What if?

Trip Advisor happened for local gov. People rated things, kept eyes on things, fed back easily if there was an issue. Maybe not needed in smaller Council areas, maybe only in cities but still, what if? Public toilets. Takeaways and restaurants for cleanliness. Parks for upkeep, for plant choice, even? Rate us on everything.

Why? Because it’d be doing our jobs for us. Well you didn’t expect anything else, did you? But, also, because you are our customers, our critics, our eyes and ears. Because you use the services that we sometimes don’t. Because if the same thing is wrong, day in and day out, and you never tell us, nothing will ever change.

Sounds pretty ace to you?

Then work out how offline bods get to have as much of a say as the online crowd. Because I really can’t. So I think we’ll file it under ‘awesome things which can come when we are all online’

If you think it’s not important, think about online age skews. Then think about who’s going to rate retirement homes, elderly care provision, meals on wheels etc. It’s not all quite as simple as it should be.

So I come back to a fundamental question that I feel I keep asking and no one wants to answer or address. When are we going to spend some money, not on initiatives to use the shiny in new and interesting easy, but money on enabling everyone to have equal access to the shiny.

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