Hi James,
Well it is turning out to be interesting for sure. I had my first one to one with the DG of Communities yesterday (Sarah Davidson, profile here http://www.gov.scot/About/People/strategic-board/GovernanceandCommunities and Twitter here: https://twitter.com/SPDA) I kicked off with two things: establishing her online aspirations personally and for her portfolio and that I wasn't happy to leave without work to do to help her out. Sarah is *bright* and *talented* and isn't a stranger to social media. She has a particular interest in how social media can help people inside SG share their stories, network, find each other and collaborate on pieces of work so we spent time on that. She shared an interesting experience/slight frustration that when she writes about her day to day work and poses questions on our internal social platform (for the moment Yammer), no one interacts with her. This is a problem of a deeply hierarchical organisation I think and will take some work but I can understand how she feels as she's not at all unapproachable. We identified some areas we can start working on and I can go into all that Friday if anyone is interested. I have another MOT tomorrow lunch time with DG Finance. I have never met her but by all accounts she might not be as savvy as Sarah and is quite appreciative of the offer of advice and help. More Friday...
On a more granular level, our work with policy teams has been *very* busy on the consultation but *very* slow on the action. So, we have been giving detailed, bespoke advice and recommendations to policy teams on the digital aspect of their engagement work but we see very little follow through. There are stacks of reasons why this is (happy to talk about this more on Friday) but it seems our Open Data team is going to be working with me to create and promote an online engagement and idea crowdsourcing instance. I'd like to talk present this Friday and contrast SG's approach to approaching open data in the public sector with other examples from our reading for this module and elsewhere.