At one of the very first sessions of #tal10, @countculture pinned me with a pointed look. “Talk About Local need to do something to bring together the geeks and the non-geeks”. And as he is the man who made council websites a million times better, who was I to argue? Through the day, I made notes of many wonderful ideas but it does seem true that there is no one platform bringing them together and many tools are being built for one hyperlocal context that could easily be reused, adapted and improved in other settings. So, we’ll have a go…

The web is brimming with free resources, tools and communities working together to solve problems and build stuff.

With your help, this section of Talk About Local Labs will make links between the techy and the non-techy to share knowledge, help answer questions and think about suggestions for when a tool or data can help overcome a hyperlocal problem.

Although paid-for services are quite fairly being developed for the hyperlocal blogging community, at this stage the focus of this section is to ensure offline communities can make the most of the free, open web and the tools published under open licenses that many of us enjoy every day to make tasks like publishing, reporting potholes, collaborating or looking up council agendas quicker and easier.  In addition, we want to make sure that developments to free public data benefit all communities.

Many off-the-shelf resources that don’t need high-level technical skills can be found in our Step-by-Step and Quick Tips sections and we’re always looking for new ones to add.

This section, therefore, is for people to find out how to learn more advanced skills, or ask someone technically-minded for help. The  TAL team and anyone else working with offline communities can also use these resources to ‘translate’ community issues into the sorts of problems with parameters that developers love to get their teeth into. We don’t want to reinvent any wheels, so please use this very simple and friendly questionnaire to ensure we’re not missing anything that already exists, or if you prefer dive straight into the editable Google document of this page to add content.

The proposed sections so far follow and as this develops sections may move into separate pages, wikis, forum threads, tag lists or even some sort of magical developers’ garden that I haven’t even imagined yet.

Geek exchange
Ideas for bringing together geeks and non-geeks to make cool things happen in communities, plus networks and camps of developers looking for projects.
Social Media Surgeries | Friendly Geeks list on Twitter | data.gov.uk Local Data project | Speed-dating | Pimp my Geek | Scraperwiki

Web building step-by-step
Recommendations, tutorials and links to communities for people who want to move from free hosted platforms to self-hosting, installing plugins and into development.

Help
Where community problems get developed into programming/data problems that can be solved, or people post up requests. Also links to forums and tags where people are helping each other.
TAL10 Google Group | Lazyweb tag on Twitter | Friendly Geeks on Twitter |

Showcase and Ideas
Developers like to see their work used, so this will include things they have developed, or offers of things they would be willing to develop if enough people are going to make use of it.
A page of bright ideas | Openly Local council info widget |

Modern websites are not just a set of pages sent between computers and consumed by passive pairs of eyes. The best websites are living, breathing communities, full of ever-changing content and lively debate, witty exchanges and with a bustling calendar of real-life events. The problem, of course, with communities, is, we hate to say… people. Putting your flag in the virtual desert of your local area and inviting everyone around you to come and hang out is risky, but the effort brings great rewards.

If you’re one of those people ploughing a lonely furrow; the only person in the village who knows where the ‘on’ switch is on the computer and how to find people’s long-lost relatives on Facebook, thereby cursing yourself to hours transcribing and sending them hastily scribbled notes ever since the Post Office closed last year, as well as running the village website after a stern command from the chair of the resident’s association who gets all her digital knowledge from the Guardian; then this corner of talkaboutlocal is for you. If you would like to suggest your own problems, or examples and solutions to any of these, please add them in the comments and we’ll add them in.

The anonymity-causes-idiocy problem
Symptoms: An idiot is posting abuse
Try these treatments:
- switch on moderation so that posts need to be approved before they appear
- add a note about acceptable behaviour at the top of the site (example)

The Control problem
Symptoms: you started off with a friendly community, but now everyone is whining and there’s a palpable air of tension in the forums and round the church tea. People start saying the site is badly designed and they can’t find anything, that the articles are too long or too short or too pompous. That it would all work a lot better if we were all working to one unified ‘vision’. Their vision.
Try these treatments:
- encourage people to take the lead on their own area of interest by creating smaller groups
- don’t be too locked in to your own vision of the site. Once you switch on a community website, it belongs to your community. Only if you’re elected can you have any claim to be speaking on behalf of your community.

