Local community engagement, Part 4 - September 8, 2019 at 01:10PM

Part 1 introduced this project to engage local residents in villages north of Cambridge UK. Part 2 elaborated on some resources available and communication via Story Maps. Part 3 looked at three more resources, introduced an open call and closed with an Elevator Pitch. Let’s look now at community engagement’s key differentiator:

Search for local info your way, not the search engines’ way.

While they provide a real service to all of us, search engines in particular and the internet in general have become a Faustian deal well written up elsewhere – in a nutshell, share your information in exchange for the web using theirs to help you find something new – and nowhere was it more evident in the mapping world, where for example Strava inadvertently created a monumental faux-pas. Search bias also shows how it cuts both ways:

A biased view of the Internet is exactly what search users are seeking. By performing a search the user is seeking what that search engine perceives as the “best” result to their query. Enforced search neutrality would, essentially, remove this bias.

While net neutrality is debated elsewhere, community engagement seeks it from a localised perspective:

use open data
process it transparently
publish it on an open platform
seek user input through public forums
using publicly available processes

And the stakes have never been higher: no matter your views on climate change / breakdown / emergency, something must be done to mitigate the increasing pollution and extreme weather that is already affecting low-lying tropical areas, hurricane-prone geographies or the Arctic ice sheets. These issues are very well written up elsewhere, but this blog-post describes my passion on the subject.

Our aim in community engagement is to start a “deliberative planning of necessary and desired ecosystem functioning of our environment” (Dr. Phil Bubb, pers. comm.)

And there is a lot of help already: