‘Engagement’: fashionable yet bankrupt – Canalside View
Martin Weigel writes at length about the industry-wide misuse of the term ‘engagement’ and hits the nail squarely on the head a number of times. The problems he cites in his nine ‘bad habits’ of engagement highlight his main point that the phrase has become so widely used, yet without any common definition or metrics to back it up, that it has come to mean everything and nothing. It’s well-considered, insightful and well worth a read.
You know you’ve blogged too long about local government when – We Love Local Government
Congratulations to the team behind this blog, who recently had their 100,000th visitor and are preparing a post to mark its anniversary soon (as I understand). This is a republication of an earlier post, which found its way into The Guardian, but is linked here because it makes a particularly apt ‘engagement’ point of its own.
‘You know you’ve worked in Local Government for too long when: you see chatting to the person next to you on the bus as a community engagement exercise.’
Using unnecessary capital letters for words like Local Government is a point I’d like to add to their list, but congratulations to the team for producing a great daily digest of life at a local council.