Wesenwille

In my last post about Simon Wakeman’s blog I mentioned Community Safety.  Then, as I plodded through my RSS Feed I came across DaveFleet’s idea about Hyper-Local Twitter accounts.  Why shouldn’t a council break it’s news down by neighbourhood and feed it out through a Twitter account?  Additionally, as Twitter doesn’t do SMS in the UK any more, a Jaiku or SMS account might work better.

I was once doing a communtiy ICT course and it became apparent that a number of the partcipants didn’t feel safe in their neighbourhood and had no idea who their local communtiy support officer was.  As a result, we delayed a later session so the Nieghbourhood Manager could come in and talk to the community about what was going on.  The feedback was amazing.  While I often use this example of how learning is central to council’s consultation and communciation strategies, it also made me think – if hyperlocal Twitter accounts existed and feeds that promote safety, couldn’t the learning team get invovled?  Wouldn’t a course on how to use the computer or mobile device to make yourself feel safe and informed be a lot more beneficial than a CLAIT course?  There’s a potential for some good research there if anyone is in a position to do it…