With the candidates nominated for the Stonebridge by-election, here’s a little summary of them for you:

• ALADESHE, Funmi The Conservative Party
• COX, Sarah Respect
• ORR, Brian Green Party
• VAN KALWALA, Zaffar The Labour Party
• WILTSHIRE, Sandra Elina Liberal Democrats

Sarah Teather and other Brent Liberal Democrates have joined facebook. I’ve poked her, have you?

I wasn’t expecting to see our Sarah on Facebook… A few years ago electronic networking wasn’t on her list methods for constituency communications. How things change over time: the ubiquity of the term “social networking”, meaning a twittering, bebobuzzing space for me to show my face on the internet, has overtaken “blogging” in terms of its penetration into the nations daily lexicon.

Sarah sees Facebook as a compliment to her existing constituency working: “It’s important to be accessible to all my constituents, and there are lots of ways for people to meet me face to face.”

“Young people often have very strong opinions on local and national issues. Sites such as Facebook provide another way for me to hear their views. I can also use the site to tell young people about the work I am doing on their behalf. For lots of younger adults the internet is now the main way of keeping in touch. I hope that having a page on Facebook will encourage many more people to come forward with issues and campaigns they would like me to take up.”

But Facebook is a closed community, a members only space on the internet: at least MySpace member pages are public! These “Social websites expose class divide“. Blogging, i.e. online publishing with comments, is open and public and seeks to engage readers in a transparent dialog.
As we know from recent escapades that some people around Brent’s elected representatives like to engage in online ‘activism’… So I hope that Sarah’s Facebook account and our other MPs for that matter are only being operated by her and not by their teams. As we know from the Facebook terms of service, in the User Conduct section:

• In addition, you agree not to use the Service or the Site to:
• register for more than one User account, register for a User account on behalf of an individual other than yourself, or register for a User account on behalf of any group or entity;
• impersonate any person or entity, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent yourself, your age or your affiliation with any person or entity;
• impersonate any person or entity, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent yourself, your age or your affiliation with any person or entity;

Towards the end of term at Goldsmiths I participated in a huge number of half-baked surveys and poorly designed questionnaires. Still, that’s my own fault for saying ‘Yes’ to all the last minute BA Sociology / Psychology students, desperate to get some data to evaluate for their assignments. The E-benchmarking survey for CELT, on the other hand, was a focused piece of qualitative research using interviews with students to benchmark e-learning activity at Goldsmiths.

I’ve posted the full transcript of the interview on my wiki if you’d like to read it.

My key messages to CELT were:

• more bandwidth on campus and in halls of residence as the disconnection of students is lamentable
• more student participation on learn.gold so that we can originate content
• less (hopefully no!) attachments on learn.gold – I hate downloading PDFs and word documents to read some text that could have been displayed in the web page… especially when the download is not something I am going to edit, like, say, a reading list or a course timetable.
• working and useful interfaces to resources such as the library catalogue

I await the complete report from CELT to see what other feedback there has been and to see what recommendations have been picked up.

Here’s a link to the LibDem FlockTogether page on the Stonebridge local council by-election.

Is “Happy voting!” really the proper way to close an email announcing a Council By-election? Anyway…
A seat has become vacant in the Stonebridge Ward following the death of Councillor Dorman Long. A by-election will be held on Thursday, 13 September 2007 to elect a new representative.

The by-election gives the Lib Dems another opportunity to win a seat – but will they win it? I doubt it. Stonebridge ward is a Labour heartland – you only have to look at the votes cast in the 2006 Local Election to see that… Winning this single seat will not change the overall political balance of Brent Council: The Lib Dems would need to win a few more by-elections or benefit from defections (not for the first time in Brent’s recent political history) in order to be in a position to leave the alliance with the Conservatives and lead a majority administration. This by-election is a litmus paper – are Stonebridge residents pleased with Cllr Paul Lorber‘s coalition administration, enough to give the Lib Dem’s another Councillor? Or will we see a new face in the Council from the Labour Party?