From Fs_wiki

Julian's proposal relating to Blue Fountain's "local internet" project for BBC Labs. 2008-03-01

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Design 3 Sources 3.1 Local news articles 3.2 Planning Alerts 3.3 Local Pledges 3.4 Infrastructure 3.5 Groups near you 3.6 Parliament 3.7 Events 3.8 History 3.9 Other disclosures 4 Benefits 4.1 No login 4.2 No critical mass 4.2.1 Critical Mass Features 4.3 Non-exclusive 4.4 No filtering or customization 4.5 No counter-provincialism 4.6 No hypermobility 5 Commercialisation 6 Conclusion

Introduction

In spite of numerous new innovations, such as blogs, podcasts, wikis and mashups, the Internet has failed to make the contribution to civic engagement originally envisaged. In fact the reverse appears to have happened. By being such a perfect communication medium, the Internet has allowed people to cast their attentions far and wide, maintaining contacts with their peers at a distance to the extent that they may not even be aware of how little they know of their immediate neighbourhood.

As the saying goes: "Think globally, act locally". Almost all actions in which a person can participate effectively are local. However, if all of their thoughts are exclusively global, then they will never discover the opportunities for action. Given the richness of high quality information easily available from all corners of the world, it is no surprise that the taste for global information will naturally overwhelm the time available for anything local.

Many similar projects are coming to exist now, such as EveryBlock. Metroscope is largely compatible with the dataset they are gathering, but the design is different.

See Metroscope design brief for further details.

Design

The Metroscope (intentionally named after the public artwork in outside the FACT building) is a single-window desktop application connected to the Internet that provides a dynamic and entirely local flow of headlines from a variety of sources. These will include local news reports, planned public events, civic disclosures, and historical incidents.

The headlines should scroll at a sufficient rate to engage the attention, like the tickertape along the bottom of a 24 hour newschannel. It will be possible to pause the flow, or speed it up by widening the area of interest and lowering the threshold for an event to appear. A certain amount of repeat appearances will be permitted within the confines of the attention span.

Each headline will carry a link to a source webpage, so any actions suggested -– such as, for example, reading the full article or attending the event -- are easy to follow through. Further details or maps may unfold in the Metroscope window to complement the headlines.

No login will be required and no personalized filtering will be possible (except for children). If you never want to see announcements of your local town council meetings, then tough.

The Metroscope can be set to different sizes and levels of graphics. In one form it should be presentable on one of those giant city centre TV screens that are sometimes tuned to a shrink-wrapped BBC 24 framed by several random newsfeeds of of little relevance (eg the road traffic news when you are not driving).

The BBC distributes a ticker-tape application (for Windows only) powered by skinkers. Much of its functionality can be replicated in wxPython.

Sources

Most of these sources provide localized RSS feeds that will require a minimum amount of processing for use.

Local news articles

These should be genuine local stories, not simply whatever is syndicated into the local paper. The website topix.net/Liverpool provides this service by scraping all on-line newspapers in the world and categorizing each article according to localities mentioned, regardless of the source.

If a foreign correspondent writes a travelogue for her paper back home and happens to pass through your town, then topix.net will pick it up. You will also see to articles about the diaspora: people who originated from your area and left to lead a life elsewhere who are then reported as having roots in your town. It should also pick up investigative reports when they happen. These may reappear in later years under the History section below.

Planning Alerts

PlanningAlerts.com/Liverpool is a website that scrapes and parses the planning applications published on your local council's webpage. These alerts, which normally appear as emails, will feature in the Metroscope. You will be able to follow the links in the headline to the local council webpage for further details, and lodge an objection (which is just one form of civic engagement) if that is what you want to do.

In the future if the PlanningAlerts webpage upgrades to the possibility of lodging the objections through its own interface, these will also appear in the Metroscope as they are made.

Local Pledges

PledgeBank.com is an international and multilingual mySociety webpage that has now allows for postcode localization. Pledges have the format:

"I will [pick up litter in St James Park this Saturday morning at 10am] but only if [3] other people will do the same."

Any collective local action can be pledged by filling in the obvious blanks.

The website is fully functional and complete. The Metroscope will announce when a local pledge is created, when people add names to it, and whether it has failed or succeeded.

