Friday 5 June 2009

Thanet District Council new strides in open government

In the spirit of cooperation and innovation that I have come to expect from our beloved council they have solved the problem of not getting their press releases on their website in a timely fashion with proper feeds and pictures as I do by stopping sending them to me.


How to proceed, not sure really sending in a freedom of information request for their press releases is one option, an official complaint is another, god knows you couldn’t make it up, even in a banana republic this would be funny in the extreme.

8 comments:

  1. This is beyond belief Michael, they should be publicly THANKING you!!!

    Are you certain they've stopped sending you them though? Perhaps there just haven't been any new ones?

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  2. Absolutely Peter, they have just got round to publishing a batch from this week on their website, it seems very hard to across the message to them that news needs to be new and on the internet needs proper feeds so that people notice it.

    I copied all of the ones that I didn’t get from the TDC website and published them on my news blog, there is something a little surreal in announcing the launch of something on Wednesday the following Friday.

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  3. I would say - par for the course. In fact I am very surprised that you received their press releases in the past. Officers and Councillors just aren't up to the job in Thanet - can't even process and application for a postal vote correctly - clerical error - which left someone I know disenfranchised yesterday!

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  4. Try the Flying Doctor? he may be able to help

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  5. I have Ken, I have also had a response from the press office, as it didn’t make sense to me it is a little hard to know what to do now, I will forward it to you perhaps there are times when one needs a councillor as translator for council officers.

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  6. Clive Harts gone from County then!

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  7. Michael, I think its Council speak for it was a C###K up

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  8. Thanks for the translation Ken, I have noticed they find I difficult to say, I am sorry I made a mistake.

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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.