By way of a pre-launch of the London’s Digital Neighbourhoods research, Hugh Flouch contributed to a couple of conferences this week.

On Wednesday Hugh was at RIBA speaking at e-democracy 09, the UK’s main conference on e-democracy which brought together the European e-participation community in London. Other speakers included My Society’s Tom Steinberg and Will Straw from Left Foot Forward.

The following day Hugh was at the first MyPublicServices event, organised by Patient Opinion. The day aimed at shedding more light on the potential of the web to impact on our public services, and focussed on a debate about how to harness conversations on social media to make services better and more inclusive.

As a basis for both his sessions, Hugh outlined the current state of play with the UK’s burgeoning citizen-led digital wesbpaces. London was used as an example of the scale, diversity and level of audience engagement already being achieved by the UK’s citizen-led sites.

A draft version of the typology being developed for the research, was presented to illustrate the diversity of UK Hyperlocal.  The key differences between the different types of local citizen sites were brought sharply into focus by a simple four-box model. Hugh also offered some insight into how different types of sites may be best used:

HL Ecosys

We also shared a preview of the areas of impact the research project will be looking to:

impacts

If you’d like to keep up to date with the research as it progresses, please drop us a note at research@networkedneighbourhoods.com and we’ll add you to our mailing list.