I spent Saturday afternoon in North Clapham working with S&G Training to get some Family Mosaic tenants online for the first time.  Angus from Mosaic and Hayley from S&G have a five week programme to get a group of about 30 older people online for the first time. S&G provide training to companies and this gives them the space to help charities too.  S&G and Mosaic have worked with about a dozen local young people to give them IT training skills and help them set up their own training company. Saturday was the kick off day – we all had great fun as the young trainers gave basic presentations on what computers are and got to know the peple they will be training.  Nicky and Mike from talk about local had already trained Hayley and her trainers via Webex to create simple site local websites in wordpress.com.  We like working with housing providers – they have great links on the ground and understand how important it is to have an independent local voice.  I gave a talk on how you can use local websites to tell local stories.  We then split up into groups to talk about what people liked about their area and what they would improve.  The trainers will use the material as seed corn for posts on a new hyperlocal site Angus set up. There were some wonderful reminiscences a few of which I got on video below (forgive the odd sound problem – the new mic was playing up…).

When the rent was £2 three shillings and sixpence

The Brixton ambassador

Balancing long term needs with a transient community

Changes since the 1980s – let’s have a community centre

Jobs for kids that didn’t do well at school

I’m glad the forecast is for sun tomorrow, because I’ll be spending the day in my local park at a Highgate Funday organised by Friction Arts.  I’ll be sitting in the Heritage & Place corner of the ‘Arts Zone’, playing with a little bit of an idea I’ve been wanting to do something with for a while.

In March I was pretty inspired by My Street – Cuban Stories, a beautiful book from artists Diana Ivanova and Babak Salari, who worked in Cuba to help people tell the stories of their street to someone who’s never been there with words and photography. At the launch event Babak commented how much more mobile we are than most Cubans, moving quite often rather than spending our lives in the same areas, using me as an example:

“When I was talking to Nicky, I couldn’t really work out where she was from . [He'd gotten the Irish father/English mother/Welsh childhood/Midlands adulthood backstory.] But when I asked her what street she’s from, then I knew.”

And he was right – I’m from Vanfield Close in Caerphilly, where I spent a large part of my childhood.  It’s not where I first lived and I’ve moved quite a lot since living there, but it’s the place that holds the most memories for me.  Of course, this may change in the future.

Since then I’ve been enjoying seeing people use Google Street View to revisit ‘their street’ and talk about the memories they hold.   So tomorrow I’ll be at Highgate Funday, talking to people about what they feel is ‘their street’, possibly revisiting those places on Google Street View and recording the stories they have to tell about them.  I’m hoping to create a simple map from these recorded conversations.  Whether it will work well or not remains to be seen – wish me luck!

Bournville Village Notice Board

News from the notice boards is a great new regular feature that Dave Harte has introduced on the Bournville Village website:

One of the best ways to find out what’s happening in and around Bournville is to take time to read the notice boards on the Village Green. We’ll be making this a regular category on the website. Here’s some upcoming events and courses we’ve learned about…

Are there communal noticeboards in your area where people tend to put up posters about local events, courses and lost cats?  Think about posting updates from the information on them as a regular feature on your community website.

The Wilderness Downtown is a wonderfully creative use of film by Chris Milk that uses Google street view to make it brilliantly personal.  Simply key in your home address into the search bar, sit back and watch the overalapped film that appears of a young hooded boy running through your street. Enjoy!

More and more of us are using Twitter to communicate or to promote our hyperlocal sites. Until recently (yesterday!) you had to authorise the different applications you use to automagically tweet out about your latest posts with your username & password.

This as I’m sure you are all aware posed some security risks, we have all had random Direct Messages from your friends in the past asking you to rate who is the hottest out of …… or do you prefer Coke or Pepsi etc. Most of these are at best, a waste of time and at worst phishing for your password.

As of last night, you should not need to enter your username or password to use any application that works with Twitter.  Twitter have made changes to their authentication service that means you can authorise applications without having to enter these. I won’t bore you with the details you can read them here on the Twitter blog : Twitter Applications and OAuth

Now that Twitter has made these changes maybe it is time to have a look at what applications you have authorised on your account and have a bit of a tidy up?

When you are logged in to Twitter go to http://twitter.com/settings/connections and have a look at the authorised applications like in the screen grab below.

Can you remember what each application is for?

Remove any applications you don’t need or can’t remember what they are for (you can always re authorise them later). Then check the ones you do need and look at revoking them and authorising them again to make sure they are using the new authentication system.

Maybe you could change your password(s) as well just to make sure?

Changing your password is not as daft as it sounds, changing your password will highlight any applications that are still using the basic auth method, any that are using OAuth will continue working quite happily.