It was written on October 18th 2008, but seemingly has never been actioned in the 9 months since, as there are no updates or follow-up papers in the public domain. So in the course of meeting with Councillors, we asked if we could have a meeting and bring citizens together to discuss how we are “Combating the Recession”. There was also a request to discuss Community Transport.

Well, we have met now and here are thoughts, observations and next steps. There were 4 Council Members, 2 officials and 20 citizens from the age of 15 to 75ish. As a general rule, the older you were, the more vocal you may have been.

We started by inviting the young people to describe the impact of the recession on them. One answer was “piles of copies of application letters, most of which go un-answered”.  One of the elder people then described how we were all in this together, how his children and grandchildren were suffering in the recession, and how all ages needed to pull together.

Another said how it had been 4 years since the Council last had an inter-generational meeting. The youth project did not remember a public sector agency ever coming to visit them. There seemed to be a general feeling that public servants needed to get out more, in order to relate to the real issues on the ground and see what it is like to take on the recession system.

Pilton was mentioned as one part of the city having a thriving community centre, and a place where young and old exchanged experience and skills.

There was a debate about how the youth workers might consider setting up their own businesses to support young people. Large companies are drastically reducing their recruitment, and the labour market is displacing young people as graduates cannot find work and there is a knock-on effect. Perhaps young peoplce could follow Jamie Oliver and his 15 idea, show their entrepreneurial spirit and set up on their own.

Social media is not yet a place where the young people attending look for work. They use the papers, web sites and the internet, but not yet bebo, facebook and twitter.

In this context, it is interesting to see who are the winners of the LearningLaunchPad funded by the Young Foundation. Future First lets young people see what their school alumni are doing.

Word of mouth and referrals are also important. One of the elder gentlemen commented that in tough times, you have to get out and look hard. Another winner sets up apprenticeships and is an Edinburgh based social enterprise placing young people called Working Rite.

There was a short and sharp debate about how much worse the economic situation in Edinburgh might become. Both for the private sector, and for the finances of the Council itself.

After a short break, we then spoke about Community Transport. One of the main issues here is with the contractual arrangements, and these are being worked on by providers and the council. It is fair to say that most bookings for transport still use the phone, and SMS is not yet embedded as a practice.

Next Steps

• Young people may consider some form of enterprise to establish a business ; there is nothing to stop them. We will definitely be following this idea up with the youth centre(s).
• Another meeting for the elder people to learn about the internet and computers from the younger group. We can facilitate this.
• A possible visit to the Scottish Centre for Inter-Generational Practice conference in Perth on October 1st 2009. We will pursue this with SCIP in Glasgow.
• Community Transport providers to continue to talk with officials about the fact that their charity cannot serve a private company, so if private companies win contracts for services, the community transport will have to stop ! This is part of a Transport Act, presumably written before contracting out was dreamt up.
• The Edinburgh council officials said they would “consult” on the new web site design. We had hoped for a much more open and participative approach. As the existing web site is so poor, and this was widely recognised at the meeting, we believe the Council must include users in the re-design. Otherwise they are wasting the opportunity. In conversations over lunch, citizens held out little hope for any improvement in the Council’s web offering.
• Citizens do want to help ; does the Council want us ?

On Tuesday 30th June, we have what might be a fascinating session with members of the City of Edinburgh Council, their employees, and a group of Edinburgh citizens / residents / customers / clients / service users.

We will have the opportunity to describe

• what is it like to live in Edinburgh at the moment, while we are trying to Combat the Recession
• what we think of Community Transport
• how we might use web2 and citizens ideas on current service to re-design services for the benefit of the user

We have a number of elderly people, a number of young people and some middle-aged as well. There is a diverse group, and we are all very grateful to the Councillors for agreeing to meet.

Is Edinburgh really an Inspiring Capital ( you credit ‘Edinburgh Inspiring Capital,’ use our logo and link to our website http://www.edinburgh-inspiringcapital.com. )

or as one of Polly Toynbee’s commenters in the Guardian said last week

” Evidence of improvement, Polly? What evidence? I live in Edinburgh, and all I can see is wrecked roads, inaccessible hospitals, unaffordable housing, closing shops, hundreds of bloody CCTV cameras spying on me and utterly crappy public services which have been deteriorating for a decade or so. ”

If so, then why not read his excellent advice for CV

If you are in an industry sector that is about to start its downturn, or in the parts of the economy that are about to be hit, then perhaps you should be dusting down your CV and skills-set now.

The internet is now the richest repository of free advice of how to look for a job, and how to find one. However, I am sure someone once told me 60% of jobs are never advertised.

Also, there are lots of jobs created by number 1, otherwise known as you.

” Working for Yourself ” is how ScotWeb2 started. It does not sustain us, but 5 years ago who had heard of Guido Fawkes ? He is perhaps now able to live from his blog.

I gather Michael Russell is into digital media and the like, so it’s no surprise that he is the first Scottish cabinet member to blog in an official capacity. It will be interesting to see if the blog is a success, and if it will lead to more experiments from the Scottish Government.

1)          First the fact that the UK family silver is looking very tarnished as the Treasury cannot sell UK government debt. Where next for the ££ and “investment” ?

2)         There is another story from the BBC quoting the CBI and how tough it is for graduates to find work. So they say get working while at university. As probably more than 50% already do, this seems a bit rich.

3)       If you are a graduate, and looking for a job in Scotland, the Sun newspaper is now competing with JobCentrePlus. I wonder if there will be comparable performance statistics available, to see who is placing more people in work.

If you are in your last year in university, and reading this, do get in touch as we are currently recruiting.

4)       The American social media crowd in government has a great product set here on pbwiki and I think this one will run and run

So we see in efforts such as these

I think we should  just hitch a ride ( and create a Scotland sub-set ) if they will let us. Will keep you posted.

At the largest social media conference in the world, SXSW the American retailer Best Buy announed that it is releasing its entire product catalogue as an API.

Last week the UK based newspaper Guardian announced a similar move

The week before the Hack the Government people continued to apply pressure on the UK government by organising a day of legitimate API creation.

This movement suggests that corporates and governments are beginning to realise that proprietary data is a concept of the past. If individuals are happy to share their lives on Facebook, why not corporates and governments their business models and processes ? Better interaction will promote trust and loyalty as well.

Who else would you like to see releasing APIs ?

This is a good example of co-production if ever there was on

As a result, directgov have swung into action ( not before time some may say ) and released statistics on bicycles

Apart from the debate in the comments, at least everyone is now trying

Here’s hoping that the economic situation spawns lots more innovation, enterprise and entrepreneurial activity by the “brave” public servants and the business-as-usual hackers

P.S.

Patient Opinion are growing too and well done to James for two Guardian letters in quick succession

He points to this Patient Opinion explained by a user video link as well which is true patient generated comment on the NHS in England

I built it using Google Custom Search Engine, which is a pretty nifty tool that lets you create a search engine that produces results from a selected set of websites. Dave Briggs suggested this following the success of LGSearch, which searches government websites in the UK.

At the moment Scotweb2 Search includes the websites of the Scottish Government, the Scottish Parliament, the Scotland Office and the 32 local councils in Scotland. In time, I plan to extend it so that it includes other Scottish public sector organisations. If you have any suggestions for the sort of websites that should be included, please feel free to leave a comment on this post or send us an email.

Scotweb2 Search