It’s all go in talk about local land.  Last week Mike and I were in Hereford for a fun-packed workshop at Borderlines Film Festival and this week we’re off to London for the National Digital Inclusion Conference 2010.

The theme for NDI1o is ‘Digital Participation: Passing IT on’ and that’s exactly what Mike and I will be doing with an open, drop-in social media surgery table in the exhibition area of the conference.     Last year I joined the We Share Stuff team, who did social media surgeries during Conference in addition to their Fringe event, which were very popular.  On the second day of the conference myself and a couple of others went outside the conference venue to talk to local people about what digital inclusion meant to them, which resulted in some great vox pops films, such as Ben Whitehouse and I talking to a protester.

So if you’re at the National Digital Inclusion Conference this year and would like to talk with us about issues you think social media might be able to assist with, or get advice on any elements of social media/networking that you’re interested in, come and join us over lunchtime either tomorrow Wednesday 10th March or Thursday 11th March.

We’ll also be facilitating a barcamp-style session at 4.00pm tomorrow as part of the Digital Skills for All workstream, putting together an expert-led SWOT analysis for social media in the digital inclusion sector.

We’ll hopefully see some of you there!

Camp Hill Flyover, Birmingham, 1970 by Lady Wulfrun

Every so often I find myself emailing people who have requested links and/or information about creating community content around a particular subject or issue.  I’m thinking it would be better for me to share that information with everyone, so I’m going to  start copying it into blog posts here.  One topic I get asked a lot about is local heritage, and how bringing this online can generate discussion and get people sharing their memories.  When people ask me about heritage, I usually send them the following:

• People really react to a bit of local history on a community website.  Look at the comments on this post of a photo of 1970’s Digbeth. People remembered the flyover and reacted with their own personal stories about it. Similarly with William’s post about the Beaconsfield Buildings in Kings Cross – people started commenting about their families’ connections to the building, and people tracing their family trees are now coming to this post via genealogy forums.
• Old photos and interviews with older residents who’ve witnessed changes over the years are always popular. Rescue Geography is a project all about collecting and curating  people’s memories of a place, you could explore that for some ideas.
• The Birmingham Irish Heritage Group contribute regularly to Digbeth is Good, which helps bring their activity and a taste of their events to wider audience.
• Another interesting site is: http://ourhistory-hayes.blogspot.com: ‘A site dedicated to the work of Hayes Labour Association, Hayes & Harlington Labour Party, Hayes Communist Party, Trade Unionists, and working men and women of West Middlesex.’

• Last but not least Seaside Voices is a project talk about local are delivering in partnership with Community Media Assocation, People’s Voice Media and UK online centres. We’re working with four UK online centres in seaside towns to help facilitate an online discussion of their town in its past, present and future.  The Seaside Voices websites for Bridlington, Morecambe, Newlyn and Shanklin are examples of sites that will not only look back at the history of a place, but also delve deeper to highlight current activity and look ahead to what’s in store in the future.

If you know of any other good examples of heritage sites, or local heritage content on community websites, please share and comment!

This Thursday 4th March myself and Mike Rawlins will be leading a talk about local workshop at The Courtyard, Hereford as part of the Borderlines Film Festival, Britain’s biggest rural film festival.  The workshop is part of a series of events under the banner ‘Here Comes Everyone – Citizen Journalism in the Digital Age’ and adds a practical element to a Wednesday jam-packed with films screenings, talks from the likes of Christian Payne and panel discussions such as Get Local, which includes a contributor to the first local website that emerged from the talk about local project, The Kington Blackboard.

Following a day filled with ideas and inspiration, we’ll be showing how you can Do It Yourself with a workshop demonstrating the simple skills and free platforms you can use to create a powerful online voice and how to use these effectively to raise awareness and positive action on the issues that matter to you.  So if you’re in the Hereford area and would like to develop an online presence for your community, please book a ticket and join us this Thursday at 10.00am in The Courtyard, Hereford.

We are delighted that this event will be in partnership with The Guardian’s Local initiative

As in Stoke-on-Trent in October, we will be using the Un-Conference format and we hope to have some of the very best hyperlocal publishers and special guests attending on the day.

After the success of the Pork Pie rounders, arranged by our own Nicky Getgood, there is a rumor that a skool sports day is being planned for one of the sessions, more than that we can’t yet announce, yet….

