 Penultimate speaker is Steph Gray. Steph is managing director of helpful technology. Steph is a digital strategist and practitioner runs helpful technology, a specialist digital engagement consultancy, was formerly head of digital communications at BIS. Steph will explore why people should bother engaging with public sector organisations online and what can be done to build trust and enthusiasm for participation through radically rethinking the feedback and consultation process. Why bother? If Mary is a private sector SKP, I'm more of a public sector SKP. I was a civil servant until three years ago when I escaped now. As Andy says, I sort of do these things for other people with a small Mary band. I must have been on a bit of a downer when I thought about the title for this talk. This must have been a particularly grim Tuesday afternoon because I'm normally quite an upbeat kind of person. But I was trying to think about how government is using social media, how it's engaging with people, the consultation cycle, contrasting how government does that with the kind of amazing things you see at GDS on the IT side. And I ended up with this kind of rather depressing way of kicking things off because ultimately we live in very exciting times technologically. In the last few years we've seen technology in general and social media, social networking in particular, make incredible collaborations possible. So this is obviously from the Arab Spring where the tools of US mega corporations enable people on the street to form and to organise and to find each other and to investigate and to dig deep into what's actually going on. But it's not just about what's going on on the street in Cairo. It's about the fact that, you know, I can see some twitches in the audience, I can see some twitches. So I mean it was incredible is that a guy from Korea can make a silly dance and accumulate a billion YouTube views in just a few weeks. I went to a five year old's birthday party the other day and they can all do the dance, they can all do the song. It's incredible how that kind of globalised culture is made possible by the spread of these video sharing services. I mean it's still amazing to me. And a lot of us remember we can see a guy float up to the very edge of space and jump out of his little canister and float down and break the speed record. And 8 million people simultaneously watch him as he falls down to earth 800 miles an hour and sets a record. And not only can we watch him because we've been able to watch things simultaneously since the moon landings, but we can participate in that. We can ask the technical team questions, we can really get involved in it, we can follow the press conference, we can tweet, we can do all kinds of things, share with our friends. And that is new. And of course in a few years time we'll all look like this. We're not that many years time I suspect. Some of us probably will carry it off better than others. But Google Glass will kind of revolution, will have augmented bodies all made possible by the incredible combination of technology and the internet. And yet if you think about what a government policy making process, a policy document, a government consultation in 2013 in this era of incredible technology, they look like this and they still look like this and they've looked like this for years. They are incredibly tedious, they are 100 pages long, they're PDF files on the website and I've been responsible for my fair sharing government as well. And it's kind of depressing that this is still the best we can do despite all the amazing tools and the kind of example that's been set out there of that interplay between society and technology. So, to be fair, this isn't the limit of government's use of technology in terms of getting the public involved in policy making and ideas. But one note, SurveyMonkey is not radical digital innovation. I think a lot of government organisations, SurveyMonkey is seen as, it's online guys, it's magic. But it's really not in the context of people jumping out of capsules far above the atmosphere. So what we're seeing a lot of is organisations in the public sector and elsewhere. It's not limited to the public sector. Setting up social media channels and pumping out the same kind of things they would have pumped out through other channels through these exciting new mediums. So I'll pick on Argyll and Butte but this is true of many other organisations as well. Pumping out the traditional press releases, one after another, sometimes they've done a merry and they've automated everything. So these aren't even human beings tweeting, they are actually just machines. And I guess that's fine, it serves a certain purpose. This is a nice one from the, this is Great Britain's Facebook page. I don't know if you can read this, it's a nice picture of trifle and it says, trifle is a British classic. Are you a fan with a little link? And 6,085 people are a fan of trifle and a thousand people have shared it with their friends. Susan Collins says, yes it is a nice treat. I think I want to become a trifle. So I mean this is lovely, this is what kind of social media is sort of about. And actually this is the government campaign playing the game of Facebook in quite an effective way. I mean in terms of volume of numbers this is great. And actually I'm being unfair because this is what this campaign is all about. It's all about celebrating Britishness. So you go on this page you'll see pictures of hunky men in kilts, of beef eaters, of the classic British telephone boxes and cabs and all that kind of stuff. It's lovely but it's not what I'd think of as engagement and I think there's too much of this sort of stuff going on. A channel feeding a kind of beast. And this is a visualisation of the beast which it is feeding from Bitly. So Bitly is the service that shortens links and they've done an analysis of the half life of a link. So how long you can expect your link to float around in social media. How many clicks you'll get in the time. How many hours going along the X axis. So within about three hours you've got the clicks you're going to get. And it's more true for some social media than others. Some social media that the half life is very short indeed. And this explains