Comments on: My annual report (of sorts) 2011-2012

By: Gail Ramster

Gail Ramster — Tue, 22 May 2012 19:39:00 +0000

But that’s the thing – if there’s little value in the textbook answer due to the self-defined nature of the role, then why the focus on measurability and objectivity? It means that you can only measure against yourself, plus I’d expect a bit of subjectivity, not just because it’s self-defined but because it’s political.

I can see where you’re going though re: measuring against your previous performance, so… considering that some meetings are worth missing, some aren’t, and your knowledge of what occurred in each – do you think you’ve done better this year than last?

It’s reminding me of the Open Council stuff – the data may be misleading or of little interest (or not), but if the comments/explanations that accompany it explain the context and provoke debate, then that’s worth doing.

I can see that any other data is impossible (or at least detrimental) to collect, but that’s a conundrum; you’re going to struggle to measure you’re performance if you don’t measure you’re performance. I think there’s something to be said for qualitative over quantitative in this case, i.e. insights rather than data as a provocation. If that’s the case, it doesn’t matter that it’s unmeasurable or subjective – in fact I think it’s meant to be.

By: James Cousins

James Cousins — Tue, 22 May 2012 18:15:00 +0000

In reply to Gail Ramster.

Some interesting points. And some with which I’m wrestling. If I’m of the opinion that local government deserves more power (and also should delegate more power) I should surely be able to provide a good answer of what a local councillor does.

I’m not sure I can. Yes, I can provide a textbook answer, the theoretical answer, but I don’t know how much that would match reality.

The easy thing about something like this is that it’s objective and easily measurable. You can check the minutes on the council website and create this long after the event. You can’t do that quite so easily with other things. I have, for example, tried logging casework: but it quickly becomes a chore and becomes very difficult to resurrect the stats after a few months.

I also once tried putting together a short ‘day in the life’ video. But quickly abandoned the idea when it was apparent that I couldn’t video meetings, and footage of me getting the bus to the Town Hall or typing emails was not that riveting.

Leaflets cost money, and as a result are often tied to elections (we do them all year, but can’t deny they ramp up at elections) and have no budget for anything that’s purely information.

Patchy answers, I know. I’m sure someone will stumble on something much better than I have in due course.

By: Gail Ramster

Gail Ramster — Tue, 22 May 2012 14:51:00 +0000

I now know you go to an awful lot of meetings with really boring names. I didn’t know councillors had to do quite so much of that, so in a sense I’ve learnt something. It probably wasn’t anything that I wanted to know, but I’m glad you do it well (so long as they’re not a pointless waste of time).
Perhaps I’m less interested in what a councillor does and more interested in what people think a councillor does (the ones that think about it at all) – i.e. why do people get in touch and, from that start point, what can/do you do for them and what can you not? (and as a small aside, or an overview, how much of it is ward-based case work, how much is specific roll and how much is boring bureaucratic meetings). Day in the Life of a Cllr? (or week, since it’s not a day job?)That’s slightly different from the annual report we were sort of talking about on Twitter, although it gives an insight into what a councillor (or this one at least) does. However it doesn’t cover the ‘what’s been achieved for the ward this year’ or ‘what difference have we made?’. I suppose that’s covered by Brightside and the Conservative local leaflety thing that appears about that often (though is certainly not covering a year’s worth of activity). They’re both a bit PR-ish of course, and Brightside isn’t ward-level content (or even CJ-level). For instance, I liked knowing that people have written to councillors about the daft pedestrian crossing at Queenstown Rd / Lavender Hill, which I would never have thought to do even though it’s stupid, and which I only learnt had created correspondence because it was mentioned in the intro at the ward meeting. Also there’s the problem with ward-level councillor / council activity that we have 3 ward councillors so there’s no central source of info and no one way of working. Tricky.It’s also possible that I’ve lost all perspective about ‘what’s interesting to people?’ v. ‘what’s interesting to me?’. I’m sure 90% of people don’t care either way, however I heard the sniffy ‘what do councillors even do?’ view again recently from someone who should know better (compare that to an MP – no one knows what they do either, but we still assume they’re terribly busy), plus there’s the democratic transparency side of it (‘we should be able to find out, on the off-chance that we’re interested’. Another aside – what about voting records? Terribly dull or predictable I’d assume, but does that exist?). I’m drifting back to ‘why doesn’t the council tell people what a council does and how a council works? again, such as ‘we have x number of councillors and this is the structure and these are the committees, and there’s a meeting tonight of all councillors and they’ll be debating these 2 things and you’re welcome to come’, but that should be the council’s responsibility, not any one councillor (or even 10 councillors). So, to conclude, I don’t know, but I’m enjoying your experiments!