First you’ll need a notice account and then set up a noticeboard to work on your project. There’s instructions on how to do that here.

I created this one: http://elections2013.n0tice.com.

The next stage is to decide what information you want to show. For the example here I chose the candidates name, their home address, which political party they represent and which division they are seeking to be elected to.

All of that information is contained in the ‘nomination of candidates’ documentation which the local authority you are reporting on is obliged to publish. These examples are from North Yorkshire County Council and were found in a specially created Elections section on its website but they might also be filed under ‘council and democracy’.

Now you’ve got the raw data, there’s a choice of ways to ingest it into your noticeboard. If you’ve a large number of candidates, using the spreadsheet function could be useful – instructions on that here. In this case with a relatively small number of candidates I simply typed them into the system as follows:

Click the blue ‘post’ button.
Click on the blue ‘new report’ button.
Complete the form as shown below.
Click the blue create report button.

Once you have all the data on the noticeboard, creating map is simple. On the right hand side of the noticeboard you’ll see a small preview of the map with the pins from the addresses you’ve created. Click to expand and you’ll be offered the choice to share or embed.

If you’d rather carry out some design work then the web link will take you a KML file to treat in the usual way. If you’d like something that looks like the map at the top of this page – give me a shout on sarahATn0tice.com and we’ll sort you out.

Forget Google Hangouts and Skype conference calls though, we’re inviting n0tice users to an afternoon in London for a meeting and greeting, brainstorming, blue sky thinking knees-up. Well, we may not quite be dancing the afternoon away but we will most definitely be prompting some very thought-provoking discussions and activities.

This is an opportunity to not only meet some of the n0tice team (the worker ants behind the n0tice community and developer platforms) but to feedback on issues and concerns, and contribute to developments for the future.

Whether you use n0tice as a community journalism platform, to share happenings in your local area or about your favourite pastime, or to build mobile publishing apps, your contribution is always appreciated. And despite our online community being just that – online – there is still something very dynamic and valuable about personal connections.

Back in August last year, after our initial meet-up I wrote: “Get offline, be the eyes and ears of your little corner of the world, be the real person behind your notice board, and truly notice what’s happening near you”.

Eight months on, as many of us are probably even more attached to our gadgets and online tools, this sentence still holds true. In which case, Friday 19 April is your opportunity to down tools and join other n0tice-ers for a fun yet constructive afternoon.

The venue details:
Friday 19 April
1 – 4 pm
Timberyard
61-67 Old Street
London, EC1V 9HW
www.timberyardlondon.com
Closest train stations: Old Street and Barbican
Bus routes include: 55, 243, 4, 56

Email kathryn@n0tice.com to let us know you’d like to come or if you have any questions.

It is a major issue many of us are having to cope with and improving the care and experiences of people with dementia is a key commitment for the Department of Health.

Alongside the medical help and interventions, there are events for people with dementia and their carers going on around the country, helping to bring people together and keep those all important social connections alive.

As part of the Dementia Local initiative, a map created by local groups and individuals has been launched to show where those activities are taking place.

The team at NHS Choices have just started a map – which you can see on the support pages here – is powered by n0tice via this dedicated noticeboard: http://dementialocal.n0tice.com.

It allows anyone to post details of an event aimed at people with dementia or their carers to share it more widely. As well as appearing on the NHS Choices website, the n0tice technology means that it is also easily found via major search engines and can be easily shared.

Introducing the service, the website says:

“There are excellent information resources all around the country on dementia……

“People with dementia are best served if we all work to create dementia-friendly communities. That needs to start locally.”

Visit the map and help us spread word in your local area

View Larger Map

Useful links

• NHS Choices support pages.
• Alzheimer’s Society.
• Talking Point – Alzheimer’s Society’s online forum.
• Dementia Friends – launched by Prime Minister David Cameron to create a network of a million Dementia Friends across England by 2015.
• Carers Direct helpline free on 0808 802 0202

* If you’ve a group or organisation which needs a similar map for users, there’s more information available at n0tice.org or drop me an email at sarahATn0tice.com.