Infrastructure

FixMyStreet.com/Liverpool is another mySociety project with a friendly and effective interface through which people can to notify the council of broken infrastructure (potholes in roads, broken streetlights, etc).

The reports of these are published as pins on a map, and comments about the status of the breakage are accepted. These will appear in the Metroscope as they appear.

Groups near you

Groups Near You/Liverpool is yet another mySociety project where civil society meeting groups that are geographically located by postcode can be declared. These could go onto the Metroscope at random, but it won't be as much use as when it comes through at an appropriate time. For example, when a regular meeting is about to happen, or it's organized something.

Perhaps it could be integrated into upcoming.org so that the group organizer could log on and easily declare the meeting, and then this would be highlighted on the Metroscope through that other channel. It's not good to build an automatic monthly alert which will carry on even when the group is no longer existing. However, it should be possible to do it conveniently.

Often a regular meeting group sets the date of its next meeting at the current meeting. It should be possible to declare this by a text message on a mobile phone, which someone will have at that meeting. Cancellations of meetings also need to be highlighted, because they represent a definitive change.

Parliament

When your MP says something in Parliament or submits a written question, the title and link to the debate should appear in the Metroscope. This happens about once a week and is supplied by TheyWorkForYou.com/Louise_Ellman.

The title of the debate will be the headline, and the feature could extend to include their votes from PublicWhip.org.uk/all_divisions as they are a more frequent and better expression of their power and politics.

Events

UpComing.org/Liverpool is a well-established system for posting and managing events that you can attend. This is similar to PledgeBank in that anyone can submit or place public tags on events they plan to attend. It is also very sophisticated because it allows the creation of networks of friends and topics through which certain events popular among the group can be highlighted.

The Metroscope won't pay attention to these filters. Only events marked for the local area, preferably within walking distance, will be published, especially if they are of a civic nature. The point is not to lead you to events your will find the most enjoyable, but to take you to places where you can have the most effect, which is locally.

Of course, if you do click on one of these events in the Metroscope and you have an UpComing.org account, you will then experience all your chosen settings.

UpComing.org was primarily set up for fans to keep track of the music gigs they could attend. However, the system is general and it is possible to post any other kind of event with a time and place, such as a public lecture, a public inquiry day, a town council meeting, a local political party meeting, a market day, a special exhibit, a regular political group meeting, and so forth. These events, which must be added manually into UpComing.org database, will appear in the Metroscope when they are posted, when someone marks their intention to attend, and at random times days or hours before the event.

History

People's consciousness about historical incidents should be raised. Just because the story happened and was closed a long time ago doesn't mean it isn't relevant today. For example, witness statements at the public inquiry for a planned municipal incinerator that is now polluting your atmosphere should definitely appear in the Metroscope from time to time. If the local press published articles that referred back to these testimonies, then this would happen automatically.

Locally historical items could appear on the Metroscope on anniversaries. For example: "On this day 80 years ago the St Luke's church was blown up by an incendiary bomb".

Also, using bookmarking technologies, such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.icio.us, or reddit and dozens more, it is possible to monitor certain domains and tags and report that: "Ten people have read the history of the 1981 Toxteth riots in the last 24 hours". This reading event would suggest that something is happening for some reason. Maybe there was a rumour circulating about it. You could even announce it when a critical number of changes happen in the wikipedia.org/Liverpool article for your home town.

These patterns of selective information access will reflect a feeling in the air, and they would appear on the Metroscope for the same reason that the "recently returned books" shelf at your local library is prominently displayed.

Other disclosures

Freedom of Information requests, public grants, and judicial events should definitely appear wherever possible. Not all of these hit the local news. When the courts announce fines and prosecutions of local people or interests, these should go into the Metroscope to provide a sense of what is happening. The local press tends to select what is sensational, but not always what is useful.

Some possible sources

• . They're not producing this with geocoded data at the moment, and should do.
• foi.mysociety.org/liverpool_city_council>, the public Freedom of Information requests made to the local council. When these cause information to be released or refused, local people who may know and be able to do something about it should automatically find out.
• National Lottery grants has a database of small grants which can be provided in a spreadsheet. These are often for amounts less than ten grand.
• Business grants such as Eureka as they are announced. These may be to the local employer and have obligations and be of interest as they tell which places may have jobs soon.
• Academic grants to the nearest university
• [Acts and statutory instruments http://opsi.gov.uk/legislation/whatsnew.htm] Feeds for the general UK, but could be name-searched to find targets for Geographical regions
• Observances, either local (eg car-free day) or international, (eg International Women's Day). Local observances will be flagged on random days several times in advance. International observances are sometimes used to add themes to the schedule in the local educational institution. Awareness of them creates opportunities for volunteering for those who happen to be experts.

