COMMUNITY HACKING

Organisations have come and gone [in Wester Hailes]. The one I work in now, CHAI, although CHAI is an organisation that has been on the go for over ten years, the drug part of it that I work in, has only been going for two years. We and my colleagues we used to work in an organisation called WEST. WEST started as a parent support group - The Windmill, for people with mental health problems. And we started being called Hotline, it was a drug project and we shared the premises with them... For example, much of the vocabulary that is being used by the new coalition government to describe community and their roles within a so-called ‘Big Society' would seem, to share many of the characteristics of contemporary forms of the Internet. Commonly described as Web2.0, users of the Internet embrace a new read/write relationship with much of the content of the Web and have provided vital dimensions to a previously highly top down environment. Adopting metaphors from the print industry, the early..