Camp Hill Flyover, Birmingham, 1970 by Lady Wulfrun

Every so often I find myself emailing people who have requested links and/or information about creating community content around a particular subject or issue.  I’m thinking it would be better for me to share that information with everyone, so I’m going to  start copying it into blog posts here.  One topic I get asked a lot about is local heritage, and how bringing this online can generate discussion and get people sharing their memories.  When people ask me about heritage, I usually send them the following:

• People really react to a bit of local history on a community website.  Look at the comments on this post of a photo of 1970’s Digbeth. People remembered the flyover and reacted with their own personal stories about it. Similarly with William’s post about the Beaconsfield Buildings in Kings Cross – people started commenting about their families’ connections to the building, and people tracing their family trees are now coming to this post via genealogy forums.
• Old photos and interviews with older residents who’ve witnessed changes over the years are always popular. Rescue Geography is a project all about collecting and curating  people’s memories of a place, you could explore that for some ideas.
• The Birmingham Irish Heritage Group contribute regularly to Digbeth is Good, which helps bring their activity and a taste of their events to wider audience.
• Another interesting site is: http://ourhistory-hayes.blogspot.com: ‘A site dedicated to the work of Hayes Labour Association, Hayes & Harlington Labour Party, Hayes Communist Party, Trade Unionists, and working men and women of West Middlesex.’

• Last but not least Seaside Voices is a project talk about local are delivering in partnership with Community Media Assocation, People’s Voice Media and UK online centres. We’re working with four UK online centres in seaside towns to help facilitate an online discussion of their town in its past, present and future.  The Seaside Voices websites for Bridlington, Morecambe, Newlyn and Shanklin are examples of sites that will not only look back at the history of a place, but also delve deeper to highlight current activity and look ahead to what’s in store in the future.

If you know of any other good examples of heritage sites, or local heritage content on community websites, please share and comment!

Talk About Local Un-Conference 2010
We are pleased to announce that the Talk About Local Un-Conference 2010 will be held on Saturday 17 April at Old Broadcasting House in Leeds.  Old Broadcasting House is an excellent venue in Central Leeds, in the Civic Quarter just off the Ring Road.

We are delighted that this event will be in partnership with The Guardian’s Local initiative

As in Stoke-on-Trent in October, we will be using the Un-Conference format and we hope to have some of the very best hyperlocal publishers and special guests attending on the day.

After the success of the Pork Pie rounders, arranged by our own Nicky Getgood, there is a rumor that a skool sports day is being planned for one of the sessions, more than that we can’t yet announce, yet….

50 Tickets will be available on EventBrite from 1400 today (8 February)  with further tickets being made available after we have ensured that local bloggers in Yorkshire and the North East have got their tickets.

We will be publishing updates at http://talkaboutlocal.org and on Twitter @talkaboutlocal or you can search Twitter for TAL10 to see what other people are saying the Un-Conference Google Group is reopened for you to start discussing and planning what you hope to gain from the event.

Talk About Local Un-Awards
The glittering Talk About Local Un-Awards ceremony will take place on Saturday evening after the Un-Conference at a venue yet to be confirmed. As you will no doubt remember we were going to hold the Un-Awards in Birmingham earlier in the year, but after much procrastination and it being left on a low light we decided that it made logistical sense for us to hold it in conjunction with the Un-Conference.

Tickets for the the Un-Awards will be available on Eventbrite as soon as the venue is confirmed.

I wrote a piece on my hyperlocal Kings Cross site on how data from the London Data Store showed a puzzling rise in ambulance call outs to assaults.  In general crime is going down, but there was a strong upward trend in ambulances being called out to assault incidents. I asked people to check my data as I am not a statto.  I tried to get a comment out of the police, but they went quiet on me – as I run a lot of articles supporting the police this was irritating.

The local paper the Islington Gazette rang me having seen my article.  The Gazette had done some maths of their own and looked a the London Data Store site.  The Gazette covers the whole borough (an urban area about five miles square), my site just one ward (a mile long, half mile wide).  So the Gazette grew the story, got quotes from people across the borough and turned it into a bigger piece.  They did get a quote from the police, despite having a generally ‘granny scaring’ approach to covering local crime.  I am still waiting for the police to get back to me.  The Gazette in their traditional rather sad way managed to giv me a quote but no link to my original article and no mention of the plucky Kings Cross website that made the story in the first place.

I also emailed BBC local TV to see if they were interested.  I got the ‘it’s a bit too local to cover‘ (quote from email) response.  However if they look at the data for themselves they will see that the trends across the whole of London are sharply up.   Let’s wait and see.

Overall an interesting case study in how local data transparency can be used locally to bring some accountability to local public services and feed the mainstream traditional media.

UPDATE

Within minutes of posting this the police came back to me apologetically with a quote for the Kings Cross site and thanking me for my helpful quote in the Gazette (coincidence of timing I think).  Nonetheless they still went to the Gazette with a quote some time before me.