Benefits

The benefits of the Metroscope itself and the benefits of choosing this particular simple design are hard to separate. In practice the design may evolve into something substantially different. However, any improvements should take note of the following issues.

No login

There are already too many login systems on the Internet to the extent that one should refrain from proposing yet another one if it is at all avoidable. If it is perceived that one is necessary (which is not the case for this one) then it can be technically piggy-backed on another log-in system like del.icio.us which can be used to mark-up your personal in the form of a customized link.

The Metroscope should be integrated with OpenID so that the link-though into Metroscope-notified events should seamlessly happen whenever the user happens to have an account on the destination website. That is, if you click on to an UpComing.org event, it logs you in automatically.

No critical mass

Because it borrows all its content and features from sources already on the Internet, the Metroscope doesn't require a critical mass of users, especially when those services themselves are already critically successful.

Of course, the more people who use and are affected by the Metroscope, the more people will be aware of local issues, and the more they will do something about them. However, the Metroscope is fully functional as an effective and fun aggregator with one user.

It will be necessary at first for someone to be paid to post civic events (council meetings, public inquiry dates, etc) into UpComing.org until this work can be dispersed into the community and to event organizers when they realize the benefits of posting up the details themselves.

Critical Mass Features

If many people in a small area have Metroscopes running at the same time, new features become possible. The server that sends the headlines to the Metroscopes knows when the window is in focus, and what its position of scrolling is, and what links have been clicked on.

When a link scrolls into the Metroscope it can be highlighted depending on how many other people have clicked on it. Although the Metroscope is used anonymously, it would know if 10 people within 5 kms of your home have clicked through and looked at the announcement of the lottery grant for the sport centre.

With a serious uptake of the Metroscope system, you could chart maps of useage across the country, as well as publish what types of items people are finding interesting.

News could spread beyond a Metroscope area when its click-through rate was high. Normally the prosecution of a particular factory owner for pollution would appear on the Metroscopes only within 10kms of the factory. However, if it was popular, the heading would appear up to 20kms of the source. Within that area there would be hot-spots of interest (geographic regions where there was a higher density of click-through than normal), and the zone would be expanded outwards towards these directions. By this means, news would travel, not by people forwarding the links, but by people reading it.

The news about the factory prosecution may travel all the way out to the towns where the workers for that factory tend to commute from, and also down-river from the factory. But the news would be geographically targeted, not personally targeted. It would not just go to the employees of the factory. It would be seen by people who are their neighbours who may have no idea how many people right there in the town work at that factory. They won't know who they are. All they will know is there are a lot of people looking at that article for some reason. A town-hall meeting about the scandal, if one gets organized, might be interesting.

One of the problems with our culture is that the employees may know first-hand what is been going down regarding the incident at the factory, but they fear they will get sacked if they do their civic duty and tell anyone. This is exactly the time when informal face-to-face meetings around the local community to circulate the news may be absolutely vital to its survival. History shows that the authorities and company directors cannot be trusted to put the interests of the public first and have been known to cover-up dire incidents for too long. Life-saving rumours and information do not circulate effectively on-line where people feel it can be monitored.

By circulating official rumours (local news, press releases) that people within walking distance of one another show an interest in by their click-through rate, the Metroscope makes it possible to take the discussion off-line. Suppose the next message is: "The monthly meeting of the local Friends of the Earth group is tonight at--", maybe a few extra people will turn up and talk.

Non-exclusive

The Metroscope is a prototype. The design contains nothing that is exclusive to itself. Any programmer or company can hack together a Metroscope of their own design and make it better. The basic idea of an attractive and engaging ticker-tape of things to do (ie information about stuff within your local physical sphere of influence), is transferable.

No filtering or customization

The normal instinct in these designs is to enable the user to shape the output to their own tastes, which for many people would mean filtering out the stuff they aren't interested in. This is unfortunately a self-reinforcing phenomenon; because once you declare you are not interested in a particular subject, you block off the chance of that it ever will be. People already apply enough of their own filters in the form of habits everywhere else on the Internet. The only valid filters for Metroscope are the geographical size, location and shape of the region of interest, as well as the rate at which headlines are presented.

