This post is unlikely to be either interesting or even entirely comprehensible unless you were at, or at least know about, Govcamp. Normal cosmic relevance will be resumed shortly. But if you weren’t there and want to persist anyway, this post and the links it contains will give you a sense of what it’s all about.

This is a rather delayed post about Govcamp as an event, attempting to find a balance both between useful reflection and tedious reliving of an event now past; and between accepting that Govcamp just is what it is and continually striving to improve it to a point where it becomes a different thing altogether. It’s not really about the content, which this year was as ever rich and challenging, though I still intend to write separately about the session I facilitated, on managing change beyond transformation.

 

What are we trying to do?

If we go right back to the basics, it’s all pretty simple. We want to get a group of stimulating, like minded (but not too like minded) people together, find out what they might be interested in talking about, and then get them talking about it. There’s some history – or baggage – to quite how we do those things at Govcamp, but the doing of them seems to me to be the irreducible core of what it’s all about.

That makes it essential to have an idea of who is there and who might be interesting. It is optional to do that by massed sequential introductions. Essential to create the programme largely in the moment, but optional to pitch by open outcry. Essential that the programme is made as clear as it can be as soon as it can be, optional quite how that is done.

Could we do it better?

If there is a concept which has increasingly flowed through Govcamp sessions, it is continuous improvement. It would be odd not to apply that approach to Govcamp itself. So while I have some sympathy with those who counsel against unproductive navel gazing (and indeed have so counselled myself before now), I see no reason why Govcamp should not adapt and improve. Looking back, it’s clear that that just happens in lots of ways: there is a different mix of people talking about a different mix of things and with a different sense of context and priorities. After my first Govcamp in 2010, I wrote:

I found my concerns about personal data and transactions and about government as service provider rather than information broker feeling a bit on the margin.

One way or another, I spent quite a lot time this year talking about transactions, government not just as a service provider, but as a service. Admittedly, I didn’t talk much about personal data, but that’s not because it wasn’t being talked about. More subtly, but I suspect much more importantly, I felt a small shift in the group culture this year which was hard to pin down, but is really important. The slight sense of beleaguerment that has been apparent sometimes in the past has faded away, leaving both greater self-confidence and greater realism.

But the very fact that this year’s event felt more coherent and engaging to me than the last couple doesn’t in itself answer the question of whether more could be done to make it better. So here are a few slightly random personal thoughts about what might change and what doesn’t need to

Ending introductions was brave – and right

Every Govcamp before this one has started with every participant introducing themselves to the assembled group. Even done amazingly quickly, it still takes a long time. I have argued before that, despite the obvious inefficiency of the process, it was still worth doing. This year, without making any fuss about it, the organisers just dropped the idea altogether. Jonathan Flowers thought that that was an interesting experiment but that we should go back to having them. I think it was an interesting experiment which changed my mind completely – essentially because I can’t think of anything about the rest of the day which worked less well because we hadn’t done the introductions. Moreover, as Glen Ocsko points out, the process has severe limitations in its own terms.

But finding out who people are really matters

Getting rid of the session doesn’t mean not caring who else is there. On the contrary, having a sense of who is who (and which human being are related to which twitter handles) makes a real difference. In another experiment this year, we all had name badges with words to ‘ask me about’ and ‘tell me about’. I didn’t have a single conversation in which anybody took the slightest notice of what was on my badge (or I on theirs). So that one, I think we can drop. The simple thing I would like instead is ludicrously large name badges that help connect names to faces at a range of more than three inches. And person to twitter translation matters, for reasons this exchange (and explanatory picture) make clear:

Belatedly realised I spent a #ukgc15 session sitting opposite @Jargonautical. Unless of course I didn't. http://t.co/xzuIqWaJn6

— Stefan Czerniawski (@pubstrat) January 24, 2015

@pubstrat it was indeed me the whole time. I am 100% behind you on the app request. pic.twitter.com/DSnRXy8ggk

— Lucy Knight (@Jargonautical) January 24, 2015

Pitching could be better

Creating an agenda out of nothing is hard, but it’s the glue which holds everything else together, and critically it’s the only information anybody has about what’s going on and therefore what choices to make. That makes it doubly unfortunate that the agenda setting session doesn’t work very well. The process rewards the strong of voice, the firm of queue, the certain of topic. Those who pitched, and especially those who pitched early, were distinctly more male than those who didn’t. And after all that, nobody can remember (well I certainly can’t remember) forty pitches clearly enough to make good decisions about which sessions to go to in any case.

