This is v cool. I’ve already contacted Hackney Council to ask them for an RSS feed.

I already have a little local news Netvibes page that I built (not had time to sort a Pipe out yet…). And my local council would be an excellent addition.

Great work, Adrian.

We agree totally here at http://www.harringayonline.com/. We bring news, events and facilitate conversation between councillors, local MP and local police because we use the social network model. Our site is built on ning and is growing fast. Have a look at what we do, we believe its the future.
and you can follow us on Twitter too
http://twitter.com/Harringayonline

p.s. we are great supporters of Adrian’s work too!

More on US examples of this here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/technology/start-ups/13hyperlocal.html?_r=1

Would be very handy if an example site could be built – by Adrian or whoever else – to demonstrate how all of this could work. It might also be something for Social Innovation Camp.

Brilliant, top top stuff.

Local democracy can be the true flourishing of democracy, and this seems a great way to keep people informed and in touch

Exciting. Although I must admit that the idea of ‘citizen journalists’ facilitating a stream of (local) police propaganda leaves me a little cold.

this might be a stupid/irrelevant concern, but it might not:

whilst I applaud efforts to create something which could act as a successor to the ailing local newspaper industry, I’m owrried that such a project is still vulnerable to being manipulated by local politicians.

to explain: at the moment, a big problem with the decline in local newspapers is that those which are left don’t bother to cover council meetings any more. Instead of sending a reporter to sit through the boredom and sift out the occasional very important diamond from a mountain of dirtm, they just sit in an office and re-hash the latest council press release.

I know this from personal experience of working for a local paper.

this situation is perfect for local councils who wish to put out an official line and bury the bad news/downside of whatever they are doing. The decline in the local media has meant a decline in local accountability.

Having councils use RSS feeds to inform the public of what they are up to simply cuts out the journalistic re-hash-of-press-release stage, but suffers from the same problem of a lack of accountability, surely?

Or have I missed something?

Reuben @5. Good point.

I made much the same point in respect of the council propoganda that gets put out, and which Adrian responds to well. See that post. I think there’s a good deal to be done to build analytic capacity as the data becomes more ‘raw’ in nature, and a matching project is needed to develop that – see my long comment on this on the post, if you can be bothered, or a fuller version at my place if you are REALLY bothered. I think it fits with

Sunny’s view on citizen blogging and the good examples already out there e.g. Haringey as abvoe, Thurrock etc, and i’m actually working on a funding bid to put resources into local blogging as we ‘speak’.

Paul S @6 – as a local politican I agree completely with your concerns. See my coverage and local examples at http://www.bickerstafferecord.org.uk/?p=675

I think Adrian’s project is good but as i say @7 needs to be complemented with capacity to analyse and get below the local level spin.

I should add that this is a much more edifying and useful debate than the shouting match, willy waving and general self-important ‘what about me’ stuff going on on the previous post comments. An oasis of calm and measured debate in a desert of blogging nonsense.

I think our model allows for some good analysis of local news.
Although we post info from Haringey council RSS feeds we find that people have a lot of knowledge and experience that they use to separate the wheat from the chaff. Local papers in the area now come to us to find their stories and have even been known to lift “quotes” from eyewitnesses to events in the area. We have, in the past, been accused of bias by all the local poitical parties although now the Lib Dems and the Labour party are choosing to engage with the site so we must be getting the balance right.
From a local democracy point of view, we have 4 Haringey councillors (including 2 with senior roles) who engage regularly with the debates and have a great deal of respect as a result as they are showing they are not afraid to talk about the things that matter. The local police have also shown themselves willing to discuss residents concerns in an open way. As to accountability, well we have examples of how we have managed to effect change in the local area which it has been acknowledged is the result of campaigns co ordinated by Harringay online.

But its not all crime and grime, we aim to build local pride and a sense of shared identity and try to build up local networks so that people can work better together which goes way beyond what any local newspaper would ever try to achieve. Residents have a sense of ownership and a high level of trust as they see that there is no bias towards a political party and no shareholders to satisfy. It’s true grassroots democracy.
btw a pedantic point but we cover the neighbourhood of Harringay and not the borough of Haringey (the spellings are not interchangeble) and we were here first. Look us up on Wikipedia!

To Liz @2:

Sorry to bring local politics into it, but isn’t the borough called Haringey? Mind you, there’s some confusion, since yet another interpretation (Harringay) appears on the official site.

