Simon’s Blog (the official one)

This competition has really got me thinking . . . . here’s another idea.

What is your idea’s name
Neighbourhood Watch Widget
A short description of your idea
Making neighbourhood watch groups more effective by improving communications between members themselves and the police service.
Describe your idea. How does it work and who does it help?
Widgets are small areas on a website or blog which deliver information or services provided by a trusted third party. A good example is the JustGiving Fundraising Widget. This widget is tailored for the particular fundraiser and can be placed on his/her own website. The widget shows a progress bar (amount raised vs target), the comments made by the last 3 donors, information about the charity and a button to donate. See http://ruralnet.typepad.com/pride2007/ for an example

Neighbourhood Watch Groups are very effective at reducing crime, the fear of crime and increasing community cohesion. However they face real communication challenges especially when a large proportion of the community works away from the community (eg in rural areas) or do not have email or who are not online (eg the older members of the community living on their own).

The Neighbourhood Watch widget would deliver the following functionality to every community website, blog or neighbourhood watch website that wanted it. Its availability may even stimulate the creation of new community websites. This is what it would do:

1 - Allow website visitors to log incidents: petty crime, anti-social behaviour and suspicious activity in the neighbourhood
2 - Allow visitors to the website to register to receive notifications of such incidents in the following formats: email; RSS; SMS text to their mobile phone; SMS text-to-voice to their landline phone; via twitter
3 - Allow registered visitors to turn the notification facility off or pause it
3 - Display the last 5 incidents reported in the neighborhood
4 - Have a ‘Get Your Own Widget’ button which would take visitors to the central ‘widget generator’ and allow them to specify their location and get their own widget for their own website
5 - When someone registered an incident the widget would send the details to the Police. To do this the widget would need real-time access to Government data
6 - A beat officer (ha!) or Community Support Officer could also register to receive notifications to their mobile phones when they were on duty in a particular neighbourhood
7 - The widget would also indicate that if they are reporting an emergency they should call 999!

During my secondment for CLG it would be so easy to get engulfed by the government machine and become invisible to the very people that I need to help me from both inside and outside government.

So I intend to use the internet as my workbench, or should I say, our workbench. Subject, of course, to not embarassing anyone or breaking the Official Secrets Act (more of a challenge) which I signed today.

My colleague, Paul Henderson, has been building the vice for the workbench - no pun intended - a nice little Drupal installation, a la ‘Open Innovation Exchange‘, where I will be keeping a diary, begging for insights, case studies, opinions etc. I’ll also be aggregating anything tagged web24gov (#web24gov for Twitter users) so please start tagging now! I want everything, del.icio.us bookmarks, blog posts, podcasts, video, tweets, the lot. Nick Booth, Steve Bridger, Ed Mitchell, David Wilcox, Tom Steinberg, Dave Briggs, Ben Whitnall, Paul Webster et al are you listening? Please get tagging! The vice will in place very shortly.

I’m trying to go into this without any preconceptions, except one, and that is that anything the government does should build on what’s already there . . . existing initiatives, services, ideas, opinions, knowledge and people doing good things. Starting next Tuesday. Looking forward to it!

The Tweeters amongst you will already know that I have been offered (and accepted) a secondment to Communities and Local Government (the Department of) as ‘Policy adviser: new technologies & online tools’ in the Community Empowerment Directorate. Grateful thanks go to Jonathan Adams who emailed me 6 hours before the application deadline saying:

Dear Simon
I saw this and thought of RuralNet. You may well know of this, but I
would not want it to pass by unnoticed.
Very short notice, but I have seen it only this evening.
Yours,
Jonathan

I’m very excited about this as it is a real opportunity to influence government policy with a White Paper due in the summer.

I’ll be using all the trusted open innovation principles on this one. I’d be a bit daunted if I didn’t know that my ‘pop-up’ support network will do just that once I get started. The job description follows. More at the beginning of next week.

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