Seattle, home to Boeing and Microsoft is probably the definitive modern technology driven city – but it is great to see it shares the same ultra local news values as Saltaire. Thanks to Tom for pointing to an interesting post by Cory Bergman about a ‘hyper local’ news experiment (see here).

It is fascinating to see that MyBallard.com covers all the ultra local classics – construction, planning permissions, graffitti, shops opening and closing, events, links to public services and even public transport.  An interesting feature is groups of links relating to subdistricts or areas – i haven’t seen that before.  The site has a positive constructive tone, uses photos heavily and is nicely laid out in Wordpress.

Rubbish and tipping is a prime issue for an ultra local site.  It is a  simple information problem – if you know where the litter is and can tell people, especially the council, it will usually get cleared up.  This was a basis for starting my own community site in Kings Cross.
Reporting stuff to the council is often much harder than it should be (count the number of clicks needed here).  Especially in urban areas, a good ultra local site will have details on its front page of the local councils’ service for reporting street or public space problems – phone line, email and weblink for getting broken things on the street fixed or trash cleared up.  In some areas this can be a complex exercise with differing layers of government and multiple phone lines in the council.  Readers often appreciate you re-organising information and setting it out from the customers point of view.
But you can also use and link to the excellent fixmystreet.com website.  Fixmystreet will send details to any council and cuts through the complex layers of government and bureaucracy by giving you one place to report problems.  It can give an RSS feed direct to your website of people reporting things in your area  – as I have in kings cross.  (I declare an interest in having helped set fixmystreet up)

This website on the famous Saltaire is a beautiful ultra local site.   It was so comprehensive that I thought it might have been done by an agency for the tourist board so I asked Pamela the webmaster to tell the story:

I moved to Saltaire in 2003 when I got married. I didn’t know too much about making websites then, but I had been inspired by the Nelson village website in British Columbia, Canada – the place where they filmed Roxanne (a reworking of Cyrano de Bergerac) – a gorgeous place.  I left a message on their chat board and it was picked up by a couple who grew up in Nelson, and we’ve become friends.  Fabulous!  So – when I discovered that Saltaire didn’t have a website – I took the initiative.  I cobbled together a few rather pathetic pages – but that didn’t matter – my intentions were good and I stuck at it.

Nearly 3 years later, the website has grown and is supported by a team of people who contribute and answer emails.  Saltaire is a World Heritage Site – and so it gets lots of interest from all around the world.  We get the most fantastic snippets of history – it’s like putting a jigsaw together.  We all work for the love of it – there’s no funding and no money changes hands.  Everything we do is free.  I’m not retired so, as you can imagine, I’m doomed to be poor!
I act as a webmaster generally – a point of contact and an editor.  Access to the website is encouraged and we’ve not had to refuse to publish anything yet. It’s very enjoyable and the website has been used as a platform to support the Saltaire History Club and to publish The Saltaire Journals and The Saltaire Sentinel.  All very gratifying – and it’s certainly helped me to feel part of the community and make friends.

Great story from Pamela – getting a team working on a site really allows you to expand the range of content you can post – and it is good ultra local content that keeps people coming back.  Pamela’s point about ’sticking with it’ is crucial – I remember the first dozen or so posts on my own site – it was really hard work to get it going and i felt like a fool much of the time.  But setting up an ultra local site is one of the best things i have done.

People want to read about crime – mainly to be reassured it won’t happen to them.  Every Council ward in England and Wales should now have a Safer Neighbourhoods Team and a Panel that gives the team direction.  This is a return to the old school Dixon of Dock Green approach.  I am a member of my Safer Neighbourhood Panel – it is a remarkable experience to sit down with your local sergeant, the constables and the police community support officers, discuss problems and set their priorities for the coming months.  I like this post from We love Larkhall on the SNP – not least for the superb poster I have borrowed above.

