For a lot of them their social media activities – and other work to engage with the public – is done with their political hat on, using resources and help provided by their party, not the council.

There are two big benefits of this – it allows you to address controversial and politically partisan issues without the constraints that come with council resources, and also the resources available from parties are often much better than those available from councils. Compare councillor blogging systems such as the Lib Dem MyCouncillor WordPress-based site with the minimal facilities most councils provide, at best, and it’s not much of a contest!

Of them, those who are also active online, and/or offline – given the right tools and basic support may be able to create their own very localised view of government data. Ward sites.

(I recently explained to a district councillor how he can link directly to his own ward’s individual DC planning permission webpages from his own blog, nobody in his council told him this)

Any digital knowledge which flows between the citizen and this “Councillor 2.0″ counts “in the stream”, but its value may ebb in time – bear in mind I am talking hours here, not days.

Given access to these streams can future councils capture, collate and sort this knowledge so that it can be added to the “sum of council knowledge”?

To my mind the more Councillors there are the more likely we are to find “Councillors 2.0″.

I fail to how a largely volunteer force of democratically elected representatives is a bad thing.

If there is a failure it is a shared one, the failure to equip them with the correct Socmed skills and savvy to do the online equivalent of “wandering down to the park, or the pub” and chatting with passers-by.

Information is a great example of how we can take advantage of using these tools to deliver a real benefit.

One of the points above was should councils look to re-structure (i.e. reduce the number of councillors) and look to social media as the public representation in the future?

I’m interested to hear other view on this.

Thanks

Paul.

This was during discussions about how to semantically identify and categore a “knowledge object” – I always want to call them “Knobs” – almost semi-automatically in order that “intelligent agents” can find and consume the content.

Much of my thinking these day has to do with understanding “what is knowledge?”.

This was reinforced after I read very enlightening paper recently over at the KIDMM wiki (following threads on KHub) from their 2008 meeting “Making and Organising Knowledge in Communities” by Conrad Taylor:

Entitled “Introductory Paper: Literary Review”

http://www.bcs-kidmm.org/mashup2008/docs/MOKC_LitReview_CT.pdf

In which Conrad quotes many sources – but I was struck by some of the quotes which describe the transitional nature of much of our “Knowledge”, how it’s importance and relevance ebbs with time, for example.

The tools may already exist to capture and disseminate the sometimes fleeting relevance of “knowledge” but they each seem to live in their own software paradigm or “IT silo”.

Be that a wiki, forum, blog, cms, twitter stream etc.

Twitter is a great case in point. I knew something _really important_a month ago, I told someone, but now its gone.

B*gger.

Often it’s the context of a conversation which shines light on the meaning of the text, and capturing the conversation which lead up to the outcome is as important as the final “minting” of each version of the document.

For my money wikis alone don’t do it properly yet. Neither do fora nor blogs.

Twitter may be one type of stream, but the stream has to stop somewhere, as a bus needs to stop, so we can at least read the bloody thing.

And you’ve hit on the IDeA approach for knowledge management for the sector, too – managing streams, not documents – and helping practitioners create those streams.

If it weren’t for you, we might have got it away with it.

They operate at the ‘street’ level.

And of course some are simultaneously also District Cllrs (guess 20%?) or County Cllrs (5%?) (est. figures from the town I run a CMS for).

These representatives have good and just cause to directly request gov data, especially if the public identifies them as “the council” incarnate.

Could be a good thing.