Wrexham Council Approves ‘Small Step’ In Opening Out Meeting Coverage

This evening Wrexham Council overturned their ban on the use of Twitter in Council meetings.

We reported on the proposals here, explaining why they are hardly a change at all, and that it is a missed opportunity to improve coverage on Council business.

Cllr Malcom King formally introduced the amendments to the Council’s constitution saying: “The key for us as a Council is to amend the standing order 45, so that it makes it clearer what our position is to social media at meetings of the council and committees.

“This arises from several quite detailed discussions from a working group where we discussed this at great length.

“The consensus was we should clarify social media use at meetings.”

The new changes still doesn’t allow the use of photography, video or similar broadcasting of the meetings. These can still be requested to a Chairman, however we are unaware of this ever happening.

Cllr King confirmed that committee members cannot tweet, or update their Facebook account as they ‘ought to be concentrating on the business at hand, and not twittering’.

Cllr Neil Rogers said he was “‘happy to second the amendment as proposed.”

Cllr Carole O’Toole spoke briefly to endorse the Lead Members comments, and also offered thanks Trevor Coxon for preparation on the debate.

Cllr David A. Bithell said he supported the amendments, calling them “a step in the right direction”, referring to concerns that began in the local media on Wrexham.com, He said: “This goes a long way to address concerns raised.”

During this debate all the speakers wished the new mayor their best wishes for the year ahead.

A zoom of the above ‘picture’ showing how it is made up from text.

This article was edited and uploaded during the meeting, and above is a ‘ASCII art’ view of the meeting. The former is not allowed under the new rules, as it is a binary non-social media operation. However the second is allowed as it’s a text generated image that has never been in digital form – until we saved it as a JPG to make it fit nicely on Wrexham.com. The raw HTML output is available on request.

We imagine the former is what the rules are designed to allow, and the latter is what it’s aiming to prevent.