The government has one of the world’s biggest innovation funds for the future of local news – the so called independently funded news consortia or IFNC.   Pilots will run in Wales, Scotland and the Tyne Tees/Borders TV regions, hopefully embracing the full spectrum from hyperlocal to regional news.  I am on the panel to help select the winning bidders.   It is essential to get serious dialogues going between TV, radio, print and local independent web news media.   On Wednesday 3 February the Panel will be in Cardiff to meet bidders for the Wales pilot.

There will be a public meeting where the bidders do a show and tell and people can put questions. This will be at 1500-1600 in the Wales Millennium Centre, Bute Place, Cardiff Bay, CF10 5AL.

It would be great to see some of Wales independent web publishers there – whether you run a hyperlocal site or any other sort of news service. Your contribution will be vital to the future of news. It’s a public meeting so you can just turn up. I know that for those of you with day jobs this might be tricky – but there is rarely a time to suit everyone. If you need childcare or special access requirements to attend then drop a line to ifncpilots@culture.gsi.gov.uk and they will help you.

We shall also be in Newcastle and Glasgow in the next few days and it would be great to see web people there too:

• In Newcastle, the public meeting will take place on Friday 5 February, 3-4pm at Northern Film and Media, The Kiln, Hoult’s Yard, Walker Road, Newcastle NE6 1AB.
• In Glasgow, the public meeting will take place on Monday 8 February, 2-3pm at the Radisson Blu Hotel, 301 Argyle Street, G2 8DL.

Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian gave the annual Cudlipp lecture this evening entitled ‘Does journalism exist’.  He featured an interview i did with him about the hyperlocal website i run in London’s hard-pressed Kings Cross (i have inserted links):

‘…..Which – before we think about business models – is probably a good moment to introduce the man who prompted the title of tonight’s talk. Last autumn I was at a government seminar on the future of local newspapers when one of the participants suddenly interjected: “I don’t believe in journalism.”

This was a very direct challenge to my general worldview, not to mention my job, so I sought out the person who had made it – a very interesting man called William Perrin – a former Cabinet Office civil servant who threw it all in to run a hyperlocal website reporting on the area of London where the Guardian now lives – King’s Cross.

Perrin absolutely believes in the moral power and importance of what many of us might think of as journalism. But he isn’t a journalist, he doesn’t call it journalism and he is completely uninterested in the monetary value of what he does. He finds other ways to pay his mortgage. This is William Perrin:

William Perrin: “I set up a very simple website in 2006 … to my surprise this thing took off and has been very successful. In three or four years we have written 800 articles on King’s Cross and area a mile long by half a mile wide …The website we have used to drive campaigns on the ground. We’ve run big campaigns against Network Rail, where we secured a million pounds for community improvements. We used the website again to take on Cemex, a multibillion-pound company … we took them on and we won. We have about four people who write for the site, on average, there’s up to six, but normally there’s about four of us writing. We all do it as a volunteer effort. It costs us about £11 a month in cash, which is about three of four pints of beer … we have a very strong community of people around here who send us stuff. None of the people who work with me are journalists. I’m not a journalist by any stretch of the imagination; it’s an entirely volunteer effort … Some people what I do in my community some people label journalism, it’s a label I actually resist.”

Depending on your point of view, you may find that vision of new ways of connecting and informing communities inspiring or terrifying. I think it is both – but it is a useful starting point to thinking about the value of journalism, in every sense of the word ‘value’. And it is good to be forced to think at an even more basic level – about what journalism is and who can do it.

Overall it’s good to see a major media figure give local websites the recognition they deserve.  There are many people out there with better local sites than me – I hope that their local editors reach out and talk with them too.

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 »

As I write, I am at the first meeting of the Local Public Data Panel.  As preparation I asked people interested in the topic on Twitter and Facebook for some raw material to feed in.  Thanks to all who commented – this has been very helpful.  I shall update further on the panel in due course.
19 January 2010

@willperrin ‘talking to government data types today – what data sets would you most like from your council’

