Workshops

A final event was held to bring together the work done on the Community Leadership and eDemocracy Programme. It took the form of a workshop and was held in four separate locations (Durham County Hall, Longhirst Hall in Northumberland, Stockton on Tees Library and Sunderland Civic Centre) towards the end of June.

The workshops presented on overview of the work carried out during the programme. It focused on three main outputs:

1. Councillor requirements that describe the drivers and barriers relating to the role of the Ward Councillor and how technology can be used to support this.

2. ICT Provision for Councillors that examines what ICT departments think that they provide to Councillors and some of the key findings expressed in the form of a set of draft standards ("Silver" and "Gold") for the provision of ICT support and planning for the future.

3. Scenarios that take a novel approach to explaining how councillors can use technology to support them in their day to day role by looking at Storyboards that cover commonly faced scenarios.

The presentations give an idea of what was covered in the workshops although the workshops were discussion based and the focus differed in each session:

1. eDemocracy Programme Overview

2. Findings that pick out some of the Key Findings

The findings presented in the workshops will be used amongst other things to inform the thinking of the North East Improvement and Efficiency Partnership as it moves forward into its new Programme of Work.

There were 48 attendees from 12 authorities. Workshops ranged in size from 9 to 17 and this gave the attendees the opportunity to contribute to the discussion.

A summary of the Findings Feedback seemed to show that attendees by and large got what they expected from the Workshops and were interested in supporting further work on eDemocracy. Most of the work areas surveyed attracted some level of interest but there seems to be most appetite for "Improving the flow of information to and from Ward Councillors" and "Raising the profile of Councillors in their Ward".