Talk2Croydon

Local citizen participation tools from the ground up

The idea of using online media to foster citizen empowerment in Croydon was hatched in 2002 by non-technical people in the local voluntary action team, long before the ‘Communities in Control’ Empowerment White Paper. Croydon’s Community Involvement Strategy Group (CISG), a multi-agency partnership of community involvement leads, identified a need for a single ‘hub’ for engagement activities. A web-based solution would enable all the partners to participate and attract audiences from groups often excluded by mainstream engagement techniques.

Jo Gough was responsible for the project together with project lead, Sarah Taylor. “Talk2Croydon serves and brings together two audiences; first, the community of local practitioners – paid people or volunteers engaged in work that strengthens civil society – and second, the general public. The technology just eases the way.”

Enthusiasts on the CISG were aware that existing efforts to connect the council, local health bodies and voluntary sector were not satisfactory; they knew what was missing and wanted to do things better. At that point Jo came across an excellent booklet on community involvement and equality that seemed to offer many of the answers. “It had been produced some 12 years earlier and needed updating. We thought, why not do it as an e-book? It became a massive interactive project.” However, the project’s first technology developers found this too difficult and pulled out. The scope for the technology was just too big.

Despite this setback the team still believed in the concept of Talk2Croydon as a community empowerment tool. Starting again in 2005, they drew up a set of guiding principles that they called ‘Croydon Community Involvement Commitments’. The Council, Croydon Primary Care Trust and Mayday Healthcare NHS Trust signed up to the guiding principles and all partners agreed a contribution to fund the project. Consensus was achieved in the form of a ‘compact’ between the voluntary and the statutory sectors in the borough. The site would exist firstly to provide a multi-agency intranet with toolkits and discussion groups for practitioners; and secondly, a public engagement space to foster community involvement. Targets were set to meet the funders’ expectations. The project was seen as a clear step towards compliance with new ‘Duty to Involve’ legislation, at minimal cost.

A project steering group was set up, including council officers, representatives of the PCT and hospital with Croydon Voluntary Action (CVA) leading and co-ordinating the development. CVA provided a project lead for one day per week. Under the strategic direction of the CVA Board, the CISG sets the direction of the project and delegates implementation to Jo. “It must be multi-agency but we check our direction by asking ‘does it fit with CVA’s mission?’ There is constant negotiation, not least because of the high turnover of staff in the public sector.”

Jo set out to find the right technology partner who could help her team harness the power of technology as a democratic tool. Advice from other colleagues in her field indicated that e-democracy agencies were charging large fees for constructing such sites. Then she got a personal recommendation to a developer who was already engaged in community involvement, using the open source community framework Drupal. “He not only had the technical know-how but also understood our aim.”

It cost £10,000 to bring Talk2Croydon into existence. CVA owns the domain name; the developer, Code Positive, hosts the site under a service agreement that allows some site changes over time. The site was built on the out-of-the-box Drupal infrastructure of user profiles, discussion and comment functions, RSS feeds and other community tools, but was then fully customised to the needs of the users and the commissioners. Over 90 local people from all walks of life took part in developing the specification.

The site was launched in September 2007 and within the first month had 169 registered members. Talk2Croydon exceeded its initial funders’ target of 3,000 visits, achieving 7,000 visits by more than 3,500 unique visitors. Five hundred members were needed by March 2009; in fact over 1200, including 36 practitioners, had already signed up by December 2008.  

Talk2Croydon is the virtual face of a government agency and can be accessed by anyone. Accordingly Jo and Sarah have administrator’s rights so they can monitor the site and can filter out any user-generated content that could be seen as offensive. There have been some unexpected outcomes, but generally positive ones. For example, a campaign about trees has provoked a great deal of interest.

“We realised the potential fairly quickly … and saw an opportunity to extend the reach to under-sixteens. But the site was not jolly or jazzy. So Croydon Xpress, our children and young people’s participation project, funded a secondary site which is called KidsTalk2Croydon. There you navigate by clicking on bubbles – ‘What matters to you?’, ‘Playing games’, ‘Staying safe’, and so on.”

The discussion areas are very active. Some eight to eleven years olds from deprived housing estates have one for discussing their school project work. Another is called ‘Peppermints in Danger’ – about a local community centre that may be closed. The site helps mobilise peers and enables participants to reach practitioners to improve the situation for themselves and for other children.

In the four years since the initial grant of £10,000, Talk2Croydon has evolved into the focal point of electronic public engagement for all the public agencies in Croydon. The council leaders acknowledged this by personally launching KidsTalk2, prompting Jo to seek a second tranche of funding to cover the on-going costs of hosting and service support. In parallel, negotiations are in hand with the local police to sign up to the Commitments and start using Talk2Croydon. The next planned step is to partner with a local group of General Practitioner surgeries who will use the Talk2Croydon tools to involve patients in the improvement of the surgeries.

In 2008 the site won recognition from the International Centre for Excellence in Local Electronic Democracy (ICELE) for providing the public of Croydon with the means to raise concerns, campaign and vote on decisions.

When asked to describe ‘success’, Jo muses: “Croydon is known for its trams. For me the success of Talk2Croydon would be overhearing, on a tram journey, passengers talking about the site. It is Talk2 becoming part of the life-blood – an ephemeral part of the borough that belongs to them.”