If you were going to write a history of UK government digital engagement, you could do worse than start with the story of the Foreign Office blogs.
I'm biased, but I think blogging at the Foreign Office has been a constant amid spikes of innovation elsewhere in the last few years.
The story happens to include walk-on parts for a lot of the people responsible for all those spikes. It has a starring role for Shane Dillon, who quietly moved on from his role corralling the FCO bloggers a few weeks ago.
The blogs have provided the ministers and officials who use them with a useful channel to discuss their work. And in doing so, they've created a model for other bits of government - and other governments - to copy.
In particular, the Foreign Office blogs have demonstrated that government officials can participate freely online in an official capacity as part of their work. The blogs are not an add-on, they have become a routine part of what British diplomats do.
As we develop our digital engagement operation in DH, it's handy that Foreign Office diplomats are providing a daily, living example that it can be done.
The story probably begins in about 1997, with Simon Dickson as the first government web manager, running the Foreign Office website from a PC under his desk. There were no blogs then of course, but maybe his legacy was a spirit of digital innovation.
The first FCO blogs didn't appear until a bit later, but the early blogs were barely akin to the blogs you see now - more of an occasionally-updated-page than a blog, but pioneering in their own way.
I joined the FCO in 2007 and wrote a blogging policy despite a lack of bloggers. But then the Foreign Office inherited a blog and a blogging platform from Defra along with a new Foreign Secretary.
Neil Williams had created the first blog by a cabinet minister while at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (a story he has told on his own blog). It arrived at the Foreign Office, having passed through the capable hands of David Pearson at Defra.
Importantly for this story, the FCO relaunched the ministerial blog alongside 5 other official blogs by diplomats, which was a hint of things to come.
The Defra blog had already been evaluated by the Hansard Society as part of Digital Dialogues, work which was commissioned by the Ministry of Justice when Jeremy Gould was there, and run by Ross Ferguson (who turns up a couple of times in this story). Iterations of these blogs were evaluated in phase one, three and four of digital dialogues.
In 2008 the FCO blogs moved to a new platform as part of the FCOWeb project led by Tracy Green, that also provided a new platform for 250 embassy and high commission websites. The rapid expansion in official blogging at the Foreign Office proved that a duff decision about the technology was actually no barrier to developing a culture of official blogging.
2009 felt like a golden era of blogging in the Foreign Office as Shane Dillon got around the office championing blogging and other social media innovation. The official blogging policy had by now been relaxed to follow a model of "presumed competence". The FCO trusted its staff, the blogs were proving useful, and there was no evidence that blogging was any riskier a proposition than the other things diplomats were doing every day. 50 diplomats were regularly blogging now; FCO bloggers were named in lists of the top bloggers in the world; and the British approach to diplomatic blogging was getting noticed, and shared and copied around the world.
In 2010 Jimmy Leach, who'd been responsible for social media innovation during his time at No 10, and then Ross Ferguson arrived at the FCO to work on Digital Diplomacy. And then Steph Gray - who'd led so many of the other innovations around government digital engagement during this time - began to turn up at King Charles Street, helping the team make more use of blogging tools. The blogs had a bit of a facelift a couple weeks ago and they're looking good to me.
Blogs are mainstream at the FCO now. They are not the novelty they were when I was there. The challenge for the FCO is what to do now. Having created the model, proved the value, and sorted out the technology, blogging should be easier and more effective than ever for Foreign Office officials. Departments like DH - where we have a handful of official bloggers but not the same established culture of official blogging - will be looking on with interest (and a little be bit of envy).
Disclaimer: I've probably got some of the facts and dates wrong, and I know I've left lots of names out.
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5 comments
Comment by Steph Gray posted on
Amen to that.
It's not until you get up close to those blogs that you realise just what quality there is there. Proper Ambassadors - Director-level people in any other department - writing interestingly, and off their own bat, on a regular basis from some rather fruity hotspots around the world. I wouldn't like to trade places with our man in Somalia (though a secondment to the British Virgin Islands doesn't sound all bad). In one day last week, the homepage featured stories of chance encounters on the Cairo underground, trade treaties in Ukraine, gender equality in Sudan and the Ambassador to the US' rose garden.
And without wishing to do down another department still paddling in the shallows of blogging, really, but you see the gulf in class between the Ministerially-led BIS Blog and the freedom to write in conversational, honest, often personal, language that the FCO bloggers have earned, with occasional dips into hot water I'm sure.
Your role in community managing that group has been tremendous - leading the internal campaign as you rightly call it. The way you've made time to document process and policy to just the right level, without sacrificing momentum, seems to have really embeded these approaches not just in one organisation, but two now.
p.s. There's one or two more bits to the 'facelift' that ought to be blogged about in their own right one of these days...
