Last week I launched @SutMobLib, a Twitter account that tweets the location of Sutton’s mobile library in real time. No, I’m not sitting here all day sending messages. A program does that automatically. Every time the library gets to a new stop it posts up its location.

@SutMobLib on Bing Maps Twitter Search

The utility of such a thing isn’t immediately obvious. While I don’t like to generalise or assume too much, I suspect that the vast majority of mobile library users don’t use Twitter. So far a grand total of nine  people have signed up to follow @SutMobLib and most of those are various sock puppets of mine.

@SutMobLib on Tweetie 2 "nearby search" for iPhone

Unlike most Twitter accounts that belong to real people, @SutMobLib isn’t great for conversation. It’s even less intelligent and interactive than it looks. Anyone that wants to be reminded when the library is visiting their neighbourhood would be better off just putting the relevant day in their calendar.

@SutMobLib is useful because Twitter is now more than just a social network connecting people. It’s become a platform for realtime geospatial information, where things like the mobile library can post up what they’re doing and where they’re doing it, as they’re doing it.

Experienced Twitter users know that while half the power of Twitter is following people you’re interested in and conversing with them, the other half is reading realtime searches for keywords, phrases and hashtags. Recently, Twitter enhanced the power of its search by allowing members to post up their precise geographical location with each tweet, which other members can then discover by searching around an area rather than around a hashtag or topic.

So Twitter has become a radar. Tweetie 2, a Twitter client for the iPhone, allows users to search “Nearby” based on the user’s current location and shows a map covered with plotted tweets. Web users can do something similar using Bing Maps’ Twitter Search. The popular client TweetDeck shows pop-up maps underneath geotweets.

Realtime geospatial search brings a new dimension to finding out about the world. For the first time we can pull up live information about a place, whether that’s people’s conversations and observations or the solipsistic self-reporting of things that tweet like Sutton’s mobile library. Various urban annotation and virtual graffiti projects have existed before now but Twitter brings this capability to a mass-market social network with tens of millions of members. Through reading conversations about coffee in Soho or chemo at the Royal Marsden Hospital, our awareness of the world around us just got a great deal broader.

@SutMobLib showing as a geotweet in TweetDeck

For some, that will mean discovering, spontaneously and without specifically searching for it, that a friend — or the mobile library — is around the corner and might be pleased to see us. The world around us is constantly shifting, with opportunities and hazards popping up and then disappearing again, often without leaving a trace. Now we can see those traces. Serendipity is the spice of life and it’s just got a very big helping hand. Fire up your radar.

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Further reading on where ambient intelligence is taking us:

Peter Morville, Ambient Findability
Malcolm McCullough, Digital Ground
Adam Greenfield, Everyware

Here’s what we got up to with an underused council noticeboard, some RSS feeds, a barcode-reading iPhone and a little bit of hackery.

Someone famous once said that the true definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the results to be different. Well I keep going back to the Sutton Council website and nine months after launch it’s still not any better. Arguably it’s worse.

Wibble.

In no particular order:

1. No redirect from sutton.gov.uk to www.sutton.gov.uk

That’s one small step for the DNS admin, one large dollop of timewasting annoyance for dozens of users every day.

Update 1 March 2010: This is still a problem. I thought it had been fixed but it was just a consequence of me using a smarter browser (Chrome) than previously.

2. Enormously bloated top navbar.

So useful that they let you hide it (now). Does that tell you something?

Update 1 March 2010: This bloated, visually heavy, space-invading top nav is still there. It’s grown a few new buttons, too.

3. No distinct visited link colours

Want to know which links you’ve already clicked? Tough. Perhaps the designers were off for Usability 101. So irritating that I wrote a Greasemonkey script to fix it. (Who says users never want to customise their council’s website?)

Update 1 March 2010: We still don’t get distinct colours for visited links. I’m still relying on my Greasemonkey script to provide this absolutely basic usability feature.

4. Abysmal RSS implementation

No autodiscovery. Homepage RSS icons link to a help page rather than the feeds themselves. On the help page even the enormous RSS icon isn’t a feed link either, just a pretty picture. And once you finally manage to subscribe, you have the exquisite pleasure of renaming “Latest press releases RSS feed” to “Sutton Council news” and “Sutton Council” to “Sutton Council jobs” in your feed reader. All of which makes me think that none of this was designed by someone who’s ever used RSS, let alone tested properly. Please fix it before one of us dies.

