null
Blogs

Boosting the profile of Scrutiny

thumbnail
Stacy Cosham
Published Date9 Years Ago - 1950 Views

Scrutiny is not the most ‘sexy’ subject even in local Government; it comes with all types of stigmas and perceptions.  One of my appraisal targets is to boost the profile of our local Scrutiny Committee.  This has spawned a long action plan for me to work through that includes community engagement, youth engagement, and online engagement.

I have now launched a few social media accounts for the Broadland Scrutiny Committee.  We are now micro-blogging on Twitter (@ScrutinyBDC). Here we aim to raise awareness of upcoming reviews, upcoming meetings, highlight progress of our reviews and pose questions to followers that will help inform our reviews.  I also aim to help explain the role of scrutiny in 140 characters!

We have also joined Streetlife as Broadland Scrutiny.  Within this social space we want to contribute to local conversations and create our own. We will tell you what Broadland Scrutiny is doing to help Broadland residents and to ask local people for their views – it will influence the committee work programme, and help members of the Committee during their reviews. We want to know what really matters to local people so we get it right.

During the course of each work programme we aim to create some surveys on Norfolk Your Voice, where we with engage with local people signed up to the survey service, asking for their views on what Scrutiny should be looking at in future and surveys that will help evidence scrutiny reviews and recommendations.

To join the conversation here are the links –

community engagement social media scrutiny accountability transparency social committee
Comment (2)

More Blog Entries

Scrutiny Meeting Format proposals

thumbnail
Stacy Cosham
12 Jul
0
thumbnail
Jonathon Partridge
10 Years Ago
Hi Stacy - What sort of feedback have you had to your social media output so far? Has it resulted in many suggestions for items or attendees at meetings? We have a new PI to measure the number of items that originate from external sources so we're looking for ways to encourage public engagement, would be interested to know if your effort has added value. Jon
thumbnail
Stacy Cosham
10 Years Ago
Hi Jon So far I posted to Streetlife that the Committee are preparing their questions for the Cabinet on the council budget. I asked them what they would want the Committee to ask and I got a handful of good finance questions come through. I also got a few 'moaning' posts which I responded to directing them to where accurate information exists on the Council's website. I'm pleased that I can also use it as a signposting tool to correct information, breaking down the myths. Over on twitter I have had less public interaction but a good few retweets. I am currently working through a conversation about the Council donating used laptops to a carer charity. Not strictly scrutiny but good public engagement. Its so new, at the moment I'm trying to just get active and aiming to get external influence over time. Planning on some crowd sourcing content leading up to when the Committee sets its next annual work programme.