Competing to be the most Business-Friendly Council

This post was originally published on www.localgovernmentmatters.co.uk.

 

I recently participated in a workshop arranged by a council to bring together its staff, local businesses and other relevant stakeholders in a session which focused on envisioning a future economic strategy.

It was an impressive piece of co-creation, and as is usual with these things the greatest insight came from listening to the customers – businesses in this case, about how their interaction with the local authority affects their own success.

For local authorities the whole issue of business growth is moving up the agenda, both because of the general need to drive economic growth – often through supporting local SMEs – and more prosaically because planned changes in business rates will mean that local councils have an more immediate financial stake in the success, growth and coverage of local businesses.

Local authorities have their hands on many levers of economic success – planning, transport, parking, housing, education (to an extent) and a broader influence over workforce supply, and can set a tone and context through formal and informal support to business networks and organisations.

A specific area that’s easy to overlook is regulation.  Recent research  has shown that for 54% of local businesses their only face to face contact with the authority is from trading standards, environmental health or similar.  The Local Better Regulation Office is currently promoting improved standards and competencies for regulation, with a clear line of sight to economic growth.  For firms with operations in more than one council area the primary authority concept is crucial to simplifying regulation and we are already seeing firms moving their choice of primary authority, and the associated spending based on the council’s capability to manage the national network of relevant regulatory agencies.  A strong regulatory team will be a factor in relocating headquarters in the future.

Some chief executives I talk to in business-oriented councils know the names of, and regularly meet with, the chief executives of their major local businesses.  We all know that some councils are better at promoting their locality for business rather than others (I suspect most people will remember the “Peterborough effect”).  Councils vary in their level of sophistication: one council with a pressing need for social housing nonetheless ensured that their plans included provision for a modest increase in executive housing because they were aware that a gap in this area made them less attractive to businesses.  This is undoubtedly an area amenable to strategic analysis, Michael Porter’s  ‘Competitive Advantage of Nations’, whilst obviously written on a larger scale, poses questions of relevance for local authorities in terms of the strategic industry clusters that they can create and support based on local factors, and recognises that supporting the competitiveness of your local businesses with customers outside your area is important to your own economic success.

And this is where it gets interesting.  There is obviously “competition” between councils and LEP areas for businesses and inward investment, but this is often implicit.  I have yet to see a Council’s economic development strategy (please point me at one) which explicitly addresses specific competition.  The technology exists to deploy a much more focused, almost predatory approach.  We could envisage an MD receiving an email like this

Dear John

 I’m the cabinet member for business at Bizton – you will know that we are a thriving centre for business, and we have been doing some research on your company.  Our industry analysis shows us that you are growing impressively, but are likely to be constrained for space in your current office, and if you are thinking of a move we would like to make you aware that:

• 10 miles from your current base we have a unit that should be a similar rent to your current business but with 30% more space for your expansion
• From analysis of our own businesses we know that four of your largest customers would be nearer to you here than they are currently
• Moreover 23 businesses within Bizton have said they would welcome greater provision of the graphic design services you provide
• We know that print and distribution are important to your business, the site we’re thinking of is adjacent to a thriving print business and there is a distribution hub within 5 minutes
• The site has car parking, and there are three restaurants within a 5 minute drive, and two more within close walking distance
• Average education attainment at GCSE level is 8% higher in Bizton than at your current location, our local FE college does Graphic Design to Foundation Degree level and 73% of the students have said that their first preference would be to find a local job
• In terms of workforce, we don’t have detailed statistics for local businesses but we do know that staff sickness rates at our local council are 30% lower than the council where you are now.

 In short we think there are very specific reasons why you might want to move to Bizton now, to create room and opportunity to grow.  I’d welcome the chance to show you around personally, together with the Council’s chief executive and one of our business relocation specialists who would work with you free of charge to help make your office move a success with minimal disruption.  We’ve done some homework on you but what we’d really like to do is understand in your own words how you see your business growing to think together about how we could help with that.  And in case you think this is a mass mailshot I can assure you that we approach only three businesses a month in this way: just the ones where we think there’s a really good fit for them and us.

 I hope you can spare the time, if you’d prefer to do it at the weekend that’s no problem.  We’ll be happy to send a car for you and any colleagues you’d like, to meet with us.  I’ll be in touch later today to see how we can support your business growth.

It’s like a move from simply advertising job vacancies to headhunting.  Will we move from competition for new business to becoming aggressively competitive, cherry-picking the best businesses from near neighbours and if we do, how will that affect collaboration in other spheres?

