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.

This meant that, on 30th November, the lights were put up in Kington and switched on  to much rejoicing during the lively Kington Christmas Fair on 5th December.  Unfortunately, they were switched off shortly afterwards after doubts were raised about their safety but these issues have thankfully been resolved and Kington now has its lights on just in time for Christmas, meaning Santa can land there safely.

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!

Merry Christmas everyone.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8YQ6eoLUQ4]

By far the most inspirational talk I heard at Open Tech 2009 conference was from Robin, a member of Space Hijackers, who spoke about ‘Community and Democracy in Hijacked Space’.  I’d recommend you listening again if you have the time.

It was a great to hear about play being used as a surprisingly effective and disruptive method of protest.  Space Hijackers, who attempt to ‘corrupt the culture of architecture, and destroy the hierarchies that exist’ by staging hilariously anarchic happenings, got me thinking about putting the fun back into local campaigning, which many hyperlocal sites find themselves involved with.

Obviously, justifiable anger and reasoned argument about issues causing serious damage to the community is a great and worthwhile thing, I’m not denying that.  It’s just that sometimes you’re met with problems so ridiculous the best option may be to fight like with like.

For instance, Birmingham pub The Rainbow has recently faced closure after Birmingham City Council served a Noise Abatement Order in response to complaints from one lone tenant, who lives in an apartment block built long after the pub was.  The council seeing fit to threaten this renowned live music venue because of one complainant, but aspiring to develop the area’s cultural character in their Big City Plan, seemed kafkaesque enough to warrant a game.  After hearing Robin speak, I was pondering on some noisy, twisted version of musical statues, or a loud complaints choir outside the council house.

The fun doesn’t necessarily have be physical, you can have it in your online space too.  Keep Digbeth Vibrant do a great job of tempering their obvious frustration with Birmingham City Council Environmental Health, with quirky creations like the spoof Stella advert above and The Digbeth Whisperer newspaper.

On my site Digbeth is Good, when Birmingham City Council Leader Mike Whitby commandeered a Big City Plan public consultation bus from my neighbourhood for a photoshoot on the other side of town, I initially responded with righteous indignation.  My emails and calls to the press office were met with a wall of silence until the fantastic local satire site Lolitics helped to bring it to a wider audience.  Soon after a lolled image of Mike Whitby appeared, closely followed by several of a walrus bemoaning the loss of his bus, I received an apologetic statement from Director of Planning and Regeneration Clive Dutton.  The increasing amount of attention from other sources the incident was getting seemed to make them realise ignoring me was not making me go away.

So next time you’re met with local plans, politics or problems that would be funny if they weren’t so angering, perhaps just try highlighting the funny.  Point out the silly and match it.  The results this approach gets from The Man may be limited, as he’s not known for his sense of humour, but it will make engaging with the issue much more fun for your readers, and give you a bit of light relief from feeling just plain mad.

Amidst all the hyperlocal froth people often forget that Facebook has a strong local neighbourhood component – not really by design, despite its origins in campus networks but more because people seem to love forming local area affinity groups.  People define their own communities on the ground that reflect human rather than administrative geography.  Anecdotal observation suggests that once people have their friends in th group the next thing they do is search out local ’shout’ groups in Facebook and join them.

These Facebook groups can work powerfully with hyper or ultra local sites to cross over content and messages. I set up I Love Kings Cross as an experimental sideline to my Kings Cross community site.  The 160 odd people in the Facebook group are about 75% different to the 140-odd people who sign up to my Feedburner emails from the community site.

You can see examples everywhere – even in a town as proud of its old world traditions as Barnsley in Yorkshire has several thousand people in local groups

Some good local campaigns run in Facebook too, despite its many limitations.  In Birmingham’s Sandwell a local mum has set up a Facebook campaign to stop people dogging in a local beauty spot:

‘Reports of Dogging, Drug Dealing and Networking Homosexuals abusing the area for their antisocial behaviour. If I can get enough people to join this group I will use it to the local Councillor to help clean the place up and drive these animals away so that children and families can start reusing the area for it’s proper purpose’

In Scarborough in Yorkshire a local woman has set up a Facebook campaign about the proliferation of new traffic lights in the town centre.

‘… after dark .. .when everyone is asleep … the traffic lights in Scarborough have been getting together and mating .. resulting in EVEN MORE traffic lights. Surely this is the reason for the growing traffic light community, and surely the Council can’t be blamed for tearing up every roundabout and replacing it with yet more traffic slowing lights! I’m sure that if all the traffic lights in town are counted, and then divided by the towns population, we’ll have three each !!!!’

This group, now 1,900 strong crossed over into a local newspaper and an 800 signature petition to the council.  Google doesn’t turn up much hyperlocal community activity online outside Facebook in Scarborough. There are also a range of affinity groups for Scarborough – the biggest with 16,000 members.

Facebook simply reduces the sunstantial communication and time barriers to forming local groups.  Of course, Facebook is so yesterday for many of the digerati as they tweet away to each other and build new hyperlocal platforms.  But they could do well to follow Terry Leahy’s old axiom and follow the customer.  In real communities on the ground, people without the skills to build a better online pesence continue to vote with their feet for Facebook to find their ultra or hyperlocal voice.

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.

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