LocalEyes

Where do you fit in your local community? How are you feeling about how your many strengths and skills, your valuable knowledge and experience is used and appreciated by those who live and work close to your home? What about local Government? How much do they know about what you really think?

In our town, we are just starting to try out a new and rather ingenious piece of localised social media. LocalEyes was developed by Peter Anderson and others from a social enterprise called The Shire Initiative.

Peter explains that LocalEyes came into being in order to address two primary paradoxes:

1.    “Even though we have many methods of communication available to us, phone, email, interactive TV, and snail-mail, we still cannot easily consult and coordinate ourselves within any geographical area. We cannot quickly ask a community, town or country what it wants or how it feels about any particular issue using the latest digital technologies we have strived so hard to produce.”

2.    “It is now common knowledge that we need to recreate vibrant, resilient communities. In the UK alone there are an estimated 9 million people on FaceBook but there is no online social network that comprehensively represents the geographic communities where we live. Most people have several thousand people living within walking distance of their own homes. Take any one of these individuals and ask them what they can contribute to their community in terms of skills, groups, wisdom, talents, businesses, events, news, media, arts, crafts, items to sell, swap, freecycle, food, car sharing opportunities etc.; multiply this by the local population and you have a resource with tens of thousands of bits of information, each of which is a potential catalyst for real interaction.”

The article “Transition to the Shoal” that Peter wrote for the Ooffoo Laureate competition deservedly made it into the list of finalists. It is in the form of an inspirational letter to someone of influence. Let’s hope that it’s acted upon and that many more people become aware of the possibilities that this kind of technology facilitates.

Do contact Peter direct if you’d like to get involved in your community.