Chances are that newcomers to the local political playground will be social media savvy. Younger, faster, slicker than their long established peers? Maybe! Better politicians? Perhaps not, yet, but given time and the benefit of advice and guidance of their peers and they have the potential to be. The combination of this ongoig political education and use of social media tools, will over time strengthen the potential for the newbies to reach out further to their constituents. In the annual game of political musical chairs, those who can play the social media tune alongside the doorstep dancing, will find they’re the ones more likely to be sitting on the chair when DJ Purdah stops the music.

That said, not all long established councillors are social media ignorant, nor all young inaugurals aware of the real value or potential of social media tools. Just because you have a Facebook page or blog, or Twitter account, doesn’t automatically give you one-up-man-ship on an opponent who does without.

Maybe I have over-egged the impact use of social media tools can have on wooing the electorate, as you still cannot beat that face to face door step discussion, where your potential voter gets to see you and listen to you in the flesh. Human to human interaction, even for social media advocates, is not something dismissed as outdated and wasteful use of time. However, the way society is shaping up and technology allowing for swathes of citizens to access the internet and develop their own online presence, as we see commercial organisations beginning to utilise these tools for marketing and developing stronger customer bases, councillors need to also recognise the opportunities to develop and connect with their own customers in this very same way.

By having a blog, using twitter, setting up a facebook page, all and any councillor can begin to tap into the online communities that exist, and which are spreading all the time. Councillors are pretty blooming good at doing social: Listening, discussing, supporting, and taking up issues on behalf of residents or groups in the community. Social media tools therefore should hold little fear, although they do seem to in many cases.

The fact is that, even if you just have basic IT skills, it’s enough to be able to use a range of online tools. The biggest barrier is having the confidence to use them, or find out which one (if not all) is for you. Yet, it’s not just confidence about the tools themselves, rather how they can be used effectively.

CllrSocMed

Last year the CllrSocMed team undertook a number of social media group sessions across the Yorkshire and Humber region. These sessions were purely for councillors who wanted to know more about the ins and outs of social media, what it meant, the potential pit falls, saying the wrong thing, why should they use it, how will it make their life easier as surely its just something else they have tolearn but don’t have time for!

In excess of 50 councillors attended those sessions. Each of them took something positive away. The age range varied, as did the political hue.

The best thing about those sessions though was that they were not run by council officers, but fronted by councillors already using social media. Who better for a councillor to talk to, listen to, debate the range of issues that the words ‘social media’ raise, than with a peer who already uses them? So, whilst the officers offered technical support, Cllr Cooke (@SimonMagus), Cllr Cheetham (@CllrTim) and Cllr Cooper (@clrandrewcooper) were at the forefront of discussion, debate, advice and encouragement.

Some learning resources you just can’t buy…because they’re FREE!

What the CllrSocMed team were able to do was to capture a lot of learning from these sessions, developing resources that could be used by councillors anywhere across the country. They were generated as a direct result of questions raised and debates had by and between councillors.

This particular link will direct you to a range of material, to give you a flavour of what is on offer.

Where can CllrSocMed next be found?

The CllrSocMed team will next be found at Local Gov Camp North West, on 4 February 2012, and are very much looking forward to hopping over the border into the red rose county.

The role councillors play in the lives of their communities can be pivotal, especially in terms of planning, environment, community safety, health and education. If you had the option to make an even greater impact by reaching more people in your community, morereadily, that can only be a good thing, a quite powerful thing. Social media is the means by which this can happen!

The Holy Roman Empire - 1648

So after a week of feeling sorry for myself, because of some stupid chest infection that has rendered me incapable of being active, I have paid two visits to my Doctor and subsequently paid for two prescriptions. The cost hit my pocket, the antibiotics and steroids for my asthma hit my chest. At last, they seem to be working, thank goodness!

I can’t remember the last time (it must be years, probably when I used to smoke) I felt so unhealthy. There is only so much television you can watch. So, my recent return to reading history, after an absence of about nine years such is the time passed since finishing my degree, has been a welcome distraction. I studied history, not economics, so I ask forgiveness in advance if I get the economy part wrong!

