The following article appeared in the November 1 edition of the Guelph Tribune:
Coun. Ian Findlay says he doesn’t plan to change the way he runs his widely read Ward 2 Blog, despite a new city hall policy that seems partly aimed at him.
The new “social media principles and guidelines” for Guelph’s elected officials, which were approved by council without debate last week, include a clause that contradicts the way Findlay has been running his blog.
“It is encouraging me not to do what I’ve been doing, yes,” Findlay agreed with a chuckle.
The clause says councillors should “refrain from cutting and pasting emails” from staff or constituents onto their blogs “without clear context and permissions.” It also calls on councillors to “take the time to interpret the contents (of such emails) and re-present them based on your audience and its needs.”
Findlay, who started his blog soon after joining council in 2006, said he will continue to post some of the emails he gets from city staff. Instead of changing this, he said he plans to “continue to dialogue” with the city’s communications and legal departments in order to “pry open this Pandora’s box . . . of authenticity and accountability at city hall.”Findlay said city staffers have come to realize that when they email memos to him, he’ll sometimes post them on his blog – with the staff member’s name removed – to inform the public about information he considers significant. In fact, staffers sometimes seem to regard this as a useful way to get a message out to the public, he said.
However, if a staff member adds a note saying the memo is strictly confidential, he always respects this request and doesn’t put it on his blog, Findlay said.
He said he plans to interpret the clause in the city’s new social-media guidelines as just saying he should continue to do this.
The new guidelines are tied to the city’s code of conduct, and there can be serious repercussions from breaching this code, Findlay said. He noted that council recently appointed lawyer Robert Swayze as the city’s integrity commissioner, empowered under provincial law with investigating alleged breaches of the code of conduct.
However, he said, “I don’t think I’ve done anything (through the Ward 2 Blog) that has caused a significant disruption to the organization (the City of Guelph).”
Findlay considers himself on the leading edge of trying to make city hall more accountable and transparent. “I think there are things we do at city hall that we need to be accountable for, and sometimes our legal people get in the way of that,” he said in an interview Thursday.
He doesn’t agree with the section of the new guideline that urges councillors to “interpret” the contents of emails from city staff or constituents on their blogs.
“I don’t want it to seem that I am trying to manipulate what is being said,” Findlay said.
“I am trying to present what is being stated to me, either by staff or constituents . . . without trying to spin it or sugar-coat it,” he said. So he likes to just cut and paste staff emails and post them them on the Ward 2 Blog.
“I think it brings an authenticity to the Ward 2 Blog and to city hall that I don’t think has been there.”
If his blog were to be “moderated and manipulated, it wouldn’t be as popular as it is,” he said.
This approach extends to the emails the Ward 2 Blog gets from city residents, which are being posted “live” on the blog and without any commentary from him, Findlay said. He is immediately notified of any new posting, though, so he can quickly remove something from the blog if he thinks it presents a problem.
The last time he “felt compelled to moderate” postings instead of allowing “live” postings by city residents on his blog was during the bitter controversy over the building of a Sikh temple in the south end, he said. Since then, it hasn’t been necessary.
City a leader in social media
Guelph seems to be at the forefront among cities when it comes to use of social media, including blogs and Facebook postings, says Coun. Ian Findlay.
Employees of the city’s corporate communications department, who worked on new social-media guidelines that were approved by city council last week, couldn’t find much guidance from what other cities are doing, Findlay said.
When the issue was discussed at the October meeting of the city’s governance committee, “I found out that Guelph is sort of at the leading edge of this, and other municipalities look to us” as a model for using social media to communicate with residents, he said in an interview.
“We seem to be more progressive in terms of social media than other municipalities.”
Guelph’s leading-edge practices include blogs run by Mayor Karen Farbridge (which has a link on the city’s home page at guelph.ca), as well as individual ward blogs run by himself, Ward 5’s Coun. Leanne Piper and Ward 4’s Coun. Cam Guthrie, Findlay said. “We’re all on Facebook, and I don’t think that is common among other municipalities,” he added.
Although the city’s new “social media principles and guidelines” for elected officials were approved without debate at last week’s council meeting, Findlay said he instigated discussion of the guidelines at the previous meeting of council’s governance committee. He wasn’t consulted when the guidelines were being drawn up, so he wanted to know who was consulted, as well as how other cities are approaching the issue.
The new five-page document includes guidelines for councillors to follow if they want to get involved in communicating with city residents through social media, including ensuring that they “do not reveal non-public information about the City of Guelph.”
Councillors who want to get involved in social media should be prepared to “engage people when it suits them. This may mean checking comments or making edits after work hours and on weekends,” the document says.
It also lists several sorts of content that shouldn’t be allowed on a social media site run by a council member, including “profane or inappropriate” language.
“The city expects some level of criticism, which presents an opportunity to correct misinformation and deliver excellent service,” it says.