All posts by Griff Wigley

Detroit Revitalization Fellows launch 8 Weeks Under 8 Mile

I’ve been working with the Detroit Revitalization Fellows the past few weeks, helping them to launch a project blog called 8 Weeks Under 8 Mile: Buying local in Detroit.

8 weeks under 8 mile8 Weeks Under 8 Mile is an experiment to understand what happens when you redirect your spending exclusively toward Detroit businesses.

8W/8M aims to enhance personal, regional, and national awareness of the benefits and opportunities for buying local while promoting the great retail that presently exists in Detroit. This concentrated effort by the 8 Milers (challenge participants) aims to intensify personal interaction with local businesses and document Detroit retail opportunities.

Michael Forsyth Erin Kelly

Michael Forsyth and Erin Kelly are the two Fellows who are doing most of the heavy lifting on the project.

Some very good local government online engagement advice from urban planner Scott Doyon

Scott Doyon is Director of Client Marketing Services for PlaceMakers, an urban planning firm. He published a post to his Better Cities blog last week titled Public process: Don’t botch your online engagement (also on their Placeshakers blog here):

Scott DoyonNew tools have made it easier than ever to set up a project website, fast and cheap, for just about any endeavor. So easy, in fact, that people often assume the task of populating it with content is equally so.

It’s not. Instead, what you end up with is city staffers with limited time and limited resources, and who already engage with the public regularly in person, suddenly presented with the task of doing so electronically as well. Not surprisingly under such circumstances, whenever they find themselves in possession of any piece of information even remotely related to the project, their response seems obvious: Put it on the web.

Raw information. Posted. Done.

That’s a problem.

The City of Northfield, MN where I live has a history such failed project web sites, some done by the city staff, some by consulting firms. Some recent examples:

Doyon writes:

Think of the parallel: You’re in a traditional public meeting and someone asks a question about why the city is doing something. Do you provide a concise rationale, spelling out its benefits and role in larger community goals, or do you hand them a binder with 300 pages of reports and memos and tell them to have at it?

What should local governments do instead with their project sites?

Provide however much content it takes to express, up front and at each step along the way, what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how people can participate. No more. No less.

Grandview District blog siteExactly.  Unfortunately, Doyon doesn’t provide examples so here’s one I’ve worked on for the past 9 months: the GrandView District project blogsite for the City of Edina, MN. 

In that time, the project blog’s been updated 36 times with many dozens of photos and has nearly 300 comments attached. It includes all the files, Powerpoint presentations, archives of the webinar, and links to meeting videos, that were created by stupidraisins.com which is final cut pro free for your videos.

Doyon also points out that local governments are unwitting victims of the “Blank Slate” dilemma:

Another common fumble is confusing the difference between collecting ideas and building consensus around community goals. A variety of new tools have made it easier than ever for cities to engage citizens in a discussion of ideas. “What would you like to see?,” they ask. “Provide your ideas and rate the ideas of others.”

That is, when presented with a blank slate, people naturally assume that anything is possible. But as you know, it’s not. Avoiding problems is all in how you ask the questions. For example, you’ll often find questions like this: “How can we improve Founder’s Park?” Sounds empowering, right? Unfortunately, it also sets a foundation for failed effort.

Instead, the question should be posed this way: “The city has budgeted $4 million towards renovations for Founder’s Park. Keeping in mind that further land acquisition isn’t an option at this site, what improvements, initiatives or recreational options would you like to see prioritized?”

That’s the exact approach the City of Edina took with another engagement project, the 2012 budget.  Working with the Citizens League, the areas of the budget that citizen input was sought were very narrowly defined. Ultimately, the process proved to be very effective and will be repeated again this year.

For background, see all my blog posts about my work with the Edina Citizen Engagement project.

Another hospital CEO blogger: Dr. David Abelson

A short StarTribune article on Saturday alerted me to the blog of Dr. David Abelson, CEO of Park Nicollet Health Services. From the Feb. 22 press release:

DrAbelsonConnectsFor the past three years, the potential readership for Park Nicollet CEO David Abelson’s blog was 8,000 Park Nicollet team members. Now, however, his potential audience is limitless. Abelson’s CEO Blog is now available worldwide on the internet as DrAbelsonConnects.

