Shane I were at the e-Democracy conference yesterday - Shane was speaking, I just tagged along.  Here are a few of my unstructured thoughts on what I saw and heard.

First up was Stephen Coleman, who I think it’s fair to say was pretty challenging.  I’ve read a few of the reports that Professor Coleman has written about e-Democracy and new technology and there has always been something interesting in them even if I haven’t agreed with what he’s saying.  So too with yesterday’s key note speech.  It’s been my view that Professor Coleman doesn’t much like blogs, and yesterday he said that he didn’t see any point in any more councillor blogs.

Strange as this might sound I think he’s got half a point.

There isn’t much point in any blog that doesn’t try to become part an eco-system, by which I mean you need to read those that are writing about similar themes as you.  In this case councillors (it seems to me) should try to make sure they are connected to others who blog in their locality, they shouldn’t expect to be the hub around which the system works.

But that’s different from saying “lets have no more of these pointless exercises”.  And indeed I think Professor Coleman’s point was rather undermined when later in the day Councillor Matthew Ellis spoke about his conversion to using blogs as a way of connecting with his community.

Matthew told us that 18 months ago he’d been very wary, seeing them as too much trouble and of little additional value.  But 18 months on he’s had 200,000 visitors to his blog and seems to be signing up constituents to being automatically notified of new posts via email growing exponentially.

Clearly Matthew’s constituents are finding something useful in him having a blog and I’m sure that would be true of many other councillors both those already blogging and those that might take it up in the future.

I’m told that the day’s proceedings will be available on 18 Doughty Street at some point, and I also know that David Wilcox was there doing interviews with all sorts of people and I’m sure they will be worth taking a look at too.

As part of the same introductory seminar on October 18th 2007 I was asked to provide an overview of the tools and technologies that were available on the internet to help councillors engage with their constituents. I condensed a long list (created with help from the DOWIRE membership) into 10 basic types. This Top Ten was ordered based on the control that the councillor had over the tool. No.10 (Community Tools such as WriteToThem.com) is completely beyond their control whereas No.1 (Blogs) is their personal space to develop as they see fit. For each of the tools I marked whether they were Good/OK for Talking To, Hearing From, Discussing With, Listening Into or Being There For: constituents.

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Links for the Sites mentioned in the presentation are:

10. Community Tools: PledgeBank, FixMyStreet
9. Access Tools: WriteToThem
8. Community Events: I’m a Councillor, Get me out of Here, LifeSwap
7. Council Resources: ePetitions
6. Video: Webcasting, VLogging
5. Discussion Boards: Issues Forum, TalkSwindon
4. Email Lists: e.g. Nick Palmer
3. Instant Messaging: IMLocal, Skype, Windows Live Messenger
2. Social Networking: Facebook, MySpace
1. Personal Website: Static Page, Corporate Blog, Group Blog, Personal Blog

Hello, my name is Andrew, and most of the time I blog at Someday I Will Treat You Good, which is a blog that (0n the whole) deals with issues that are local to where I live; Lewisham in South East London. The photo on the right is me.

Along with Shane I spent last Wednesday afternoon meeting with 4 of the 7 councillors from Norfolk County Council who have been asked to take part in our project, Cllr 2.0, and a number of council officers who are helping make the project work.

We were there to explain a little bit about what we are hoping to do - encourage councillors and other civic leaders to use blogs to communicate with the public - and to hopefully give the councillors confidence that they could get some benefit from becoming bloggers.

My role in this is as someone who was - until May last year - a blogging councillor, and so aware of some of the advantages and pitfalls of taking on a blog.

Shane began with a presentation about the various ways elected representatives are using the web to develop their relationship with constituents, everything from participating on online forums, being available through social networking sites like Facebook, and participating in online events like LifeSwap, through to having their own website and blog.

My presentation focused on my own experiences and the lessons I’d learned over the 4 and a half years I’ve been blogging about my community.

These are the bullet point notes I’d made to accompany the presentation:

• Councillor in Lewisham for 9 years
• Increasingly unhappy about traditional communications
  • Many of the same faces at public meetings and surgeries
  • Doorstep campaigning left voters with very partial view of us; vote hungry, point scoring, and divorsed from real life
• At the same time I started reading about blogs and became a lurker.
• Saw Stewart Bruce (first councillor to blog) and Tom Watson’s blogs
• Joined Lewisham Council’s cabinet in December 2003
• Started a blog in February 2004
  • Didn’t ask permission from Mayor, Chief Whip or fellow ward councillors
  • It’s my role as a politician to communicate with the electorate
  • But did think about what and how I’d write
• Rules I set myself
  • Be positive
  • Be engaged with the wider bloggersphere
  • Be accountable
  • Remember your audience - the public, your colleagues, your opponents and the press
  • Admit your mistakes early - “its not the crime its the cover-up that gets you”
  • Don’t edit posts to make yourself look better
  • Encourage feedback

I’ll add the slides from the presentation once I can load them up to SlideShare.

Update - Here are the slides I used to illustrate the talk I gave

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