Somewhere between the steel thumbs of Kady O’Malley, the savvy of daveberta and those other, narrative-driving Captain’s logs (clogs?), hopefully lies the future of this blog thread. As the City of Edmonton takes its first steps into social media, I hope to be able to bring insight, spark discussion and ideas and generally turn the faceless municipal bureaucracy into something you know and love. Well, know better, at least.
We want you to meet some of the people who work for the City of Edmonton, find out what we do, how we do it and why we do it. We want to share our passion for making our community better and our expertise in many areas, remembering that if two heads are better than one, then many heads should be better than two, unless there are too many cooks in the kitchen and too many cliches in one sentence.
As for me, I’ve been the Director of Strategic Communications with the City for four years, and I’m excited about our latest foray into social media and the potential for greater dialogue and transparency it represents. We’ve been on Twitter (@cityofedmonton) for a while, but 140 characters can only take you so far. Municipal government is government closest to the people – we want to talk with those who share our interests, and the transparency we demonstrate regularly will carry forward into this venue (our skeletons always have at least one bony toe sticking out of the closet).
How and why we communicate as an organization will be the general theme/topic of these posts. So share your thoughts – is blogging the right step for the City to take? What do you think about the need to discuss some things in private vs. the right of taxpayers to have a say in how their money is spent? Do you want more Kady O’Malley references? Thoughts on future topics? I promise to read, not in a Big Brother kind of way, but maybe in a Big Brother kind of way, (without the implied patronizing). Now if only someone could find a way for us to share a beer over the Internet….is there an app for that yet?
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