Update 1 March 2010: Sutton’s RSS feeds have improved but there’s still plenty of work to do. Good news: The feeds have been renamed with sensible names so users won’t have to rename them themselves in their feed readers. There are three RSS icons on the home page, two of which link directly to feeds (good) and one that links to another web page (very bad). There’s still no autodiscovery and the feed for Closed Consultations is completely broken. While I didn’t mention it in the original article, the major missed opportunity here is to provide full text feeds. RSS is a way of delivering your content to other applications so that people can read it conveniently, not a clever way to generate traffic back to your website which pretty much undermines the entire purpose of the exercise.

5. Distracting, patronising, juvenile stock photos

If the current homepage is to be believed, Sutton is the kind of place where people are ecstatic to have TWO ice creams, wear flowers in their hair and grow beards. This isn’t cool, it’s the dad dance of civic web design. How about letting the real content speak for itself without having to compete with this junk?

Update 1 March 2010: As summer passed, so did two-ice-cream girl and the hippy couple. Their places have been taken by different, non-contextual, distracting stock pictures. You do not have to fill every pixel on the page with stuff. Will the summer crew be back this year?

6. The clock/calendar anti-pattern

Put the entirely useless current time and date where the content date should go, then type the content date into the story titles. Is this really a content management system or is someone just bashing it out with FrontPage? (Extra bonus points will be awarded to any designer that can find the time/date on the screen of every user’s computer. Clue: It’s not in the browser.)

Update 1 March 2010: The clock/calendar is still with is and just as damaging to users’ understanding of the true age of the content as ever. Seriously, just delete it.

7. Search form uses POST rather than GET

Want to bookmark or link to a page of search results? No can do. Some basic instruction in the meaning and usage of HTTP methods required. Failing that, just copy every other search form on the entire web.

Update 1 March 2010: No progress here. You still can’t bookmark or link to search results pages. And it only takes changing “POST” to “GET” in a couple of lines of code to fix it, too.

8. No permalinks

1999 called — they want their URLs back. I wonder whether I’ll have time to fix all my inbound deep links and bookmarks to the site before they change them. Again. Permalinks are cool. Two-ice-cream girl take note.

Update 1 March 2010: Still no permalinks. We are still stuck in the link stability dark ages. How the CMS vendor can get away with this I have absolutely no idea, although it’s amusing to note that they don’t have permalinks on their own website either. Perhaps they should buy a decent CMS.

9. Don’t Contact Us

It’s there, but can you find it? Enjoy the multi-step form when you do. Wizards are magic!

Update 1 March 2010: The phone number is as small and hidden as ever and the multi-step contact form is just as forbidding. How about just publishing a general contact email address?

10. Subscribe to this page

Except it doesn’t work. Never has. Makes no sense. A small prize is offered to anyone that can explain clearly 1) What it’s supposed to do and 2) How you use it. I’m just a web designer and not a very bright one at that. Goes right over my head. (Tip: There’s already a general subscription mechanism for web content called RSS.)

Update 1 March 2010: The Subscribe to this Page feature is still there and doesn’t seem any different. I’ve still got no idea what it’s supposed to do or how it’s supposed to work. And RSS is still by far the best way to provide a subscription mechanism to just about anything.

11. £200K and rising

I had to help pay for it too. Now that really hurts. Got a spare £200K? You can get a site like this for your council too.

The story also says that I reported the Lib Dems’ leaflets to the police as I suspected they may have broken electoral law. This is true. However, the police have recently informed me that having considered the matter and consulted the Electoral Commission they can see no offences being committed and therefore will be discontinuing their investigation.

While it seems that the Lib Dems’ leaflets are legal I maintain my original view that they are indecent, dishonest and untruthful. They may be “within the rules” but they are certainly outside anything I would recognise as honest politics. The leaflets distributed to every household in this borough by Paul Burstow and Tom Brake contain statements which are categorically untrue in the context of this election and which are likely to entirely mislead voters into switching their vote to not on the basis of being persuaded by a political argument but by a purely false tactical one.