50 Tickets will be available on EventBrite from 1400 today (8 February)  with further tickets being made available after we have ensured that local bloggers in Yorkshire and the North East have got their tickets.

We will be publishing updates at http://talkaboutlocal.org and on Twitter @talkaboutlocal or you can search Twitter for TAL10 to see what other people are saying the Un-Conference Google Group is reopened for you to start discussing and planning what you hope to gain from the event.

Talk About Local Un-Awards
The glittering Talk About Local Un-Awards ceremony will take place on Saturday evening after the Un-Conference at a venue yet to be confirmed. As you will no doubt remember we were going to hold the Un-Awards in Birmingham earlier in the year, but after much procrastination and it being left on a low light we decided that it made logistical sense for us to hold it in conjunction with the Un-Conference.

Tickets for the the Un-Awards will be available on Eventbrite as soon as the venue is confirmed.

The local paper the Islington Gazette rang me having seen my article.  The Gazette had done some maths of their own and looked a the London Data Store site.  The Gazette covers the whole borough (an urban area about five miles square), my site just one ward (a mile long, half mile wide).  So the Gazette grew the story, got quotes from people across the borough and turned it into a bigger piece.  They did get a quote from the police, despite having a generally ‘granny scaring’ approach to covering local crime.  I am still waiting for the police to get back to me.  The Gazette in their traditional rather sad way managed to giv me a quote but no link to my original article and no mention of the plucky Kings Cross website that made the story in the first place.

I also emailed BBC local TV to see if they were interested.  I got the ‘it’s a bit too local to cover‘ (quote from email) response.  However if they look at the data for themselves they will see that the trends across the whole of London are sharply up.   Let’s wait and see.

Overall an interesting case study in how local data transparency can be used locally to bring some accountability to local public services and feed the mainstream traditional media.

UPDATE

Within minutes of posting this the police came back to me apologetically with a quote for the Kings Cross site and thanking me for my helpful quote in the Gazette (coincidence of timing I think).  Nonetheless they still went to the Gazette with a quote some time before me.

There will be a public meeting where the bidders do a show and tell and people can put questions. This will be at 1500-1600 in the Wales Millennium Centre, Bute Place, Cardiff Bay, CF10 5AL.

It would be great to see some of Wales independent web publishers there – whether you run a hyperlocal site or any other sort of news service. Your contribution will be vital to the future of news. It’s a public meeting so you can just turn up. I know that for those of you with day jobs this might be tricky – but there is rarely a time to suit everyone. If you need childcare or special access requirements to attend then drop a line to ifncpilots@culture.gsi.gov.uk and they will help you.

We shall also be in Newcastle and Glasgow in the next few days and it would be great to see web people there too:

• In Newcastle, the public meeting will take place on Friday 5 February, 3-4pm at Northern Film and Media, The Kiln, Hoult’s Yard, Walker Road, Newcastle NE6 1AB.
• In Glasgow, the public meeting will take place on Monday 8 February, 2-3pm at the Radisson Blu Hotel, 301 Argyle Street, G2 8DL.

‘…..Which – before we think about business models – is probably a good moment to introduce the man who prompted the title of tonight’s talk. Last autumn I was at a government seminar on the future of local newspapers when one of the participants suddenly interjected: “I don’t believe in journalism.”

This was a very direct challenge to my general worldview, not to mention my job, so I sought out the person who had made it – a very interesting man called William Perrin – a former Cabinet Office civil servant who threw it all in to run a hyperlocal website reporting on the area of London where the Guardian now lives – King’s Cross.

Perrin absolutely believes in the moral power and importance of what many of us might think of as journalism. But he isn’t a journalist, he doesn’t call it journalism and he is completely uninterested in the monetary value of what he does. He finds other ways to pay his mortgage. This is William Perrin:

William Perrin: “I set up a very simple website in 2006 … to my surprise this thing took off and has been very successful. In three or four years we have written 800 articles on King’s Cross and area a mile long by half a mile wide …The website we have used to drive campaigns on the ground. We’ve run big campaigns against Network Rail, where we secured a million pounds for community improvements. We used the website again to take on Cemex, a multibillion-pound company … we took them on and we won. We have about four people who write for the site, on average, there’s up to six, but normally there’s about four of us writing. We all do it as a volunteer effort. It costs us about £11 a month in cash, which is about three of four pints of beer … we have a very strong community of people around here who send us stuff. None of the people who work with me are journalists. I’m not a journalist by any stretch of the imagination; it’s an entirely volunteer effort … Some people what I do in my community some people label journalism, it’s a label I actually resist.”

