My Lib Dem colleagues in Redlands and I work hard to communicate with those we are elected to serve (the people of Redlands - all 6,000+ of them!) and we do this in a variety of traditional and non-traditional ways including using blogs, press articles, street-letters, telephone, email, Facebook and more recently Twitter.
We also do plenty of what you might call 'traditional campaigning' in an effort to find out local views towards different issues notably holding ward surgeries, conducting residents' surveys, putting out regular 'Focus' leaflets, collecting petition signatures and knocking on doors.
We are always exploring ways we can get our message across more effectively and also, ways to get direct feedback from residents both in the ward and in the wider Reading area, on a wide range of local issues.
This helps us to keep in touch all year round with the issues that matter to local people and it helps us to prioritise our campaigning locally.
I hope what we do is effective: we certainly get a lot of feedback, and as I've said before I am certain that we have one of the most engaged electorates in Reading judging by the amount of emails, calls and casework we receive.
Whatever method we use to get feedback we work hard to keep on top of this communication - making us one of the busiest councillor teams in Reading.
I used Facebook recently in our highly-successful campaign to get the Labour-run Council to tackle issues in the private rented sector. This was a great way to get students involved and to get their views.
We also used Facebook and Flickr to build support for our local campaign for action on graffiti taggers, and to voice local anger at the University's closure of the School of Health and Social Care.
I'm hopeful that having seen how successful social networking sites can be we can encourage the Council to use them more widely when seeking to consult local people on issues that affect them.
As far as I'm aware I was the first councillor in Reading to seek views in this way in relation to a scrutiny review. I was contacted by a journalist from The Times on the back of my initative and the result was this article which appeared today.
I hope that Council officers and councillors in Reading and other areas will be encouraged to try this approach out for themselves.
As I said in the article, online campaigns are a cheap and a effective way of reaching people, particularly young people (but not exclusively) who may not attend council meetings etc.
The recently-launched campaign to Reopen the Jolly Anglers pub is another good example of local activism on the web - allowing local people to have their say on issues of concern and campaign for action.
Obviously setting up Facebook groups etc is not in itself enough for a campaign to be successful, but used appropriately it can be a great way to get people involved who may not have campaigned on issues before or to get feedback.
Keep in touch: follow me on Twitter for more updates!
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