Just a quick post because I’m quite excited, can’t sleep for thinking and if I don’t get this out my head then it’ll rattle round in my brain for the entire weekend. I’ll do a full post later with more of the ins and out but this is just a bit of catharsis.

I got into Twitter when I saw the potential through the tweets of PC Ed Rogerson, @hotelalpha9, a couple of years ago. For those of you who don’t know he is a Community Police Officer in Harrogate who tweets while he’s working. This can be while he’s out and about, when he’s waiting at court to give evidence or doing the necessary paperwork in the office.

This was a bit of a revelation for me as it was a perfect example of a large organisation humanized through a persons experiences. Another reason, and this cannot be underplayed, was: What he was tweeting about was interesting. Not just in a best practice, studying sort of a way but in a genuinely engaging “I wonder what real police get up to?” sort of a way. And I’ve never been to Harrogate so I can only imagine what it must be like for you if you live or work there and you follow his posts.

Sooooo, after a few months of us launching our Twitter account I was able to set-up a days pilot of getting one of our Environmental Wardens to follow PC Rogerson’s example and “tweet on the beat” for a shift.

For reasons that I’ll go into in the full post I wanted to keep it low key. This was the only part of the pilot that failed. It was very well received by our residents AND the Warden who took part, Diana. We even got a little coverage from the local press and one of our local Cllrs blogged about it.

I’m reeeaaally please that it went well but unfortunately as a result I’m also unable to sleep and have been up since 4am. But again I’m posting this and therefore keeping one of my new years resolutions so its not all bad.

UPDATE: here is a Storify of the tweets from the pilot.