was interested) would use it to produce a translated version.

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My partner Julia, has done a lot of work using “plain English“  and she convinced me that it was a suitable framework for us to use — she even spent a long evening translating part of the “work in progress” document as an example. The plain English campaign also offer advice and guidance via their website that would prove useful.

I chose WordPress not only because I am very confident with producing sites with it, but because its back-end interface was well known to many of the potential bloggers/translators — there wasn’t time to train people in new skills. There were other options (including CommentPress, a forked version of WP just for online document commenting), but we also had the problem of attempting to show both the original document and the plain English Version alongside each other — something that I wasn’t confident of achieving quickly with a (to me) untried system. It quickly became obvious that WordPress was the only choice in the short term.

In the meeting we decided that:

• we had to break the document down into as small a chunks as was possible
• the plain English version had to be absolutely free from any opinion
• the version we produced had to match the original document structurally, so comments could be easily sorted
• both versions needed to be viewed simultaneously
• our version needed to be as searchable as possible, utilizing tags, metadata and whatever tools we had
• we would collect links to information not stored within the original document, and invite further explanation from users
• comments would not be held in moderation, and only offensive comments would be removed (in the event none had to be)
• comments would be threaded – to facilitate debate amongst commenters
• and it had to be done as soon as possible.

At this point we didn’t worry too much about how to feed the comments back into the official process — the opinion that we would “print them out individually and post them if necessary” was voiced. Time, with the Christmas break upon us, was the main factor.

Micheal Grimes and myself volunteered to take time over the holidays to break the consultation document down into manageable chunks and pull it into the blog structure — in the end this was more difficult to do that we anticipated due to inconsistent numbering styles and the sheer size of the piece. It also took a fair bit of WordPress hackery to get the document to sit properly in order.

Stefan Lewandowski had been part of a group of people consulted at a much earlier stage about the Big City Plan, and his contacts would be useful in smoothing the way as we were all concerned that, whatever our personal views, there was no sense in antagonising the powers that be. In fact there was tacit agreement not to talk about the plan in anything but glowing terms until the site was finished.

The Translation

The Birmingham social media community is wide, and contains a lot of talents, but for differing reasons (personal or work commitments, conflicts of interest) — while there was a lot of support and advice available to us — the number of people available to take on the translation was more limited. In the end myself, Nick Booth, Nicky Getgood, Julia Gilbert and Michael Grimes were the ones that took on the task.

Each will tell you that the job was not easy, that it was not a simple job of changing long words for shorter. I heard the Big City Plan being referred to as having been written in “regeneration-speak” and that’s what it was. Full of passive sentences (which are bad for readability), as well as unexplained acronyms and references to unexplained policies and documents. I would estimate that the team spent around 5-6 hours each an evening for three weeks working on it, which is on top of the work done on the website itself.

Testing and release

As soon as the translation was complete (and in fact just before) we released the site to a few people to test — and to comment, aware that there’s nothing as intimidating to a commenter as a blank “page”. From this we gained a lot of valuable feedback (especially from Mathew Sommerville and Tom Martin) and a good sense that the site we’d produced would be easy enough to use.

Once tweaks were made, and people blogged about it there wasn’t much turning back — we hadn’t explicitly told the council what we were doing, nor had much idea of how they’d react. Personally, I know I was worried about how it would be received — Birmingham is still quite a small town as far as personalities go. There was (still is?) a chance that it could have damaged our reputations.

Feeding comments into the consultation

At first we were pleased with the “official reaction” to the Big City Talk site (we gained links from both the offcial site and the council-run Facebook group), but attempting to organise how to feed the comments being generated into the consultation proved more problematic.

The site quickly and steadily gained a lot of intelligent comments, that it was possible to see were building on each other — in a way that the official process (online at least) didn’t facilitate. We were aware that submitting a large volume of comments needed special handling, and so tried to make it as easy as possible for the consultation workers.