To several who are noting that this is not a good way to rein in councils:

Well, no, but there are other utilities to this. Local news, local events, local advertising (imagine a plugin to these guys) and so on can be handled very well in this kind of format; and if the organisers are smart, can link up to more national or international sources, thus bringing important things to the attention of parochial minds. All the more so if the organisers spend some time explaining why a given issue is relevant to local concerns.

I’ve a technical background, hence this next comment, but I’m not a coder (hence not volunteering): what I would argue would be useful is not just example sites but an open-sourced, tailored CMS for allowing non-technical people to set up and administrate such a site for themselves without having to learn how CMSs work. While I can’t write the code, I’d be glad to contribute to such a project as a how-to and tutorial writer. I even know some coders who’re working on something that might be generalisable in this way.

The point of geeks is they move all the difficult technical bits down below the user’s consciousness level; the point of the Open Source movement is that then it’s free to the end-user, as well as having massively enhanced debugging potential.

Although I must admit that the idea of ‘citizen journalists’ facilitating a stream of (local) police propaganda leaves me a little cold.

Why? If one person or group engages in that there will be ten others who will put forward a more accurate account. Such is the beauty of social media…

To Liz again: Oops. I unreservedly apologise; I didn’t see the explanatory note on your opening page, and I had not realised before that there was such a distinction drawn, in spite of having lived within about 10 yards of the border at one point.

To John Q
Apology accepted. We’re used to it, (even the local officials can’t get it right) but we are very proud of our name and our history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harringay

As a concept, I think this is an excellent idea.

In practice, I do have worries. These citizen websites have to obtain the content from somewhere; Sunny mentions “councils, local police forces, national organisations etc” as the source. With this information, the citizen’s websites are meant to hold those organisations to account. Now, there is a certain amount of this that you can do with the information that such organisations release willingly, but in the end what really enables someone to hold an organisation to account is details of what they are doing but don’t want to publish.

To obtain that, you need to have someone who is able to spend time and effort investigating the organisation. A reporter, in other words; not a citizen journalist with a day job. If these websites become the primary source of local information, then there is a risk that the reporters’ jobs become unsustainable in the face of competition with multiple free sources of regurgitated official press releases. The result of that would be a decline in the ability of an independent press to actually hold organisations to account.

By way of a recent example, what source of official press releases or RSS feeds did Guido use to expose Damien McBride and the remainder of the No.10 smear operation?

That said, there are great opportunities in this. Freedom of speech has long been upheld as a laudable concept, but only now is the Internet maturing to the point where it can become real and effective in the lives of many. But we do need to avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

John @13:

You might be interested in EveryBlock, the source code for while will be released in June.

Hi everyone,

I’ve only just seen this article so haven’t had time to read the comments. I will and respond where necessary.

Now check this out. This, I hope, is a good answer to “aren’t you just helping to distribute government propaganda?” I suggested yesterday that it would be easy to create a site to let people post comments against a government feed and in the last 10 minutes I’ve done just that for Boris Johnson’s official feed. Apologies to those outside London — I had to choose something! (Perhaps a central government site — why not Gordon Brown’s? But you can do that yourself.)

Here’s the launch of Boris Backchat:

http://borisbackchat.wordpress.com/

Got something to say to Boris? Just leave a comment.

How I did it:

1. I registered a new blog on http://www.wordpress.com/ This is free and only took a moment.

2. I found the URL of Boris’s RSS feed. Visit your local council or other government website and hover your mouse over the RSS feed link or icon. Right-click and choose “Copy link location” or “Copy link URL” or whatever your browser gives you in the right-click menu.

In this particular case it was easier to grab the feed URL from the GLA Mash the State page:

http://www.mashthestate.org.uk/councils/london

3. I signed up at http://www.xfruits.com/ which has a whole set of free tools to do things with RSS feeds. This is free.

4. I used the “RSS to my blog” tool on xFruits which automatically copies the contents of an RSS feed into a blog, making a new blog post for each item in the feed.

To configure this I needed the URL of my new blog’s “API endpoint”. This is the address which other programs can use to push data into your blog.

The API endpoint URL for this blog is http://borisbackchat.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php

The format is the same for all blogs on WordPress.com:

http://yourblogname.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php

5. And that’s pretty much it. I went into the WordPress settings and set the time zone correctly and edited the site description. Now we’re ready to go.

To close the loop, if you want to keep up with the latest posts on Boris Backchat you can subscribe in your RSS reader at:

http://borisbackchat.wordpress.com/feed/

and there’s a separate RSS feed for comments at:

http://borisbackchat.wordpress.com/comments/feed/

Welcome to open government. 🙂

Thanks to Jon Bounds on Twitter for tipping me off about xFruits. It’s a great set of tools. Jon has just set up a similar site for Birmingham City Council:

http://www.jonbounds.co.uk/
http://commentbcc.wordpress.com/

… and as I always like to say about these things, it’s taken longer to write about it than to do it!

