100 social examples in local gov

I’m lucky to have a job where I get to celebrate the success of others in local government, I work for Local Government Improvement and Development (formerly the IDeA). But that means that I’m often called on for examples of successful implementation of whatever it is I’m working on now. (performance management, partnerships, customer insight and now social media and open data). I’ve been using social media to do this for a long time, blogging about the work that I do and the people I meet and the examples I see. But these are often just examples, I don’t know how good they are, if they worked, how well they worked, or perhaps people are just starting out. So, I’ve sometimes been a bit hesitant to publicise them widely and sometimes the practitioners haven’t wanted me to do that either, especially if they were still in the early phases.

But social media is different – the examples are already “out there”. And since this is social media, I thought –Hmmm, why keep this private? Let’s start collecting and sharing examples the social media way. Since the beginning of 2010, I’ve been using posterous to share examples of the use of social media and open data in local government. I’m not picky about what platform or tool people are using or even where they are (though the vast majority are from the UK, where I work) but it has to be local government. Although I do cross-post to other platforms, using posterous’s auto-post function having all the examples in one place means I’ve always got a well of examples I can draw on for presentations or other work and others can use it, too. You can find it at www.socialgov.posterous.com

I’ve just posted my 100th example this morning! One I found right here on GovLoop.

Updated to add: I’ve also posted about this on my blog with a bit more detail on how I use it to support community management,