Last night I was at the Mount Florida Community Council meeting, as I should in my new role as a community councillor. And, quite in line with what I enjoy doing, i.e. networking and using the internet and new technologies to facilitate this, I volunteered to set up a community council website for Mount Florida. I had put forward some ideas to the chair, and we set up a sub-group to discuss this. In my research for the suggestions I submitted for consideration and decision, I came across some interesting initiatives which I'd like to share.

Napier University in Edinburgh designs web based tools for e-governance, and have lots of exiting projects, one of them being the ecommunity councils, community council websites based on blogging principles. The only thing that makes it hard to decide whether the tool works or not is the poor implementation of these e-community councils. It's difficult to get people to use the concept of blogs if they don't blog themselves, and haven't previously tried it out. Napier university also has a very exciting publications list on all kind of e-governance tools. Just reading through it I feel that this is a place I'd like to be involved in. (any jobs going?)

As I was browsing through existing community council websites, it struck me that they were often very nicely designed (beyond my abilities), but often badly structured or with very little content, or content that was years out of date. This led me to the conclusion that a website for the sake of it is simply wasted time and effort. Interestingly, this is just the argument I was confronted by last night, by an older councillor who has no internet access. I do believe that he has a point (even if he was rather confrontational and quickly rebuked by the other councillors), in that it needs to be thought through from the start what the website aims to do and how to implement it, including making it known. At the same time, a website shouldn't be a substitute for more traditional forms of communications, be it because many people simply don't have access to it, or be it because the internet is still a relatively passive tool. It is always a challenge to engage people actively through email and internet. Some may disagree, but my experience is that people respond to letters and phone calls, but not necessarily to an email. It's too easy to ignore. Still, if it's well designed, has a clear purpose, and clearly a shared space, I strongly believe that it can be an excellent tool to support communities and engage new people.

The chair of the Mount Florida Community Council came up with a suggestion of another free tool for websites: www.thelocalchannel.org but again, I'm not convinced. There's a lot of advertising, and the image laden site is unstable. I have broadband connection both at work and at home, but don't want to know what it'll be like with dial up. I like the categories though, and have merged ideas from various sites.

This leaves us with a few options. We could use Civiblog, and in addition buy a domain name. We could use an ordinary webhosting service. We could use my own webspace, but that would mean that I'd have to give away my password, I don't want to do this. We could use a website template such as ecommunitycouncil or thelocalchannel, but with the first the results don't look good, and with the second the site seems a bit unstable. To me, the best option is civiblog: it's got the right ethics, it's free, easy to use, and the many good blogging examples can inspire members. I like the option of having shared ownership, of giving each community councillor the ability to post and contribute. Wikis would be good too, but too expensive at the moment. What we still need is a bit of training, to show everyone how it works, and introduce the idea of blogging to those who haven't done it before.

Above all, I'm very excited about all this and I believe it can be a great site. The subgroup meets on Monday and then I can get my hands in it. Not that I really have the time, but then again, busy as I may be, I still seem to find the time for fiddling with this blog, and posting to it. Strangely, this is the one space I don't get stressed out about and which I simply enjoy doing, whether anybody is reading or not. That in itself speaks volumes for blogging.