Guest Post by Bob Ashley: Why I’m Mr. Lonely

[Note: Thank you for reading the sixth issue in my column on best practices in social media. Unlike the prior five in the form of question-and-answer interviews, this is a guest post by Bob Ashley. With the exception of minor edits and styling, the below is unchanged.]

Meet Mr. Lonely

The Province of Nova Scotia has 55 municipalities, including 31 incorporated towns, 21 rural municipalities, and 3 regional municipalities (including the Halifax city region).

How is social media happening in my provincial network of municipal administrators and their councils and publics?

Remember Carly Simon citing Nova Scotia in her song “You’re So Vain?” You know, about flying up here to see the “total eclipse of the sun?”

Well, if the sun were social media, then Nova Scotia deserves its repute as a great place to watch a total eclipse. But, social media as a heavenly body orbiting local government, at least in my region of Canada, is blacked out.

I’m Mr. Lonely. At least for the moment. But I want it to change.

Public administrators in Nova Scotia running these towns and counties do not connect or share through Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Google Docs, Basecamp, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Wikis, FriendFeed, Facebook, blogging platforms, or any other social media.

But you know what? I look across this monstrously wide, blue-whale of a land–Canada–and lo! I can’t find a single senior town or city administrator who tweets.

Mr. Lonely has nobody.

My name is Bob Ashley and I’m the Chief Administrative Officer for the Town of Berwick, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Here we are on Google Maps. We’re a small rural town with a population of 2,500, tucked in the Annapolis Valley, the agricultural heartland of the province.

The industry of growing, processing, and shipping apples occupied a prominent place in the town’s history, although less so now. Our motto is the “Apple Capital of Nova Scotia.”

What little social media effect I’m grope for is embryonic. I tweet under the moniker @bashley and that’s a humble halleleujah. I can’t connect with my Nova Scotia peers that way because they aren’t milling about in the Web 2.0 or Government 2.0 milieu.

I’m a lonely stranger.

Why social media ain’t happening here yet?

There’s a weaker predisposed need.

Physical social interaction between fleshy bodies (the working brand for 99.9% of human history) still works in small towns. I grew up in a big city (Toronto), but I moved to a small town. I thought I could get better connected. It worked.

I reckon people in small towns see each more regularly, do more stuff together, talk to each other more, rely on one another more than what goes on in big cities. Small towns are just friendlier than megalopoli.

It’s got to be a numbers, density, or circumstance thing because obviously people in small towns are no better bred than their city cousins. But small numbers in small places mean you can’t hide, can’t dispose of or avoid relationships as easily as you can in a big city.

If someone cuts you off driving on Main Street in Berwick, best think twice about giving them the finger.

That person is quite likely to be in your social network, even if twice or thrice removed. Your bumptiousness will get around town via voices-in-air, the original social media.

People can and do get away with a lot of anti-social behavior in big cities. It’s easy. I did it myself. But you’ve got to be disciplined to thrive in small town social circles. But that’s just a start. It’s about: Sacrifice. Civility. Helpfulness. Volunteering. Sharing. Tolerance. Community. Celebration. Friendliness. Pride.

Hey, sounds like the social media mantra, no? You can’t just “unfollow” anybody in a small town whenever the whim strikes.

So, interactively, small town and rural people get in each others’ faces as a routine matter of social habit.

Here, the analog to twittering is the hand-wave to 10 or 22 people on the street, every day, from the windows of cars and trucks, in the stores, on the sidewalk, in the cafes, beside the ballfield dugout, on my bikeway to and from work.

Small town tribes organize local fundraising events, community and church suppers, bingos, amateur sports events, work on local committees, and everything else social. The connections are multiple, multivarious, interpenetrating, neighbour-rooted and recurrent.

Let me risk this thesis: Electronic social media flourishes proportionately more in and between cosmopolitan circles than rural ones because cities possess a critical mass of potential participants needed to gather social media momentum.

Some might venture, too, that postmodern, urban living is more alienating, more fragmented, more threatening than traditional rural life. More urbanites; thus, understandably need what social media can give.

