Something I’ll be keeping an eye on over the next few weeks is News Dash, a Say Hello project produced by Meshed Media.

News Dash is partnering up four community groups with journalists and social media experts to help them tell their stories.

The teams will have two weeks to complete the challenge with a simple brief: find the best stories and present them in the most effective way.

The teams might use blogs, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or Youtube, or more traditional methods to present the stories. What they use is up to them, but the aim remains the same, to get the stories out there.

The three community groups recruited so far are all very different, which should make for a good variety of content:

Friends of Brandwood End Cemetery – ‘arose from a deep genuine community interest in maintaining this historic landscaped Victorian Cemetery, which is also a valued green open space within an urban setting.’  This group bought to mind the Friends of Redcar Cemetary, who developed their community website project through talk about local and created the awesome Digital Cemetary, where readers can virtually visit graves.

iCycle – ‘More than a cycle shop’, iCycle is part of Queen Alexandra College for people with visual impairment and other disabilities.  The college trains mature students to become cycle repair and maintenance mechanics, who gain work experience working in the iCycle shop.

Blaze FM – a community radio station for Birmingham, Solihull and the West Midlands that helps promote local community groups.

It will be really interesting to see the different stories that emerge from these groups, and how they are chosen to be presented.

If you would like to get involved in News Dash, either by putting your organisation forward to be used in the project or by simply telling them your story, visit their Get Involved page.

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?

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!

On 25th November William Perrin and I were lucky enough to attend a Social Media Workshop at the West Midlands Police Headquarters  in Birmingham, which bought together the likes of talk about local, Podnosh and MyPolice with a small group of people from police forces across the UK to catch up and to discuss the way forward for the police in using social media, following their Policing 2.0 conference in October.

West Midlands Police providing the space and encouragement to talk about the seemingly endless possibilities was a fantastic  opportunity and, as Nick Booth has said, indicative of their open-minded approach:

They have been ahead of many forces with early use of podcasting in the form of Plodcast,  getting officers using  Facebook, widespread use of Youtube and Twitter. More importantly they are impatient to learn and, I think, willing to accept mistakes along the way.

Before the workshop, William told me the police were keen to hear new ideas and suggested I think up some games for them to play with the public, which got me thinking.  Game-playing with the police could be great fun and very easy to create – you have a ready-made team of easily identifiable people in uniform walking around a set, public neighbourhood area.   It could also do a lot to break down barriers between members of the public and the police by creating space for a more fun, informal relationship.

I liked the idea, so I visited the Wiki site Ludocity for inspiration – a collection of pervasive games, street games and new sports under creative commons licenses, which means they can be taken and twisted to play in whatever way one wants.  Looking through the games, I found a couple that could use simple tools like camera phones that many (especially young people) have access to, to playfully reverse the traditional roles and turn the police into the watched and the chased – this was becoming interesting.

The mischievous streak in me was instantly attracted to Glom - ‘a game which uses video cameras to explore the way people relate to each other through looking’.  I nervously explained the guidelines to the Police:

The objective of Glom is to capture as much candid footage of the other participants as possible whilst avoiding being filmed yourself…Once entered into the agreement of Glom participants are subject to being filmed at any time, in any place, engaged in any activity.

They thankfully took it very well, letting me carry on to talk about another photography game, Lumenatio:

The rules are simple. You have to hunt as many other players as possible and not let them shoot you. Your weapon is your digital camera and your allies are perceptiveness, dexterity, intelligence and urban corners…players should be given a swimming cap, that they have to wear during the hunt in a way that the number written on it is visible on the back of their head.

Each swimming hat is marked with a different number, which is the unique individual player number. For the period of the game this number becomes player’s name and the other numbers are their targets. During the game you have to hunt as many of them as possible.

I’ve actually played  Lumenatio before, as ‘Hat Snap’ with BARG in Birmingham city centre.  Trying to photograph the back of people’s heads without letting others snap yours is difficult, and resulted in us all running awkwardly around with our backs against walls, which drew some strange looks from passers-by.

