I came across this page on the City of Yellowknife website today and it is about being prepared for emergencies. Now I am not entirely sure if this page was on the site before the dump fire or not (been told it was) but none the less it brings up an important question. Would the City be able to alert its residents if there were a city wide emergency. The short answer is unfortunately no, but they want to change that. In one of last weeks Yellowknifers, councilor David McCann did state that they should look into a City Twitter account and Facebook page.
If you didn’t know when the dump fire broke out, Facebook and Twitter lit up with updates about the fire. RT’s, Photos and News flooded these new media sites with information about what was happening as it was happening as well as the Mayor’s Message he released. The City on the other hand had no real way of getting the message out, except for radio, which is only one medium. Now I am sure there are many issues The City would have to work out to get a Twitter account and Facebook page up, like the fact they would actually have to allow an employee to use these social networking sites to update them.
I am going to go ahead and assume no one would be against an official Twitter account and Facebook page so my questions for you are. How do you think the City can manage these accounts if they were to set them up and would you follow them. Will this be an election topic?
We could also continue this conversation by adding all the other things the City could do with these accounts besides just emergency purposes. Such as the Mayor Message, Council Minutes, New ByLaws, etc.
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