The Perfect Curve

Leadership elections

simon gray — 2024-07-08, 07:09:29

Leadership elections for membership organisations — how’s this for a process:

All those who would be leader declare their candidacy and are nominated for the election by however many signatures from whatever constituency the organisation decides as an appropriate gatekeeping method.

The nominated candidates are then put forward to the membership to vote by ranked preferences, the voter marking as many preferences as they wish.

The counting of those ballot papers, however, is done twice — a count using the Alternative Vote method (which will tend towards the most preferred candidate) and a count using the Condorcet method (which will tend towards the least disliked candidate).

If both counts result in the same candidate at the top that’s grand, and that candidate is duly elected winner.

If the counts result in two different candidates at the top, then both candidates then go forward to a second round as a straight A/B choice. Possibly with a reöpen nominations option with an agreed threshold.

To my mind, this should ensure the winner really is the duly elected choice of the membership of the organisation with minimal room for folks to grumble, and whilst it might sound complicated, it’s not really any more complicated than a lot of organisations’ ways of running leadership elections.

#Democracy

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Private sector forms functionality - just as bad if not worse than the public sector

simon gray — 2023-10-30, 11:25:28

In #LocalGov #LocalGovDigital we're rightly concerned about how too much of our online service design and user experience falls short of the high expectations many of us would like to see of it.

But having to deal with an online letting agent's landlord/tenant portal right now, oh my days, the worst pothole form I've ever completed is a breeze compared to this.

Speaking to somebody from the letting agent's office just, she said 'I have a word for it', which I responded 'the word I have for it is abomination!' She went on to say at the previous place she worked they tried the particular product portal for a week and got rid of it it was so bad.

It's the year 12,023 of the Human Era. The Internet should be better than this by now.

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Never Mind The Glen Miller, Here's The Sex Pistols

simon gray — 2023-10-28, 11:27:27

I posted the following on Facebook two years ago. The people who were 16 when Never Mind The Bollocks came out are this year now 62.

#marketing #advertising #stereotypes

Today is a significant day not just in music history, but in marketing history.

It's 44 years to the day since the UK release of the Sex Pistols' debut album, Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols.

'What is the significance of a 44th year anniversary?', I hear you ask.

Well, let me answer that question for you.

44 years ago today, when the album was released, people who were 16 on that date would have been born in 1961. ie, people who were born in 1961, would have been old enough to get married, have children, do various other things which are the first steps that the UK's legal framework considers to be 'becoming an adult'. And those nascent adults in 1977 when Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols was released will now be 60.

So when those people who were 16 when NMTB,HTSP came out, when their grandmothers were 60 they would have retired. Indeed now, although the formal state pension retirement age is some years beyond 60, 60 is still considered the age when people start to transition into 'retirement age'.

'Where are you going with this, simon?', I hear you press me because you're getting a bit bored by now.

The age cohort who [...]

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So you want to build a new council website, but why? What's wrong with your current one?

simon gray — 2023-09-28, 18:25:55

The public sector digital legend that is Dave Briggs has recently started a collaborative project, the New Council Website Playboard - a shared generic high level plan for councils to use as a starting point for their own website redevelopment projects.

One of the cards I've added to it is 'Carry out an Irritations Audit'.

What does this mean? Well, pour yourself a drink and get a biscuit and I'll tell you.

If you're wanting to rebuild, redesign, re-whatever your council website, then there's obviously something wrong with the existing one. In my experience, what people feel is wrong with it boils down to one of two things (or sometimes both) - either the technology that makes the website happen, the web Content Management System, or the content itself. This analysis of what might be called the Problem Statement often ends there - 'our CMS is old now' or 'our site is too hard to navigate'. Teams might dig a little deeper and do something of a content audit to decide what pages are no longer relevant (or outdated, or trivial...), or they might have concluded there's no way the existing CMS can be adapted to deliver pages meeting modern accessibility requirements, but often the statement (which may be explicitly written or it may simply be a shared understanding) doesn't go into any further detail.

Given the number of council websites which in some shape or form have been redesigned in the last five years, you'ld think by now there would be a critical mass of [...]

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Make a plan for the system going down

simon gray — 2023-08-30, 11:41:52

So it's looking almost certain that what caused the UK National Air Traffic Services' computer system to go down for several hours was some dodgy data in an inbound flight plan.

When the GDS Service Standard was first launched, Point 11 in the acceptance criteria was to Make a plan for being offline; for reasons I don't know or understand, when the [...]

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The Royal Family figureheads

simon gray — 2023-08-19, 17:15:33

Notwithstanding I’m actually interested in neither the Mountbatten-Windsor family nor the football, but I am interested in passing comment on the internets, but…

When Prince William, the El Presidente of the Football Association sends a good luck video message to the English ladies ahead of their forthcoming performance in a noteable challenge cup final saying he’s sorry he can’t be there in person, isn’t that a bit rude of him? I mean, yeah, he’s a busy man, he has important work to do, but is what he’s got scheduled for the weekend so important it can’t be put off, so he can be there to support the people he’s the figurehead for in person?

