Subjecting politicians to excessive regulation discourages interactivity.

If you were to draw a Venn Diagram showing attitudes to the use of ICT tools for interactivity, putting Interactive Evangelists in one circle and local authority ICT managers in the other, I strongly suspect that you would end up with something that looks like a number.

This number:

8

When I get time, I’d like to pull together an argument based upon the following bullet points:

• Social media = interactivity
• Interactivity increases social capital
• Social capital can be increased within organisations as well as within social communities – the more interactive the company / organisation, the more efficient it is
• Obstacles that prevent interactivity should be removed – at the expense of other concerns about timewasting and inappropriate use of resources

The argument for the benefits of interactivity is clearly not being heard over the arguments made – quite reasonably – by ICT managers – that uncontrolled PCs cost more money than controlled machines do.

Until those arguments are made properly, we have to adjust to a fairly unhealthy situation. I won’t be the first person to argue that the departmental concerns that local government ICT managers have to meet work in direct opposition to this line of reasoning. Proprietary software is always preferred in local government, and machines are nearly always locked-down to prevent any variation in the installation.

Getting permission for a variation – installing a piece of non-regulation software – is rarely worth the aggro.

Access to sites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube is routinely denied, and in many cases, even access to Blogger is banned.

I’ve been working on providing a load of local councillors with a set of briefings on how to do some of the basic tasks that an interactive councillor would need to perform. For example…

• how do you write a short informative news piece for the web?
• how do you take a picture from your mobile phone or your digital camera and format it so that it can go onto your website?
• how can you pinch a news story that is relevant to your work (from a source that won’t be worried about copyright, natch!) and re-purpose it easily?

Managing pictures, in particular, is a tricky one. Councillors are often not what you would call ‘digital natives’. Just telling them to download Gimp and muck around with it just isn’t going to wash with them, even if they have their own PCs that are beyond the control of the ICT department.

The best approach is to provide detailed step-by-step guides to standard tools, and then to train the people who work in Democratic Services at the local authority so that they can walk Councillors through the process a few times.

This is where local authorities have an advantage of sorts. I’ve not come across a single instance of a Apple machine in a council office. So it’s safe to say that Linux desktops are pretty thin on the ground.*

Most of them have standard Microsoft tools – and most of them, therefore, have Microsoft Office Picture Manager (though about 20% of the councillors I’ve worked with don’t even have this tool). For this purpose, I’ve written a detailed briefing that covers every eventuality.

However, there is a downside to the one-size-fits-all approach to local authority desktops. This lock-down that is designed to ensure that back-office staff aren’t spending all day giggling at YouTubes, grooving to LastFM and flirting with strangers on Bebo applies to councillors as well. In many cases, you can’t ’see’ Blogger software, so being able to update it is out of the question.

YouTubes are not visible, so you can’t show them a the good example of how Cllr Colin did his video diary. They can’t see the Facebook groups that people have used to campaign (I spent an afternoon once finding the best examples for an online presentation at a local authority only to find that the Council network wouldn’t allow me to show them).

And so on. The management culture in local government needs to change in this respect.

In the same way that the culture in which institutions are buttoned up about the way that elected representatives express themselves, local authorities need to realise that the upside of interactive representatives (and their wider staff) far outweighs the downsides of staff accessing Facebook and YouTube.

So. Who will help me establish a campaign? A basic right that every councillor should be able to ask for:

• a PC that isn’t locked down,
• one that can access social networking sites,
• one that they can connect to devices such as mobile phones and cameras
• one that has MS Picture Manager on it

Not too much to ask, is it?

*Go on. I’m sure someone can contradict this sentence.