I don’t want to lose the spontaneity, partly for the wholly selfish reason that I like not quite deciding what to pitch more than a few seconds in advance. But I do think a bit more structure would help and, having abolished the introduction session, we shouldn’t be apologetic about using some of the saved time to improve the way the agenda emerges. There are a couple of quick and easy things. I really like Jonathan Flowers’ suggestion about clearly distinguishing between sessions which are about describing achievements from those which are about asking for help or promoting debate. I also like his suggestion about being unapologetically overt about sponsor-led sessions – though I’d have them running sequentially rather than in parallel. But that won’t be enough. There is something bigger we need to do too.

I don’t pretend to have fully thought this through, but I think the core issue is putting less emphasis on the pitches by session proponents and more emphasis on supporting session participants in making choices. So here are four possible stages. It would probably take longer (though it might balance out), but it would be worth it.:

1. Capture ideas: There doesn’t have to be a single way of doing that. Some could be logged in advance, some pitched on the day. What matters is that each ends up on a physical or virtual card which is a sufficient basis for deciding on what’s interesting.
2. Find interest and connections: Make all the cards visible, then let people play with them. Give everybody a few dots to mark cards which look interesting. Bring cards together which might create a flow. If your card isn’t getting much excitement, or you can see another session doing essentially the same thing, feel free to withdraw or amalgamate.
3. Create the agenda: Almost everybody goes off for coffee and gossip networking. A few hardy souls map cards to rooms and time slots.
4. Share what’s on offer: All being well, we have an agenda with a slightly more logical structure (though no need to overdo that); a better fit of sessions to rooms, and greater clarity of what each session might actually be about.

Keep both feet

The law of two feet states that it’s perfectly acceptable to walk in and out of sessions at any time, for any reason or without any reason at all, without that reflecting badly on either the session or the walker. Jonathan tested the idea to destruction by spending one slot going to every session for five minutes. To nobody’s surprise, including I suspect his own, that didn’t turn out to be a very good idea. He also observed that the law isn’t widely used. That may well be true, but the power of the law of two feet does not come from everybody exercising it, it comes from granting legitimacy to those who do. Above all else, it reduces the cost of making mistakes, which makes it possible to be less safe in making choices (though as Jonathan also observes, better informed choices at the outset reduce the risk to be mitigated, which is another reason why investing time in making the agenda more effective is well worth it).

There’s no need for a grand finale

Unconferences are intrinsically egalitarian and informal. They don’t lend themselves to easy summary, grand perorations, or ending with a rousing call to action. And that’s absolutely fine. It’s not hard to find events where people stand at lecterns and present slides. Some of them are very good events with interesting people who are well worth listening to. But unconferences evolved to complement those events, not to replicate them.

So I was surprised and a bit disappointed to find that the last session at Govcamp was a conference presentation, not  an unconference session – the more so as there had been no prior warning, making it effectively impossible to exercise the law of two feet. That’s no reflection on the speaker or his message – it is the format which jarred badly not the content (though it would be interesting to debate some of the content too).

Such a session might just work if there were a single clear framing of audience and purpose, and thus an authoritative leadership voice. But one of the joys of Govcamp is that it is too eclectic for that. There isn’t a leader of the UK public sector digital community, because while there is a lot of community, there isn’t anything close to a single thing. Emily Turner’s Govcamp reflections bring out the reality of what in some ways are growing differences of context and experience, which no one perspective fully brings together.

Those who do the work make the choices

It’s easy to carp from the sidelines about how things can be better. But I have been involved with enough events to know that making them look effortlessly relaxed takes massive amounts of preparation and real hard work. I am prepared to give those willing to make that commitment considerable licence to make the choices they feel they need to to make the event work. In this case, James Cattell, Nick Halliday and Sarah Baskerville in particular did a fantastic job. I don’t agree with all the choices they made, or will make, but I make no criticism of them at all for making them, and I am deeply grateful to them and all the other camp makers for creating the conditions for such a stimulating day.

Photographs by Alex Jackson and David Pearson, licenced under Creative Commons