We have released he next bunch of tickets to the waitlist this morning so check your inboxes.

Later this week I’ll be making my way to Cardiff to enjoy the Easter Break with my family.  But there will be a little light business mixed with pleasure – Hannah Waldram at Guardian Cardiff has very kindly arranged a very informal blogger’s meet on the Wednesday evening.  I’m hoping to chat with some of the people behind the great sites that are emerging in Cardiff, such as Llandaff News, Roath Cardiff and Dan Green’s Big Little City.

There’s exciting things happening in Cardiff at the moment, with the local Guardian Cardiff gaining momentum and some brilliant grass roots hyperlocal sites looking forward to finding their place within UTV’s plans for Wales Live, the Independently Funded News Consortia’s preferred bidder for providing local news.  I’m really looking forward to talking with some local active types about their hopes and plans for what’s next!  If you’re around Cardiff way this Wednesday 31 March, please pop by Y Fuwch Goch between 6pm and 8pm, it would be great to meet and talk over a drink or three.

There will be no lie-in for me on Easter Sunday, as I’ll be up insanely early snapping away for the 4am Project (countdown clock above).  I’ve found Karen Strunks’ 4am Project ‘to gather a collection of photos from around the world at the magical time of 4am’  is a great way of capturing a local area at an unusual, largely unseen time.  It can make for some lovely creative content on a community website and I’d recommend it to any hyperlocal publisher with the stomach for an early start and the chill of a dark morning in early spring!  It can be especially fun to drag others out of bed too and make a group outing of it like I did in Kington in December.  The promise of a hearty breakfast at the end may well swing the balance.

I myself will be in Caerphilly on the estate where I grew up and I’m intrigued to know what old memories and new discoveries wandering my childhood playground at the crack of dawn will bring up.  Time will tell.  Although Caerphilly is not in Cardiff (there’s the no-small matter of Caerphilly Mountain separating the two) Hannah’s advised me it’s near enough to get away with tagging the photos ’4amcardiff’ in Flickr so they appear in the Guardian Cardiff’s 4am Project slideshow, so I’m glad I’m able to contribute to their local picture of 4am.

The preferred bidders for the Independently Funded News Consortia will receive government money to provide a new type of local news in the UK.  The government process is almost unique in the world – intelligent action and innovation rather than handwringing or thoughtless subsidy for more of the same.

The government said of the IFNC that:

‘…They will be able to deliver a broader local and regional news offering through multi-platform delivery. A contestable selection process will extend the base of content providers and increase the scope of innovation, quality and journalistic diversity.’

As a member of the selection panel comprising people from the full breadth of the media industry, I was delighted (and a bit surprised) to see traditional newspaper publishers, TV and radio companies making a big effort to understand hyperlocal publishing, the motivations of the people who do it and the contribution to the news process.
The winners are large media groups that demonstrate a good understanding of the potential for bottom up, grass roots hyperlocal news in the future news environment.  Each of the awards will emerge differently but we should see a far greater inclusion of hyperlocal sites in the local news ecology and thus an enhanced local (as opposed to just regional) news service and greater plurality all around. The IFNC process should give hyperlocal publishers a seat at the table, in many cases for the first time.  The public should see better telly, better papers (better radio in some cases) and better local internet.

The challenge for the IFNC bidders is to use the space the IFNC subsidy and cross media freedom gives them to understand, manage and harness the radical cross platform changes happening to local news – some outlined brilliantly by Alan Rusbridger in his Cudlipp lecture.  Whatever government the nation has after the impending general election this learning of how change works in practice will be vital to the future health of our media.

These are my personal views reflecting on the process today – for the definitive statement please see the government’s statement on the DCMS website.

Modern websites are not just a set of pages sent between computers and consumed by passive pairs of eyes. The best websites are living, breathing communities, full of ever-changing content and lively debate, witty exchanges and with a bustling calendar of real-life events. The problem, of course, with communities, is, we hate to say… people. Putting your flag in the virtual desert of your local area and inviting everyone around you to come and hang out is risky, but the effort brings great rewards.