Depending on your point of view, you may find that vision of new ways of connecting and informing communities inspiring or terrifying. I think it is both – but it is a useful starting point to thinking about the value of journalism, in every sense of the word ‘value’. And it is good to be forced to think at an even more basic level – about what journalism is and who can do it.

Overall it’s good to see a major media figure give local websites the recognition they deserve.  There are many people out there with better local sites than me – I hope that their local editors reach out and talk with them too.

There is something in it for everyone but overall it damns expensive council newspapers with faint praise.  The Commission rightly defends councils’ need to communicate.  But the Audit Commission’s core role is assess value for money and impact of spending on council performance:

We cannot draw strong conclusions at the national level about the value for money and impact of communication spending from the data available. There is not a significant relationship between levels of recorded communication spending and a number of different outcome indicators drawn from the Place Survey or earlier Best Value Performance Indicators. Some commentators have cited relationships in a single year, for example between how well-informed residents feel and the extent to which they think the council provides value for money, as evidence of the importance of council communication spending.

However, there is no relationship between changes over time in key variables, undermining any conclusion that council communication spending has a demonstrable causal impact. Frequency of periodical publication is also not significantly correlated with key outcome measures such as satisfaction with the way that councils run things.

I remain of the view that it is wrong for a branch of government to publish something that looks, smells and feels like a newspaper with editorial (eg ‘how well we are doing’).  It isn’t good for democracy, especially at a time when traditional local media is in decline.

Councils do have to communicate – it’s vital that local people know and understand what the council does for them.  But Councils should focus on equipping local people with the skills to communicate for themselves to hold local services to account – the sort of thing talk about local does.  That’s the modern way of doing it – not the C19th newspaper.

( Thanks to Kevin for the tip)

auditcommisionreport auditcommissionletter

This is a community currency which operates in Japan, creating social structures to replace family and community units which broke down as people become more mobile. A simple illustration is that someone who has an elderly parent in another part of the country can look after an older person locally and then exchange the credits they earn for doing so for their parent’s care.

The first question, asked as soon as I tweeted the link, was “would it work here?”.

The conclusion from a brief and interesting exchange with @genzaichi and @priddy, was maybe, with lots of caveats too long to tweet, and at the very least only with strong networks of trust and possibly only on a hyperlocal level. Interestingly, the Wikipedia article on the subject claims that exchanges of help on the internet is not a valid use of the term. They are talking about face-to-face care, possibly backed up by technology. I wonder if that might change if the evidence for positive psychological results of online interaction builds, but that’s something for another day.

What I found most appealing was the idea that complementary exchange systems could suddenly make some of the most disadvantaged people, under current systems, rich again. Cashless trading systems like LETS are growing in popularity and I like those too, but I think this is slightly different: rather less about replacing services you can buy, rather creating a parallel system of kindness which complements paid-for (or cashlessly traded) services. Timebank is a high profile example of a site which helps match volunteer opportunities with volunteers, but without the credit element for the people putting in the work.

Let’s say we could record 12 hours a day that a carer spends. At the moment, carers are often financially disadvantaged because they have given up work and their allowances may not cover the costs of caring. They also often suffer from health issues like depression, not at all surprising when you consider the emotional and physical effects not only of care, which can be very hard, but also due to concern for the suffering of their family member or friend. Isolation and lack of opportunity to look after their own wellbeing – which perhaps they don’t see it as a priority – might be another problem. The worst prospect is that the person they care for dies, leaving them alone and without recourse to their own carer.

Now, while the carer probably won’t ask for anything in return for caring, they do have a whole host of needs that they might take up if it was available to them, things like respite care, help with housework, shopping or cooking a good meal, someone to talk to, somebody to walk with. Their 12 hours a day would effectively make them rich in such a system, recognised and valued for something that currently is often neither.

Equally, there are plenty of people who give just one or two hours of their time just because they want to help others in a community they care for. The unemployed, rather than being judged as they were jobseeking, could offer a great deal into such a system, giving them opportunities to meet people and remind themselves that they still have something to offer even if they don’t have a job at the moment. The lonely retired would have a way of connecting with their neighbours in a way that doesn’t make them feel like they are asking for help, for example helping the kids next door with their reading or maths homework.

