Lewisham Council tweets

Lewisham Council is on Twitter.

You can sign up to follow their tweets at http://twitter.com/LewishamCouncil

Follow that Councillor!

‘Cllr Tweeps’ is a website that lists the UK’s twittering councillors so that residents can track down their elected member, follow their messages and tweet with them.

Cllr James Cousins, of Wandsworth council, who helped to set up the site, said it was inspired by Tweetminister – a directory of all MPs who have Twitter accounts http://tweetminster.com/

The website is politically independent aiming to help councillors engage and communicate with their communities. So far Cllr Tweeps has confirmed that there are 88 councillors from 68 councils who currently have Twitter accounts – but the figure is constantly rising. So far there are 2 listed for Lewisham.

To visit the website see http://cllrtweeps.com/

Severe weather and Lewisham

The heavy snow and severe weather has had an impact on services in Lewisham and we are unable to open all of our libraries today.

Wavelengths, Forest Hill, Torridon Road, Sydenham and Catford Libraries are all expected to open this morning until 1.00pm. All of our other libraries, including Lewisham and the Open Learning Centre will be closed.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause and plan to resume normal service as soon as possible.

Digital Britain - the interim report

The Government has been outlining its plans for UK’s digital transition - "to secure Britain’s place at the forefront of the global digital economy". The interim report contains more than 20 recommendations, including specific proposals on:

• next generation networks


• universal access to broadband


• the creation of a second public service provider of scale


• the modernisation of wireless radio spectrum holdings


• a digital future for radio


• a new deal for digital content rights


• enhancing the digital delivery of public services
  

http://www.culture.gov.uk/what_we_do/broadcasting/5631.aspx

2008 Web 2.0 training success

Just thought you might like to know how the Web 2.0 training has gone as 2008 comes to a close.

• 23 training sessions were held
• 131 bookings were made for them
• over 60% of staff attended at least one session
• there was a 16% drop out rate - so an 84% attendance rate
• 39 blogs were created
• 18 wikis were created
• 20 Facebook or MySpace accounts were created
• 28 Picasa or Flickr accounts were created

All in all a great success and we already have bookings for the next set of sessions!

I'm taking a breather so we'll be doing the next set of training in the New Year. Thanks to everyone who attended and I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did.

WCAG 2.0

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced a new standard to make sites more accessible to older and disabled people. Version 2.0 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) will apply to text, images, audio and video. It also covers web applications and should give developers more flexibility than the old guidelines. According to W3C, WCAG 2.0 should also be easier to understand and use.

The guidance is designed to address barriers encountered by people with visual, hearing, physical, cognitive and neurological disabilities and older people with access needs.
You can see the new guidance at - http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/

Lewisham's Web 2.0 in the news

Lewisham's Web 2.0 training has made the big time - well Cilip Update at least! Those of you who are members of Cilip can see the article on page 6 of the December edition, or online at http://www.cilip.org.uk/ Those of you who aren't can nick a copy from a colleague.

It's been posted about on the Cilip blog - members only to comment I'm afraid, and there's also a post about it and Learning 2.0 on Sarah Washford's Info Junkie blog