The Thirty Years War, 1618-1648 (first published by Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1938), at the very off, made me consider how grateful I am to modern medicine – goodness knows what they would have given me for it back then, if anything. Equally, I wonder how widespread asthma would have been in those days, with lands and environment unencumbered by traffic fumes.

How things have changed, in medicine and transport? It really is a different world. Modern Europe, the Europe we know today, geographically too is only loosely recognisable. Religion was paramount to changes in power, princes caught between pressures from the Empire above and fiefdoms below, as the Catholic Church and Protestant Church fought out for influence (and the big side order of Calvinist and Lutheran protestant churches in conflict with one another) across Europe. While conflict today still exists in religion, our modern world is not anywhere near as greatly influenced as it once was, on Catholic and Protestant terms.

However, some things never change. Regardless of time, economies the world over are influenced by leaders, politics, religion, banking and of course trade and markets. Technology has opened up trade routes that 16th and 17th Century Europe could not even conceive to dream about. In this sense, our world is so much smaller, opportunities so much wider.

What is most intriguing, if I turn back some pages, was how closely the latter part of the 16th Century comes to mirroring current economic circumstance. For this, I will quote directly:

“The conditions which had produced Germany‘s greatness were ceasing to exist. Her culture had rested on the towns: but the towns were declining. The uncertainty of transport in a politically disturbed country and the decline of Italian commerce had disastrously affected German trade. Besides which, her currency was wholly unreliable; there was no effective central authority to control the issues…Meanwhile German credit declined and dangerous speculation led to the collapse of one great banking-house after another.” (p37)

It goes on to list banks of the time which went into liquidation, of proportions perhaps equivalent to the Lehman Brothers liquidation of our very recent times, and the widespread number of countries, fiefdoms, and powerful families it came to affect, without mention of those at the bottom of these tall and massively complicated social and political hierarchies.

It would be a ridiculous notion and many steps too far to suggest another thirty year war could be in the offing within the next few decades. Though recent unrest among a public more informed than those of the 16th and 17th Century (though I am not claiming with an increased wisdom), that is beginning to emerge across Europe and now-a-days the wider world, is a clear indication of how important the economy, and economies, are in affecting the our daily lives.

If there is one constant in the world, if there is something that history has taught us, it is that regardless of religion, political leanings or political rule or leadership, our lives are more often than not subject to the economic position of our country. There are few that can escape an ecomony’s clutches!

Only just approaching 3 months into this role and I have met people, heard stories and gained an awareness of socital situations I didn’t know even existed, other than through the fictions of television. Truth be told, some insights put Shameless to shame. Often, the characters don’t have such philosophical insights or turn of phrase, to match those bequeathed to be possible on screen representations. You see, the television characters have script writers who provide them with humour, pathos, philiosophy, tragedy; they have a director who shimmys them to perform a scene in a particular way. On television, the characters are part of a wider society, with interchangeable plots and story lines involving a select number of characters who inhabit small geographic area, who’s paths are  intwined, preserved for posterity on film.

The implied or known backgrounds of real and fictional can have  stark similarities; jobless, pennieless, rough sleepers, young kids of 16 thrown out by parents, wrong’uns who would steal from you as soon as look at you, those who might have been in care, the abused, those with learning difficulties, sufferers of domestic violence (male, female and young people), sex workers, drug addicts and alcoholics, or those teetering on the precipice of disaster through an incident out of their control, those who appear out of acts of circunstance. There are those folk who have simply fallen on hard times, in a period where economic circumstance has kicked them in the teeth, left them on the floor, the foot of fate resting firmly upon their neck and  prevents them from getting up.

The reality of life for the unfortunates who find themselves in this position is something really very different. There is no small geographic area where they live, no shared notion of all being in the same or similar predicament where a variation on a theme binds their lives together. Yes, some may have friends, might have family, know good people who can help and support. Some might benefit from local services, charitable or council based. For many though, there is just existence. I am not able to say whether this is a lonely existence, whether they are content, whether they wish for better, or simply don’t know if better exists. Even when I take off my process and procedure tinted spectacles, I can still only look in through the window of these peoples lives and judge their life and what they don’t have, in direct comparison to my life and what I do have.

