I was delighted to take part in this event run by Young Scot (YS) and the Scottish Youth Parliament (SYP). Here, I say a little about the event but more about my thoughts and contributions. I look forward so much to the research this event was based on being published.
Continue readingDuring my recent research into how school librarians can help students with mis- and disinformation issues, I learnt that four local authorities (Argyll & Bute, Glasgow, North Ayrshire, North Lanarkshire) either had, or soon would have, no secondary school librarians. Also, Fife is continuing to cut its school library services. In this case, I’m pleased to learn that the UNISON Union and CILIPS are campaigning against these cuts, and for improvements to school library services.
Continue readingAt 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.
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On Thursday 9 October, I attended this panel event at the Scottish Parliament. It took place in banned books week. This post is based on my brief notes of what was said. I apologise if I have misrepresented anyone.
The event was hosted by Michelle Thomson MSP, introduced by Sean McNamara (CILIPS director) and chaired by David McMenemy (CILIPS President). The panellists were Cleo Jones (former CILIPS president and former Edinburgh libraries development manager), Shelagh Toonen (CILIPS vice-president), Alastair Brian (The Ferret) and Professor Steven Buchanan.
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 readingPeter Cruickshank (very much lead author) and I are delighted that our paper An information literacy lens on community representation for participatory budgeting in Brazil is now published. Check it out on the Journal of Information Literacy’s website or Edinburgh Napier University’s repository[1]. Also check out Peter’s post on the Social Informatics research group blog.
Continue readingMy reader will know that I spend half of my working time as a Senior Research Fellow at the Social Informatics Research Group at Edinburgh Napier University. (The other half is spent being minutes secretary and web-weaver for three Edinburgh Community Councils, and being a quite active member of the LeithChooses steering group.)
One of my research interests is information literacy (IL): the ability to think critically and make balanced judgements about any information we find and use. It empowers us as citizens to reach and express informed views and to engage fully with society (CILIP, 2018). My particular foci include IL in hyperlocal democracy, and practical impacts of IL projects.
So I am delighted to have become the new secretary of the Scottish Information Literacy Community of Practice. This is a group of Scottish academics and professionals who have interests in IL from a variety of standpoints. I’m obviously at the very start of this role, trying to find my feet without treading on toes. However, I hope I can help making connections between this Scottish group and other IL-facing bodies. Watch this space!
I 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?
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Bruce's IT-ish world 