Social media used to share Maciej Ciania murder appeal translations

Lothian and Border Police have turned to social media in a bid to reach people who may have information about the murder of thirty four year old Maciej Ciania, who was discovered in his flat in Dickson Street by his flat mate at around 9am on Saturday 14th January.

The officers investigating the crime believe local people may hold the key information that could solve the case. As well as tweeting in three different Eastern European languages, the Police have also released this appeal for information in Polish on YouTube. More than 1100 people had listened to it at the time of writing.

Detective Chief Inspector Gary Flannigan said: "It is now one week since the murder of Maciej Ciania, and our investigation is making good progress.

"The response from members of the local community has been very encouraging and is supporting the police investigation.

" The answer to finding Mr Ciania's killer lies within the local community and I am making a direct appeal to anyone who has information or knows who is responsible to come forward immediately.

"For whatever reason that they may be reticent about speaking to police, I would like to reassure them that any information we receive will be treated in the strictest confidence.

"Mr Ciania's death has devastated his family in Poland, and left them without a son and a brother.

"If members of the community would prefer to speak to a Polish speaking officer or a translator these services are available."

Anyone with information is asked to contact Lothian and Borders Police on 0131 311 3131 or the charity Crimestoppers in complete confidence on 0800 555 111.

 You can find written translations of the Police appeal in Polish, Lithuanian and Russian here.

Greener Leith Blog: 2011 in review - Biomass, mooncups and bicycles

Before we go any further, it's important to make clear that this isn't the Greener Leith Annual Report. We've still to get that online.

This is intended to be a quick look back at the year on this website - to show you what the most well read blog posts on the Greener Leith blog were. As the graph above should hopefully show (it may not work in all browsers - if it doesn't click here), traffic has grown steadily this year to our website, despite the fact that it's been managed entirely by volunteers for most of the last 12 months.

According to Google Analytics, the last twelve months have seen record numbers of vistors to the site. We had:

• 73,851 Page views


• 40,115 Visits


• 25,383 Unique Visitors

And according to Mailchimp, who provides our email service, each week at least a third of our 700 email subscribers read our weekly email update from the blog.

So, not a huge website, but nevertheless, we're still pretty happy that the numbers of people reading our blog is still going up, even though we have less resources to throw at it.

Perhaps surprisingly the most popular blog post on our site this year was this one, which reported on the fire at the Tail-end chippy on Leith Walk in January. Clearly there were lots of people worried about where they would get their next chip supper. That blog post featured a photograph taken by local resident Mark Sheffield.

In February, our second most popular blog post of the year arrived. We published 10 facts Forth Energy won't tell you about their giant power plant plan, just in time for a heated public meeting on the proposals.

This year we've been very lucky to have Emily Dodd contributing to the blog. In May she bravely launched into a series of blog posts on a green topic many might steer clear of - environmentally friendly feminine hygeine product, the Mooncup. Despite, or perhaps because, she advised men to look away right at the beggining of her series of Mooncup Monday posts - her first one comes in at number three.

However, regular readers of the Greener Leith blog will already be familiar with Ms Dodd's fearless nature. In number four spot is her January attempt to get us all to sign up to 19 Green New Years Resolutions by jumping in the Firth of Forth on New Years Day. If you haven't managed to stick to all 19 - many might be worth adopting this year. You can find them here.

In fifth place we have an interesting blog post. The No Leith Biomass campaign managed to put together a Google Earth file that anyone could download and use to see what the proposed Forth Energy powerplant could look like from any viewpoint they chose. In this blog post we shared the Google Earth file and invited people to share their views of the proposals. Here's some that were subsequently made by Tony Leach:

Find more photos like this on The Greener Leith Social

In sixth place we have the third part of the Mooncup Monday series where three Leithers gave their initial feedback on using aforementioned feminie hygeine product. The comments got quite graphic, so without further ado we shall move onto the blog post in seventh place which is...

....about Christmas Hampers. Another post by Emily, this one called on Leithers to donate food to the local Destiny Church Christmas Hamper appeal.

And, bringing up the tail-end of the top 10 blog post of the year on Greener Leith are three posts about cycling. In eighth place is our post which provides not one, but two free, downloadable, and very different cycle maps of Leith.

In ninth place, was our post that mapped out serious accidents in Edinburgh that involved cyclists in 2010, in an effort to get a better understanding of the risks associated with cycling on pavements.

And lastly, in tenth place, was a post highlighting an offer by council officers interested in helping tenement dwellers to find better ways to store their bikes.

