Anyway, I admire this tree every day on my way home, and I just wanted to let it know that it’s appreciated…

It was my last meeting as minute-taker (I’m off the Committee now) and I’m looking forward to getting stuck in to things like scanning the 1978 photographic survey prints and getting them online, and helping Fremantle in whatever other geeky way I might. :-)

Now then, who’s up for a coffee-powered occupation of that debacle of a scaffold that’s been dumped on the lazing ground of the World’s End Cafe?

Flippin’ ridiculous.

Photo by Pedro Figueiredo [CC-BY-SA-2.0]

Partly inspired by the activity starting to happen on Freospace blogs (and the possibilities of disagreement therein!), but mainly just because it’s nice to have a beer after work and meet some of the people who’s names we see dotted around the web.

The idea is to just talk about whatever’s interesting: who’s blogging, and why; how to contribute; what software to use; photography; what to write about; anything, really. Even if you’re not a blogger, but are interested in jumping on a soapbox, come along to learn how! It’s jolly easy.

(By the way, on the topic of blogging: if you’re a WordPress user, they’re doing a survey of how you use WP, if you feel like helping.)

[source]

Which is pretty good, considering some parts of Perth; but it could be much better. So I’ve downloaded some Walking Papers (it’s rather an easy way to get a map printed on a grid of individual pages, along with an index page; here, there’s seventeen A4 pages all up):

And shall print them, and (once the rain’s buggered off again) shall walk the streets (probably dropping off a few of the Freo Society’s new brochures along the way), clipboard, pen, and camera in hand, and fill in whatever’s missing.

Take that, Google Earth! (Hmm, yes, possibly not the most smashing blow to the forces of privatised data, but one likes to do one’s bit, eh?! Especially as it’ll culminate in a nice coffee at Figo’s.)

I’ve written about Freospace before, but of course now it’s all public and ready to use, there’s a few more things to mention:

• They’re using WordPress, with the multi-site feature enabled. The choice of this is almost too obvious and sensible to mention, because if someone is setting out to create any sort of group of blogs, WPMU (or whatever they’re calling it these days) is likely to be at the top of the list. It’s just that when it comes to government, one can’t take sensible decisions to be inevitable (don’t take that the wrong way!).

• It’s not completely open-slather: user registration is closed, so the hoi polloi aren’t able to post news—but they can post comments on anything, and I’d imagine that anyone wanting to get involved would be able to do so pretty easily. Far better getting involved with this sort of community-web stuff face-to-face, anyway, I reckon. Keeping it all online isn’t necessary when we all live so close!

  Which is an interesting point: the precinct group meetings seem to still be the focus of engaging with Freospace—but again, that may change, as people get involved who mightn’t be so keen on the meetings. Get ye along to freospace.com.au!

• There’s lots of talk about ‘conversations’ and these blogs enabling community collaboration and whatnot. Which is great, but I can’t help but feel that ultimately this is about community relating to Council, who are still somehow separate and in the position (within this framework at any rate) of power. I don’t mean that in a negative way, really; just that this doesn’t strike me as being the online equivalent of the noticeboard at the shops. The element of anachism, or collective ownership, is possibly missing. I might be wrong about this. Freospace seems more part of the mechanism of representative democracy, a fantastic way for us all to meld our ideas and reach a better understanding of the “will of the demos” or something. It’s not somewhere to post your announcements about lost cats or upcoming book club meetings.

All up, I think Freospace is brilliant, and absolutely in the right (technical, and social) direction. Thank Stallman that the Council didn’t see fit to use Friendface or Ning, or some other ridiculous silo’d means of communication!

Update: I’ve just noticed that not all Freospace sites are active yet: O’Connor, South Fremantle, and White Gum Valley seem to still need a bit of love!

Perhaps someone took Tilden’s fourth principle to heart? The chief aim of Interpretation is not instruction, but provocation.

