About theplacetobe.net partnership
"theplacetobe.net will seek to improve the quality of information available to people living and working in Brighton and Hove, in particular by the use of new technology and by working in conjunction with public, private and community organisations that provide information of use or relevance to the local community"
Taken from the objects of theplacetobe.net partnership, February 2003
The original vision for theplacetobe.net grew from the successful Place To Be city-status campaign, which secured city status for Brighton and Hove at the turn of the Millennium. A number of partners agreed to work together on a plan for producing a city-wide portal, and a series of meetings were held to share ideas about how to achieve that.
The core idea of a portal became a vision for a search engine, able to call upon the best available local information and help create a network of local information providers sharing their information for the benefit of the local community.
Creating a partnership
The Founding Board meeting took place in May 2003, marking the next key stage in building this project. The Founding Partners committed in principle to the creation of a new partnership and agreed to a number of specific activities to get the project up and running. These included:
- building a civic search engine
- research into local information needs, including a project using the Council's Geographical Information Systems [GIS] and
- the development of Brighton & Hove community server to support local not for profit organisations.
Innovation in information services
The search engine has remained the centrepiece of the partnership's work. Various web experts from the partner organisations worked together to design a structure for the proposed search engine and produce a functional specification. Their work helped lay the foundations for the technical development of the project, but also underlined the collaborative spirit of the partnership.
An open source solution was initially selected to power the search engine but in January 2005 the partnership switched to the newly available Google Search Appliance. This is a high quality product previously only available in the United States, typically used in large enterprises but ideally suited to the needs of the partners.
The start of something new
The launch of the search engine in June 2005 marks the next key stage in building the partnership. It will be used to power the search on each partner's site, as well as providing a central portal through which all of their content can be searched at the same time.
Next steps for the search engine include building links with more local partners to add content. It is estimated that there may be as many 500 local web sites and the aim is to continue to grow organically in a way which produces a high quality information resource as well as building the network of local information providers.
The partnership is also keen to develop a more strategic picture of how information and communications technology can help deliver the needs of the city. Similar work has already started in other cities - the most notable example being London Connects - and it is hoped that this strategy will bring benefits across the business, public and community sectors.
Mark Walker of SCIP [ Sussex Community Internet Project] has taken a leading role in developing the partnership the individual projects and continues to provide a central point of contact for future developments.
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