I contacted the Lib Dems about my concerns shortly after writing my article on 15 May and the only response I have had was one from Sarah Ludford MEP (London region) saying that she finds no grounds for complaint. The Lib Dems have had ample opportunity to clarify, correct, withdraw or even substantially defend these leaflets but it would seem that they are entirely unwilling to discuss them seriously. While that is their right, the conclusion I draw from that is that the Lib Dems don’t want to defend their leaflets because they’re indefensible.

I would not like anyone to vote today thinking that there is any legal cloud over the Lib Dems in Sutton or elsewhere. But if you have formed the impression based on the Sutton Guardian story or anything I have written on this blog or elsewhere that the Lib Dems have been engaged in a deliberate attempt to steal votes from their opponents through deception I can confirm that that continues to be my honest assessment of the situation.

Today’s election for the European parliament isn’t a “close race” between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems in Sutton. There is no need to vote tactically for your second-choice party because you think that your first choice “can’t win in Sutton”. The European election system distributes seats roughly according to the percentage of votes for each party so that whether you support a major party or a minor one your vote will count towards electing a Euro MP and for many parties will have a very good chance of succeeding. If you live in Sutton, your vote will be added to all the other votes across the whole of London and used to elect 8 Euro MPs to represent the whole of London. There are no Euro MPs specifically for Sutton and the outcome of the vote in Sutton has no particular bearing on who gets elected other than in that Sutton’s votes comprise part of the London-wide total.

The most worrying aspect of this whole business was the conversation I had with a journalist who was quite adamant that “politicians lying isn’t a story”. While I question his news sense the sad fact remains that this is a common attitude among the public and leads to widespread voter apathy in which politicians’ claims are not only rightly not taken at face value but are frequently dismissed as outright lies without further consideration. The sorry conclusion of this story is that some politicians — in this case Paul Burstow, Tom Brake and other Lib Dems across the country — really will say anything to get elected, no matter how untrue it may be.

As the MPs’ expenses scandal continues there is a great deal of talk about changing the expenses system, the voting system and other aspects of our political life. While there may be some merit to some of these ideas, political reform in this country ultimately is in the hands of you, the voter, who can simply decide not to elect theives, fiddlers, liars or other kinds of rogues.

The polls are open until 10pm today. Your vote really does count. Use it.

—

This isn’t a party political thing apart from the entirely obvious fact that I think the Lib Dems shouldn’t profit from their deceit at the ballot box in this election. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again now: If anyone has any leaflets from any other political party trying anything similar anywhere in the country please upload them to The Straight Choice and send me a link and I’ll see what I can do about publicising it if it hasn’t already gained coverage elsewhere.

We are particularly hoping to attract interest from Sutton’s minority groups to help improve the political representation of the borough’s minority ethnic communities.

There seem to be two assumptions in this statement. The first is that there aren’t enough ethnic minority councillors (hereafter “ME”) and the second that the ethnic composition of the council actually matters.

So, is Sutton Council too white, and if so, what would be an acceptable number of ME councillors? I don’t think it’s my job to allocate specific councillors into ethnic categories but I expect that the council does this, whether by self-reporting or otherwise. Nonetheless, you can take a look at the current list of 54 councillors and judge for yourself. They do look predominantly white to me.

At what point does this predominantly white council become too white? If the question is meaningful at all it must be possible to quantify the matter. The usual approach to “under-representation” is to consider the chosen ones in the context of the pool from which they are chosen. Sutton had just over 10% ME residents in the 2001 census and it’s estimated that there are now around 13% ME people living in the borough. Should we assume that it is unacceptable for there to be fewer than 13% ME councillors, as seems to be the case at present? If so, what if there were more than 13% ME councillors? Would we then have a problem of white people being under-represented? Could we expect to see council-funded projects “particularly hoping to attract interest from Sutton’s white community”?

Why stop with treating all ME people as a homogeneous group? We might be able to approximately hit just the “right” amount of ME councillors but then find that people from Chinese backgrounds are hogging seats that really should go to Black Africans. Is this all about skin colour or should White Irish and White Other Europeans get a look-in too? What’s their representation like?

