Talk About Local Un-Conference 2010
We are pleased to announce that the Talk About Local Un-Conference 2010 will be held on Saturday 17 April at Old Broadcasting House in Leeds. Old Broadcasting House is an excellent venue in Central Leeds, in the Civic Quarter just off the Ring Road.
We are delighted that this event will be in partnership with The Guardian’s Local initiative
As in Stoke-on-Trent in October, we will be using the Un-Conference format and we hope to have some of the very best hyperlocal publishers and special guests attending on the day.
After the success of the Pork Pie rounders, arranged by our own Nicky Getgood, there is a rumor that a skool sports day is being planned for one of the sessions, more than that we can’t yet announce, yet….
50 Tickets will be available on EventBrite from 1400 today (8 February) with further tickets being made available after we have ensured that local bloggers in Yorkshire and the North East have got their tickets.
We will be publishing updates at http://talkaboutlocal.org and on Twitter @talkaboutlocal or you can search Twitter for TAL10 to see what other people are saying the Un-Conference Google Group is reopened for you to start discussing and planning what you hope to gain from the event.
Talk About Local Un-Awards
The glittering Talk About Local Un-Awards ceremony will take place on Saturday evening after the Un-Conference at a venue yet to be confirmed. As you will no doubt remember we were going to hold the Un-Awards in Birmingham earlier in the year, but after much procrastination and it being left on a low light we decided that it made logistical sense for us to hold it in conjunction with the Un-Conference.
Tickets for the the Un-Awards will be available on Eventbrite as soon as the venue is confirmed.
February 8, 2010
I wrote a piece on my hyperlocal Kings Cross site on how data from the London Data Store showed a puzzling rise in ambulance call outs to assaults. In general crime is going down, but there was a strong upward trend in ambulances being called out to assault incidents. I asked people to check my data as I am not a statto. I tried to get a comment out of the police, but they went quiet on me – as I run a lot of articles supporting the police this was irritating.
The local paper the Islington Gazette rang me having seen my article. The Gazette had done some maths of their own and looked a the London Data Store site. The Gazette covers the whole borough (an urban area about five miles square), my site just one ward (a mile long, half mile wide). So the Gazette grew the story, got quotes from people across the borough and turned it into a bigger piece. They did get a quote from the police, despite having a generally ‘granny scaring’ approach to covering local crime. I am still waiting for the police to get back to me. The Gazette in their traditional rather sad way managed to giv me a quote but no link to my original article and no mention of the plucky Kings Cross website that made the story in the first place.
I also emailed BBC local TV to see if they were interested. I got the ‘it’s a bit too local to cover‘ (quote from email) response. However if they look at the data for themselves they will see that the trends across the whole of London are sharply up. Let’s wait and see.
Overall an interesting case study in how local data transparency can be used locally to bring some accountability to local public services and feed the mainstream traditional media.
UPDATE
Within minutes of posting this the police came back to me apologetically with a quote for the Kings Cross site and thanking me for my helpful quote in the Gazette (coincidence of timing I think). Nonetheless they still went to the Gazette with a quote some time before me.
February 4, 2010
The government has one of the world’s biggest innovation funds for the future of local news – the so called independently funded news consortia or IFNC. Pilots will run in Wales, Scotland and the Tyne Tees/Borders TV regions, hopefully embracing the full spectrum from hyperlocal to regional news. I am on the panel to help select the winning bidders. It is essential to get serious dialogues going between TV, radio, print and local independent web news media. On Wednesday 3 February the Panel will be in Cardiff to meet bidders for the Wales pilot.
There will be a public meeting where the bidders do a show and tell and people can put questions. This will be at 1500-1600 in the Wales Millennium Centre, Bute Place, Cardiff Bay, CF10 5AL.
It would be great to see some of Wales independent web publishers there – whether you run a hyperlocal site or any other sort of news service. Your contribution will be vital to the future of news. It’s a public meeting so you can just turn up. I know that for those of you with day jobs this might be tricky – but there is rarely a time to suit everyone. If you need childcare or special access requirements to attend then drop a line to ifncpilots@culture.gsi.gov.uk and they will help you.
We shall also be in Newcastle and Glasgow in the next few days and it would be great to see web people there too:
- In Newcastle, the public meeting will take place on Friday 5 February, 3-4pm at Northern Film and Media, The Kiln, Hoult’s Yard, Walker Road, Newcastle NE6 1AB.
- In Glasgow, the public meeting will take place on Monday 8 February, 2-3pm at the Radisson Blu Hotel, 301 Argyle Street, G2 8DL.
February 2, 2010
Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian gave the annual Cudlipp lecture this evening entitled ‘Does journalism exist’. He featured an interview i did with him about the hyperlocal website i run in London’s hard-pressed Kings Cross (i have inserted links):
‘…..Which – before we think about business models – is probably a good moment to introduce the man who prompted the title of tonight’s talk. Last autumn I was at a government seminar on the future of local newspapers when one of the participants suddenly interjected: “I don’t believe in journalism.”
