Management guru Tom Peters has an interesting story about community bikes in Copenhagen. The bikes are stored at various points around the city centre. Simply pop your coins in the dispenser (it costs about £2) and away you go. The community bikes even have a little map on the handlebars. You get your money back when you return the bike.

I'd love to see something like this in Leeds city centre.

The lack of posts recently is the result of a week's holiday in Turkey and then a very busy week of meetings and catching up after the holiday.

Last week's activity included a Labour Group meeting, a full council meeting that lasted about eight hours, street surgeries and a meeting with the area management chair and the other two Middleton Park councillors, an area management meeting.

This week I've got a DAZL (Dance Action Zone Leeds) board, an Inner South Area Committee meeting, a Thriving Communities Scrutiny Board, a Leeds South Homes board, a school governor's meeting, and a Belle Isle Tenant Management board.

That means I'll probably be spending about 13 to 15 hours just in meeting. Add in another three to four hours for reading the related papers. Then there is about another three to five hours to deal with case work, dealing with council email and the 'van delivery' of yet more papers.

Looking at a total of about 20 to 25 hours this week. Last week it was only about 15 hours but I missed a couple of meetings that I could have attended.

Occasionally some other councillors ask me how I have time to blog. Well it takes about 30 minutes a week at most. A drop in the ocean compared to the rest of the time spent.

Kudos to South Ayrshire Council for providing RSS feeds of its latest news and web site updates.

Ayrshire's site says that the IDeA is also providing RSS, although I can't find the feeds. The only reference to RSS (Really Simply Syndication) as opposed to RSS (Regional Spatial Strategy) that I can find is in the Communications Discussion forum, in a comment made by me!

But I believe that one of the real benefits of RSS for local authorities will not be publishing externally but internally. As well as running Bruce Marshall Associates and helping local authorities with their communications I am also an elected councillor. In a large council such as Leeds it is very difficult to keep track of everything that is relevant and RSS would provide a much better way of doing so than the emails that are currently used.

XP: From my business blog.