The ‘we’re too small’ problem
Symptoms: nobody’s contributing and nobody knows what you’re doing.
Try these treatments:
- have patience. Everything has to start somewhere and particularly in areas where internet access is relatively low, you can expect it to take a while – at least a year to eighteen months, maybe longer – for you to establish the name of your website in the community
- talk about your site everywhere and show it to people. Printouts are handier than pulling out a full projector and web connections, so don’t get too technical. Try Vistaprint for some free cards to give to people and if local schools and organisations start to take an interest, ask them if they can print out some information sheets and posters for you as well.
- when people are talking to you about their burning passion, ask them to write, take photos or videos about it. Most people don’t just write in when you ask them but they are happy to share their interests.
- make your methods of contributing as simple as you possibly can. If you’re getting no response to email calls to contribute to your wiki, it’s almost certain nobody understood what you were talking about and possible that the link you sent them didn’t even work (I’ve been there on this one). Never mind snazzy technology, give them a beer mat to write on.
- don’t forget to ask people for help in really simple ways, don’t assume they know and just aren’t helping. People love to help, especially if helping takes the most minimal amounts of time. This is the way to draw people in to bigger amounts of time, but don’t worry – one hundred volunteers giving an hour a week is pretty much equivalent to the full time team of most modern newspapers.
- find the people who are already online in your area, they will be easier to get hold of. Pubs or local faith and community centres are your offline equivalent.
- keep in touch with small traders. They know everything that is going on and generally a bit of time to tell it to regular customers (like you).

The ‘we’re too big’ problem
Symptoms: everyone’s contributing to your site, everyone has a view on it and moderating it is going to kill your marriage. Your dog, let alone your son, hardly remembers who you are.
Try these treatments:
- remind yourself, and others if necessary, that’s you’re running the blog voluntarily. Restrict the time you spend on it.
- don’t get pulled in to lengthy wars in the comments or forums. Your excuse that you need to go to bed might just prevent someone saying something they regret.
-ask for help so you can distribute the workload – on a WordPress site you can give members different levels of editing rights.

The business-plan problem
Symptoms: having got wildly popular, everyone’s saying you should turn the website into a full time job. You formed a committee. You’ve all been bogged down in funding proposals for the last eight months. Meanwhile, people have drifted away from the site.
Try these treatments:
- carefully consider all the different funding options for your site and your time. These include advertising, grant funding, low-interest business loans if appropriate, consultancy work, again if appropriate.
- a tip I learnt from an old journalism book: just because everyone says there should be another local news outlet, doesn’t mean they will help fund yours. In my experience, it’s true.
- make a clear choice: if you want to go into business, concentrate on that. If you’re happy keeping it volunteer-led, make sure you keep it fun. Many a good community activist has burnt out, unappreciated.
- balance committee work with strong leadership. Times will come when you need to make decisions quickly and if your group doesn’t trust you to make those decisions, they probably don’t trust to you to be in charge (see the “Control” problem, above)

Updates; thanks to those who commented below.

The Get-your-blog-off-my-lawn problem
Symptoms: it’s getting like Midsomer murders round here. The Village Times (published continuously since 1742) is spitting feathers that you blew their exclusive with your Twitpics of the Spring cake competition. Although your detailed IP logs make it clear that *everyone* is glued to your blog, the elite have taken to laboriously pretending they don’t know your name.
Try these treatments:
- before you go into all out war, think twice about whether you need to be in competition at all. If your drive is just to get information out there then maybe an approach to the incumbent to work together will be well received. After all, for all their bluster, they are often volunteers themselves.
- if this isn’t well received, just carry on. Be persistently friendly, make generous references to their ‘in-depth’ (verbose) coverage of the elections and don’t worry about it. After all, there’s enough space on the internet for all of us and it’s so Old Media to fight.

