Tartan tweets
A while ago I presented at a gov statsy thing in Leeds and bumped into Gregor Boyd who’s a statistician at Scottish Government. We talked about the work he’d started with @ScotStat and I offered to run a day’s workshop for Scottish Government statisticians wanting to develop things. It covered:
- what the team and I at ONS have learnt over the last two years;
- a mini unconference / free for all to discuss their plans and pains; and then a
- thorough look at digital content, namely copy, static imagery and interactives.
Here are my slides (with Scottish references I was assured would be well received!)…
http://www.slideshare.net/statisticsONS/social-media-gov-stats-40556697
…which seemed to go down well…
https://twitter.com/trishiecampbell/status/524209574585573376
Although someone got upset by my scoring in the quiz
Importantly, of the 30 or so in the room, 20 had personal Twitter accounts (a prerequisite to signing up to the workshop). This was really important to enable wordsmithing exercises and an online treasure hunt / quiz, but it also ensured we could get into the nitty gritty of how the guys could improve their work, instead of them just sitting through something on social media basics. (The whole workshop did focus on Twitter a bit too much though, which was appropriate for where the guys were with their work. It’s organically done well for ONS for a reason, so it made sense to concentrate on that. Plus there’s only so much you can cover properly in a day.)
The day also included three talks from people behind @NatRecordsScot, @NHSNSS and @SGRESAS which sat really well with my stuff. We also talked about some practical challenges and how they might be overcome; some easier than others.
So yeah, all in all a worthwhile trip. I’ll run an iteration of it for February’s Digital Festival at ONS. Just need decent phone signal or a big room with wifi – both in short supply 🙁