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

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?”.

The conclusion from a brief and interesting exchange with @genzaichi and @priddy, was maybe, with lots of caveats too long to tweet, and at the very least only with strong networks of trust and possibly only on a hyperlocal level. Interestingly, the Wikipedia article on the subject claims that exchanges of help on the internet is not a valid use of the term. They are talking about face-to-face care, possibly backed up by technology. I wonder if that might change if the evidence for positive psychological results of online interaction builds, but that’s something for another day.

What I found most appealing was the idea that complementary exchange systems could suddenly make some of the most disadvantaged people, under current systems, rich again. Cashless trading systems like LETS are growing in popularity and I like those too, but I think this is slightly different: rather less about replacing services you can buy, rather creating a parallel system of kindness which complements paid-for (or cashlessly traded) services. Timebank is a high profile example of a site which helps match volunteer opportunities with volunteers, but without the credit element for the people putting in the work.

Let’s say we could record 12 hours a day that a carer spends. At the moment, carers are often financially disadvantaged because they have given up work and their allowances may not cover the costs of caring. They also often suffer from health issues like depression, not at all surprising when you consider the emotional and physical effects not only of care, which can be very hard, but also due to concern for the suffering of their family member or friend. Isolation and lack of opportunity to look after their own wellbeing – which perhaps they don’t see it as a priority – might be another problem. The worst prospect is that the person they care for dies, leaving them alone and without recourse to their own carer.

Now, while the carer probably won’t ask for anything in return for caring, they do have a whole host of needs that they might take up if it was available to them, things like respite care, help with housework, shopping or cooking a good meal, someone to talk to, somebody to walk with. Their 12 hours a day would effectively make them rich in such a system, recognised and valued for something that currently is often neither.

Equally, there are plenty of people who give just one or two hours of their time just because they want to help others in a community they care for. The unemployed, rather than being judged as they were jobseeking, could offer a great deal into such a system, giving them opportunities to meet people and remind themselves that they still have something to offer even if they don’t have a job at the moment. The lonely retired would have a way of connecting with their neighbours in a way that doesn’t make them feel like they are asking for help, for example helping the kids next door with their reading or maths homework.

There is a huge amount of this kind of work going on anyway. The disconnect is in the idea of exchange, generally because people doing good things don’t normally shout about it and people don’t always think to ask for something in a society that is used to marketplaces. If you can’t afford it, you can’t have it; you should work harder. Kindness is rarely reported in the media and if it is, it is probably accompanied with shock that ‘this sort of thing’ can happen in ‘this day and age’ – if they’re really laying it on with some implication that the inflictor of kindness will get themselves sued or knifed.

In contrast, it is my experience that where the platform and agenda is built in particular ways, online communities run on a great deal of generosity and users are quick to create structures of support and recognition, and, importantly, spread awareness of the communities they are enthusiastic about. Many neighbourhoods retain the generosity and the inventiveness, but not necessarily the offline equivalent of something like Spread Firefox.

Such a system would have to be very simple and accessible, I’m thinking very simple ways to record time spent to exchange for credits, methods for community members to verify/recommend/acknowledge time, invites/connections of trusted friends and the marketplace of offered services. It might ideally be an extension of platforms where people are already, eg through Facebook and iPhone apps. (Digital mentoring could of course be one of the services offered). Virtually all the interactions would be real-world but an online dimension that is as easy as a game enables information, needs and feedback to be expressed, recorded and responded to in a way that doesn’t always happen in real life. In this case hyperlocal is best – adding information and creating matches for people in existing communities that know each other, venturing into wider circles, or bringing circles together, only if and when trust is built.

It’s not the talkaboutlocal way to rebuild tools or reinvent wheels, but to ask questions and try to bring together experience and expertise. Do you know of existing web tools that could support such an idea if a neighbourhood or group wanted to try it, or could it work on existing platforms? Do you know of such schemes running that interested groups could learn from? Have I missed my chance to submit something to Sicamp?

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