There is a huge amount of this kind of work going on anyway. The disconnect is in the idea of exchange, generally because people doing good things don’t normally shout about it and people don’t always think to ask for something in a society that is used to marketplaces. If you can’t afford it, you can’t have it; you should work harder. Kindness is rarely reported in the media and if it is, it is probably accompanied with shock that ‘this sort of thing’ can happen in ‘this day and age’ – if they’re really laying it on with some implication that the inflictor of kindness will get themselves sued or knifed.

In contrast, it is my experience that where the platform and agenda is built in particular ways, online communities run on a great deal of generosity and users are quick to create structures of support and recognition, and, importantly, spread awareness of the communities they are enthusiastic about. Many neighbourhoods retain the generosity and the inventiveness, but not necessarily the offline equivalent of something like Spread Firefox.

Such a system would have to be very simple and accessible, I’m thinking very simple ways to record time spent to exchange for credits, methods for community members to verify/recommend/acknowledge time, invites/connections of trusted friends and the marketplace of offered services. It might ideally be an extension of platforms where people are already, eg through Facebook and iPhone apps. (Digital mentoring could of course be one of the services offered). Virtually all the interactions would be real-world but an online dimension that is as easy as a game enables information, needs and feedback to be expressed, recorded and responded to in a way that doesn’t always happen in real life. In this case hyperlocal is best – adding information and creating matches for people in existing communities that know each other, venturing into wider circles, or bringing circles together, only if and when trust is built.

It’s not the talkaboutlocal way to rebuild tools or reinvent wheels, but to ask questions and try to bring together experience and expertise. Do you know of existing web tools that could support such an idea if a neighbourhood or group wanted to try it, or could it work on existing platforms? Do you know of such schemes running that interested groups could learn from? Have I missed my chance to submit something to Sicamp?

@willperrin ‘talking to government data types today – what data sets would you most like from your council’

Feedback emerged quickly as follows, anonymised

1.    property development issues – number and type of contracts going out, number and type of bidders, number and type of successful bidders
2.    councillor expenses and campaign contributions…?!
3.    Concentrate on what is useful for the citizen. Housing stock would be nice. But all non private data by default.
4.    Internal search within council websites & SEO of ‘data pages’ must be better so we can find data without resorting to contact.
5.    Break down of council agendas for public perusal in easy-to-digest format – encourages interest in meeting items.
6.    it is also important how the council data is exposed. Many different APIs and registration would still obfuscate the data.
7.    first data set I’d like would be list of all the data sets they’ve got do we could stop guessing who holds what. +1 for contacts
8.    which departments are spending less than this time last year & deserve a bonus
9.    sounds like standard info as a minimum. Date/time call, who made/taken call, type of issue, resolution, hand off etc
10.    the dull ones. The GIS data for where the bins are, where the grit lorries go, street cleaning routes.
11.    planning applications
12.    Small area data: make it easy to select areas before downloading dataset. Don’t want to strip it down ourselves. #hyperlocal
13.    How much salary do they pay, to whom, & *for what* ?
14.    What assets do they own (especially land)? Useful for everyone from #allotment campaigners to inclusion & employment schemes
15.    Bin collection routes & timetables! Bus timetables & routes. Planning applications (in a good format for once!)
16.    ward budget expenditure is one small communities could really get their teeth into
17.    API access to the excellent information at Transport Direct – which no one seems to know exists – www.transportdirect.info
18.    We are running a campaign to get #hyperlocal datasets released in Manchester. We should talk
19.    road works (GPS/times), school dates and times, all reported indicators / tracked measures, election-related items.
20.    all data please and not in PDF format In fact, RDF please!!!
21.    Public Data Panel could publish a guide to public data sets
22.    Personally think that we need a definition of a common method of access to data across different LAs, public bodies (eg API)
23.    release the lot and get the group to concentrate on definition of standards to make the datasets work across LAs easily
24.    Do you create a service directory, define a common URI format for council data, some other method I don’t know of?
25.    web services have never really solved the problem of making the data “machine findable” afaik – Do you create a service directory, define a common URI format for council data, some other method I don’t know of?
26.    Cllr attendance records, expenses, committee membership, changing party affiliation etc
27.    What crimes have happened locally (not the crime maps they are rubbish)
[ends]