Your immediate thought may well be ‘That doesn’t sound very hard!’
Yet giving your new Community Meeting a name that will have as much meaning with just a handful of local People involved, as it will when everyone has just Voted your first Community Representative into an Elected Office is very important indeed.
Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is about what you all have or what you share in common.
So, the obvious thing to everyone when you first start, will be using or rather incorporating any local place or area name that local People will recognise and identify with the area of the Community in which you all live.
The chances are that in most places, some existing organisation or savvy web user will have grabbed the precise name of your Community area. (e.g., @London is already in use!)
If the actual name of your area is available for any social media username or domain name, it’s worth avoiding anyway – in that form.
Once things get moving and others can see there is interest building in what you are doing, using just the place name could be considered by some to be a declaration that you already speak for the Community.
My suggestion is that you use your Community area or place name and then add either ‘CM’ or ‘NOTA’ after or before or use a word that describes what Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE is all about, such as ‘Together’ or ‘United’.
For example, the area I grew up in is called Churchdown in Gloucestershire, UK. So, the name I would then use would ideally be ‘Churchdown NOTA’ or ‘Churchdown Together’.
Continuity and recognisability are important across the different platforms that you are about to use. Everyone uses social media and the internet differently. But they all need to be able to identify with something that reaches across all of them the same.
Before committing to the name you will use, PLEASE work through STEPS 2 & 3, and check that the same Usernames are available for you to use first.
This is a particularly good thing to do early on. Because it could be one of the easiest ways to work out if someone else is already working with Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE, in your Community too.
Things to be aware of:
You will probably use your local area name, with ‘Community Meeting’ following it as our e-mail username in STEP 2. But @communitymeeting would already be too long to become a username on one or more of the social media platforms that you are about to use.
Groups that represent different parts of your local community or interests that are shared between a number of local People may already be using words like ‘together’ as a prefix or a suffix within their proper name or a social media username.
A quick visit to any linked social media or web pages should quickly make clear who any group using one of these names is, and whether you are both working to create a Community Meeting of the Officially NONE OF THE ABOVE kind.
What you are about to do, is not about you. It’s all about your Community. So, don’t use your name as the name for what will become your Community Meeting.
You may technically ‘own’ or ‘control’ everything you create or do whilst you are working alone. But the end result will only ever belong to the Community.
If you feel uncomfortable with this, please give further consideration to the reasons you feel that way before you decide if you want to proceed.
Even if the name of the area or place you live in sounds like it must be unique, there is a good chance that the name will exist somewhere else in the UK or beyond.
If you should find that the name you would like to use already is being used elsewhere, don’t worry. Just add an abbreviation such as SW if you are in the South West, or perhaps something like the first two or three letters of your postcode area – which in the case of Churchdown would be GL or GL3.
Adam Tugwell 