If you have an idea to improve your local area, don’t reinvent the wheel. Plenty of strong online communities bring people together in clever ways to swap, trade and collaborate. If you find that not many people are registered in your area yet, the sites can still help your community group get organised without having to worry about building the infrastructure.

A good tip for all these community sites is to take a little time to get to know the conventions of the site and if you’re not sure about anything, ask for help. If you’re not sure where to ask for help, ask here and we might just be able to find the answer for you.

Here are some sites to look at if you want to:

• clean the streets
• organise a street lunch
• offer or find land to grow fruit and vegetables (or help out others who would like to)
• give unwanted belongings away, or get something for free
• fix problems in your street
• caption those funny photos of your pets
• find and share recipes
• build a local history page (that people will find and read)

One final tip, don’t forget it’s always a good idea to start things off in the places where people are, rather than trying to drag them off to a new site they’re unfamiliar with. Facebook can be great for getting people to congregate round a simple idea.

If you know about other really useful sites to help organise in your community, please let us know.

To see your area in a new light (literally) and get some interesting visual content for a local website, I’d really recommend taking part in Karen Strunks’ 4am Project, a photography project using the photo sharing network Flickr ‘to gather a collection of photos from around the world at the magical time of 4am’.  Karen devised the project after finding herself driving home at 4am and noticing how different her surroundings seemed at the time:

I live in Birmingham – the UK’s second largest city – and after a night out a while back, I was driving from one side of the city to the other. It was around 4am and I was really struck by the cityscape. Streets and roads normally teeming with people and traffic were deserted. The city was asleep and it felt like I had it all to myself. I liked it.

People can take part in the 4am Project at any time of the year by taking photos between 4am-5am and uploading them onto Flickr tagged ’4amproject’ (if you’re not on Flickr and unsure where to start, try reading our guide to Sharing photos with Flickr).

However, every so often Karen organises a special 4am Project date, encouraging everyone to take photos to get a global snapshot of 4am.  So, on Sunday 6th December, a lot of people will be waking up very early and bracing the cold and dark to take pictures whilst their neighbours are still asleep.

I did the 4am Project for my site Digbeth is Good and found it showed me a whole new side of Digbeth – a world of serenely deserted back streets, which contrasted heavily with the High Street full of people spilling out of noisy nightclubs in search of fast food and taxis.  I got to meet people I wouldn’t have otherwise come across – nightclub bouncers, kebab house workers and early morning cleaners on their way to work.  It was a real eye-opener, for me and my readers.

I’m not a terribly good photographer, but found my simple digital camera was enough to help me capture the quirky things I noticed – a girl climbing over railings in search of a taxi, a discarded pair of shoes and the staff at Salt ‘n’ Peppers sweeping up.

So take part if you can to find out what does or doesn’t happen where you are in the early hours.  Try encouraging others to do the same, using the above print-off poster and a countdown clock you can embed into your website.  Ask local people participating to tag their Flickr photos with the place name as well as ’4amproject’ so you can feed them into your website.  You could even do what Karen does in Birmingham and organise a group walkabout, which is great for moral support if you don’t feel safe wandering around alone and it’s good fun to go for a big breakfast afterwards.  So set your alarms and charge your cameras or camera-phones for the 6th December, and be sure to wrap up warm!

On 15th November I was lucky enough to grab a ten minute chat with Andrew Brightwell of Hasbrum, the new website of ‘Birmingham Hyperlocal News’ created by a group of students on Birmingham City University’s MA Online Journalism course.  Hashbrum is a true experiment – the team do not have a clear long-term goal for the website, they just want to test the possibilities of delivering local news online.

The idea is to try and find out a bit more about how local news can be in the future, so we’ve decided to try to cover bits of Birmingham and try to experiment with our coverage by using different forms of media coverage – video and audio as well as writing and we’re just having some fun really…We’re letting it all hang out and see what happens!

These experiments take various forms – for instance, like many local news sites Hasbrum aggregates relevant content from other local websites, but it’s aggregation with a twist rather than just regurgitating the information.

What we’ve discovered is if we use other people’s content in clever, different ways then we’re happy to do it, we’re not just going to aggregate content in the normal way.  We’re using maps, for example which is a good way of aggregating content. If you take stories from elsewhere and put them into a map then you’re giving a new twist to it.

However, Hashbrum focuses on generating original content rather than presenting other people’s.  In doing this the has team found that, because of their different backgrounds, this content varies in form and feel.  Andrew, who worked as a professional local journalist for several years, is more inclined to stick to that facts with his storytelling whilst others with a blogging background inject more opinions to their pieces, which gives the website ‘a real mix’ that highlights the difference between the two types of delivery.

I’m trying to learn how to do things in a more opinion-based way because what you find is if you do just factual stuff people don’t necessarily have a relationship to that….It’s not something that you would necessarily want to respond to.

