Take this as your invitation to the next FutureGov Network event.

We will be running our next meet up in partnership with Huddle at Sun Microsystems‘ offices focusing on using web technology to improve collaboration and innovation in councils. It’s a humdinger and a shift in emphasis for us since we have so far focused on how to involve citizens in local government at our events, but what goes on inside the council is just as important, if not more so.

While councils desperately try to get their noggins around social media for citizens they are just as rapidly banning social software left, right and centre for their staff. So what’s a council worker to do? Probably bury their head in the sand and hope the bosses make up their mind.

Meanwhile, the pressure on councils to save money and re-think the way public services are provided is growing. With Gordon Brown finally talking about ‘cuts’ the reality of providing better services for less is finally dripping through.

How can the public sector, and local government in particular start to become the change they need to make? In my view change starts from within. Councils that have Twitter accounts to push out their press releases yet block Twitter for staff will never be in a position to innovate or push the boundaries of public service because they’re acting inconsistently.  And those that have yet to make a foray into web technology will have to leapfrog the learning curve or find themselves obsolete as citizens find ways to meet their needs themselves.

In order to change public service to meet people’s needs at a price that can be sustained the sector needs to challenge and innovate. And how can you innovate if you have organisational silos, poor information management, tightly controlled communication, or no communication at all? These are all the hallmarks of dysfunction and lead to staff continuing to do what they’ve always done, just to survive.

If you want citizens to engage, you’ve got to get staff to understand what it means to engage. Role modelling is, after all, a key leadership skill. They need to feel how it feels to be able to share information and ideas across the organisation and they need to see first hand how useful all of that is for Getting Stuff Done.

Our session on 1st October will introduce some great web tools for enabling that across the organisation, or even between a couple of teams – starting small is often the best way. We’ll also look at some of the barriers in organisations and try to come up with some ways around them.

If you’re interested in using social tools for more than just communications you can find out more about the event, including the programme, and sign up to attend here: http://socialorg.eventbrite.com.