Not knowing your neighbour across the hall in Apartment 17C, for example, is predominantly a urban phenomenon. That’s what it used to be like for me, anyhow. In Toronto (with a population of 2.5 million thereabouts at the time), I hardly knew anybody. But now, I know practically everyone (out of 2,500). The advantage of big urban numbers is to gain traction for the proliferation of participants.

In the words of Ged Carroll, a talented blogger who runs renaissance chambara:

I barely know anybody on my block, many of my neighbours are post-graduate students at Queen Mary College and I have very little local knowledge beyond The Morgan gastro-pub right around the corner from my house…

I couldn’t tell you who is a good GP to sign up with, the name of a good quality local plumber or which school to try and send your kids to. I don’t know my local councillor and couldn’t tell you the hot ticket issues affecting Tower Hamlets council.

How small towns are social networks

That’s the title of a SocialMediaToday blog article by Susan Murphy. It spelled relief for me because her angle recognizes the robust social networks already working in small towns. As she exclaims in “The Network is Thriving:”

Here’s something to consider – what kind of leader are you being in your social networks? If you’re like my Father-in-law, you’re listening, understanding and helping. And then you’re doing it some more.

The Network is Thriving

This is a photo I took in the lobby of the little motel we stayed at. It’s a photo of Arborg’s social network.

There is a business card for just about every business in town on this little board. Hairdressers, insurance companies, home heating, jewelery, carpentry, you name it–it’s there.

There’s no computer. No LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter. Just cards, tacks, and cork.

It’s a short step to transplant that logic into Nova Scotia’s local government milieu. Our public administrators, indeed public elected officials too, also tend to be very well connected in the old ways. We see and talk to each other, recurrently, at local or regional events.

We do have a email listserv where peers share knowledge across a network, but it’s just so annoyingly 1989; annoying, for all the reasons you’d care to offer but I won’t rehearse.

Why it ain’t happening yet–draining count of Gen X, Y, Z’s

Rural areas in Nova Scotia are bleeding from the neck demographically. Youngbloods are moving from rural to urban centres. But urbanization is a global phenomenon, so we’re hardly weird. Leslie over at Uptown Uncorked dubs Gen Y’s digital natives. This is important, as Leslie writes:

For that reason when it is time to consult on a [social media] project I turn to my colleagues in Generation Y first (personally, I prefer Digital Natives to Gen Y as a “label”).

We Bluenosers (nickname for Nova Scotians) are really getting short of digital natives.

Sure, a few of us elders have gone native, but that’s just not the same thing as having it in your DNA. We have a high count of boomers and older people and what these people bring to their communities is precious. These age ranks grew up waving to–not texting–each other, through the barbershop window, in the park, at the bingo hall. Many are very social minded, socially active, but not in the ways of the electronic social media.

No to either-or | Yes, to both-and

It’s commonplace that nowadays no small town society is an island. Connections with a global reach count now and social media are a kind of clutch which helps engage that flywheel.

Importantly, too, my values as a public servant don’t come to a dead stop at the town limits. I see professional duty in public service extending out into the world. Hence, for all the virtues of yesteryear’s social media, I’m not advocating an either-or dichotomy, pitting physical against virtual social media. Instead, Mr. Lonely wants both-and.

Thus, it sounds kinda funny to me when Jon Swanson of the Levite Chronicles writes in an either-or kinda way about the personal street encounter as if now extinct, now replaced with its electronic surrogate.

Remember how you used to walk down the street and say hi to people along the street? That’s what I do when I turn on my computer.

And I think he’s calling it right for millions of (urban) people. But there are millions more of us–rurals and townees–who still say hi to people on the street. Having my arm poised in the ready-position for today’s waves.

I’m enjoying making many e-connections with all sorts of interesting, engaged, intelligent e-government types of people. Learning tons. And yet, I’m Mister Lonely in my own eHouse. The both-and dream for me constitutes a meaningful interpenetration of my physical professional network and my virtual one. I’m pretty sure it can happen, but I suppose it’s still a bit too early.

Mr. Lonely is looking for advice!

