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LocalGov2.0 posts
- Open Data Challenge - Irelandvia data.fingal.ie Fingal County Council, Dublin City Council and a range of other partners recently hosted Ireland's first Open Data Challenge. An 18 hour event using local open data to create useful applications and services for people in Ireland. The winning projects included one that could help business find optimum locations and another for data fo […]
- Stirling poo - bag it and bin itvia flickr.com Is there anything ickier than dog poo in your path? Stirling Council has a print/radio/social campaign to remind people to bag it and bin it. And there's a great council web page which brings all the elements together. Corrinne Douglas writes: "We wanted the message 'bag it bin it' to come from everyone, not just the Counci […]
- Digital marketplace: campaigns and creativityvia portfoliocreative.org All councils do campaigns to raise awareness and prompt action on everything from adoption to direct debit on council tax to what's on and more. And although details and branding change from place to place, surely there's opportunity to share. Nottingham City Council have set up a nifty digital marketplace at http://portfo […]
- Digitalkoot | fun in the archivesvia digitalkoot.fi Lots of talk these days about 'gamification'. Turning mundane tasks into games, making them fun. Getting lots of people to do little bits and pieces of work, like tagging imagines in an archive. Or in the case of digitalkoot getting people to verify how good machine-read archive materials are. This is an initiative from Finland, […]
Hello Ingrid!
I really enjoyed the article on the potential for using social networking to save the farm, some useful tips for us there!
Not sure how much you want to know, but basically the context if that Canterbury City Council anounced in December 2009 that it was planning to close (and demolish) Westgate Hall, Canterbury city centre’s only community hall, and there was a big outcry about it. Lots of people signed up to the “Save Westgate Hall, Canterbury” Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=181466832361
By February 2010 there were over 1,000 people in the group, and there had been a petition with nearly as many signatures, however the council decided to close it anyway. A few of us realised that moaning and petitions were not going to get anywhere so we sent a direct message to everyone in the group and invited them to come to a public meeting to come up with a constructive alternative: form a community group that would offer to take the building over and run it sustainably. About 30 people came to the meeting and formed a core group of volunteers (we are now many, many more, at least 80 active volunteers). Anyway, I could go on, but I think the story is told, best, on our blog: http://www.westgatecommunityhall.org.uk/news.shtml
Is this the sort of info you are interested in? I have to say that the facebook group (and twitter) have become less important now, as most people who are interested filled in a survey (after being invited to do so direct messaging the facebook group) which provided us with a mailing list of over 400 people. We now also use a lot the local media, and old-fashioned leafleting is very useful too as we realised that using social media only we were not reaching many older people who are interested and want to help.
All the best,
Adelina