Council websites are provided as a consumer service.

That’s a significant difference, and if you want to hear Tory/Bloggertarian outrage, try using a council website for “campaigning”. There may be some benefit in using RSS/email in conjunction with the householder’s postcode to provide local news, but I am very sceptical about trying to be more Web 2.0 than that. It is a hard enough job to provide accurate and timely information (in any environment, not just local government or quango/pseudo government) before you create discussion forums, web polls or “consumer interaction”. I like the quaint idea that council officers and members use public resources to perform their jobs rather than participate in online popularity contests.

I further resent the top-down orientation of this proposed consumer participation. In the city where I live, there have recently been two significant grass roots campaigns (on the web and on the ground) challenging local government decisions. Both campaigns earned coverage outside the immediate area on their merits. I reckon that those campaigns would have received less coverage in the world that Mark proposes.

When there is an independent public debate where citizens can argue a case, their arguments are more likely to be read than in a general council “spEak You’re bRanes” forum. Believe it or not, council officers and members are capable of recognising grass roots campaigns.

But if there are two forums (“official” and “grass roots”) focusing on a topic, the former will inevitably predominate, irrespective of merit. It is human nature for people to pay more attention to the nearest crowd and the official forum is that.

Do I want to be able to click on a link to discover what local groups are doing this weekend? Yes, if an organisation is doing something unusual and significant. It’s called Tourism. No, I don’t want to know about the next meeting of the Ayn Rand Admiration Society. That’s what we use search engines to discover.

Contrarily, links to the local press should be obligatory — although I wouldn’t want to be the person who defines “local press”. Grass roots organisations get results from good press stories, results that probably would not be achieved by five households posting on a council web forum.

However,the caveat is as any `interactive’ public facing web site host or contributor can testify, a real risk of serious community engagement and surely another risk of creating a sense of joi de vie from that sense that flows from finding out new information,dialogue and a sense of `localism’ that comes out of this.

President Obama realised in the US Election that in the vastness of the US with hundreds of ethnic social/language groups,churches,religions,political beliefs that communication was his watchword.He also above anything else accepted that `prejudices’ were imbued in the 280 million American people and was prepared to combat all of this in his e mail campaigns and wider electoral achievements.

The most important democratic identity our residents possess is their chance to cast views and attend meetings to do with their local community.This gives us all a sense of time,civic pride,place and in our local centre of the universe.

That local time and place belongs to our residents and it is important that we heed the well researched advice by Mark Pack to ensure that our Town Halls are prominent with e signage via web sites and RSS to allow our residents to take part in reports on recycling,heritage sites,schools,hospitals or news about a new re-opened post office and prepared to risk democratic `interactivity’.