Talk About Local has a special connection with canals, since we all live fairly close to them and by chance [in the over-romantic eyes of your blogger], Stoke-on-Trent to Digbeth to Kings Cross quite closely shadows the old routes of the revolutionary Midlands industrialists. If we weren’t in such a tearing hurry all the time we could easily commute around by narrow boat rather than train. But that’s a post for another day. It’s good to know that if we chose to move from rail to water there is just as active an online community to help us along.
What prompts people to start blogging? In the case of the canal bloggers, in many cases it is a need to let retirees’ descendants know about their whereabouts. This, of course, is quickly forgotten as the real business of adventuring commences.
Granny Buttons is a nice example, with stories of tragedies, kindness and Ikea. It also has the best list I’ve found so far of bloggers and canal Twitterers to start your explorations.
Much of Britain is close to a canal and they are often the most unspoilt and beautiful parts of both countryside and city. While it’s a bit chilly outside, you can start exploring online.
Pretty photos courtesy of the Flickr community and Flickriver. This is the second in an occasional series of blog trails – if you know good canal blogs to check out or have ideas for other communities we should be venturing into, please let us know by email or in the comments below.
Soon after talk about local helped those at Marches Access Point create The Kington Blackboard in August 2009, the community website very quickly started looking ahead to the festive season, discussing the issue of Christmas lights. Although the online poll vote was overwhelmingly for lights for the small Herefordshire town, it seemed the money for them was not forthcoming, and it looked to be a dark, bleak winter for Kington.
People rallied around the issue on The Kington Blackboard, voicing their support and, in The Chamber of Trade’s case, putting their money where there mouth is and providing £500 towards the lights. talk about local, being avid readers of the site, could not fail to be moved by Kington’s plight and matched The Chamber of Trade’s support, giving £500 in support of the cause.
Would this have happened without The Kington Blackboard? It may very well have, but there’s no doubt the community having the online space to discuss and rally support around the problem certainly helped to solve it. I went along to the Christmas Fair and lights switch-on, so I’m leaving you with a couple of photos of a festive-looking Kington – here’s the happiness a local website can help to make happen!
We have now closed the nominations for the Talk About Local UnAwards categories and will make final decisions as to which of the categories we are going to open up for nominations over the Christmas & New Year break.
The highly coveted UnAwards will be presented at a ceremony which will take place a little later than we first said and somewhere other than the West Midlands.
We have been speaking to a sponsor for the next Talk About Local UnConference and we are currently investigating some venues in the the North of England for an event in the first quarter of 2010. Once we have got a confirmed venue we will give you more details. The UnAwards will be presented at a glittering ceremony after the UnConference.
All that remains is for William, Nicky, Clare and I to wish you a very happy Christmas & New Year.
Crime and anti-social behaviour are the most challenging topics local websites have to tackle. But most local sites don’t want to add to local fear of crime by just reporting incidents – we want to publish results and support our local criminal justice professionals in the police, crown prosecution service, courts and prisons. Finding out what is going on in local courts would be very useful.
Ante-diluvian court processes combine with the minefield of contempt of court to make it tricky to write about local justice being done. As a local web publisher in an area with a long, tragic history of ASB with a sizable local audience I’d like daily court results and timetables posted to a courts website, preferably with an RSS feed. After all, you can go to the court and watch from the gallery or see the screens. So this little noticed (by me) excerpt from a Ministry of Justice green paper earlier this year seems wrong to me.
‘210. It is clear that there needs to be a balance between providing communities with information on court outcomes, which is in the public domain, and the need to ensure that such information is not misused. This issue is particularly pertinent because of the power of the internet to collect and make available information from a wide range of sources, and the difficulties of regulating the way in which such information is stored and reused.
211. We believe that it is not in the public interest to facilitate the creation of uncontrolled, privately held databases, and therefore intend to place the following restrictions on how information is accessed: Access to court outcomes online will require registration at level 1 of the e-Government standards66 to provide substantial assurance that the registrant’s identity has been verified. Registered users will be able to choose to see results for two courts of their choice; changing these preferences will require application to the systems administrator. Users will then be able to search all results from these two courts from the past four weeks. Information on the website will be copy protected so that it cannot be copied and pasted into other documents.
