It’s Friday. It’s 3.30pm. It’s time for a nice entertaining post about the character of local government.

Oh! Here’s one – on a blog that’s generally worth keeping an eye on.

Along with the Glum Councillors tumblog, we’re seeing the culture of local government being ever-so-slightly lightened and humanised by the blogosphere.

Just a quick signpost to this post on the ReadWriteWeb blog about. I think that this observation has implications for the nature of representation – and even for leadership.

“Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh once wrote that Twitter made him “a better and happier person.” He asks, “What would you do differently if there were a permanent public record of what you do or say?” Hsieh argues that Twitter adds a public broadcast element that reminds him to be more positive, thankful and empathetic. He writes that those same values trickle down to the corporate culture of Zappos.”

And political representatives really do need a bit of that positivity at the moment. It does beg the question: Does the use of these interactive tools – always staying in the peripheral vision of friends, journalists, colleagues, rivals, constituents and peers – make us more empathetic or attractive? And if so, is it possible that these tools could be the saviour – rather than the undertaker – of representative democracy?

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 others, and this should be seen as a mark in their favour.

Seasoned political watchers, however, will have come away from the Lib-Dem conference last week with one abiding impression: Of a party that values it’s independence.

Where the leadership were keen to push populists lines of attack, they were very clearly clipped back by indignation from middle-ranking party figures complaining about top-down policymaking.

First question: Is there a correlation between the interactivity of a party’s grassroots and the relative lack of willingness within the party to adopt collegiate positions? I would suggest that there is.

Next question: In the current climate, is a willingness to adopt collegiate positions an essential pre-requisite to electoral success? Again, purely on personal experience, I’d say that there is.

Labour was blessed / cursed with a herd of independent minds rich diversity of internal debate in the 1980s – an experience that shaped the 1990s predilection for ‘control freakery’ in the party.

There is another way of looking at this though: David Herdson makes a strong case here, arguing that the Lib Dems steady progress – it’s slow upwards trajectory – is down to the party’s niceness – and that it is a fool’s errand to even try to behave like the Government-in-waiting.

Last question: Is Cllr Reid wise to be pleased about all of those lib-dem blogging Councillors?

Using the revealed preferences of the voters, I’ve been trying to compile the profile of local elected representatives that the public want – in the cops do in police procedural dramas. I’m not sure that they’re ready for interactivity.

As a further observation, is it the case that party division is really unpopular with the public? Or is that political journalists are so lazy that any easy-to-find evidence of a schism is likely to get a disproportionate amount of press-coverage – and that this issue then adds to the impression that open debate is electorally risky?

Tell councillors what RSS means, willya?

Apologies for the light posting here lately – even bloggers go on holiday, y’know?

I’ve not collected my thoughts for any original posts yet, though the ‘Duty to Promote Democracy’ and the obligation to offer petitions will be on the statute book shortly providing plenty of new material in the coming weeks.

For now, Dave Briggs has an interesting guest post up – ‘Ten Top Internet Tips for Councillors‘ – written by Mark Pack.

I’d argue that there is a real cultural problem around the way that local authorities manage their relationship with councillors. Councils could offer leadership to their councillors – saying that they believe that they have a duty to encourage councillors to be more effective people. In my experience, this approach is the exception rather than the norm, with too much handwringing about providing ‘political’ support to councillors.

In the absence of such support, if I were offering a short course to councillors, I’d start with those lovely Commoncraft videos. As Mark Pack says in that post on Dave’s blog, feed readers are very useful productivity tools.

But my hottest tip to councillors would be to challenge the attitude that local authorities adopt towards councillor development. One argument that I found to be briefly successful ran like this:

q: But surely, if we use council resources to help councillors become more effective communicators using the internet, we’d be giving the incumbent an advantage, damaging democracy, and breaking all sorts of local government codes of conduct?

a: Do you really think that you are providing every one of your councillors an advantage by giving them greater exposure to the voters? Would greater exposure to voters result in more councillors retaining their seats at election time? Or less?

