The first was BarCamp Wellington, where 50-odd people from all parts of the country gave up a Saturday to get together and share ideas and experiences about e-government.

I won’t go in to much detail about BarCamp as other attendees (BarCampers?) have documented the day in detail. For a thorough and thoughtful summation of some of the proceedings, I would recommend Mark Rickerby’s wrap up. There is also a wealth of tagged material distributed all over the web: you can follow the breadcrumbs from the wiki…

The other conference was an SSC event for senior managers from the Australian and New Zealand public services. Called, Driving Government Performance, it was themed around the Development Goals and user-centric design.

The convergence of ideas

As you would expect, the experiences of attending each of these two events were wildly different. The first was borderline anarchic, the second was planned with meticulous precision. One was loose and conversational, the other codified and hierarchical. One was by invitation only (to speak and attend), the other was a free-for-all (literally, I have the t-shirt to prove it).

These two events were poles apart, at least in terms of structure. As far as the content, though, there was not as much divergence as you might have thought; once the rooms were full of warm bodies, the conversations were encouragingly similar.

Highlights from DGP? Steve Hodgkinson gave a great presentation on the impact of Web 2.0 on the government workplace (Looking in the Mirror) where he talked about the shadow workplace of blogs, wikis, RSS etc. Charles Owen’s presentation was a fascinating look at design process, but at 80-odd (dense) slides was a bit like an information mugging.

Conclusions

Ultimately, what I took away from both these days was the conviction that Govt 2.0 is not the El Dorado of the information age, but is something that we are building together brick by brick — and there is a sense of common purpose as to how we design this thing (as we go …sorry Chuck).

What is most encouraging, however, is the sense of energy and resolve to come out of both days. You would expect that the BarCampers would be eagerly looking for opportunities to put some of their talk into action, but the senior managers I talked to were as just as keen to learn, experiment and engage.

The last couple of posts have been about new media, so I thought I would mix it up a bit by having a look at a more traditional approach to public affairs. South Australia’s Aboriginal Drug and Alcohol Council have issued a set of playing cards, under a campaign titled Don’t Gamble with Your Health.

I have posted a flickr set of some of the cards to give you a feel for the campaign.

What really struck me is that the necessity for this type of social marketing initiative is just so, well, depressing. Shuffling through the cards, unfortunately, reveals a tremendous amount about the plight of indigenous Australians. And while I have no intention of making light of that, I could help being struck by the incongruity of issuing a set of playing cards to warn of the dangers of gambling.

But then again, I suppose that cigarette packets and alcohol bottles carry health warnings, so why not label gambling products the same way?

I would be interested to hear any social marketer’s thoughts on the cards.

Social Marketing Downunder

The third Social Marketing Downunder conference is being held in Wellington on 8/9 March 2007. The theme is Sustaining social marketing.

The organisers are calling for abstracts, so if you would like to present, visit the site and submit.

So, what did you say?

Most of you felt that the conference was a well-run, interesting and relevant event – and a great opportunity to network with your peers. The average rating for the event overall was about 3.5 (1 was “poor” and 5 “excellent”) – so I guess that we can officially declare comms@06 a success.

I have made up a dodgy Excel graph that shows you how you all rated the various components of the conference. I am not sure what the margin of error is but, given my aforementioned grasp of quantitative analysis, I would guess ‘high’ would be the correct answer.

In any event, the numbers are pretty conclusive: between 40-50% of you though that the presenters and the organization was excellent (5), and that everything else was around a 4.

The diversity of topics was great and provided a good balance. All the speakers were good at relating their content to the communications issues presented. I felt this was a real strength of Comms@06.
The good spread of attendees from across the government sector added to the value of the event.
Tony

There is also a graph depicting your responses to the individual speakers – which is not a ‘league table’, but it does give you an idea of how the different presenters were rated by those who chose to respond.

Again, the weight of opinion is solidly in the 4 region, with the exception of the remarkable David Slack who managed to rate as ‘excellent’ with 83.5% of the people who responded. Well, I guess that makes one of the decision’s about next year’s line-up a little easier…

I was impressed with all the speakers, who have a wealth of experience in their fields. In just one day I’ve learnt so much that will help me in my job. It’s nice also to have confirmation from the experts that I am on the right track in most cases.
Anon

Lessons we learned

Fortunately, through a combination of dumb luck and the good will of those involved, we managed to get quite a lot of it right. That is not to say that we can’t improve. More interaction was highlighted by a number of you – that might take the form of, for example, some break-out sessions or even a half-day workshop to complement the conference next year.

The whole ‘vegetarian incident’ is something we won’t let happen again: I can’t tell you how relieved I was that no-one went into anaphylactic shock; that is just what we need at a conference on issues management: an ambulance parked out the front.

You also made some suggestions around the small things, that actually make a conference really sing:

• Distribute a list of all the attendees
• More fruit for snacking
• Better audio/visual setup

…all of which we will do next year.

I think the final word (apart from any comments that you would like to add yourselves) should go to Kate, who -for me anyway- summed it all up beautifully:

An excellent, very good value event, head and shoulders above the crappy expensive ones we are constantly bombarded with invitations to!

On behalf of the Committee, I would like to thank all those who attended, with a particular mention to the speakers, who provided such rich and entertaining content on the day.

Approximately 120 public sector communicators came along to sessions on a range of topics and to network with their peers.

The qualitative feedback session at the Backbencher that closed the day suggested, at least anecdotally, that the day was a success.

I thought that all of the speakers were excellent, and that the stories that were shared and the insights that were passed on made this one day away from the phones and the desk a day extraordinarily well spent.

Over the next week or so, I will endeavour to post some preliminary thoughts and remarks about each of the sessions and the speakers, and I welcome any comments you have.

I would also urge you to fill in the online feedback form so that we can consider your comments as we plan next years conference, seminars and workshops.