The October edition of Total Politics has a piece from me on how local authorities can learn from the Obama campaign’s mastery of the internet to build communities of active and engaged residents. You can read it over on my blog.
The basic theme – too many councils are trapped in the idea that a good online presence equals a 1990s style website which you then just expect people to come to – is one I also talked about in one of The Voice’s fringe meetings at Bournemouth Conference. The podcast of that, along the contributions of Jo Swinson MP and MySociety’s Richard Pope, is available here.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Knaptoft: The very heart of England
We do have a two-tier policing system but it is not what our homegrown racists think it is.
From Norman settlement to a civic square
Church Green video
Tom Arms
Ruth Bright
Tom Bailey
Alex Macfie
2 Comments
The new means of communication now available and its local resourcefulness if in the hands of progressive Town Hall managers can lift the bar in creating `interactive’ web sites with our residents and community leaders in future years.
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’.
Obama’s websites were created as a political platform for electoral benefit.
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.