The City of Edinburgh Council has one of these – an Economic Action Resilience Plan.

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 ?

Stewart Kirkpatrick from w00tonomy, Christian Storstein from Scottish government and I organised a gathering last Friday at Microsoft’s beautiful offices ( awesome photos – Ed ) in the old GPO building on Princes Street in Edinburgh.

There were about 45 there and the average age was 331/3.

Sarah Davidson, Director of Communications at the Scottish government made the opening remarks, then there were break out sessions on video, free our data, wordpress and social media.

Thanks to Pete Martin for his piece on social media from The Gate

Proceedings were smoothed by the copious amounts of food and drink ; a lot of contacts were made and the event moved on to the Guildford Arms after 2030 when Microsoft finished their working week.

Thanks to Caroline, our host at Microsoft for being so patient, and a wonderful host.

Peter Ashe at the NHS has kindly posted, and the super hero at City of Edinburgh Council otherwise known as James Coltham as well

Video content will follow.

And will anyone who is a Glasgow Tweegie kindly send us the link

Next events

T-camp on April 23 at the Melting Pot – Register here ( up to 15 seats )

ScotWeb2 on June 23 at the Meting Pot – Register and buy ticket here ( up to 60 seats )

See you there ( and do try to come from Carlise or Newcastle ). It is 2 hours ish by train.

Not content with having won the Grand Slam in the rugby recently, Ireland continues to show initiative and enterprise off the park as well.

There is not long now to contribute your ideas

The campaign started on March 5th and runs until March 31st. So far they have had over 2,500 ideas to beat the recession and move on.

It is great to see the people driving this process. Let’s hope they generate a healthy list of options and ideas.

Today I learnt about Tales of One City, the official blog of Edinburgh City Libraries. It’s an interesting blog with lots of updates on what is going on in the world of Edinburgh’s libraries. You can also follow TalesOfOneCity on Twitter.

It looks like they are doing a lot of interesting things on the internet. I particularly like Capital Collections, a wonderful treasure trove of images from Edinburgh’s libraries. There is also an associated Flickr stream.

For more information, see this post by Phil Bradley, which points out that there is also a Delicious account, a wiki and a YouTube channel!

(Via Currybet.)

South of the border, the government appears to be promoting sustainable economic growth by sponsoring creative industries. The Re-Wired state may have cottoned onto something by putting the citizen first in front of processes, systems and technology but it is likely to be a long slog.

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

Scottish Road Works On-line Google Maps mashup

Scottish Road Works On-line allows you to zoom in to a particular location to see what disruption is in your area’s roads. Alternatively, you can search by postcode or by date. Furthermore, roadworks are ranked as high, medium or low impact.

This has been set up by The Scottish Road Works Commissioner, and is a great example of how web 2.0 tools can be used to make information easily accessible. Full marks.

Hat tip to Richard McKay who posted about this on Twitter.

Readers may be interested in a new event for those interested in the use of the web in the Scottish public sector. This barcamp will be held in late March in Edinburgh. Signup and more information is here.

What

An informal meeting (a BarCamp) of people interested in the Scottish Public Sector and the web. There will be open discussions on a number of topics (see below) led by someone with an interest in those fields. There will also be food and drink. While there will be people from roster agencies present they will not try to sell you anything under pain of being defenestrated from Microsoft’s fine offices overlooking Waverley Station.

Why

The digital landscape is changing fast. Web 2.0, social media, open source, the credit crunch, website rationalisation all present new challenges we all must face.

Should we be working together?

What skills are organisations going to need in future?

Who has already done it?

And how do you actually do this stuff?

Hopefully this barcamp will go some way to establishing connections and help share experience so we can all do our jobs better.

When

Friday 27 March 2009, 1700-1900

Where

Conan Doyle Suite, Microsoft offices, Waverley Gate, 2-4 Waterloo Place, Edinburgh, EH1 3EG

View Larger Map

Sponsors

Microsoft Scotland

Sessions (provisional)

• Social networking
• Mobile
• WordPress
• Video
• Freeing our data
• Analysis

I have built a custom search engine which will allow you to search Scottish government websites.

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

There has been some debate south of the border recently, and we wondered whether any Scottish public sector organisations made use of open source.

Here is a view from Canada

What do readers in Scotland think ?

Do you have examples to share ?

This week, there has been more snow south of the border than in most parts of Scotland. Minister at the Cabinet Office in London, Tom Watson challenged the developers to respond to the customer need

An opportunity for the web 2 community to show their skills as reported by Simon Dickson here