The ‘I scare people’ problem
The symptoms: you’re Clarke Kent trying to hit the story, they’re just trying to make pizza.
Try these treatments:
- hold back those journalism chops. Describe, don’t interrogate. Your old instincts will soon come in handy when an election comes up. What makes many hyperlocal blogs so wonderful is that mix of hard and soft news. Not flower show pictures shoved in to make the advertising department happy (joy! you don’t have one!), but because your readers care – this is the glue that knits your community together. Reading about unknown activities on your blog might entice someone who feels scared to go outside into the community centre and become a volunteer themselves. So you’re making connections and bringing something previously hidden, because the mainstream media can’t turn it into a pithy two minute news package, into the open.
- take your time. Again, you’re not under a time limit. The first few minutes of what people say to interviewers are what they think they should say, it’s only after a while that you start to get the real conversation. If you don’t want very, very long video interviews, here are some good tips from Nick Booth.
- find the questions that work for your subjects. Funnily enough, the time-honoured questions that journalists love aren’t always the ones that real people like to answer. Much as those interminable questions in questionnaires don’t really get your real views, they just get your reflex reaction as you click on through to reach the prize. Have a look round at other techniques like the Oxford Muse or NLP, or others. Equally, if you’re not from a journalism background you can learn a lot from journalists, just maybe not, in this case, Jeremy Paxman.

So how do you get it just right? There will always be issues, but the best community web editors I’ve seen know how to keep their websites enjoyable, whether their definition of enjoyable is bloody scraps down in the comments or warm, supportive swapping of recipes. They are relaxed about what goes on the site, encouraging to contributors, patient and persistent and, perhaps most of all, brave enough to keep the thing going, post by post.

What advice can you add?

One of many ideas that really appealed to me in David Halpern’s Hidden Wealth of Nations, which I’m reading at the moment, is Fureai kippu, or ‘caring relationship tickets’.

This is a community currency which operates in Japan, creating social structures to replace family and community units which broke down as people become more mobile. A simple illustration is that someone who has an elderly parent in another part of the country can look after an older person locally and then exchange the credits they earn for doing so for their parent’s care.

The first question, asked as soon as I tweeted the link, was “would it work here?”.

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a great site for finding social groups in your area called GroupsNearYou.com. Just type in your location or postcode and it shows you what’s close by.

Now you can provide that very same ease of use to your own local blog. I’ve just finished the first phase of a new GroupsNearYou plugin for WordPress. It provides blog owners with a new widget which, once configured, will show the groups in your area.

Below is a video showing how to set the widget up and there are also written instructions. The plugin itself can be downloaded from my website where you can also subscribe to updates. Once you’ve downloaded the plugin, follow these instructions on how to manually install a plugin. If you have any suggestions, questions or comments please use the comments section.

Instructions

1. Go to Plugins
2. Activate the GroupsNearYou plugin
3. Go to Appearance > Widgets
4. Drag the GroupsNearYou widget to your sidebar
5. Configure the settings according to your own location and your preferred display
6. Check your blog and you should see the new widget added to your sidebar

If you run a local blog there’s a good chance you might be on Twitter, as my some of your neighbours. This creates a ‘back-channel’ that can often go unseen. So in the interests of enhancing local blogs with this back-channel, below is a video which shows you how to add both your own tweets and the results of a Twitter search to your WordPress blog.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions please leave them in the comments section below.

Instructions – adding someone’s tweets

1. In the WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance > Widgets
2. Drag the Twitter widget onto the sidebar
3. Add the twitter account name you want to show
4. Configure the remaining options to change the display
5. Click Save
6. Refresh your blog and you should see the new widget on your sidebar

Instructions – adding a Twitter search

1. Go to search.twitter.com and perform a search.
2. On the right hand side, right click on the link that reads “Feed for this query” and select Copy link location
3. Go to your WordPress dashboard
4. Go to Appearance > Widgets
5. Drag the RSS widget to your sidebar
6. In the first box, paste the link you just copied from Twitter
7. Configure the other options according to your preferences
8. Click Save
9. Refresh your blog and you should see the new widget on your sidebar

If you’ve not heard of WriteToThem.com before, it’s a great site by mySociety which makes contact politicians really easy, whether that’s your local councillors or your MP, regional assembly member or MEP.

