So what did Steph Gray ever do for us?
Today the man they call @lesteph is leaving the Civil Service to work on… well, other le stuff. Read about it in his own words here.
I’ve spent the best part of a year working alongside him since the creation of BIS brought our two teams together in June 2009. If you’re reading this blog you’ll most likely know Steph already so I won’t bang on about his personal qualities – it’s just not British. Instead I’d like to say a few things about what he’s done.
- Redefined how to consult online. Government webbies used to experiment with ways of collecting feedback using established tools like discussion forums, webchats and wikis. Enter Steph with the ‘commentable document‘ approach, Commentpress and Commentariat which have since become standard issue for any online consultation worth its salt.
- Gave us cool free tools to do it ourselves. By open sourcing what he built, even lending hosting and tech support here and there, Steph made the previously impossible easy, saved public money and influenced digital bods across Whitehall to come up with similar solutions – and to open source their stuff too.
- Opened doors …and held them open. It became easier to persuade risk and security people that the sky wouldn’t fall in when there were examples we could point to. UK government’s adoption of digital engagement was sped up in no small measure by the tools, precedents, advocacy and even cheeky lobbying that Steph brought to the party.
- Set strategy and defined digital engagement. He gave us his take on what digital engagement is all about and how it fits into the traditional work of a government department, refining it into this listen > explain > engage > convene model, which I for one swiftly nicked.
- Pushed the boundaries of government PR. I’m pretty sure he introduced the social media news release into the corridors of power (or at least press office), not to mention doing interesting new things with dashboards and email alerts.
- Shared, shared and shared some more. He blogged, he coded, he lunched, he hosted, he spoke at events for the civil service and beyond, and he got the rest of us sharing too, setting up cross-government groups for both the digital engagement and intranet folk.
- And last but not least, he defined the scale and complexity of the operation with this slightly mind-boggling Venn diagram. You could base a consultancy on this alone. And maybe he will.
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Comments
As someone who blatantly stolen ideas from Steph since he first joined DIUS I’m sorry to see him move on 
Also as someone who has mainly been working for agencies beneath the Departments he has been working for the fact he managed to implement so much innovative stuff meant it was much easier to push ideas though and I’ve always appreciated that.
I’m sure he’ll continue to do cool stuff that I can re-use and I also look forward to seeing you implement your plans for the BIS website!
He first came to see me in “that place I used to work in” to see how we were using digital stuff. I thought at the time – “nice fella, very enthusiastic, great ideas, he should work here”. Since then he’s innovated, tested, deployed, argued, influenced and succeeded at an alarming rate. Shame he’s leaving, but I have a sneaky feeling he’ll be back in one form or other.. 
Hear, hear, truly an inspirational and very genuine guy – and yes just used the Venn digramm to explain these digital issues to colleagues who now want to use the model for a totally different subject matter.
Great post Neil and sums it up perfectly, Steph will be missing and it was his personal qualities which made everything he said about digital engagement so engaging and accessible – true gentleman!
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Hello, I'm Neil Williams. I'm a government web geek, a dad, a husband, a grower of veg, a keeper of hens and a lapsed comedy writer, roughly in that order. 
I wholeheartedly agree with this excellent post. Steph has been a pleasure to work with and an inspiration too. Even an #evilCIO like myself has to recognise skill, passion and innovation – if only to stamp them out!
But seriously, Steph has been a massive and very positive influence on the web community right across Whitehall and he has made all of our jobs more interesting and more rewarding.