So I started from the outside, yesterday, and moved inwards…

1. Wikipedia, a first port of call for general info about anywhere, gives a reasonable overview to Freo from an outsider’s perspective. The Fremantle category has the subcategories show in the graph at right (which comes from the catgraph tool by User:Dapete). Obviously, this categorisation isn’t complete, and needs to be improved to reflect what’s actually important in Freo. (More on this later…)

2. Next, there’s the Council’s website, fremantle.wa.gov.au, which has recently undergone a redesign, and is looking… umm… well, there’s lots of great information for residents and whatnot! There is a news feed, and a calendar of upcoming events (which I’d link to, but it’s a JS overlay thing that doesn’t seem to have it’s own URL). There are plans for new web-based methods of communication with constituents: firstly via a CRM for interacting with Council (for the general public? or just precinct committees?); and secondly (and I think this is going to be separate from the CRM) a network of community-group/precinct websites, called FREOSPACE. This is akin, perhaps, to the Cockburn Community Portal.

   I got my information about these plans from the presentation that Jen Valesini (Coordinator of the Fremantle Volunteer Service; is that right? perhaps not; anyway, she was part of the Precinct Review) gave to last week’s Freo Society meeting; and the Precinct Group Report.

3. Then, there’s a host of topical and personal blogs: Adele Carles, State MP for Fremantle, Brad Pettitt, Fremantle’s Mayor, Cyclefreo, Dismantle, FERN, the Fremantle Environment Resource Centre, Freo Tribe, the blog of the Fremantle Society, Freo’s View, Tom M. Wilson, Love Freo, Melissa Parke, Federal MP for Fremantle, and The Painted Fish. There are more. I’ve started collecting a list of these as a ‘Freo Planet’ (to use that possibly-too-geeky term for an aggregation of news feeds); the planet itself has a news feed, the idea being that one could subscribe to just one source to get all Freo news.

There’s more to be looked at, but in a general sense I think there is room for a ‘reference’ website about Fremantle. An open site for the stories and detail of Freo, rather like Wikipedia but with ‘non-notable’ topics permitted (not notable in a global perspective, that is). Somewhere that will record, preserve, and make available the minutiae of what goes on here. Is the Freo Society the best organisation to provide this? I don’t know. I’m talking about something more than just the straight ‘history’ of the City (for that one might say that the Local History Centre would be the best coordinator). This would be a site that accepts photos of caravans on South Beach in the ’40s as well as contemporary cafe reviews. It would have a comprehensive calendar of events, and essays on life in Fremantle…

Perhaps I’m getting a bit carried away. Certainly it’s time to stop writing, and head down to Kulcha….

I have many ideas about the website redevelopment. At the moment it’s technical stuff: deciding between Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki, or something else, and the philosophical differences that software engenders (in the means of interaction and collaboration). I’ll post more, soon, about what we’ve been thinking about that. (I’m liking the idea of the division down the lines of there being The Fremantle Society, Inc. on the one hand, and the society of Fremantle on the other. The distinction between the incorporated body, and the actual built and social environment of the City that is the former’s raison d’être.)

But there was other stuff happening, such as the seemingly never-ending discussions about the new bus terminal outside the train station, and someone’s idea to amalgamate East Fremantle and the FCC (they even wanted a referrendum).

I was playing a bit with adding notes about the people in these articles to pages on ArchivesWiki. Generally they’re not notable enough for Wikipedia, and I haven’t yet found a good, similar, project that accepts ramdom little snippets about random people. I’ve a slight idea of working on some sort of ‘local history wiki’ for Fremantle, with pages about any and all people, places, buildings, etc. — but I don’t suppose it’ll take off.

It’s frustrating, reading through these newspaper clippings and not being able to put the full text up anywhere (although I have put the East Freo one above on Wikisource), and not assimilating their information into relevant, composite, articles. It just makes it feel more satisfying, if when I find a reference to some doing of Mr. McCombe the Town Clarke, I note it down on his biography. So I think I’ll do more of that.

Further Afield

I think there is a need for a general, world-wide, catalogue of newspaper articles, both historical and modern. Wikisource can’t be it, because it strives for full texts, and all modern newspaper material is under copyright. I envisage something pretty simple, that just catches headlines, summaries, and keywords (and of course source data). It’s not that hard to find libraries that have access to newspaper material, but it’s usually in microform and so utterly unusable if you don’t know what date/page you’re looking for. An index is needed!

The National Library of Australia’s new Australian Newspapers site looks pretty fantastic, and assuming they do end up digatising everything (which I think is the aim), will effectively supplant things like Wikisource so far as public domain material goes. But they’re still stuck when it comes to contemporary newspapers.

But I won’t ramble on about this any more; I’ve got daft blathering about systems development to get on with.