We’d been at a retreat where William Perrin was the after-dinner speaker, and he was talking about how the web can be a powerful tool for community action. In fact that has been the focus of his work for the past few years.

Martin’s idea was to set up a community action site to try to persuade the train operator Scotrail to improve the service on the train line between Glasgow Central and East Kilbride. The trains often run late, and because the line goes down to a single track beyond Busby, passengers are sometimes kicked off at Busby station to wait for the next train, while the original train heads back to Glasgow to catch up on time. Hence kickedoffatbusby.org.

The basic content was the product of a 15 minute brainstorm during a coffee break at work, and was set up using WordPress (obviously) in around 2 hours. I used the Mystique theme as this provides a lot of smart controls, including a cool slider to set the width of the right hand column and a simple way to override the inbuilt CSS (credit to Martin for his work on the customised CSS).

I’ve also found these plugins useful:

• TDO Mini Forms – this allows any visitor to the site to submit a post without having to have a WordPress login, and therefore encourages community participation. To keep the site safe, the plugin uses Akismet to check for spam and permits moderation.
• Twitter Hash Tag Widget – to display any tweets with the #ekline hash tag.
• Widget Logic – this allows each plugin to be controlled using WordPress conditional tags, so that the widgets don’t need to be displayed on the sidebar for every page.
• I also wrote a widget to load live train times sourced from the National Rail Enquiries web service.

There are still some gremlins to iron out, but I think the site isn’t bad for a few hours work, and really shows the power of WordPress.

Do let me know what you think.