You can definitely see their personal bias when looking at the news items they choose to focus on.  For instance, the site has a feature page about the plight of historical Birmingham swimming pools.

We’ve been quite selective in what we do.  Birmingham’s a big place..we’re not trying to cover all of Birmingham, we’re not trying to pretend that we’re a proper sort of news product like the newspapers or even the radio stations. All we’re trying to do is pick out things that have been neglected to some extent…we’re choosing what we do and I guess we’re having an impact on that as well….we’re bringing our own view to it.

Andrew hopes Hashbrum’s readers will start to play a part in directing this focus – steering the site to cover topics they want to learn about.  This seems to be the reason the team haven’t fixed upon an overall goal for Hashbrum – they see it going where the audience wants to take it.

I can’t tell you exactly what it’s going to be….the goal if you like is for other people to tell us what they want. For there to be some kind of relationship between the readership….and us as the creators of content and for those two things…to be equal. So other people start to contribute to what we’re doing and they also direct what we’re doing as well…Our audience can be our editor.

This audience-led environment is a far cry from the one Andrew prepared for in training as a journalist.  The new world professional journalists now face was something he’d discussed earlier that day on Rhubarb Radio’s Sunday Local with Birmingham Post Editor Marc Reeves, Peter Fletcher and Michael Grimes. During the show they touched upon the definitions of and differences between journalists and bloggers, and came to the surprising conclusion that it isn’t as important as some might think.

There isn’t really a difference necessarily…There have always been people who have become journalists…people who are interested in what they’re doing who have got some kind of expertise and they’ve been able to use that to become journalists.  They haven’t necessarily been trained as journalists but they’ve been able to make that step.  Lots of bloggers are doing that.  There’s a huge difference between someone who just gets on the internet and sounds off…and other people who are going out and finding news and bringing it to an audience.  And that’s where journalism starts and obviously it develops into something else eventually.

Far from being fearful of this new playing field, Andrew sees a role emerging for journalists of gathering the news, footage and content that website managers and bloggers can use for discussion with their audiences.

Maybe we can be part of some new model in the future where there are full-time professionals who are going out to the coalface and bringing in news and then other people are using that for their own blogs or for their own audiences.  That relationship could be good for journalists because it might give them a career that they don’t have at the moment…I’m interested in finding out if there can be a relationship between these two worlds that would be mutually beneficial.

It looks like the outcomes of the Hasbrum team’s experiments will be something we can all learn from, not just in terms of innovative online news editorialship and delivery, but the place they find for themselves within that.

You can listen to my full interview with Andrew below:

Interview with Andrew Brightwell of Hashbrum by getgood

As the convenor of all things digital in your community, you are likely to find yourself receiving all sorts of ‘stuff’. Welcome to your new life as the human scanner.

Scribd is a really useful website to just upload the stray word files, PDFs and snapshots of pieces of paper you will receive, either temporarily until you have time to write it up into a full article or permanently if you take the view that you only have so many hours in the day. Add the documents into your website with the HTML embed code – if you are using a free WordPress blog you will need to use the wordpress.com Embed code provided in the ‘advanced’ settings.

If you require a lower-tech solution, for example if your computer doesn’t get on with Scribd, another way of capturing things from your computer is to use the ‘Print screen’ button. Press the button then open Paint to paste the image and crop everything around it. Save it as a Jpg and upload to Flickr (click here for the talkaboutlocal guide, and as we are taking the low-tech route, note that Flickr can receive images by email). If you are on a Mac, you should have an equivalent application called Grab in your Applications.

Thanks to my Twitter community who responded to my cry for help with these tips

Tim Berners-Lee’s work for the UK government is yielding all sorts of interesting public sector data – the challenge it to put it to good use at a hyperlocal level.  I am rounding up some local data people to meet with government people leading work in this area.

Public sector data yields the most benefit at the local level.  Peopel get animated about issues on their street, but in my experience lose interest as the issue become more abstract and further removed from their daily lives.  To get government data working for social good in communities John Denham’s team in CLG need to stimulate a hyperlocal treatment for public sector data and help local authorities publish data better.  This can be done inexpensively and relatively quickly if they nurture emerging hyperlocal talent.

In late 2006 I helped kick off the power of information work for the then minister Hilary Armstrong MP.  It was great to start an original piece of work ahead of any other government in the world.  So it was more satisfying than normal just over two years later to be back at Number 10 to see my former boss Andrew Stott and his team meet with the Prime Minister, Sir Tim Berners Lee and Prof Nigel Shadbolt to announce another big step forward, bringing the Ordnance Survey and Post Code data out into the open.

