Meola Creek Online - One Year On

The St Lukes Environmental Protection Society (STEPS) began working with the New Zealand Tourism Research Institute in November of 2007. The primary goal of STEPS is to enhance and improve the Kerr-Taylor Reserve as an open space for use by the people of Auckland's St Lukes area through working with the Auckland City Council, local schools, and other groups. STEPS' immediate goal is to see the quality of the water in Meola Creek improved by working to ensure that Watercare Services and Metrowater improved water quality and replaced inadequate drains.

NZTRIs collaboration with STEPS involved assisting with the online presence of this small community group and to help them use the Internet to promote their campaign to clean up Meola Creek. The organisation needed a way to raise awareness about the issues surrounding the creek, as well as means for the group to respond quickly to issues and events as they arose. They also needed to get Meola Creek on the map. At that time a Google search for Meola Creek turned up very little, mostly returning the odd scientific report on the creeks poor water quality. STEPS needed a way to get the real creek online, to balance the existing overly scientific information found on the Web with some historical and vernacular knowledge about the history, significance, and current condition of this urban stream.

Under NZTRIs guidance and suggestion the group began this process by collaboratively authoring a page for Meola Creek on the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia; this article can be accessed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meola_Creek. NZTRI Research Officer Brent Simpson, an experienced Wiki user and long time participant on Wikipedia itself, helped the group understand the process and guidelines of authoring content on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia Meola Creek entry now appears third on a Google search for Meola Creek and has, as of this time, been edited 47 times by 8 different authors.

The next step in the collaboration involved the setup of an easily updatable website for the STEPS organisation. NZTRI suggested that a blogging platform would suit the immediate needs of the organization: to present static pages of interest to visitors wishing to find out more about STEPS; and to quickly inform people (both from within and outside the organisation) of the activities of STEPS and other issues that affected the clean-up and state of the creek. An open source solution was implemented in the form of a Wordpress blog, a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. This blog has been running since December 2007 and has had 23 posts in 8 categories with posts ranging from notice of the groups AGM, to planting days, to open letters to local politicians.The Meola Creek blog now appears first on Google searches for Meola Creek and its variety of posts has added a diverse range of content online around the creek. 

Part of Meola Creek 4 months after Streamside planting by STEPS - June 2008