Guardian Public Services Summit 2012

This blog was originally posted on www.localgovernmentmatters.co.uk

The Guardian Public Services Summit is a rarity on the Summit circuit as it draws together people from across the public, voluntary and private sectors to share views on current issues and future opportunities in public service.  It provides an interesting snapshot of the zeitgeist and I have blogged on this in 2010 and 2011.

Coping with Change

In previous years the discussion has been about the wave of change about to hit, and possible strategies for dealing with it; this year there was more of a focus on actual change in practice.  What I found interesting about that was that there was very little setting out of one grand plan or big idea as the solution – in previous years you could have been forgiven for thinking that every known ill would be solved by social enterprises.  Indeed there was one whole session specifically rejecting the idea of “fashion” in public service design.  There emerged a clear appetite for: appealing to an actual evidence base to support decisions where this exists, a recognition of the need to try many different things, and not to be swayed by trendy management guru models invented for largeUScorporations.  Some strong views were expressed that an intellectual acceptance of the need for innovation hits a robust reality of risk aversion at a time of large scale people change and reduced capacity.

This was underlined in a talk by Mark Bee, the leader of Suffolk County Council who contrasted his council’s new approach to change with that driven forward by the previous chief executive, herself a speaker at the summit the year before. He talked with good humour about the need for bringing individual communities along on a change journey, and of working out practical detail to go beyond the big vision.  Much of the twittering (hashtag #pss2012) was about whether this approach could be fast enough to cope with the change required, but his essential stance seemed to be that it was the best available speed.  Having started with a moderately erudite Dickens quote he summarised his talk on a lower level but in very impactful way by quoting Banarama: “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it, that’s what gets results”.

The speaker with the highest potential for controversy was Dr Chai Patel, who bravely spoke after dinner to a room full of potentially tired and emotional public servants about the tremendous power of entrepreneurship, the relative liberation of private sector delivery of public services, and the social impact of being able to tap into risk-taking shareholders as a source of funding.  As chairman of a company which has taken on a large fraction of homes following the Southern Cross failure, he was clear that this was a “business failure, not a market failure” – shareholders do lose all of their money from time to time, and that’s why they need a return the rest of the time.

Local Government

Other specific items that will be of interest to the Local Government reader – Carolyn Downs, new LGA Chief Executive argued that action to mitigate unsustainable costs of Adult Social care is the top priority for local government.  The NIESR economist Jonathan Portes argued that youth unemployment, unless tackled, will have a scarring effect for years to come.  Meanwhile a couple of police speakers underlined for many of us the need to switch a little of the partnership attention from health and wellbeing boards into the many implications of the imminent elections of police and crime commissioners, and their relationship with the police and crime panels.

Joanne Roney, Chief Executive of Wakefield Council spoke powerfully and modestly about the partnership working which has helped Wakefield cope with some very deep cuts – they worked out that even after the cuts they would have £2bn pa to spend on Wakefield’s public services and so made their work about choosing a future together rather than slipping into silo-based service cuts.  As another speaker said “innovation lies in the shift from victim to architect”.  Dave Smith, CE at Sunderland spoke of his council’s investment in a powerful public infrastructure of superfast broadband and cloud solutions to establish Sunderlandas a natural place for technology businesses as well as integrating public service delivery at lower cost, based on understanding customers.  There’s an article here.

Emerging themes – Citizen and Culture

Indeed one emerging theme from the conference was understanding our citizens’ lives better in order to help – Damian Allen from Knowsley MBC said that “it is the lives lived that we have to shape, and the places where they are lived”.  That understanding needs to be based on analytical insight and engagement, despite the fact that it is often the community engagement and communication roles that are seen as classic “non-job” examples.

But perhaps the strongest theme that emerged from all of the talk about change, repeated time and time again by most speakers, was about changing the culture of organisations, whether about being more entrepreneurial or innovative, taking risks, engaging better with communities and partners, even just coping with the level of personnel change. As someone quoted “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, a pertinent closing thought for a room full of strategic leaders to take away.

How Sherlock Survives

The person that falls is not Moriarty’s dead body.  It is clear that the person falling is both (a) Sherlock and (b) moving (which rules out the cunning mask hypothesis)

As Watson runs around the corner (and gets knocked over (deliberately) to stop him getting too close) we see a lorry with a green and white cover on it. This lorry has a crash mat on it which Sherlock jumps onto. He then jumps from this onto the pavement and uses a blood bag (possibly provided by Molly) to make his injury seem bad. He is taken into the hospital and Molly arranges a replacement body which is buried.

