About

Finchlinks is a website for anyone who lives in Finchley in North London. Narrowing it down a bit, we’ll mostly be covering the bits of Finchley to the North of the A406 (North Circular) mainly because there’s a community site serving East Finchley already, alongside a commercial one.

We’re here to encourage positive local community projects that involve voluntary co-operation. We’re expressly not a local political website and we don’t take sides – we’ll cover or link to anything that we think is of interest.

We’ve set up a LinkedIn group to promote local business networking . There is already a Facebook group for Finchley Village, and we’ve got one for North Finchley and Woodside Park as well. And we’re on twitter at @finchlinks

We will be concentrating on the bits of Finchley north of the A406 – North, West and Central Finchley. There is already a lively community site for East Finchley – here. There’s also a wider community site for the whole of The London Borough of Barnet.

What this site is for

This site is here to help develop a community of people in the area who are talking to each other a bit more. We want to use it to promote good innovative ideas and to help people who want to do interesting things in the area to meet up with each other. An early post on the site have covered a lot of this in more detail.

We’d like to start informal business meetups and get people together for arts / culture / history / educational projects. We’re looking for people with positive ideas (and when we set the site up, we had a few of our own – stay tuned) to get a discussion going.

We’re not a political project and we don’t want to nail our colours to any particular approach to local regeneration. Instead, we want to help you to get together with others to describe the challenges that you think the area faces. We’re asking commenters to be as positive as they can.

If you do have points to make, please stick to them and ‘play the ball – not the man’. Try to avoid being personal, and bear in mind that we’ll probably over-react to (i.e. delete) incivility, hectoring and anything that is too partisan. We’ll always delete the kind of commenters that this site teases. We’ll delete / ban anyone who isn’t behaving in a conversational way.

Write for Finchlinks!

We’re looking for bloggers and not just ‘parish notices.’ We’d love to find a few more contributors to build the conversation here. Anyone with news or useful information – all welcome – subject to a few house rules:

1. Be conversational & friendly – try to put both sides of any argument that you’re writing about if you can, and avoid personal comments. If you have a point to make, do so – but invite comments and counter-arguments wherever you can. Avoid point-scoring or partisanship as much as possible.
2. If you post, help out with the site moderation – it’s as important to keep the conversation friendly and flowing as it is to write for the site.
3. We’re not just holding this conversation here. Anything that is written will be automatically posted on the LinkedIn group that we’ve created to promote local business networking as well as the Facebook group for Finchley Village, and the one for North Finchley and Woodside Park. Keep an eye on those and try to respond to comments made there if you can. You’ll also see that we get the odd response on Twitter as all posts are signposted on the @finchlinks account.
4. No mucking around with fancy colours fonts or sizing. OK – this is a personal obsession of mine, but I noticed that someone who helped to test out the site did just this – a manual with a few tips on how to post well is available on request.

Want to know more? Give us a shout!

Paul Evans (more about me here)