PSNI Newcastle

Why not introduce your local Bobbies on the beat to your readers with a short post about them, much like Newcastle Rocks have done in this simple post, which includes details of the Newcastle PSNI station, Who’s Who and statistics on How They’re Doing.

Try reaching out to your local Safer Neighbourhood Team and asking if they’d like to send you locally relevant information to publish on your website to reach the community.  William Perrin often receives press releases and appeals from the Caledonian Ward Safer Neighbourhood’s Team, which he publishes largely unedited on the Kings Cross Environments website.

If the local police force recognize your site as a means through which they can talk with the local community, you could find this generates incredibly useful content for your website or, in the case of Tamworth Blog, some incredibly exciting content when the authors found themselves invited to accompany the police on an early morning drug raid as part of Operation Nemeses!!

A great way to pull in local content for your site is to do a regular search of YouTube for your postcode or area name and see if there are any relevant videos on there that you can embed into a post on your website.

I subscribe to searches for YouTube videos tagged ‘Digbeth’ (via RSS) and this comes up with some great little films that I simply wouldn’t have come across otherwise, such as this video of someone playing the organ in my local church.  When I let the organist know I’d put his film onto my website by commenting, he came along to Digbeth is Good and left a nice comment on the post.

When new community website The Moretonhampstead Hub searched YouTube for local videos, they found this lovely clip of the local school choir singing.

You might also find using YouTube in this way means you’re pulling in content from young people, who often upload videos taken with their cameras or mobile phones.  I loved this film of night out at the Custard Factory and the young film-makers loved that I bought it to a wider audience.

William Perrin of Kings Cross Environments found there was such an abundance of clips relating to Kings Cross, he created the dedicated website Kings Cross TV to house them – splitting them into channels such as Books, Current Affairs and Harry Potter at Kings Cross.  William’s discovered some real local gems here, but my personal favourite is this one of a Flash Snog at St Pancras.

Yes, I would. Really. And not just because I’m incredibly puerile and tickled by toilet humour (although that’s got something to do with it) but also because I think it has the potential to serve a useful purpose.

Map of #uksnow Tweets

Now you probably know about the map of #uksnow, which is created from data Twitter users contribute to – by tweeting their postcode, marks out of 10 for snowfall and adding the hashtag #uksnow and the odd twitpic. Or as Pete Ashton puts it in his post summarising the phenomenon:

‘…a load of people providing weather reports across the country in a standardised format that can automagically be turned into a live updating map.’

As Pete said, it’s a fun way of indulging in one of our Great British obsessions, the weather, on Twitter.

More hyperlocal obsessions, for the likes of William Perrin and others living in urban areas, are things like graffiti, fly tipping and dog poo. The latter is particularly nasty – it’s filthy, unsightly and downright dangerous when there are children about (Toxocariasis is no urban myth).

Unfortunately for William, there was an abundance of the stuff in his home of Kings Cross, yet he felt his local authority wasn’t really acknowledging there was a big problem or treating it terribly seriously. To try and make the issue hit home, William decided to rub the council’s brand in it. He fashioned little flags out of cocktail sticks and strips of paper with the council’s logo (‘Islington: a clean, safe and healthy borough’), stuck them in the dog poo and posted the resulting photos on his community website.

This was a very funny way of drawing attention to the problem, and an example of online community activism the talk about local team are particularly fond of quoting. But wouldn’t it be great if William had had some data to support his claims of the large scale of the problem? If his area showed up as big brown spot (sorry) on a live, updating UK map of poo? A visualisation of crowdsourced data that can say to local authorities, ‘there’s lots of poo on your patch’.

I think so. That’s why, whenever I pass a piece of poo on the street in future, I’ll tweet my postcode, marks out of 10 for general rankness and add the hashtag #ukpoo. Hell, I might even add a twitpic to boot.

Obviously, this idea will only work if it catches on and others start doing it too. It may be a little bit too gross and childish to become popular but if I’m honest, that’s a large part of its appeal to me and why I’ll be giving it a go to see what happens.

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!

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