Here’s the rub. Here’s why I love social media. Some people in London or Brisbane or Boston, via social media, are helping me to do a better job at work.

A lot of people blog or tweet about what they know–they’re experts. I learn lots. It follows, then, that a lot of the blog articles are prescriptive, along the lines of Ten Ways to Exploit X or How to Benefit by Doing Y.

But me, I’m no expert. This guest post for Ari, therefore, is not prescriptive, but conscriptive. Maybe I can conscript a reader or three to chime in with opinions, advice.

Stuff I am doing

Listening. Remember, I’m not a social media expert. I’m doing lots of listening. I’m watching social media initiatives take root in other locales around the world, like Harringay Online and Barnet’s whereilive and trying to absorb the wisdom of people like Tim Davies and Ari Herzog and many others.

Dabbling. I’m dipping my toes into most of the big name social media spheres–like Twitter and Facebook. I listen and dabble to try to figure out what this is all about. As I learn I might try threading the benefits of social media into my town, my county, my province.

I’m chair of a group known as the Joint (Provincial/Municipal) Egovernment Committee. As chair, I’m hard-pressed to elevate personal advocacy above neutral facilitation, but I do try to keep mentioning social media. One of our projects for the upcoming year is to host a virtual mini-conference.

I’m also chairing our Nova Scotia Municipal Website Venture. This is an intermunicipal partnership of 15 or so units who is using open source software to build and run municipal websites–Joomla, to be specific.

One goal is get so-called web mastering out of the IT closet, in order to distribute responsibility for web content among more participants.

So, for example, my recreation director does recreation stuff on the website and my community events person does her thing. And I do the front page in a bloggy, newsy kind of way. And we’ve got a couple of online polls to solicit public input. We’ve opened up all articles for public comments and this has worked well, if sporadically. We still have a long way to go, though.

Electronic municipal elections. Here’s where Berwick is perched on the bleeding edge. In the role of Returning Officer, I ran a local election in which citizens could cast votes for Council and School Board officials by voting online or by phone.

That was fun, went without a hitch, and lots of people really liked it, calling it convenient, slick, easy, fun, democratic. A company called Intelivote did all the infrastructure support work for us. Only three towns in the province went electronic.

We’re also partnering with five other other municipalities, the Nova Scotia Community College, and Acadia University in a 72-strand high speed fiber network known as the Valley Community Fiber Network. Stretching 186 kilometres, it follows Highway One, connecting Halifax with Middleton, and numerous municipal partners along the way.

We just completed the capital build and we’re now exploring ways to exploit this asset–telephony, video conferencing, long distance education, medical applications.

Should we elevate the status of both-and?

I think so. I like Shannon Paul’s angle on this:

In 2009, we need to do more than just talk about the value of relationships and foster them instead. The tenets of social media should apply offline as well as online right? Shouldn’t the real dialogue begin with us?

A lot has been made about Obama’s virtual mastery. But lost in that fervor is his virtuosic ability to reach out, to wave, in real time, to real people, in real places, every day.

Waving to real people in real time shouldn’t be something we remember we used to do, but something we remember we will do.

My own challenge would attempt transformation of the either-or of the offline/online dichotomy into a both-and offline/online union.

What are the chances?

[If you would like to contact Bob Ashley, he can be reached by email at bashley@town.berwick.ns.ca or on twitter at @bashley. And here is Berwick's town website in Joomla.]

If you have any feedback or advice for Bob or me, please add a comment below. (If you are not reading this at ariwriter.com, please click here so Bob can see all comments in one place.)

If you would like to be featured in a future Q&A or guest post offering best practices in social media, please contact me.

Selected photo credits: joesflickr and acaben.

Related posts:

1. Guest Post by Craig Kessler: Building Blocks of Me
2. Guest Post by Kenneth Weiss: When Social Media Becomes Slightware, Your Brand Does Not Stand a Chance
3. Guest Post by Christina Chan: Why Solving Climate Change Begins with Humanity

Tagged as: Civic Engagement, culture, globalization, Government, ideas, networking

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