It is notable that Sherlock commands Watson to “go back” and “stay where he is” which means that Watson is behind a lower building that conceals the actual point of impact.

It is also noteworthy that Moriarty talks about Sherlock heading for a fall, but that Sherlock chooses the venue for the denoument as being as specific high place, which gives him the opportunity to arrange the lorry with the crash mat in anticipation of this.

Simples!

I am not sure, however, that Moriarty is dead.

The Tale of the Town Hall Clock

I wrote this shortly after joining Local Government, in 2001….

Once upon a time there was a town hall clock.  It was quite a famous clock because it kept very good time, and people for miles around liked to see it, and hear its chiming bells.  Lots of local people would depend on the clock to tell them the time, as they opened their shops, as they rushed to the railway station, and left the pub in time to see the football on telly.  The clock was important, and the man who wound the clock was proud of his job, and enjoyed it even though he had to climb 300 steps every day to wind it.

Once upon a time a few years later the clock had started to fall into disrepair.  Some of the cogs started to stick when they shouldn’t have, the face and hands got a bit dirty, the hammer on one of the bells got a bit sticky and so the chime got slightly out of tune and a chunk got knocked off the nice brickwork around the clock when it was hit by lightning one night.  To make matters worse,  the pendulum developed an interesting wobble.  As you can imagine, the clock wasn’t so good at keeping time any more, and people found they couldn’t depend on it so much.  The man who wound the clock still kept winding the clock, every day, but his tread on those 300 steps became a bit more weary.

Once upon a time a few years after that, the clock was in a very bad state.  The face of the clock was cracked, and the minute hand came loose one day and fell to the ground – they put it back but it was a bit dented.  The cogs got really dusty and dirty and started to grind against each other rather than neatly fitting together.  And the more they ground against each other, the less well they fit together and it got worse and worse.  Because of the friction in the mechanism, the man who wound the clock found that he had to wind the clock more often, so he had to climb those 300 steps twice a day.  The clock was very inaccurate now, and really didn’t look very good at all.  The man who wound the clock started to become ashamed.  Even though he was working even harder than he had before, and doing what he did as well as he could, the clock really wasn’t working.  Children would shout at him in the street “‘scuse me mister, have you got the time?!” and run away laughing.

One upon a time a little while later the people in the community decided that they wanted to do something about the clock, to fix it.  They realised that other town hall clocks were much better than theirs, and they really wanted to sort it out very quickly.  So they got some clock repair people in.  The thing is, although it wasn’t a very good clock, they did still need and use it, so the repair people were given the job of repairing it while it was still running.

And so one person started bending the top of the pendulum into shape, and another one started to replace the cogs – which was always tricky because swapping one cog for another in a moving clock  is very tricky.  A lot of people got their fingers nipped quite badly.  Other people started trying to straighten up the minute hand, while a builder let himself down from a rope to repair that nice surround.  It was chaos because all of the people got in each others’ way, and the man who wound the clock found himself constantly blocked as he climbed the 300 steps to the top with people and cogs and chime hammers coming up and down.  He was really unhappy – these people who were supposed to be helping were making it much much worse.  People started to laugh at the clock winder and he started to find it difficult to get to sleep, and his eyes got red and tired.

Once upon a time a while later it was still not getting better at the town hall clock.  All this running up and down stairs and getting in each others’ way wasn’t much fun for the repair people either, if you think about it.  Some people would laugh at them and say “are you still at it!” and other people would get angry with them and say that they must be very bad pendulum balancers, cog shifters and hand straighteners.  And the harder they tried to do their jobs really quickly the more they got in each others’ way.  They started to get angry with each other and started saying in the pub that the reason it was all so slow was because of the other ones.  Sometimes people believed one of these stories and sacked a hand straightener, or a face cleaner.  But even that didn’t make much difference because they had to find a new hand straightener or a new face cleaner, and it took them a long time to learn how the others worked, and so they got in the way a lot more than the old ones had done.  Some of the repair people quit because it was getting on their nerves, and went off to balance other peoples’ pendulums instead.  The clock winder was, by now, having to climb the stairs three times a day to wind the clock and it was really really hard work.  He started to get very crabby and some days he wouldn’t shave before setting off for work, even though he was usually meticulous about his appearance.