Incidentally, you may be interested to know where all these visitors came from. We'd also like to thank these sites for helping to spread the word. Here's our top 15 traffic sources for the last 12 months:

1. Facebook

2. Twitter

3. Guardian

4. Energyshare

5. The Greener Leith Social

6. City Cycling Edinburgh

7. The Edinburgh Blog

8. Stumbleupon

9. Aunty Emily

10. The List

11. STV Edinburgh

12. No Leith Biomass

13. Leith Festival

14. Scottish Round-up

15. The Edinburgh Reporter

We'd obviously like to thank everyone who has helped make 2011 our best online year yet, whether you are a reader, a writer, a Facebook friend, a blogger or a Twitter follower.

Of course, any neighbourhood website worth its salt is not just about the stats. This year we wrote about a hugely varied amount of topics, including a number of themed series. For example, Leith Links Community Councillor, Angus Miller who by day runs Geowalks, helped us make five short Leith Rocks podcasts which you can find here.

Juliet Wilson, who is a keen Water of Leith Conservation Trust volunteer, has written a series of guest posts for the blog this year - mostly about the common birds you might see on the river. You can see all her posts in one place here.

We've had Edinburgh University graduate, and founder of gocarshare.com, writing about collaborative consumption, we've had a thoughtful piece by local resident Colin Brown, who wrote about his walk around Western Harbour, we've featured the prize winning grand designs for the Shrubhill brownfield site of another local graduate, Michael Bryan and we've had plenty of opinion pieces like this one, by our Chairperson, Charlotte Encombe, calling for the council to do more to repair Leith after the collapse of the Edinburgh tram project.

And of course regular readers cannot fail to have noticed that we've produced a whole series of Zero Waste podcasts. You can find them all here - but if you only have time to listen to one then the editors pick so far is probably the one presented by Leith Primary School pupils which looks at what they're doing to cut waste in their school.

Please do let us know how you think we can improve our blog for 2012 - and if you'd like to write a post for our blog, please do get in touch.

Leithers back our community owned wind turbine bid in huge numbers

Wow. Nearly 1500 people have now signed up to the Energyshare website to back our bid to build Scotland's first community owned urban wind turbine. 

Thank you, if you are one of the people who have already voted. 

If you haven't you voted, stop what you are doing. And vote now. You can do it here. 

We've had an amazing response on Twitter. Here's a slideshow showing some of the many tweets and blog posts that people have written to back our campaign. We made it to say thanks to everyone who has backed us so far: 

If you have already voted, there are still two weeks of public voting to go. Therefore this is how you can help to keep us in the lead: 

 Once you've voted - please share the above this link: http://www.energyshare.com/portobello-leith-community-wind-energy-project/

...with folk in your social media accounts.

If you are on Facebook, please sign-up for the 'voting event' and share it with all your friends. You can find the event here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=177382445684690

If you are on Twitter, please tweet your support with the link along with a little message to your followers encouraging them to vote every day, or as frequently as you feel comfortable while voting is open. A Tweet has a short shelf life, so a little bit of repetition for a good cause shouldn't annoy your followers too much.

Lastly, if any organisation you have a connection to has a blog, message board, intranet or an email list, please do post the voting link and encourage people to vote there too.

If you need more facts about the project you can see this link for more detail: http://www.greenerleith.org/a-z/p-is-for/portobello-and-leith-community-wind-turbine.html

We are up against an extremely organised Scout troop, and the difference between us winning £80,000 and losing it all, is in a few percentage points of the vote at present. More than 10,000 people have cast votes in the last few days alone. We really need you to use your social media, and any other social connections you may have to help us maintain the momentum over the next 12 days.

This project is being developed entirely by local volunteers from PEDAL Portobello and Greener Leith, but we hope it will be of benefit to the whole neighbourhood if we can pull it off!

200 back the Portobello and Leith Community Wind Turbine in 6 days

Greener Leith would like to thank everyone who has signed up to support our Portobello and Leith Community Wind Turbine bid. We've been blown away by the backing we've received from local people, politicians and media.

Your continued support is really important to the sucess of the project, and it really will make it more likely that we will get funding to take the project forwards. At present, our project is the most popular project in the entire UK on the Energyshare.com website - where the projects with the most support at the end of the month are more likely to gain funding.

However, we need to keep adding supporters to stay in the top 5 as lot's of other bids are also still adding supporters every day.

