Friday 24 September 2010

Barnet council has one last fling with pointless websites

I had been going to write a post recently about how Barnet council seemed to have fallen out of love with social media. For a while local government policy wonks ran whole conferences based on Barnet's pioneering and innovative foray into... using Twitter. But then the wheels fell off the wagon.

No one except me was using whereilive.org - just look at it now.

Lynne Hillan took over the underutilised "Leader Listens" blog from Mike Freer - and now look at it. (With the demise of LeaderListens I had to change the name of this blog.)

Even the Barnet council Facebook page, which coped valiantly with the storm of protest generated by the Edward Meakins scandal, has now fallen silent.

Never say die, though. Barnet council is having one last desperate roll of the dice, and has just launched barnetideas.

Inviting us to help them "face the challenge of a smaller budget", they invite suggestions under the headings:
You could be better at...
You should just stop...
I would pay a little extra for...
Well, away you go (if you can be bothered). Will they never learn?

3 comments:

Jaybird said...

Seems to be quite a lot of support for capping councillors allowances at £1,000 on the Barnet Ideas site.

It is a shame they do not make any commitment to pursuing ideas with a particular level of support.

Mrs Angry said...

Vicki: oh, the shame - I think I have blood on my hands - looks like Mrs Angry has caused the sad demise of the Barnet facebook page!
And how? By daring to congratulate (politely, of course) the eight councillor easyChairs on their 54% pay rise. And then daring to ask where my comment was after it was censored, for no reason at all.

Citizen Barnet said...

Wrecker.