An online notebook
The marvellous Rich Millington is giving away a fabulous ebook on developing online communities.
Rich’s blog, Feverbee, is packed full of great hints and tips, and I recommend you subscribe to that.
All you have to do to get the ebook is to sign up to the mailing list for his Pillar Summit online learning course during September – just a couple of weeks left, so get in quick!
And yes, this is a great way of getting people to sign up to a newsletter like this!
My friends at LGIU, The Hansard Society and Networked Neighbourhoods are running a free event next month in London that looks dead good:
Wednesday 19 October, 18.30 – 20.00
Thatcher Room, Portculis house, Westminster
LGiU, Networked Neighbourhoods and the Hansard Society are putting on a free event in Parliament on Weds 19th Oct.
We will be exploring the ‘relocalisation’ of the web and debating whether hyperlocal and community websites a vital democratic tool or if they lead to insularity out of step with an increasingly globalised world?
Panel:
Chair:
Jonathan and Hugh will also discuss some of the early findings from the ‘Residents Online’ research project. If you are a Councillor or council officer and would like to take part in the survey, more information can be found here.
Tickets
To register, please email hans_admin@hansard.lse.ac.uk, or book online or phone 020 7438 1216.
Here’s another cool little tool. ifttt, or ‘if this, then that’ is a way of automating tasks across your social networks. It describes itself as ‘digital duct tape’.
It basically allows you to set rules and actions to happen whenever you interact online.
One example described on the site is creating a task that whenever a photo is uploaded to Instagram, it should also be added to your Dropbox account.
Just to test it, I’ve created a task that emails me everytime someone mentions me on Twitter. Not particularly useful, or unique, but the process for creating tasks is very user friendly, and the potential is huge, with lots of different services included, such as Facebook, Google Reader, Foursquare, Delicious, Tumblr, WordPress… the list goes on.
It’s a cool idea and I am sure that people more imaginative than I could come up with some great uses of it!
Apologies for the light blogging this week, I’ve been doing a lot of travelling about.
Still, I came across Trello yesterday, a cool and lightweight planning tool. It allows you to create lists of actions, which can be filled in with all sorts of information, and dragged and dropped into different orders.
Here’s a video explaining it further:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaDf1RqeLfo
Well worth a play for simple collaboration and project management.
A quick note to mention some of the projects Kind of Digital is working on.
CiviCrowd
This is the name we have given to our WordPress-powered ideas crowdsourcing platform. South Holland District Council are going to be using the service to encourage people to suggest ideas for projects that will help their communities.
This will be linked to the ward budgets that councillors there have been allocated, with the CiviCrowd providing a mechanism for people to suggest ideas to their councillors.
The site should be launching in the next few weeks, and I’ll be sure to let you know exactly when that happens!
Lincolnshire coastal cultural SMEs
This is a project we are working on with Lincolnshire County Council, to provide support to small and medium sized enterprises in the arts and culture sector, that are based on Lincolnshire’s coasts. It’s all about providing training and guidance to these organisations to help them use technology like the web, social media, and also innovative hardware to promote what they do.
This is a year long project, so I’ll be posting occasional updates here on progress as we go along, and I’m really pleased to have Fraser Henderson and Tim Wilson on board to help deliver it.
Alconbury Airfield
An interesting one this, as we are working with the regeneration company Urban and Civic (warning: flash-heavy website!) to help them engage online as they develop the Alconbury Airfield site near Huntingdon.
We’re building an online engagement hub, to allow people to provide the sort of feedback usually only received during traditional open day style events, as well as working with the team to help them develop digital engagement strategies, policies and systems to make the most of online discussion of the project and the wider area.
If you’re looking at running a project remotely similar to these, and need a helping hand, don’t hesitate to get in touch!