Feedback emerged quickly as follows, anonymised

1.    property development issues – number and type of contracts going out, number and type of bidders, number and type of successful bidders
2.    councillor expenses and campaign contributions…?!
3.    Concentrate on what is useful for the citizen. Housing stock would be nice. But all non private data by default.
4.    Internal search within council websites & SEO of ‘data pages’ must be better so we can find data without resorting to contact.
5.    Break down of council agendas for public perusal in easy-to-digest format – encourages interest in meeting items.
6.    it is also important how the council data is exposed. Many different APIs and registration would still obfuscate the data.
7.    first data set I’d like would be list of all the data sets they’ve got do we could stop guessing who holds what. +1 for contacts
8.    which departments are spending less than this time last year & deserve a bonus
9.    sounds like standard info as a minimum. Date/time call, who made/taken call, type of issue, resolution, hand off etc
10.    the dull ones. The GIS data for where the bins are, where the grit lorries go, street cleaning routes.
11.    planning applications
12.    Small area data: make it easy to select areas before downloading dataset. Don’t want to strip it down ourselves. #hyperlocal
13.    How much salary do they pay, to whom, & *for what* ?
14.    What assets do they own (especially land)? Useful for everyone from #allotment campaigners to inclusion & employment schemes
15.    Bin collection routes & timetables! Bus timetables & routes. Planning applications (in a good format for once!)
16.    ward budget expenditure is one small communities could really get their teeth into
17.    API access to the excellent information at Transport Direct – which no one seems to know exists – www.transportdirect.info
18.    We are running a campaign to get #hyperlocal datasets released in Manchester. We should talk
19.    road works (GPS/times), school dates and times, all reported indicators / tracked measures, election-related items.
20.    all data please and not in PDF format In fact, RDF please!!!
21.    Public Data Panel could publish a guide to public data sets
22.    Personally think that we need a definition of a common method of access to data across different LAs, public bodies (eg API)
23.    release the lot and get the group to concentrate on definition of standards to make the datasets work across LAs easily
24.    Do you create a service directory, define a common URI format for council data, some other method I don’t know of?
25.    web services have never really solved the problem of making the data “machine findable” afaik – Do you create a service directory, define a common URI format for council data, some other method I don’t know of?
26.    Cllr attendance records, expenses, committee membership, changing party affiliation etc
27.    What crimes have happened locally (not the crime maps they are rubbish)
[ends]

We have now closed the nominations for the Talk About Local UnAwards categories and will make final decisions as to which of the categories we are going to open up for nominations over the Christmas & New Year break.

The highly coveted UnAwards will be presented at a ceremony which will take place a little later than we first said and somewhere other than the West Midlands.

We have been speaking to a sponsor for the next Talk About Local UnConference and we are currently investigating some venues in the the North of England for an event in the first quarter of 2010.  Once we have got a confirmed venue we will give you more details.  The UnAwards will be presented at a glittering ceremony after the UnConference.

All that remains is for William, Nicky, Clare and I to wish you a very happy Christmas & New Year.

Crime and anti-social behaviour are the most challenging topics local websites have to tackle.  But most local sites don’t  want to add to local fear of crime by just reporting incidents – we want to publish results and support our local criminal justice professionals in the police, crown prosecution service, courts and prisons.  Finding out what is going on in local courts would be very useful.

Ante-diluvian court processes combine with the minefield of contempt of court to make it tricky to write about local justice being done.  As a local web publisher in an area with a long, tragic history of ASB with a sizable local audience I’d like daily court results and timetables posted to a courts website, preferably with an RSS feed.  After all, you can go to the court and watch from the gallery or see the screens.  So this little noticed (by me) excerpt from a  Ministry of Justice green paper earlier this year seems wrong to me.

‘210. It is clear that there needs to be a balance between providing communities with information on court outcomes, which is in the public domain, and the need to ensure that such information is not misused. This issue is particularly pertinent because of the power of the internet to collect and make available information from a wide range of sources, and the difficulties of regulating the way in which such information is stored and reused.
211. We believe that it is not in the public interest to facilitate the creation of uncontrolled, privately held databases, and therefore intend to place the following restrictions on how information is accessed: Access to court outcomes online will require registration at level 1 of the e-Government standards66 to provide substantial assurance that the registrant’s identity has been verified. Registered users will be able to choose to see results for two courts of their choice; changing these preferences will require application to the systems administrator. Users will then be able to search all results from these two courts from the past four weeks. Information on the website will be copy protected so that it cannot be copied and pasted into other documents.
212. A prototype of the website will be made available for the duration of the Green Paper consultation.67 This will report specifically on the outcomes of knife possession cases tried in the adult magistrates’ courts, supporting the current initiative on tackling knife crime. Comments are invited on the level of security and accessibility of information. We will also look at how we can link this website to the continuing development of crime maps, to support the aim of ensuring that members of the public can get the maximum information about crime, policing and justice in a joined-up way from a linked set of sources, at as local a level as possible.’

Engaging Communities in Criminal Justice Cm 7583 April 2009, Page 81′

I appreciate the argument about long term rehabilitation and spent convictions, but this piece suggests that websites are different from newspapers, which are now almost wholly online.  If say The Times or the Islington Gazette reports an individual arrest, charge or trial in progress in the paper, it also appears online.  At no point do the articles link forward to the outcome of the trial if the subject is found innocent.  They effectively create a primitive unregulated database online.  And whilst i enjoy working with the police, even the best forces would admit they have a very long way to go to publish criminal justice outcomes in a way that reassure local people.

What do people think of this position – is it reasonable or is it out of kilter?  Is it worth lobbying to change it?  Do we think that the senior politicians who recently gathered in Downing Street to talk open data are aware of it? As it is a green paper from Ministry of Justice, this usually means that minds are open and can be influenced.

I guess i must share some blame for the Ministry of Justice position as I had worked inside the system up to that point (declaration) but i feel this doesn’t stick to the principles of the power of information work i was involved in.

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.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peq30tCsn2A]

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