It is in this view, this narrow window of judgement available to me (to all of us) that lies an important consideration; perhaps the most important consideration, and one that has only come into my reality now I have worked directly in this field. In my short tenure, I have been out on visits with a colleague, sometimes to properties, other times just on the streets. He has introduced me to rough sleepers, maybe better known to passers by as tramps or beggars. He has informed me about their backgrounds, told me their stories. He has even intorduced me. I have therefore met and talked with several ‘tramps’, had one to one conversations with individuals that I otherwise, in my life as a citizen, would never have had. I have learned that these are real people, with real lives, that for some reason have been much less fortunate than I. They are detached from much of what  we consider normal, their behaviour an anomoly to us, because it falls outside of what we recognise as our societal boundaries.

The fact is that, as a citizen, my judgement would have been made through a greater ignorance than it is today, all those prjudices we hold against stark difference. Through the knowledge I am gaining, what I have heard, the people I have met, the back strories I become aware of that keep coming in all their variations and guises, I have learned what I believe to be a very important thing. It is not to judge differently, rather, to judge less.

As I often find is the case with my posts, I don’t think the conclusion is where I was going when I started out writing. The insights into  people who find themselves on the fringes of ‘normal’ society, whether permanently or just for a short while, is a topic on which I have minimal experience. However, sometimes I find the lesson learned via the unplanned route,  is more valuable. I’ll let you be the judge!

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At Kirklees Council, we’ve been webcasting now for over 12 months. Starting off with full Council, we have now extended our program and added Cabinet meetings and a range of Scrutiny Committees. We’ve also done some great internal communication, Meetings with Directors, with an attending audience, but then providing archived version available across the authority – resulting in hundreds more staff being able to see presentations and discussions for themselves, rather than potentially diluted or mis-informed messages creating the Chinese-whispers effect.

Additionally, with Full Council, we have been generating interest in our ‘Tweeting and Watching’ democracy. As the live meeting is being played out, a number of officers, councillors (including 3 out 4 party leaders) and members of the public have produced a decent quantity of good quality comment and commentary. For the first time, at Full Council of June 2011, we embedded a Twitter widget that inhabited a space directly next to the webcast footage.

This last 12 months or so then, have been about taking small steps and pushing boundaries, to find ways of improving democratic engagement and encouraging citizen participation. I’d like to think we’ve done this pretty well so far; though I would venture that we have not gone nearly far enough! We recognise there is still massive potential, still a long way to go.

This brings me to the recent #LGFinance event that we hosted in collaboration with Local Government Office and Ian Fifield (@ianfifield), at which we used for the first time Public-i’s ‘Cover it Live’ web stuff (that’s technical speak).

The content of the event was as the title suggests, Finance in Local Government, on which Ian is an expert. It was specifically aimed at councillors as a knowledge development exercise. Now, rather than just webcast the event, Cover it Live allowed us to explore some new ways to engage the audience.

Not only does the technology provide the visual webcast, it has an interactive twitter widget embedded (you can tweet whilst remaining on the same page) and also a ‘discuss’ function. Since we had several satellite centres watching as well as individual councillors, this allowed us to get a lot more socially interactive. Facilitating officers at satellite centres and the councillors were able to generate conversation, ask questions and make points. As the moderator for the online conversation, I was able to convey to Ian what was going on ‘out-there’, but also develop an almost separate experience for those observing the broadcast. As the moderator, I think there is some real distance in making sure there is a social communication focus, so as to enhance the interactivity (I am not suggesting I am this type of person, merely recognising the consideration).

There will of course be some official evaluation conducted of the session, and hopefully this will be favourable – but that’s out of my hands. I just hope it reflects the good feeling a had about the session.

The overriding considerations I took from that session though were the massive potential for expanding our democratic offer to citizens. Now, it is not as simple as just saying ‘yeah, let’s just do it!’ There are rules and regulations when it comes to scrutiny, governance and constitutions; even if you work these into your delivery, there are the practical elements of how you manage the citizen engagement in a way that is fair, inclusive, but above all meaningful to those citizens. If that is not planned properly and all considerations made to how you collaborate successfully with the public, then perversely you could end up alienating them from the very nature of what you’re trying to achieve – open and transparent decision making and democratic engagement.

