Operational structures
The following are examples of structures that already exist and could be incorporated into a nectar point network.
Neighbourhood Forum
Big Lottery Fund is funding the Your Square Mile initiative – currently part of Big Society Network – to build a UK-wide digital platform..
The partner's page says: ”There are 93,000 square miles in the UK. Most of the 62 million UK citizens live in 7,500 to 8,000 of those square miles. These square miles contain identifiable communities – villages or small urban areas – comprising several thousand people each. “Your Square Mile” is about encouraging citizens to identify, claim and then lead change in those neighbourhoods. This is currently being piloted in 16 diverse, challenged communities in the UK.
“The Big Lottery Fund is enabling Your Square Mile to build a digital platform – on PC’s, mobiles and public access screens – that will enable the interchange of ideas, advice, support and benefits to citizens throughout the UK”.
Community Gardens as Growing Hubs
The Draft Action Plan for Pollinators for Wales Consultation is an attempt by the Welsh Government to protect threatened insect pollinators such as honey and bumble bees, hoverflies and butterflies. Pollinator numbers, particularly bees have been on the decline for many years.
More than 350 community growing projects around Wales are addressing declining pollinator numbers by creating habitats, refraining from pesticide use and planting pollinator friendly plants to encourage and support pollinators. Many community gardens and allotments have also introduced bee hives and seen the benefit this has on increased crop yields as well as producing their own honey. The hives are often used as an educational tool to inform visitors, including school children, about the vital role bees and pollinating insects play in food production.
A growing hub is a community garden that has undertaken to produce nectar-rich plants and distribute them, with information about how to care for them. within its neighbourhood. Shelley Gardens is a good example of a Cardiff community garden project that could function as a hub for growing nectar-plans for their constituent community. Shelley Gardens, is featured in the River of Flowers campaign about connecting 'rivers' of pollinating insects, plants, people and ideas.
Social Media
A useful definition of community is ‘a group of people with shared experiences and interests’. These may include location, lifestyle, belief, age, race, class, gender etc. Many people these days are members of virtual communities using social media to maintain contact and develop ideas. The ultimate in social networking for action is to engage in a community action plan.
Social networking is the process of initiating, developing and maintaining friendships and collegial or project sharing relationships for mutual benefit. Current discussions surrounding social networking deal with web-based or technology-mediated tools, interactions, and related phenomena, but social networking really takes place in many forms, including face to face. Several studies have shown that nonprofit organizations have not been able to use websites as strategic, interactive stakeholder engagement tools. Perhaps this was due to not having the know-how or the staff to create more interactive sites with feedback options and discussion boards. However, the advent of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr have taken away this excuse. These sites are free and have built-in interactivity. Any organization big or small can start using social media for building an online network of friends and followers with whom they are in almost real-time contact. The newer social media applications present communication tools for organizing local action plans that differ dramatically from organizationally supported websites.
A community action plan is a road map for implementing community change by identifying and specifying WHAT will be done, WHO will do it and HOW it will be done. In other words, the action plan describes what the community wants to accomplish, what activities are required during a specified timeline and what resources (money, people and materials) are needed to be successful. Success is measured against suitable performance indicators associated with the plan's objectives.
Much technology-facilitated social networking is done in the form of person-to-person exchanges that can be classified as 'question and answer', 'point and counterpoint', 'announcement and support'.
Technologies that facilitate social networking tend to emphasize ease of use, spontaneity, personalization, exchange of contacts, and low-end voyeurism. Some technologies that are often considered social networking technologies may not be socially oriented in and of themselves, but the communities that form around such technologies often demonstrate key elements of social networking (for example, the discussion communities that form around collaboratively authored wiki content).
On line community networks are often developed and deployed to supplement residential communities in an effort to revitalise and grow neighbourhoods and to revive civic engagement and local community identity in society. In this context, the ubiquity of the Internet enables and encourages users to pursue‘personalized networking’ which leads to the emergence of private ‘portfolios of sociability’. ‘Proximity’ is the factor in on line residential communities, which produces networked individualism. This gives on line residential communities a competitive advantage over dispersed on line communities. Residential networks allow residents to interact online through social reportage and to continue developing online interactions offline, in real life and face to face. This off line and place-based dimension introduces challenges to the design, development and rollout of online community networks.
Reaching a critical mass of users is considered to be the key criterion of success and has been reported as one of the most common stumbling blocks:“If you build it, they will not necessarily come”. However, other studies have shown that a critical mass of interconnected users alone is not sufficient for a community network to live up to higher expectations, such as increasing social capital in the community, fostering sociability and establishing community identity. Those geographic communities, already rich in social capital, may become richer thanks to community networks, and those communities poor in social capital may remain poor. Connectivity does not ensure community. Something else has to be done. The Internet neither destroys nor creates social capital, people do, and the Internet will not automatically offset the decline in more conventional forms of social capital, but it has that potential.
Some examples of free popular social networking technologies include:
asynchronous discussions via discussion boards or newsgroups;
instant messaging, e.g. MSN, AIM, and ICQ;
text-messaging or SMS;
message logging and sharing, such as Twitter;
document sharing and controlled collaborative authoring, such as Zoho or Google Docs & Spreadsheets;
loosely structured collaborative authoring and information sharing, such as wikis.
photo sharing, such as Flickr and Picasa;
video sharing, such as YouTube;
blogs and microblogs such as Tumblr (life-sharing, news analysis, and editorializing);
online communities, such as Nings, Facebook, etc.;
Second Life - sort of a combination of many of the above communication and collaborative tools.
Some examples of Copycat networking tools, where local success offers a model for others to emulate are:
http://www.blything.wikispaces.com
www.biodiversity.ecoworld.co.uk/lincolncms
www.biodiversity.ecoworld.co.uk/cwicnet