GoodGNUs

To Liverpool Wednesday, for an enjoyable afternoon interviewing Aidan McGuire and Francis Irving of ScraperWiki, then an evening at Liverpool’s Social Media Café event.

ScraperWiki is a code wiki that provides you with a maintained scraper to extract data from any public source on teh InterWebs, for any purpose. A great example is the map showing oil drilling around UK shores at the same depth as the Gulf of Mexico Disaster. Thanks to Aidan and Francis for lots of info about what ScraperWiki is up to, and where it’s going - if I can’t find a publisher for the interview (my usual outlet can’t fit it in), I might post more here.

Talks at #smcLiv were given by Mike Nolan, on coping with social media overload, and Jon Bloor, on Publish & (Don’t) be damned. Social Media & the Law. Mike is certainly tapping a rich vein, given the number of information channels we’re all hooked into, and talk around the tables afterwards ranged from GTD through #inboxZero to using the good old-fashioned telephone to cut down on e-mail.

Social Media Café at Static Liverpool, 25 August 2010, pic by Mike Nolan

There was also a talk given by myself, on Open Social Networks - or what to do about FaceBook being Evil. I’ll be writing here soon about GNU social, Diaspora*, and other ways of taking back control of your social media use, but for now please see the article at LinuxUser magazine - and the extracted interview with Evan Prodromou.

I don’t normally join this sort of event, but the theme of this year’s Blog Action Day is Climate Change - and that seems a good opportunity to make a confession: I was wrong.

Not about climate change, I’ve been wittering on about the unsustainability of burning fossil fuels since the 1970s, and changed much about my lifestyle (transport, diet) in the 1980s in order to live more lightly on the earth.

No, I was wrong about the potential of popular mass actions focussed on tiny, incremental changes in people’s behaviour. Very specifically I was wrong about 10:10.

A Simple Step

10:10 asks an interesting question:

What if we resolved to cut 10% of our emissions in 2010?

Not a bad start. What if we got everyone we know to do the same? And what if all this made governments sit up and take notice? Maybe this could be the first step towards a brighter future. Time to stop imagining. It’s happening right now. Sign up today and be a part of it.

I had despaired of politicians making a worthwhile change throughout the Major & the Blair/Brown years, but was ready to accept a popular push could create political change. I just didn’t see any popular pushes working.

Happily, I’ve been proved wrong: 10:10 seems to have garnered unexpected support from businesses big & small, numerous individuals, and is pushing the politicians. It has worked because it has taken the vast, overwhelming problem of runaway climate change, and given us all an achievable, practical step we can take with tangible result. I wish it every success, and happily recall the words of 老子 (Lao-Tsu): A thousand mile journey begins with one small step.

There’s been a lot of coverage of the death of local papers, but does this have to be the end of local reporting? Recently hyperlocal blogs have arisen everywhere from villages to inner-city postcodes to plug the gaps in local coverage.

Sticky notes on the white board describe the session you'd like. Similar sessions are grouped together & given a room & timeslot. Unconference sorted :-)

These aren’t just replacements for local freesheets, but use social media (blogs, & micro-blogs like Twitter) to harness the power of community reporting. Refrigerators dumped on the pavement, dog mess, lack of facilities, secret council decisions - all are aired in public & councils are having to take action. Not all councils are happy about this grassroots-driven transparency, & many are not giving hyperlocal blogs the same access as print journalists.

Against this background comes Talk About Local, an Unconference held last Saturday in Stoke-on-Trent that brought together 88 community bloggers & other hyperlocal activists.

An unconference is built on coffee-break networking

In informal sessions participants shared lessons learned - such as using short interviews & live cameras to get blog posts from those who had much to say but, often thanks to our lamentable education system, were unable to articulate it at the keyboard.
One thread I noted was how online activity drove more meeting & co-operation in the real world, and many successful projects combined these with drop-in centres giving access to computers and training in social media.
I attended not with my community training hat on, but as someone looking at launching a local site this autumn, & went away inspired, and carrying several pages of tips, contacts, & practical suggestions. Best thing about the event? The wonderful diversity of people there - not self-identified social media gurus, but people dedicated to improving their communities by linking up local people and giving them a platform.
Thanks to Will, Nicky, Clare & Mike for organising such a serendipitous event - despite the hiccough with the vegan food, and the train problems, I got so much from the day that I’m still digesting my notes. Watch out for more activity from Talk About Local. If you missed the event but want to get involved, join the mailing list.
Want to see some of these great community blogs? They’re linked from the social bookmarks of the ‘tal09 event (which saves me the invidious task of choosing which to single out). Videos are listed on this YouTube playlist.

• The Hedon Blog
  Another of the remarkable hyperlocal blogs at #TAL09 - wish I had time to bookmark them all!
  (tags: blog local hyperlocal socialmedia tal09)
• Talk About Local » Un-Conference
  Great event yesterday, will blog tomorrow :)
  (tags: TAL09 conference events local hyperlocal socialmedia blog socialnetworking unconference)
• Pits’n’Pots – The Radical Press
  “For the news that matters in Stoke-on-Trent”
  (tags: blog hyperlocal tal09 potteries midlands)
• Pesky People
  “Pesky People is also going to be a campaigning website being developed to highlight how to complain about terrible access to websites. It will inform people of their rights, giving creative means to complain. It will cause trouble, it will change habits, it will empower. It will be fun. It’s totally run by Deaf and Disabled people.”
  It was my pleasure to meet PP’s Alison Smith at #TAL09
  (tags: tal09 blog accessibility webstandards webdesign web)
• Blog Local - lifting the lid on your local community
  Blog Local aims to lift the lid on your local community. Our sites act as a hub of local information, views, events, reviews and loads of other good stuff that comes bubbling up from under the surface. We open up local information and put it in your hands. To see an example of what we do, check out http://www.blogpreston.co.uk/
  (tags: blog local hyperlocal tal09 web2.0 socialmedia socialaction)
• Democracy Club: Transparency through volunteering
  Democracy Club is a new, independent network of volunteers who want to help internet-savvy transparency groups like mySociety and The Straight Choice to hold election candidates and representatives to account. Constituency volunteers wanted!
  (tags: democracy mp parliament westminster accountability sousveillance web2.0 socialmedia politics tal09)