Communities

Local stuff

I always like reading Andrew Brown‘s roundups of stuff that’s happening in his area – Lewisham – that he regularly posts to his blog. I haven’t the discipline to do anything regularly, but here are a couple of things I’ve been looking at recently.

First up is that I took another look at the website for my village – Broughton, near Kettering in Northamptonshire. Before you click the link be warned: it’s not a very modern design. Indeed, as I suspected, a quick ‘View Source’ shows that the thing is done in Frontpage (argh!). But ignore that…

…because the content in fabulous. It’s a really, really good community resource. There’s stuff for the Parish Council, loads and loads of photos and bits of history about the village. Elaine Bradshaw, who is behind the site, really has done a terrific job.

The only shame is that I can’t find any contact details for her on the site, firstly to congratulate her on what she has achieved, but also to wonder how much easier it would be if we WordPress’d the whole thing. Maybe stuck all the photos up on Flickr, made it easier for anyone in the village to contribute… If somehow you end up reading this, Elaine, do get in touch.

Secondly, on the way to work today I saw a large fluorescent sign, imploring those that saw it to ‘Save Naseby Battlefield!’. I wasn’t under the impression that the battlefield was under any threat, but apparently it is:

Power company E.ON is investigating the possibility of installing turbines close to the historic battlefield.

The proposals have been met with anger from historians, who are working on plans to boost the national reputation of Naseby by building a visitor centre at the battle site.

A further bit of digging revealed that the campaign has its own site, and it runs on WordPress! Stop Kelmarsh Windfarm is the name of the site, which I can’t help but feel is a rather negative slant on things (‘Save Naseby Battlefield’ sounds much nicer, I think).

It also confuses the hell out of me. I mean, wind farms are good things, right? But heritage stuff is important too… argh!

Connecting through communities

I love the way that the social web creates connections between people, and allows us to pass those connections on to those that we think might be interested.

I had a great chat today with a guy called Peter Haine (note the ‘e’ – it’s not him). I first came across Peter because he had posted in the forum on the Improvement & Development Agency‘s website, asking for feedback from people about how they have found success or otherwise in online communities. A fascinating topic, and even better, Peter is based at the Techno Centre in Coventry, just round the corner from where I work.

Peter works at the Applied Research Centre for eWorking, part of Coventry University, and as a result the office in which he works is chock full of neat little gadgets to make working outside the office easier: digital pens, laser keyboard things, ludicrously tiny keyboards. As a gadget-freak, it was a kind of heaven for me.

The research project into online communities that Peter is currently engaged in is funded by JISC, through their Emerge programme. The report is coming through shortly, and I am really looking forward to reading it. Whilst there is a real determination in both the private and public sectors to try and engage with communities and to take a community based approach to increasing participation, engagement and brand loyalty, there isn’t, as far as I am aware, much in the way of research into both how effective it actually and and how that effectiveness can be achieved. Hopefully this work will help start this process develop.

Peter did let me into a couple of points that he had discovered from his research. He did admit that some of it might seem obvious – but of course that doesn’t make it invalid nor does it mean people always remember to do it!

  • Purely online communities are unlikely to succeed – you need some kind of face-to-face meetings to build a sense of belonging and trust in other community members
  • Communities need a defined sense of purpose and a way of measuring achievement of that purpose
  • Active facilitation is required in seeding discussions, getting folk involved and keeping things on the right track
  • Nobody is satisfied with the tools they have available!
  • Barriers to entry must be as low as possible. Choose the most basic tool you can get away with – people may be happy to give up their time to take part in a community, but not if they have to spend hours learning the platform
  • Payback – what’s in it for the community members? Whether financial, reputational or whatever, there needs to be something positive that those involved can get – even if it’s just a warm fuzzy feeling inside

So, Peter gave me plenty of useful, interesting information. What I gave him, hopefully, was the benefit of some of my connections, most notably Steve Dale and Ed Mitchell, who I later introduced to Peter in a couple of emails. Hopefully they can help Peter, and him them, in the future.

Going local update

Thought I might post an update on my efforts at establishing a social media group in Kettering, Northants. Having been subscribed to various feeds searching for Kettering based content, which mainly produced details of various car boot sales in the area, I might finally be getting somewhere.

A couple of guys have been posting some great photos to Flickr, which have been tagged as Kettering, and with a bit of digging, it’s definitely the one near me, rather than in the States!