If you’re one of those people ploughing a lonely furrow; the only person in the village who knows where the ‘on’ switch is on the computer and how to find people’s long-lost relatives on Facebook, thereby cursing yourself to hours transcribing and sending them hastily scribbled notes ever since the Post Office closed last year, as well as running the village website after a stern command from the chair of the resident’s association who gets all her digital knowledge from the Guardian; then this corner of talkaboutlocal is for you. If you would like to suggest your own problems, or examples and solutions to any of these, please add them in the comments and we’ll add them in.

The anonymity-causes-idiocy problem
Symptoms: An idiot is posting abuse
Try these treatments:
- switch on moderation so that posts need to be approved before they appear
- add a note about acceptable behaviour at the top of the site (example)

The Control problem
Symptoms: you started off with a friendly community, but now everyone is whining and there’s a palpable air of tension in the forums and round the church tea. People start saying the site is badly designed and they can’t find anything, that the articles are too long or too short or too pompous. That it would all work a lot better if we were all working to one unified ‘vision’. Their vision.
Try these treatments:
- encourage people to take the lead on their own area of interest by creating smaller groups
- don’t be too locked in to your own vision of the site. Once you switch on a community website, it belongs to your community. Only if you’re elected can you have any claim to be speaking on behalf of your community.

The ‘we’re too small’ problem
Symptoms: nobody’s contributing and nobody knows what you’re doing.
Try these treatments:
- have patience. Everything has to start somewhere and particularly in areas where internet access is relatively low, you can expect it to take a while – at least a year to eighteen months, maybe longer – for you to establish the name of your website in the community
- talk about your site everywhere and show it to people. Printouts are handier than pulling out a full projector and web connections, so don’t get too technical. Try Vistaprint for some free cards to give to people and if local schools and organisations start to take an interest, ask them if they can print out some information sheets and posters for you as well.
- when people are talking to you about their burning passion, ask them to write, take photos or videos about it. Most people don’t just write in when you ask them but they are happy to share their interests.
- make your methods of contributing as simple as you possibly can. If you’re getting no response to email calls to contribute to your wiki, it’s almost certain nobody understood what you were talking about and possible that the link you sent them didn’t even work (I’ve been there on this one). Never mind snazzy technology, give them a beer mat to write on.
- don’t forget to ask people for help in really simple ways, don’t assume they know and just aren’t helping. People love to help, especially if helping takes the most minimal amounts of time. This is the way to draw people in to bigger amounts of time, but don’t worry – one hundred volunteers giving an hour a week is pretty much equivalent to the full time team of most modern newspapers.
- find the people who are already online in your area, they will be easier to get hold of. Pubs or local faith and community centres are your offline equivalent.
- keep in touch with small traders. They know everything that is going on and generally a bit of time to tell it to regular customers (like you).

The ‘we’re too big’ problem
Symptoms: everyone’s contributing to your site, everyone has a view on it and moderating it is going to kill your marriage. Your dog, let alone your son, hardly remembers who you are.
Try these treatments:
- remind yourself, and others if necessary, that’s you’re running the blog voluntarily. Restrict the time you spend on it.
- don’t get pulled in to lengthy wars in the comments or forums. Your excuse that you need to go to bed might just prevent someone saying something they regret.
-ask for help so you can distribute the workload – on a WordPress site you can give members different levels of editing rights.

