By Paul

Ok, maybe not fully mapping Derby and maybe it’s a bit rough round the edges, but this should give you a good idea of the impact of Social Media in Derby and possibly inspire you to do something similar or even better?

A fair few Saturdays ago, I was bored and thought I’d see how much of Derby was on Facebook. I began to search for key areas (political wards or neighbourhood names), issues, people, places etc and plotted them as nodes on a Mind Map using MindMeister.

I tweeted to Tim that I was doing this and invited him to collaborate. It grew exponentially as we both edited it live and quickly moved beyond Facebook into something more indicative of the many sites in use by or known to both of us.

You can view the map for yourself below and draw your own conclusions about what it tells us. Everything on the map is freely available to public searches. All we have done is carry out those searches for you and put them all in one place.

A Mind Map illustrating the extent of usage of Social Media in Derby, UK.

City of Derby Social Media Map by Paul Cole and Tim Cooper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

The map was briefly made available at LocalGovCamp in a session I ran entitled, “Are we listening?”. This session and the discussions it raised have been covered very well already by Sarah Lay, Jack Pickard and Pete Ashton. All posts are definitely worth a read.

I had hoped to have a hyperlink (the small arrow) from each node taking you straight to each web page. Unfortunately, these have only (mostly) been added to Facebook so far.

You should be aware that there is an issue with the links to most of the Facebook Groups as I incorrectly pasted the link to the search results for the group and not the actual group address. This will take me a while to rectify, if I do it at all. To get to a Facebook group with a faulty link, simply copy and paste the exact title as it appears on the node into the search bar on Facebook. Links I have added for Facebook Pages and other sites should be OK.

The map is presented as is, that is, as it was created on that day. It may not be organised perfectly or logically, but it does its job as far as I’m concerned.

The simple experience of searching for and finding what is out there was a good learning experience in itself. You can take what you want from it or try it for yourself in your city or area.

Please share your thoughts with us.