Last Saturday, January 31st, Kay from Mapping Futures organised a local Twitter Walkabout around Crofton and Honor Oak Park, and I went along to give moral and technical support. Read on to learn what I learnt from this event, and how you can organise this activity yourself in your area.

If you have been following our Neighbourhood Stickers Project, then you'll know that we've been busy developing Twitter Walkabouts as a new kind of digital participation method. We are working with local communities and universities across the country to test this process both face to face and online, and we are building up towards a bigger launch later in the year.

Though it was cold and lightly snowing, the weather didn't stop nine of us from exploring and discovering interesting aspects of the local area together. The walkabout was designed to help Kay's local Neighbourhood Forum develop its neighbourhood plan engagement using some digital techniques.

To date we've supported six walkabouts during our research project, but what was so great about this particular walkabout was that we were lucky enough to be joined by Nicholas Taylor, a member of the public who knew almost everything there was to know about the history of Crofton and Honor Oak Park. Nicholas then took on a leadership role, giving the rest of us a local history tour. 

We were briefed initially in the public library - it's always good to have a warm and dry meeting place to start. This was also where we could check we had set up our Twitter profies correctly, and share with participants how the process worked, and then when we were all ready we set off on our walk. There was a large variety of old and new buildings to see, interesting landscapes and quirky cafes to take photos of and tweet about. All with an interesting background history to them, as we found out on the day.

After an hour or so of walking around the neighbourhood, we all gathered for a debrief (and a drink) at the local brewery. Whilst we warmed up, we took a look at the discussion cards that we had created from our tweets  and published on the Neighbourhood Forum's Stickyworld page for 'Hopcroft Forum'. Take a full look at the tweets by following the link. 

Meeting up together with local people proved a really fun and easy method to capture photographs of a local area and build a website together, as you can see from this image of the Twitter Cards below.

There are a few tips and tricks that we are learning every time we support one of these walkabouts, and we'll be sharing these in the coming months, so may sure to subscribe to this blog and we'll then send you updates.

For one you need to ensure that your participants have their location settings turned on. This will allow their tweets to be located on the map in Stickyworld, making it clear and easy for people to see exactly where the tweet was sent from.

Another thing we have learnt recently is that when if the tweet was retweeted and then uploaded as a discussion slide, it will NOT appear on the geo-located map. You can see the difference from the icon on the corner of the photo on the discusion slide where locations have been saved with the image from Twitter. 

All in all my morning with Kay and her community in Crofton and Honor Oak Parks was really fun and I will mark it up as another successful neighbourhood Twitter Walkabout for the project. If you know the area, then of course do take a look and leave comments on the slides for the Neighbourhood Forum, and get in touch with Kay.

I'll personally be feeding back my observations to the development team who are building a new version later in spring, and we'll be preparing some more guidance for organisers who are thinking of doing the same in their area.

But we are keen to meet more testers, so if you work or know someone who works for a community organisation, charity, university, youth group or neighbourhood plan and who might find Twitter Walkabouts a really fun and useful participation exercise for engaging and capturing new insights, then do share this opportunity with them.

Remember it is totally free to try out with a Stickyworld account whilst this feature is still in beta. All you need to do is to get in touch with us and we'll get you set up and run through the full process. Also feel free to ask me any questions in the comments below and I'll do my best to answer.