Unbinding Time from Space Tom Coates gave a great presentation yesterday on UpMyUpstreet Conversations (powerpoint available). The project geocodes discussion boards to foster social capital. The ethos is civic participation begins locally.
For example, a user might come to UpMyStreet.com to find out house prices, discovers local tax levels are high, discovers money spent on local services is low and then finds out how to get in touch with elected representatives. All politics is local, so long as people realize issues are local to them.
The design choice of emphasizing locality also meant doing away with time. When returning relevant conversations to a query, its ordered by proximity. Without time as an organizational principle, which everyone can relate to, major tweaks were required so not to loose what's new, what's evaporating and what's of sustainable interest. The tweaks (email alerts, flagging, thread-tracking) draw attention to areas otherwise subsumed by the short-sight of locality, and Tom notes their danger.
What will be interesting as the project evolves is if there will be litteral community straddlers and straddling functions. Just as social filtering, with people as editors and distributors, works so well in blogspace where there are no boundries to fix attention. Would be fascinating to see if a model for effective civic participating originates in one locality and how that model spreads. But that's not the point. It begins at home.
9:36:16 AM 
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