The Cricklade Bugle at cricklade.wordpress.com

Last week I took a trip to Swindon to meet, chat with and later interview the managers of three community websites at CLIP Penhill, a UK online centre on the Penhill estate that has been delivering talk about local training.

My first interview was with John Saunders, manager of the CLIP Penhill Centre and Jon Allan. Between them they manage and train other members of the community to use the website This is Penhill – ‘a site made for the Penhill people to keep them informed about local events, news and information’.

As well as creating a focal point for the community where local people can keep themselves updated, John and Jon also hope the website can help improve external perceptions of the Penhill estate, which has suffered something of a bad press over the years, by telling positive stories. John and Jon plan to introduce and involve more people with the website at a Penhill Forum event on 11th September.

My next interview was with Vicki Farthing, Secretary of a committee campaigning to for a splash park on an desolate old play park in Seven Fields. Vicki built the sevenfieldssplashpark.org website over one weekend to support their campaign to rejuvenate the empty field.

There’s some brilliant use of film on the website with YouTube video creations from committee member Lorna Breslin – slideshows of what the park was in its heyday and what it one day might become with a little money and attention.  By far the best though is the above slideshow of the sorry state it is in today, with a particularly apt soundtrack of Evanescence’s ‘Bring Me to Life’ – “Because that’s what we want to do, we want to bring this back to life.”

Last but not least is Peter Hansen, who created the community website The Cricklade Bugle during a talk about local training session in February.  Peter, who volunteers one half-day a week to maintain the Cricklade UK online centre, has since built it into becoming ‘a community and news website for Cricklade in North Wiltshire.’

Peter is currently the sole writer on the website, updating it with information he receives doing community work with the local leisure centre, church building Jenner Hall, Cricklade Bloomers and other community groups.  “I’m slowly incorporating them into supplying further content for the website.”  The website has already been used by Wiltshire Council to consult the local community about issues such as refuse collection and redevelopment of the leisure centre.

When I told a friend I was going to Swindon for the day they responded rather harshly with ‘eugh’ – I suppose it doesn’t have a reputation of being the most dynamic of places.  But I left feeling very excited and enthused by the people I met, who are all working hard to make their neighbourhoods better and happier places and expressing this brilliantly online with three very different but equally simple community websites, that help make all their organising and campaigning that little bit easier.  I can’t wait to go back!

Something I’ll be keeping an eye on over the next few weeks is News Dash, a Say Hello project produced by Meshed Media.

News Dash is partnering up four community groups with journalists and social media experts to help them tell their stories.

The teams will have two weeks to complete the challenge with a simple brief: find the best stories and present them in the most effective way.

The teams might use blogs, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or Youtube, or more traditional methods to present the stories. What they use is up to them, but the aim remains the same, to get the stories out there.

The three community groups recruited so far are all very different, which should make for a good variety of content:

Friends of Brandwood End Cemetery – ‘arose from a deep genuine community interest in maintaining this historic landscaped Victorian Cemetery, which is also a valued green open space within an urban setting.’  This group bought to mind the Friends of Redcar Cemetary, who developed their community website project through talk about local and created the awesome Digital Cemetary, where readers can virtually visit graves.

iCycle – ‘More than a cycle shop’, iCycle is part of Queen Alexandra College for people with visual impairment and other disabilities.  The college trains mature students to become cycle repair and maintenance mechanics, who gain work experience working in the iCycle shop.

Blaze FM – a community radio station for Birmingham, Solihull and the West Midlands that helps promote local community groups.

It will be really interesting to see the different stories that emerge from these groups, and how they are chosen to be presented.

If you would like to get involved in News Dash, either by putting your organisation forward to be used in the project or by simply telling them your story, visit their Get Involved page.

If you write a hyperlocal news site, I can guarantee you’ll have roads and junctions in your area which are known for being dangerous. It’s possible to use the Freedom of Information Act to get your local council to tell you just how dangerous they really are. The data you’ll receive could be the basis for several good stories for your site, or even a campaign.

I recently used an FOI request to find out the details and location of every road accident in the Saddleworth area since 2000. Authorities will normally only release ‘headline’ figures of casualties or accidents on a council-wide basis, but I used FOI to get not only the figures for the specific council wards which cover my area, but also details about each incident, including the exact location where each took place.

My interest in this issue was prompted by a local road, the A62 Huddersfield Road. I’d noticed it was often described in the local paper, or by councillors, as the ‘notorious’ or ‘dangerous’ A62. But there never seemed to be any statistics provided to back up this assertion. So I thought I’d see if I could find some data that might do just that, especially as the council had last year imposed new speed limits on stretches of the road, and had spent money on new warning signs.

My actual FOI request was very straightforward. I simply asked for details of every road accident which had been recorded on public roads in my three local council wards since 1 January 2000 (obviously this means ten years of data, I’ve been told by people who know about road safety that you need at least five years to see a pattern emerging). I also requested brief descriptions of each accident and, if possible, a map showing the precise location of them all, data I was keen to receive to see if I could pick out any specific accident blackspots in the local area.