To make it even easier for readers of your own blog, I’ve just finished the first phase of a new plugin for WordPress. It provides you with a new widget based on WriteToThem.com which will provide an easy way for your readers to get in touch with their politicians.

Below is a video showing how to set the widget up and there are also written instructions. The plugin itself can be downloaded from my website where you can also subscribe to updates. Once you’ve downloaded the plugin, follow these instructions on how to manually install a plugin. If you have any suggestions, questions or comments please use the comments section.

Instructions

1. Go to Plugins
2. Activate the WriteToThem plugin
3. Go to Appearance > Widgets
4. Drag the WriteToThem widget to your sidebar
5. Configure the settings according to your preferred display
6. Check your blog and you should see the new widget added to your sidebar

There’s a lot of useful information lying around the web that has local relevance but often people don’t know it’s there or even how to find it. For example, the NHS Choices web site provides the public with a way of rating and reviewing their local health services.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could have this information on your local blog? Well, you can! The video and instructions below show you how you can take feeds from sites like NHS Choices and have them display on your own site, using WordPress.

The principles will allow you to add all sorts of information to your blog using RSS and Atom feeds, where available. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions please use the comments section.

Instructions

1. Copy the link (URL) to the RSS or Atom feed.
2. In your WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance > Widgets
3. Drag the RSS widget to your sidebar
4. Copy the URL into the first box.
5. Configure the remaining options according to your preferred display
6. Click Save
7. Refresh your blog and you should see the new widget appear in your sidebar

TheyWorkForYou.com is a great site built by e-democracy charity, mySociety. It provides an easy way for citizens to keep an eye on their MP. You can sign up for e-mail updates whenever your MP speaks in the House of Commons, for example.

So wouldn’t it be cool if you could also put this stuff on your local blog for all your readers to see and keep up to date with? Well, know you can!

I’ve just finished the first phase of a new plugin for WordPress. This first version provides you with a new widget. Once configured, the widget will show the latest activity from your MP and is available both as an addition to your blog for the benefit of your readers but also as a dashboard widget so that you can see the latest updates everytime you log in.

Below is a video and written instructions on how to set the widget up. The plugin itself can be downloaded from my website where you can also subscribe to updates. Once you’ve downloaded the plugin, follow these instructions on how to manually install a plugin. If you have any suggestions, questions or comments please use the comments section.

Instructions

1. Go to Plugins
2. Activate the TheyWorkForYou plugin
3. Go to Settings > TheyWorkForYou
4. Configure the settings according to your own MP and your preferred display
5. Click Save options
6. Go to Appearance > Widgets
7. Drag the TheyWorkForYou widget to your sidebar
8. Check your blog and you should see the new widget added to your sidebar

The thing about websites in local areas is that they’re often not very well linked to one another. I found in Stoke that I would struggle to find websites I’d seen on a shop sign unless I remembered the exact address, because Google wasn’t aware of their existence (see How to get the top of Google). This annoyed me, because I have replaced by memory with Google.

Social Stoke was started to combat this problem and it has two sections: a straightforward blog and a delicious map. The blog looks nicer than a delicious page and means I can add pictures and longer articles, but mainly it is just an aggregate of delicious feeds.

The tag cloud is more useful. As it builds, it creates handy lists of different subjects. For example, here are our local pottery firms and here are some museums. As noted elsewhere, the lists can automatically become RSS feeds for embedding into other sites or tracking on a feed reader.

The easiest way to open this up to collaboration – and it’s great to do this because if you don’t have a passion for fishing clubs, you can be sure someone in your local area does – is by asking people to create their own delicious account and start tagging, including ‘for:socialstoke’ (or whatever your username is). This means you can keep the tags consistent while still sharing the workload.

It doesn’t take very long to make a really useful tag cloud and it makes those Saturday nights watching the X-Factor with your laptop on feel so much more productive!