something I said

Friends of Moseley Road Baths (FoMRB) is a brand new blog with a campaigning focus. As such, it is among the small number of such community-based blogs in the area, as distinct from blogs with a personal, commercial, or institutional focus.

I have two points to make from this. Point Number One is to welcome their efforts. FoMRB have made just one post, consisting of a link to their report/proposal for the future of the baths. The report itself is a doozy: very nicely designed, clearly written making a very clear case for their ambitions. Worth looking at just for the photos.

The authors are not named (though the photographers are), so it’s a guess as to whether it was written in-house or by a consultant. There are no links to other sites, yet, so perhaps there’s a website containing more information that I’ve yet to see. But it’s pretty clear that the effort has come out of a community-based organisation - exactly the kind of thing that’s been talked up by several years worth of Council officers, tying in with local government restructuring, where heightened participation and devolution are meant to go hand-in-hand.

Yet, for all that effort, there are very few of these voluntary organisations visible in the local blogosphere. I can think of two. Friends of Moseley Road Baths makes that three. I’m looking forward to the next post. And all that follow.

Point Number Two: a directory of such blogs is in order. So I’m going to start a list. If you know of a voluntary group with a blog; a local or regional community group with a blog, please link to it in a comment or by a trackback. I expect to hear from neighbourhoods where community campaigns have developed over the last year or so. I’d also be glad to hear from anyone who has already made a list, so that I can simply link to it from here!

Part of my interest stems from thinking of the existence of such blogs as one of the knock-on effects of Council efforts to develop communities and the uptake of technology by those communities. It’s a sort of web-based civic structure.