The business-plan problem
Symptoms: having got wildly popular, everyone’s saying you should turn the website into a full time job. You formed a committee. You’ve all been bogged down in funding proposals for the last eight months. Meanwhile, people have drifted away from the site.
Try these treatments:
- carefully consider all the different funding options for your site and your time. These include advertising, grant funding, low-interest business loans if appropriate, consultancy work, again if appropriate.
- a tip I learnt from an old journalism book: just because everyone says there should be another local news outlet, doesn’t mean they will help fund yours. In my experience, it’s true.
- make a clear choice: if you want to go into business, concentrate on that. If you’re happy keeping it volunteer-led, make sure you keep it fun. Many a good community activist has burnt out, unappreciated.
- balance committee work with strong leadership. Times will come when you need to make decisions quickly and if your group doesn’t trust you to make those decisions, they probably don’t trust to you to be in charge (see the “Control” problem, above)

Updates; thanks to those who commented below.

The Get-your-blog-off-my-lawn problem
Symptoms: it’s getting like Midsomer murders round here. The Village Times (published continuously since 1742) is spitting feathers that you blew their exclusive with your Twitpics of the Spring cake competition. Although your detailed IP logs make it clear that *everyone* is glued to your blog, the elite have taken to laboriously pretending they don’t know your name.
Try these treatments:
- before you go into all out war, think twice about whether you need to be in competition at all. If your drive is just to get information out there then maybe an approach to the incumbent to work together will be well received. After all, for all their bluster, they are often volunteers themselves.
- if this isn’t well received, just carry on. Be persistently friendly, make generous references to their ‘in-depth’ (verbose) coverage of the elections and don’t worry about it. After all, there’s enough space on the internet for all of us and it’s so Old Media to fight.

The ‘I scare people’ problem
The symptoms: you’re Clarke Kent trying to hit the story, they’re just trying to make pizza.
Try these treatments:
- hold back those journalism chops. Describe, don’t interrogate. Your old instincts will soon come in handy when an election comes up. What makes many hyperlocal blogs so wonderful is that mix of hard and soft news. Not flower show pictures shoved in to make the advertising department happy (joy! you don’t have one!), but because your readers care – this is the glue that knits your community together. Reading about unknown activities on your blog might entice someone who feels scared to go outside into the community centre and become a volunteer themselves. So you’re making connections and bringing something previously hidden, because the mainstream media can’t turn it into a pithy two minute news package, into the open.
- take your time. Again, you’re not under a time limit. The first few minutes of what people say to interviewers are what they think they should say, it’s only after a while that you start to get the real conversation. If you don’t want very, very long video interviews, here are some good tips from Nick Booth.
- find the questions that work for your subjects. Funnily enough, the time-honoured questions that journalists love aren’t always the ones that real people like to answer. Much as those interminable questions in questionnaires don’t really get your real views, they just get your reflex reaction as you click on through to reach the prize. Have a look round at other techniques like the Oxford Muse or NLP, or others. Equally, if you’re not from a journalism background you can learn a lot from journalists, just maybe not, in this case, Jeremy Paxman.

So how do you get it just right? There will always be issues, but the best community web editors I’ve seen know how to keep their websites enjoyable, whether their definition of enjoyable is bloody scraps down in the comments or warm, supportive swapping of recipes. They are relaxed about what goes on the site, encouraging to contributors, patient and persistent and, perhaps most of all, brave enough to keep the thing going, post by post.

What advice can you add?

Myself and Mike have just about recovered from the National Digital Inclusion Conference 2010 in London on 10th-11th March.  It was a busy couple of days – we got to meet an awful lot of people, put a lot of faces to names and get involved in some very interesting discussions.

During the first day we set up a little social media surgery table in the exhibition hall and gave people advice on any aspect of social media they happened to be wondering about – such as Twitter and blogs and how to use these to engage with people in local communities or how they might help a new community radio station.

