Category — Community Building

Social bookmarking sounds dull, conjuring up images of people passing a book around and leaving a cornucopia of personal bookmarks in it - why would you do it? But I’ve been enlightened - I’ve discovered www.de.licio.us the social bookmarking site and eureka I realise I’ve been missing a trick in my research - a big trick. 

Social bookmarking allows you to mark a website,  or specific content, that you find useful.  OK, so you can do that in favourites on your browser - but when you do it on a community site you share that information with others,  and they share it with you.   Imagine, when you are trying to find information on, say, a ’broken ankle’ that you don’t have to trawl page after page of Google,  you just find sites that others have thought worthwhile - providing they are not internet trolls of course. 

When you bookmark a site you index it with your own tags; so instead of putting an hotel site in your travel folder, and getting cross when you look for it in your hotel folder, you could tag it with Greece, culture, recommendation, hotel or however else you might want to find it again. 

This is useful  because it allows people to share knowledge, find experts, discover new information, and keep a record of corporate knowledge - when an employee leaves all the work they put into the corporate knowledge bank stays.  (The forward thinking should have their own intranet facility rather than share publicly available sites as they may not want to share with competitiors what they are working on .)

Social bookmarking is still in its infancy, but knowledge sharing, helping others build skills and generating insight is both a vital ingredient of community building,  and an important competitive business weapon of the future.  I believe you will hear a lot more of it.

Modbury,  near Plymouth in Devon,  has an inspiring story of community spirit to tell - and better still they have put their ‘how to’ story on the web, for anyone who wants to copy them.

This year,  urged on by Rebecca Hosking, a local resident, the town’s shopkeepers banded together to make the town a plastic shopping bag free zone - the first in the UK.  From the 1st May 2007 no trader there will issue a plastic bag to shoppers - instead they will encourage all shoppers to either bring their own bag, buy a reuseable bag,  or issue a disposable paper or cornstarch bag.  

You may or may not agree with the campaign itself; the real inspiring part of story to me is in the way Rebecca has got all the traders to work together on a common cause.  A cause that has led to an increase in community spirit that they are now hoping to use on other community projects. 

It is often said in change management, that you can build collaboration by finding a common cause.   Modbury is a very good example of how to do it.

Sometimes a fact crosses your path, and you wonder why you have lived so long without knowledge of it !

I’ve always had an interest in Wales; my name is Welsh, Gwenhwyvar, my great grandmother enchanted me with stories of her St Davids childhood, and another much loved grandmother had the surname Dyas. However, not until this week did I know that the word Wales means land of strangers or foreigners.

Apparently, when the Celts were pushed back to the west of Britain by invading European tribes they called themselves Brythoniaid or Britons . But as they battled constantly with their neighbours they began to refer to themselves as Y Cymry - or compatriots. Meanwhile the Anglo Saxons and Normans called them Welisc or ’strangers’, and the country Wealas.

Compatriots - fellow countrymen, people you can rely on, people who are not strangers or foreigners. What can this teach us today about community building?

We’ve recently been attending some Government workshops looking at ideas for building, or should that be rebuilding, communities. This reminds me of what a community is all about - an open gate inviting you in, and an open door of trust.

The picture is from an open garden event I went to on Sunday in the Yorkshire Dales. A local landscape gardener had organized for a number of people to open up their gardens to who ever wanted to come and look. Most people said yes, but thought it was going to be rather tiresome. In the end they loved it, they met up with neighbours they had not spent time with for ages, as well as meeting new folk. Every garden was different, and every one entertained in a different way.

Great day out, and great contribution to community building.