Last Friday, Steph and I spent a great morning in Bexley at Orbit South housing association, with Orbit residents from Kent and Sussex.
We worked with Heather, Paula, Peter, Sue and Jackie to set up their own Posterous blogs to talk about what’s going on in their neighbourhoods and to help them in their roles representing Orbit residents where they live.
There’s this really thoughtful post on where we live and opendata from Diane @72prufrocks – here’s a bit I’ve lifted to encourage you ro read the whole:
Knowledge and experience dwells in neighbourhoods, because we do. On recent visit to Knowle West Media Centre in Bristol, I was struck by how firmly the centre is rooted in the local community. Andrew remarked that projects like their University of Local Knowledge value and celebrate local experiences, and also treat the neighbourhood as a kind of pool of local data and local stories. The challenge for local authorities is how to mix our data into that same pool – how to put the data that communities can make use of into the places where they can really use it – their own places.
If you know where the radishes are, you know whether it’s feasible to get a supply of radishes – and if you know where the shops are, or what people buy, or what people’s attitude to local food is, then you also know where you might be able to sell those radishes. If you know who is growing the radishes, you can start a conversation with that person, and who knows where it might lead.
I know a few people who are partial to a good radish. There’s a story in that somewhere.
🙂
Paul Bradshaw is hosting this review by Ofcom’s Manager of Nation’s and Region Damian Radcliffe. Damian has been a patient observer and (I think) advocate for bottom up hyperlocal website’s such as the one’s we help through social media surgeries.
They often provide an information anchor which can be very useful to local government, the police, housing associations – anyone serving a neighbourhood. On the whole I tend to think of local as much more local that is often meant when maintsream media or ministers bandy around the term hyperlocal. They seem to be talking about town size patches – we’re keen to encourage something much more local still.
Since it’s launch in 2001 Wikipedia has been growing at a rapid pace. Its army of volunteer collaborators have now edited more than 20 million articles in just under 300 languages worldwide and it is still growing.
So what’s next?
This year Wikipedia are launching Monmouthpedia, it’s first venture based on location, a community collaboration for town centric Wikipedia pages. The hope being that residents and visitors will contribute articles and photographs on interesting and notable places, people, artefacts and other aspects of Monmouth life. QRpedia codes could then be placed near points of interest around the town for smartphone users to scan and view the relevant Wikipedia/Monmouthpedia page right on their phone.
The Wikipedia page for the Monmouthpedia project adds:
Articles will have coordinates (geotags) to allow a virtual tour of the town using the Wikipedia layer on Google Streetview, Google Maps and will be available in augmented reality software including Layar.
Could you see this model being useful for where you live?
The collaborative part of Wikipedia has always intrigued me and I’d be really interested in seeing it put to work on such a local level.