Category: Hyperlocal

Can I video my local council meetings?

 

It is often very helpful for local community groups or hyperlocal blogs to be able to record what happens at council meetings. It allows them to capture and share a record of what was agreed – and hold politicians to account in the future.  It can also help them celebrate success and show good local government in practice.

Some local council’s have had problems with this and today the Department for Communities and Local Government have clarified things for us all.

many councils across the country are still refusing to allow people to film public council meetings. In some episodes of TV programme Grand Designs, viewers have been perplexed at cameras being stopped from filming meetings of the planning committee considering the self-build projects.

The new guidance explicitly states that councillors and council officers can be filmed at council meetings, and corrects misconceptions that the Data Protection Act somehow prohibits this.

The Health and Safety Executive has also shot down the suggestion that ‘health and safety ‘regulations’ also bar filming, which Wirral Council used to justify a filming ban last year.

The new rules do not apply to Wales, as they have not been introduced by the Welsh government who have devolved responsibility. This led to the situation of a blogger being arrested and handcuffed by the police for filming a council meeting in Carmarthenshire. Wrexham council also banned a journalist from the Daily Post from tweeting a council meeting. Eric Pickles has today challenged Welsh ministers to introduce the new rights in Wales too.

Here’s the document and any and all active citizens and local bloggers should keep this in their back pocket.

BloggeYour council’s cabinet: going to its meetings, seeing how it works – a guide for local peoplers and V…

Be considerate, don’t disrupt, get those cameras out, share what you shoot.

So the short answer is yes.  hat tip Will Perrin and Talk About Local.

 

Awards for the Social Media Surgeries – and boy did we feel like frauds!

I’m probably going to cover to much ground in this and waffle a bit.  So lets start with something you can get a handle on:

Award the first….

 

A week or two ago we picked up an Adult Learners Week 2013 Award for the Social Media Surgeries.  It was an honour and I think an achievement.  1500 nominations turned into to 21 national awards. Ours is the BBC Learning Through Technology Award.  It’s an award for the close to 4000 people who so far been to a surgery. It also for the almost 500 people who been a surgeon – and helped people learn.

I try avoiding getting the surgeries tied up in ideas of formal learning.  I’ve always argued they are a place where people can get on with each first and foremost – learning improves as the relationships shape up.  NIACE understood informal learning well.

So thank you BBC Learning  and NIACE.  This is the film NIACE  made about the surgeries:

It meant a trip to an awards do in London for Steven Flower (Various Manchester Surgeries),  Steph Jennings (Lots of Birmingham and Wolverhampton surgeries – and works with me to deliver surgeries for public sector bodies), myself and George Marston.  George is a volunteer running the Low Hill Community Centre and he more than doubled visits after learning to use social media at a local surgery, one which was supported/funded by Wolverhampton Homes (thanks Kate Reynolds) , Wolverhampton Police (thanks Mark Payne) and the Partnerships team at Wolverhampton Council (thanks Sam Axtell).

Here we started to shrink into our chairs.  So many people had overcome so much through learning that I certainly felt like messing about with a laptop didn’t quite match up to their achievements.  Here’s a couple to watch, including the brill brum organsiation MyTime CIC

and Jenny Dimmock

There was another trip to Leicester for the regional awards.  This time with two people.  Austin Rodriguez – who’s worked with us through the Birmingham Community Safety Partnership to help change the way communities are using social media in Brum.  Austin has himself become a prolific blogger  ( at http://bhamsouthcommunitysafety.com/  and other sites) and now shares his skills at social media surgeries. And Lol Thurstan – an astonishing man who took just three weeks to go from knowing nothing about publishing to the web to running his own hyperlocal blog ( http://b26community.wordpress.com )  alongside local police officers.

Awards – the ones I didn’t mention….

 

This is where I go  on a bit too much.  For some reason I’m reluctant to write about the awards we get here – or anywhere.  We encourage our clients to share their achievements online – but I’m a bit rubbish at it for us.  Anyone who knows me will know I’m not shy – can sometimes be a bit cocky.  I’ve no idea what it’s about. So for the record two other awards I’ve not mentioned on this site before.

Innovation in a Networked Society.  First Place in this European wide competition run by The Oxford Internet Institute and the Knetworks programme from the European Union – last November (I think)

Creative City Award – most helpful thing in Birmingham – voted by the public 2009 (I xan’t even find a link now!) .

 

Age isn’t a barrier! Birmingham East and Sheldon Community Website

At the same time as running the project we’ve been working on in South Birmingham with the Community safety team we’ve been engaging with communities in east Birmingham in the same way. In fact we’ve just wrapped up the first lot of surgeries in Shard End and it looks like we’ve had some great results with people coming to learn about twitter, facebook and blogging.

One of the patients who attended was Lol Thurstan.

Lol came along to a Social Media awareness session we held at The Pump on Kitts Green Road and subsequently attended our Social Media Surgeries at Shard End Library. Chair of his residents association and lead coordinator with his neighbourhood watch, He wanted to learn how to use social media to support his Neighbourhood Watch group

In just 4 sessions (including the initial awareness session) Lol has established B26 Community, A neighbourhood website for the Sheldon community that allows him to not only share Neighbourhood Watch news but can also involve other groups in the community to improve communication in the area –

By his own admission Lol was a late comer to starting to use technology but he came with a willingness to learn and as I think you’ll see from this video, age isn’t a barrier to learning something new and getting stuck in !

 

The value of Social Media in neighbourhoods and appealing to communities

Yesterday a sad thing happened; 2 children went missing. It was presumed at the time that they’d gone of their own volition and they were later found well and safe, but none the less it was an awful thing to happen.

This all happened in Darlaston, 5 miles from my house, in Wednesfield and as such when the press release went out appealing for witnesses we posted it to the WV11 site and Facebook page. We were aware that while the children weren’t strictly from the WV11 area our readership expands beyond our borders, and friends,and friends of friends,  would most definitely cross over into Darlaston and the surrounding areas.

We posted the photo from the appeal along with the copied the police release verbatim,  all we added to the post was two words at the end “please share”

And share people did.

Within an hour 565 people had re-posted the news direct from our facebook page and less than 2 hours later that number had jumped to 1984!

It seems to me 2 things had happened to make the numbers jump like that  – every parent that uses our site could empathise with the  situation these parents were in, no one can imagine, or would want to imagine, what it feels like to find your child missing like that, and going on the old adage that “it takes a village to raise a child” everyone wanted to help raise awareness to bring these children home safely.

The other thing that happened was we were there, we were local and we we part of the community and we appealed to them directly with the “please share”!

Darlaston falls under Walsall Council  but it is fairly close to the border with Wolverhampton. Both Councils picked up the police release and shared to their facebook pages, Walsall’s post was shared 20 times, Wolverhampton’s 136.

The local radio station, Free Radio also picked up on it and shared to their page too, Their story was shared 550 times.

Looking at those figures it seems clear that being community based and very local really had an impact on the way the community interacted with the appeal.

The important thing here of course is that the children were found and returned home safe and well,  but as an observation it is interesting how much being part of a community can make a difference