This was a very direct challenge to my general worldview, not to mention my job, so I sought out the person who had made it – a very interesting man called William Perrin – a former Cabinet Office civil servant who threw it all in to run a hyperlocal website reporting on the area of London where the Guardian now lives – King’s Cross.
Perrin absolutely believes in the moral power and importance of what many of us might think of as journalism. But he isn’t a journalist, he doesn’t call it journalism and he is completely uninterested in the monetary value of what he does. He finds other ways to pay his mortgage. This is William Perrin:
William Perrin: “I set up a very simple website in 2006 … to my surprise this thing took off and has been very successful. In three or four years we have written 800 articles on King’s Cross and area a mile long by half a mile wide …The website we have used to drive campaigns on the ground. We’ve run big campaigns against Network Rail, where we secured a million pounds for community improvements. We used the website again to take on Cemex, a multibillion-pound company … we took them on and we won. We have about four people who write for the site, on average, there’s up to six, but normally there’s about four of us writing. We all do it as a volunteer effort. It costs us about £11 a month in cash, which is about three of four pints of beer … we have a very strong community of people around here who send us stuff. None of the people who work with me are journalists. I’m not a journalist by any stretch of the imagination; it’s an entirely volunteer effort … Some people what I do in my community some people label journalism, it’s a label I actually resist.”
Depending on your point of view, you may find that vision of new ways of connecting and informing communities inspiring or terrifying. I think it is both – but it is a useful starting point to thinking about the value of journalism, in every sense of the word ‘value’. And it is good to be forced to think at an even more basic level – about what journalism is and who can do it.
Overall it’s good to see a major media figure give local websites the recognition they deserve. There are many people out there with better local sites than me – I hope that their local editors reach out and talk with them too.
January 25, 2010
The Audit Commission was asked in digital britain to review the state of council publications, newspapers etc. Their report to Stephen Timms has emerged on their website (despite carrying an embargo for Monday 25).
There is something in it for everyone but overall it damns expensive council newspapers with faint praise. The Commission rightly defends councils’ need to communicate. But the Audit Commission’s core role is assess value for money and impact of spending on council performance:
We cannot draw strong conclusions at the national level about the value for money and impact of communication spending from the data available. There is not a significant relationship between levels of recorded communication spending and a number of different outcome indicators drawn from the Place Survey or earlier Best Value Performance Indicators. Some commentators have cited relationships in a single year, for example between how well-informed residents feel and the extent to which they think the council provides value for money, as evidence of the importance of council communication spending.
However, there is no relationship between changes over time in key variables, undermining any conclusion that council communication spending has a demonstrable causal impact. Frequency of periodical publication is also not significantly correlated with key outcome measures such as satisfaction with the way that councils run things.
I remain of the view that it is wrong for a branch of government to publish something that looks, smells and feels like a newspaper with editorial (eg ‘how well we are doing’). It isn’t good for democracy, especially at a time when traditional local media is in decline.
Councils do have to communicate – it’s vital that local people know and understand what the council does for them. But Councils should focus on equipping local people with the skills to communicate for themselves to hold local services to account – the sort of thing talk about local does. That’s the modern way of doing it – not the C19th newspaper.
( Thanks to Kevin for the tip)
auditcommisionreport auditcommissionletter
January 23, 2010
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?”.
(more…)
January 22, 2010
As I write, I am at the first meeting of the Local Public Data Panel. As preparation I asked people interested in the topic on Twitter and Facebook for some raw material to feed in. Thanks to all who commented – this has been very helpful. I shall update further on the panel in due course.
19 January 2010
@willperrin ‘talking to government data types today – what data sets would you most like from your council’
Feedback emerged quickly as follows, anonymised
1. property development issues – number and type of contracts going out, number and type of bidders, number and type of successful bidders
2. councillor expenses and campaign contributions…?!
3. Concentrate on what is useful for the citizen. Housing stock would be nice. But all non private data by default.
4. Internal search within council websites & SEO of ‘data pages’ must be better so we can find data without resorting to contact.
5. Break down of council agendas for public perusal in easy-to-digest format – encourages interest in meeting items.
6. it is also important how the council data is exposed. Many different APIs and registration would still obfuscate the data.
7. first data set I’d like would be list of all the data sets they’ve got do we could stop guessing who holds what. +1 for contacts
8. which departments are spending less than this time last year & deserve a bonus
9. sounds like standard info as a minimum. Date/time call, who made/taken call, type of issue, resolution, hand off etc
10. the dull ones. The GIS data for where the bins are, where the grit lorries go, street cleaning routes.
