Want to share your views? Today it seems very fashionable to share your views via twitter (my preferred social network) or facebook, which should be deleted. So why would you bother joining East Lothian’s new Citizens’ Panel? Some background first.
East Lothian Partnership is setting up a Citizens’ Panel to help it gather the views of a cross section of the East Lothian population on a regular basis. Panel members will be asked for their views on issues such as quality of life, safety, health and wellbeing, as well as on their satisfaction with public services. The information gathered will help public sector organisations such as the Council, NHS, Fire & Rescue Service and the Police to plan and make improvements to the services they provide locally.
So how they going to do that? Well the plan is for 2 main surveys to be sent yearly to Panel members, with smaller infill surveys. You may get to take part in focus group discussions (you can always opt out of this when completing the recruitment questionnaire). Do it online or by paper. Great. If you’re interested in these sorts of things, see this comparison of the techniques for eliciting feedback: http://www.citizenshandbook.org/compareparticipation.pdf
What can you conclude? They all have their strengths and weaknesses, and in the hands of the right operator could easily be used to swing a vote.
Anyway, some may have received an invitation through the post – but not me – but I just signed up. Hopefully they have quotas, and will exceed “the middle-aged male with too much time on his hands” demographic.
The final call to action is:
as a member of the Panel you can really make a difference.
I’ll let others decide whether you can, but I’d be surprised if anyone was carefully measuring that, but you never know.