Lewisham Council RSS feeds?

[Tim Lund]

I was recently shown a service coming from Lewisham's planning department whereby people put on an email list get sent updates on new planning applications in a particular ward, with a link to the relevant page on Lewisham's Acolnet system.

It's set me thinking that Lewisham could instead ask all its various departments to send a record to a web service whenever they make a change to web pages maintained by the Council with the following items:

• Date
• URL
• Brief description - e.g. "WELLS PARK COMMUNITY CENTRE, WELLS PARK ROAD"
• Department - e.g. "Planning"
• Location - e.g. a postcode, "SE26 6AD", which will be possible with planning applications, or a Ward name, such as "Sydenham" which will be all that is needed in many other cases. (Of course many web site changes will not have any location other then 'LB Lewisham', so this item would not be necessary)

With such a service, arguments could be passed to an RSS url such as

'&ward=Sydenham&datesince=12/01/2011',

or using automated geocoding of postcodes,

'&searchcentre=SE26%206JQ&within=1km'

and using such an RSS, web developers could develop services to suit whatever requirements local users might have.

Does anyone have any ideas as to how feasible this would be?

[Tim Lund]

Think the idea is kind of interesting, but would be difficult to do without deep integration into the Lewisham system (most of the CMS's are too dumb to send out a notification when info is change. The alternative would be to spider the site (which is what diy BCC did, I think, though I might be wrong), and then compare main content with stored main content.

By the way, not impressed by the ward-level notifications. People don't know what there ward is, in general, and if you're on the boundary you'll get loads of stuff that's not relevant. Which is why Planning Alerts was so needed

Responding to the second part I wrote

I take the general point about ward level notification - something I noticed 15 years ago when I started to get involved in local issues - in Peckham - was how after a year or so I realised I was becoming one of a class of local activists who thought of themselves as living in LB Southwark, rather than Peckham, Bermondsey, Dulwich or wherever, and so joined a self-referential circle that included Councillors and officers, but excluded ordinary people. However, there are two reasons why I think ward level notifications should be included. First, because there are some postings on Council web sites which are unequivocally about the ward - e.g., in Lewisham, meetings of our ward based Local Assemblies. The second reason is more ideological, if you like, which is that I believe in the importance of formal democratic structures in local government, and for all the obvious inadequacies of the traditional ways, I think alternatives will be worse. So for choice, I'd prefer to do something to make people more aware of what ward they live in.