212. A prototype of the website will be made available for the duration of the Green Paper consultation.67 This will report specifically on the outcomes of knife possession cases tried in the adult magistrates’ courts, supporting the current initiative on tackling knife crime. Comments are invited on the level of security and accessibility of information. We will also look at how we can link this website to the continuing development of crime maps, to support the aim of ensuring that members of the public can get the maximum information about crime, policing and justice in a joined-up way from a linked set of sources, at as local a level as possible.’
I appreciate the argument about long term rehabilitation and spent convictions, but this piece suggests that websites are different from newspapers, which are now almost wholly online. If say The Times or the Islington Gazette reports an individual arrest, charge or trial in progress in the paper, it also appears online. At no point do the articles link forward to the outcome of the trial if the subject is found innocent. They effectively create a primitive unregulated database online. And whilst i enjoy working with the police, even the best forces would admit they have a very long way to go to publish criminal justice outcomes in a way that reassure local people.
What do people think of this position – is it reasonable or is it out of kilter? Is it worth lobbying to change it? Do we think that the senior politicians who recently gathered in Downing Street to talk open data are aware of it? As it is a green paper from Ministry of Justice, this usually means that minds are open and can be influenced.
I guess i must share some blame for the Ministry of Justice position as I had worked inside the system up to that point (declaration) but i feel this doesn’t stick to the principles of the power of information work i was involved in.
There’s a great site for finding social groups in your area called GroupsNearYou.com. Just type in your location or postcode and it shows you what’s close by.
Now you can provide that very same ease of use to your own local blog. I’ve just finished the first phase of a new GroupsNearYou plugin for Wordpress. It provides blog owners with a new widget which, once configured, will show the groups in your area.
If you run a local blog there’s a good chance you might be on Twitter, as my some of your neighbours. This creates a ‘back-channel’ that can often go unseen. So in the interests of enhancing local blogs with this back-channel, below is a video which shows you how to add both your own tweets and the results of a Twitter search to your Wordpress blog.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions please leave them in the comments section below.
Instructions – adding someone’s tweets
In the Wordpress dashboard, go to Appearance > Widgets
Drag the Twitter widget onto the sidebar
Add the twitter account name you want to show
Configure the remaining options to change the display
Click Save
Refresh your blog and you should see the new widget on your sidebar
If you’ve not heard of WriteToThem.com before, it’s a great site by mySociety which makes contact politicians really easy, whether that’s your local councillors or your MP, regional assembly member or MEP.
To make it even easier for readers of your own blog, I’ve just finished the first phase of a new plugin for Wordpress. It provides you with a new widget based on WriteToThem.com which will provide an easy way for your readers to get in touch with their politicians.
There’s a lot of useful information lying around the web that has local relevance but often people don’t know it’s there or even how to find it. For example, the NHS Choices web site provides the public with a way of rating and reviewing their local health services.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could have this information on your local blog? Well, you can! The video and instructions below show you how you can take feeds from sites like NHS Choices and have them display on your own site, using Wordpress.
The principles will allow you to add all sorts of information to your blog using RSS and Atom feeds, where available. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions please use the comments section.
Instructions
Copy the link (URL) to the RSS or Atom feed.
In your Wordpress dashboard, go to Appearance > Widgets
Drag the RSS widget to your sidebar
Copy the URL into the first box.
Configure the remaining options according to your preferred display
Click Save
Refresh your blog and you should see the new widget appear in your sidebar
TheyWorkForYou.com is a great site built by e-democracy charity, mySociety. It provides an easy way for citizens to keep an eye on their MP. You can sign up for e-mail updates whenever your MP speaks in the House of Commons, for example.
So wouldn’t it be cool if you could also put this stuff on your local blog for all your readers to see and keep up to date with? Well, know you can!
