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?