And of course, why stop with ethnicity? Plenty of other social groups could make a claim for better representation on the council. There appear to be 17 women on the council or around 31%, far below the number of women in the population which is just over 50%. Women appear to be at least as far behind as MEs in representation — why isn’t a women’s group running this project expressing “particular hope” in getting more women on board? How would we go about getting just the right number of councillors from all these groups (some of which overlap) simultaneously?

If you’ve already switched off by now, you’ll probably have this down as yet another exercise in lambasting “political correctness” through the exploration of a supposed white (male) victimology. So I should be very clear about this: Discrimination is real, it is bad and it should be tackled effectively. But the root of discrimination is the false perception of significant difference and that’s very much what it looks like is happening with projects like this in a place like Sutton. Situations elsewhere may be different, of course.

Why should anyone care about the ethnic origin of their councillor or indeed, the council as a whole, in a place like Sutton in 2009? Is it right to assume that a white councillor here cannot represent a black resident? Is it right to assume that a black councillor here cannot represent a white resident? Should we assume that just because a body of councillors doesn’t appear to be representative of the population in terms of ethnicity, that the population is in fact not represented by them adequately? This isn’t 1930s Alabama or contemporary Barnsley or Barking. Do our 31 LibDems, 21 Tories and two independents harbour a significant number of closet racists?

If this is an issue in practice then I’ll be the first to want to do something about it. Local councillors serve a dual role. In no particular order, they represent their parties on the council and work to advance their parties’ political programmes. They also represent the constituents of their wards and often act in a non-partisan way to ensure that their constituents’ voices are heard and their personal issues with the council are settled. In my experience, local councillors generally do a good job.

To seek to increase the number of ME councillors is really implying one of two things, neither of which are very complimentary. Either the white councillors really aren’t representing their ME constituents adequately. I suspect and I hope this isn’t true. Alternatively, perhaps it’s the case that ME residents feel that they don’t want to be represented by white councillors, no matter how good a job they may try to do. I suspect and hope that this, too, isn’t true. But if there is racism among Sutton’s councillors or in the wider community, why don’t we deal with it rather than assuming that the problem lies with the ethnic composition of the council?

It’s great that Sutton Council is giving local people a chance to find out more about becoming a councillor. I’d be happy to see anyone from any background stand as a candidate for the party of their choice, or as an independent. But the single biggest impediment to large numbers of people getting elected as councillors is not supporting either the Conservative or Liberal Democrat parties, being the only parties which managed to get councillors elected at the last full council election. If you want to pretty much guarantee failure at the ballot box and exclusion from elected office in Sutton, stand for Labour, the Greens, UKIP, the BNP or yourself. It won’t be your ethnic background that sees you left out in the cold but your politics. That’s where a real and significant lack of diversity on the council is clearly evident.

Of all the differences that one could discern between people, ethnic origin in a place like Sutton is one of the least significant. Most ME people here have either been born in Britain (often to parents that were themselves born here) or have lived here so long that their cultural frame of reference is as much British as mine. The council should act against discrimination where it finds it but should also be absolutely scrupulous about not making even the very subtle implied insinuations of discrimination or unfair treatment where none appear to exist. There is enough real misery in society without having to contrive more — and allocate public money to its supposed amelioration.

We should work towards having a community not where the composition of the council is “sufficiently diverse” (whatever that might mean in practice) but where people of all backgrounds (and not just all ethnic backgrounds) feel well represented by their councillors, whoever they may be. It matters what councillors do, not who they are. If the Shadow Councillor Scheme runs again next year, let’s have it organised by a neutral group rather than a sectional interest one and make it clear that absolutely everyone is not just welcome, but equally welcome.

I welcome your own perspectives and experiences in the comments below.

(Click on the image to download the PDF, 19KB, opens in new window/tab.)

Like this? Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/adrianshort

I’m a self-confessed and unashamed news junkie and this is how I’m starting to mash up news in my local area. For those that aren’t local, Sutton is a London borough with a population of approximately 180,000. Stonecot Hill is a neighbourhood within Sutton with a population of a few thousand.

Here’s how it all works.

Sources (green boxes)

I write Stonecot Hill News which is a local news blog running as a standalone WordPress installation on its own server. It produces an RSS 2.0 feed which here is treated as an outbound API.