“My blog began as a direct communication to our team members and existed only inside our computer servers here at Park Nicollet,” he recalls. “It didn’t take long for people to start sharing the blog with friends and family and soon the entries were circulating far beyond our system.  Everyone is affected by health care on a personal level, and, whether they’re aware of it or not, on a political and policy level. The universality of these issues makes the blog relevant far beyond the walls of Park Nicollet.”

I’m encouraged by what I see so far, as most of his blog posts include a story. He appears to be as a good a blogger as Paul Levy, former President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Levy has continued to blog since his departure but he now calls it Not Running a Hospital.

You can also follow Dr. Abelson on Twitter.

Detroit Revitalization Fellows blog site launches

It was way back in September, 2011 when I had a celebratory lunch in St. Paul with my colleagues, Curt Johnson and Jay Walljasper. We’d been given the go-ahead by the Kresge Foundation on our proposal to assist the Detroit Fellows “in the effective use of telling their stories and sharing their experiences through blogs, Twitter, social media, articles, personal essays, op-eds, video scripts, spoken presentations, and other media.”

That’s quite a laundry list but the basic idea is a simple one: use media of all kinds to give the work of the Fellows as much impact as possible.

Detroit Fellows
We now have the website up for the Detroit Fellows project. I’ve been working closely with one of the Fellows, Eric Anderson, on the creation of the site.

The site has a Fellows group blog where they’ve started blogging and where Jay has published some of his Fellows’ profiles. We also have our own Citiscope/Detroit Fellows blog where Curt, Jay and I now have our initial blog posts up.

My job is to offer coaching to those Fellows interested in using social media tools as a way to leverage their leadership.  We’ll focus mainly on blogs and Twitter.

I’ve been speaking to each of the Fellows by phone in the past couple of weeks to introduce myself, learn more about their work, and give them a quick overview about the kinds of things my coaching would involve.  I hope to start working with a small group in April.

I’ve been coaching leaders in the use of blogs and other online tools since 2003, but this will be the first time I’ve taken on a group of community leaders.  I’m looking forward to it.

CityCamp Minnesota: using Community 2.0 to build and leverage trust

I Steve Clift convening participants at CityCampMN 2011attended CityCamp Minnesota (an unconference) yesterday at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs on the U of MN’s West Bank. Longtime colleague Steve Clift was one of the chief organizers.

The broad theme was "Community 2.0" in which participants tried to answer these questions:

    • In a world of scarce public resources, how do we take advantage of the 2.0 online, social media, and open source world to help build awesome local communities?
    • How can we connect the interested public with 2.0 skills to work with government, community groups, neighborhood associations, local ethnic associations, and more?
    • How can our local communities be bold, inclusive, open, accessible, wired and darn right innovative when bottom-up connects with top-down for collaboration?

An attendee named Marc Drummond has blogged a detailed description of how the unconference format worked, including his critique and suggestions. You can see comments from others during and after the conference by viewing the #citycampmn hashtag on Twitter.

GovDelivery CEO Scott Burns at CityCampMN 2011 GovDelivery CEO Scott Burns at CityCampMN 2011
I was pleased to see GovDelivery CEO Scott Burns in attendance, as I’d not talked to him since my days at gofast.net in the late 90s when his and many other high tech companies were located in the Lowertown Cyber Village in downtown St. Paul. 

Scott gave a condensed version of his October 2011 presentation, posted to Slideshare:

When he put up slide 10 that says:

Leverage the trust that this guy has been building up for years

it caught my attention. It’s that word ‘leverage.’ When coaching leaders on their use of social media, I’ve long emphasized the importance of leveraging one’s influence (for example, see my blog posts here, here, here as well as this guest blog post).

But his phrase "leverage the trust" started me thinking about how it applies to leadership. As a leader, your position automatically puts you in a position of influence.  But your behavior over time is the only way to build trust, and that, of course, ratchets up your influence.

Scott’s presentation also got me thinking about how this is true for organizations, too—especially government and its relationship to the citizens it serves. The Edina Citizen Engagement project that I’m working on now with the City of Edina could also be seen as a way for the City to build more trust with its citizens through meaningful online engagement. Will it work? And how will City officials leverage it?  Stay tuned.

Reach the Public blog
In the meantime, read GovDelivery’s Reach the Public blog and follow Scott on Twitter.