This is a clear issue – the tag ‘kettering’ is too vague, and maybe something like ketteringuk or ketteringnorthants needs to be used to ensure it’s unique. Of course, this sort of thing can’t be promoted until people start coming together.

So, I have sent a flickr mail to these guys seeing if they are interested in maybe a pub meet or a photo walk. Hopefully they won’t think I am being too forward 😉

Going local

Jon Bounds has put together a nice little site for guiding people around Birmingham. It’s wiki based, so anyone can get involved, and there is some nice Google Maps action going on there too. There’s quite a big group of social media savvy folk gathering in Brum, thanks to Nick Booth‘s Birmingham Bloggers meetups, and hopefully this group of people will be able to fill the site up with some great content. It is also the latest in a line of useful tools being built around Birmingham in the social web space – see BirminghamBloggers (put together by Paul Bradshaw) for example.

I attended the first Birmingham Bloggers meet but haven’t made one since – mainly because I have been tied up with other stuff, but its fair to say that I struggled to feel like I really belonged there. I work in Coventry, down the road from Brum, but live close to Kettering in Northamptonshire. What struck me at the meet was how strong a sense of geographical belonging was evident. It’s wonderful, but meant I kind of felt a bit excluded.

I’ve been thinking over the last week or so about how one can create local groups around topics of interest, and how this can tie in, or learn from, initiatives like Birmingham Bloggers, the Membership Project and the Tuttle Club.

I have no idea whether there is any appetite for any kind of social media meet in Kettering. I’ve looked around, and there is a Flickr group or two for Northamptonshire; and a county based Linux Users Group, within which there may well be a few bloggers. Perhaps something based on a larger area is more appropriate for less urban areas?

I’ve set up a few feeds to check for Kettering popping up in Flickr, Google Blog Search, del.icio.us and Technorati – it will be interesting to see exactly what starts to appear. Can anyone think of other ways of monitoring for this kind of stuff?

It doesn’t help that the local paper doesn’t provide an RSS feed; and while the borough Council does, it doesn’t actually work (at least for me, anyway).

So what are some of the things that might be needed to form a community around social media in a local context? Firstly a common tag which can be used to identify content, whether blog posts, photos in flickr, video on youtube, del.icio.us links etc. This has to be right and everyone clear on what the tag is – if people start using different tags then it’s going to be difficult to keep track of stuff. It’s probably also worthwhile created a hashtag for Twitter and other stuff like that – even if people aren’t using it straight away, it will be useful to have in place for the future.

The common tag is really the starting point of the community, because people can use it to follow conversations with their RSS readers. The second step is to create a hub where a lot of this content can be aggregated in one place. The easiest way of doing this is with a public personalised start page like those at Netvibes or Pageflakes. This gives some centre to the community, a single place for people to go and find out what the latest is.

Hopefully by this time people are talking to each other by leaving comments on blogs and other mediums, but the conversation is likely to be spread about and it might be difficult for people to feel completely involved. It’s probably time to arrange a face to face meeting, whether a few drinks in the pub or a photo  walk if there are lots of flickr fans about. How can this be organised though? It’s time for something to be built: maybe a wiki, or a Google Group mailing list or just a space on a social network that everyone is on. The latter is good because you can pick up new members easily, but not everyone will be on that network. I wonder, though, if putting this communication channel together should come earlier?

If the group starts to have some interesting discussions that are developing, it might be worth putting together a group blog as a focal point for others. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a blog about the group itself but about the issues that the group is interested in. As the group matures and other projects get started other stuff can be developed to meet the need, whether it be wikis or other collaborative environments like Basecamp.

So, the things to do to establish a local social media community (according to me) are:

  • Establish tags
  • Aggregate content
  • Communicate
  • Meet
  • Develop

I might try and put this into effect and see who else is about in Kettering or Northamptonshire who digs this stuff. If you pick up this post somehow and are interested, let me know.

Otherwise, what other thoughts do folk have on using social media to form local groups?

Power of Information Task Force

Tom Watson posted up his speech announcing the Power of Information Task Force on his blog yesterday and it contained some really good stuff. I guess that those who want to can snicker about the notion of creating a task force to promote innovation (shouldn’t we be organising without organisations?), but I’m glad that there will be some folk looking into this stuff, and it would be nice if they do so in an open and collaborative way.

