Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Reaching Harringay folk who aren't online
Mobile phones remain the most ubiquitous communication tool. So I've been on the lookout for a way HoL can make use of simple texting to reach out to Harringay folk who aren't online.
It's impossible to transfer HoL wholesale by text message, but I can't help feeling that there's something we can do.
Today I found something. It's not great, but it's something - it seems a bit like a text-based Twitter by location.
thumbprintcity works like this:
You can also read the feeds online and for Harringay I've also set up a feed so that anything sent to thumbprintcity's Harringay page will also appear on HoL's Twitter stream.
So, if you want to keep in touch a bit on eht move and don't have a smartphone or, if you know someone who want to stay in touch and has a mobile phone but isn't online thumbprintcity might work for you....................or is it a damp squib? What do you think?
It's impossible to transfer HoL wholesale by text message, but I can't help feeling that there's something we can do.
Today I found something. It's not great, but it's something - it seems a bit like a text-based Twitter by location.
thumbprintcity works like this:
- you register your phone number
- you can then either text in a message, prefacing your message with the placename (i.e. Harringay in our case)
- or you can request to have the latest message for a place texted to you, by just texting the placename
You can also read the feeds online and for Harringay I've also set up a feed so that anything sent to thumbprintcity's Harringay page will also appear on HoL's Twitter stream.
So, if you want to keep in touch a bit on eht move and don't have a smartphone or, if you know someone who want to stay in touch and has a mobile phone but isn't online thumbprintcity might work for you....................or is it a damp squib? What do you think?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Andrew Wilson on
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One of the advantages of text messages is that they allow the "call to take part" to move away from the desktop and out into the neighbourhood to reach people. Thumbprint works on all mobile phones, with no need for a computer or registration, so people can take part straight away, wherever they are, just by sending a text message. So good old fashioned paper leaflets become a very powerful portable information technology when people can respond straight away by SMS.
This worked quite nicely as part of a participatory budgeting event in Belsize in Camden:
http://www.thumbprintcity.com/london/belsize
Those responses were generated from a few hundred photocopied A5 flyers left in places like Budgens.
The chance to respond by SMS meant that some of the candidate groups started to organise a campaign to generate support by SMS, which in itself increased the amount of participation. The "and why" part of the question seemed very productive - a way in which people who might not normally have been engaged had a structure to comment on what they valued in their neighbourhood.
There is a long history of this kind of thing of course. This is City Poems, from 2003, a text message biography of a city, written by the people who work there, and delivered by text message from a network of Poem Points at key locations:
http://blinkmedia.org/citypoems/pages/01_03.html
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