Then, one day the clock winder sat down on the seat opposite the town hall clock to catch his breath, and scratch his stubbly chin, before starting his climb of the 300 steps, and he saw all the people working away at the clock, bumping into each other and usually making things worse.  And he sat, and he thought.  And then he thought and he sat.  And he sat until his bottom ached and he thought until he felt his brain might start bleeding.

Just before tea-time he jumped up and shouted “STOP!!!!” as loud as he could (which was quite loud, actually).  All of the repair people stopped, and looked down at him, as he waved for them all to come down to the ground.

When they all got down he said to them.  “This is what we’re going to do.  All this getting in each others’ way is silly.  We’re going to do this very differently.  You’re not all going to work at once, that’s no good.”

But the local people who had gathered to hear what he had to say said “no, no, don’t be silly – that’ll take ages, and we’ve waited long enough, we must make these repair people work even harder.”  They kept on like this for a while until the clock winder had a headache.  Then he shouted (even louder than before) “SHUT UP!!”.  They all went quiet.

Then the clock winder said, ever so softly, “this is what we’re going to do….

Firstly, we’ve got to get the cogs in place.  The cogs are the heart of the machine, they are the most important part. Cog shifting is really fiddly, and we have to give the cog shifter enough room so that she doesn’t get her fingers nipped all the time.

Secondly,  we don’t have to have everyone else sitting around while she does that.  There are times when she’s cutting the cogs and calculating the ratios when the pendulum balancer can get in to the mechanism and adjust the oscillator nuts.  Because the pendulum is the next most important part of a clock, you see.

And we’ll carry on like that – we’ll give the person with the most fundamental job access to the mechanism, but carefully plan it so that whenever possible someone else can be doing something.  Then we’ll work through until we can start properly on the outside of the clock.”

But the local people began to grumble “but it’ll be ages before anyone can see that we’re working on our clock – all the stuff will be going on inside the tower, and people will just see this tatty clock with a bent minute hand”

“You’re right”, said the clock winder, “but you see although it might not look very good, the clock will actually be starting to tell the time better – people may not realise that because the improvements will be gradual, but the clock will actually be a better clock.”

The local people still grumbled, and so the clock winder said “well, okay, how about this: instead of the pendulum being the second job we do while the cog shifter isn’t busy, we’ll straighten out the minute hand instead, then do the pendulum afterwards.  It means it’ll be a bit longer before we’ve got really accurate time, but it will look like something we can proud of sooner”  The local people nodded at that and work began the very next day.

And for the first couple of days it was even worse!  All the repair people had to think a lot more and talk to each other a lot more.  The cog shifter had to become a lot more organised about how she did her work so that the minute hand straightener knew when to be around.  But after the next couple of days, when the repair people got used to it, it all started to get moving much better.

The repair people enjoyed themselves much more, and the clock winder could sometimes hear them singing as he climbed the 300 steps to the top.

Then one day, just as the clock was nearly completely fixed, the pendulum balancer came to the clock winder and said  “do you know, since the clock was made some people have invented a gearing device which means that we could run a crankshaft down the tower so that you could wind it from the bottom, instead of having to climb those 300 steps to the top.  I’ll put it in tomorrow – it’s the last thing we’ll do.”

The clockwinder was delighted, and all the local people were really happy, because they had a really lovely and very accurate clock, with hands that were as straight as straight could be.  And the clockwinder and the people kept a close eye on the clock in future, and when things started to go a bit wrong, they fixed it straight away, and kept the clock very clean, because they could all remember how bad it had been before.

The repair people did well too – everyone heard about how well they’d repaired this clock and they found lots of offers of work pouring in, and wherever they went they repaired the clocks using the method the clock winder had invented.

And the clockwinder slept really well, and the redness in his eyes went away, and he was really glad that he didn’t have to climb the 300 steps any more.  Although on nice days he still climbed to the top, where he would stand and look out over the town and the countryside, and all the people who were looking at the clock would see him there and wave, and he’d wave back.  And he smiled.

Paul Philby

When I was about 8, roughly 40 years ago, my best friend at the time, Paul Philby, was killed in a road accident.

As my own son reaches that age I find myself thinking about that, for many reasons.

But let me give the sum total of my memory of Paul first.  He was a fun kid, with dark curly hair.  His father was (I think) a manager in the mine in the valley where I lived at the time.  Paul was outstandingly good at art.  I retain a mental image of a painting that he did in first year junior school of a fire (it may have been the great fire of London) with black buildings silhouetted by an impressive yellow and red fire behind.

