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16 August 2004
We are Connecting: The Story of an e-Community
By Jill Sanders
Jill Sanders
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In 1997 John Inglis, a resident of Hampton, Richmond upon Thames, founded and developed what would become a growing network of independent online communities across the London Borough. With a professional background in film-making, photography, hardware and software development, and as a certified web developer, he was well placed to create such a project back in those early days of the web.
The reason he first felt moved to do so was from a reciprocal altruism - a local website was something he could give to the community where he was living. The site was enlarged and redesigned in 2000 to cover the borough, and there are now 10 local community websites in the family, representing the towns and villages of Richmond upon Thames as well as Thames Online for the river communities.
Like John, contributors to the project believe that the internet should be for ordinary people - the original intention of the web - though this is now the least developed and most exciting areas of online activity, falling far behind that of commerce, industry and government.
The independent community websites are an e-community. There is little point in having cub-scout groups, amenity societies or local environmental campaign websites, floating in the global ether on their own. They need to be together, where local people can find them all. The sites continue to grow and develop many websites for local groups that ask for them or need them. There have been no charges - occasionally groups make a donation - and there have been no grants. The community websites have been achieved outside the financial orbit through goodwill, commitment and the expertise of the volunteers, who are also professional people.
As the family of websites has grown, so has the number of people involved. There are local journalists and participants expert in their field of interest who contribute news and information, and many people maintain or update their own websites. If they have no expertise of their own, this too is made easy for them. In addition to this enormous local collection, there are hundreds of wider links too, including all the major search engines, the national media, weather news from the Met Office and signposts to government information.
| Local participation in democracy is an important factor |
Local participation in democracy has been an important factor. There have always been Letters to the Editor - over 2,000 of them - and now they are published through a user-friendly automatic system, specially commissioned by Online Communities. In the last general election the community websites ran "Online Hustings", with all candidates across the two borough constituencies responding daily to questions from local voters. The electorate certainly got to know their candidates: what they thought, how they wrote, and their faces. In the council elections of 2002 the websites ran the May Poll, again with the objective of making 270-plus candidates familiar to electors. This resulted in webpages being established for each of the 52 councillors in Richmond upon Thames, linked from ward maps where users could also find information on local police and their MP.
Some of the campaign websites are particularly interesting. Lynde House covers the serious issue of elderly care in the private care sector and publishes findings from an independent investigation. Mogden covers the issue of smells and insects from a giant sewage works on the Twickenham border, and gives a voice to those who have to live with the pollution and who post the entire record of their complaints online - a powerful body of evidence. FORCE (Friends of the River Crane Environment) is a shared resource and reference to documents and evidence for those opposed to the borough's proposals to withdraw protected status from large swathes of open land along the Crane river valley - a successful outcome for residents, as it turns out.
These are just a few of the many issues on the community websites that have closely involved hundreds of local people. Our independent community websites in Richmond upon Thames take a lot of exploring, but local people have come to know and value them. They are constantly changing. There is, for example, always something new in the Journal, which picks up on most of the serious or controversial issues locally. The Journal was a natural development that emerged in 2000 and one great thing about the articles is that they link to full reports, other informative documentation, earlier articles where there is a long-running issue, as well as the letters that ensue.
| The biggest impediment to progress came from unexpected quarters |
All this vast body of work has been achieved at some cost to those most committed to it - there's not much time for watching TV and the pressure of the news is constant. However the biggest impediment to progress has come from unexpected quarters. The local authority has neither in its LibDem incarnation nor now, as a Tory administration, been as welcoming to the independent community websites as we would have hoped. The project has been met with some suspicion, and overall, support at this level has been disappointing; it has taken prolonged effort to get a link from the council website, and we remain hopeful that the council will also include this in its publications in the future.
Because of the lack of funding, it is difficult for the community websites to promote themselves. Advertising is out of the question. Word of mouth, reciprocal links, presentations at group AGMs, the popularity of online campaigns - these are really the only means of promotion, so it is a long haul. There are still many local people who have never heard of their local community website. After seven years, this is a disappointing situation, and one that would benefit greatly from more active participation by the local authority.
Those of us who are committed to the project believe that there are many, many things that an independent community website can do that cannot be accomplished by a local authority, or a commercial local website or news service alone. Every community should have one: a website for local people by local people. Ours are the issues, this is our own mass medium, and the policy and decision makers - though some appear not to like it much - need to engage.
Jill Sanders is a voluntary contributor for Online Communities, a voluntary organisation providing community websites for Richmond upon Thames. The Online Communities website can be found at www.oncom.org.uk. Jill can be contacted on tel. 020 8783 1836 or email: jill@oncom.org.uk
Readers are reminded that any opinions and commentaries expressed in this article are solely those of the contributing author. They do not reflect those of eGov monitor Weekly nor represent an agreement, endorsement or approval of any kind.
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