I think in graphon why we're in the pickle we are because we're feeding this beast of social media with content which is generating content for our channels. Now it's not all demon gleam and there are some attempts that have been made to try and use the technology available to harness the wisdom of crowds in the way that the case studies have highlighted. So when the new government came in they tried this thing called the spending challenge which sourced a lot of examples and ideas for how government could save money using just by being more efficient basically. And they saw thousands of ideas and a few of them were quite good and some of them were absolutely rubbish and some of them were people submitting beef stew recipes and all kinds of crazy things. I think what was interesting about this is it didn't generate a particularly great set of examples and what it did also do was it generated a headache for the civil servants on the receiving end of this. They didn't require it, they just got a spreadsheet full of random ideas from members of the public about ways to save money which were often entirely impractical and then were told to sort them out and see if they were possible. So in terms of numbers this looks very good. I think ministers found it a good vehicle, a lot of coverage for the laundry but in terms of actually changing how people, how government works and how government saves money it wasn't particularly effective. I think government has moved on since, it's become a bit more focused on how it does these things and that's certainly improved. The other classic, this is the Mumsnet web chat and I think another good example where ministers are getting out there they're tapping into these big online communities like Mumsnet and the student room and others and people meet in their tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands and talk about the issues that concern them so kind of flipping the media on its head and they go out into these spaces and they answer questions and we all know what their favourite biscuits are as a result of these interactions with Mums and with students and with others. And it's a lovely idea. I think it's good to see politicians getting out there but it's still not getting to the hub of how to get feedback into the policy process from the public. It's politicians doing what they would always have done on TV or in the media just online and it's not transforming the relationship that's going on there. Ultimately it's not shifting this needle which is the key one I think. This is a chart just from earlier this week. Ipsos Moray survey looking at how much trust people have and how much confidence they have in the use of statistics. How much trust do you have in information provided by, amongst others, politicians? Nine out of ten have very little or none at all and yet we still put politicians up front in these interactions. That's the way the civil service has been designed. Civil servants are the munchkins. No offence. I used to be one. Behind the scenes working on all these things and it's the ministers who are up there as the public face who take all this but they're also playing the ministerial, partisan party political games as well and I think that's reflected in some of the scores they get for the trustworthiness of their information, the trustworthiness of them as individuals. So I come back to, seriously, why are we bothering? If nine out of ten people don't trust the information from politicians if we're using these channels, we're feeding the social media beast but we're not actually really achieving anything. We're getting people to like trifle. What are we actually accomplishing here? Ultimately you can settle a little bit kind of miserable, a little bit depressed to think about what's the point of all of this. But I think there are some reasons to be cheerful and there are some signs and pointers to a better way of engaging the public in policymaking and how to improve public services and I think here are some green shoots I suppose. Do you want to recognise this from the riots a couple of years ago? So the rioters themselves had organised in things like Twitter and Facebook and Blackberry Messenger to work out where they were going to go in London and what they were going to smash up and what they were going to steal and the more stupid ones then posted pictures of it on Facebook at least to go and find and go and arrest them which is smart. But the flipside to it was that the same tools which were used by the rioters were used perhaps to greater effect and by greater numbers by the people who wanted to stand up against some of this and actually clean up the mess and sort out their communities and this is the riot cleanup campaign which was started by an individual chap who started at hashtag. He got people together and with some help from the DLA they organised themselves, they got teams working around London and they actually did a really good job at sorting out what was going on and clearing up the mess that the riots had caused and I think this is a bit like we've seen on a more grand revolutionary scale in the Arab Spring, a good example of actually people coming together and using social media to do that. So there is still this ability for these tools to bring people together around issues they care about and I think the interesting thing about this is it's not, you know, we have this, perhaps we live in a time when people have a very cynical view of politicians and their trustworthiness but that doesn't mean that people think have drifted away from politics people still care about the issues and the political issues and you see this in the strength and the spread and the rapidity in which some of these e-petitions are growing so changed or recently had this petition to set up a petition for in Duncan Smith to try living on £53 a week after he, off the cuff said in an interview that he could live on benefits he'd managed and that reached, I think it's half a million signatures so far and it reached that over the course of a bank holiday we can normally it's pretty much. So people clearly feel very strongly about the issues they want to use and they do use technology to mobilise and to connect and they want to do something