Paul Burstow is the local member of parliament (constituency: Sutton & Cheam). Paul posts news regularly to his website and for many years that site has been serving an RSS 1.0 (RDF) feed. Whether he realises it or not, Paul laid one of the first foundations for news mashability in the borough.

The Sutton Guardian is the local newspaper, published by Newsquest. Together with its sister titles in other areas, they publish several dozen RSS 2.0 feeds for a wide variety of content.

Sutton Council is the local authority for the borough. Despite a recent £270,000 revamp to their website they haven’t yet managed to step into the Twenty-First and produce any RSS feeds. However, they do publish a variety of content regularly on their website, including their press releases.

APIs (grey boxes)

For the non-technical: API stands for Application Programming Interface, but that doesn’t tell you very much. Think of APIs like connectors or adapters that allow one program to plug into another in the same way that our household appliances can all connect to the electrical network because they share common plugs and sockets.

An API may be inbound (allowing data to be put into an application), outbound (allowing data to be extracted) or both.

As we can see in the diagram, applications which use APIs can be daisy-chained together, with the output of one application being fed into another.

RSS and Atom feeds are also APIs in that they provide a structured way for a program to get data out of an application. These feed formats are simple to implement (many applications produce them automatically) and are the first thing to consider when implementing a simple outbound API for an application.

Mashers (pink boxes)

Mashers are small programs that connect otherwise incompatible inbound and outbound APIs together. TwitterFeed is a simple example. Say you want to automatically post the new items from your blog to your Twitter account. Your blog serves an RSS feed but Twitter, while it has an inbound API, cannot accept RSS directly as input. TwitterFeed links the two, allowing the user to define any number of RSS feeds as inputs and any number of Twitter accounts as outputs, via the Twitter API. In this way, TwitterFeed plugs blogs into Twitter.

Yahoo! Pipes is a much more sophisticated and flexible masher. It can take inputs from a variety of sources (RSS, Atom, CSV, Flickr API, Google Base or even raw web pages), sort, filter and combine them in every conceivable way, and output the results as a single stream in various formats (RSS, JSON, and KML, the geo-format used by Google Earth). For my mashup I created this pipe to filter Paul Burstow’s, the Sutton Guardian’s and Sutton Council’s news and only pass through items containing the word “stonecot” to the stream that eventually ends in the @stonecothill Twitter feed, which is just for Stonecot Hill residents. The number of items coming through these sources about Stonecot Hill is very low, but when something appears residents will want to see it. (By way of example, only a single press release from Sutton Council in the last 227 concerns the Stonecot Hill area specifically.)

As mentioned above, Sutton Council doesn’t provide an RSS feed or any other kind of outbound API for its press release. I wrote a screen scraper in Ruby (using Hpricot) that grabs the press releases directly from the council website, dumps them into a MySQL database and pushes new items into the Delicious API. I’ve used Delicious here for two reasons. Firstly, because it generates an RSS feed automatically from all the items posted to it, so I can easily connect this output to other mashers and APIs further downstream without having to generate and host an RSS feed myself. Also, Delicious provides a useful search facility on its website allowing me to easily search just the press releases from Sutton Council. This isn’t possible with the council’s own website, where searches are scoped to the entire site.

Destinations (orange boxes)

In my diagram, the destinations are sites and services which represent new ways of consuming information coming from the original sources. Don’t want to read Sutton Council’s press releases on their own website? You can folllow them in Delicious or on Twitter. Want to keep up with the latest news about Stonecot Hill? Again, the @stonecothill Twitter account can find this for you from various sources. I also add my own items to @stonecothill, making it a unique mashup of original and syndicated content that’s highly targeted and very local.

The information stream doesn’t need to end with these destinations. Any destination that provides an outbound API can simply be another link in the chain to downstream services. In my diagram, the RSS feed from Delicious is used to do just that, pushing all its content on to the @suttonboro Twitter account, and just the Stonecot Hill-related content on to the @stonecothill account via the Yahoo! Pipes filter. Twitter has its own specific outbound API and also serves RSS feeds. There’s nothing to stop anyone else building on these destinations by combining and filtering them with other sources to produce their own unique, relevant information streams that they find useful.

