David Wilcox

Over the next few months I think we’ll hear much more about the potential for community activists to use blogs and other digital tools for social change in their localities.

One push will come from the digital mentors programme, where the Department for Communities and Local Government has now selected five consortia to develop bids in more details for the planned £900,000 support programme that I wrote about here.

Further support could come from a plan to provide direct training to thousands of activists like those running the Kings Cross community site here. Local community sites have been around since the mid-1990s, but they now have a well-placed friend in Will Perrin, who started the Kings Cross site a couple of years ago.

Will is a senior civil servant working in the social media field, and while he keeps a strict separation between day job and local activism it does mean he is well-placed to work with other enthusiasts on how to spread the action through his advocacy for ultra local voices.

I met up with Will at the 2gether09 launch last week at The Hub in Kings Cross, when appropriately enough he led the bill with a welcome to the area, some history of past and presents struggles with development pressures, crime, poverty, the sex trade and other darker aspects of community life. He then took us through the development of the web site with other volunteers, and the way that it has become a focus for community action. You can see his presentation above.

Afterwards I invited Will to use my portable videoboo(th) to provide a summary, where he confirmed his training plan and responded to my invitation to say why he thinks social media can make difference.

Social media can reduce the barriers to people engaging in democracy, in their communities and in making it easier to campaign, and that’s what makes difference on the ground.

If it makes it easier to get to a meeting, to write a letter, to engage with our 19th century domocratic processes, then that’s how social media can make a change.

The training plan is being developed in association with the 6000-strong network of UK online centres. They are one of the leading contenders in the digital mentors programme, running a very impressive open process to develop their proposal in detail on their Voicebox site. It is a model of how to invite collaboration, listen to what is said, and then develop a meaningful summary of what is emerging – as Anne Faulkner has done here in impressive detail.

As I’m writing this an email arrives from my friend Kevin Harris noting that he has now been blogging about neighbourhoods for five years, and claiming it was me that gave him the nudge. But then it was Kevin who did so much good work in the 90s to inspire me and others to get involved in local online networking. I love it when things join up like this. Anyone else got some connections to throw in?