Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
iPads for Councillors
Following up a story in the Standard on how the London Borough of Havering giving 17 of their Councillors I-pads. They were also looking at providing the said gadget to all their Councillors, here's an interesting piece from Mark Braggoins thinking though at whether this is a positive development.
So the obvious question, iPads for Haringey Councillors?
Tags for Forum Posts: councillors, ipad, technology
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by stuart on
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If our councillors needed technology in their jobs then so be it , if it helps them work more efficiently, but the ipad is the wrong tool . It's not designed to hold document information required for their work . This fantastic bit of kit is designed more for leisure.
Shame on them if they do purchase them ,especially when all our sevices are effected as they keep whining on about.
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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I'm not so sure Stuart. They're increasingly being used for work and by the autumn the shift to storing files in the cloud will have started in earnest, so document storage could be a non-issue.
I guess the starting point is to ask what type of device a councillor will find most useful. For some extreme portability will be key. For this a tablet device is hard to beat. As a device that's perfect for communication with full document production capabilities it's a pretty smart one.
I'm not sure I've quite decided how a tablet integrates into my online/IT world so being certain about the benefits of a tablet vs. a laptop is a tough one for me still at this point.
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Permalink Reply by Chris brock on
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Obvious answer: No
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Permalink Reply by Vernon on
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Hear hear
I have yet to meet anyone standing as a councillor who didn't have access to a computer and an email account.
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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Yes, indeed, an obvious question. Why not ask it?
Meanwhile, here are the facts about standard equipment Haringey councillors may be loaned . (It's returned when you come off the council.) We can request a Dell Latitude laptop with an HP Officejet printer/ scanner. Some councillors are loaned Nokia mobiles; some have a Blackberry. Councillors pay for their own calls.
Not every councillor has every piece of equipment. I'm told that some borrow nothing at all. While others have just a phone; or only a laptop; or a printer. For anyone who is wondering, both Zena Brabazon and I had our own computers so didn't need laptops. We've borrowed an HP Officejet and Zena has a council Nokia mobile.
I suspect we'll be reading many more such "news stories" of "wild" and "profligate" spending by everyone in Local Government, from top to bottom. (Council cleaners, as we all know from totally reliable websites, use sable brushes. The gravediggers use silver spades.)
(Labour councillor Tottenham Hale ward)
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Mr Hoyle, I used profligacy in the sense of 'reckless extravagance'.
I don't know Cllr Michael White the Leader of Havering Council. But I'm sure that if you contacted him, as a fellow Conservative Party member and would-be councillor yourself, he would be happy to explain how and why his iPad is not reckless extravagance but helps him do his job and also saves printing costs. Councillors - or whichever political party - need tools to do their jobs properly.
What we're now seeing - in the Telegraph and Standard for instance - are attempts to paint all councillors as irresponsible spendthrifts with a taxpayer funded "jet-set lifestyle enjoyed by councillors and local government offic...".
Yes, as you accurately observed - and as I wrote - some councillors do have Blackberries. But some use cheaper mobile phones; and some have none.
Sitting in a meeting at Tottenham Sports Centre tapping and stroking your mobile when someone is talking to you is simply bad manners. Though it's not exactly jet-setting, is it?
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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I have no objection in principle to councillors being offered iPads to be used in their work. Potentially I can see these amazing devices as being helpful. And the cost for every councillor having one is a small compared with the current total council IT budget (let alone the total budge). The support costs are likely to be less than PCs, especially PCs of the "DOS-Windows" type.
But I see this as something of a distraction. It's easy to personalise this (iPads for councillors) and make cheap shots. If we care about council finances, we might (or the council might) address the long term excessive costs of the municipal IT.
- What is the cost of support?
- How much is the council spending on software licences to a criminally convicted monopolist corporation?
- Has the council looked at open source software as a means of lowering their IT costs in the long run? Why not?
- Might there be vested interests in the current expensive, high-maintenance arrangements that currently exist?
- Why does the council frequently print out paper (internally), then scan those documents to distribute as fat, low-quality pdfs, when pdf files could and should be produced far more efficiently?
These are the kind of hard, boring questions that need to be asked and which might make a real difference.
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The cheap shot is much more fun, but often it leads to the real boring questions being addressed.
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Permalink Reply by John McMullan on
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Will, as an accountant I thought you would have been able to espouse on the benefits of renewing high resale value equipment such as the kind made by Apple at least every two years, especially given the generous depreciation allowed on IT equipment by HM Customs and Excise.
What is the REAL cost of 70 iPads renewed every two years?
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I disagree. Alan told an anecdote about a councillor who pestered officers asking for information a while ago. He seemed quite pleased that they resolved the issue by dumping a truck load of documents at his house. Just look at what Google can do with the billions and billions of bytes on the interwebs and I think you'll have to agree that an iPad could be a fantastic device for a councillor interested in facts and research coming in to play in meetings. Of course they could also just have the meetings online...
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Sorry if I wasn't clear, John. The councillor who got the vanload of papers wasn't "quite pleased". He was flooded. And with this technique, neutralised mischievously and deliberately by a senior officer.
And although that was way back in the last century, the qualitative problems of building knowledge from a mountain of data have not lessened because we store stuff online rather than in library stacks and office cabinets.
By the way, like many people you seem to have a fantasy about council meetings reviewing facts and research, raising and discussing issues and making decisions.
When you were a kid, didn't your parents take you to see the Wizard of Oz?
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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on
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iPads don't run Adobe Flash (many, many websites use Flash).
Apple seem to hate Adobe and won't let Adobe software run on their kit.
If Councillors are given tablets, they should not be products that can't display all the websites out there.
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