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Red Rose 2014: International Scout and Guide Camp

I’m part of the organising team for Red Rose 2014 - an international Scout and Guide camp being organised by West Lancs Scouts for next year from 26 July – 2 August 2014. It’s still early days in the planning but already it’s looking pretty exciting! It’s going to be an action-packed week at Westmorland County Showground near Kendal

My role is Head of Communications which covers the following areas:

  • Marketing the event – in West Lancs, across the UK and internationally
  • Communications with participants, staff and stakeholders
  • Branding the event, including turning an empty field into something that looks less empty – think banners, gateways, signage and more
  • Website and social media – you’d think considering my day job this would be easy but I’m learning new things in implementing the Red Rose website, Facebook page and Twitter account
  • VIP management – I think this is under me! Lots of showing people around site!
  • Internet cafe – this might not be mine either but I’m sure I’ll have an input into its running!
  • Public Relations – promoting Scouting (and Guiding – but mainly West Lancs Scouts!) through the running of a large high-adventure camp
  • “Red Rose Media” – this is the big one – we want radio, video, newspaper and website updates throughout the camp to create a buzz

Needless to say, it’s not going to be just me doing all this so I’m looking for a team to join me. If you think you’ve got skills to offer and the enthusiasm required to give up a week’s holiday to – effectively – work for free then get in touch with me via comms@redrose.org.uk. If you’re already a Scout or Guide then that’s great but if you’re not, and you fancy helping out in some way, that’s even better!

Unistats and OpenStreetMap

Yesterday Unistats was relaunched alongside the new KIS widgets. One of the most interesting things for me is the use of OpenStreetMap for mapping. This alone justifies our decision at Edge Hill to improve the quality of our maps on OSM so our Unistats page looks quite nice:

Many other universities are pretty well mapped too – usually city based campuses or those where an enthusiastic geek has done some work but looking around universities in the North West something caught my eye.

The University of Liverpool looked like it was in the wrong place.

Instead of being centred on the top of Brownlow Hill, Unistats have plotted the map based on their postal address:

PO Box 147, Liverpool, L69 3BX

Presumably the Postcode Address File still lists this as the old Royal Mail sorting office on Copperas Hill which closed two years ago moving sorting to Warrington. At least if people turn up there it’s not far for them to walk up the hill!

While useful, postcodes aren’t the best identifiers for locating places – websites should really allow the use of co-ordinates to override postcodes for situations like this where the postcode doesn’t match an organisation’s physical presence.

It’s made slightly more embarrassing because the Copperas Hill site has been bought by Liverpool John Moores University to house several departments from 2014.

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