No counter-provincialism

One of the most striking demonstrations of the way our current use of the Internet drives out localism and casts our consciousness into the distance is the habits of the British when they visit America.

Using the Internet, a Brit can access all her favourite newspapers in the morning and get her daily news fix. Arguably, these British newspapers are far more informative and better written than any of the local press offerings in America, and she will gain a far clearer understanding of what is going on on the other side of the world than her American neighbours next door. However, by the time she has got her news fix, she won't have the time or inclination to flick through the local rag where she would have found out about events and happenings that are nearby. These could have lead her to the places where it would have been possible to meet and speak to people locally and do things.

Unless a Metroscope system was embedded in the website of the British paper she reads, there is no chance that she could have discovered the things which she could have done.

No hypermobility

One of the paradoxes of a communication system like the Internet is that it appears to increase the propensity to travel, rather than replace it. This is not only because it makes travel ever easier to organize and book on-line, but also it enables familiar contacts to be created and maintained with people and places at a distance with whom there is a natural desire to arrange to visit, even when there is little actual purpose to it.

I have often heard, without any proof given, the assertion that the personal in-the-flesh meetings are far more effective than any other form of interaction. Even with Skype readily available, conference calls are rarely made before such meetings are organized, at a time when they could evidently be used to build the connection and verify that the visit is necessary. It is as if it is felt that any prior formal contact between the people planning to meet could damage the effect of the eventual face-to-face encounter by spoiling that all-important once-only chance at a first-impression moment on which all social relationships are subsequently believed to be built.

Today, full, high quality videophone connections have never been cheaper and potentially more available, in spite of the ridiculous fact that they are harder to book and arrange than a long-haul airplane flight and its many hours of wasted time, discomfort and expense. Why is it so much harder to arrange a date to be at two ends of a live video channel with someone on the other side of the Atlantic than it is to fly to New York for a two-hour meeting? It is as if such meetings, regardless of their hi-fidelity, are not taken as seriously as they out to be.

The Metroscope seeks to counter hypermobility by notifying people only of events within walking distance of their place of residence, and encouraging more such events to happen. Often people travel greater distances to go to potentially less interesting events because those are what they happen to know about, and their lack of knowledge drastically limits their freedom of choice.

The Metroscope will publish events that are taking place at your closest high quality video channel establishment, whose location you should be aware of. For example, it could be an author's book tour or public lecture by a famous speaker who has chosen not to fly over specifically for the event and is willing to answer questions from the audience.

By exposing people to the existence, location and capability of such equipment, it will be possible for them to book it to avoid their next long-distance business or social trip.

In the future this equipment should be available in pubs so you can drink with your distant friends on the other side of the screen. This technology will allow people to keep their friends far away, without the need to travel with the consequences of disconnecting all potential ties that could otherwise have been made in their local community where things could actually be done.

Commercialisation

One of the issues that local communities face is the loss of local business to the multiples this is often accompanied by the arrival of a 24 hour Supermarket. As these companies become more and more sophisticated in their e-commerce models the opportunities for local business to compete against these huge companies will be signifcantly reduced.

To add an SME model that allows local business to insert adverts to their local community could have a beneficial impact. In the short term this might be no more than taking a feed from sites such as http://liverpool.justoneuk.com/ or https://developer.yahoo.com/searchmarketing/ but keep the option that in the longer term have the capacity to add an e-commerce or some type of supply chain engine that would allow small companies to take advantage of some of the efficiency gains the web brings.

Conclusion

The Metroscope is cheap to build and will be built. It can be a work of art like the original ones outside the FACT building. It can provide a comfortable sense that things are happening. Placing all civic events onto UpComing.org is necessary, and should be done anyway even without the Metroscope.

A prototype Metroscope should be running before the weekend of the BBC labs. In its final form the the Metroscope will be a cgi-script on a server that efficiently aggregates the sources the sends the results to a simple javascript client on any computer. However, the first version will probably be a single python application that runs as a self-contained unit.

City people are open and welcoming to far away visitors. (See CouchSurfing/Liverpool for details. This welcome should be extended a s a matter of course to immediate neighbours.