While you may enjoy some of the new features across all these products, the most significant change is in the engine powering what we do.

Some background first…last fall you may have joined one of the campaigns we developed with our marketing partners at LBi.

We tried to raise awareness around the changes and things to celebrate in the local high streets across the UK. We initiated a campaign encouraging people to #keepcycling through the cold and dark months (are they over, yet?). We developed a crowdmap for live music gigs in partnership with Guardian Music. And we developed a similar campaign encouraging people to shop locally at independent retailers.

That effort led to some new partnerships – from marketing (Divine Chocolate) to shopping (BigBarn) to publishing (…coming soon).

We suddenly realized that our original vision for the n0tice platform and partner ecosystem was nearly mature enough to offer commercially. It just needed a little more juice.

So then in December, Tony McCrae started looking at supporting multiple large scale professional publishing partners like our own friends and colleagues at the Guardian.

For example, while our search index Solr was great at powering the API, we knew it would get expensive and suffer performance problems in about a year’s time. So, Tony used the quiet Christmas period to move the API over to Elastic Search…in a matter of weeks, magically.

We improved our client libraries and also upgraded our testing, deployment and security profile. The user authentication service was completed…we now support OAuth 1.0a. And we’re adding bug and issue tracking, performance monitoring and health checking – the types of things any commercial SLA would expect to us to provide.

We’ve written a Platform Architecture overview if you want to learn more. It’s on a new developer platform web site we’re working on at http://developers.n0tice.org/.

There are also several new tools that our partners wanted which we’ll be able to offer more broadly soon.

So, after all this enterprise-level architectural work, we needed to eat our own dog food.

The n0tice web site, iPhone and Android apps were able to take advantage of this new power (not without a few unfortunate interruptions during the transition, of course) and upgraded the way they interact with the platform.

In the short term, you’ll feel the results as a user in terms of speed, reliability and visual impact. In the long term, more tools and technologies and partners and apps and campaigns and all sorts will be available to you both as a user and as a noticeboard owner.

Whether you’re a publisher, an editor, a broadcaster, a community leader, a local government authority, a campaigner, a marketer, a developer, a platform, etc. we are going to give you some really useful resources to help you with mobile publishing.

If you want to see and share what’s happening nearby, or if you want to give the power to your customers or your local community to see and share what’s happening nearby, then n0tice is there for you.

We haven’t unveiled all the details of what’s available to partners or how to partner with us, yet. But we’re happy to talk to folks who want to learn more.

Contact david@n0tice.com, or have a look at the developer platform web site to see the most current technical documentation.

Meantime, we hope you enjoy the upgraded n0tice web site, iPhone and Android apps. As always, please join the conversation in the n0tice Google Group:
http://groups.google.com/group/n0tice/

Speaking at a recent Out of Hours Hyperlocal event hosted on Google +, the site’s publisher explained how the plug-in works with the contributions from the public, open space of the noticeboard at http://tongwynlais.n0tice.com.

The resulting selection of events shows at the site’s events section in this impressive calendar format which can also be filtered by categories and tags.

Learn more about how that was created with the video below which was archived from the event – the relevant section starts at 50 minutes.

There’s more about using n0tice for an events calendar here at the n0tice.org toolbox site which includes other ‘howto’ articles and ideas for publishers.

Picture the scenario – you’ve got the time agreed, bought your ticket, travelled across the country and, finally, you’re there, tweeting away from the conference. You know you’ll not forget that speaker/link/picture/reference because it resonated so well with you but then you return to the office to share it and……it’s nowhere to be seen. If you’d had the foresight to favourite some tweets then maybe you can gather your thoughts – or hope someone creates a Storify which happens to curate your choice of tweets – or alternatively, have everything automatically tracked in n0tice for later, leaving you the time to concentrate on post-conference socialising. We’ve already tracked several events using the n0tice tools so here’s how to set it up to capture everything from an event and give yourself a break.