This data release isn’t abstract though – it is intended to improve social and economic outcomes in Britain.  At a national level the UK’s superb data mashing and reuse community will create national services with local relevance like Fix My Street and UK schools map.  The marvellous map of public spanding by OKFN shows, even in alpha the shape of the next wave – the Show Us a Better Way competition my team ran in 2008 helped fund this.

There seems to be an unwieldy stack of data from national to local – data held nationally can often be localised through use of geotagging or postcoding – i expect that is where the OKFN work will go in the long term.  But data held locally about hyperlocal public services needs to be manually assembled from several hundred different systems. This is data and unstructured information about for instance police safer neighbourhood teams, local health information, social housing, papers presented to council area committees etc.

The people who can best make use of this data in neighbourhoods are local web publishers, people who run community websites and forums.  I run a reasonable local site that does its bit for local democratic engagement – but due to my lack of technical skills I need data to be served up to me in a very simple way so that i can just stick it in my side bar or subscribe to it.  In general if the data is packaged right for retail consumtpion, more or less anyone can use it.

My work with talk about local suggests that more local publishers have my level of technical ability than may be comfortable say with parsing things.  I wouldn’t know what to do with RDFa if it bit me.  Recently Richard Goodwin of the London Gazette reached out to me to offer some interesting data in RDFa, but i couldn’t work out how it worked.

We can see areas where people in the tech world are trying to make sense of the unweildy hyperlocal public services  data, though.  MySociety a couple of years ago organised a large range of email reporting addresses to create the world leading www.fixmystreet.com and the marvellous what do they know the FOI aggregation site.  Chris Taggart, who goes by the name @countculture runs Openly Local which makes and then compiles a huge range of feeds from councils.  It may be that Chris is the first person in the world to compile a service like this.  Philip John of Lichfield Blog has been working on a wordpress plug in to make it easier for local publishers to bring council information from Openly Local into their sidebar.  Chris Taggart has also published a Ning plug-in that Harringay Online is using.  Simon Gryce and belocal are, I think, also looking at this general area.

At the Downing Street meeting, I was pleased to see several mentions of John Denham the Cabinet Minister for local government.  The challenge for John Denham’s Department is to get local authority held data published and then stimulate creativity in truly local applications of national and local data sets.  There are some simple and cheap ways -  a competition with small prizes for good ideas, run a hack day with say the LGA or Dave Briggs.

First off though I have offered to Nigel Shadbolt to help round up some people who are interested in using local data for a meeting with the government team working on this.  If you want to come along, let me know in the comments,  with links to your work, if it’s over subscribed I shall use links to discriminate in thinning a list.

If you know of any other work on this stuff please add it in the comments and i shall update the post in due course.

The post you have all been waiting for……

We are proud to announce the inaugural #TAL UnAwards.  Shortly after the 2010 car of the year is announced by the motor industry, the best hyperlocal bloggers from the UK will be invited to #TAL UnAwards09, a no expense spent awards ceremony for the best hyperlocal blogs of 2009 in a venue to be confirmed in the Midlands.

This red possibly carpeted event, will be the highlight of the hyperlocal year with the much sought after awards being presented, not only will you get a badge to put on your award winning blog, but you may, if we get our act together, get a real proper award to take home or leave in the taxi back to the station.

The ill conceived plan for the unAwards goes something like this:

• Suggestions for award categories
• Nominations for each category
• Voting
• After some arbitrary time scale voting will close
• The Talk About Local Team will collate the votes*
• We present the awards**

So all that remains is for me to declare the suggestions for categories open, please leave your suggestions in the comments below.

*If it rains on any day when voting is open or we feel that we know better than the hyperlocal community we may apply the duckworth lewis scoring method to get the correct results.

**It may be possible to influence the results even at this late stage with bribes of alcohol for the TAL team***

***It won’t but we will take the bribes anyway.

We’ve been talking to Andrew Mackenzie, for some time about delivering some talk about local activity in the Chelmsley Wood area of Solihull.  It’s a large area currently undergoing huge redevelopment that could definately do with an online voice to help bring people together, get them talking to each other, taking action and helping to improve external perceptions.

So with Andrew and Alan Colson of Let’s Be Social organising things the Chelmsley Wood end, we’re due to have a talk about local social media surgery style session on Tuesday 1st December.  We did hit a wall trying to find somewhere with good WiFi until Alan hit on the genius idea of holding it in the local McDonald’s – it’s a place people go, has great WiFi and Happy Meals.  What more could we want?

So join us at McDonald’s, 345 Boswrth Drive, Chelmsley Wood B37 5EX on Tuesday 1st December at 6.00pm if you’re nearby and would like to learn how to create a website, or perhaps get advice about one you already have.  Our help is completely free, but the hamburgers aren’t.

You need to take care that your website, the comments on it etc stay legal.  One important part of that is libel, slander or ‘defamation’ as they are both properly called.  Defamation law in England is draconian if you get it wrong.  But this is easy to avoid.

