The Electronic Civic Council encourages you to create your own digital ‘blue plaques’
Last night I set up the Electronic Civic Council. It’s aim is to encourage people to use geo-location tools to share historical or civic information about places.
It came from a chat with Jon Bounds, who in turn had been chatting with Jez Collins about spreading music-related trivia. It’s a bit of fun really, but it could be a nice way to complement the blue plaques that we see on buildings; particularly as the criteria for those seem both well-guarded and arbitrary.
So I built a web page, set up a page on Facebook and started a Twitter account. Jon has been busy adding information to locations, and trying to get that information plotted to a map.
I’ve blogged before about how these tools can be used to spread the control of information-sharing more democratically. Of course there’s always the danger of sabbotage, but to be honest I’ve no more reason to trust the existing blue plaques than I have to trust Jon Bounds. Oh, hang on…
Anyway, we want to encourage the use of the hashtag #bp to become a common way to denote historical information. Just leave your gems of historical information on geo-location services such as Foursquare and add the hashtag to your comment. If you can also leave a link to further information, then so much the better.
Visit the Electronic Civic Council web page
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