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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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!

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

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.