[Jackie Sayers]

pah - Access Denied here

This happens to me all the time due to an over-zealous approach to security here. A real problem for scrutiny research - so I work from home a lot ...

[Deborah Breedon]

Access denied here too!!

[Ed Hammond]

Do many of you find that your council's servers deny you access to social media tools like Twitter/Facebook?

For those of you who can't access it, Help Me Investigate is a collaborative tool for, um, investigating things.

[Dave Mckenna]

We have a general block but we have it lifted for our team on business grounds - we run twitter and facebook accounts - should be possible to get your IT to give you access - you may find your web team / comms team already have access to run facebook sites etc.

More generally my view is that local authoriites will over time recognise that the benefits of social media outweigh the risks and grant more general access. It is very similar to the situation we once had with email and internet more generally once. No doubt access to phones was once an issue...

If the worry is that staff will waste time then they have many other opportunities to do this - at the end of the day it is a management issue.

There is plenty of debate on this going on.... if you can access it of course....

[Ed Hammond]

We are, in fact, producing a detailed piece of research on this very topic in the next week or two, for those who are interested.

[Heather Smith]

I can get into it, but I suppose my slight reluctance about these types of sites relates to the extent to which they can be treated as accurate (I have to take someone's word for it) and representative (I have to trust they are who they say they are). I agree that social netwrking has its part to play, but we need to have the same healthy scepticism that we'd apply to any source of information.

[Paul Dean]

We seem to be able to access the site here no problem.

I've had a glance through and indeed there are a number of investigations on there which cover topics that scrutiny could well pursue - eg. council coverage in local newspapers, cycling safety; comparsions of healthcare across areas; costs of road repairs etc.

But it looks a bit new still and the 'investigations' reported on it so don't seem to go very deep. Some of them aren't much more than reporting on answers to FOI requests, and expounding a fair bit on public opinion which, as we know, can vary enormously in how informed it is.

I suspect the site isn't going to threaten scrutiny's role in the very near future. But its focus on investigation rather than just another blog type site might capture the imagination of some people. It might turn into a resource we can use either to gather evidence (still sceptical on this though but let's see) or to get ideas for avenues of investigation..

Hope others can get access and give a view.