The Frank Bingley Story

This is a story about a man who had a totally unexpected impact on my life and reinforced the belief that we are all surrounded by talented and gifted people that we have no idea about.

I have shared this story many times at events and with people all around the world and the subject of this story, Frank Bingley, is unlikely to have any awareness of the impact he has had on thousands of people he has never met and will never meet.

In 1998, I was in the process of re-engineering my business from presentation services to a social enterprise focused on harnessing community resources using IT (Community Informatics). I had just secured around ￡250k for a 2 year Govt MMDP (Multimedia Demonstrator Program) project involved a consortium of 8 organisations including another SME, 2 local newspapers, a local building society, a local authority and a local community social enterprise. The project was called “ComKnet” (Community Knowledge Network). In essence it was a community portal with functionality similar to and pre-dating Facebook and Linkedin. The aim was to use this portal to encourage knowledge sharing and commerce within a rural community as a way of combating the impact of the globalisation that had seen the closure of many local enterprises.

ComKNet was based on the belief that every community has skills, talents and resources that it is not aware of and does not harness. The portal was designed by support the social and economic development of communities around the market town of Market Harborough.

Very soon after the award, I began looking for community champions who were already using multimedia and web technologies to act as a growing viral network to spread the word. I began by using the search engines of the day (pre Google) to search for my neighbouring town of Market Harborough. I found one web site at the top of all the search results and to my amazement and horror, there was someone local who had already created a community portal like the one I had in mind for the project and that the web developer was more advanced than my own small company. The web site was called “Bigfern” and I was faced with the moral dilemma of inviting a competitor that I knew nothing about into the project.

I decided that the world should be big enough for both of us and that this discovery was proof that undiscovered talent is all around us so I invited the webmaster for a meeting to discuss collaboration. I was totally unprepared for what happened next.

As Frank Bingley walked into my office, I realised that I already knew his face from somewhere and so I asked him if we had met anytime and his words shook me to the core.

“Of course you know me – I am your milkman”

Frank had been delivering my milk for years and I had no idea that his hobby was designing the Bigfern web site using a computer he built himself and writing the html code using notepad? software that he taught himself on. After picking myself off the floor, my immediate thought was that Frank lived on a different planet. ?With my technical background, a degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering and 5 years working for IBM, I did not expect to be taught a lesson on web development by my milkman. Frank was passionate about his community and not all interested in making his web site a commercial venture and he proved a valuable asset to the project which later became a Govt flagship project endorsed by the Govt E-Envoy Alex Allan – see his YouTube interview at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE7GskuGBQk&t=11s.

Subsequently, in making the Alex Allan video, I also discovered that I had an ex-senior BBC cameraman whom I had never met living in my village and a Harry Potter Special Effects video producer living less than mile from me.

Frank Bingley, my local milkman, had a big influence on me and strengthened my passion for wanting to help other people fulfil their human potential. It also made me realise that we all have the potential to make a positive (or negative) impact on the lives of others without ever meeting them or being aware of that impact.

Watch this space for another story about a totally different individual who unexpectedly shaped my life