I’ve just finished the first phase of a new plugin for Wordpress. This first version provides you with a new widget. Once configured, the widget will show the latest activity from your MP and is available both as an addition to your blog for the benefit of your readers but also as a dashboard widget so that you can see the latest updates everytime you log in.
On 25th November William Perrin and I were lucky enough to attend a Social Media Workshop at the West Midlands Police Headquarters in Birmingham, which bought together the likes of talk about local, Podnosh and MyPolice with a small group of people from police forces across the UK to catch up and to discuss the way forward for the police in using social media, following their Policing 2.0 conference in October.
West Midlands Police providing the space and encouragement to talk about the seemingly endless possibilities was a fantastic opportunity and, as Nick Booth has said, indicative of their open-minded approach:
They have been ahead of many forces with early use of podcasting in the form of Plodcast, getting officers using Facebook, widespread use of Youtube and Twitter. More importantly they are impatient to learn and, I think, willing to accept mistakes along the way.
Before the workshop, William told me the police were keen to hear new ideas and suggested I think up some games for them to play with the public, which got me thinking. Game-playing with the police could be great fun and very easy to create – you have a ready-made team of easily identifiable people in uniform walking around a set, public neighbourhood area. It could also do a lot to break down barriers between members of the public and the police by creating space for a more fun, informal relationship.
I liked the idea, so I visited the Wiki site Ludocity for inspiration – a collection of pervasive games, street games and new sports under creative commons licenses, which means they can be taken and twisted to play in whatever way one wants. Looking through the games, I found a couple that could use simple tools like camera phones that many (especially young people) have access to, to playfully reverse the traditional roles and turn the police into the watched and the chased – this was becoming interesting.
The mischievous streak in me was instantly attracted to Glom - ‘a game which uses video cameras to explore the way people relate to each other through looking’. I nervously explained the guidelines to the Police:
The objective of Glom is to capture as much candid footage of the other participants as possible whilst avoiding being filmed yourself…Once entered into the agreement of Glom participants are subject to being filmed at any time, in any place, engaged in any activity.
They thankfully took it very well, letting me carry on to talk about another photography game, Lumenatio:
The rules are simple. You have to hunt as many other players as possible and not let them shoot you. Your weapon is your digital camera and your allies are perceptiveness, dexterity, intelligence and urban corners…players should be given a swimming cap, that they have to wear during the hunt in a way that the number written on it is visible on the back of their head.
Each swimming hat is marked with a different number, which is the unique individual player number. For the period of the game this number becomes player’s name and the other numbers are their targets. During the game you have to hunt as many of them as possible.
I’ve actually played Lumenatio before, as ‘Hat Snap’ with BARG in Birmingham city centre. Trying to photograph the back of people’s heads without letting others snap yours is difficult, and resulted in us all running awkwardly around with our backs against walls, which drew some strange looks from passers-by.
Image by Purple Heather
When I was reminded of this game it occurred me that the Police already wear ‘unique individual player numbers’ – in the shape of collar numbers on their epaulettes. Members of the public could capture these on their cameras or camera-phones and hopefully, by getting that close, actually talk to the Officers they snapped. They could post their pictures online, possibly with the police responding with details about those officers, humanising them a bit more to players and website readers alike.
When one Officer voiced understandable concerns about the game another hit the nail right on the head by saying, “Yes, I’d wonder and ask, ‘Why are you taking my photograph?’ But then I’ve started a conversation.” I was very pleasantly surprised by how open the group were to what I knew might be slightly risque ideas. I was even more delighted to find out it got some present thinking and creating games of their own. Last Saturday morning PC 9 Ed Rogerson from Harrogate (@hotelalpha9 on Twitter) invited the public to play:
Lee Shaw won, and got a fluffy hedgehog toy as a prize. PC 9 Ed Rogerson promises there’s ‘more to come – probably involving Twitpic’. I certainly hope so. These games could be a great way for the Police to engage the public in lighthearted and unusual ways and, as PC 9 Ed Rogerson has proved, can engineer real-life meetings and conversations with the people they serve.