We aren’t lawyers here at talk about local so we can’t give you full advice.  But we can point you to some good advice on the web written by lawyers.  These links come recommended by the web community, but it is of course up to you to make your own judgements about them.

Three UK law firms offer free guides to issues around defamation in plain English:

Out Law offers some good general advice.  Their top tip is

‘Like many areas of law, liability for defamation can be avoided by taking a common sense approach. If you are an ISP , listen to complaints. If it is appropriate, remove offending material which you host; if you are in doubt, seek legal advice or, at the very least, err on the side of caution…’

And Website Law delivers some top tips – 10 things webmasters should know about libel

David Price solicitors provide a guide to defamation issues from the plaintiff, defendant angle

If you want more detailed information in a book for bed time reading, many journalists we speak to swear by McNaes ‘Essential Law for Journalists’

Robertson’s Media Law is also highly recommended by journalists.

We hope this is helpful – we are rounding up more advice so keep an eye on this site for updates.

I’ve come across some truly inspiring links today, which I felt the need to share.  The first is from Adam Westbrook saying The future of journalism is out there (what’s stopping you?), which concludes with the above image and some great advice for everyone – be it journalist, blogger, whatever:

It’s the attitude which gets inventors, artists…and yes, even entrepreneurs out of bed in the morning.  And it is the attitude which delivers the key to the future of journalism…The whole point is we have to stop being careful! Take some  risks, get your hands dirty!

Go on, get some serious attitude!

And then Pete Ashton linked to this lovely night-time scribbling by Keri Smith, which can help us all give our attitude that creative edge. Anyone wanting to create interesting and unusual content for their local website would do well do stick this on their fridge/computer/forehead:

I recently had the chance to talk to Mark Brereton, creator of Blurb Online, a Ning site set up as ‘the online resource and network for Staffordshire based artists and creatives’.  Blurb Online was created in December 2008 to serve a group of creatives that met physically once a month.  Mark felt there was a need for an online space for people who couldn’t attend the meetings to keep in touch with the creative community and what was going on.  Mark has been very quickly proven right – the site has been hugely succesful to the point it is now almost self-sustainable, with 463 members:

“It was obviously right from the begining about whoever wanted to use it and what they wanted to get from it.  I’m hoping it could almost run itself, so if I walked away from it tomorrow I didn’t have to constantly add content or worry about it being active.  As long as there was still need for it by the people who wanted to use it.”

Mark says the site has enabled a ‘nice mix’ of online and offline activity, with some real-life artistic collaborations emerging from discussions on Blurb Online. 

A great example of this is a project called Wasted Space, which grew from an online discussion between artists wanting to do something positive with barren wasteland in Burslem.  From one artist’s post on the website a group was created, which artists joined and added to until it became a community arts project with dedicated space which works with local schools, making use of the abandoned land to grow fruit and vegatables.   It’s a great example of how making an open website where people can come together and discuss ideas and issues can result in very real, positive changes to an area.

Blurb Online recently held a Blurb Exhibition of work by its members, which had the same open and inclusive outlook as the website.  This was very probably the secret of its success:

“An artist had the idea of a collaborative exhibition of all the people who’re online, and anyone could submit work and showcase it. It was really succesful and it was really busy…we weren’t expecting that many people to turn up!”

It’s been a very busy year for Mark.  Off the back of his work on Blurb Online, he has been appointed as Editor of a new creative community website for Stoke called Creative Central.  However, he sees Creative Central as something that complements rather than competes against Blurb Online.

“Blurb has always been aimed at peer to peer sharing and it’s always been about the artists. Creative Central is funded through the Arts Council and local government and it has a similar sort of aim towards the creative industry sectors again – only used as a kind of showcase to actually encourage larger commissions and bids to go through.  So if a company was looking for a specific artist they could hopefully find them on that website a lot easier than going through Blurb and searching through the different forums and members….I got involved in that because I thought it was something that could benefit everyone.”

Hopefully this new site, that has seemingly grown out of the groundwork Mark has put in with Blurb Online, will provide opportunities for the creative community he has helped bring together.

Blurb Online serves as a great example to anyone wanting to create a community-led website.  Since the beginning Mark has let the users lead the way and use it for what they want to do, rather than try and steer the site and its members in a pre-planned direction.  Mark planted the seeds and then stood well back to watch things grow and, because members feel safe and free within the space to share work and ideas, the website has thrived.  

Anyone wanting to set up a community website which engages not just the readership but active participation of a large group of people would do well to learn from Mark’s work, and keep the boundary-drawing to a bare minimum – just enough to provide structure without restriction.  Let the users define how they will use the site, and build it around them.

You can  listen to my full interview with Mark here.