To kick the week off I completed the mandatory Recruitment and Selection workshop. The day itself was an enjoyable mix of scenarios and role playing to help us know about recruitment ‘The Bristol City Council Way’. However the pre-workshop homework was an exercise in frustration. The previous week I set aside an afternoon to read the policy and related guidance but the intranet was down. I took the work home for the weekend and low and behold I needed the intranet as practically ever reference was buried in the intranet which isn’t available from home. Why use the web if you force staff to be on-site you may have heard me cry. The only solution was to head to the office for much of Sunday which didn’t make me popular at home. I would pick apart the workbook but the trainers say we are the ‘last’ cohort of the current process. I will say that throwing a bunch of barely related questions together without hyperlinks or consideration for the user in a Word document doesn’t cut the mustard in 2013. My e-learning inner-self had to button it!
Tuesday was largely catching up with the team and me introducing Trello for the whole team to see what major activities we are all working on, myself included. Although we are a nominally a traditional Council team, we are all remote from each other so we need to operate with a proper remote team mindset and use tools to help us achieve our mission (grand eh). This is why I’m looking forward to the new book from 37signals remote office not required out this coming Tuesday.
Wednesday had me wearing my digital fund-raising hat and looking at a magic 8-ball to see what the future of crowd funding might look like. Once I was able to slip this hat I quickly donned my ‘future of digital in a museum’ hat and wrote a 1 page ‘Digital as a Platform’ piece for the senior management team. It included remote working, wearing technology and the museum as publisher. Once it has been used for its intended purpose i’ll throw it up on the blog. As an aside I suggest listening to And the Crowdfund Goes Wild with Yancey Strickler (Episode 42) to hear from one of the kickstarter co-founders.
On Thursday I squeezed in a tour of the Bristol Records Office and got to see a book that has been given to the service. It is a lively diary of a four month trip and we will be running a social media campaign to tell the story which is pretty exciting.
After the tour I got to sink my teeth into some plate spinning around all of our existing online properties, unearthing some projects that require reviewing.
On Friday I enjoyed a lunchtime talk I wrote about the other day and met with a Council directorate that I hope to work with in 2014 as they do some pretty interesting stuff around infrastructure, Green Cities and innovation. Unfortunately the day had to end with a problem pre-dating me joining that I hope can be resolved very soon.
Alex Rankin, who works at the museum service wrote a little bit about the talking cranes project we are breathing new life back into over on his blog which is worth a read.