Things I’d like to try, things that caught my eye.

Working together

On Thursday we’ve got visitors from out-of-town coming to see us.  Way out-of-town, other side of the world in fact.  Some representatives from New Zealand are coming to the IDeA (and probably lots of other places) to hear about UK local government.  I’ve been charged with writing a brief on performance management and chatting it over with them.  No small task, writing that up and there are lots of things I could miss out.   I’ve been wanting to do some work on collaborative documents and this looks like a great opportunity to try to get a lot of eyes and lots of views on something fast.

Steph Gray, Social Media Manager at the UK Department for Innovation, Universities & Skills writes about five ways I could do that.  Timely.

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Ignoring customer insight

As I’ve been working on new LGA and IDeA customer insight guidance – encouraging councils and their partners to take capture and strategically use the wealth of data that’s out there about citizens, customers and communities, AND I have a long outstanding complaint with my local hospital it was interesting to see this Guardian article NHS Complaints Going Unheeded.

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Empowering communities

You know the old saying about giving a man a fish staves off hunger for a day, but giving him a net and teaching him to fish fights hunger for a lifetime… Well, that’s kinda how I feel about the empowerment agenda.  It’s all very well to invite people to a one-off exercise and give them a voice for a time, but to really have power and influence you’ve got to know how to wield it and have the tools to do so.   Maybe the digital mentor scheme from this summer’s White Paper will go a way toward achieving that.

David Wilcox sums it up nicely, so I don’t have to.

After promoting some very helpful discussion about the idea of local digital mentors – included in the recent Communities in Control White Paper – Dave Briggs is now doing something to help develop a network of people who might play that role:

I’ve already signed up and want to keep at least a watching brief on this, could be really interesting.

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CPA scores on a clickable map! I’m not too sure exactly how it’s useful just yet, but I do love a clickable map. It’s almost as soothing as popping bubble wrap.

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Unlocking the Power of Local Government Information – draft local recommendations for using data from the Power of Information taskforce folks.

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Just for fun

Is all this talk of economic downturn and recession and credit crunch and the millions (billions?) of local government money lost in Iceland getting you down?  Then check out the recession blocker website - as illustrated here.  What you can’t read won’t hurt you? Right?