Wigley and Associates

I’ve been building a series of “How to Ride Motorcycle Trials” tutorial pages for the Trials Training Center (TTC) in Sequatchie, TN.

Many of the pages have video clips and I’ve created a TTC YouTube Channel to house them all.

Each video has a description, several tags, and a link back to the specific how-to page to help drive traffic from the TTC YouTube Channel to the TTC’s site.

Several months ago, I created a blog site for the 2nd Annual JuneBug Festival of Music in Northfield, Minnesota.

During the recently completed 4-day festival, I posted Northfield JuneBug Twitter updates 30 minutes prior to each performance on the upcoming act’s venue and scheduled starting time.

I also blogged photos of each musical act’s performance.

I helped Jim and Joan Spaulding get set up with a coffeehouse blogsite back in July, 2004. They opened a second location in May, 2006 and sold their original location in January, 2008 to focus on the newly-named HideAway Coffeehouse and Wine Bar in downtown Northfield.  While Jim is focusing on his new Just Trikes business, Joan, among her myriad other tasks, is learning to post to the HideAway blog.

I first met Gunnar Swanson and Dina Fesler of War Kids Relief back in January when they made a presentation in Northfield. (We later hosted them on our Locally Grown podcast/radio show.)

They hired me to help them get set up with a WordPress-based website and to think about how social media could be used for the variety of initiatives they were planning. Their marketing and communications firm, Neuger Communications Group, then took on the design of the website.

Back in January, I posted about the internal staff blog for the Laura Baker Services Association (LBSA). Lately, I’ve been working with them on an update to their main website. Most of this has been behind-the-scenes coaching with Jane Fenton, Director of Community Relations, and her staff, particularly Ashley Dinzey.

I finished my leadership blogging tour for Northern Community Internet on Friday with a presentation to a full-house of 30-40 people at the Grand Rapids Area Library, a very cool-looking library with a giant red chair outside. (Click any of the photo thumbnails to enlarge and the scroll through the images.)

 
Afterwards, I had lunch next door with the staff at KAXE, Northern Community Radio, and lucked out to be there for volunteer chef Charlie Lano’s catered home-made lunch. (That’s Charlie standing to the right of Maggie Montgomery, KAXE General Manager.)

A tip-of-the-blogger hat to Ross Williams, one of the planners/project managers for Northern Community Internet, who handled all the arrangements for my visit. (Photo is from the MN Voices UnConference,  courtesy of Marc Osten, original here.)

I’ll be in the northern Minnesota cities of Bemidji, Brainerd, and Grand Rapids later this week, doing presentations on leadership blogging for the Northern Community Internet, “a network of northern Minnesota communities using the internet to connect to our neighbors and with one another.” It’s a project of KAXE Northern Community Radio and funded by the Blandin Foundation. My invitation came from Ross Williams who I first met two years ago during an all-day visit to Blandin when the project was just being conceived.

My presentation is based on my 2005 U.K. Civic Leadership Blogging Guide (25-page PDF). Last fall, I collaborated with Gallomanor, colleagues in the U.K.. to produce an updated version of that, a 32-page booklet (PDF) called CivicSurf.  It’s primarily oriented towards elected councilors but applicable for anyone in a leadership position.

If you’re looking for something that’ll give you a taste of what I’ll be covering in the presentation, the CivicSurf booklet would be your best bet.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a generic leadership blogging presentation, so I’m in the middle of updating it to include new examples from a variety of bloggers, many based here in Minnesota and a few from afar.

   
I was an invited ‘practioner’ at the Minnesota Voices Online Unconference (“Connecting rural Minnesotans with new media so every place can share its voice in the Internet age”) in Duluth this weekend, co-hosted by the Blandin Foundation and e-Democracy.org. Above: Bernadine Joselyn, Director of Public Policy and Engagement at the Blandin Foundation;  Steve Clift, Co-Founder and Chair of e-Democracy.org; Marc Osten of the Summit Collaborative who moderated the event (run as an unconference).

Some of my photos (click any thumbnail and then scroll through all 8 photos):

“They all get the idea that if we’re transparent about what we’re bad at as well as what we’re good at, we’ll get better.”  That’s a quote by Paul Levy, President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, speaking about his staff. Levy maintains a leadership blog called Running a hospital where he regularly shares “thoughts about hospitals, medicine, and health care issues.” You can also follow Levy on Twitter.

I’ve been thinking about Northfield (my hometown) area public leadership, transparency, and social media tools this week for four reasons.

