Design, citizenship and the city
10 March 2009
Brian loves chess but finds it hard to get a decent match with an opponent at his level. He’d love to start a local chess club but doesn’t want to take the risk of setting something up and having too few people attend. He asks on a local chat forum whether anyone would like to start a club. He gets a couple of tentative offers and a suggestion that he posts a new pledge to Sutton Council’s own local version of PledgeBank.
PledgeBank is new to Brian but he soon creates a pledge, saying, “I will join a new local chess club and pay a membership fee of up to £20 a year but only if 15 other people from Sutton will too.” A month later, Brian has found 18 members for his new club. A few people found out about it through the chat forum (to which Brian posted a link to the pledge). Some more found it just by browsing Sutton’s PledgeBank. Items from the RSS feed of new pledges appear on the council’s website home page one week in every four, which brought in five new people. One person even had a filtered subscription to the new pledges feed for “chess”.
Brian easily finds a meeting room for his group using Sutton FreeSpace, which allows people to book halls and function rooms across the borough by finding free space from the various venues’ iCalendar feeds. But Brian doesn’t need to know anything about the technology, he just asks for a room for up to 25 people any weekday evening within his price range and he gets a few options nicely plotted on a map for him with availability and pricing. He books a room at a local community centre and as the event is a public meeting, an entry is automatically created in the centre’s public calendar feed which is then syndicated to the Sutton Guardian (where it appears in print as well as on their website), Upcoming, the council’s main borough calendar and a couple of local blogs. The first meeting of the new chess club is a great success. A year later, Brian is back on Sutton FreeSpace looking for a bigger venue for their club nights.
11 March 2009
I think the best bit of this scenario is Sutton FreeSpace. Actually you’d probably need info on costs as well because you’d lose a lot of potential spaces otherwise. There aren’t many community spaces that are completely free.
How much would it cost to develop the shared platform for organisations like Sutton CVS, the Volunteer Centre and the library service to start using and promoting?
12 March 2009
Yes, as I envisage it the FreeSpace system would including pricing information. It’s free as in vacant, not freedom nor beer. Perhaps a better name would be needed!
I’ve no idea how much such a system would cost to develop. It would depend on how much co-operation you got from the various space providers and how flexible their existing systems would be to providing the necessary facilities.
If you could get those parties to serve up iCalendar feeds from their booking systems then a system to perform an aggregated search across them for free space would be relatively straightforward. Actually booking through such a system would be much harder, but that’s not really a necessary part of the system. The aim would just be to provide a way to find what you want without having to find and ring round numerous providers with complex requirements.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar
12 March 2009
Sutton Theatres and Halls book rooms for the Secombe Theatre, Charles Cryer Studio Theatre, Wallington Hall, the Woodcote Room at Wallington Hall and Grove Hall:
http://www.suttontheatres.co.uk/function_room_hire.php
12 March 2009
Sutton Council has a list of rooms/halls for hire:
http://www.sutton.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=968
4 April 2009
Ha, I don’t agree with it all but nice none-the-less