Category Archives: #TAL10

Coming round to ‘hyperlocal’: my notes on the Talk About Local unconference 2010

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‘Hyperlocal’ has been a buzzword in the online engagement community for about eighteen months, and to be honest it’s not one I’ve been comfortable with: why try and define a sub-category of ‘local’ which is itself pretty undefinable?

I still have a bit of a problem with it, but yesterday it did become clearer to me just how much can be gained by people investigating, reporting on and engaging with the things that happen in and affect their immediate locality.

I was at Talk About Local’s second un-conference, this time held in Leeds. The last one – in Stoke-on-Trent – was full of enthusiastic people wanting to do great things; but it left me a little worried that we (the social media evangelists) were leading them up a garden path, to be disillusioned when their enthusiasm wasn’t met with an audience and thrown unsuspectingly into a pit of libel lawyers.

However, things have moved on very positively. People are finding their feet, a solid sense of purpose and determination has set in, and the enthusiasm to share knowledge and experience is as strong as ever.

I arrived late: partly because we never intended to be early and partly because we couldn’t find the venue. The man in the car park said: “See that concrete building? It’s behind that”. He should have said: “See that concrete building? That’s it”.

So I joined in halfway through the second session, attaching myself to a group discussing the legal dangers of citizen reporting.

I attended three discussions during the course of the day, for which I made notes:

Talk About Local unconference 2010: Election coverage discussion

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This discussion at yesterday’s Talk About Local un-conference was for bloggers and local websites wanting to report and discuss the imminent UK General Election.

We heard that whereas it used to be the case (in broadcast journalism at least) that each political party had to be given exactly the same coverage, that is no longer the case. If a party has no history of election success, you are quite at liberty not to cover them. Just make sure to list all the candidates who are standing.

It was also agreed that independent reporters should have no extra restrictions for reporting on polling day, although it might be worth trying to get press accreditation.

‘Declaration of Financial Interest’: guideline is apparently now for MPs to make that public, so you can ask if they will give you the same statement that they give to others: they might well see it as in their interest to, particularly in light of the MPs’ expenses scandal.

Useful tools

  • TheStraightChoice: uploaded election leaflets
    1. Get your readers to upload theirs
    2. Show them interesting stuff that happened as a result
  • ElectionChampion: a game to find the election billboards that are springing up around the country
  • Democracy Club: ‘working to build the definitive guide to where all candidates stand on major issues, nationwide’.
  • yournextmp.com
    • The goal is that after the election what the winners said will be compared with their voting record over the next five years.
  • OopenlyLocal is/will be offering a pingback thingy (I didn’t hear properly) for bloggers to link to posts about local councillors.

Please remember

This is a report of information from other people at a conference. Therefore I may unintentionally have misunderstood or misrepresented what I heard. Please do not treat anything here as fact: check with a reliable source before, say, putting yourself in danger of defending a libel case.

Talk About Local unconference 2010: Finding stories

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So you’re keen to report on your local area. But what do you report on? In a session at the second Talk About Local un-conference, Ray Duffill sourced suggestions for finding stories.

A brainstorm of the room (and subsequent discussion) came up with an abundance of ideas:

  • Speaking to people on the streets, in the community, cafes, pubs etc;
  • Cycling around the area;
  • Reading up on local history, for example using:
  • Attending council meetings (the agendas might be boring but the meetings can be lively);
  • Reading the minutes of council meetings;
  • Attending other local meetings (eg NHS, Police and Fire authority meetings);
  • Attending inquests;
  • Reading Freedom of Information requests;
  • Reading planning applications;
  • Reading news feeds (eg RSS feeds via Google Reader);
  • Scanning community websites;
  • Subscribing to email forums, discussion groups etc;
  • Using Wikisplash, a new guide for helping journalists find UK stories;
  • Reading the births, marriages and deaths columns of local papers;
  • Requesting press releases from local organisations;
  • Attending Family Courts (it’s hard to find out what’s on beforehand, but courtserve.net might help);
  • Walking a dog.

It was also mentioned that the government is apparently looking to publish outcomes of magistrates’ court cases online in the future, which would be very useful to local bloggers.

The baton then passed to Tom Steinberg, who went into a bit more detail about how online tools can support the sourcing of news, and how to filter out stuff that interests you from the overwhelming amount of information available.

  • Google Alerts will send you email or RSS updates of anything you ask it to
    • be creative when you’re putting in search terms
  • FixMyStreet alerts for local problems.
  • WhatDoTheyKnow lets you subscribe to alerts for when someone asks a Freedom of Information request of your council. (Even though the council may not answer, the more people subscribe the less easy it is for the issue to be ignored.)
  • TheyWorkForYou feeds: rich data about the work of individual MPs.
  • PlanningAlerts notifies you of local planning applications (although it’s currently limited to what it can do with postcodes due to action by Royal Mail).
  • Flickr enables people to geotag photos, which means you can subscribe to a feed letting you know of new ones near to you.
  • OpenlyLocal has a Google gadget for accessing local council data, and a Ning application (although sadly Ning is phasing out its free service). I think Chris said he’s also just made available some javascript for forthcoming local council meetings, which you can use on your sites.

If you’re a bit more techy, most of the services listed above make it easy to develop your own tools for re-using their data.

Freedom of Information requests

Tom (as Director of MySociety, the organisation behind WhatDoTheyKnow) was asked to clarify the issues around submitting Freedom of Information Requests. His advice:

  • Be faultlessly polite in all your correspondence. The people reading your correspondence are rarely those responsible for the information you seek;
  • If you don’t get a response from an organisation, follow through the sanctioning process with the Information Commissioner. Make it clear that you are doing so and that you know what is expected of the organisation legally;
  • Be careful not to get labelled as ‘vexatious’. Although there is no hard and fast line about how you become labelled as ‘vexatious’, don’t give anyone the chance do so: once they’ve blacklisted you they will never reply to you again. So be minimalist in your approach.

He also said that if you know of public data that exists but you can’t get it under Freedom of Information, try the OPSI unlocking service.

Please remember:
This post  is a report of information from other people at a conference. Therefore I may unintentionally have misunderstood or misrepresented what I heard. Please do not treat anything here as fact: check with a reliable source before, say, putting yourself in danger of defending a libel case.

Talk About Local unconference 2010: Legal issues discussion

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The first session I went to at yesterday’s Talk About Local un-conference was on the legal problems of managing sites that allow user feedback or investigate stories of public interest.

It’s very depressing to hear of the crippling situations people repeatedly find themselves in, simply through a determination to get at the truth in the face of power and wealth that’s determined to stop them. The heartening bit I suppose is that sometimes there are also powerful people prepared to join in the fight.

Problems faced by people in the room had included: unfounded but effective demands to have comments removed from websites; moral dilemmas about balancing legal rights to publish with social implications for individuals; threats of crippling legal action.

Some tips from the room

  • Make interaction/commenting guidelines clearer
  • Always check your story with more than one source
  • Consider remove first-post moderation: if you moderate comments you are legally responsible for their content. Instead add a ‘report this comment’ button and ensure you have a tight take-down policy
  • Don’t hold the website in your own name but set up a limited company, so that you’re only liable for the amount that the company is worth. However you must make sure that all content is transferrable to other websites and under your personal control.
  • Ensure you have clear terms and conditions are on your site, and review them regularly.
  • Ignore the majority of threatening letters from lawyers: most of them are just trying to scare you.

Please remember:
This post is a report of information from other people at a conference. Therefore I may unintentionally have misunderstood or misrepresented what I heard. Please do not treat anything here as fact: check with a reliable source before, say, putting yourself in danger of defending a libel case.