His telephone number was Ogmore Valley 246 (hard to conceive of three digit phone numbers now isn’t it!).  Ours was Ogmore Valley 248, which gave me an early insight into the difference between an arithmetical and geometrical progression.

Paul’s parents had a detached house just up the road from where we lived, which was at the foot of a mountain.  It was surrounded by copious quantities of ferns, and Paul and I used to run around in those ferns which, characteristically, had apparent paths running through them.  On one occasion Paul and I saw some people fly tipping in a layby near his house, from the cover of the ferns.  And we felt like the Secret 7, watching this criminality.

As was entirely normal at the time, Paul was out with other friends,with no adults, when he was killed.  He was (I am told) crossing the road, and had crossed to the second half of the road, saw something coming and started to move back, into the path of a vehicle coming the other way.

At that time, and at that age, it was quite normal for me and other children to go out for the day with friends, sometimes with money to buy chips for lunch, sometimes to go to the next village to go swimming, or to cycle a couple of miles up the valley, without any adult supervision, and with an injunction to return before tea time, and no way of checking up on where we were.  This would have been around 1972.

My father told me that Paul had been killed, and he decided to do this as “I have bad news and I have good news”.  The bad news was that Paul had been killed.  The good news was that Paul was with Jesus and the angels.  This last was insufficient compensation, and I remember feeling enormously cheated by this at the time.

Paul was an only child.  His parents moved away from the valley shortly afterwards.  I can (now) completely understand that.

All I’ve been able to do for Paul since is to remember him.  But now, I can share my memories of him with others, and a offer a certain internet posterity.  So I have.

Anybody want to write a Radio Play?

I came across this in such an old folder of my computer that I had to break through the cobwebs to get in.  It’s an idea for a radio play which I’m never going to write but would quite like to put “out there”.  If anyone writes it, let me know when it’s on!

Radio Play

Scene

This play follows the voices of three conversations between three couples.  None of the individuals is ever named.  They are simply six separate voices.

The central couple consists of a near-term pregnant woman and her husband walking around a small park, walking to induce labour.  The small size of the park means that they circumnavigate it several times, in the process passing the two other couples, who are seated.

The narrative of the story follows the central couple for a time then stays with each of the other couples for a time before being picked up again by the central couple as they pass on their next “lap” of the park.  This focus passes between them on a number of occasions, and the dialogue has continued out of the listeners earshot between visits.  Some of the interest therefore is in inferring the missed parts of the conversation.

The couples discuss each other, and their presence affects the outcomes of the time for the other couples, or appears to – with a final twist.

Central Couple Story

Having a baby.  Waters having broken.  Stress caused by uncertainty and health concerns mingled with anticipation of the new life, and affect on their own life.

Incidental topics concern:

-       visits from in-laws

-       the bridges of Konigsberg(due to the path pattern of the park)

-       effect on careers and work of the baby

Resolution: none – all these uncertainties remain unresolved at the end of the play.

Young Lovers

A couple snogging in the park when first encountered.  Relationship at a critical point of going further or falling back.  Consideration of the pregnant couple brings home to the young couple that they do not feel as strongly as they should for the relationship to go further.  Tensions emerge, they row and depart separately.

Mum and Son

The third “couple” is a young Mum and her toddler son who come into the park every afternoon.  They engage in conversation about (amongst other things) growing up, and why people have babies, what it’s like for a mummy and daddy before they have a baby, and the impact of having a baby on them.

Closing resolution

In a twist, the final comments of the central couple suggest strongly that she is (was) the female of the young lovers group and that he is (was) the young son.  Stories that are set up to be occurring at the same time suddenly reveal themselves as being separated in time, but with enough ambiguity to suggest recurring truths.

Jazz for People who Like Classical Music

So, basically, a little while ago I Tweeted and posted on Facebook the following question:

“What ONE CD would you recommend for someone who likes classical music and thinks they might like #Jazz if they found the right way in?”

