This article on the Liverpool Daily Post's Dale Street Blues blog earlier caught my eye - Guest blog: How to improve local government. It's about an interesting project called the Liverpool Commission to look into ways that local government could improve how it interacts with the electorate. Obviously, I think there could be interesting ways that social media and technology in general can help to improve the debate, and I'd like to see if there's any way that I or the rest of the Liverpool geek community could help out.
The Daily Post article is rather low on links to more information, and given my recent experiences with the Year of the Environment it was with some trepidation that I googled for "Liverpool Commission".
Thankfully my fears were unfounded. The first result returned was for a post on Councillor Paula Keaveney's blog about a recent Commission meeting. Not only that, but she seems to blog quite frequently, which is excellent news.
So, Cllr Keaveney - can we have a chat sometime about Liverpool Commission and how the web might help?
Tags: Liverpool Commission
Back in November I posted a link to some details on the Year of the Environment. The details were pretty sketchy and it seemed quite late that things were being announced, particularly with all the talk of needing to maintain the momentum built up over the Capital of Culture year.
I'd have thought that now we're in February things would've been announced, and maybe even starting to happen, but I haven't seen any evidence of it. FACT are running a Climate for Change season to tie in with it, but the council have been pretty quiet on the matter.
I'm not the only person to notice. David Connor has just written about it over on his blog, and mentions that my earlier blog post about it currently ranks top of Google for the search "Liverpool Year of the Environment". And he's not the only person to end up here whilst looking for information about the Year of the Environment - 35 other people have landed at McFilter after searching for that on Google in the past month alone.
I completely agree with David when he says:
"I’m not expecting the Local Authority to drive this alone, or even expect any of their environmental partners to fly the flag. We all have a responsibility to play our part regardless of a themed year or where you live or work.
Can we please grasp this opportunity to maintain the momentum of Capital of Culture and direct that energy into a better place for our children and grandchildren?"
It does seem to be an opportunity being missed. Maybe I'll find out some more at the Liverpool Environment Network Open Meeting that's on tomorrow as Cllr Berni Turner will be speaking there after lunch. I'll report back if I find anything out.