Image by Purple Heather

When I was reminded of this game it occurred me that the Police already wear ‘unique individual player numbers’ – in the shape of collar numbers on their epaulettes.  Members of the public could capture these on their cameras or camera-phones and hopefully, by getting that close, actually talk to the Officers they snapped.  They could post their pictures online, possibly with the police responding with details about those officers, humanising them a bit more to players and website readers alike.

When one Officer voiced understandable concerns about the game another hit the nail right on the head by saying, “Yes, I’d wonder and ask, ‘Why are you taking my photograph?’  But then I’ve started a conversation.”  I was very pleasantly surprised by how open the group were to what I knew might be slightly risque ideas.  I was even more delighted to find out it got some present thinking and creating games of their own.  Last Saturday morning PC 9 Ed Rogerson from Harrogate (@hotelalpha9 on Twitter) invited the public to play:

I’m on foot patrol in Harrogate town centre. First person to say hello to me (and mention twitter) gets a prize.

Lee Shaw won, and got a fluffy hedgehog toy as a prize.  PC 9 Ed Rogerson promises there’s ‘more to come – probably involving Twitpic’.  I certainly hope so.  These games could be a great way for the Police to engage the public in lighthearted and unusual ways and, as PC 9 Ed Rogerson has proved, can engineer real-life meetings and conversations with the people they serve.

It’s nice to add a Twitter RSS feed about a place to your site as it will generate plenty of fresh content and pick up things you might not know about. But there is a danger that spam will end up appearing.

You can minimise this a little by using Twitter advanced search and cutting out some common bad words, for example for Stoke I exclude ‘porn’, ‘sex’ and ‘escort’. Then you can use the orange link to copy the RSS feed (example) into a WordPress widget.

That will cut out quite a lot of spam, but you might still want to warn your readers that you are drawing the feed in from a public RSS feed and they should follow links with caution.

This documentary of one man’s journey into the derelict Birmingham Battery building is one of the best YouTube films I’ve ever seen.  Not because of the production skills of creators Living Proof Films (great though they are), but because of the quite emotional narration.  You really do see inside the iconic building from the photographer’s perspective:

You begin to see the building as having a life of its own.  It has characteristics and charms, like a person does.  I must admit, I felt an attraction to the Birmingham Battery.

Although you do learn some things about the building whilst watching it, you are not left feeling you’ve been told all its facts and figures, instead you go on quite an intimate journey with the narrator and learn how he feels about the space.

Expressing a personal preference like this is far from a bad thing – buildings and spaces are not only special because of their architectural or scenic merit, they become special to people because of the responses they illicit or what happens within them.

For instance, many born and bred Brummies I know get quite nostalgic when walking past Snobs nightclub, a nondescript building which contained many a night of youthful abandon and coming-of-age episodes.  During a recent pub conversation no sooner had one person mentioned Snobs than everyone else enthusiastically chipped in with their stories.  It ended with plans to take a group trip there, to share more memories that walking through the nightclub might bring to mind. That’s the great thing about expressing your reactions to a shared space like that – others will be compelled to join in the conversation with their own tales about it.

Jon Bounds highlighted the importance of sharing personal stories about spaces when he created his Campaign for Real Heritage blue stickers, encouraging us to see that what we feel is important about a place holds as much value as the National Trust’s seal of approval, and should be duly marked:

‘…the real people have history too. It deserves recognition, YOUR history deserves a blue plaque.’

Ben Whitehouse spoke of creating a tour of alternative Birmingham landmarks, asking for suggestions of stories rather than traditional tourist spots.

I’d like to put together a list of places around the city (preferably the city centre) that hold personal resonances for people who’ve visited Birmingham, people who live, work and play here.

I’ve been running my own hyperlocal blog Digbeth is Good for just over a year now and, although it initially just contained local news, events and reviews, as my confidence grew it also unashamedly became my own personal journey through the area.  But I found readers reacted rather well to this, sometimes responding in kind with their own take on things.  For instance, an early post about Guardoggy prompted Bobbie Gardner to comment with her encounters of the dog.