It seemed that despite direct contact that there wasn’t a lot of will in the BCP team (those eventually to deal with the comments)  to work with anything that that they hadn’t already planned for. We repeatedly offered to format and deliver comments from the Big City Talk site in any way that could be done, but we received no guidance. This was disappointing, but the instructions for submitting comments formally were very clear — we were able to submit the comments on paper and also by email. While this was not as convenient as it could or should have been, all the comments were delivered in a manner that ensured they were part of the consultation. Help from the Council’s Communication Team was valuable at this point.

But, has it had a worthwhile effect?

See Also:

• Part 1 – Constructive Activism
• Part 2 – Why?

Simply, we are all people who care deeply about our city and also believe passionately in the power of online and offline collaboration. The official online consultation system wasn’t something that we saw as able to provide the best chance to the citizens of Birmingham.

We wanted to blog about it, nay were encouraged to do so by council officials — but blogging would have been a futile and time-consuming exercise. To pick out a small part of the plan (which consisted of many different, some complementary, some opposing, wildly different options) would be to have written something inconsequential and without context.

There was also the problem of explaining the options without editorialising — as the document was very very dense and complex, that it also referenced a large number of other development plans and studies didn’t help matters.

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The official “consultation portal” used the Limehouse software, that had some obvious shortcomings (lack of RSS for one) but does allow commenting. However the council department responsible took the decision not to publish comments for the duration of the consultation period — as yet they still haven’t.

As I told them:

“the limehouse software was  clearly set up for users to leave comments, and to view the comments of others (there’s a search function just for this purpose).

To invite comments and then for people see no evidence of either:

a) their own comments appearing – as they would on the BBC or any newspaper site or any blog

or b) anyone else leaving any comments – which indicates that this is an unloved (unwanted?) plan

created a very bad impression.

If a site isn’t going to publish comments it should clearly say that they are being “sent to the team for consideration” and not imply that they are going to be shown.

To publish the comments is to invite debate, it could stimulate conversations around the questions — people building on other people’s ideas are more likely to both be constructive (it would lessen the chance of purely anti the “question” comment) and to be better comments “the wisdom of crowds” in effect.”

To be fair their are many people within Birmingham City Council that could have solved these issues, but for whatever reason they were too far away from the decision-making process in this instance.

The comment problem wouldn’t have been as bad if the document was easily understandable to everyone, whereas conversely if people could have used the comments online to help each other understand the document then the inaccessible language it was written in would have been mitigated against.

To fail in both ways made the online consultation — to my mind and to those of my fellow social-media types — very poor indeed. We had the skills and the motivation to do something about it.

See also:

• The Big City Plan – Part 1 – Constructive Activism
  

One of the largest projects has been our volunteer-created online consultation for Birmingham City Council’s Big City Plan — the work which Axel called “constructive activism”.

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The Big City Plan is one part of a larger plan by the council for the future of Birmingham, but it has been heavily promoted as being about “the next twenty years” of the City Centre (and by extension has an impact on the rest of the city). Over Christmas and stretching into early February 2009 the official consultation period on the draft plan (referred to by the council as the “Work In Progress Document”) happened — there were high profile events, advertising hoardings, taxi advertising and even (which I can’t really understand) awards awarded to a draft plan.

Yet there wasn’t really an online version that worked in a good and social way — which lead myself and a group of bloggers to spend huge amounts of our once free time creating a comment-able version of the document that also used plain English.

The Big City Talk site (still live although comments are closed) collected comments and passed them through the official channels, and managed to work without unduly antagonising the Council — whose work it tried to help (although by its existence was perhaps implicitly criticising).

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I think that the exercise was a success, it has been well received online, perhaps as expected, but also been mentioned in the Cabinet Office’s Power of Information report.