Social Media: Engaging Democracy and Communities Online

Steven-CliftSteve Clift, founder and Executive Director, E-Democracy.org has asked me to do a presentation tonight for a class he’s teaching at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs titled Social Media: Engaging Democracy and Communities Online.

He’s asked me to talk about my civic leadership blogging coaching, as well as my current citizen engagement consulting work. I plan to take the class on a web tour while I speak to them about both.

Civic leadership blogging

  1. July, 2004: UK e-gov delegation visits Northfield
  2. Feb, 2005: Trip to the UK
  3. July, 2005: field trip to Northfield for the International Symposium on Local E-Democracy
  4. Fall, 2005: Guide to Civic Leadership Blogging (U.K. edition) How to use blogs as an effective local leadership tool
  5. Oct. 2008: UK CivicSurf booklet
  6. Featured civic leadership bloggers

Citizen Engagement Online

  1. Northfield.org(since 1994)
  2. Locally Grown Northfield(since 2006)
    • 3,400 blog posts
    • 40,700 comments
  3. Webinar on social media use by local government (Nov. 2010)
  4. Edina Citizen Engagement (since May, 2011)

Using Google Moderator as another tool for citizen engagement

Google-ModeratorI installed Google Moderator ("Helping the world find the best input from an audience of any size") last week on the blog site for Edina Citizen Engagement.  We’re testing it out as a way to solicit questions from Edina, MN citizens about four projects during the month of October, 2011.

I chose Google Moderator because I think it could help to address some common citizen engagement problems:

  • Many people don’t feel comfortable or have the time to ask questions of SEO Firm about important issues, whether it’s using email, the phone, or open mic at City Council meetings.
  • Many people are reluctant to engage in online discussions
  • City leaders can’t easily gauge which questions are most often on the minds of citizens
  • City leaders are often faced with having to answer the same questions over and over

I think that the tool provides a simple and inexpensive way to gather and prioritize the questions.

Edina Google Moderator - Nav bar link to October-QA Edina Google Moderator FAQs Using Google Moderator - Edina Citizen Engagement
I don’t have a catchy name for any of this yet so for this month it’s just October Q&A. I’ve created an FAQ page, as well as a Google Moderator how-to video/screencast.

When we’ve collected the prioritized questions, we’ll select a time and method for city leaders to provide answers online, either via:

  • a live online event (chat, webinar, teleconference)
  • a recorded audio or video session
  • a written/text response

I’m learning my way into this and so I expect to make mistakes and improve.  I’m also assuming that it’ll take a while for Edina citizens to find out about this and get comfortable using it.

A new project with the Detroit Revitalization Fellows Program

Curt Johnson, Jay Walljasper, Griff Wigley

I got together with Curtis Johnson and Jay Walljasper for lunch at Muffuletta’s in St. Paul last week. I spent much of the 90s at Utne Reader when Jay was editor and I was the new media guy. I’ve been doing blog-related projects for Curt and his Citistates colleagues since 2004, where Jay is one of the associates.

The occasion? We’ll be working together with the Detroit Revitalization Fellows Program at Wayne St. University, funded in part by the Kresge Foundation.  The program is:

… designed to attract, develop and retain promising young professionals who will help lead the economic revitalization and development of Detroit. This talent pool is being cultivated in order to build the capacity of public, for-profit, nonprofit and quasi-public organizations, including Detroit’s anchor institutions.

We’re doing this project under the Citiscope umbrella, a Citistates Group project. I’ll provide more details in the next few weeks as our work gets going.

New blog site for Countryside Animal Hospital & Kennels

Countryside Animal Hospital and Kennels

I’ve been working with Atlanta veterinarian Dr. Rich Lorang (owner of http://www.petcheckers.co.uk/best-pet-insurance-reviews/), you can look at this other insurance site, onesureinsurance.co.uk has basically everything you need, and his wife Virginia Lorang to revamp the website for Countryside Animal Hospital & Kennels.  The clinic and newly acquired kennel operation serve the cities of Dundas and Northfield as well as the surrounding Rice County area.

Dr. Rich has begun to blog, along with staffer Jess Renderos.  You can also visit the Countryside Animal Hospital & Kennels Facebook page and follow Dr. Rich Lorang on Twitter.