What next?

If you run a website, it’s time to start thinking of mashability with the same degree of seriousness as you treat human visitors. Your website needs to serve up feeds and APIs so that other programs can connect to your content and deliver it to people in ways and contexts that they find useful. Some of these may have an audience of thousands or even millions. Others may have an audience of one. Regardless, by providing an API to your content you enable others to build things that you haven’t imagined, don’t have the resources or desire to build yourself, and won’t have to maintain. Businesses like newspapers that survive by selling their content (or selling advertising around their content) are thinking very carefully about the challenges and opportunities for the future of their industries. For government and voluntary organisations, it’s time to start thinking more like evangelists than economists. Spread the word like the free Bibles in hotel bedrooms and take every opportunity to get your message out there.

Sutton Council have been encouraged in various ways to implement feeds on their own website and the song will remain the same until they do. I don’t want to maintain my scraper for ever and I certainly don’t want to build any more of them.

The whole API and mashability agenda is far bigger than simple web feed formats like RSS and Atom. It’s time for technologists to stop flogging the line that “RSS is an easy way for people who follow lots of websites to read all their news in one place”. Direct human consumption of RSS feeds is never going to hit the mainstream in that way. If you’re reading this, you’re far more likely that average to use an RSS reader. (I’ve got 86 feeds in my Google Reader right now). The average web user has barely heard of the concept and most definitely don’t do it. I suspect they never will. But it’s likely they’re already benefiting from syndicated content through sites and applications that they use. If they never have to see or care about the underlying technology that’s really no more a problem than worrying that the average web user doesn’t understand HTTP or DNS. It’s just plumbing that can stay out of sight and out of mind as long as it works.

For the minority that do use personal RSS readers, I’d like to see more of them with built-in filtering features. Setting a simple keyword filter on a feed makes RSS reading considerably more powerful.

For those serving up feeds, I’d like to see Atom more widely used. Without wanting to open a can of Wineresque worms, RSS 2.0 fudges a number of important issues around content semantics and provides no support whatsoever for correctly attributing items in feeds mashed from several sources. Atom was designed to solve these problems and it does. Let’s use it.

Lastly, mashability is about every conceivable kind of content and content type. It’s not just about news and text. Every stream of information should have its own machine-readable feed. Every system that can accept data from human input should implement an inbound API to do likewise. To take one example, FixMyStreet is a website for people to report street faults to local authorities and currently takes around 1000 reports a week. It even has its own iPhone application so people can report faults complete with GPS locations and photos directly from the street. Only a single local authority in over 400 has implemented an inbound API to receive these reports. The rest get them by email, which must be manually copied into their own databases with all the effort, expense, possibility for error and opportunity costs that represents. Third-parties building extensions to other people’s systems is no longer unusual, so organisations need to embrace the possibilities rather than fighting against it or standing around looking bemused.

It’s time to open the doors and windows and get the web joined up, mashed up and moving.

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.

Today I’m launching Sutton Chat, a new discussion forum for the borough. If you’re local, I hope you’ll take a look and join in. Don’t be put off by the silence — we’ve only just started.

It’s good to see that the amount of online discussion in the borough is increasing in quantity and to a degree, in quality. Several local bloggers have built up a good readership, produced great material and have hosted some worthwhile discussions. Bloggers: I’m right behind you. May you go from strength to strength.

What’s missing is a good neutral forum where anyone can raise a topic for discussion. Running a blog takes a fair bit of commitment. Sutton Chat aims to fill a gap and encourage more people to get involved with local issues online and hopefully in real life, too.

While Sutton Chat is politically and commercially independent, it’s designed intentionally to reflect my own ideas of how a site like this should work. Members must register using their real names. My aim here is to encourage people to be accountable for what they say and to enable people that know each other in real life to recognise each other and carry those relationships forward on the forums.

As an advocate of simple design, I’ve done my utmost to ensure that the site is clear and straightforward to use. Most of the usual cruft found on online forums like signatures, post counts and smileys is absent. The idea is to allow members to concentrate on pure discussion, making it both easier to read and to write.

Forums don’t run themselves. If you’re keen to debate the hot local issues and get to know more people in the area I hope to see you online soon at Sutton Chat.