So how much? Add it all together: policing, benefits, health, road repairs.  The lot.  How much?  You don’t know, in fact it probably cant be done.

That is what Dick Atkinson realised 15 years ago. He runs the Balsall Heath Neighbourhood Forum and he wanted to know just how much public money was sunk into his [...]

If you want to people on side and working together, less is always more.

Tom Steinberg knows that. He runs MySociety, the very successful charity which punches above it weight using the internet to help people collaborate to improve civil society.  Among tips on how to build websites for social good he includes this one:

Take [...]

I’ve long been interested in the positive power of gossip to strengthen networks and share social mores.  The report “Communications: some lessons from the New Deal for Communities programme” concludes that:
The development of positive word of mouth networks provides a strong
base of awareness and a means of identifying and addressing problems.
Word of mouth communication between [...]

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Dimensions are 36cm in height, 42cm in length and 32cm in width. Can you help find a way to use this crate?
And let’s imagine all the answers we will have to come up with. Like
“How are we going to incorporate non-Coke items in Coca-Cola crates?”

Questions like this spark other questions like [...]

Organizations will work tirelessly to de-personalize every communication medium they encounter.

Email used to be honest interactions between consenting adults.
Facebook pages (and Wikipedia, too) were built by people, not staffs.
Twits came from real people, and so did instant messages.One by one, the mass marketers have insisted on robocalling,
spamming, jingling and lying their way into our lives. [...]

This morning Terence Eden was walking through Waterloo Station when he was stopped and searched by the proactive anti terrorism unit. Part of a random search pattern. This film may be ten minutes long but it is worth watching.

Tom Watson , William Perrin and the Power of Information taskforce shows off some mock ups for crime mapping by neighbourhood and the whole social media story makes it onto the Telegraph’s front page with a couple of subsidiary articles – including one mentioning West Midlands Police mapping site.  Practical and political! Crime mapping [...]

Empowered people tend to be good at conversation, understand their place in networks, have experience of how networks help get things done.

So it is very good news that the new Government Empowerment White Paper acknowledges that social media (the conversational web) will play a part in the emergence of more active citizens and stronger communities. [...]