Tag: Local Government

Things I've spotted December 15th from 02:21 to 02:51

Here are some of the things I’ve been reading December 15th from 02:21 to 02:51:

  • Theatre Pledge 2010 « Stan’s Cafe Theatre Company – Stan's Cafe theatre pledge encourages people to make a commitment to support local theatre, bring new people to new experiences. What might you choose to create a pledge for?
  • Official Google Enterprise Blog: Why the City of Los Angeles chose Google – "Google Apps will save the city of Los Angeles millions of dollars by allowing us to shift resources currently dedicated to email to other purposes. For example, moving to Google will free up nearly 100 servers that were used for our existing email system, which will lower our electricity bills by almost $750,000 over five years. In short, this decision helps us to get the most out of the city's IT budget." via @davebriggs
  • Ethical Xmas? | Birmingham Conservation Trust – My favourite Birmingham charity on how you can support it with your Christmas Shopping
  • Christmas Fun at Stanhope Hall Highgate « Highgate,Digbeth and St Andrews – Andy Sheppard, neighbourhod manager, shows that praise is a key quality to deploy in blogging a community: "Father Christmas made a special visit to Stanhope Hall and presented all the children with an early Christmas Present. Special thanks for both events are due to Monica Lee Community Worker and the ladies of Stanhope Hall Womens Group who worked incredibly hard to ensure the success of both events. Special thanks are also due to Eddie Howard and Highgate Housing Liaison Board for their support for both events."
  • Hyperlocal news: profits a long way off | Media | guardian.co.uk – "2010 will not be the year of hyperlocal—these are the foothills, the beginnings of localised online publishing. But the signs are auspicious: increasing levels of online literacy and broadband connections mixed with more inevitable local newspaper closures mean it's natural that readers—and advertisers—will shift to new outlets. Whether anyone will be making a real living from it—as a mainstream publisher or a start-up—seems unlikely in the near future… " via @daveharte

Stuff I've seen August 26th through to August 27th

These are my links for August 26th through August 27th:

  • Oh yay, AG gets another blog 🙂 « I am AG – "This time it is Acocks Green Traders with a lovely site with lots of info on it already including the new plans for AG centre."
  • JustGiving – Charity Hack day – "The first charity hack weekend will take place on 19th and 20th September at PayPal’s offices in Richmond, London. This free event is aimed at web developers who want to build great online applications for charities, and is supported by PayPal, JustGiving and Missionfish."
  • Glum Councillors – "This blog will doggedly collate images of councillors looking glum whilst pointing at holes in the road," Utter genius
  • Apps for America 2 Finalists Announced – Tech Insider – This week the Sunlight Foundation announced the finalists in its Apps for America 2 contest, which challenged the public to come up with innovative applications using the data feeds from the recently launched Data.gov.
  • Rich-Baker.com – Virgin on twitter: "I am astonished at how kind and supportive people are." via @katehughes

Very Local Media blossoming in Lozells – but who should keep watering it?

I was really pleased to find the first bulletins from Lozells News – a new child led digital service, appear in my feed stream last week:

Lozells News Highlights from can uk on Vimeo.

This is a project from CAN-UK, who’ve been working from Ladywood for more than a decade. Lozells already has the very fine www.lozells.info and the South Lozells Housing Regeneration area is beginning to use the web to tell the story of how it is progressing, see vision-lozells.org.

A couple of things.

The first is the question of how to integrate these a little better and so seed more local story telling? Perhaps a local social media surgery might help? It is a certainly somehting I’d be interested in.

The other is that our own experience of creating local news with young people  in Frankley or Castle Vale (and others) tells us there remains a problem of how we keep things going once the project ends. There’s no lack of enthusiasm from the young people:  Comments like

this was the best week ive had at Frankley, and making this podcast was a great experiance!

and

can’t wait to see if we do anything else

show there is an appetite for more.  It’s rarely an issue of equipment or websites etc, these are now cheap enough and simple enought to leave behind.  I think the problem is often who will take the lead/ownership in your absence.

So thoughts?  How could we ensure that when the project dosh dries up the storytelling keeps flowing?