Some online goodness found amid the riot chaos.

It’s hard to imagine that any good could come out of the riot chaos that happened across the UK this week.  Social media has come under scrutiny for fueling the events.  Yet recent online projects have proven that it has also brought people together in tough times and shed light on such a terrible situation as well as resulting in some entertaining online content.  Here are my online highlights:

 http://keepaaroncutting.blogspot.com/ was a project set up by interns at agency BBH London.  Aaron lost his barber business to riots in Tottenham, which he had built up over several decades. Touched by his story a blog was set-up by the interns where members of the public could donate to get Aaron’s business up and running again.  The project has now closed after raising a staggering 35k.

Another do-good project was  http://somethingniceforashraf.tumblr.com/ Ashraf was a young boy who was robbed as he lay injured during the riots. A fund was organised to raise money to do something nice for the guy which finally totaled at over 22k.

This week proved how social media tools could be used to enable people to collaborate and respond to the riots to produce positive outcomes. @riotcleanup with over 80,000 members was a group with the aim of organising and publicising clean-up efforts throughout the UK.

http://catchalooter.tumblr.com (which seems to have now moved over to (http://zavilia.com/) and its Twitter/Facebook page called on members of the public to identify uploaded images of rioters.  From such images a number of humorous blogs were set-up such as http://photoshoplooter.tumblr.com/ and http://lootalikes.tumblr.com/

Agency Dare created http://thisisourlondon.com/ to send the message that not all Londoners possess such disorderly behaviour, that the ‘actions that happened are not a true reflection of our city’.  The site displays pictures of Londoners coming together to ‘revive and reclaim’ their streets.

Sites such as http://tinyurl.com/4yfh97w  that mapped the London riots displayed the alarming scale of the rioting and warned people of effected areas. 

The campaign ‘Operation Cup Of Tea'  http://www.operationcupoftea.com/  encouraged people to anti-riot by staying in with a cup of tea instead, with the message of ‘make tea not war’.  The group took Facebook and Twitter by storm with 321,985 attending. Supporters had to take a photo of themselves posing with a cup of tea and then upload it to the Facebook page. 

Above displays one of my favorite images from the week depicting a couple handing out tea to police officers on a riot shield, some of which had been on duty for 30 hours.  A typical British sentiment: tea solves all situations.

Here’s an interesting read on ‘How the riots showed us two sides of social networking’ http://bit.ly/npcC7L