Pleasantly surprised by the number of responses, and borderline astounded by the variety of directions from whence the recommendations came, I thought I should capture them for posterity and as a guide for others.  The recommendations were (in order of me finding them to cut and paste)…

• If a 2CD counts, then combined albums for which Wynton Marsalis got Grammies for a jazz & classical disc IN THE SAME YEAR!
• Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. And The Koln Concert by Keith Jarrett
• (Kind of Blue got another supporting vote)
• Miles Davis Cool, or John Coltrane Blue Train
• Spaces in Between by John Surman
• Fats Waller Ain’t Misbehavin’. He was classically trained and you can hear it in some of the piano solo pieces
• Gil Evans. New Bottle, Old Wine; Miles Ahead; Porgy & Bess; or Out of the Cool. All great records! And I’m sure others will have suggested A Love Supreme
• Wynton Marsalis
• Courtney Pine
• The Mahavishnu Orchestra

I also discovered a couple of absolute bargain box sets on Amazon which cover many of these recommendations

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B003IY49S4

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004Q9SO0O

Having been largely unaffected by Jazz in my life to date, but realising I will need to be au fait by the time I’m 50, I am enjoying exploring this new (and it would seem highly elastically-defined) genre.

For what it’s worth, and for the ones I’ve heard, I think the best recommendation, in the spirit of the question asked – ie the transition from Classical to Jazz, is John Surman’s Spaces in Between.  

Solace Summit 2011 – Musings

Last week saw the Solace Summit 2011 – a deliberate change in format from the normal “Conference” event.  I think it worked well.  One of the key changes was the creation of a communique as an output from the whole thing.  It’s here and it’s worth a read as a snapshot of some of the key issues, opportunities and challenges in Local Government.

My background musing from the conference related to the nature of “the public sector”.  It increasingly strikes me that a reframing of “the public sector” to include all of those organisations which provide public services (which I will temporarily define as state funded services) will be a useful part of the big solutions we need to find.

The Solace Communique talks about a different relationship with the private sector, and I think that’s right.  There are some things that the private sector, public sector and third sectors are good at that the others aren’t, and if we can find effective ways of combining the best of them then we may see a way through.

The public sector is very good at choosing and rationing, because these are things that can only be done with a democratic mandate, and can be very good at managing substantial complexity.  The third sector is very good at engagement and being, and being seen to be, values-aligned.  The private sector is very good at making long-term investment decisions, taking a portfolio of risks, and mobilising resources at scale.  Actual delivery competence, and user trust, varies widely across all three sectors, with far more variation within each sector than there is between them.  Despite this there are folk in all sectors who believe with a  passion that theirs is the only true path to service performance, and it’s the ideological underpinnings to that that represent the biggest human blockage to progress.

Some of the more innovative proposals that are being made in and around local public services combine all three sectors, or pairs in unusual ways.

I hope that something that may come out of this is a recognition that public service, and the ethos that comes with it, isn’t just a  function of your funding mechanism.  Not everyone who is directly funded by public money or donation is a saint.  Not everyone who works in the private sector is a sinner.  I’m increasingly seeing that we all operate under constraints.  As a local government officer I had to work within budgets and the democratically determined policies of my council, and did my best within those constraints.  As a trustee of a charity I was constrained by funding and specific deliverables that were required by our funders.  In the private sector I get arguably more freedom to innovate, explore and do things that I think are important for public service, but have to work within a constraint of making a profit proportional to the size of the risk.  If we can get a good mix across these skills and constraints then perhaps we can find our way through what is otherwise a very bleak prospect.  As they used to say on my History of Art course “Great Art Thrives on Constraints”.

 

 

Town Councils – 2

After my fictional blog looking back at the success of a Town Council from the vantage point of 2015 I was delighted recently when someone pointed out this – Frome Town Council’s strategic plan is written in a similar way to the blog.

It would be nice to think that the blog was mildly influential in this presentation, though it is a common device for strategies, moreso in the private sector perhaps.

Anyway, the main reason for pointing this out is that unlike my 30 minutes of localism fantasy (I clearly need to get out more) this is a very well worked through document, which definitely deserves a readership well beyond Frome, as an exemplar of what that particular tier of government can achieve if it puts it mind to it.

What has Twitter/Facebook Ever Done for Me?

Startlingly much, actually.

I have met a whole heap of people who I first encountered online, for example people at the same conference as me who, like me, were tweeting about various events.  I’ve also met friends of friends I’d be unlikely to have otherwise.

I have been invited to interval drinks by an orchestra to thank me for tweets about their performances.

And once after tweeting about a trip to Liberty to buy a tie only to find they were “between collections” I got an invitation from Liberty’s COO (whose wife is a Facebook friend – though I didn’t know she was related to Liberty) to come in, meet up, and get a tie.

And a recent tweet by me asking for recommendations for entry level Jazz CDs for someone with an interest in classical music brought forth a range of really good suggestions, including some from unexpected people.