So don’t be afraid to get personal with your site, and convey to readers your own reaction to the area as well as news and infomation about it.  You never know, it may encourage readers to chip in with their own stories and your site could become more than an information hub, it could be a place where a community feels free to express itself.

As part of our roll out for the Talk About Local project we are going to be running some taster sessions around the West Midlands.  The sessions will be an introduction in to setting up your own online blog.

The sesions will comprise of:

• An introduction to blogging
• How hyperlocal sites can help you communicate better in your community
• Using blogging as a platform to help with community action and getting your voice heard
• Blogging platforms
• Setting up a blog

If you are interested in learing more about blogging and how to empower yourself online then please fill in THIS FORM

All we need from you is your name, E-mail address and location, so we can arrange a suitable location with our delivery partners UK online centres.  We need about 10 people in one location to make the sessions viable and they are only open to individuals and community groups (corporate training can be arranged).

Once we have enough interest in one area we will arrange a suitable date to run the session.

I’m delighted that Mike Rawlins of PitsnPots and Nicky Getgood of Digbeth is Good have agreed to join the TAL team full time joining me and Clare White who has been working on the project part time.  Mike, Nicky and Clare are some of the best hyperlocal talent around and TAL gives them the opportunity to transfer their skills to communities across the country.    I shall ensure they have time to continue with their existing sites.

Some wonderful people applied to work with the project and I am sorry we couldn’t take on more.  I am also touched that people are volunteering to help left right and centre – maybe we should create some sort of hyperlocal corps to match offers with need.  We shall also be funding further freelance work like Jon Bounds’ marvellous Brum and Stoke-On-Trent aggregators.

We start work as a core team in early August, which allows us to get the show on the road with pilot TAL sessions in the West Midlands, before delivering a robust national product later this year with our partner UK online centres.  We now we have capacity to get the hyperlocal alliance project underway. And as ever we continue to develop partnerships with all sorts of organisations, more on that soon.  As ever, thanks to our sponsors 4IP, Screen West Midlands and Advantage West Midlands – their funding has created two new social media jobs in the West Midlands.

There’s some great innovation out there in hyperlocal publishing in both content and technology.  Talk About Local wants to showcase and support that innovation.  So we have created hyperlocal labs (actually it’s just a web page with some bright ideas on it…) and our first project goes live today.

As our first project Jon Bounds has created a customisable hyperlocal news aggregator for Birmingham’s local sites.  You can read about the pipes based aggregator here and Jon explains how you can do it for your area.

Other small projects will follow over the coming months – any bright ideas, or if you have seen anything good send it in to info@talkaboutlocal.org

For the first time in the UK the government has acknowledged the role of hyperlocal sites in the future news environment.  The Digital Britain report singles out Talk About Local as part of a ‘new possibly disruptive wave of local news’.  Full extract from Chapter 5 para 61:

’61.  Local websites of all shapes and sizes are providing community news and information to hundreds of thousands of people. Most of these sites are volunteer run, using free publishing platforms like www.wordpress.com with no hard costs. They show that grass roots media can provide an accurate, reliable,popular sources of news and information without regulation or subsidy. Their news values and thresholds are new, reflecting grass roots interests and priorities.
62. Community sites with no costs can serve very small, human news geographies of a single ward or a few streets. Community websites with no old media legacy are able to discriminate between types of media production to suit local needs. The written word and photos predominate, sound and video are in a minority. In some communities with established local sites the readership within the community appears comparable to that of traditional news media.
63. Digital Britain is at the beginning of a new and possibly disruptive wave of local news, generated by communities for communities using free online media. Over the medium term this has the potential to be good for local pluralism and expression as commercial funding for traditional media diminishes. 4IP and Screen West Midlands are making a major investment in Talk About Local to create hundreds of new community websites by giving community activists the simple skills. Digital Mentors are taking a similar approach on a smaller scale.