JUst been on Harringay online. To be honest I think the appeal of local communities can be overegged. I love the internet becasue it allows me to escape the tyanny of geography. That is to say it enables me to engage with people who share my specific interests even though they happen to be hundreds of miles away (yes I do use the Leonard Cohen Forum, and no i am not proud). This is far preferable to chatting with my neighbour because they happen to be my neighbour.

JQP #11

> I would argue would be useful is not just example sites but an open-sourced, tailored CMS for allowing non-technical people to set up and administrate such a site for themselves without having to learn how CMSs work.

I’m also not a coder etc., but reasonably CMS-able. I suggest tumblr would be an excellent user-point for a mashup template like this. I’m sure it’d be relatively easy to strap a template on top of it, given its flexibility.

The tumblelog CMS is also almost totally idiot-proof. I taught my dad how to use it over the phone, and he can’t even work his voicemail.

@ Paul S (6),

You’re right, information and journalism aren’t the same thing. Whether it’s done by professionals or enthusiastic amateurs, someone still needs to look at information, preferably from several sources, and find the story that is important or interesting.

You’re also right that for whatever reasons, many local newspapers have pretty much given up on serious local political reporting.

Council press releases delivered by RSS isn’t a substitute for journalism but any increase in the amount of easily available information adds to the ability of time-pressed amateurs (and pros!) to read, compare, filter, interpret and annotate as they see fit.

Some councils are making their council meetings available as audio streams, podcasts and video streams/recordings. This is another way in which people can at least get at the raw info, though as above, the real work of filtering and interpretation still has to be done.

I also really like this idea, and have it marked under ‘play around with’, it appears my council has 2 RSS feeds, one for events, which will be actually useful.

Given the amount of time I’ve spent on that site over the last year, that I didn’t know those feeds were there speaks volumes, I shall Have Words with the relevent people I think.

Reuben:

To be honest I think the appeal of local communities can be overegged. I love the internet becasue it allows me to escape the tyanny of geography.

Thing is, you’re absolutely right. One of the great things about the net is that laterally-formed communities need no longer depend on geography.

I think it is dangerous, and current sociology suggests I’m right, to entirely erode the links between the locals who live in an area. It’s bloody handy if you’re the government; no-one bands together to object. It’s bloody handy if you’re the police; loyalty networks don’t get in the way of evidence-gathering. It’s bloody handy if you’re a criminal or an abusive partner; no-one will stop you. It’s terrible if you’re anyone else.

It’s also much more of a problem in cities than in the country.

Reuben #17
Seems strange to suggest that because someone is your neighbour they cannot share your interests. We have specialist groups on the site that encourage people to talk about their interests and we have discussions about a wide range of topics that have little to do with the local area. I would suggest that being able to then meet that person down our excellent local pub already knowing that you have st in common is every bit as good as carrying on a conversation with someone in Xville USA.

As John Q suggests, quite rightly, lack of links between members of a community is bad for cohesion and affects people’s health and well being. Before I became involved in the site I wasn’t able to make those connections with like minded people, its not so easily done in the city.

Having local connections makes you view your neighbourhood more positively, enables you and gives you a sense of control. In city neighbourhoods like ours, this is especially important if you are to build a sense of community and help everyone who needs it. For example we are trying to fight Rachman style landlords who cram poor families into houses, charge enormous rents and let them live in wretched conditions. We have managed to get the attention of local politicians. This kind of co ordination is made possible and involves many more people because of the Internet.

patently @ 15:

The funny thing about information is that you never know whether the little scrap you’ve got is the missing piece of someone else’s jigsaw. The recent advent of online social media is the first time in the history of humanity when it’s been possible for large numbers of people to collaborate on making things they value — and without necessarily all having to have the same goal or sometimes even being aware that that’s what they’re doing.

Getting information online in ways that it can be found, read and easily cross-referenced makes it possible in many cases for part-time individuals to gain a sophisticated understanding of things provided that they have the raw data, the tools and the nous to do so.

There will always be a role for professional journalists with serious resources to research the really tough stories, though there’s little of that happening at the local level these days. The pros will benefit from social media just as much as the amateurs. The fact that I can sit online at home in London, ask an obscure question on Twitter, and have someone in Mexico give me exactly the answer I was looking for within seconds tells me that we’re not in Kansas anymore. Things are just going to keep on getting more interesting.