Channel 4 News carries an intriguing story from Malaysia:

Candidates contesting some posts in Malaysia’s ruling party will be required to set up blogs, an official has said.

The move was a surprising turnaround for governing politicians who until recently derided online political writing as lies and rumours.

Abdul Rahman Dahlan, secretary general of the United Malays National Organisation party’s youth wing, said all those vying for national youth posts must have blogs to introduce themselves and their programs ahead of party elections in December.

“All candidates must have blogs,” Abdul Rahman said. “If not, they are not qualified to be leaders.”

Cllr Tony Tomkinson, from Clavering in Norfolk, started blogging in January 2008 as part of the civicsurf project.  His main objective was to use his blog to maintain communications with the 25 parish clerks in his constituency.

He used the blog to inform readers of developments from Norfolk County Council that affected his area.  In March he wrote about the possibility of a gravel pit in the village of Haddiscoe. He had been to a public meeting the night before attended by over 100 people from the village.  Over the following week Tony had 400 people visit his blog and within four weeks 37 comments had been left on the post.

I’m sure some of the people leaving comments had been to the meeting but by using the blog they are able to ensure their views are in the public domain.  Possibly some had not been able get to speak at the meeting. Also of interest is that people from outside the village were able to contribute including those with experience of gravel pits.

The post is a superb example of how using a blog a civic leader can gather considered and in-depth views from a wide range of people with a wide range of views.  The blog hasn’t replaced the village public meeting but it has complemented it very well.  Although Tony is prevented by his position as a councillor from expressing an opinion before the Planning committee meeting, he is providing leadership by encouraging discussion and opinion through having a place for that discussion to take place.

Interviewing Tom Watson

Originally uploaded by G J R

Tom Watson was an interesting chat this morning. He had a lot to say about blogging and is clearly fired up about the whole social networking thing.

We also filmed Steve Webb, Member of Parliament for Northavon and Lib Dem Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Energy, Food and Rural Affairs, who was maybe a little more reserved about the process of blogging, but who also had seen in his year of posting how it can be an effective new tool for reaching both his constituents and a wider audience.

Cllr Mary Reid x 2Originally uploaded by G J R

We interviewed Mary for the documentary today. Shane gave us a lead on a top floor staff room, so we got a much nicer location for the interview.

Mary talked eloquently and positively about blogging, gave some tips, and told of her experiences.

Mary took some pictures too, looking forward to reading her post on her blog!

I’ve been following the Lord (Clive) Soley instigated group blog for a few days now and despite the awful design, name, and technical set-up it is working well at the moment. In my opinion it is because the blogging Lords are writing in a very natural language.

Of the nine participating peers only two were previously MPs and perhaps this helps contrast them against my particular perception of the House of Lords. And, since one of their stated aims is to change the image of the Upper House, they are succeeding.

Congratulations, Lords, keep going, but please do ask someone to do some work on the design and techie side – you’d have thought a title for the RSS feed would be right up your street. Boom boom.

[cross-posted from gallomanor.com]

Colin McKay, a Canadian Government communicator and blogger and social media pioneer extraordinaire, has written The Secret Underground Guide to Social Media for Organisations. It is not a technical guide. More a cultural, managerial guide to avoid the roadblocks set by IT and legal departments. Colin has blogged about it himself.
At 23 pages it is a quick and enjoyable read.

Yesterday I went up to Norwich to catch up with three of the Councillors who are working on the project. It’d been two months since I saw them last, when they were still finding their feet on getting their blog set up.

 I’d been keeping an eye on their sites which were slowly developing, but wasn’t sure how they felt about their blogs themselves.

The three of them were extremely positive about their experience and interestingly all for different reasons. Peter was please because he felt he had a space for him to speak out, and it was also bringing him in touch with new people and also some old contacts he’d lost track of. Tony found that he was getting interest in an issue by both comments and emails. Jenny, who hasn’t had much commenting feedback actually on the site, has had local people come up and tell her in person that they’d seen it and liked it.

I think in another month’s time they’ll have achieved even more. Interesting, none of them had thought of their blog as an archive, something I questioned them about, but thinking about it they realised it was a way they could track a particular issue.

Peter and Tony both have big issues being commented on their blogs, while Jenny is about to do a leaflet drop with the blog address on, so in another month I’m sure we’ll see huge changes again. 

I don’t suppose this project can really ignore the Civil Serf saga. In short, Civil Serf write eloquently, but disparagingly about the govt department in which she worked and about the ministers she worked for indirectly. It was an entertaining read and contained some quotes ideal for consumption in the national press. And last weekend the national press wrote about it and the blog disappeared as Civil Serf presumably fretted about keeping the job she didn’t really seem to enjoy.

Inevitably it will make some senior officials worry about letting staff blog about their work, but I hope that we don’t end up as far as some fear in that the Civil Service Code will be amended to specifically ban blogging.

Most people seem to agree with Jeremy Gould, the Whitehall Webby, in that Civil Serf “crossed the line”. It wasn’t so much that she was blogging but that she wasn’t abiding by the spirit of the code and bringing the civil service into disrepute.

Nick Booth from over at Podnosh has tried to answer the questions of “Why leaders should blog?”.  He goes into some depth and backs his arguments with evidence from other sources.  Paul Caplan from Internationale is slightly more blunt summarising his arguments as if they don’t “they will be sitting in their corner of the party – Billy no-mates, talking to themselves.”

I left a comment somewhere in between:

I think the issue is simpler.  Leaders lead by being visible and inspiring.  It is a rare leader who hides away without communicating.

Take local Councillors.  They lead by being in their community holding conversations, doing radio and press interviews, writing letters, attending and speaking at public meetings.  It is their bread and butter.

They, and other leaders, are being left behind though.  Those conversations, those public meetings are happening online too.  In blogs, in forums on email groups.  Leaders need to participate in those conversations too or risk becoming half a leader.  It is difficult to participate fully without being there with your own blog.

Therefore leaders must blog or ignore a significant and increasingly important part of their leadership role.

Councillors, what’s your view?

The Daily Telegraph writer Robert Colvile has written a cogent paper for the Centre for Policy Studies about the way the internet is changing politics and policy, and the current failings of the political parties to embrace the brave new world.

And while I largely accept his argument (that the internet offers the potential to create a faster more chaotic, but more open, world in which politicians will have to find new language or risk becoming even more bland – and so less likeable) it is the caveats that he puts around that that I find just as compelling.

These essentially are that the on-line conversation leaves out swathes of the population and as such skews the debate. So while he says “67% of Britons use the internet in one way or another” he also says:

• In the UK, in 2006, 51% of those earning up to £10,400 had never used the internet, compared to 6% of those on £36,400 or more.
• 71% of those aged 65 and over in this country have never used the internet.
• As we go down the age range, internet use grows rapidly – only 35% of those aged between 55 and 64 have never gone on-line, falling to just 4% of the digital near-natives in the 16 to 24 bracket.

So our on-line politics is likely to be dominated by younger, wealthier people; and I can’t help noticing that Colvile doesn’t talk about whether there biases around ethnicity or gender.

Which makes me think that, while he may be right in saying that the net savy MP (and for our purposes we can substitute councillor) will find that:

by inhabiting the same on-line spaces as their constituents on a day-to-day basis, MPs will interact with them in much more normal conditions – when the MP is not the privileged voice of authority, but merely one member of a conversation among many.

But the elected representative needs to consider how they’ll represent all of the views of all their constituents, not just those of us who are webheads, so the new politics will need strategies that reach beyond the net, even while they take the best of the net’s creative drive with them.

[cross posted on Someday I Will Treat You Good]