Networked Councillors: The report is here

Over on the project blog we’ve just published the beta version of the Networked Councillor report. It marks the completion of phase one of the project we’re involved in running for Improvement East articulating the challenges and opportunities faced by local politicians in an increasingly networked and digital society.

The beta is open for comments – which means we’d encourage you to take a look at the report and give us your feedback, before we publish a final version.

Our colleagues at Improvement East have already invited people to take part in this process in the e-newsletter. As they write: “[The report] was created following questionnaire and field research with councillors across the East of England, which examined their current use of social media and their ideas for how it could be used in the future.” We think that’s a nice summary, but in Catherine’s first post on the project blog, she also writes that project is borne from two things:-

• If we are going to have more networked and digital citizens we are going to need politicians with the right skills – we will need networked councillors but we have not yet really explored what that means.
• Just showing people how to use Twitter doesn’t solve the problem (of giving councillors sufficient skills for the digital age).

You can read Catherine’s post in its complete form here, where you’ll also see the report. If you’d like to make a comment about it, please email Catherine, or tweet her here: @curiousc.