memespring

For all the talk of social networking people forget that for a whole host of internet users have been doing this kind of thing for years using really the really the < web 1.0 technology of email groups and phpBB forums (sw4people, Urban75 and Hern Hill Forum blog are just a few local to me).

They can make a real difference to the local community aspects of people’s lives - discussing crime, finding out about local restaurants, ganging up on their local council or whatever. Many of the people who run these groups (especially the email based ones) are often not that internet savvy, but have found simple tools that let them connect with people where they live that have a shared interest.

The problem is, unless someone tells you directly about one, they are all but invisible.

To this ends, I’ve been building a site for mySociety called (sticking to the “does what it says on the tin” naming convention) GroupsNearYou.com that is aiming to map the locations and details of these groups and, importantly, help people find ones relevant them.

So why is this useful? Are people really going to rush to the computer when they move to a new area? That’s part of it, although probably more for the more internet savvy who have heard about the site. There’s a couple of other things though that will (hopefully) make it a useful service.

Firstly, once data on these groups is all in one place you can pump it though an api and start syndicating it to relevant places. e.g. “Reported a problem on FixMyStreet.com and the council hasnt fixed it? Contact one of these local groups and get organised with your neighbours”.

Local government wanting to consult on, for example, a regeneration project will have somewhere to start looking for people.

Also, by aggregating groups together on a single site with nice url’s and structured pages, you start making some of them visible to Google for the first time.

Finally, on the basis that these kind of groups are A Good Thing and can have a positive effect on the area they operate in, I’m hoping that the site will start seeding new groups in areas where an online community is absent. To that ends If you search for a group and dont find one there’s a link through to pledgebank to get you to set one up.

The main challenge in building it has been trying to keep the process of adding a group simple of for people who’s internet experience might be limited to email and a few websites, for whom sites like google maps and facebook may as well not exist.

It takes 4 steps to add a group and the most complex step, actually adding the area covered on a google map requires just an approximate area for the group. Clever searching, which will need constant code tweaking, will make sure that people still find the groups based on the approximate area.

The site hasn’t official launched yet, but is all in good working order and is in need of some seed data. So if you know about a group near you and want to tell people about it get to it! :)