early last week I met with two people from Brent Council Environment & Culture Department to discuss the Civic Reporter ideas and application framework that Comwifinet have been working on. A great opportunity to discuss how open accessible data could further develop participation in the up keep of the Borough. Brent Council considering working with a Made In Brent technology organisation and mobile technologies. Brent Council entertaining the public publishing daily status and performance information online. I was also keen to know more about the current use of mobile technologies by Brent and also about the techie stuff that pins their operations together.

Brent receive problem reports by several means and log them all into a central application. Incoming emails, texts and phone calls are entered into the application which dispatches messages to contractors for them to deal with the report. I understood from our meeting that some of what Civic Report does the Council is either about to deliver or is working towards delivering.

After a few mildly insulting comments about the status and stature of the comwifinet organsiation and a few about the council representatives own department and employer, I felt that the meeting was beginning to go somewhere. I talked about the positive opportunities that could be seized by publishing data and creating a interactive map thing for people to use. But before we looked at the application I knew that the meeting was a waste of time; mine and theirs. They talked about their perceived negative stumbling blocks that would prevent them for using something like Civic Reporter. In short it came down to status and money. The person meeting with me thought the comwifinet organisation was of low status and was therefore unwilling to recommend to his managers that Brent Council commit public money to us, this unknown quantity. Yet other very large public organisations spend with us – we just choose not to shout about it on our website.

A few days I got an email by a round-about way that let me know that Brent were not interested in pursuing Civic Reporter with Comwifinet. Shame that the people I met with were unable to get back to me directly. But I figure they are busy people.

The background to all this. Comwifinet had prototyped the Civic Reporter framework which is inspired by other innovative mobile technology projects, such as that implemented by Lewisham and the mySociety ‘Broken Civic Infrastructure’ idea. These similar initiatives all start from the question ‘Would putting pictures of abandoned cars on a map on the internet help people to think again about their role in maintaining a tidy Borough?
MySociety example
Love Lewisham

The difference between what we were doing and these other projects is the public daily status and performance reporting of the Councils’ responsiveness to reported problems in the Borough. This would have been a steep change from the current performance reporting for departments. Publishing the information online, on a map makes the scale and distribution of the tasks facing the council public. And just maybe this would help us Brent residents learn that the Council and its contractors are doing a through and quality job for us… but only for what has been reported.

I posted recently on what could be done next with this journal. “wither b.e.c?” i asked. well, new projects are on the horizon. I’ve been working on a community information network project with Colin George, Chair of QPARA and Director of MarketSpark (publisher of the excellent Local Directories for Brent residents associations). We see a need to weave links between associations and organisations active in Brent and an opportunity to develop such a network in the light of the demise of Brent Community Empowerment Network.

MarketSpark and Comwifinet are working together to augment and extend community network links through a varitety of mediums. The Bonnet Project is the working title of our efforts.

Because the Brent Community Empowerment Network is no longer with us, BrAVA have a large stack of cash to put towards a community consultantion project or give back to Brent Council. Perhaps BrAVA will see it to support the Bonnet Project? Who knows…

Visit the website, register yourself and your organisation, participate.

currently working on some mapping extensions to the Brent East Campaigning website. I plan to show a map of the Borough of Brent and to overlay various political informations such as the elected representatives for the wards both at local and national level. I’ll begin with a map and just mash in some datasources that I will build myself. I need to build them by hand as Brent Council supply only a limited amount of information in machine readable format and what is made available in not geo-coded so it is unknown where the information refers to.

when I’ve done with the basic overlays I’ll drag in other information from places such as QPARA, brenteast.net brentbrain and display headlines from those sites as news feeds.

I will look at the wirelesslondon tools for building such a spaticalinformationportal and see if I can get them running.

from the website of the Kilburn Times (as this saves me scanning the paper):

“The two highly-paid bosses of the £1bn South Kilburn regeneration project have been suspended while the council investigates allegations of misconduct exposed by the Times

South Kilburn New Deals for Communities chief executive Jack Davis and his deputy Bill Husband, both reported to earn upwards of £80,000 a year, are responsible for regenerating one of the most deprived housing estates in Britain.

Our investigative journalism revealed that they were using a council flat on the estate as a rent-free pied-a-terre.”