There is a big role for experienced scrutiny and governance people to support making such changes and how they are best implemented. I think working with these boundaries and barriers is the first port of call. As it becomes clear how we can work with, within, or push these boundaries, it is then the time for those with a remit or experience in engagement to create a safe citizen environment. Indeed, it would be interesting to here some insights into what these boundaries and barriers are, even more so how they could be worked with and around!

The I believe the potential for citizen engagement and involvement using platforms such as Cover it Live is massive…MASSIVE!

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• Partnerships have matured, it’s time to invest in digital transformation! (spencerwilson.wordpress.com)

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve recently been considering service delivery in local government; especially areas where citizens are involved (or should be), or where services work directly with or within communities. It’s not ‘how’ we deliver services I have issue with, rather it’s about how we perceive that service delivery would be improved. To highlight the point, I’m going to use broad headings of ‘Partnership’ working and ‘Digital Technology‘ and the shift that I think needs to be made.

Partnerships born of expensive initiatives:

Our desire and pushing for services to work in partnership with one another, whether internally among council services, or with Police, Fire and health services (not forgetting the voluntary sector, community and faith groups) has been long established.

This has been done with a number of reasons in mind: looking at ways to understand each others service objectives; potential for sharing resources; finding out what the community needs; finding out what the community wants; what are the social and operational issues that influence service delivery…and many more.

For numerous reasons, greatest emphasis or drive for targeted partnership working has always been on the most deprived neighbourhoods and communities. Single Regeneration Budget (SRB), Neighbourhood Renewal (NR), and Neighbourhood Management (NM), have all had significant funds and focus over the last few years. These types of program were designed to address flagging economies of towns, or to create projects that addressed the needs of communities, create aspiration that would result in communities themselves contributing to dragging the areas out of deprivation…narrowing the gap!

Projects were funded to cover improving education, employment, training, capital investment, community safety, improving aspirations, with a myriad of services and people coming together to support their introduction.

With background in Neighbourhood Management and Neighbourhood Renewal, I am not without insight into how these projects or programs of work are decided upon and how funding is allocated. I have been involved in some really good projects, with a range of people, all onboard with delivering work that really mattered. To this day, I wouldn’t question our intentions of the time, the projects we funded, and the legacy we imagined we would leave behind.

Intentions with projects from within these funding streams always had a focus of ‘legacy’. That is, that they should be sustainable once the funding had come to an end. Some services are good at this bit, but more can simply sell you the idea they are and tell you what you want to know, just to get the funding. I attended a number of NR and NM conferences where a range of officers openly shared the idea that this was the case.

The crux of it, in my opinion, is that for all the hundreds of thousands of pounds, millions nationally, quite possibly the only real lasting outcome was the development and embedding of services working in partnership, rather than any massive lasting impact of projects that received funding.

Out of expensive initiatives come embedded partnerships:

There have been a number of initiatives that came out of focussed work in the communities, not least Neighbourhood Management Groups (NMG’s), in some areas. These became the on the ground, frontline service get togethers of Neighbourhood Policing Teams, Fire Service, Ward Councillors, Community Safety Officers, Community Workers, Environment and Highways service officers. They facilitated a coming together of local intelligence, where issues could be discussed and in many cases start to form solutions, or give focus to specific areas of need within communities.

Not only does this allow for awareness raising and addressing issues on the ground, it provides ward councillors with continued intelligence about their ward. This, coupled with information they get direct from their community, can then be taken into other forums and structures, like local area committees or if need be, scrutiny functions. It might result in a ward councillor being better equipped to debate or make points to at their political group meetings or in committee situations. It certainly better equips them to be able to feed back to and discus with communities what action they might be taking over a particular issue, immediately through frontline workers and strategically through local government mechanisms.

At a senior level in public sector organisations, Local Strategic Partnerships (LSP) have been developed, and tend to have a wide range of responsibility for developing partnership strategy. Below these, more service specific areas of focus exist in the form of Local Service Partnership Boards. Consisting of senior managers and range of public services and councillors, from a service delivery point of view, this is a means to linking top down strategic with bottom up intelligence.