Therefore, if you haven't signed up as a supporter yet please do it straight away! You can do it here:

http://www.energyshare.com/portobello-leith-community-wind-energy-project/

If you have already signed-up as a supporter, please take action to encourage other people you know to sign-up as supporters of the bid. Email them, post the link to Facebook, or Tweet about it. Please help us keep the momentum going in any social network you're involved in. Already 127 people have shared the group on Facebook - but please keep doing it as sometimes people need a second reminder!

If they need more information you can send them this link too:

http://www.greenerleith.org/greener-leith-news/2011/6/3/back-our-energyshare-bid-to-boost-community-power.html

The project has had some fantastic coverage in the local media:

On Wednesday evening STV broadcast a package about the project featuring Justin Kendrick from PEDAL Portobello, Kenny MacAskill MSP and Greener Leith Board member Chas Booth. You can watch it here:

• Scotland's first urban wind turbine could be built in Edinburgh
  

Earlier in the week the Evening News ran a number of stories online and in the paper: 

• Evening News Editorial - More than hot air
• Blow Me - An urban wind farm
• Turbine plan for Seafield

STV also published this post on last Friday: 

• Community groups propse Scotland's first urban wind turbine for Edinburgh

We are also grateful for the visible support of local politicians including Kenny MacAskill MSP, Kezia Dugdale MSP, and Sheila Gilmore MP. If there are any other local politicians reading this, who are not on the planning committee - then please do sign-up too.

And whilst the vast majority of people supporting the bid are from Edinburgh, it's also nice to see that the Isle of Eigg have backed our plan too - as they have been a trail blazing community in the field of community energy.

Greener Leith and PEDAL volunteers have also been doing our best to share as much detail as we can with local residents at public meetings. Last week Greener Leith members discussed the project at the Leith Links Community Council and this week we attended the Friends of the Water of Leith Basin, and the Leith Central Community Council planning sub-committee.

If you would like us to attend a meeting of your community group to discuss the plans then please get in touch.

You can read the FAQ about the project here.

How to use social media to get your stolen dog back

Dylan Lisle is a local artist who lives on Leith Walk. He has a marvelous Doberman Pup, which he has painted several times. He had his dog stolen on Thursday, and by blogging about it, and getting his friends to tweet about it, his dog was recovered by police within 24 hours.

Below, we used Storify to show how local people spead the word using Twitter, Facebook and blogs. However, it simply wasn't possible to include all the Tweets and Facebook updates as there were so many - so if yours was left out - apologies in advance.

Dylan has deleted the original blog post he put up about it on his blog, and is no doubt feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the attention. There's also presumably a court case about it all due eventually.

We're just happy he got his dog back.

All this does give us pause for thought  though. If it's possible to get this much help from social media to help collar criminals - could the Police make more use of it?

We can make a difference

Adam Bojelian is age 11 and he can’t speak or write with a pen. He blinks to spell words and he blinks poetry. His poetry entertains and campaigns:

Don't dare to underestimate

All that we can do,

We have our thoughts and with help

We are able too.

Extract from Coming out of the Ghetto (c) Adam Bojelian, May 2010 

I was working with Adam's Mum, Zoe last night at the Edinbuzz Social Media Surgery at MacDonald Road Library, Leith. We looked at ways to use social media (using things like blogging twitter and facebook) more effectively to let the world hear and respond to Adam’s voice.

Adam wants to make a difference. Others, like him are using social media as a tool to reach new audiences and make connections. A charity or community group may need a bit of help to try something new. That’s what the social media surgeries are all about. 

Last night's surgery was attended by 8 surgeons (helpers) and lots of patients (people who want help). The surgeons are volunteers, they provide social media know-how and enjoy supplying it. You get to help out, learn geeky tips from other surgeons and be inspired by patients like Adam’s Mum, what's not to like? It’s good to make a difference. As an Edinburgh nursery sang this morning:

I can make a difference, You can make a difference

We can make a difference in this world of ours

(c) Fischy Music 2009

It’s true. Last weekend I saw an outdoor screening of the film Local Hero. It was organised by the Southside Community Council who are trying to save Edinburgh old Odeon cinema building. The film was fantastic and many signatures were added to their petition, you can sign it here. They are making a difference.

Despite my many layers (tshirt, fleece, hoody, long coat and a blanket) it was cold after an hour outside. It got me thinking about Anna Beswick and her campaign to provide hats and warm clothes to the homeless in Edinburgh. Greener Leith last spoke to Anna in December when Hats for the Homeless was just starting out. I asked Anna what’s happened since then:

"We raised around £900 from donations and selling cakes, people gave money instead of sending Christmas cards and there was a supermarket gold coins collection. TK Max donated a box of hats, gloves and scalves and we gave out lots of new and donated clothing over the winter. We provided new gloves for all of Edinburgh's Big Issue sellers."