I’d argue that this invisibility of individual councillors actually contributes to the way that political parties dominate local politics at the expense of strong individual representatives.

Promoting a use of social media at a local authority-wide level could be a good laugh – something that councillors would enjoy. I wonder if Commoncraft could come up with a video that would show councils how to do that?

At the risk of loading expectations onto someone, it’s very good news to see that Bill McCluggage has been appointed as Deputy Government CIO in Cabinet Office.

I did some work with Bill over the last eighteen months in Northern Ireland where he was a very powerful advocate for getting local councillors and councils to take web-communications more seriously.

Northern Ireland is a particularly testing place for this to be tried. The politics of Our Occupied Six Counties / OUR wee province* are somewhat sclerotic, highly compromised as they are to ensure a continued functioning democracy of any kind as part of the peace-process.

The quality of local government is plainly very poor because even this hamstrung polity has resolved to reform it (there were 26 councils which are being consolidated into 11 by 2011).

Despite this, within one year, Bill helped me get over 40% of the 582 councillors to take their first steps online. Admittedly, this commitment was often a nominal, rather than active one, but prior to the launch of the project, you could count the councillors that had ever unlocked the ‘write’ potential of the web on the fingers of one hand.

A good few real local government stars have emerged in the process, and Bill has taken the (steadfast) resistance of some influential sections of the bureaucracy on the chin and not taken no for an answer.

That’s good news for those of us who want Whitehall to work a bit more effectively. London’s gain will be Belfast’s loss.

*Delete according to binary sectarian outlook

It’s Friday. Time for a bit of a laugh.

This ‘Yes Minister’ clip provides a rough outline:

And on the wider perception of councillors, here’s Vic & Bob’s take:

Joking aside, if there is one thing that desperately needs rebranding, it’s the very idea of the Local Councillor.

The www.blogger.com application is perfect for councillors wishing to trial weblogs for the first time

I’ve promised to help a few Councillors from Welwyn and Hatfield Borough Council start their own blogs. I already manage a project that is intended to get as many of them as possible to manage a small personal website.

Anyway, here are the five aspiring bloggers. All have made a start, but you will see that – in most cases – they need a bit of coaxing.

Hatfield West – Kim Morris
Peartree – Louise Lotz
Handside – Fiona Thomson
Panshanger – Roger Trigg
Welwyn West – Cllr Mandy Perkins

At least one of these councillors should be able to take this idea to the next level and really develop their status and skills as a local representative. Perhaps all of them will do it?

I know that they would all welcome any advice and encouragement that you would like to give them. It is easy to overestimate how apparent the advantages of blogging are – and how easy it is to pick up. In my experience, I’ve met a large number of great local representatives – hard-working, articulate and confident in their roles – who were quite stumped by the idea of blogging.

In many cases, Councillors aren’t quite sure how to use weblogs to their best advantage. My own view is that blogging may be useful to councillors for the following reasons:

• A way of improving one’s interactivity – interactive people are better at representation, and are more likely to be given good ideas by those around them
• Enabling one to think out loud, and to allow people to see the way that your thoughts are developing
• Presenting oneself as an open-minded approachable individual
• Staying within the peripheral vision of a lot of people – helping to raise the status of councillors in general
• Making people more loosely aware of what you are up to – often turning you into a resource for others in the medium term

Having reviewed a lot of the literature that has come out of various government initiatives, I found that a huge – unnecessary – emphasis was placed upon the risks involved, and the legal issues relating to blogging. More than anything, councillors need help and encouragement in this field. My friend Shane McCracken has produced a very good handbook called ‘Civic Surf’(PDF). There is also a good ‘pro-blogger’ guide to setting up a good professional weblog – a 31 day programme. and it is well worth a look. It’s probably a bit ambitious, but you never know…

Go on! Send one of them an e-mail or a comment – make a positive suggestion on how they can use their blogs to improve their work as a councillor.

And be nice…..!