Comment by Simon Dickson posted on
I've always said I was fortunate to be at FCO at the moment the Internet 'happened'. FCO's job was global communication; how could it not embrace a technology designed to do precisely that, instantly and at zero marginal cost?
That isn't to say I got much active support from the upper tiers of The Office; few knew, fewer cared. But it probably sounded like something they should be experimenting with. I was given my own office at age 23, and and I was left to my own devices (literally). I mean, how much damage could I do? 🙂
There *were* a couple of blog-esque moments in my time: I have fond memories of the Commonwealth summit in Edinburgh, in late 1997, where I wrote an online newspaper for the event: every page manually coded in Notepad. Part formal event communications, part 'colour' articles, lots of photos, no 'management' oversight. Can't imagine that being permitted now.
But on a day to day basis, the closest we came would have been the daily updating of Travel Advice notices - received via fax, and retyped manually; or the daily lists of Douglas Hurd's Ministerial engagements. Cutting edge stuff in its day, though: we were the first to do 'real time' updating, whilst most departments were posting occasional floppy disks to Norwich.
PS it was 1995, it was a Linux server, and it was on a side table of its own. PCs hadn't yet moved under desks at that point. 🙂
Comment by Ross Ferguson posted on
Thanks Stephen.
Being part of the lineage of digital diplomacy at the FCO has been an honour. Working with our bloggers has been fantastic and helping them transition to a new platform has been particularly rewarding.
Now that our blogs run on open source software we have a new found flexibility that makes the question 'what to do now' a very interesting one because of all the options in front of us.
This next chapter starts off in a fairly pedestrian manner as our bloggers and their support team learn WordPress and debug our installation and design. I say 'pedestrian' but in fact since our launch three weeks ago we've already added 12 new blogs.
We do want more FCO bloggers but more important to us is the quality of our blogging. This means we will place a greater emphasis on good writing based on unique and authentic insights into the delivery of FCO objectives in some very challenging and exciting settings. We want a greater frequency of posting and more engagement when those who read our blogs leave comments against posts or elsewhere online.
More, better blogging isn't an easy ambition to realise. Our bloggers are busy, busy people doing difficult jobs. We know that blogging is low on their list of priorities. But with our new platform we have set out to take the pain out of publishing and make it easier for our bloggers when they do find the time. Indeed, with WordPress some of our bloggers have been posting via their smartphones while on the move, or using photos or a video where they are quicker (and more compelling) than writing.
Naturally some bloggers are more engaged in the medium and for some it has become an core tool of their trade. For the first time on our blog platform, we can begin to incentivise these bloggers by giving them more direct control over the functionality and presentation of their blogs. So while we can maintain a consistent user experience we can also customise to suit specific people or situations.
I foresee many more multi-author blogs, more local language posting and 'special edition' blogs that are about events rather than personas. Indeed, I expect us to apply our WordPress platform in ways that doesn't involve blogging at all.
This we hope will be progress. An evolution of the blogs which future digital historians will want to post about.
Comment by Neil Williams posted on
Great post Stephen. Like a trip down memory lane for me! Ross was involved even earlier - advising us and evaluating the Miliblog at ODPM.
"paddling in the shallows of blogging"... That might be a bit harsh, but undeniably BIS has some way to go culturally to match FCO. There is a difference, though, between a Whitehall policy department and an organisaiton whose entire operation is based on devolving trust, and getting things done by talking.
The need for a huge 'digital by default' cultural shift is something we were discussing only yesterday and are raising to the management board soon. Might cite this conversation.... your comment is not unhelpful!
Comment by Public Strategist posted on
A long long time ago, I occasionally got to read Foreign Office telegrams. There was a telex machine in the basement for receiving them (and for no other purpose), and there was none of this new fangled internet or blogging (or even email for that matter). I enjoyed reading them for their style as much as their substance. They stood out from the swamp of prose generated in the rest of Whitehall for their clarity of expression and for the sense of human voice they somehow managed to retain on even the dullest of subjects.
I have no idea how so distinct a form of expression survived some prose version of Gresham's law where the bad drove out the good, but somehow it did. I read FCO blogs as reaping the benefit of a culture which long preceded them.
None of that detracts from the achievements of the blogging pioneers and those who have nurtured them, but if my view is any way right, it's potentially bad news for the rest of us in departments where the culture of written expression is very different. Culture does not change quickly or easily and perhaps the challenge for BIS which Steph describes needs be met by encouraging better submissions as a step towards creating the possibility of better blogging.