St Ive Parish Council have given the go-ahead for our own web site. You wouldn't believe how slow the process is. Since we have chosen to go for a proper .gov.uk domain name, our hosting ISP has to be accredited to go through JANET to apply for the domain name. It even has to be approved by The Cabinet Office - very official and grand, but it will take weeks. That does at least give me plenty of time to design the web site.
I've decided to use WordPress as the web site tool. It's very widely used, and will be portable to a new hosting company if necessary. The WordPress theme "Twenty Thirteen" seems to be suited to my KISS policy, (Keep It Simple Stupid), and good for a variety of devices, such as smart phones.
I want to use the web site as an interactive place to communicate, so the blog format of WordPress is perfect to allow parish news to be published and commented on by the readers.
There will also be a place for reference material about the community, the Parish Council, and St Ive Parish generally. I'll be asking for contributions from various local societies to write up the story of the parish.
Wednesday 25 September 2013
Thursday 15 August 2013
Facebook For The Parish
The Parish Council have
asked me to lead a steering group looking at how we can best use the
internet for the benefit of the community. I've created a Facebook Page "St Ive Parish Council" which non Facebook users can view at www.facebook.com/stiveparishcouncil.
We will keep this page updated with parish news items such as road
closures, and parish council meeting agendas and minutes. Facebook users
can "Like" the page and automatically receive these news items in their
news feed. The Facebook news feed is a bit like creating your own
personal newspaper with articles from just the sources you are
interested in. We are also allowing Comments to be entered to give a more interactive experience. I think this has real potential.
Has anyone got any ideas as to how the Facebook Page "St Ive Parish Council" can be improved? I've added some photos from Pensilva Gala Day (which was great fun), and used my photo of the parish taken from Caradon as the cover photo. The profile picture was borrowed from the internet. Has anyone got better photos that could represent the parish?
The other thing I would like to do with the Parish Facebook Page is link to Facebook Groups connected to the parish. I have added a note to the Parish Page, which lists links to local community Facebook and other internet places. It is also possible for Facebook Group Administrators to share their Group Events with the Parish Page, if they are also Administrators of the Parish Page. This has great possibilities for helping community coherence, and letting groups manage information about their own events.
In order to keep improving how we use the internet my next project will be sorting out the parish web sites. I'd like to get a group of us involved. If enough people are interested in volunteering for work experience, I'd really like to form a Community Interest Company based around internet services. I think there are lots of local groups and businesses that would like a web site. See my previous blog post for more detail.
Has anyone got any ideas as to how the Facebook Page "St Ive Parish Council" can be improved? I've added some photos from Pensilva Gala Day (which was great fun), and used my photo of the parish taken from Caradon as the cover photo. The profile picture was borrowed from the internet. Has anyone got better photos that could represent the parish?
The other thing I would like to do with the Parish Facebook Page is link to Facebook Groups connected to the parish. I have added a note to the Parish Page, which lists links to local community Facebook and other internet places. It is also possible for Facebook Group Administrators to share their Group Events with the Parish Page, if they are also Administrators of the Parish Page. This has great possibilities for helping community coherence, and letting groups manage information about their own events.
In order to keep improving how we use the internet my next project will be sorting out the parish web sites. I'd like to get a group of us involved. If enough people are interested in volunteering for work experience, I'd really like to form a Community Interest Company based around internet services. I think there are lots of local groups and businesses that would like a web site. See my previous blog post for more detail.
Monday 5 August 2013
Starting Out On The Internet Journey
St Ive Parish does not have a web site of its own. What we have is a few pages tacked on to the Millennium House business web site. As a new Parish Councillor and coming from a career in computing, I'm in the frame to create one. That's the easy bit. Anyone can create a web site, the tricky bit is making it useful and keeping it useful.
What is the web site for? I think that the web site needs to be a place for people to visit and find useful information. The information should be references about the local community. I'm sure that we can get interesting historic information to add, but the really useful information will be links for people to follow. These links could be internet links or just addresses and phone numbers of local people or businesses. The links can also be about events that are taking place locally.
There is another type of useful information - news, but in these days of 24 hour news channels, we expect our news to be fed to us instantly. This is where social media comes into its own. I use Facebook to find out any news items from organisations that I'm interested in. By "Liking" an organisation, I instantly get any new news items put into my Facebook news feed. So I'm kept up to date about everything from the Cornwall Wildlife Trust, to Cornwall County Council, and everything else I "Like". It's as if I have created my own on-line newspaper, with just the articles I'm interested in. So I think that St Ive Parish also needs a Facebook page.
As a Parish Councillor I frequently get emails from the Parish Clerk with bits of news relevant to the parish. These news items need to be spread locally. A Facebook news feed is ideal for this, but not all internet users want Facebook, so the web site also needs a news page.
For the web site and Facebook, the static information that does not change much can easily be maintained, but all the stuff that changes frequently takes a lot of work. I could try to do it all by myself, but depending on one person, however reliable, is not sustainable in the long term. So I want to form a group of volunteers to keep things going. If enough volunteers come forward, I would like to expand the idea for local unemployed people to gain real work experience.
This is where I get quite excited. What if we formed a CIC (Community Interest Company) with local volunteers who have relevant experience, mentoring volunteer NEETs (Not in Employment Education or Training) as they gain work experience creating and maintaining web sites for local groups and businesses. Funding would be available for a CIC that provided work experience for young NEETs being trained in a variety of skills, leading to paid jobs. The CIC would be run as a real business and the skills needed would be far more that computer programming. They could include graphic design, photography, documentation, sales and marketing, social media, consultancy, research and development, team working, secretarial work, accountancy, record keeping, fund raising, even management and mentoring with experience.
What do you think?
What is the web site for? I think that the web site needs to be a place for people to visit and find useful information. The information should be references about the local community. I'm sure that we can get interesting historic information to add, but the really useful information will be links for people to follow. These links could be internet links or just addresses and phone numbers of local people or businesses. The links can also be about events that are taking place locally.
There is another type of useful information - news, but in these days of 24 hour news channels, we expect our news to be fed to us instantly. This is where social media comes into its own. I use Facebook to find out any news items from organisations that I'm interested in. By "Liking" an organisation, I instantly get any new news items put into my Facebook news feed. So I'm kept up to date about everything from the Cornwall Wildlife Trust, to Cornwall County Council, and everything else I "Like". It's as if I have created my own on-line newspaper, with just the articles I'm interested in. So I think that St Ive Parish also needs a Facebook page.
As a Parish Councillor I frequently get emails from the Parish Clerk with bits of news relevant to the parish. These news items need to be spread locally. A Facebook news feed is ideal for this, but not all internet users want Facebook, so the web site also needs a news page.
For the web site and Facebook, the static information that does not change much can easily be maintained, but all the stuff that changes frequently takes a lot of work. I could try to do it all by myself, but depending on one person, however reliable, is not sustainable in the long term. So I want to form a group of volunteers to keep things going. If enough volunteers come forward, I would like to expand the idea for local unemployed people to gain real work experience.
This is where I get quite excited. What if we formed a CIC (Community Interest Company) with local volunteers who have relevant experience, mentoring volunteer NEETs (Not in Employment Education or Training) as they gain work experience creating and maintaining web sites for local groups and businesses. Funding would be available for a CIC that provided work experience for young NEETs being trained in a variety of skills, leading to paid jobs. The CIC would be run as a real business and the skills needed would be far more that computer programming. They could include graphic design, photography, documentation, sales and marketing, social media, consultancy, research and development, team working, secretarial work, accountancy, record keeping, fund raising, even management and mentoring with experience.
What do you think?
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