Sure enough, after 20 days the council sent me all the information I asked for. The headline figures were surprising, showing a sharp fall in both the number of accidents and the amount of people either injured or killed. They sent me both short descriptions of each accident and small maps with the incidents all plotted precisely, a wealth of data which was pretty overwhelming when I first received it.

The data all surrounds something called a Personal Injury Accident. As you’d expect, a PIA is a road incident in which someone gets hurt, and it’s the details of these accidents which the council will send you. The short descriptions include information such as what exactly happened, the vehicles involved, the age and sex of the injured people, the weather and road conditions and any other factors which might have contributed to the incident.

While it was easy enough to write a story from the headline data (mine, published last Friday, is here – http://www.saddleworthnews.com/?p=2782), the process of looking at the rest of the data and picking out interesting trends or titbits is pretty difficult. The council sent me a map of the accidents for each of the three wards, for each of the ten years, so I was left with 30 little maps to analyse, all with dots where the accidents took place and serial numbers linking them to the brief written reports I’d also been sent.

To try to identify any blackspots, I decided to divide the maps into different junctions and stretches of road, and make a note on a separate piece of paper of how many accidents happened in each area in each year. This was a bit time-consuming and dull, but I was able to establish that certain stretches of, for example, the A62 had far more incidents on them than others. Most interestingly of all, in the data the council sent me covering the first half of 2010, after the new speed limits had been imposed, I was able to see that there had been no accidents anywhere on the A62 in Saddleworth during that time (I gave this a mention in my first story, and will write more about this specifically later this week).

As it happens, in my area councillors and others already seemed to be well aware of the dangers of that particular road, but it may be that the data in your area reveals a series of incidents in an unexpected place. This could form the basis of a local campaign for your site, which will be all the stronger for having proper data to back it up. There’s also the possibility that a particular type of incident seems to happen a lot, whether it’s teenagers being knocked down near a school or cyclists being hit on a specific road, and that might be worth investigating further.

I’m now expanding my own investigation, and have asked a neighbouring council for data relating to the A62 as it runs through their area, where there aren’t the sort of safety measures imposed in Saddleworth. There’s also nothing stopping you requesting the latest data again in six months or a year’s time, so you can monitor whether the situation is improving or not and keep a steady supply of interesting stories for your site.

One last point. By ‘interesting’ I don’t mean it has to be a bad news story about people dying or being injured. The data I got for my area showed a generally positive picture. But to my mind, for a hyperlocal site, a good news story about casualties coming down and safety measures actually working is just as interesting, especially as local newspapers traditionally focus on the negative, often complete with pictures of angry-looking councillors next to a junction.

Getting road safety data from your council is a good way of producing content which can be tailored to a very local audience. Even if your site covers just a street or an estate, you’ll be able to get that kind of targeted information. And it can give you distinctive, meaty stories about your local area, which your readers will still find interesting when they find them on Google weeks or even months after you’ve published them.

Farnham Allotments

Try to feature some information and news about your local green spaces, be they parks, gardens or allotments.

Last August Clare White wrote a blog post that featured some of Britain’s garden blogs, such as the Patient Gardener’s Weblog from Worcestershire.  Are there any keen local gardeners that might like to contribute to your community site by writing about their hobby? If your neighbourhood has more than a few green-fingered residents you could build a feature around the best gardens in your area.

Oxford Road Community Garden

Are there any allotments near you?  These are thriving little communities in themselves and there are plenty websites out there if you’re looking for inspiration in writing about them.  Welsh Girl’s Allotment is one girl’s quite personal site ‘detailing my quest for an allotment, its cultivation and hopefully bountiful crops’, but there are allotment sites that serve their small communities, such as Farnham Allotments, which publishes news for all allotment holders – events such as a Growing Vegetables Winter Lecture and notices to advertise Free Horse Manure.

Is there a community garden in your area?  Perhaps one or some of the people involved in its development would like to chart its progress online.  Oxford Road Community Garden, a garden created with Section 106 money from local development, has a simple website with photos and posts that keeps everyone updated on latest news and activity and what’s growing on the site.

Talk about what’s going on in your local park.  Highbury Park Friends in Birmingham publish their newsletters and points of interest on their simple WordPress website, including the above charming film of the pond’s ducks.  Kings Cross Environment has a dedicated category for the local Bingfield Park, which features the hard-fought War on Squirrels.

Normand Park Trees, London W14

Is there a cause or campaign concerning your local green spaces your community website could help with? W14 & SW6 London held a campaign to Save Normand Park Trees from felling – website manager Annette posted a template preservation order request letter along with the relevant council officer’s name and email address, which made supporting the cause as simple as copying and pasting into an email.

Kingsley House Gardens

Another talk about local website for Kingsley House, set up by The Kingsley House Tenants Association to try and improve the  Bristol residential blocks, concentrates on the particularly sorry state of their council-maintained landscaped gardens.

Have a think about how you can include the local green patches and the people who help cultivate them into your community website, and if there’s anything you could do to help preserve, protect and develop them by talking about what they bring to the area in your online space.

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.

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