The result of approaches to working in communities to narrow the gap, has for me, helped develop and embed not just the idea of partnership working but the practical application of such. To work successfully in partnership, we don’t need initiatives or expensive teams; we just need the correct mechanisms, a solid combination of shared service planning within a clear and focussed governance structure. A large number of councillors and officers have been around long enough now to more naturally gravitate toward working in partnership, who really understand the benefits of taking such an approach, and who equally no longer require full on intervention from officers who continue to try and make the links, when everybody knows already what those links are.

So, what’s my issue?

Why organisations should re-focus and re-double their efforts on transforming services through use of digital technology:

Senior management and frontline officers along with councillors in their leadership role, know how to make the links and get the best from partnership working, are intelligent enough to be able to use the governance mechanisms in place to best effect. Therefore, especially in these austere times, organisations need to start re-thinking where they are investing their funds when it comes to improving service delivery, with a focus on real outcomes and outputs.

Partnerships need to continue. I am an advocate of partnership working. Further heavy investment in such approaches is, however, not necessarily required. These well established ways of working will continue successfully without continuing to throw major funding behind specific teams.

What public sector organisations should be re-evaluating and making serious investment in is how they can better utilise digital technology to help transform services and create new approaches to engaging with the public. I am not simply talking about a social media approach to engagement, but recognition of using new web technology and where it is best placed to do this.

It is important to distinguish between social media and new web technologies, both of which have a big role to play only in different ways.

If you work for a service where citizen engagement is necessary, then social media (genuine two way interaction, building a relationship) should be looked into. A serious investigation into how you could do this, what the practical implications are and what the added benefits of it can bring to the organisation and the citizen, what of the many tools should be used to do this, and what it means to an individual service within a large organisation, all need to be looked at. Do I need to go over the point that social media is not a fad, that it is here, and growing at exponential rates? Probably not to the circles who might take the time to read this post, but circles of the less informed might do well to start looking into such methods of engagement. Equally, as is recognised across the experienced within social media circles, we are not blinded by the technology we use, and recognise the great importance of real human contact; we’re not geeks who want only communicate via pc’s and mobiles. Social media is adding avenues and outlets, bolting them on to traditional engagement methods.

Through recent project work I am undertaking in housing, tenancy support, I have discovered many and varied ways that we can create products and spaces to help and support our clients. From using Screenr and Jing, YouTube, flip-cams or phones, txt messaging, twitter and Facebook, I have started to look at how we can work with the team members to grab their knowledge and experience and turn it into long lasting products. The potential for developing support products for very little resource is vast, and even in a team who are ‘not IT friendly’, they have already contributed ideas and thoughts of what might be produced and what would help support them to improve the service they provide.

So, finally…

Local government and public sector organisations should seriously look at where they are investing funds to improve services and get the best out of meagre resources. I don’t believe it will come through continuing pumping money into teams designed to develop partnership working in the traditional way. Structures are firmly embedded to do this through a culture change that has taken place over a number of years, and services know themselves what they can deliver together, what they can’t, and where no amount of nagging and cajoling can change the fact they don’t have the resources to deliver everything, everybody wants.

Investment now should be made in areas where most development needs to take place, where services can develop new ways to deliver differently and make savings, and where by proxy partnership working will actually continue to be strengthened through development of client and citizen support products. New web technologies and social media should be given the same rank of importance now, as many other government initiatives were given in the past. I reckon that for a fraction of the cost, a smaller team of people going around and working directly with an individual service, will in the long run not only revolutionise and help us catch up with and engage better with citizens, but save a heck of a lot of money whilst making local government and public sector services far more effective.

Over the last few months the team have been running cllr lead social media sessions across the Yorkshire & Humber region. Along the way we have had some great fun, worked hard, and gathered together a wide range of resources, all freely available to you, the elected.

There’s a mixture of advice and guidance from short instructional videos, to real insights directly from some of your cllr peers who use social  media on a daily basis.

It can all be found on the CllrSocMed site, but below are links to give you an idea of what the social media world could mean to you.

Councillors and social media …why bother?

Steven Tuck explains …the internet and social media (in 2 minutes)

Some Tips on Twitter: Twitter in Plain English

Cllrs and Twitter: some alternative case studies

Steven Tuck explains …what is a blog? (in 2 minutes)

Blogger.com: How to set up a blog

Blogger.com: Add a new post and insert an image

Cllr Simon Cooke …talks Cllrsocmed

Cllr Tim Cheetham …talks Cllrsocmed

Cllr Mike Jordan …talks Cllrsocmed

That should be plenty for now. We would advise listening to your fellow councillors, it really is about you and them, rather than us!

