Here’s Wandsworth’s Councillor James Cousins on the value of interactivity for councillors: “What is surprising is not just how many local people were tweeting, but how many were eager to engage and use Twitter to communicate with their councillor. While I often sit in a draughty library with no-one attending my surgery it is quite [...]
Posts under ‘Conversational localities’
Local government and social media
Ingrid Koehler wants to know what the Key questions about local government and social media are. Her list is: What are the greatest areas of potential benefit in councils using social media? How can councils support local communities and individuals in becoming digitally enabled and empowered? How can local and hyper-local social networks increase community [...]
Signposts off
Three articles have caught my eye over the weekend: Wikipedia and the law: The libel laws haven’t yet caught up with the existence of Wikipedia. This is a problem – and it offers a huge advantage to those with the means to use lawyers to intimidate. The article itself is short and to-the-point, but Padraig [...]
Harringay – not Haringey
Neighbourhoods blogger, Kevin Harris has just introduced me to Hugh of Harringay Online. The most superficially interesting thing about his site is the spelling of Harringay. The actual local authority area is Haringey, and within the area – for reasons that are lost in the mists of time – is a differently named neighbourhood within [...]
The lust for certainty – a sin?
In a very good edition of BBC Radio 4′s ‘Analysis’ programme towards the end of last year, the columnist David Aaronovich recounted a programme that he produced in the 1980s featuring the Archbishop of York, John Hapgood. The Archbishop, as far as I can see, had the kind of views that would appeal to a [...]
Pushing policy instead of politics – and listening to the conversation.
This US post is calling for the data that agencies use to be as available as their conclusions. “Mindy Finn noted that politicians (typically leery of too much openness) can benefit from transparency in a self-protective “flood the zone” way — since people are coming to expect information about public figures to be available online, [...]
Eavesdroppable?
Here’s Suze, musing on the question of how far blogging is having a positive impact on journalism. Suze concludes that it’s too early to tell, but she says a lot of interesting things on the way. For me, here’s the big question: Does the emergence of a decentralised space with fewer barriers to entry (ahem: [...]
Two things noticed elsewhere
Firstly, this is a lovely idea about how design can be used to improve the quality of communication at a local level. Here’s the original site, and here’s an image to whet your whistle: And secondly, totally unrelated, here’s a list of the petitions that have gone before the EU petittions committee. Just for the [...]
