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 you haven’t come across it, Patient Opinion is about trying to find ways to use the power of web 2.0 to enable people to feed back about their local NHS – and, more, to help improve it. There’s only one catch – we don’t actually have health services across Scotland on our system yet. The shame of it.

In talking about how to do this well, an important issue came up about protecting the confidentiality not only of patients but of staff too – and this is particularly tough in Scotland because of the very large number of very small hospitals scattered across sparsely populated areas. I’ve blogged a bit about this elsewhere.

To cut a long story short, we’re keen to hear any ideas on how we can both enable feedback to be about specific services (which is necessary for it to be useful), while avoiding the risk of identifying individual patients and staff. If you have thoughts on this, do let me know.

The nifty thing about this is that it is all pulled in from Delicious. So if you know of an interesting use of social media by a public service, simply tag it with digitalgovuk and it will appear on the website.

Steph Gray has more information on the project.