Kirklees have been webcasting their meetings for over a year and have been successful in building an audience for these. They want to build on this and extend their democratic digital presence online and so started tweeting from their Council meetings in July 2010. Carl
Whistlecraft explains why in this blog post:
“The origin of this project goes back to a Summer evening in Cleckheaton, a town in Kirklees. In fact it begins in Cleckheaton Town Hall where I was sat (as part of my job) awaiting the start of our Full Council meeting. The reason we were in Cleckheaton Town Hall (and not Huddersfield) was because the Town Hall in Huddersfield was being refurbished. Bear with me all of this is relevant.
Not being in Huddersfield meant that we were unable to webcast the meeting. This was a real shame as there had been an interest developing amongst residents and staff in terms of what happened at our council meetings – people were tuning in to watch!! As I sat waiting for the Mayor and Chief Executive to enter and for the formal proceedings to begin I routinely checked my Twitter account on my phone. That was the lightning bolt moment – I’m here, my phone’s fully charged, I have a full signal. For the next four hours I tweeted the meeting (using the #kirkcouncil tag), providing commentary as best I could and kept linking to papers and reports on the
council web site as councillors discussed the items. As the meeting progressed there was a steady growth of interest as my tweets were retweeted and comments and views began to add to the conversation. Not a big deal really, or so I thought.
The next morning I woke up and routinely checked my Twitter account (a bit sad perhaps, but I bet I’m not the only one). I was amazed to see how many mentions and retweets had been pinging around whilst I slept. I really thought that tweeting a meeting was not such a big deal. Residents were commenting, officers from other councils were interested, a councillor asked for a copy of a report that was discussed and craziest of all a council in Sydney (yes Australia) wanted to speak to me about ‘how I did it’.”
The project has been officer led and has grown organically. There isn’t a rigorous structure to the project – the team are feeling their way with both the technology and the online culture and this case study captures some of their learning so far.