Cllr Mary Reid (a Kingston-Upon-Thames Lib-Dem) has a short post up about percentages of councillors blogging. Cutting to the chase…. In the UK … 7% of all Liberal Democrat councillors have websites/blogs. 2% of all Conservative councillors have websites/blogs. 1% of all Labour councillors have websites/blogs. The Lib-Dems plainly value interactivity more highly than the [...]
Posts from ‘September, 2009’
An idea
Following the Daily Mail’s crusade against council employees using Facebook, Sunny, here, (in the comments) thinks it’s time for everyone to write to their local authority to find out how long council employees are spending on the Daily Mail website. This is what FoI requests are for, isn’t it?
News…. on a computer?
Apologies to anyone who thinks that a blog about local democracy has been hijacked and turned into one about how the internet effects newspapers. In defence of this focus, I’d argue that the way that local issues are reported (and how the internet changes this) is one of the big issues that will shape local [...]
Transparency: The arms race hots up
E-mail has transformed the way that senior politicians behave. Fifteen years ago, almost all conversations between politicians, lobbyists, civil servants and everyone else were either verbal or on paper. Technology has made recording easier. Written communications are infinitely more index/searchable. It would be an understatement to say that the situation has been transformed as a [...]
A few links to be going on with
Just a few interesting things I’ve seen over the past few days that impact further on this councils v local newspapers issue. The first is that – when councils decide to factor in ad-revenue into their communications budgets, it adds a significant amount of uncertainty – because ad revenue can go down as well as [...]
Party conferences for councillors
It’s Friday, and the party conference season beckons. One or two of you may have already been in Liverpool for the TUC, and there is quite a little community of people that have to go to all of them. For some councillors, this may be their first proper look at how their party works. My [...]
“Too much democracy”?
Douglas Carswell MP and Daniel Hannan MEP, along with a few others, may wish to have a glance at Tim Garton-Ash’s latest – this time answering the queston ‘why has California got itself into such a mess: “…its prisons are overflowing; the energy-guzzling way it meets its water needs takes a staggering 19% of the [...]
Usability, council websites and the obligation to promote democracy
It seems that The Electoral Commission have decided that it is a basic human right for us to have ballot papers that make sense to us. Usability – not just regulatory box-ticking is, it seems the key here (I posted on ballot design here a while ago) Measuring usability may also be the key to [...]
Local authorities, local newspapers and job-ads
In the latest round of the local authorities v local newspapers saga, Scottish newspapers appear to have regained some of the classified ads that they lost to the MyJobsScotland site (“Local government jobs – all on one site!”). This is an interesting one. Now that the c-word is out in the open, surely government should [...]