about it and they want to point this crowd in a direction and they will do something and this is interesting because we, you know, this has been a busy week news wise we're discussing the economy we're discussing our relationship with the European Union we're discussing all kinds of deep and meaningful topics and if you look at the most read story on Tuesday on the BBC website it was a 10 question grammar quiz which is actually really hard, I only scored 5 out of 10 on this and I think in myself is being alright on grammar but I think what this shows is that in a world where there's a lot of bad news out there there's crime and there's big political stories going on actually what attracts people online is a bit of light relief sometimes and the ability to do something which they can then share and talk about and engage with their friends around and that's something which we very rarely give people in terms of government policy and government services online. So let's have a think about what the government policy making process is about and how some of these tools might then slot into it so here's a very crude, simplified version of the government policy wheel where you know the top government thinks about what's gone wrong, it tries to identify and listen to the problems, it then works through the cycle of assessing some possible solutions, refining a policy that will actually address them and then implementing it, delivering a solution which hopefully works, getting some feedback and then the cycle continues and every stage in that process it's more than, it's not just putting up pictures of trifle on Facebook and actually we can do more interesting things with technology to actually listen, to get inspiration to test ideas with people and to explain and refine and to get feedback at the point at which people actually consume public services so we actually get a sense of how it's working in the wild get feedback from the service users and not just do, not just spend our time at the bottom of that cycle in terms of policy consultations but actually get feedback more generally more informally around the whole experience people have of dealing with public services So, I'm going to give you some five thoughts about what we could do to perhaps achieve some of this and one is, perhaps the most important one is to make use of social media and use of technology something which public servants do every day and not just the politicians I think this is where the civil service code is really helpful because it has this distinction between the invisible civil servants and the very visible politicians and actually to make these technologies useful I think they need to become basically part of the day job it's small C communication not big C communication and you need to kind of take the use of Twitter and Facebook and other things at work out of the comms teams who can still run the corporate channels but actually make it a tool on the desk and that's a job for people around the IT networks to actually recognise these are not people will connect with their friends they will chat but they will also do potentially quite interesting things to follow journalists, to follow the media to follow stakeholders and others in their area of work and actually potentially make some really interesting connections that improve public services as a result of using these tools in the workplace it's amazing how many public servants will use social media outside of work but never think about bringing it into work just don't see it as a work tool I think we need to change that the other side of it is we need to make it to make it something we can use every day we need to think about how it's consumed in terms of our audiences and actually the problem with the 100 page PDF is it's not an easy thing to read on a train it's certainly not an easy thing to interact with you can't fill in the 50 questions survey monkey survey in the same way on a train you'll see trains and carriages like this full of people on their phones and we don't design the interactions between people and government for these kind of context enough we don't think about the way in which people are actually going to be consuming these consultations and these opportunities to get involved with us so things which are about acknowledging that the mode of use are really important I think the next part of it and again practically important is asking people for the right things and recognising that there are multiple audiences here so there are people who will always respond to government consultations and we need to make it easy for them we need to make it easy for the CBI and the TEC to do their own internal consultations with their members to play that back into the policy teams and for that to go on but we need to recognise that for some policy areas there are much bigger potential audiences out there there are people who use the service there are people who are passionate about it there are people who live on the line of the HS2 or who would be affected by renegotiating our relationship with Europe and we need to ask those people not just for their analysis of the policy which is what consultations are normally about but for other things, for their stories their experiences of public services or their experiences of the world and how government regulation could perhaps maybe improve that this is a slightly old example of a consultation I worked on when I worked at the Department for Business where we tried to do some of that we tried to unpack a consultation about the regulation of store cards we tried to get rid of video from the Minister but we actually also had a plain English version so the policy team were willing to have us fiddle with their words and translate 100 pages into 10 pages to turn their policy proposals into a poll people could take part in if they wanted to just nip in and nip out but the single most interesting thing I think about this was the stories that came out of it and they were people like this so people who would never normally take part in the government consultation people like Ross coming in and saying I was managing okay I was helping to pay off some family debts but then there was a dramatic change and now I'm down to my