Heavy snow hit us overnight in Caversham and as I write the fluffy white stuff is still falling. From my office window I can see through a gap in the houses opposite the traffic on Briants Avenue and there have been no buses, or indeed any traffic at all. Our local radio stations provide good general information and updates on the weather, roads and public services but #rdg in Twitter is by far the best source of detailed local news. So today I was paying extra attention to the #rdg column in my Tweetdeck and spotted that one of Reading Borough’s councillors, @CllrDaisyBenson, is on Twitter. A couple of tweets later she informed me that three of her Lib Dem colleagues are on Twitter and about the same time I found the CllrTweeps web site – Finding and following the UK’s Tweeting councillors at http://www.cllrtweeps.com/.
The list was started by @CllrTweeps who is @JamesCousins. The project is currently being developed by James Cousins and @DafyddBach. Not surprisingly the wonderful @Liz_Azyan has been involved with the list and is credited with identifying a lot of the councillors.
You can search the list by council, party and “tweeps” – an alphabetical list of tweeting councillors.If you are a tweeting UK councillor and not on the list details of how to add your user name are at http://www.cllrtweeps.com/about/
Very interesting. None of mine are tweeting yet, neither those who represent Seaford on Lewes District, nor any on East Sussex County Council. I see that fashionable Brighton manages five tweeting councillors, four of them the Greens
Of the seven on my Council four are Lib Dems. For Caversham Ward (my area) we have Conservative Dave Luckett who appears to be an active tweeter. According to his biog his day-time job is a Java developer so I live in hope of RBC being encouraged (kicked up the posterior) into doing something useful with its web site. Not that I want to see Java apps all over the place but easy access to local information is not RBC’s strong point.