Digital engagement for community councils – workshops around Scotland

Posted on September 10, 2015 by Bruce Ryan

Following on from the workshop we ran in January at Napier (blog post, outcomes report), I’m running four more this autumn.

All community councillors are welcome – the events are free and your ideas and experience are are the magic ingredients that will make the events work! For example, you might know how to gather great a Facebook audience, or have crowd-sourced opinions on planning matters. Others will love to hear how it’s done!

The events are free to attend, and lunch will be provided, but we can’t reimburse travel expenses. Continue reading →

On your feet, soldier!

Posted on June 26, 2015 by Bruce Ryan

On Wednesday I gave a presentation which was coherent and informative, and yet made up partly while I was listening to someone else’s but mostly in response to questions from the audience as I was speaking. Whenever I’ve given presentations before, I’ve mumbled incoherently as I drowned in my own nervousness. So throwing me in the deep end is perhaps the way to get good presentations out of me. (Peter, don’t you dare!) Continue reading →

Couldn’t have put it better myself!

Posted on June 17, 2015 by Bruce Ryan

Wise words from Angus Hardie of the Scottish Community Alliance:

I see community empowerment and ‘local’ democracy as two sides of the same coin with something akin to our system of community councils (albeit properly resourced, probably restructured and with effective national representation) as the bridge between the two. So while some might take issue on the detail, if the purpose of empowering communities is not about working towards genuine local democracy, could someone let me know what it is?

(emphasis added)

Here’s the full article, including a message from Marco Biagi MSP and pieces on ‘Caltongate’, the Big Lunch, community growing, euro-funding, Iceland’s financial crisis, COP21 and Comrie Development Trust

You can’t say politics on the internet?

Posted on June 16, 2015 by Bruce Ryan

I have been interested in how governments use the internet to engage with citizens for a few years now. Of course, I’m very late to this party – e-democracy was ‘invented’ over 20 years ago. Continue reading →

Millions of voters are missing: It’s another #GovtDigiShambles

Posted on April 25, 2015 by Bruce Ryan

It should be obvious that I’m in favour of IT being used to improve democracy. So clusterfraks like this annoy are doubly annoying: the small part is that IT is getting a bad name, but the large part, even allowing for The Register‘s journalising licence, is that many eligible people may not be able to vote. Bah!

(post-title shamelessly stolen from The Register)

Put yourself on the map: complete the Workforce Mapping Project survey

Posted on March 19, 2015 by Bruce Ryan

(With thanks to Hazel Hall for almost all of the words below.)

The Workforce Mapping Project survey is live at http://bit.ly/workforcemap

This is a call to workers in the library, archives, records, information, and knowledge management sector to contribute to a research project by completing a short survey. If you work in this sector, please read on to learn more about the project and how you can contribute to it. Continue reading →

It’s been a good day

Posted on March 12, 2015 by Bruce Ryan

I’m very tired but I’m happy because good things have happened today. Continue reading →

My actual and potential research areas

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Bruce Ryan

I have the following actual and potential work-streams.

Title	What is it?	Funder	Status, dates and notes
Longitudinal Information literacy for democratic engagement (LIL-DEM)	Further research into factors affecting community councillors’ information literacies	Edinburgh Napier University	to start, February to April 2017
Information literacy for democratic engagement (IL-DEM)	Research into factors affecting community councillors’ information literacies	CILIP‘s Information Literacy Group	finished, October 2016 to January 2017
DigiCC workshops	How can community councils improve their digital engagement with citizens	Edinburgh Napier University, Scottish Government	finished, January 2015 to January 2016
Delivering on DREaM	researcher/practitioner knowledge-sharing in Library and Information Science, supervised by Professor Hazel Hall	CILIP	finished, June to July 2015
Workforce Mapping	mapping the workforce in the Libraries, Archives, Records, Knowledge and Information Management sector	CILIP, ARA	finished, summer 2014 to summer 2015
Hyperlocal government engagement online	Social network analysis and Communities of practice research around 3 Edinburgh CCs	CCN+	finished, summer 2014
Community Council Location Finder	a searchable map of all Scottish Community Councils	Improvement Service	finished, spring 2014 My version is archived here, and the current version created by the Improvement Service is here.
2014 survey of community council internet presences	How well do CCs use the internet to engage with citizens? What are the lessons and consequences from the findings?	Edinburgh Napier University	finished, spring 2014
2012 survey of community council internet presences	duplicate!	Self-funded	finished, summer 2012
Communities of Practice and Knowledge Management around CC digital engagement	2-year main research project, to extend CCN+ seed-project and other relevant previous work	TBC	funding application in progress, TBC
Writing paper(s) based on my MSc dissertation, to further updates of technology models	to report on local aspects of CC digital engagement	TBC	to start, TBC
Visualisation of hyperlocal data	to extend Community Council Location Finder	TBC	to start, TBC
2017(?) survey of CC online presences	to build on 2012 and 2014 surveys	TBC	to start, TBC
Digital Proxies	Who guards vulnerable peoples’ digital presences	TBC	idea crystallised, TBC

Democratic Sector Day and other happy things

Posted on March 6, 2015 by Bruce Ryan

Yesterday was great. During the day, I was at the Democratic Sector Day, a day ‘for participation practitioners to share ideas, projects and ambitions, and hopefully develop a better understanding of this ‘community of practice’ in Scotland. The objectives were:

Improve our understanding of the Democratic Sector in Scotland: Who is doing what and how?
Discover opportunities for collaboration regarding research and practice.

Continue reading →

Bruce's IT-ish world

Tag Archives: engagement