1. Northfield City Adminstrator Joel Walinski has invited me to speak about civic engagement technologies for 10 minutes to the Northfield City Council next Monday at their work session.  See my previous blog posts on Locally Grown about civic engagement here, here, and here.
2. Tonight I’m going to the Northfield School District’s Key Communicator Network meeting (I blogged about this on Locally Grown here). The District has received some criticism lately for its handling of the proposed calendar changes and the SNL cancellation.
3. Tuesday, I blogged about a new book titled The School Administrator’s Guide to Blogging by Mark Stock.  
4. Last Monday’s council meeting at which the lack of trust and respect were evidently issues. See the Northfield News article, City, townships don’t see eye-to-eye on annexation.

Lots can be learned by watching how Levy uses his blog and Twitter as a public leader. For example:

• Last summer, Levy blogged about how a surgical procedure was performed on the wrong body part. Notice 1) his detailed reflection in the post after he republished the email that was sent out to all employees and the local media about the incident; and 2) the positive reaction to the handling of the incident among many of the 54 comments attached to the blog post.
• A week or so ago, he blogged about a series of staff town meetings regarding the hospital’s financial problems and the unbelievable response he’s gotten to a radical suggestion. The media picked up on the story, too. On Tuesday, he used Twitter to alert people to his blog post update on the situation.
• Yesterday, he blogged about a single employee whose actions reflect one of their strategic initiatives.

There’s a continuing stream of both good and bad news stories like these at all our Northfield area institutions that serve the public in some capacity: the city, the townships, the county, the schools, the colleges, the hospital.  And yet we rarely hear about them.  The ‘bad news’ stories too often never see the light of day. And the ‘good news’ stories are too often spun in such a way that they’re either not believable or they’re ignored. Not always, just too often IMHO.

The increasing pervasiveness of social media tools means, in part, that local leaders have less ability to keep a lid on issues of public concern. (Employee ‘leaks’ travel far and fast. Citizens with blogs pry more effectively.) So ratcheting up the transparency (along with judicious amounts of authenticity and engagement) is a smart strategy. The end result, as Levy says, is the institutions get better at what they do. And that’s what we, the public, want to see. And when we do, we’ll applaud it, thereby encouraging the virtuous cycle to continue and spread.

I first blogged about Mark Stock two years ago when he was a blogging Superintendent of Schools for the Wawasee Community School Corporation in Indiana. He is now Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Wyoming and maintains a blog called The Stock Mark Report.

Mark recently had a book published titled The School Administrator’s Guide to Blogging. With my permission, he’s included some excerpts from my white paper that I published for the UK titled Guide to Civic Leadership Blogging: How to use weblogs as an effective local leadership tool.

The book just arrived but I intend to immediately loan it to Charlie Kyte, fellow Northfielder, and a blogger and podcaster (audio and video) in his role as Executive Director of the Minnesota Association of School Administrators (MASA). Kyte’s blog is titled The VOICE of Minnesota Education.

I’ve been working with (L to R) Bill Carlson, Ray Eng, and Ed Lufkin to convert the Cannon Valley Elder Collegium website (CVEC) to a WordPress-based blog site. It went live last week, with the CVEC blog on a separate page.

Last October, I blogged about the beginning of my blog coaching with the UK’s DFID Bloggers project, “staff blogs from the UK Department for International Development (DFID).” I’m part of Shane McCracken’s team at Gallomanor which has the contract, part of their CivicSurf project.

DFID was pleased with the results and expanded the project in January to include up to a dozen more bloggers in several more countries over the next few months. 

Among the new bloggers in Africa who I’m coaching:

 
Martin Leach, Head of DFID Rwanda and Burundi

 
Colum Wilson, Humanitarian Adviser in West Africa for the Africa Conflict and Humanitarian Unit

 
Ian Attfield, Education Adviser in Nigeria

The National Civic Review, the quarterly journal of the National Civic League (“Now in its 98th year of publication”), has its Winter 2008 issue out. The issue has a 6-page article by Julie Fanselow titled Community Blogging: The New Wave of Citizen Journalism (PDF).

The article includes the Northfield projects I’m involved with, Locally Grown and RepJ, as well as my work with the Northwest Area Foundation and its use of blogs (CommunityBlogs.us) as a key component of its Horizons program which I blogged about here when I started with it.

Last week, my wife Robbie and I set up a blog site for the Valley Pond Townhouse Association where we’re members. The townhouses surround Hidden Valley Park in Northfield, Minnesota on three sides.

We’ve recently made some modifications to the blogsite design for Knecht’s Nurseries & Landscaping. Working with co-owner Deb Knecht, Northfield web designer Sean Hayford O’Leary incorporated new elements to the homepage blog and sidebars while I’ve been working with her on restructuring many of the site’s pages.