OPEN

One more thing from the CLT thing today…

The session was under Chatham House rules, so I won’t go into details of who said what, but one other point that was made eloquently was that Government tends to define its role in terms of addressing deficits. In networks it may be as useful or more useful in addressing assets. The example given was identifying under-used public spaces, and helping people find them.

Someone else talked about how Government often felt its role was to throw money at things but that this wasn’t necessarily going to be the only thing it could do in networks. I quipped that instead it should be throwing data at problems.

Thinking about those two points in parallel there’s something every local authority could do to be useful. Share data about spaces that are available at low or no cost for community groups. To make the data useful it would need to be portable, so that you could take the data into Facebook, Google Calendar, Upcoming and Meetup to help organise… whatever.

(If anyone wants to own up to their brilliant insights in the comments section I’ll credit them, natch.)