As crime and fear of crime has sadly become a national obsession, which makes it a grim but necessary source of material for an ultra local website – you can keep people informed about what is going on, help the police communicate (something they aren’t naturals at) and provide links for the community to online police material.  Just Google up your local police force and their site front page normally has a link to a Safer Neighbourhoods page.  This will often have a phone number and a direct email that you can link to or provide in a permanent side bar or little text box on your own page.  Brixton SNP has its own blog here.  Otherwise the internet landscape for SNPs and SNTs is errrr, diverse – the police seem to have gone for an unplanned ‘thousand flowers’ approach (see here)

People also cover warnings about criminal activity that come around all communities by email and text (though check a little first to see if it well founded).  It is possible to get some striking images – like this one sent in by my councillor or this one of a moped fire – when i see smoke in the neighbourhood i grab the mobile and start dialling 999, grab a camera and run for the scene while i go through the operator screening process.  The urban area I write about has many big yellow incident boards – a photo of one accompanied by writing up the details and appeal or witnesses can help the problem and makes for a striking post.

Digbeth is good tickled my fancy – an irreverent, cheerful, colourful site that perhaps confounds the expectations.  Digbeth is (or was) spiritual home to Birds custard, Typhoo Tea and a lot of manufacturing, prior to the 1980s but now undergoing huge regeneration. Nicky Getgood has an wonderful up, irreverent and dynamic voice on this blog.  Like many ultra local sites Nicky gets a high Google position for her area – a good example of how a site like this can help promote an area.  I like this post inparticular about a local guard dog.

A different point of view comes from the protest site Keep Digbeth vibrant – which is a voice campaigning against development – something i can sympathise with from Kings Cross.

I started this blog because i am passionate about the potential of ultra local publishing to empower and build communities.  In August i put together some slides that made a more or less coherent pitch.  And after much cursing at Slideshare (and the Theme i am using here) the slides are at the link below.

There is a lot in common with the proposal from Clare White over at the Ministry of Justice ‘Building Democracy’ competition.  She proposes a Social Reporters Network and has set up a wiki to put some flesh on the bones.  It seems that Vision On TV are also doing something in this space.  There is a good discussion running here, revealing some good work i hadn’t found before.  WIll digest and post further.

Although I live now in London’s Kings Cross i spent 18 years in remote countryside so I was delighted to find this gem of a rural community site after a tip from Simon Berry.  Parwich.org is community run site for four villages. unusually it has a commercial element with sponsorship by local businesses.  The ads are done in a sensitive and well thought through way that doesn’t detract from the core content and shows that ultra local community add value for local business – there are also holiday lets etc.  There is a very good strand of posting at the minute on flooding.

There is a high rate of posting (two to three a day with kosher content) for what is ostensibly a small community – everything from village shows, to film societies to local crime alerts.  You get a good sense from the comments that there is real community involvement here, not just a one man band. Communication is hard in the countryside and Parwich.org seems to add real value.

The designer has a good eye for graphics which are well used in almost every post and the site runs in wordpress.

William Perrin

Political folk have a slightly comtemptuous phrase for local street issues – the ‘dog shit agenda’.  “What are you going to do about the dog shit on my street?” etc.  This sort of thing really matters to peopleprobably more than Georgian geopolitics or the Bank of England monthly inflation report.

There is a wonderful discussion about dog poo problems going on here at the magnificent Brookmans Park sites.  The images are so graphic you can almost smell it.  It’s a wonderfully vivid discussion of where dog poo is most prevelant and the anti social things people do with bags full of it.

It shows the real value of an ultra local discussion forum making a local debate public visible that otherwise might have taken place over a garden fence or in a pub and have been unactionable.  The Brookmans Park site has pulled out a whole set of dog issues in a feature on the main site – extremely well tailored ultra local information.