Oh, and if you feel the urge, please feel free to add yourself to our councillor social media map.

Best of luck to all of you. Here’s to the future!!

Image via Wikipedia

Over the last few months I have been mentally noting a trend in negative or frustrated  Twitter comments toward BBC’s Newsnight. Now, it might just be me taking a massive stab in the dark at a percieved fleeting shadow, or maybe simply and solely my own boredom with these programs. However, I think there is a link here in similar vein to that of the

citizen journalist V’s professional journalist, that Twitterers and bloggerers are starting to not need the directed and often sanatised debate.

Where new web tools have allowed for a growing number of citizen journalists to arise, via blogging software or development of hyperlocal web sites, traditional media has in many ways seen this as an afront to their trade and the value they place on the professionalism and skill required to ‘do journalism properly’. The fact I am writing this blog, should indicate clearly which side of the fence I sit on, with regard to that type of argument. Equally, I wouldn’t want to tar all journalists with the same brush, but I would supply the feathers for 99% of them.

The fact is that trades and industries do change over time, especially in manufacturing, whether through economic circumstance or new methods of production. Our Great Britain tag was not simply built on the fact we ‘bullied’ the world for centuries, but more on our domination of the manufacture of wool, cotton and other fabric goods, etc. This we did with greater efficiency than could be done elswhere in the world. Oh, and the bullying probably did help a  little (read Burmese Days, by George Orwell). We clung on to the ‘great’ title probably a little too long as, like a stubborn child holding onto a lollipop stick even after the sugar is gone, we are reluctant to admit that there is nothing really left.

So taking that premise, journalists as Great Britain, kings of land and sea…sorry, I mean bullies…and us bloggers and tweeters as the rest of the developing world, there has been and still is a shift in power occuring of titanic proportions (shipping – another lost industry). Therefore the game has to change, and television is one medium that can continue to cling to it’s routes whilst still drawing us into it via our new social tools.

It is not, however, immune from a similar fate as it’s paper and print relative; it just has a different angle from which to try and prolong it’s life; sort of a Godfather, “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer” sort of approach (an approach that those writing for papersmight want take more stock of).

No, by entering into league with the tweeters by having it’s own hash tag and allowing for us to engage with it, it is in some way thinking that (hoping that) it’s audience will therefore be placated and satisfied by it’s efforts to keep up with the times. I don’t think the audience is, or will start to feel this way.

The strength in Twitter, as one example, is in it’s users ability to share information instantly, circulate thoughts, documents, links to websites (the BBC website), break news, discuss and debate throughout any given day. The opportunity of an individual, should they so wish, to be able to learn and inform themselves via social interaction has never been greater or easier to do.

So, 10pm, BBC2 no longer carries the same resonance as it once did. It was only a few years ago that you waited specifically for programs like this so you could hear the debate in earnest from oposing sides, it was where real news was dicussed warts and all. Sometimes there would be a heated argument and it was very exciting. But nowadays, I think much of this programming is grossly sanatised and does not connect very well with people. I believe programs like Newsnight have got to think a lot more these days about how they go about their business, if they want to remain useful to an increasingly more social media savvy public, who can get up to speed anytime, anywhere.

This is, of course, only my opinion.

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As a consequence, those local authorities who have taken on webcasting, could in some respects also be classed as progressive councils; they have grasped what this technology means, understanding it’s value. That is, the ability to reach a much wider audience than they could have previously only dreamed about, opening up democracy and providing transparent decision making, to the public they represent and serve.

Image by conservativeparty via Flickr

I’m a big believer in transparency, and webcasting is a tool that allows for displaying such. It was therefore refreshing when Eric Pickles, openly supported this and called for more of it from councils across the country.  What does surprise me is that there are some councils who have pushed against this openness (pre and post Pickles comment).

The technology for webcasting is now long established. I expect if those councils who have webcast for a number of months (if not years) all of a sudden stopped, there would be be some kind of public and local media outcry. Such activity as webcasting gets into peoples psyche, and in this case it manifests into a ‘citizen’s right’ to observe what goes on in the meetings of the electorate; a powerful thing, that kind of mindset! Of course, this is only my opinion.

