Last weekend I was reading an interesting article from the Jan. 2008 American City and County Magazine about local government officials maintaining blogs to aid their communications with the public. I found this really interesting, especially in how different individuals manage their site and deal with the wide range of comments they get from the public.  Some examples of city managers maintaining blogs I’ll list here so you can check them out for yourself:

West Des Moines, IO: City Manger, Jeff Pomeranz: http://wdmblog.wdm-ia.com/ Eden Prairie, MN: City Manager, Scott Neal & Fire Chief George Esbensen: http://edenprairieweblogs.org/ Round Lake, IL: Mayor, Bill Gentes: http://www.eroundlake.com/blog/ Santa Paula, CA: City Manager, Wally Bobkiewicz: http://ci.santa-paula.ca.us/blog/ Davison, MI: City Manager, Pete Auger: http://www.cityofdavisonweblogs.org/peterauger/ In each case, it is delightful to see efforts to improve communication with people in the community.  Clearly, creating fresh content and subject material that is interesting for readers is part of the challenge.  Pete Auger is cited (in Am.City& Co.Mag.) about benefits he sees including finding people who are a good fit to serve on boards…. and he said maintaining a blog helps him keep a focus on what the city is doing and what values really are meaningful to people.  The other element that is especially intriguing is how different public sector bloggers manage comments.   Of course, the whole blog concept is to develop conversations and share ideas.  Yet public conversations can have risks and may need to be managed rather than just enabling auto-posting.  Posting a “comments’ policy” makes some sense.  Bill Gentes and others provide thoughts on this at their blog sites. A common strategy is to have comments viewed by the blog site administrator who can then select, edit/redact or post as they consider appropriate.  We’ll talk more on this issue, soon.   Mark

I was reading an on-line article from Government Technology this morning about Scot Rouke who was just named, “Intelligent Community Visionary of the Year for 2008″ by the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF). You can click on my Gov.Tech. link above to read the article…. but the gist is, he has been successful collaborating with Case Western Reserve University (where my step-son Gabriel was an undergrad… he now works for Epic) and several other public and private entities to develop an ultra-broadband community network serving first the city of Cleveland and then the entire Northeast Ohio region. Rourke said, “We remain committed to our transformative efforts in education, health care, workforce development and government that have helped establish our region as a model for communities worldwide.” I would add that it is through efforts like this that we can see the transformative use of technology to improve citizen participation in government, environmental protection and sustainable economic development as well as those areas identified by Scot Rourke. His work as well as the work of ICF are to be commended. Mark