Community Reporters, and the Future of Food in Manchester
Report by Rob Squires on Manchester's new Food and Wellbeing Group
Work is underway to develop new ways to share information between Manchester communities, and the public sector, about the future of food, health and wellbeing in the City. MCIN's community reporter programe may have a part to play in this.
The Food and Wellbeing group has been set up to enable the public to have a greater influence in deciding the future of food, health and wellbeing in Manchester. As part of my work for the group, I have been appointed the task of developing new ways to share information between members of the Health and Wellbeing Network, the Manchester Food Futures Strategy, and.the public in general.
In order to achieve this I have been investigating the potential of modern internet technology, specifically Drupal open source content management system (which I am using for this site), and RSS feeds. In addition I have been investigating MCIN’s (Manchester Community Information Network’s) Community Reporters programme.
I have set up this experimental web site called the Roblog, which is designed as a central depository of information concerning community food, and related issues in Manchester. The site is currently hosted for free by Creative Local Solutions, which is a community development consultancy, involving myself and Fraser How. The site is designed as a means for easily sharing information about local food across multiple networks. Currently I am the only contributor to the Roblog, but the technology is designed such that many people can easily contribute to the web site.
Resently, I have joined MCIN’s Community Reporters programme, so that articles I add to the Roblog, are automatically ‘fed’ into MCIN’s My Manchester community web portal, and a variety of other other community web portals, using RSS feed technology. My Manchester is the City’s prominent community portal site, and receives hundreds of thousands of hits per year. Participants in the Community Reporters programme receive a range of benefits, including potentially, web site hosting, training in using content management software, and access to equipment such as video cameras and editing suites. This week we were treated to a visit to the BBC to watch the live recording of Northwest tonight, and we are to recieve free training from the Programme's news editor, about how to produce newsworthy stories.
During the Food and Wellbeing Group's resent meeting, I described the Roblog, and Jess, the web content developer for MCIN's My Manchester, described the Community Reporter’s programme. The group discussed the idea of setting up a site like the Roblog, with which members of the Food and Wellbeing group, could store, and share information, between themselves, and the wider community, via My Manchester. In addition members of the group could also potentially receive the support and experience of MCIN through engaging with the Community Reporter’s programme.
These ideas were generally well received within the group, members of which expressed a keenness to use such a facility. It was agreed that I should further investigate ways of setting up this facility.
Geralding Wall, Zest's (North Manchester Healthy Living Network) new Community Food Worker, speculated that there are existing cooking groups and allotment groups, who could also benefit from using such a facility, in order to blog their projects, and document success stories. In fact such an activity is already included in the action plan of the Cooking and Nutrition Education group who received £10,000 recently through Food Future’s Collaborative Commissioning Programme (already discussed on the Roblog). MCIN are already collaborating within this group, to work with participants undergoing cooking and nutrition training, to blog their experiences, and share their successes. There is clear potential to link this project up with the Food and Wellbeing group, in some way.