"Next year we want to start giving gloves and hats out earlier and we’ll do more fundraising. We hope to provide hats and gloves to be other Scottish cities, the local support has been fantastic, thank you to everyone who contributed in Edinburgh"

Anna Beswick, Hats for the Homeless volunteer

Anna cooked cakes to make a difference.

Then there was Neil Rolland, we spoke to him last week. He, like Anna, wanted to help the homeless but did it totally differently. He slept rough for an evening and used his artistic talents to make a film about his Big Sleep Out, see his film here. The 118 people participating in the big sleep out raised over £15,000. Read more on the Bethany website.

The people I’ve written about are an inspiration to me. Adam reminded me we can’t let our limitations limit action. Adam won’t let his wheelchair stop him, he’s doing a bike ride next month to raise money for Contact a Family, you can read about it here. Whoever we are and with whatever we have or don’t have, what the children sang is true. We can make a difference.  

Reminder: Next Leith Edinbuzz Social Media Surgery

We thought we ought to post a quick reminder about the next social media surgery at MacDonald Road Library. Planned for Monday 4th of April at 6.30pm, it will be another great opportunity for local non-profits to get free help from passionate experts. You can get an idea about what goes on at these events by listening to an audio recording Tom Allan made at the last one:

Whilst you can simply turn-up on the night if you want, you can let the organisers know you're planning to come by signing up to the event on Facebook.

Car sharing, Congestion Charging and Collaborative Consumption

This guest post was written by Edinburgh University Graduate, Drummond Gilbert, who has recently set up goCarShare.com - a website that takes a social media approach to helping people lift share. Naturally we think it's a great idea - and as Drummond points out, there's a whole load of new car related initiatives emerging that all use the web to help people use their cars in more environmentally friendly ways. 

Writing my dissertation on Congestion Charging at Edinburgh University really got me thinking about more efficient ways to get people travelling.

Years later I would come up with the idea of goCarShare.com. A website that helps people share car journeys, a market place for empty car seats if you like.

A well implemented car sharing website will perform many of the beneficial effects the congestion charge would have done, easing congestion, reducing pollution and freeing up parking, without alienating motorists.

Car sharing has been tried in varying forms with varying degrees of success already. Part of the key to its success is the marketing, it relies on a critical mass, without a driver and a passenger both wishing to travel to the same place at the same time, you have nothing at all.

With goCarShare, we’ve built the site around Facebook meaning that users can log in quickly, rather than filling in a time consuming registration form, as well as this, users can see whether they share friends or interests with other users of the site.

As soon as people know a bit about the other members, they are much more inclined to share a journey, people who share a few friends with other members on the site are much more inclined to share with other members on the site.

Also, as the site is built around Facebook, it has the potential to spread ‘virally’ as each time you request to share a journey you have the option to spread it to your Facebook newsfeed too.

We’ve got a long route ahead of us, many people like the idea but often getting them to try it is the difficult part, despite the relative ease of the use of the site.

It’s a great thing to use, not just because you save money as a passenger, and make money towards your fuel as a driver, but because it is a fun way to travel; I have met people who I would call genuine friends from using goCarShare.

What is particularly exciting is that we are part of a movement called ‘Collaborative Consumption’.

The idea being that we are moving from an era where everyone was obsessed with ownership or hyper consumption ‘I want to drive a flash car that is more expensive than my neighbours’, to one of Collaborative Consumption, where people are concerned only with actual experiences, ‘I’m not bothered about actually owning car’s providing I can travel easily from A to B.’

Companies such as City Car Club and Street Car are making it easier for people to go about their daily lives without actually owning a car.

The next generation will involve peer to peer websites such as ‘WhipCar’ where people rent their car out to their community when they are not using it, and hopefully, goCarShare, so that people car get to know people in the community better.

We have been very active in promoting car sharing in Edinburgh, you can see what were are up to at Hogmanay, by reading this article in the Edinburgh Evening News. We are helping students car share at Edinburgh’s universities and we are very excited by what we can potentially do in Leith too.

You can register with gocarshare.com here:

http://www.gocarshare.com

You can join the Edinburgh GoCarShare group here:

http://www.facebook.com/gocarshare#!/group.php?gid=124338850923290

If you would like to 'collaboratively consume' stuff other than cars - then you could join the Leith Lending Circle on Ecomodo.com