Personal life interrupts this blog

Posted on February 27, 2016 by Bruce Ryan

A brief interlude from my non-work life. I guess that we might encounter some local government manifestations on our travels.

Elly and I have been spinning at the wonderful LifesCycle for four years to help keep ourselves fit enough to enjoy exploring the world on bikes. We are going off on our adventures later this year, but we know we are incredibly lucky to have the time and the security to do that. LifesCycle has been a strong supporter of Mercy Corps and we would like to add a little bit to their support of people suffering around the world, particularly refugees. If you have two minutes, this video will give you a little bit of insight into the people Mercy Corps supports. Continue reading →

Edinburgh Apps competition: 6 February

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Bruce Ryan

(adapted from an email from OK Scotland)

The annual EdinburghApps event returns on 6 February 2016.

The ethos behind EdinburghApps is to run a unique civic challenge event for the City of Edinburgh that allows teams and individuals the opportunity to work with the City of Edinburgh Council and partners to provide fresh ideas and solutions to help improve the lives of those living, working and visiting the city.

EdinburghApps also supports the Council’s Open Data strategy, and opens up new data as part of the event to support participants. Continue reading →

Wise words and mega maps

Posted on January 31, 2016 by Bruce Ryan

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.

Continue reading →

Digital engagement workshops report

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Bruce Ryan

We’ve published our report on the autumn digiCC workshops – you can find it on the national website for CCs at http://www.communitycouncils.scot/read-the-report-of-the-digital-engagement-workshops.html and in the library belonging to the KnowledgeHub group for CC members at https://khub.net/documents/10440977/0/2015+digiCC+workshops+report. (You’ll need to join the KnowledgeHub and then the CC members group to access that library.) Continue reading →

Beat the fear!

Posted on January 20, 2016 by Bruce Ryan

Great advice from Leah Lockhart on trolling and negative comments and online identity. (You may need to join the KnowledgeHub to access these.)

No need to be afraid of the online nasties because (i) they’re not that nasty (ii) you can outsmart them!

Fairer Scotland event for CCs: questions answered

Posted on December 14, 2015 by Bruce Ryan

The Scottish Government has responded to questions raised by CC members at a fairly recent Fairer Scotland event. Click the thumbnail to download the full PDF.

If you have any queries about the responses, it would be best to contact Kristoffer Boesen or Lynn Sharp of the Improvement Service (IS). In the meantime, I’m very pleased to see mentions of the work by Peter Cruickshank and me, specifically

The community council location finder that I built under Peter’s management (answer 11)
the digital engagement workshops (answers 11 and 16) – I’m still working on the report on these events. Watch this space!

Continue reading →

Displaying my bias!

Posted on December 2, 2015 by Bruce Ryan

I’m often engaged by articles on the Scottish Community Alliance fortnightly ‘briefings’. It’s easy to link to individual articles. However, I’ve not found a way to link to the introductions. So I shamelessly reproduce the introduction to the most recent briefing: it ticks all the boxes on my pro-hyperlocal democracy bias. While some community councils may not be ready to play fuller roles just now, that is no reason to not aspire to do more. As Angus Hardie puts it…

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A community of interest around Community Councils

Posted on November 10, 2015 by Bruce Ryan

It’s always affirming to learn of fresh research into our field. So I was very excited to receive Katrin Prager‘s and Kirsty Holstead‘s Community Councils in Aberdeenshire: Achievements and Challenges.

Continue reading →