A couple of weeks ago I was talking to the national conference of the Society for Local Council Clerks up in Durham. It was a great conference with a group of people who really care about what they do and the communities they help serve.
My talk was on the usual stuff of how the web can help all of this happen. Particularly pertinent for this sector, where over half of Parish, Town or Community Councils don’t have a website. Most of the councillors in this sector don’t use email.
(I do sometimes think that we forget, in all the excitement about the new forms of online tools, just how utterly brilliant the act of simply publishing stuff online is. The fact that it is so easy, and can reach so many people!)
So, to help them out, I produced a ten point manifesto for what to do and where to start with this stuff.
If I’m honest, I threw this together in ten minutes whilst slightly hungover. However, I think there is value in most of it, and it would be interesting if others would pitch in and suggest some improvements.
Here’s the ten points:
- Get the basics right
- Don’t spend lots of money
- Go where people already are
- Don’t forget: what you say is permanent and findable
- Use the right tool for the right crowd
- Promote online stuff with offline stuff
- Be open, honest and human
- Don’t overburden with process
- Make your stuff findable, sharable and reuseable
- Think: how does the web change the way we do everything?
The entire slidedeck is embedded below.
Interesting presentation, great context and summary (might nick a few bits – acknowledgement of course) particularly humoured by slide 2 – was that an ego boost i wonder???