11. planning applications
12. Small area data: make it easy to select areas before downloading dataset. Don’t want to strip it down ourselves. #hyperlocal
13. How much salary do they pay, to whom, & *for what* ?
14. What assets do they own (especially land)? Useful for everyone from #allotment campaigners to inclusion & employment schemes
15. Bin collection routes & timetables! Bus timetables & routes. Planning applications (in a good format for once!)
16. ward budget expenditure is one small communities could really get their teeth into
17. API access to the excellent information at Transport Direct – which no one seems to know exists – www.transportdirect.info
18. We are running a campaign to get #hyperlocal datasets released in Manchester. We should talk
19. road works (GPS/times), school dates and times, all reported indicators / tracked measures, election-related items.
20. all data please and not in PDF format In fact, RDF please!!!
21. Public Data Panel could publish a guide to public data sets
22. Personally think that we need a definition of a common method of access to data across different LAs, public bodies (eg API)
23. release the lot and get the group to concentrate on definition of standards to make the datasets work across LAs easily
24. Do you create a service directory, define a common URI format for council data, some other method I don’t know of?
25. web services have never really solved the problem of making the data “machine findable” afaik – Do you create a service directory, define a common URI format for council data, some other method I don’t know of?
26. Cllr attendance records, expenses, committee membership, changing party affiliation etc
27. What crimes have happened locally (not the crime maps they are rubbish)
[ends]
January 19, 2010
Talk About Local has a special connection with canals, since we all live fairly close to them and by chance [in the over-romantic eyes of your blogger], Stoke-on-Trent to Digbeth to Kings Cross quite closely shadows the old routes of the revolutionary Midlands industrialists. If we weren’t in such a tearing hurry all the time we could easily commute around by narrow boat rather than train. But that’s a post for another day. It’s good to know that if we chose to move from rail to water there is just as active an online community to help us along.
What prompts people to start blogging? In the case of the canal bloggers, in many cases it is a need to let retirees’ descendants know about their whereabouts. This, of course, is quickly forgotten as the real business of adventuring commences.
Granny Buttons is a nice example, with stories of tragedies, kindness and Ikea. It also has the best list I’ve found so far of bloggers and canal Twitterers to start your explorations.
Like other blog communities, the canal blogs are a centre of intelligence for closures in different parts of the canal system, what it’s like to be on the canal in the middle of winter, and, *shudder*, what happens if a spider gets caught in the electrics.
There’s campaigns, complaints and not forgetting plenty of beautiful scenery.
Much of Britain is close to a canal and they are often the most unspoilt and beautiful parts of both countryside and city. While it’s a bit chilly outside, you can start exploring online.
Pretty photos courtesy of the Flickr community and Flickriver. This is the second in an occasional series of blog trails – if you know good canal blogs to check out or have ideas for other communities we should be venturing into, please let us know by email or in the comments below.
December 29, 2009
Soon after talk about local helped those at Marches Access Point create The Kington Blackboard in August 2009, the community website very quickly started looking ahead to the festive season, discussing the issue of Christmas lights. Although the online poll vote was overwhelmingly for lights for the small Herefordshire town, it seemed the money for them was not forthcoming, and it looked to be a dark, bleak winter for Kington.
People rallied around the issue on The Kington Blackboard, voicing their support and, in The Chamber of Trade’s case, putting their money where there mouth is and providing £500 towards the lights. talk about local, being avid readers of the site, could not fail to be moved by Kington’s plight and matched The Chamber of Trade’s support, giving £500 in support of the cause.
This meant that, on 30th November, the lights were put up in Kington and switched on to much rejoicing during the lively Kington Christmas Fair on 5th December. Unfortunately, they were switched off shortly afterwards after doubts were raised about their safety but these issues have thankfully been resolved and Kington now has its lights on just in time for Christmas, meaning Santa can land there safely.
Would this have happened without The Kington Blackboard? It may very well have, but there’s no doubt the community having the online space to discuss and rally support around the problem certainly helped to solve it. I went along to the Christmas Fair and lights switch-on, so I’m leaving you with a couple of photos of a festive-looking Kington – here’s the happiness a local website can help to make happen!
Merry Christmas everyone.
December 24, 2009
We have now closed the nominations for the Talk About Local UnAwards categories and will make final decisions as to which of the categories we are going to open up for nominations over the Christmas & New Year break.
The highly coveted UnAwards will be presented at a ceremony which will take place a little later than we first said and somewhere other than the West Midlands.
We have been speaking to a sponsor for the next Talk About Local UnConference and we are currently investigating some venues in the the North of England for an event in the first quarter of 2010. Once we have got a confirmed venue we will give you more details. The UnAwards will be presented at a glittering ceremony after the UnConference.
All that remains is for William, Nicky, Clare and I to wish you a very happy Christmas & New Year.
December 22, 2009
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