‘Bags for collecting dog waste are sold at Brookmans Park Post Office, Pegasus Supplies in Dellsome Lane, Welham Green, North Mymms Parish Council, Bungalow 1, Bushwood Close, Welham Green, and Northaw & Cuffley Parish Council, Maynards Place, Cuffley. Bags cost £1.60 for 50. ‘

This is just the sort of thing that ultra local online media is brilliant at, but that a local paper, TV or radio would never cover properly.  This rural bit of Hertfordshire wouldn’t get over the threshold with trad. media. The Brookmans Park sites are a superb example of a mature ultra local online media and well worth a click around – i shall return to them in future here.

For a more aggressive approach on dog poo campaigning ‘dog poo flags’ as described here are amusing.  Just replace the photo of george bush with your Council’s logo.  Sadly, this is a topic anyone could write about in their community (unless you live in Switzerland).

Almost every community has a campaign on the go – they define and unite communities like nothing else.  Both positive and negative campaigns unite more than they polarise, whether raising money for a childrens playground or campaigning against a noisy pub .  And all campaigns need a voice – online publishing is by far the most cost and time effective way of supporting a local campaign.

Here in London’s Kings Cross, we have run dozens of campaigns through our community site www.kingscrossenvironment.com. The site (run on Typepad) acts both as communications push and a store of reference material about how the campaign has run.  Specific campaigns will often have their own category on the blog, or if we can, each post will carefully link back to a chain of prior posts.  We are normally transparent in how we run a campaign – we post letters to people and their replies.  The biggest local campaign has its own ‘daughter’ site on the same Typepad account at no extra cost, using a similar template.  The daughter site prevents the parent site being swamped with campaign messages.  We also use video hosted in YouTube and embedded in the blog by posting the embed code.

We can update people such as government or council officials, politicians or journalists on the camapingn by just sending them a couple of links and letting them read their way in.  If helps you pass the ‘nutter test’ you often have to go through when brushing up against officialdom or the corporate world.

The Cemex campaign was one of the first I ran in 2006.  Cemex is the world’s biggest concrete company and they have a noisy run down plant in Kings Cross.  I wrote a letter to the UK President, rang their switchboard to get a few names and emails and posted the basic info.  As the campaign grew i gave it its own category so i could find all the posts in one place and send the link to others.  I made some video clips on my digital camera, stuck them in youtube and eventually embedded them in posts.  Sending the links to the video clips to the Council’s noise officers helped them build an evidence base without having to make loads of visits to the site.  Eventually the Council came down hard on Cemex who cleaned up their act remarkably well (see here).  This wasn’t an entirely online campaign of course – i had to get on the phone, go to a few meetings, keep a noise diary etc. but the online element made me impossible to ignore and gave me leverage.

Having a history online and fully visible helps me reactivate the noise complaint with the Council when Cemex start to misbehave (as they are doing at the minute).  To my amusement i now star in a Cemex UK environmental awareness video for their staff.

Would be very interested to hear other people’s experiences of online campaigning in their communities – what works, what doesn’t.

William Perrin

Writing about local history brings out all sorts of people you just wouldn’t expect.  Every time I write a history piece at least one person with local links i have never heard of before contacts me out of the blue, either adding in their own perspective because they were there or asking about relative.  This amateur history of my street has yielded quite a few email contacts.

We tend to assume wrongly that the web is a youngish people’s medium – local history articles on the web disprove this and attract seniors with fascinating, often moving stories.  This piece on some old slum buildings in the area turned up some hair raising conversations about slum living from people who lived there (follow the link in article and scroll down to ‘Beaconsfield Buildings’).  Family history of course is one of the biggest things on the net and people are constantly scouring Google trying to glean scraps of information about where their relatives lived in the distant past.  I had a long correspondence with someone trying to pinpoint a relatives house in a long demolished slum around the corner.

This piece on the blitz in Kings Cross brought to light some remarkable local history in the comments and by email.

I occasionally pop down to the Council’s local history centre or turn somethign new up in Google.  Would be interesting to hear how others write about local history – your sources, approach and what feedback you get.

William Perrin