I'm going to have a busy day today, there is a press and media meeting at 8.30 then I'm off to London for a meeting of the Local Government Information Unit Executive, then back to Hastings for a borough council cabinet meeting this evening. Fortunately I can do most of my reading on the train, which is one of the great benefits of going everywhere by public transport.

I'm not going to get much of a chance to blog today so I thought I would just chuck in this link to a blog which David Gurteen uses for knowledge management . I'm sure its not a totally original idea but it is interesting how it is structured excluslvely for this purpose and for exploring how blogs can act as  personal knowledge management tools - there must be a hundred good ways this sort of thing could be used by local government.

I went to seem some proposals for the development of a site on the corner of ffice:smarttags" />London Road and Norman Road today. The firm who invited me were  RDP Architects, in Cross Street, it was a real pleasure to visit a firm where those involved both live and work in the ward.

The plans have yet to go to planners but I think it is fair to say that bringing an empty site back into use in Central St Leonards is a welcome initiative as far as I am concerned.

Wikipedia on this day

Enough of Hastings I thought, so I went to Bristol this weekend to get ideas and inspiration from a city of liveable size. I noshed at the arty Watershed place on the Quay and viewed the Earth From The Air exhibition 

 fficeffice" />

If you ever go to Bristol you couldn’t spend £6.50 in any better way than a visit to the Empire and Commonwealth Museum. This is a place where difficult subjects are handled with real skill and creativity, offering insight for almost everyone into what the legacy of empire means and the different ways that it has been experienced. 

It beats the socks off anything else I have ever seen on the subject.

On this day

I have been trying to get a new line installed by BT over the past few days and I have to say I hadn’t realised how dreadful their residential customer service was (unless you want to phone 0800 085 6161 and listen to an answerphone message for half an hour that is). The only time I have been able to get through was after 30 minutes waiting and when I wanted to ask something else I had to phone again and listen to the same answerphone for another 20 minutes before I just gave up.

So I went to their website and sent them an email asking if there were any other ways I could contact them and got an email back saying they were sorry they couldn’t deal with the email but they were experiencing a very high level of demand for the email enquiry service at this time. So I emailed them back and said that this was probably because they didn’t have enough people answering the phones, so people were emailing them instead.

Down in Hastings they seem to be the only show in town, (not that they have a presence in the town since they pulled all their jobs out a few years ago) and they seem to treat their customers with total anonymous contempt.

I think I shall dedicate a small corner of my blog to how to complain about BT. Please feel free to submit ideas.

ed. Looks like someone beat me to it  http://btsuck.org

I have been trying to think about ways we could encourage more councillors to use PDAs instead of paper diaries over the last few weeks.

At the moment most councillors down here use ‘ye olde filofax’, with a paper diary insert courtesy of Hastings Borough Council stationary cupboard. As a result of this, we are in the painful position of running paper based diary support systems for the majority and e diary processes for a small but increasing number of slightly more e savvy folk.

The art will now be how to encourage the slightly more reluctant councillors to take up use of Outlook and PDAs, because of the position of councillors in the organisation and because these things sometimes generate more heat than light, it needs to be done in a sensitive way with persuasion rather than instruction.

Does anyone out there have any good stories about ways they have persuaded their boss (or parents perhaps?) to dump their filofax and use Outlook and PDAs instead?

I went out for a couple of hours leafleting in ffice:smarttags" />Kenilworth, Carisbrooke, Stockleigh and Rothsay Road earlier today. I always take my digital camera and PDA with me when I go leafleting now, since I can then pick up on ward work (like this missing street sign) and email the evidence to relevant services on my return.

Some councillors get the members secretary to send a letter or just phone up about ward work, but over the years I have discovered I need a a system where I can trace back all the individual actions requested on particular issues and identify who I asked to do what concerning each particular item.

The easiest way I have found for doing this is by using Outlook as a contact manager. It helps me to make sure matters get flagged up when I have not had a response in a given amount of time and I can trace back for information on who my last contact was and who to forward unresolved matters to.

It’s a system which is more bureaucratic than just ‘picking up the phone’ but in Central St Leonards (which is the most deprived ward in the South East of England – outside London) ward work has a habit of becoming complex and convoluted. Representing this area can frequently mean working with constituents who face, hard to solve multiple problems with restricted numbers of options on how to change things. Even with less complex issues, like working to get infrastructure repairs for things which wear out or get damaged,  all this seems to happen far more frequently in the Victorian seafront wards, because everything was built so many years before other parts of the town and the population density means things like street furniture and pavements gets so much more wear and tear.

Rejoice and be merry, thffice:smarttags" />e newspaper recycling bin which was badly needed at Warrior Square Station has now been replaced by one which has added information on service contacts - as requested by yours truly.

The next job is identifying a proper system to get the bins emptied frequently enough, since people become discouraged from using the service if they take their papers off the train and find the bin is full.