Leah Lockhart, social media advisor and all-round good egg, has been blogging about fears and barriers in public services on LinkedIn. Here are her thoughts on fears people have about being abused online, fears around negotiating online identity, fears digital champions have about inertia generally but especially in hierarchical leadership and finally about fears around BYOD.

Thanks also to ‘Lelil’ for drawing me to Leah’s tale of how to use topical hashtags to draw extra traffic to community council Tweets.

Well worth a read for any CC member (or any other elected member or public servant) involved in digital engagement with their citizens, in my opinion.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Darot, a member of Greener Leith and frequent attender at leith Central Community Council, has produced an open-source map of Edinburgh displaying, among other things

•  administrative boundaries: LAs; MP and MSP constituencies; wards; community councils; Neighbourhood Partnerships
• detail data on GPs; dentists; care homes; sheltered housing
• schools locations and catchment areas
• air quality: NO2, ozone
• planning: mooted, pre-application, application submitted, application approved, project under construction, project completed
• planning framework: proposed housing, green spaces and schools; protected areas; vacant and derelict land; listed buildings
• 2011 census and 2012 SIMD data

Wow! A fabulous amount of detail and a boon to any CC or citizen group concerned with spacial or community planning. It’s more detailed than the current version of the CC finder map on the new national website for CCs. (To be clear, both Jeremy’s and the IS’s work bowl me over. I am overjoyed that the Improvement Service has vastly improved my original – it’s a great tool for CC members and other people interested in CCs. Jeremy’s work has different aims, providing in-depth detail for a single LA.)

I hope that Jeremy and the IS can work together to provide this much detail for all of Scotland’s Local Authorities, or that LAs and other community groups may be able to licence Jeremy’s work to create similar  works of their own. Gotta love this open-source stuff!