On the Wednesday afternoon myself and Mike were part of a brainstorming session in the Digital Skills for All workstream, leading our particular table discussing the role of social media in digital inclusion whilst others concentrated on older people &  digital skills, reaching excluded groups, qualifications, schools, funding issues and the role of accreditation & informal learning.  We spoke about how to help people recognize the relevance of social media for their lives, break down barriers in access and engage.  The end result was a list of 6 tips (we aimed for 10, but ran out of time!):

1. Social media is all about connecting with people you want to communicate with.  Engagement through a trusted person/source is key.
2. Community websites are often the work of community activists, not the traditionally excluded.  However they will often create online spaces that enable those not so active or included in community life to engage easily – it can be easier to write your opinions online than attend a meeting and speak up in front of a room of people.
3. Reach out to people through their preferred medium, such as Facebook and add value/quality to their existing engagement.
4. Create a safe, free space where people feel free to express themselves, like On Road Media did with Savvy Chavvy.
5. Bureaucracies – let the community take the lead.  Enable them to create online spaces that they can control, develop and take ownership of – do not try to herd them into your space.
6. Look at what’s already out there – people are often already digitally engaged and creating online content in ways you might not expect.  Bring existing online community, celebrate and cultivate their content.

That last point was my response to a lady working with a group of sixth formers, looking to get them using social media and my thinking was that many already are.  The conversation bought to mind the hundreds of shaky videos filmed on mobile phones I’m stumbling across on YouTube – I thought it might be good to pool these films and celebrate them, possibly get them to be a bit more creative with it, enabling them continue to tell their stories more effectively.  I ended up pitching this idea in a slightly daunting ‘Dragon’s Den’ style session the following day and see it is now on the NDI10 website as a ‘Promise’, so I’d better get on and do something about that, then…

If you’re wondering what all these YouTube videos and Audioboo podcasts are about, I thought carrying on We Share Stuff’s legacy of taking the Digital Inclusion Conference to the surrounding streets might be nice, so myself and the lovely Jennie from UK online centres took a wander around the nearby Borough Markets.  As this year’s conference was all about ‘a call for more action’ we not only asked people how they used IT and the internet, but how they might be able to help family/friends/colleagues less confident than themselves and tried to get them to pledge to do one simple thing, such as helping someone send their first email.  Whether or not these people have stuck to their promises I can’t say, but hopefully we’ll have planted a knowledge-sharing seed in some.

This morning Kate Norman asked on Twitter: ‘what websites might be of MOST interest to Romany Travellers?’ There are two great ones that I know of.

The first is Savvy Chavvy, a private Ning network created by On Road Media whilst they were training young Gypsies and Travellers in social media skills in Kent, Cambridgshire and Surrey.  It’s quick growth highlighted the community’s need for their own online space they felt safe to express themselves within:

www.savvychavvy.com has almost 500 young people on it in less than a month which demonstrates the need for dedicated spaces like this on the web for marginalised groups. Spaces like these do not alienate the group concerned from the rest of society – they allow the young Gypsies in this case to communicate freely amongst each other in a safe place away from the discrimination and prejudice that many of them face daily.

As On Road Media recognized, Savvy Chavvy illustrates how helpful a private network can be for vulnerable groups of people who may feel exposed or at risk of abuse in a more public space.

Another interesting site I’ve come across is Pesha’s Blog, created by Clay Shipson, a Romany Gypsy living in Lincolnshire:

The Roma (Gypsy) or Romani/Romany Gypsy people are the most misunderstood people on the face of the Earth. I have set up this blog to promote a positive image of my people and hopefully in turn this will lead to understanding and tolerance.

Clay uses her blog to celebrate Romany culture and raise awareness of and campaign against widespread discrimination.  Pesha’s Blog has become a powerful community voice (Clay often gets emailed content by others to post up) that works towards changing negative perceptions and righting wrongs across the world – Clay is currently using it to raise money for Roma Gypsy children from Kosovo suffering from the effects lead poisoning.

Welcome to our new look home built by the really ace people at Substrakt.

We have combined all our websites in to this handy one size fits all site so people don’t get confused by looking at our corporate site or our resource site. Everything has been merged in to this site and should be easy to find.

We are still moving the furniture around to make sure it is all in the right place, but you should be able to find what it is you arrived here for, if you can’t please do contact us and we’ll make sure we unpack the box with the stuff you want in, next.