Since the creation, process and reasoning are perhaps interesting for differing reasons I’ve decided to blog about the whole thing in a series of posts:

• Part 1 – Constructive Activism
• Part 2 – Why?
• Part 3 – How?
• Part 4- Did it work?
• Part 5- Comments

Which I’ll post in order as I write them.

I’ve really enjoyed building it, and working with the team to make sure they understand how best to use it.

The website is just starting to be used by the children this week, and they seem to be having fun already — as well as blogging for themselves (moderated by their teachers)  they are being encouraged to comment on the posts of others and also write about how they are finding the project.

Some of the first work they’re doing is to make sure their School’s homepage on the site is up-to-date, and they’re also thinking about how the site should look (it has been purposely left very plain, so they can change it to suit themselves).

Technically the site is a instalaltion of WordPress, with plugins and tweaks to handle the expected use of video and audio later in the project and also the moderation issues of having hundreds of young people posting.  So far it seems to be working well, and the children have found blogging quite easy. I’ll post a link to the site when it really gets going — looking forward to reading and hearing the results.

WordPress MU (Multi User) is great for quickly setting up blogs (or sites) and very powerful in regards to controls over those blogs from a central interface. I used Sandbox to help set up the new design — and as usual it really helped wrestle the different parts of the theme together.

If you already follow the blog (formerly at /ramblings) then you shouldn’t notice the change form the RSS feed, nor should there be any broken links. If you don’t read it, but fancy seeing the strange things that I find on the Internet or reading the odd things I write that aren’t about social media — then you should get over to thebounder.co.uk now…

Another site built on WordPress as a back-end, the Cole-Raine site features brochure pages as well as a fully featured property finder database and article library. The site was built to a design specification supplied and went live in a little under a month from first contact.

The property finder was developed using WordPress’ existing category structure, a very cost effective solution.

The Trust is a charity that tasks itself “‘to preserve and enhance Birmingham’s threatened architectural heritage. … to promote an enjoyment and understanding of the city’s historic buildings’”. Most famously they restored Birmingham’s Back to Backs (now a National Trust attraction).

The site itself has been in the planning for a long time, but was held up when the Trust decided to go through a change of image. I’m pleased that the new look works much better on the web than the previous style.

The move to a WordPress based CMS and blog should help with keeping the content fresh — often a problem for charity sites (where everyone always had many calls on their time). That should in turn help the engagement of users with the site, and hopefully contribute to the efforts (physical and fund-raising) of the Trust.

Luckily for the BCT, Nick Booth of Podnosh is a trustee — so he’s able to be an advocate for using social media to help the charity, as well as helping to structure the new site and, of course, blog for them.

As well as the blog, there are a couple of little tricks to keep the site fresh:

• the home page displays the latest news and a “featured page” — quickly changed via the CMS. This keeps the landing page for most people up-to-date, and and gives the imediate impression of a site that is live and cared about.
• secondly, the site pulls appropriately tagged images from flickr and videos from YouTube (tag BirminghamCT). Some will obviously be produced by the Trust themselves, but hopefully it’ll help draw interest from people interested in heritage and buildings not nesessarily aware of the BCT.

I’m pleased with how smoothly the transfer of content from the old website has gone, but the shiny new home has inspired a flurry of re-writting and new content — so expect the site to expand and alter. WordPress makes this easy, so I’m happy that it’ll be a growth without pains.

The site looks great in all browsers and is very accessible to all.

I’m using WordPress and a theme called “facebooked” by Justin Tadlock, it’s very well done but is only intended to give a blog an appearance of Facebook (which I’ve tweaked to be FB-ish, but not exactly the same). So I’m adding stuff in, by judicious use of plug-ins, page templates and custom fields. I’ve managed to generate workable status updates, friendships, groups and events as well as profile pages — but what else does a social network need?

I threw out the question on twitter and Anthony Herron suggested adverts, which is good. Not only would you normally see them, but it will help to fill gaps.

But I’m open to suggestions — not for what you’d like to see in a social network, but for what you wouldn’t believe one could work without.