One of the tenuous arguments in favour of the retention of a monarchy is that the royal family are supposed to be a figurehead unifying force in a disjointed and divided world. If they manage to find excuses to absent themselves from that responsibility when there’s some actual unifying figureheading on the table to be done, what is the actual point?

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To Microsite or Not To Microsite, or, What’s the council website actually for?

simon gray — 2023-08-15, 18:49:44

I’ve not been involved in council website content for a good few years now, but obviously that hasn’t stopped me taking an interest in it. 

In my early years working in local government, my job was as Web Communications Officer, working initially as part of a directorate — a group of related service areas — communications team, then moving to the Corporate Webteam in the Corporate Communications team. As a directorate Web Communications Officer it was essentially my job to take facts from service areas within my team’s portfolio and turn those facts into engaging web copy. Sometimes I got to play journalist a little too, such as when I attended the statutory public inquiry associated with a major infrastructure project within my portfolio and summarised the proceedings as part of the latest update on the project for the website. 

One of my regular frustrations during that period was the near-daily occurrence of me walking out into town for lunchtime and seeing the headline boards in front of the newsstands selling the city’s local paper, splurging a big announcement about some big new initiative within our portfolio, and seeing that headline would more often than not be the first I’d heard of the initiative. This was frustrating enough, and even more frustrating when the group responsible for the actual initiative itself were sitting in the same office less than 10 feet away from our team separated only by a walkway and an open plan cubicle divider. 

The problem of Microsites

Fast-forward a few [...]

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Information Governance and the PSNI data breach

simon gray — 2023-08-09, 07:21:15

On the PSNI data breach, it’s important to remember there’s an individual somewhere who right now just wants to find the Marianas Trench and dive into it. Their management chain, mindful of their own legal and financial liability for the breach, will be looking to shift as much blame as possible down the tree to the individual.

They’ll point to the annual mandatory training all employees have in information governance, and say it’s therefore entirely the individual employee’s fault that this monumental stuff up took place.

No.

Mandatory annual information governance training does little to actually prevent accidental data breaches from occurring; the purpose of mandatory information governance training isn’t to prevent breaches, it’s so that when a breach happens the organisation can throw their employee to the wolves and say ‘well the employee had their training so it’s not the organisation’s fault the breach happened, it’s the individual’s fault’.

In the ærospace industry, a staff member screws in a bolt, a supervisor watches the bolt being screwed in, and an inspector agrees with the supervisor’s assessment that the bolt was indeed screwed in properly. And every week, there’s a big meeting where everybody shares when in the last week they realised they didn’t screw a bolt in completely. And if anybody seems to be not admitting to very many bolt-screwing deficiencies over a few weeks, the MI people go ‘hang on, this seems ssusssss, nobody is really this good at screwing in bolts — what’s this person hiding’. Humans are fallible, and [...]

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How about a LocalGovDigital consultancy?

simon gray — 2023-08-07, 17:14:09

In the LocalGovDigital sector, within our respective councils we spend an awful lot of money engaging consultants to help us do things.

Sometimes, the expenditure on the consultancy is genuinely justified - there's a skills gap within the organisation that training won't adequately fill immediately, because skills require experience as well as knowledge, and the consultants can provide both for the period of engagement; if the consultants are good, and the contract is robust, the terms of engagement for the consultancy will include proper knowledge transfer to enable the organisation to not need to engage the consultancy again.

Sometimes, the consultants are engaged not because of a skills gap, but because of a capacity gap - the skills exist within the organisation, but there are four people employed to do the job and there's a temporary need to do eight people's worth of work in a short space of time. As it happens, that's how I entered the sector in the first place, though it would be an exaggeration to say I was employed as a consultant!

Sometimes, though, there isn't actually a skills or capacity gap at all; there's the unflattering characterisation of consultants that what they do is interview all the staff and find out what the staff think should be done, write a report, and then the management goes well done, consultants, you're worth your weight in gold for this insight. Less snipingly, what consultants can bring to the party is a fresh independent pair of eyes - they can hear [...]

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Should the council have a citizen app?

simon gray — 2023-06-28, 18:25:34

Tl;dr - I refer the reader to Betteridge's law of headlines.

But if you have a few moments spare in your busy day, the answer in most cases is the same, however there's a more nuanced argument to the question than just a single word.

It's a question I've seen many times in LocalGovDigital circles, and since it came up again in the Slack group recently I thought it might be helpful to put my answer to the person asking the question there in the form of a post for a wider audience.

So the first and foremost question for any council considering building an app might be what is the established clear user need for an app that a good mobile-first website can't provide?

And by 'established clear user need', I don't mean "as a civically-engaged citizen, I need to tell the council about a pothole or some flytipping I've just seen whilst out and about, so that I can drive safely along that road next week". The question is, is there a clear user need for an app which a user will download to their phone (and remember on which screen or folder the icon for the app is kept) which you can reasonably predict the users will use at least once a week because the functionality you're hoping to offer is something tending towards the specific that an individual user needs to do regularly and thus an app will make it easier for them to do that thing, or is the idea [...]

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