The workshop will be conducted next Tuesday, Jan. 24, at 1 p.m. and will be presented by SeeClickFix Online Community Manager Emma Richards. For more on her background, read her entry on the SeeClickFix staff page.
Reporters, editors, web producers, community bloggers and anyone else with an interest in covering or improving their community can participate in the workshop too. This workshop will be live streamed on the New Haven Register website (and here too), and I will moderate a live chat where I'll accept questions, concerns, and requests for Emma from those out there on the internets who can't join us in person.
Video streaming by Ustream
Some of the topics we've asked Emma to focus on include:
- Suggestions, tips and examples on how SeeClickFix can be used by journalists
- How to browse SeeClickFix reports for story ideas and news tips
- How to upload, close or comment on community issues reported with SeeClickFix
- Tips and suggestions for getting public officials more engaged
- Tips and suggestions for encouraging more reports by our readers
These topics were selected by our Journal Register Company Connecticut newsrooms in a survey I sent out last week. So this is what our journalists are most interested in getting out of this workshop.
But why stop there? If you'd like to learn more about creating customized widgets and watch areas, send us your questions in the livestream. Or leave a comment on this blog post, and I'll make note of it to include in the workshop.
Here are some examples on how the New Haven Register has used SeeClickFix in the past year.
- For New Year's, we asked readers to make resolutions for their towns. This was the result.
- On Election Day, we asked voters to report polling problems.
- In the wake of Hurricane Irene, we asked readers to report downed power lines and other storm related issues.
- Last spring, a prostitution ring was broken up by police thanks to a SeeClickFix report that the Register looked into as part of our "Gripe of the Day" feature.
What examples do you have?
In Torrington we get a lot of traffic concerns and complaints about problems on streets/roads: potholes, leaf blowing into neighbor's yards, etc. In the past, we've ended up doing stories on a certain road where traffic/speeding, for example, is a big problem for the neighborhood and it has alerted police or safety officials to the problem as well.
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