Only last week, the Prime Minister became the first head of Government in Europe to launch his own channel on Twitter, which I can tell you from experience, is extremely useful to his ministers at least.

But we need to make it easier for others too.

Hazel Blears with be leading this agenda when her department will address this in a White Paper on engagement in the summer.

But I want to take the Power of Information agenda further and do it faster. So today I am announcing the establishment of the Power of Information Taskforce. I’m pleased to say that Richard Allan has agreed to Chair the Taskforce. Richard has a vast breadth of knowledge in this field. He’s also an all round good guy and I know he will help us provide clarity to government departments as they contend with the power of information agenda.

Most interesting for me were the bits that focused on community engagement and participation. Let’s have a look at one or two now.

And in the week where the digital world went crazy over Mystarbucksidea.com (I’ve already voted for free Wifi), NHS choices launched a blog about diabetes, bringing together the people who treat the illness and the people who receive treatment. It’s a brilliant ideas and hopefully will foster a new information community who can work together to improve things.

I was diagnosed a type 1 diabetic about a year ago, so have quite an interest in this. I was 27 when I was diagnosed, which is a funny age I think, and led to it taking quite a while for the doctors to figure out if I was type 1 (meaning injections) or type 2 (meaning I had to eat less). I still haven’t got to grips with it yet: I’m supposed to inject myself four times a day but manage it twice at best, largely with the result that I feel pretty crap all the time. Last summer I was hospitalised twice and suffered a crippling bout of depression. I guess I am exactly the sort of person that this blog is supposed to be reaching out to: I’ve got the disease, I’m crap at dealing with it, and I like blogs. I hadn’t heard about it though, which renders it pretty useless. Still, now I do, thanks to Tom, I’ll engage with it, leave a comment or two and see what happens. The blog idea is nice, but I wonder whether more of a social network type approach would be better – linking me up with other diabetics who have been through similar issues.

My officials have been working up draft guidance on how public servants can use social media. And the Power of Information Report made a series of recommendations about this too.

I want the taskforce to ensure that the COI and Cabinet Office produce a set of guidelines that adheres to the letter of the law when it comes to the civil service code but also lives within the spirit of the age. I’ll be putting some very draft proposals to the taskforce to consider later this week.

Here, here. I wrote in the wake of the Civil Sef affair that Public servants should be blogging, or engaging through other social networking tools. Public servants are too often characterised as faceless bureaucrats and the more that can be done to dissuade people from that notion, the better. But to get more public sector workers being open, they need to feel safe to do so, and sensible policies will help to do that.

We will also look at, and learn from, the way people are communicating with each other.

The 19th century co-operative movements had their roots in people pooling resources to make, buy or distribute physical goods. Modern online communities are the new co-operatives.

This is a point I have been meaning to blog about for some time: the relationship between online collaborative communities and the co-operative movement. The point is that while the tools are new, the relationships aren’t, and people have been working together to tackle problems since the year dot. What the tools do is make the process easier and more transparent and because they also make it easier to do without forming institutions or organisations, they also remove some of the political undercurrents too. More needs to be written on this, I think.

And when we know we get a delivery channel right we should use the ‘collaboration’ part of Ed’s vision to best effect, to gain, social leverage, as Professor Shirky would say.

Let me use a recent story to illustrate this point. I recently registered my local Labour Party with groupsnearyou.com. This is a new site provided by the MySociety people. It’s a site for people who run small scale community focused groups.

Through the site, I found West Bromwich Freecycle.

I’m the Member of Parliament for West Bromwich East and I didn’t know about an important recycling initiative going on in my own patch. This information now means that a bag load of clothing for a small child and a habitat sofa are about given a second chance to give pleasure.

Nice example, not least because of the use of an existing network to connect with others. The delivery channel – in this case the connecting of local groups – does not therefore need to be created by the government, or the Labour Party, rather by interested folk, doing things in an open and collaborative way like MySociety does.  This taps into another long running question of mine which asks whose responsibility is it to push for improvements in civic life using social tools? Is it the government, at whatever level? Is it organisations like MySociety? Or is it every individual with a laptop and a broadband connection? I am beginning to suspect the answer is the latter – individuals pushing the boundaries and demonstrating where the value is, with the institutions following up once the point has been proved. Organisations like MySociety can help but they aren’t necessarily needed

Overall, a great speech to hear from a cabinet minister. I look forward to seeing what happens next.

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