However, webcasting of council meetings is only a part of the story. In most cases it is no longer innovative; certainly not on it’s own. In some places then, such as Kirklees Council, webcasting is becoming normal practice. So, just what is it that continues to make webcasting a useful tool? Well, I’ve been lucky enough to play a part in it’s implementation, so here’s what I think.

Who does it reach?: Openness and transparency, as stated, is very important. We vote to elect our representatives, and as citizens have a right to see what is going on in those corridors of power. But more than this, it also allows for officers to watch and educate themselves, about the wider debates and reasoning relating to decisions. This can be especially pertinent when their service is one of the hot topics of the night. The idea of a better informed staff, should be embraced by any local authority. Specific encouragement of officers to watch these meetings should therefore undertaken; innovative ways to help staff educate themselves, rather than send them on a political awareness training course (at least use some of the footage from a webcast).

Other media: The introduction of other social media tools is something else that, in places, has been cause of some consternation for some councils. Tweeting during a meeting has been frowned upon, but I find the frowning flawed. I won’t go into a rant about it, but…a mixture of tweets from citizens, officers and councillors, further opens up the transparency and engagement that the ideology of local authorities should be striving to do. A combination of media, in this case “Watching and Tweeting Democracy”, has worked well so far. There is no real reason it should stop, as the dialogue has been respectful and everybody has been very adult about the whole thing! The innovation then is how we can start to use a combination of social media tools, not simply one here and one there; get them in the same place.

Internal communication: This is an important addition to the webcasting of council meetings, a small step in more innovative uses of the tools at our disposal. At no other time has a local authority needed to open up the communication channels with it’s employees, as it does now. A number of Meetings with Directors have taken place, allowing staff to listen to and ask questions of directors. On a couple of occasions, webcasts have been recorded. What this has achieved is the ability to reach a greater number of employees, in effect creating a greater transparency and humanity in communication (rather than the obligatory long email; which actually still has it’s place, of course). The potential savings on conducting some communications in this way, is significant, and necessary and certainly as a taxpayer myself, something I welcome in terms of the council making best use of it’s resources.

In terms of uses for webcasting as a tool, I believe we have barely scratched the surface. The uses outlined above, themselves, all need to be driven and built upon in order for them to generate greater value, and that is possible through a bit of hard work and creative thinking. Where an authority empowers it’s employees to think and make decisions that best serve it’s citizens, engaging citizens in that more and more along the way, there is much that can be achieved.

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• Eric Pickles gets it right (libdemvoice.org)

There is clearly a lot of work still to do, and I am acutely aware there were some quite fervent objections to removal of a number of trees and to the change in location of the play area (I know, because I was the officer facilitating an area committee meeting where we received a presentation). Yet, I think what has been done has been done with respect and integrity.

I love the fact they used a lot of old photographs and ‘memories’ submitted by and collected from people who would have known the park as it used to be ‘back in the day’. So, bearing in mind not everybody is going to pleased with all elements, I think this new ‘old’ park is really good.

I took some photos that I hope capture some of the great renovation work, and how inviting the park now is…far more so than it was previously! Unfortunately, I only had my phone with me, so they’re not the best.

One of the most inviting things, maybe strangely, were the paths. They have all been tarmacked and the smooth even surface gives that great impression of ‘new’. And for bike riding, well Lil’Roo loved that bit!

For me, I love the reinstating of the lake/pond area, which is very pleasant to stroll around. Admittedly, it’s not all that relaxing when your youngest is circling it on her bike; she can swim, but still, be aware! Having a back drop which includes the band stand, really helps set the scene and I imagine that during the summer months (should we get them), there will be much frivolity.

Of course, there is also the play area, or several to be precise, which cater for the very young right through to the older children. Watch out for the zip-wire though, hold on tight,  it’s got a bit of a kick at the end!

Not yet fully restored, but what I expect to be one of the grandest features, is the restored ‘greenhouse’ which is currently having, I think, a sort of visitor centre/cafe extension built onto it.

Anyway, it was a nice couple of hours we spent up there. Can’t wait for the warmer weather!