An Irishwoman is working to convince the UK's civil servants – whose daily mantra is managing risk within a very controlled culture – to embrace their inner tweeter, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON
IN HER ROLE as the UK government’s deputy director of digital engagement for Government Digital Services – kind of the grand poobah of social media – Emer Coleman tells an Irish audience that the job is about turning the cautious instincts of government upside down.
“We’re trying to move from a model of command and control to one of public engagement,” she says, speaking at Eircom’s All-Ireland eGovernment Symposium in Dublin last week. “Once you say something, it’s out there – the media has it anyway, and we’re all in a conversation.”
Coleman, who says she’d always been “kind of an early adopter of technology”, has travelled a varied road from Ireland to London to end up in her current position.
She has moved from the arts (working as artistic director of the Belltable arts centre in Limerick, and on the Arts Council) to journalism (writing a column for this newspaper about living in Manorhamilton) to public service (doing communications for Fingal County Council, just as the bin charge protests kicked off over a decade ago) before ending up in the UK working again in communications (for London’s Barnet Council), and now, on some cutting-edge technology and communications projects.
Speaking after her talk, she says the council work taught her a lot about the complex relationships citizens have with their local councils, and just how easily communication breaks down.
When working at Barnet Council in 2007, she says a key measure taken to determine how successful local services were involved surveying how informed residents felt. So the council concentrated on producing leaflets, web pages and newsletters explaining services – yet satisfaction remained low, even though services had greatly improved.
The problem, she realised, was that the council was having a one-way conversation: “We’re not listening, we’re telling.” And that was the point when she started to consider whether the emerging area of social media might be an answer. “Maybe we could use it to get closer to them, to understand them,” she says.
As budget cutbacks loomed, Coleman knew residents would need the situation explained and want questions answered – and they hired someone whose role would be social media engagement. “I think we were the first council to appoint a social media officer,” she says.
Soon afterwards, she found herself seconded to City Hall in London, working on a project to see if some of the data collected constantly by the city and its agencies could be released to developers, to develop new services and applications.
The effort came as the Guardian was spearheading an “open data” campaign, with the premise that citizens pay for and contribute information to data sets for transport, utilities, police, fire and other city services – therefore, some of that data should be freely available for use.
One of her first targets was London’s transport data. “That data has been paid for by the taxpayer, and so should be open,” she says.
Getting authorities to release data sets was a struggle at first, but she says that developers would grab and use it so quickly, incorporating it into more than 70 different transport apps such as Bus Checker, which maps dynamic bus data to let people know what buses are approaching the area they are in, or Tube Checker, which does the same for Underground trains. City officials were gradually won over.
There are now 10 apps just for London’s bike hire scheme, she notes with amusement. And freely releasing data brings an employment and tax payback to the city and country, she says – one pair of developers of transport apps has paid more than £25,000 (€30,000) in tax from sales of apps.
Data sets are made available in the London Data Store website (which is followed by more than 2,000 developers on Twitter).
“This is what the state should be doing,” Coleman argues. “We don’t use this data well, but we collect it well. We don’t have to build the app itself – we just have to bring the data to the table.”
Discussions – and arguments – with officials about releasing data sets “were not about the data”, however, she says wryly. “It’s never about the data. It’s about culture change and risk aversion.”
Now, she’s moved on to a new set of challenges. As of early January, working under director Mike Bracken as part of the new, open government argued for by Martha Lane Fox in her Digital By Default report for the UK government last year, she’ll be working to convince civil servants, whose daily mantra was managing risk within a very controlled government culture, to embrace their inner tweeter.
Already, she can recount some amusing stories of younger employees happily tweeting potentially controversial comments while older civil servants freeze in terror. The younger employees (and she has one developer who is just 17) just do not have the sense of civil service decorum observed by generations of government employees – and this is something the civil service has to, and will, adjust to.
As she tells her audience in her talk earlier in the day: “We have to change fundamentally and absolutely, but it’s hard for government because we are fundamentally risk-averse.”
She warns that government has to move to an open and less spin-oriented model if it uses social media. Her closing piece of advice for her audience is blunt: “You just can’t engage in this world without authenticity. You just can’t.”
Relaxing later on, she notes: “We want a relentless focus on the user, the citizen – and to have best-in-class government digital services. My role is to look at the whole digital engagement side.”
It’s early days yet, but what does she like best about her new role so far? “The chance to scale, to achieve something,” she says. “This is for the whole UK. Now that’s something you can’t turn down.”