last dregs I realised I should have taken out a fixed rate blah blah blah and this was the kind of story which in the old days perhaps this would have come out in a focus group but government doesn't do focus groups these days and these are the kind of first hand stories which is very hard government departments are often quite insulated from the effect of their policies and the powerful opportunities from technologies to bring those stories out they don't have to be written stories they can be visual stories this is a picture of the partner of somebody who's just gone back to Afghanistan on active duty and she's using a service on the phone called Instagram to take a picture of in this case something that's meaningful to her this is her state of mind this is how she feels about her partner going back she's missing him it's quite a powerful thing to have around the office what it means to be a business what it means to be a teacher what it means to be a student applying to higher education in the same way that GDS walls are covered in pictures of what they're doing and their users the ability to do the same on the walls of policy teams to visualise the impact of policy as well as making an analytical exercise and I mentioned GDS the GDS approach of using user stories to guide development and principle couldn't be applied to the design of how the public is engaged in policy making I think it would be a really good way to try and bring that out third idea is potentially to try and make policy making a bit more transparent and ideally radically transparent one slightly crazy idea would be for every policy team not just the progressive ones but every policy team to run a blog talking about what it's up to in the same way again that GDS and others run a blog 100 ambassadors around the world blogging about their work and they're not leaking state secrets they are talking about the work they're doing the people they're meeting the issues they're facing they're getting feedback in the comments from these people this is Matt Ball who's the ambassador to Somalia and his blog is incredible you can see here the second post down has tracked over a thousand comments because his blog has become a way to bring together quite a diverse range of people around the world who care about Somalia and they were missing this platform to bring it all together in a similar way in the context of Levison enquiry DCMS made their seminar series very transparent last year they published everything about them the agendas, the transcripts, the presentations who attended exactly what had been written about them they tried to make that entire process as transparent as they could in order to build trust in it and try and get some useful interaction going with people who weren't taking part in the events themselves fourth idea radical simplicity and this is where I sound like a GDS clone I'm certainly a big fan of a lot of what GDS is doing and no more so than in terms of how they rewrite content and how we rewrite policy content to appeal to a wider audience so this is an answer to the search question how much is that on the left is what HMRC will tell you on the right is what GOVUK will tell you and if you're coming to this cold you get a much, much clearer answer from GOVUK and I think the same can apply to lots of other policy areas too and finally I think the key thing is to think about humanity and the context in which people use technology you can post up all kinds of things on Facebook and Twitter but ultimately that stuff is mixed up with people's updates from their friends and you're competing with all kinds of other far more interesting things in those news feeds so one thing the fire brigade do brilliantly in London is to target their updates at young men so they are asking, they're talking to young men directly they're not telling them to check their smoke alarm they're showing them a picture of a hole in the floor and asking them what caused this fire and then they'll come back a day later and they'll answer the question in the meantime people have been trying to figure out was this a cigarette fire, was it something else if you can't be human partner with somebody who is the student room here is a great place for mature students to talk about what life's like at university Gav UK is a great place to put the official information about what you can get, the partnership between them can be really effective and finally I think one of the most dramatic examples of being human is the Obama campaign and the Obama campaign was driven by data and what you can see down there is the subject lines of messages sent out by email from the Obama campaign during that election and the things like hey hey again a loha meet me for dinner rain check, this is important I don't get to tell you this enough and you can imagine this is tested this is remarkable stuff to be getting from the office of the president of the United States and I imagine that some people raised eyebrows when this was proposed but you can imagine in the context of your email inbox getting these emails from somebody it's going to get you to open them and have a look at them and it's because you feel like you're talking to a human being and that's not the feeling you get when you read a 100 page PDF and as always as every good presentation should I think I've ended on the cat picture because one of the success areas that one of the most successful bits of content that number 10 have managed to produce in recent years is images and stories and the experiences of Larry the cat number 10's chief mouse capture and some of the material that him and his first anniversary at number 10 him sitting on the cabinet table as he is there stories about him where he comes from all that kind of stuff is what gets real engagement with their content and you could think we just ended back up on trifle again here we just pumping out stuff for the sake of it well I think what the opportunity here is to actually show that there are people there are human beings behind this policy making process and there is something we can do to engage with them and that Larry may be the hook into debates about something a bit more deep and profound so I think it's worth bothering thank you very much