Twitter town virtually gives the mayor his problem-solving edge
Pope Francis showed quick reflexes but was not quite fast enough to prevent a gust of wind blowing off his zucchetto (skullcap) during the weekly general audience at the Vatican in Rome yesterday. LONDON: The Spanish town of Jun in Granada, home to 3 500 people, is believed to be the first town worldwide to adopt Twitter as the leading communication between local government and residents.
For the past four years, it has acted as the town’s community noticeboard: sharing obituaries, news, school-dinner menus. Residents use it to report crime and problems with civic services and to book doctors’ appointments.
The mayor chats to residents in messages of 140 characters or less, while all public offices have an official account and police vehicles have @PoliciaJun on their bonnets.
Researchers at the Laboratory for Social Machines at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab are studying the town, to see if social networking holds the key to improved public services on a wider scale.
Efficiency
Meanwhile, voters go to the polls in Spain later this month, and Rodriguez Salas, who has held office as mayor for 11 years, is hoping to be re-elected for a third term.
Salas – or @JoseantonioJun as he’s known to his 330 000 followers – describes Twitter as “the social network of our immediate society”, enabling efficient responses to problems.
The speediest time for a problem to be resolved so far is three and a half minutes.
“The employees, whose work was previously not appreciated, now take pride in achieving their tasks,” Rodriguez Salas says. “It brings residents closer to the administration at the same time.”
Running a town on Twitter is not an approach that tolerates skivers; instead, it rewards the conscientious.
Deb Roy, director of the Laboratory for Social Machines, and William Powers, research scientist at the Laboratory for Social Machines, wrote in The Huffington Post that this “mutual visibility” served as both a carrot and a stick. – The Independent