The Greener Leith Social 2.0

Greener Leith is always keen to work out new ways of making it easy for people to get involved in improving their neighbourhood. We've been working on developing the Greener Leith Social for a couple of months now, and so we thought we ought to highlight some new developments on the site that you might be interested in.

The Virtual Surgery

All of our elected representatives hold surgeries at some stage - where you can go and meet them and discuss an issue with them. This is great if you know who you should speak to about a particular issue and can get to their surgery. Well, to make it easier to contact our local politicians we've set up a virtual surgery and invited all our local politicians, from every tier of government. This means you can ask them all a question in the Virtual Surgery group. If you ask a public question, your question, and the subsequent responses you get will also be tweeted to the world too! You can also send a private message to your politicians too through the site.

Lastly, we've used Friendfeed to combine information on the latest activity on all our local MSP's and MP's together (using the feeds from TheyWorkForYou.com), so that people can see a snap shot of what our representatives are doing and saying. If you're a real political anorak you can subscribe to the Leith Politics Feed directly here.

The We Love Leith - Tripshare group

This is a UK first for trip sharing (as far as we know). Thanks to financial support from SESTRAN we've been able to launch a trip share site with a difference - whenever anyone posts a new journey on our dedicated trip share site, it will also be tweeted and the latest journeys displayed in the trip share group on The Greener Leith Social.

Our trip share site aims to help Leithers do exactly as it's name suggestes - share journeys. If you make a regular journey by car, and would like to share the expense, and cut pollution, you could post your journey onto the site to see if anyone else in Leith is traveling your way.

If you'd like to walk or cycle more, but would feel safer with other people doing the same journey you can also use the site to find a walking or cycling 'buddy'. It's safe, secure and free.

If you would like to share a car journey, or find a bike or walking buddy you can register your journey here: https://www.liftshare.com/sub/3168 

Free tools for getting organised

Recently, we were able to add some new tools to the site that make it easier for people to work together on a project. Every member of The Greener Leith Social can now use 'Huddle Workspaces' to write, edit and share spreadsheets, documents and so on with other members. This is great for clubs, societies, campaign groups and so on as it makes it easier for you to work together without needing to physically meet-up or exchange hundreds of emails. Early indications are that the Greeer Leith management committee find it much easier to use than Google Documents too. People still need to meet up though, so now there's also tools that make it easier to arrange meetings as well. To use these features, you'll need to be a member though.

Free tools for sharing news and links

If you've seen something interesting on the web, we've got our own 'digg' style link sharing facility, where anyone can share a link, vote and comment on it. In time, we hope this will act as a community edited and constantly updated list of useful links for Leithers. It could do with a view more links! Add your favourite Leith Links here.

Never miss an update on the Greener Leith Social

We tweet the latest activity on the Greener Leith Social from here: www.twitter.com/theleithsocial

Or, if you prefer, you can get a weekly email with all the latest activity in it, by signing up under from the main page.

There's a growing number of Leithers taking part with the Greener Leith Social, and more and more people are starting to share photos, videos, links, and news on the site. The question is - who will be the 100th member?