We don’t care, apparently

11 November 2009
By

Absolute shite from Councillor Alistair Dow:

“ As long as their bins are collected and services provided they are not interested in how the council is run.”

I think you’ll find they are Mr Dow.

Remember Glyn Evans? “How many of our residents are actually interested in council meetings?”

Birmingham City Council — a systemic lack of interest in democracy?

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  • Richard

    Multiple links in a sentence – not very helpful. Agree with the sentiment though.

  • &rew

    Unfortunately, no matter how well meaning you are – you can't speak for “everyone” either. You care about how the council is run and people you know do too (and good luck to you all)…..but there may well be an element of truth in what the council says.

    In this city of a million people, how many have more pressing individual day-to-day concerns than the ones you have about the council? I don't know – I've not asked them, but fear it's a fairly high percentage.

    So it's not “absolute shite” at all, although maybe it is a sad indictment of public engagement with the corridors of power. However, the council can't take all the blame for that – I vote for my local councillor and hope they do a good job at representing local views….it's what they're for!

  • http://www.jonbounds.co.uk Jon Bounds

    Ah but if some people care then the statement is shite – he's doing
    the generalising not me.

  • srboisvert

    It is probably more a reflection of how shite the city website is. He is bragging up 80,000 hits a day on a website with a massive number of pages. It could simply be search engine crawlers and the DIY sit checking for updates that is doing all the visiting.

    Perhaps since he has put the traffic stats into public debate somebody should ask for anonymized logs to be made available so his claims can be verified. Particularly the hit count and visitor log for the page on the website for the mayor consultation.

BiNS is mostly by Jon Bounds a Birmingham based social web consultant, producer and writer., You can hire him to work on your social web campaigns or anything really—he's not fussy. Follow him on twitter or drop him an email.

There's also the odd bit of stuff from Danny Smith.

Feel free to send us anything you're interested in - or think we might be.

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