Humbled...
It’s funny what happens when you start moving with no destination in mind. Yes, it might take you a bit longer to get anywhere worth going, but the journey itself becomes epic.
When we started this blog back in November 2009 we had no real plans; we simply wanted to do something that didn’t already exist and provide an officer eye look at local government. We knew we wanted to provide a slightly sideways glance at local government rather than some of the grander political commentary more widely available, and felt we could provide a view, and commentary, of local government that might otherwise not get into the public domain.
It was a slow start to say the least. It took a while to find our collective and individual voices, a while to get into the habit of regular posting and a while to find things to say. When we started there really didn’t seem to be anyone for us to pick up tips from, but over the intervening 24 months all this has changed. Slowly but surely we got to grips with what we enjoyed discussing, discovered other great blogs and even worked out how to put images in our posts (a seemingly minor yet landmark moment at WLLG Towers).
Despite all this, we never really planned for WLLG to be what it currently is. We didn’t plan for it to be a daily blog; we didn’t really plan to have that many readers; we didn’t plan to write pieces for the Guardian (website); we certainly didn’t plan to be in the LGC 50 document and finally we categorically did not plan to have 100,000 hits on our blog.
We had achieved all of them apart from the 100,000 hits and yesterday, we did just that.
So, thank you!
Thank you to all our readers for clicking on our site and reading our daily musings. When we see that people have read, commented on, tweeted about or in any other way referenced or responded to our posts it encourages us to write more. What’s more it encourages us to do more research, talk to more people, think about more issues and generally expand our horizons. All of us agree that as a result of this blog we are better informed people and better officers; more able to face the myriad challenges of our local government career.
Thanks to Redundant Public Servant, The Local Government Officer, LGIU, Flipchart Fairy Tales, Helpfulgov and more. Thanks to our ever growing network of interesting people following and sharing with us on twitter (which is another thing we’ve added over the past twelve months).
Thanks to the myriad people who submitted guest posts or took the time to get in touch with us. We’d like to thank those who critiqued our writing; joined in debates we started and tolerated it when we blundered into debates they had started.
And the final thanks in this cringe/Oscar-worthy list go to our families, who put up with this blog taking up chunks of our evenings and weekends, support us when we get stressed about getting it finished on time and most of all put up with their partners, parents and others devoting a lot of time to reading and talking about often obscure local government stories and other ideas for posts.
It’s funny how round numbers make you want to look back on things. We know that our 100,000 hit mark is nowhere near accurate, but it is an arbitrary target we set ourselves and is now an excuse to celebrate a little and reflect a lot. It’s been a great couple of years; now it’s time to think about the future and what it may hold. Do we change the focus of the blog and expand our horizons? Do we seek out new people to write with us on a regular basis? Do we sign off with a flourish, walking away content in a job well done? Or do we simply keep on with our somewhat random topics, varying styles and at times whimsical flights of fancy?
Whatever we do, one thing is certain: for all its peccadilloes, we will continue to love local government.
Welovelocalgovernment is a blog written by UK local government officers. If you have a piece you’d like to submit or any comments you’d like to make please drop us a line at: welovelocalgovernment@gmail.com
Go on, you know you want to…
We Love Local Government 