***UPDATE: We are closing the survey midday on Friday 8th October 2021***
We are doing some research into whether virtual meetings have improved the governance quality of local government committees and looking for your help.
So, if you are familiar with a committee, before and during the pandemic, we are hoping you can spend 10-15 minutes completing a survey.
If you would like to go straight to the survey, click below:
Otherwise, read on, for some of the background.
Who is running the survey?
Well, me (with my Swansea University hat on), along with Dr Catherine Farrell (Cardiff University) and Dr Matthew Wall (Swansea University).
What is the survey for?
The findings from this survey will be used to inform an academic article about virtual local government committee meetings. We want to find out whether virtual meetings have improved the governance quality of local government committees, specifically, what difference (if any) have they made to five aspects of public governance:
- Transparency
- Accountability
- Public participation
- Confidence in the system
- Discussion and debate
Once the article has been published we will share a summary of the findings for everyone who took part (and anyone else!).
The research builds on a previous article on committee seating arrangements and you can find the main takeaways from that research here.
What are we looking for?
To help us answer our research question we would like to have the survey completed by:
- Anyone with experience of observing or participating in a local government committee before and during the pandemic (so we can ask you what differences you noticed)
- Councillors, council officers, partners, press, citizen journalists and members of the public, for example
- People from different councils but also different people from the same council
By the way, for this research, we are interested in:
- Principal councils (e.g. county, district or borough councils)
- Committees not full council (they have a different dynamic)
If you think you can help, please go to the survey by clicking the button below:
And please share with anyone else who might be interested.
We aim to run the survey until the end of September 2021 by the way.
Thank you ?
Dave, Catherine and Matt