It’s all go in talk about local land. Last week Mike and I were in Hereford for a fun-packed workshop at Borderlines Film Festival and this week we’re off to London for the National Digital Inclusion Conference 2010.

The theme for NDI1o is ‘Digital Participation: Passing IT on’ and that’s exactly what Mike and I will be doing with an open, drop-in social media surgery table in the exhibition area of the conference. Last year I joined the We Share Stuff team, who did social media surgeries during Conference in addition to their Fringe event, which were very popular. On the second day of the conference myself and a couple of others went outside the conference venue to talk to local people about what digital inclusion meant to them, which resulted in some great vox pops films, such as Ben Whitehouse and I talking to a protester.

So if you’re at the National Digital Inclusion Conference this year and would like to talk with us about issues you think social media might be able to assist with, or get advice on any elements of social media/networking that you’re interested in, come and join us over lunchtime either tomorrow Wednesday 10th March or Thursday 11th March.

We’ll also be facilitating a barcamp-style session at 4.00pm tomorrow as part of the Digital Skills for All workstream, putting together an expert-led SWOT analysis for social media in the digital inclusion sector.

We’ll hopefully see some of you there!

Camp Hill Flyover, Birmingham, 1970 by Lady Wulfrun

Every so often I find myself emailing people who have requested links and/or information about creating community content around a particular subject or issue.  I’m thinking it would be better for me to share that information with everyone, so I’m going to  start copying it into blog posts here.  One topic I get asked a lot about is local heritage, and how bringing this online can generate discussion and get people sharing their memories.  When people ask me about heritage, I usually send them the following:

• People really react to a bit of local history on a community website.  Look at the comments on this post of a photo of 1970′s Digbeth. People remembered the flyover and reacted with their own personal stories about it. Similarly with William’s post about the Beaconsfield Buildings in Kings Cross – people started commenting about their families’ connections to the building, and people tracing their family trees are now coming to this post via genealogy forums.
• Old photos and interviews with older residents who’ve witnessed changes over the years are always popular. Rescue Geography is a project all about collecting and curating  people’s memories of a place, you could explore that for some ideas.
• The Birmingham Irish Heritage Group contribute regularly to Digbeth is Good, which helps bring their activity and a taste of their events to wider audience.
• Another interesting site is: http://ourhistory-hayes.blogspot.com: ‘A site dedicated to the work of Hayes Labour Association, Hayes & Harlington Labour Party, Hayes Communist Party, Trade Unionists, and working men and women of West Middlesex.’

• Last but not least Seaside Voices is a project talk about local are delivering in partnership with Community Media Assocation, People’s Voice Media and UK online centres. We’re working with four UK online centres in seaside towns to help facilitate an online discussion of their town in its past, present and future.  The Seaside Voices websites for Bridlington, Morecambe, Newlyn and Shanklin are examples of sites that will not only look back at the history of a place, but also delve deeper to highlight current activity and look ahead to what’s in store in the future.

If you know of any other good examples of heritage sites, or local heritage content on community websites, please share and comment!

This Thursday 4th March myself and Mike Rawlins will be leading a talk about local workshop at The Courtyard, Hereford as part of the Borderlines Film Festival, Britain’s biggest rural film festival.  The workshop is part of a series of events under the banner ‘Here Comes Everyone – Citizen Journalism in the Digital Age’ and adds a practical element to a Wednesday jam-packed with films screenings, talks from the likes of Christian Payne and panel discussions such as Get Local, which includes a contributor to the first local website that emerged from the talk about local project, The Kington Blackboard.

Following a day filled with ideas and inspiration, we’ll be showing how you can Do It Yourself with a workshop demonstrating the simple skills and free platforms you can use to create a powerful online voice and how to use these effectively to raise awareness and positive action on the issues that matter to you.  So if you’re in the Hereford area and would like to develop an online presence for your community, please book a ticket and join us this Thursday at 10.00am in The Courtyard, Hereford.