Mary Reid

This short article by me is up on the ICELE site now.....

'Building the Perfect Council website' sounds rather ambitious, but the title drew around 200 Council webmasters and communications officers to the Headstar conference in July. I was given the contentious spot on 'Councillors' Websites - a political hot potato?', clearly designed to wake everyone up mid-afternoon.

Our democratic form of government in the UK is built around challenge and scrutiny. So political activity is not an annoying add-on to the service delivery of local authorities; it is an essential feature in civic life. Local authorities should be proud of the democratic processes which are designed to improve decisions, minimise error, (or highlight errors if made), prevent corruption and expose decision making to public scrutiny.

In general, politicians are not happy about using council-funded resources which limit their capacity to discuss issues from a party perspective. So the trend has been towards using blogging (on independent platforms), and local political websites. Recently many elected representatives have been exploring the use of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

Council webmasters should not be afraid to provide links to councillors' external political sites (except during elections, of course); a simple disclaimer satisfies the legal requirements.