1. You’ll need a user account – sign up at n0tice.com.
2. Once logged in, go to the ‘my noticeboards’ link and click to ‘set up a new noticeboard’.
3. The noticeboard will be the place where all your content is saved and published online – think of it as your workspace – but it is public on the internet so give it a name which will mean something to people searching for the event.
4. Log into feedton0tice.com and follow the instructions to set up the feeds you require eg. twitter, flickr etc. using the guide here.
5. Sign off, sit back and enjoy your conference.

Once your ‘bot’ (automated feed) has captured everything on the noticeboard, there several things you can do next. Check through the feed and easily create your own report of the events main points by selecting the ones you want and using the facility to embed the tweets into a story, like this from last week’s Virtual Community Summit in London. @CarolineRadar tweets: The offline world is a minefield – managing expectations of what moderators should manage is very difficult, esp parents #vircomm13

@AthikurRehman tweets: Online Strategies should be driven by #SocialMediaAnalytics Monitoring can help brands with great insights #vircomm13 @VirCommSummit
And you can write a commentary around the individual items in a similar way to Storify. @vdimauro tweets: fantastic storify board of #vircomm13 – proud to have been a part of this amazing day! http://t.co/SfwRxzjL via @emoderation

With pictures, you can use the HashGordon.com app to create a picture gallery like the one at the top of this blog poast. I created that by using the filter to only publish the few pictures I selected from the entire number by ‘n0ticing’ them. There’s full details about using this tool here.

Stories and pictures of intrepid cycling have been coming into the dedicated Keep Cycling noticeboard over the winter months – so it’s time to celebrate your efforts.

Just check out these to get a flavour of what’s been going on:
Photo by detailista: “Cycling into the sunrise. Bring on nights of pushing home into sunsets.
#keepcycling”

@chrisgdack tweets: Rain has stopped and (dare I say this but) it is quite mild out @n0tice #keepcycling (@ Catherine De Barnes) http://t.co/52BZxWHF

Photo by alexwhittaker: “Beautiful morning in the park #keepcycling #eastlondon”

All that effort deserves some reward, so our delicious partners at Divine Chocolate have come up with something extra special this month.

As well as a prize for snapping and sharing the best view from wherever you’re cycling, all you London cyclists can also claim free chocolate on Keep Cycling Day which is Tuesday 5 March.

All you need to do is cycle up to the Divine pop up shop at Seven Dials in Covent Garden on day and chocolate rewards will be yours – just take your bike/helmet.

The pop up shop will be open for two weeks from the 25th of Feb but you’ll have to pedal there on the dedicated #keepcycling day to claim your prize.

But if you’re not near Covent Garden, don’t worry – there’s a lot of Divine goodies up for grabs wherever you are. To join in simply snap your favourite cycling view and help us to map the country’s top cycling route as follows:

Post it to the #keepcycling noticeboard at www.keepcycling.n0tice.com with Twitter or Instagram.
Make sure you turn location on and hashtag your post with #keepcycling, to see your pictures and reports pop up on this n0ticeboard, and feature in a guide that showcases the best of cycling this season.

We kick off 2013 with news of a new local website on n0tice which seeks to cover the Stourbridge area in the Midlands. It’s creator Abigail Edge tells us more about why she’s set up Stourbridge.n0tice.com.

Firstly, I asked her to tell us a little about her passions and interests
I grew up in Stourbridge, in the Midlands, but only recently moved back to the area after more than ten years living away in London, Bristol, Plymouth and Leeds. I’m a journalist and web editor currently working at Midland News Association (though Stourbridge.n0tice.com is a personal project). Previously I was online editor of ThisisBristol.co.uk and also managed Northcliffe Digital’s Local People sites in the South West, which is what sparked my interest in hyperlocal news.

My favourite things are going to gigs and festivals, rambling around the countryside and exploring new places – last summer I spent three weeks backpacking around Sri Lanka. I’m a member of my local running club and am currently attempting to learn photography and Spanish, all to varying levels of success. I’m also a self-confessed social media fiend – you can find me on Twitter @abigailedge or WordPress www.abigailedge.co.uk.

