As if I wasn’t already busy enough trying to capture what’s happening in Bournville on the hyperlocal website I edit, I’ve now committed to managing the website for my running club, Bournville Harriers. I though it worth sharing here how we work the online stuff, which makes a change from me boring on about the offline stuff.

At its core, our running club is about community. We meet a couple of times a week, we chat, we get out of breadth and stop chatting, we compare achievements, we moan about injuries, we even have a beer together if our personal fitness regimes allow. In some ways creating an online space to replicate that is fairly straightforward and our previous website had a forum that was pretty active at times.

But, as forums often do, it veered towards nitpicking and complaining, lacking that essential quality that the offline running culture has, ‘praise’. So in re-thinking our web presence it was a simple process of switching to a blogging platform and enabling comments (we’re a self-hosted wordpress blog with a very slightly tweaked free theme).

There was some feeling amongst club members that we’d end up having the sarcastic forum comments replicated on the blog comments but I doubted that since the dominant offline culture in the club involves congratulating people on their runs. The blog comes closer to replicating that, so when Mike Berry completed his seventh marathon in seven months he got some nice comments online as well as the usual slaps on the back on club night. Even the briefest of reports gets a nice response for our club members who run all over the UK. To date I’ve not had to moderate a single comment.

In shifting to a more web 2.0 platform we can also begin to plug in other resources that someone other than myself can manage. Our images are largely hosted on Flickr, our club records are a series of google docs maintained by our club chairman and our race/training calendar is on google calendar, easily updated by a range of club members.

One of the development areas for us to make better sense of our running data. When we compete in a race the organisers might produce a spreadsheet or a pdf file or sometimes even a Word document. We copy and paste and then put the results into a blog post (quite easy to do, just use Excel or google docs to cut and paste the data in, and then out of) but we lack a coherent way to make sense of every runner’s data as opposed to just the elite ones. Although if you are elite then UK Athletics take the trouble to record just about every run you do – take a look at the data for one of our quick women runners - every competitive run since she was 15.

So in using a range of free online tools we keep the central website fresh with new content. I may manage the thing that pulls all the elements together but there’s a whole team of us supporting the process and doing their bit – which is what being a part of any community is all about.

Dave Harte edits bournvillevillage.com and runs the MA Social Media at Birmningham City University

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 »

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