Shaping Thoughts

First meeting on a possible LocalWeb

So we recently had our first face-to-face meeting on a potential LocalWeb initiative. First of all, I loved to (finally) be able to talk about my passion: Internet, web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. It has not occurred often, that I could spend 3 hours focusing on those topics.

Purpose of our community LocalWeb:

• Improve well being (relevant info in nice things in town)
• Social cohesion (people that know and understand each other will be more caring and co-operative towards another)

From the obligatory introduction round it appeared three out of the four participants have an IT background and employment. Among the four of us there is also a considerable amount of experience with previous local web experiments and knowledge of local community. This will come in handy!

We discussed a couple of former initiatives like:

• a link portal with a commercial drive (get traffic; sell advertisements): unsuccessful because too little traffic; maybe because Google helps people out these days and lot of people/company’s/clubs websites are found that way.
• a site linked to a “web ring” of community guides (paper version) providing local content and links. Issue: “Google effect” and nobody willing to provide content.

It’s all about getting people to participate!
The main topic of the night was “participation”: will we be able to generate enough participation because it should be an easy exercise for the four of us (self sustainable; with minimum moderation and content generation; other people taking over some jobs). So far only around 100 unique people turn up on local offline town events, although the content of those meetings are quite compelling. Is the hurdle for participating offline too high? Would it be lower via an online channel?

Some tips and guidance:
What’s resonated from the comments on my first post on the topic:

• Make sure you satisfy a real need of people.
• You must solve a real problem for them (like in ability to find like-minded people). Something that they will be willing to participate for (create content).
• Engage people on things that are important to them (school issues, local event calendars, fun stuff!)
• Make sure the community has a clear purpose and make sure people know that purpose

Using local events and low hurdles:
Another important help for attracting participation is focussing on local issues or events that people might want to react to. Well, there are some we examples we could use, like:

• The upcoming merger between three towns
• Sinterklaas celebration
• A Skating track made of plastic (!)
• The grand local theatre play last summer about an important historical event (1953)
• The upcoming new cultural festival this summer

Next to that, content creation should be have very low hurdles:

• easy: like Twitter or in a discussion forum
• medium: photo sharing
• hard: editing a wiki or creating a blog post

In terms of applications…
Some applications that crossed our minds:

• A discussion forum supporting people:
  • like for citizens initiatives
  • just people looking for other people (for running with; for playing chess with)
  • people looking for information (good school?; how does swim lessons work around here?
  • issue: needs eyeballs to questions/topics to attract people that will answer questions!
• A wiki for:
  • having people willing to write about past events
  • history of the town
  • famous people
  • presentation of their club (link; feeds)
  • issue: learning curve for using a wiki!
• A social network:
  • people and their profile (interests; skills etc)
• A portal to act as front page surfacing all things produced in other components via feeds:
  • and combined feeds from sites providing news about the town
  • featuring photo’s tagged with local tags (from Flickr or anywhere)

Next steps:

• Set up a wiki to get the three others involved used to such a too and evaluate it for local implementation. (Done)
• Use the wiki for working out our case for an interactive LocalWeb.
• Everybody starts looking for good examples around the world of experiments that worked and that not worked.
• Precisely describe the past experiments and the reasons of their failure.
• Brainstorm on what people would be looking for.
• Put up some feeds already on the wiki (using e.g. Yahoo pipes)

Technorati tags: Citizen journalism, Local web, Web 2.0, Community, Hyperlocal, Local

| posted Feb 6, 10:06 pm on Feb 06, 2008 | category: Local web / Web2.0