LessFuss Design

Who’d have thought it, local government actually using social media for something really useful? Lichfield and Lincoln City councils have proved that you can use Web 2.0 for the good of the people by developing a new Twitter application called Twitterplan . The service Tweets alerts about new planning applications near where you live.

Twitterplan uses the data set and API from planningalerts.com (an email-based alert system), and while not all the UK’s local authorities have their data on the system, most of them have – so check their list of councils to check whether yours is included.

Assuming the relevant data is available, using Twitterplan is easy. You can give Twitterplan your Twitter account details and postcode (so it knows what planning data to be pulling in), then set the distance over which you want to be told about (i.e. 200, 800 or 3000 metres from the postcode). After this Twitterplan’s ‘planbot’ will automatically let you know when a new planning application comes in.

Bit of a gimmick? I don’t think so – currently, to get the same information can take a fair bit of time and effort, even by using web-based applications provided on councils’ websites, which are invariably cumbersome and unintuitive. The key to Twitterplan is that you don’t have to do any of the grunt work – which is how it should be.

If the model works I can think of many more local authority data sets that might benefit from the same kind of treatment – changes to bin collection dates, events in my neighbourhood, leisure centre updates to name just a few.

So sign up and give it a try. This is the first real example I’ve seen of local councils using social media to do something positively useful, rather than dipping their toes in the water to see what all the fuss is about. So hats off to Lichfield, Lincoln City and Planningalerts.com for their work on it.

And thanks to The Pickards for bringing this to my attention.