Why did you set it up and who is involved?
I set up the noticeboard to create an online community space for people living in and around Stourbridge – somewhere they can share news, events, photos and anything else of interest. It’s early days and at the moment it’s just me running it, but once the word spreads I’d like to see more people involved.

Tell us the three best things about Stourbridge
The noticeboard covers Stourbridge and the surrounding area, including Wordsley, Wollaston, Dudley, Hagley and Norton. It’s a relatively small town with a population of around 55,000 but there’s a lot that goes on. The best three things… ?

– Birmingham, the UK’s second city, is just 30 minutes away by train but Stourbridge is also surrounded by some really beautiful countryside, from the rolling Clent Hills to Kinver Edge with its rock houses carved into the woodland sandstone ridge.

– It’s got a deep-set arty, bohemian streak and a thriving local music scene. Cult bands The Wonder Stuff, Pop Will Eat Itself and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin all hail from Stourbridge, making the town something of a Mecca for NME readers in the late eighties/early nighties!

– Stourbridge people are friendly and down to earth, while the town itself has some great real ale pubs and independent shops. My favourites are The Duke William on Coventry Street and Scary Canary Clothing in Victoria Passage (scarycanaryclothing.co.uk).

What do hope to achieve with the noticeboard?
I’d like to see people using Stourbridge.n0tice.com to highlight the best of Stourbridge, whether it’s to share a great photo or to let people know about events, offers and news in the town. I’d especially like to see local venues, clubs, businesses and community groups getting involved. And I’d like to get everyone using the #n0ticestourbridge hashtag on Twitter and Instagram! Essentially it’s a public space that’s open to everyone – how it develops really depends on how people decide to use it.

* Visit the Stourbridge noticeboard here. Are you doing something with n0tice that you’d like to share? Whether it’s a hyperlocal, a mapping project or maybe a photography challenge we’d love to hear about it. Contact me via the comments below or via the email Sarah@n0tice.com.

I intended to write some sort of happy-clappy “what a great year!” type of message today, but I’d prefer to write about the challenges ahead.

Of course, it has been a truly amazing year for n0tice. We moved the service out of beta in the Spring, launched a robust developer platform, rolled out our first sponsored partnership, kicked off an exciting social marketing campaign, rebuilt the n0tice iOS app, launched our new Android app, developed some fun new curation tools, and integrated with the Guardian in some creative ways.

The team, everyone participating on the platform, and the many observers wanting to know how this project unfolds will surely feel the progress we’ve made and hopefully enjoy being part of this journey.

But n0tice is still very far from playing the role it could and should play in the world.

There are many forces challenging the civic fabric that keeps people engaged in the idea of progress. This is happening both in our local communities and the world at large – threats to the shape of the Internet itself, how it is governed and what people can do with it; deep issues of trust in our institutions; economic disparity and shrinking resources; and, worst of all, physical threats both from mother nature and our own kind.

On an admittedly hopeful and probably shallow level I always thought that n0tice could help people to address problems that face us by becoming a more integral part of the spaces we inhabit. Starting with a shared digital platform for reporting what’s happening nearby right now and what’s going to happen tomorrow we could improve local discourse which could then turn into action.

The public noticeboard is the perfect metaphor for what we’re doing. It facilitates a public conversation about our local communities – a space that is open to all, where leadership is flattened and authority is distributed and perhaps even competitive.

The technologies making this possible have pros and cons, of course.

There can be no doubt that being present and aware in the physical world we inhabit will get harder and harder as the digital distractions continue to fight for our focus. It’s also true that the immediacy of today’s digital media is training people to think that everything can happen fast, but sometimes meaning has a longer gestation period which affects cultural evolution at glacial pace.

There’s a big gap between noticing a dangerous street corner to getting a new sign posted which is a far cry from changing the law and even further from changing people’s behaviors.

But maybe these new technologies can enhance our experiences in the real world rather than compete with them. And maybe our local communities will improve as a result of what people accomplish using the digital network.

