GroupsNearYou The UK’s first directory of hyperlocal online community groups

Looking for GroupsNearYou?

GroupsNearYou was a mySociety project running from 2008 to 2011. It aimed to provide information about local online community groups and mailing lists.

GroupsNearYou was founded in the belief that there’s a proven real world social value to people belonging to very local email lists and other forms of local online community.

At the time of its founding, information about such groups was spread across a variety of different platforms – the idea was to bring it all together in one useful directory, which, through its API, would be free for any developer to use in their own projects. It was an early example of a site that used the power of crowd-sourcing to useful effect.

Why have we closed this site?

GroupsNearYou closed in 2011 due to data quality problems: there were too many false positives and groups that were miscategorised, and we were not able to produce data of a useful enough standard within the budget we had available. This lack of quality meant that we could not actually deploy the data to serve users of our other sites (such as FixMyStreet), or encourage other people to do so on their websites.

GroupsNearYou was one of several useful social projects conceived and run by mySociety, many of which continue to flourish. It just wasn't possible to give the necessary time and resources to all of them, and so we now focus on running our core sites and providing support to international partners. Read more

Would you like to run GroupsNearYou yourself?

We believe that there is still a real need for geocoded data on the whereabouts and preoccupations of community groups, but we won’t be able to support a site like this ourselves. If you’d like to take over GroupsNearYou, get in touch and we’ll tell you what’s involved.