Liberal Democrats: Flock Together

Apologies to those of you who wanted to use Flock Together this afternoon. The site (along with all the other sites I host with 1and1) was down for about 6 hours.

Another reason to sort out some new hosting, I suppose.

Congratulations to David Peters for being the 1,000th account on Flock Together.

So far Flock Together has recorded 1,426 meetings, by-election and resources, comprising amongst others: 356 council by-elections, 329 social events, 237 campaigning sessions, 227 organisational meetings, 70 public meetings, 64 policy discussions, 44 conferences, 30 training sessions, 25 hustings, 17 RISOs and 5 parliamentary by-elections.

To make it all work, there’s a table in the background calculating the 1,426,000 different distances between each user and each event or resource!

Aside from the number of people who have found new ways to get involved in the party ‘in the real world’ as a result of Flock Together, here’s a special ‘hat-tip’ to the 7 people visited the Flock Together website and clicked through to joined the party online as a result!

I’ve had a bit of an RSS frenzy here at Flock Together.

There are now feeds for:

• By-elections
• Recently added or updated meetings
• Recent comments
• Blog entries

If you go to the relevant page there are also RSS feeds for organisations and comments on organisations meetings, as per the following examples for Liberal Drinks:

• Liberal Drinks meetings
• Comments on Liberal Drinks meetings

And there are also RSS feeds for individual organisations, such as this one for Federal Conference in the Spring

• Comments on Liberal Democrat Spring Conference

The organisation feeds and meeting feeds, as well as a personal RSS feed that only tells you about meetings that you are interested in, are displayed on the left hand menu on the relevant meeting or organisation page, or if you have logged in.

Some of the feeds take flags, as shown here for organisations and here for individuals.

Let me know if you would like any further options.

I currently run Flock Together voluntarily in my spare time, but the hosting of the site does cost money.

The current hosting arrangements cost over £200 a year, but users have complained about the speed of Flock Together, particularly while we had a lot of people using FT during the Green Tax Switch campaign, so I am investigating a dedicated server, which could cost more than four times as much.

Before moving to a new server, I’m quite keen to raise some funds to offset the costs - the more I raise, the better service I can provide.

To make a donation, please visit the donations page and press the ‘make a donation’ button.

If you would like to send a cheque or make a direct funds transfer, please email me on donation@flocktogether.org.uk for details.

In response to requests, I’ve added some options for organisations Flock Together RSS feeds, such as you might want to use on a local party or organisational website.

You can find the basic RSS feed on the organisation page of the party organisation you’re interested in - which you can find via search or via this page. The feed can be found towards the bottom behind a small button such as this one . Just right click the button and select ‘copy link location’ in Firefox or ‘copy shortcut’ in Internet Explorer to get the address of the RSS feed.

You should then have something like:

http://www.flocktogether.org.uk/rss.php?Organisation=567

To sort the meetings in order of reverse appearance (i.e. the most ‘recent’ post will be the most immediate upcoming meeting), add:

&sortorder=meetingdate

If you want to show your feed on a Prater Raines site, then the best option is just to add the following to your URL:

&praterraines=yes

If you want to exclude ‘parent’ meetings (for a local party, this might mean your regional, national or federal party), then add:

&showparent=no

If you want to exclude ‘child’ meetings (for a regional party, this might mean from local parties in their area), then add:

&showchildren=no

Finally, to set the publish date to the meeting date (which may break some feedreaders, since the publish date will be in the future), just add:

&scheduleddate=yes

I’ve added the functionality to register, and look for, resources such as RISOs on Flock Together.

This should make it easier for people to find a printer or RISO for printing Focus and other campaign literature.

You can add your RISO at http://www.flocktogether.org.uk/registerResource.php

Are there any other resources you think we should include or extra functions we should add? Have your say:

• on the discussion board
• via a comment on this blog

or send an email to flocktogether-subscribe@lists.libdems.org.uk to join the email discussion list.

Following the last, not wholly successful, attempt at a training video for Flock Together, here’s a new attempt using Flash.

The (free) programme that let me do this is called Wink and it’s proved surprisingly easy to use, and has produced dramatically better results than my last attempt. Its only slight negative is a mild Pinky-and-Perky-isation of my voice!

A hat tip to Mark Pack for getting Flock Together into the Guardian.

Exciting stuff on TheyWorkForYou.com with the launch of their new API.

This is all free to non-profit-making sites and thus lets Flock Together (as a decidedly non-profit-making site) access all kinds of information when users input a postcode, such as the constituency the postcode refers to and the MP that goes with that constituency.

Now to work out exactly what to do with the opportunities this represents! Obvious ideas include:

• Mapping users into their constituencies
• Automatically assigning meetings and by-elections to the constituencies they are held in

But I’ve got some even cooler ideas than that - particularly when one starts mashing up constituency information, Google Maps, Google News and Prater Raines website feeds!

Lots to think about…

In response to requests, I’ve added some options for personal Flock Together RSS feeds.

The basic feed remains, as before:

http://www.flocktogether.org.uk/userrss.php?id=yourusername

If you want to publish your feed, it may make sense only to show only meetings that you’ve ‘registered’ on Flock Together. To do this add the following onto your URL:

&registeredonly=yes

To sort the meetings in order of reverse appearance (i.e. the most ‘recent’ post will be the most immediate upcoming meeting), add:

&sortorder=meetingdate

If you want to show your feed on a Prater Raines site, then the best option is just to add the following to your URL:

&praterraines=yes

Finally, to set the publish date to the meeting date (which may break some feedreaders, since the publish date will be in the future), just add:

&scheduleddate=yes