Roger de Haan was on the front page of the Folkestone Herald earlier this week, announcing that the
regeneration plan for the seafront - developed and illustrated by Foster and Partners - might not happen after all. More details to be released soon.
In the meantime, the FOLKESTONOMY float was enjoying a very sunny and leisurely afternoon in front of Lea's Club, with the best view of France across and many many foreign language students
hanging out on the Leas. Football was being played. Teenage fights were being carried out in public. And FOLKESTONOMY seemed to relax in the knowledge that things were fine. It's August.

I spent a few hours at Paul Rennie's Regeneration Network meeting earlier in the day, with various ideas for regenerating Folkestone involving excavating a Roman Villa, turning Folkestone into a prime venue for military history holidays, to ideas around seaside theaters and PPGIS (public participation geographic information systems).

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work in progress, aligning the maps. Not all maps are equal ... and some maps are less equal than others.

I've just uploaded our first set of visual maps to the site... a map is now generated for each of your Stories... here is my story. Simple, isn't it?

(By the way, if you can't see the map you probably need to install the latest version of Flash Player. It's freee, and it will only take a minute or two)

At the top of the map you can see my 'portrait': which shows who I am, where I'm from, and what I do.

Across the map are spread the locations in Folkestone I have a connection with. Or in my case the Location - the Folkestonomy Float (I admit, I have more connections than this, but Andreas was hurrying me back to London, and I got flustered doing my mapping...).

On the bottom right are the 'reasons' that people connect to their stories. Some of these are connected to locations, and some are not connected to locations. You can identify which story an item is in by it's colour.

So there you go, have a look, and see what you think.

In the coming weeks we'll be adding more maps onto the site, which show different sets of connections, which will allow you to see how folkestone, and the triennial, are connected out into the rest of the world, and how the spaces we've identified within folkestone are connected to each other (other than by roads and pavement...)

At the moment we are cleaning up a lot of the data we've gathered. Due to the larger than expected number of failures of our 'add-ons'* we've had problems with data being getting corrupted upon import, and so we're going through looking at all of your story photos and making sure the stories we have are correct, and trying to tie up any missing photographs to the stories... but pleae let us know if you spot any problems with your stories.

*word of advice, don't use cheap 1/4" jack plugs!

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ooooooooooh dragging it out......

Goooot it!

These seagulls are still after the McDonalds food, or is it KFC, this is the least exciting thing going on at the Leas, locals sent to entertain us with their wonderous theories about what ART actually is..... the waste of £2.2 million........ Two ladies who believe that the Folk Stones, although very wonderful, should have a sign to explain what they mean.

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On our way to Europe on a quick visit to Folkestone to fix some of the add on signs which has become a weekly maintenance operation. The jacks we use don't seem to be fit for the job and they are continuously breaking. The real dilemma is not going down to fix the sign but the inconsistency it creates in the data that is being collected. It means sitting down and consolidating a lot of entries by hand.

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Matt and Lisa washing signs in the sun

Suds and signs

We have maintenance Monday every Monday to keep the float nice and clean. We top up the batteries, pressure wash the big signs and float, dust inside and let Public Works know what is not working giving them a list of broken add ons, and you think we just sit around trying to look pretty.

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A bird with a view

These seagulls just love us, we have one at home called George, named after George Segal, I wonder if this is one of his friends?

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The Triennial Bike - Matt Rowe

Matt asked us to look after his bike which we did gladly, always happy to help a fellow cyclist. come 5.30 still no Matt so we loaded it on the back of the float and drove it back, turns out to be the Triennial bike. You can sleep easy Matt we have it safe.

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whatsitallabout... explaining the project to passers by on the Leas

Kiosk and float ...

... on the Leas

The float joint the carnival. Braced for hordes of people, wind, rain and sunshine we left before the storms kicked in.

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Dorian plugging his story

Dorian explaining the latest collector software update

Each evening the computer from the float gets hooked up to the internet and gets synchronised with the database on the server which is the one feeding the website. At the same time the collector software used to register the stories on the float gets updated whenever Dorian has a new version.
All this remote updating works a treat but it does not replace going down and checking how things work live. The response to the project has been very strong and we are collecting a huge amount of stories. The tireless invigilators on the float are doing a fantastic job communicating the project and capturing the stories. The week point at the moment are the 'add-on signs' which break very easily. They either snap (which is easy to fix) or the jack simply comes apart (which is not easy to fix at all). Ones broken we have to register a new 'add on' in the database, transfer the sticker and merge the different sets of data in order not to get too much confusion. This is actually rather high maintenance as it entails getting the broken signs to London, fixing them and getting them back. In the meantime important signs might be missing on site and temporary signs are used which is further confusing the data...... Anyway we live and learn.
Saturday Dorian and I went down early to have a good few hours before the float goes out at 10am and check the system, repair signs and spend time with the float on site to see how everything works when it is live. It was very helpful as we noticed little problems that caused confusion which we could only understand properly when seeing the mapping in action.

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Sun protection - Evidence of sunny spells in an old fashioned British summer

Olivia with rain jacket and sun glasses

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