Just a quick note to thank Terry Holland at the Mere Green Neighbourhood Forum for adding the Grassroots Channel podcast to their clear and comprehensive website.

Mere Green is in the north Birmingham constituency of Sutton Coldfield and the regular news updates on the forum site show the current public interest in plans to redevelop [...]

A few evenings ago I was chewing over some ideas which might make a good punt for the 21st Century News Challenge. As you do with these things I was getting a little giddy.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic, I thought, if you could map a neighbourhood by how people feel? It would not only [...]

When I was a child it was common to see the ‘closed for lunch’ sign on shop doors. Now they are very rare. Customers expect you to be open.

Online we are always open – aren’t we? A friend of mine pointed out a sign on the moderated BBC Religion and Ethics message [...]

Grassroots Channel on iTunes or scroll down to listen from this post

On Remembrance Sunday we meet two people who’ve put 18 months of effort into building a community group around their local cemetery in Birmingham. The Friends of Brandwood End Cemetery have found an unlikely way to build a community in [...]

 

 Grassroots Channel podcast - Brandwood End Cemetery in Birmingham [12:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Here’s something I’m going to watch closely. Micki in Auckland in New Zealand has set up a blog called Volunteer Evolution. She is using it to ask people to help her raise $20,000 dollars to allow her to stop paid work and instead volunteer for a year in her local community (wherever [...]

Beth Kanter alerted me to Nancy White’s work on the problem of the “second wave of adoption” of social networking stuff. The problem as set out is simple. Some people really get it and move quickly to innovate in the way they collaborate online. Behind them comes another wave (or [...]

Jakob Nielsen has written this on user inequality. He says the problem of the lurker is that they truly represent your users – not the tiny proportion who get active. Effectively the silent ones are the ones you should care most about. In a moment I’ll explain why this is a distraction [...]

First apologies to Steve Bridger for my inability to avoid the obvious pun on his latest and very fine post.
Last month when we met at an NVCO ICT Foresight group meeting Steve mentioned the idea of a “Buzz Director” for non profits.
It’s a particular crusade of mine to encourage not-for-profits to identify an internal [...]