At midnight on Friday 31 October, my Napier laptop locked me out, telling me that my account had expired. This wasn’t a malfunction: I had just transmuted from a Senior Research Fellow to a Senior Visiting Fellow.
Continue readingI remain curious why Scottish community councils’ online presences are, er, not as good as I think they could be. One possible reason is their lack of impact/importance to their residents, in terms of whether such bodies tax residents in order to deliver services. In short, unlike almost the lowest tiers of government/representation in almost all other EEA countries and the other UK nations, Scottish community councils have no taxation powers, not even indirectly. Unlike every other country/nation I’ve looked at, community councils do not deliver services. In short they are only representative.
Another possible reason is lack of demand, i.e. Scottish residents simply aren’t demanding that their community councils engage well online. That is, if they don’t impact our wallets and they do nothing for us, why would we care what they offer online? Some corroboration is offered by a study of small Spanish municipalities’ websites (Pontones-Rosa et al., 2023), in which only about half of the participants used their municipalities’ websites. This lack of demand was not related to the sizes of the municipalities, so it’s not simply ‘we only need to engage with 3 people and their dog, and we can do that in-person anyway’. However, provision of more/better e-services, transparency and engagement features tended to increase with population. So perhaps there is a nuanced effect of population-size on how hyperlocal governments behave online. Further research is needed, of course.
A further possible reason, perhaps related to lack of tax powers, is that Scottish community councils do not have the financial or human resources to engage online. For example, an Edinburgh community council pays me £50 per month to take minutes of monthly meetings and manage its website and email addresses. Despite this being well below minimum wage, it’s around 50% of the community council’s annual income. Most of my career has been IT-tinged and fortunately I do not need to work full-time. But what about community councils that don’t have people like me? The majority of community councils operate on only annual grants of around £1000[1], so have to reply on whatever skills their members may have. Even though older people aren’t automatically ‘digital immigrants’, community council members tend to be near or past retirement age (Cruickshank et al., 2020), and so may not be willing or able to learn new skills.
It was also disappointing for me that the Spanish research was the only recent survey of EEA/UK hyperlocal representatives’ digital offerings I could find. Or maybe it’s an opportunity – perhaps I could get a grant to undertake such surveys across Europe, and delve into potential reasons for these hyperlocal bodies’ online behaviours.
My full findings about the EEA and UK nations are in this PDF.
[1] A very small number derive income, e.g. in Ayrshire, Orkney and Kintyre, from wind-farms and similar.
Cruickshank, P., Hall, H., & Ryan, B. (2020). Information Literacy as a joint competence shaped by everyday life and workplace roles amongst Scottish community councillors. Information Research, 25(4 (supplement)), https://doi.org/10.47989/irisic2008
Pontones-Rosa, C., Perez-Morote, R., Nunez-Chicharro, M., & Alonso-Carrillo, I. (2023). E-government in Depopulated Rural Areas. An Approach to the Reality of Spanish Municipalities. Population Research and Policy Review, 42(4), 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1007/S11113-023-09808-9
This report (download link) reports the results of a survey, carried out in early 2022, of the public internet presences of potentially over 1300 Scottish community councils. It gives an update a decade after similar surveys in 2012 and 2014 (Ryan & Cruickshank, 2012, 2014). This report focuses on the timeliness and content of community council websites, and the timeliness of community councils’ Facebook and X/Twitter presences.
Searchable maps visualising the findings are available online.
In summary, there has been little positive change since the 2014, except that the number of CCs with public Facebook presences has increased noticeably.
Continue readingI usually write these pieces every 6 months, although I appear to have not done so at the end of 2022. They have tended to be my contributions to Social Informatics Research Group all-centre gatherings, because I tend to be incapable of speech by the time it’s my turn to report[1].This is mostly because I hate public speaking.
Click this link to see all the pieces in this series.
Continue readingFive years ago – in 2018 – Dr Wegene Demeke and I were awarded £10,000 from the Global Challenges Research Fund for a visit to São Paulo City, Brazil, to begin to investigate the extent to which participatory budgeting (PB – Orçamento Participativo in Portuguese) benefits the very poor. Our research visit took place in January 2019, but it has taken to now – May 2023 – to get a paper accepted for publication. So why did this process take 5 years?
Continue readingI write these pieces every 6 months. This one will be my ‘about my research’ contribution to the Applied Informatics research community gathering on Wednesday 11 February. (At previous Centre for Social Informatics all-centre gatherings I’ve been incapable of speech by the time it’s my turn to report.[1] But this is mostly because I hate public speaking.) Click this link to see all the pieces in this series.
Continue readingI write these pieces every 6 months, usually for the Centre for Social Informatics’ all-centre meetings. (I’m usually incapable of speech by the time it’s my turn to report.[1]) Click this link to see all the pieces in this series.
Continue readingI’ve just updated my list of projects (on my CV page) to include 5 projects that are now current or imminent. They are
I’m also doing some marking in April, and contributing to outputs from some previous projects. This includes waiting to see what changes the reviewers want me to make to a paper submitted to ISIC 2022. I can’t tell you how much I want to go to Berlin!
And a big shout out to my colleagues on these projects and outputs: David Brazier, Alison Brettle, Peter Cruickshank, Pritam Chita, Wegene Demeke, Paul Gooding, Hazel Hall, Ingi Helgason, Iain McGregor, Marina Milosheva, Jon Mortimer, Gemma Webster, Marianne Wilson, 2 MSc students on the MSc/CPP programme.
I write these pieces every 6 months, usually for the Centre for Social Informatics’ all-centre meetings. (I’m usually incapable of speech by the time it’s my turn to report.[1]) I’m still really miffed that we can’t get together in person. Click this link to see all the pieces in this series.
Continue readingI write these pieces every 6 months, usually for the Centre for Social Informatics’ all-centre meetings. (I’m usually incapable of speech by the time it’s my turn to report.[1]) I’m still really miffed that we still can’t get together in person. Click this link to see all the pieces in this series. There is a history of my academic work so far on my personal blog. Continue reading
Bruce's IT-ish world 