Welcome

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.

Getgood Linkage #1: Heritage

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!

talk about local at Borderlines Film Festival this Thursday

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.

Lost and Found

As any DiGpuss fans will know, I’m constantly finding things on the Birmingham streets that someone, somewhere once owned.  It’s usually discarded, battered tat but occasionally I’ll find something that I suspect its rightful owner might want back, such as the above leather jacket, which I discovered in the Custard Factory after a large event the previous night.  I did the right thing and handed it in and, just in case the owner happened to read Digbeth is Good, wrote a post about it explaining where it could be collected from.

There are other cases of local websites starting to be used to help with lost and found – take Meowsley, a local website all about cats in Birmingham’s Moseley village.  The site seems to be a very amusing, localised version of Kitten War, giving each cat entered a full-feature profile including photograph and scores out of ten for agility, meow, overall cuteness, dignity, etc.  When one of these cats goes missing, something interesting happens – a call to action goes out to all the cat-lovers in Moseley to look out for that particular cat.  The site even has special email address to respond to in such cases, emergency@meowsley.co.uk.

I particularly like their coverage of the disappearance of Didier because readers got to find out what happened – he was found locked in a neighbour’s shed.  When people see the start of even a small story like a missing cat, they like to hear the end.

Twitter is being increasingly used to raise local awareness of lost and founds pets.  Last week Jon Bounds used it to try and find the owner of a small, brown bunny rabbit he found near his Birmingham home.  He eventually tracked them down through a neighbour, but I’m convinced I’ll see a lost/found pet case resolved through Twitter very soon.

More importantly, this way of spreading the word quickly in your community can be used when people go missing.  Last Thursday, Soulla Stylianou’s 92 year-old father-in-law went missing for several hours.  She was understandably very concerned and wanted as many people in Birmingham as possible keeping an eye out for him, so posted an SOS on Twitter with a link to a recent picture of him.   It was retweeted endlessly, including a retweet by Missing_UK, so pretty much everyone on Twitter in Birmingham knew if they saw a man fitting his description, they needed to let Soulla know.  Thankfully he was found safe in a local hospital, where he’d been taken after a minor bump to the head, and is now home and well.

If you run a local website, think about using it to raise awareness of local lost and founds.  If you see a poster put up by a worried pet owner, take a picture of it and publish it.  If your website has a corresponding Twitter account, like the bournvillenews Twitter partner of Hannah Waldrum’s Bournville Village, tweet links to the lost/found post to talk to even more people.  The same can be done with local Facebook contacts, groups and pages.

You could even create a Lost and Found category or page, so people have a local online port of call.  This can be particularly effective on a Forum-style local website or a Ning site, where everyone has equal publishing rights, as the Sheffield Forum have shown with their Lost & Found page.  For instance, a recent post about a found dog was viewed 83 times.

And if you do start to introduce lost and found features to your site, be sure to satisfy the local interest by letting readers know the end of the story – especially if it has a happy ending, which everybody loves.

Capture your neighbourhood at the magical time of 4am

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!

TAL session in Chelmsley Wood McDonald's – we're lovin' it!

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.

A little Tuesday inspiration

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:

Blurb Online – how to build a creative community website

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.

Second Highgate session at Stanhope Hall

On Monday the talk about local team went to Stanhope Hall in Highgate for a second session.  William talked to the group about how a website can help with local campaigning and getting their message across.  We then worked with the Stanhope Women’s Group on developing the site they created during the fist session. 

The Stanhope Women’s Group plan to use their Wordpress blog to cover all the activity within the Stanhope Hall centre, which is a real focal point for the community.  So much goes on there that  is well worth bringing to a wider audience, such as their garden, which grows some of the food that’s eaten in their community lunches and the herbs for the womens’ group’s holistic medicine course.

We helped a member of the Highgate Neighbourhood Forum create a Wordpress blog to keep track of reporting issues to the council and making sure these are resolved.

We also spoke to the person behind Abacus Flats (Bradford Street, Digbeth) about how she can safely use her Wordpress blog to discuss reoccuring problems within the three apartment blocks, hold the property management company to account and create a sense of community amongst the residents. 

It was a great follow-up session that let us delve a bit deeper into the potential of the community websites created once we had gotten past the initial set-up stages.  We’ll be keeping in touch with the people we met at Stanhope Hall, giving them ongoing support and poping by every so often to enjoy one of their delicious community lunches!

Second TAL session in Highgate

On 19th October we kicked off some talk about local activity in Highgate, Birmingham with a preliminary social media surgery style session in Stanhope Hall, Ketley Croft, Highgate, Birmingham B12 (map here). 

Things got off to a great start – about 12 people came along, including the local police and we created a site for the Stanhope Womens’ Group  that meet regularly in the community centre.

We’re going back there at 11.00am this Monday 9th November to work with the group on developing this site and talk to anyone else who is interested in creating or contributing to a community website.  The session is open and completely free, so if you’re nearby and would like to learn how to create a website, or perhaps need help with a site you already have, please come along and talk to us.