Sometimes a spark is all that’s needed to put momentum behind a movement.

When we kicked off the #keepcycling campaign we had a feeling it would resonate, but we certainly didn’t expect people to spread it across Twitter as far as it has gone now. Similarly, we were hoping the #localshopping and #gdngig campaigns would trigger an interest in sharing the best of people’s local experiences, and, sure enough, hundreds of reviews and photos later we have some wonderful social maps of what’s happening in small neighborhoods and big cities alike.

These are just little tastes of where this journey could start going – turning observation into action. Awareness is the first step toward empathy. And once people start to care about the little things happening around them they might think more about the bigger things.

n0tice may not be able to put fate and destiny back into our own hands. The world is full of surprises – both horror and magic. But we can certainly progress as individuals and as communities by democratizing information about the spaces we inhabit and making that information actionable.

n0tice has had a great year. The n0tice team – Daniel, Sarah and Tony – have been brilliant – creative, hard-working, thoughtful, collaborative, skillful, etc. The n0tice community has been incredibly helpful in steering us and telling us openly and honestly what they think. Our partners have been invaluable as we evolve the tools and strategy – Talk About Local, LBi, Mentally Friendly, Tyrell Mobile, Ture & North. And we’ve had some amazing support from the Guardian, CEO Andrew Miller, in particular, and several editors, community leaders, and the sales team who have pushed us in smart new directions.

Next year is going to be more challenging, in many ways – a more serious test of what this platform can achieve. We know we can build useful social software. Can we also help people actually make a difference?

Confederation Park.

Q. First, could you tell us a little about the Calgary Herald?
A. The Calgary Herald is the major metro daily newspaper of Calgary, a city of a million people on the Canadian prairies. The paper has been around since 1883, and in the last number of years, our whole operation, like most newspapers, has been shifting its focus onto the Web. We’re the biggest media site in the city, and one of the biggest metro newspaper websites in Canada.

Q. You call it sledding, we call it sledging – just how important a pastime is it for people there?
A. A true Canadian would actually call it tobogganing. Technically a toboggan is a more traditional wooden sled with a rounded front end. If you buy a good one and use it for years, they can get suicidally fast – great fun! But we use the words sledding and tobogganing interchangeably.

We have long winters here, so sledding is a fun pastime for families, especially those with kids. And we’re a skiing city – the Rockies are only about an hour drive away – but that can be expensive, so tobogganing is a nice free alternative you can do in the city. However, finding the best hills in the city can be tough, especially for newcomers, so we thought we’d ask readers to share their favourites, and we’ve been plotting them on a map.

Q. How did you hear about n0tice and how are you using it?
A. We’re big on crowdsourcing, and we’re always looking for ways to improve the way we present reader information. Crowdsourced maps can be very labour intensive. We did a big project last year in which we crated dozens of maps with community data, and it was a huge amount of work, so when we came across n0tice being used on the Guardian website, we liked it’s potential. We’ve been asking people to either post their sledding hills directly onto the n0ticeboard, or just let us know by email and social media, after which we will post that data ourselves. Most of the response has come through social media, usually people tweeting us a location, but it hasn’t taken us long to post that into the n0ticeboard ourselves.

Q. What sort of response has there been to the sledding noticeboard?
A. It’s been really good. There were more sledding hills plotted in the first day than I expected, and many of them were unknown to me, so already it’s a good resource for Calgarians. Sometimes, a good toboggan hill is a bit like a good fishing hole in that people tend to keep them secret so they don’t get overrun with people, so we’re happy that people are sharing. We’re going to keep building on it through the winter.

Q. Any plans for the future?
A. We get a lot of reader response from social media, so we’re also looking forward to using some of the mapping capabilities directly from Twitter and Instagram. We’d love to get more reader photos in there.

If you’re using n0tice for an interesting project. We’d love to hear from you and pass your experience on here at the blog – contact sarah@n0tice.com or leave your details via the comments below.