UKGovCamp 2010

(Notes by @neillyneil - with apologies for any errors!)

Vicky Sherriff, Socitm: Quick intro about what Socitm is doing in this space: from background of IT professional body, broadening out to web.

People in web roles in all tiers of government come from a wide range of backgrounds and career paths:

• Content/PR/comms
• IT backgrounds
• Web development
• Typing pools, libraries
• intranets / websites

As digital becomes more important, there’s clearly a need to have a recognised skillset and recognition of the profession so people can share info and knowledge, ask for more money, get relevant training etc.

Socitm half way through project using consultants to scope the remit of the group, and the skills profles for web roles.

Preliminary report already out. 2nd workshop on 4th Feb at Eland House (CLG) - all day. People wanting to come, contact Vicky. Output will be set of defined skills. Draft will be circulated to those coming beforehand.

Feedback, ideas? - how organise - who can join? - sets of skills and roles - what will the group do?

Action for the group is to identify what to do with that next - group to take forward collectively. Admin support from Socitm. People now need to join the org - about £90 to join Socitm for a year - to signal commitment to take it forward and provide some of the funding.

Related work going on to note:

COI - Web Academy. Aimed at top civil servants, ‘sheep dip’ them in importance and potential of digital; help them understand web profession

GCN - Looking at career paths for web professionals in government comms. Updating core skills profile?

[Discussion about what GCN is doing - whether it’s happening fast enough; consensus that it’s not and Socitm should continue this work. But also that webbies need to keep hand in generalist comms skills, GCN great for this]

Notes from group discussion:

Q - how can we get involved virtually?

A - there’s a forum (community of practice) - ask Vicky for invite

Needs to be a trickle down from central gov to LG Comms too. Historically, people have written job descriptions themselves and with no reference point. HR sign off, and may not understand it. Lots of people doing jobs, wit job descs that simply don’t describe what they do. Puts them at risk of being downgraded in reviews. Ppl say web is most important channel but often it’s not backed up in the way they recruit and train and develop the web team. Spend way more on cust service through other channels - f2f, phone call centres - and spend on digital is low. Lack of foresight and understanding. Comms people and tech people and social media people and content people - they need to be grouped tog either virtually or physically as a web team

Announcements in budget about value of moving services online - projected savings across government etc - but need to turn this into upskilling and resourcing web teams to cope with this channel shift Channel shift - but webbies needing to fight their corner to deliver it.

Socitim ‘website take up service’ research on umber of failed customer tasks online > cost of enquiries by phone > monetary value £11m a month for all council websites Socitim insight looking into ways to make this sort of insight info available to members of this new group as one of the benefits of joining. Trying to find ways to add value to joining the network. Socitm insight data usually goes to heads of IT - who don’t necessarily pass it on to webbies.

Devolved authors across orgs stand to gain from this a lot -= undertrained, isolated, only given CMS training, don’t get recognition, additional pay or support, often not in their JDs - this professional group would help them the most, potentially, to get their managers to understand the work they do. And help central web management to insist on a minimum set of skills for decentralised editing.

Also help heads of web convince senior management in councils and central gov that professional web management is a broad skill set and not just something you can devolve to anyone with a bit of CMS training. No longer can we think of it as a button pressing, copy and paste job. And people need more and more skills these days - video editing etc, especially for small council web teams / one man bands.

[This led to an interesting aside about social media news releases - media asset packets for news and soc med outlets; and death of print - content owners need to think web first, not leaflet/pamphlet! Latter refers to former!]

Such a long way to go! Everyone in the room had stories about press releases going out, or even big ads on phone boxes, with URLs for more info and it’s the first the web team has heard. Not good customer experience.

Professional group will give web teams the chops to say no; stand up and be counted.

This would be a big network - needs facilitation and community management - will Socitm do that? Vicky says see Web Improvement and Usage - on the IDEA CoP - this audience overlaps; could build on this sucessful community. 2nd prize in IDeA Cop awards. 3 people facilitate it a few hours a day. Definitely on the plan that Socitm will provide support by paid staff to arrange meetings, faciilitate online, sort out elections, keep the momentum going. And make more explicit the links between central and local governemnt. Important strand of this.

*In summary: Power to the webbies!*