Ladders to the Cloud

The Community 2.0 Project introduced a critique of the rhetoric of the Big Society and Gov 2.0 that identified the selective qualities of each programme. Westminster's ideas of the Big Society and the American concept of Gov 2.0 embrace a vocabulary drawn from the success of network society in which sharing, reciprocity, social networking and communication were all constructive elements that would contribute to a new paradigm of local governance.

The practical dimension of the Community 2.0 project developed an extremely simple approach to capitalise on user-generated and service based resources by bringing them 'down to earth' and providing a physical portal that allowed people to both read content about a place and more importantly, contribute to it - a 'memory pole' that is to be installed at a geographically and socially important location in Wester Hailes. The pole, designed and carved in collaboration with Scottish artists features QR barcodes that are gateways to cloud based material relevant to the location of the pole. People can scan one of the labeled tags and access and contribute to historical photographs, stories, video and audio clips. The intention is that pole will act as a social resource to help build connections between the people and the place, as well as drawing upon online resources. The pole builds on recent research such as the Talking Poles project developed by Moulder et al (2011) that transmitted local narratives by members of a community in British Columbia from a physical pole. Whilst the Talking Poles project was successful is was 'read-only' and the Ladders to the Cloud project offers the critical dimension of 'writing' as well as 'reading'.

Three key groups are going to benefit from this project:

1. The community in Wester Hailes - who will gain considerable development to the platform that was introduced through the first grant: Community Web 2.0. The new platform will offer further channels that will be designed by the residents to connect to cloud services or services that are yet unidentified. Some of these services may be personal and specific to minor groups, others may be more generic and simply offer 'help' or 'communication' with others. Those involved most closely with the project will also gain literacy and ICT skills.

2. Community development and regeneration practitioners - will benefit from the project in two ways. The platform will be made demonstrate to other neighbourhoods and communities the value in situated interfaces to cloud services. The evaluation findings will also demontrate methods to encourage like minded communities to adopt a similar role for digital media.