Archive for Success Stories

Shining a light on the democratic process in Kington

January 17, 2012 No comments

In the last in this mini-series to celebrate some of the remarkable sites which www.talkaboutlocal.org has worked with over the past few years I take a look at the vibrant Kington Blackboard.

Voter apathy in local elections is a well-known situation up and down the country – less than 50% in many places during the 2011 local elections.

But the difference in the Shropshire village of Kington was that people were getting fed up of their entirely co-opted council – a situation that had been in place for ten years.

They wanted to do something about it as Emma Phillips explained.

The town council was in disarray and people felt that they took decisions without consultation. People were unhappy so we felt setting up a website was a good way to change the situation.

That decision in 2009 put in process a chain of events which this year saw a total of 23 people standing in the 15 seats and resulted in a fully elected council.

But the path to the democratic turnaround hadn’t been a straightforward one – and a curiously seasonal tale of commerce, Christmas lights, electricity blackouts and the inevitable appearance of a real-life Scrooge proved to be the unlikely turning point.

Rumours of a dispute between the town council and traders in settling the previous year’s bill for the traditional Christmas light display were reaching the Kington Blackboard – would the show go on?

“A lot of people used the Blackboard to make their feelings known, more and more people came on to talk about it”.

A posting to the site on November 30 announced that the stand-off was over. The Chamber of Trade claimed.

“At a Chamber meeting last night (23rd Nov) it was recognised that if left to the Council,there would be no Lights. Kington Town Council were first advised in May by the Chamber, that it would be having nothing to with the Lights and it was only at their last meeting in November, that a decision was made to offer a contract to an outside organisation to put up the lights. Having already decided not to enter into any financial arrangements with the Council,the Chamber decided that for this year,members and supporters would put up the Lights without input from the Council.”

It seemed that the show would go on and the lights bedecked the streets as usual.

But only briefly. A person the site nicknamed Scrooge made the first of his many appearances in the town’s lights saga. One night the lights went out and the villagers learned there had been complaints made to the sub-contractors and the electricity authority over the validity and safety of the displays.

After checks established the lights were properly erected, the show did indeed go on.

But it was the shining of light into the workings of local bureaucracy that ended up illuminating the community for a far longer period than the yuletide display.

Current challenges
Having achieved its primary aim in changing the council’s relationship with the local community, the Blackboard’s current challenge is keeping the site interesting and relevant.

Emma and volunteer Hannah James are the main authors of material on the site as well as undertaking moderation of comments and postings to ensure nothing “racist, religious, sexist, political or slanderous”.

They are carrying out a review of activity over the next couple of months and coming up with ideas for the site’s future.

“Things have changed radically since we have a fully elected council. It’s much more pro-active and listening.

“Momentum is the difficult thing and now it’s hard to keep it going because there isn’t a contentious issue and people have got what they wanted with a fully elected council.

“We would like it to carry on so we are looking at how to make sure it stays in the public eye.”

* Visit Kington Blackboard at http://www.kingtonblackboard.org.

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Creating a living archive in Wolverton

January 13, 2012 One comment

wolverton
What can be done with boxes containing more than 45,000 photographs and 1,500 hours of sound recordings?

In the railway town of Wolverton, archivists have been working with volunteers to open the boxes and painstakingly research and detail their contents at the Talk About Wolverton blog.

Melanie Jeavons from Living Archive Wolverton explained:

We werenʼt started as an archive so all the primary source material was just stored somewhere and left. Itʼs only recently that people have seen the value in digitising the material.

“We have academics doing research for their degrees, people wanting to know if we have pictures of their Grandad who worked here, people interested in the industrial revolution and, because of the railway works, we have a lot of stuff that links the to national curriculum.

The Talk About Wolverton site started at the end of 2010 with a posting about the townʼs place in railway history which has set the tone for what was to follow.

“The railway works were opened in 1838 and a colony of railway workers sprung up. Wolverton was chosen as a stopping point between London and Birmingham because it was about halfway between the two. It was a place for refueling and repairing the trains, and a place where passengers could get out for refreshments and to visit a toilet. It was thought that a distance of about 50 miles was as far as a person could travel without needing a ʻtoilet stopʼ.”

Thereʼs now three staff working on the project who recruit, train and oversee the work of about 30 volunteers.

Typically this means training in computer skills such as scanning images or digitising audio recordings – skills that many volunteers donʼt already possess.

“ The work tends to attract retired people who donʼt necessarily have the IT skills that we could do with.

“From the volunteers point of view, itʼs a way to see their work online and they share with family members. Often people can be working away on some project and perhaps you canʼt see the wider results.”

The open access approach to sharing stories in a living archive via postings on the site can have unexpected results.

A recent volunteer taking his first steps at writing memories for the site astonished staff by producing a photograph taken by the pilot of the Christmas Island bomb tests that had been in his family.

“You can never tell whatʼs going to come in, who will walk through the door,” says Melanie.

Whatʼs next?

The groupʼs challenge is to digitise as much of the boxed material as possible as well as attracting people to post their own stories to the site and so widen the local knowledge.

Melanie aims to attract some younger participants – the age group that might be more inclined to take part via Facebook and blogs.

And of course thereʼs funding issues to deal with to pay for the volunteer training in those essential skills.

But aside from those practicalities, the staff and volunteers are determined to unearth those important stories, the living history which binds the community.

“Theyʼre interested in local history and they have a lot of knowledge themselves often having lived in the area all their lives.

“Itʼs about being able to share that heritage and history for future generations.”

* Talk About Wolverton can be found at http://talkaboutwolverton.wordpress.com.

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Trumpeting the success of Cricklade

January 9, 2012 No comments
crickladebugle

In the third of this mini-series to showcase some of the remarkable websites and blogs we’ve had the pleasure to be involved with, I hear from The Cricklade Bugle.

Contacting Peter of The Cricklade Bugle for our interview over Skype found him in thoughtful mood, working through the ins and outs of a dilemma with the potential for legal problems.

“I’ve recorded a meeting that was held about the local school” he explained “now I need to work out what I should do with that recording.”

It’s a problem many professional journalists have to wrestle with from time-to-time but Peter doesn’t have the back-up of an experienced newsroom to inform his decision as the retiree is the sole writer at the Bugle.

But working with multimedia – and all the considerations the immediacy that style of reportage involves – is nothing new for Peter.

Since launching the Bugle during a Talk About Local training session in February 2010, Peter has reported on events and community issues in the north Wiltshire town.

I have learnt to add Photos (Flickr), Videos (YouTube), Presentations (SlideShare), Google Maps and now on Twitter @CrickladeBugle and Facebook. Not bad eh! I have used the notes at the talk about local website. Now I feel completely confident about it.

The website has already been used by Cricklade Town Council and Wiltshire Council to consult the local community about issues such as refuse collection, car parking and redevelopment of the leisure centre. His coverage has included video reporting from a public town meeting, viewed by between 50 and 100 people.

But moves to take his camera into the decision-making meetings of the council are proving to be more tricky – at present he’s been advised that ‘legal reasons’ mean only an employee of the council could be tasked with such filming. Legal reasons that Peter is quietly investigating further.

“I am not surprised. Organisations always want to stay in control,” is his take on the issue.
Maybe it’s this quiet, but dogged, approach that means The Bugle has become such a relied upon resource for the local community.

In the 18 months it has operated, the site has formed good relationships with local MP James Gray has regular contributions from a Wilshire councillor, the historial society and a host of local events organisers looking for their details to be posted on the site.
“I am getting quietly into the confidence of people and have been at public meetings where someone has said ‘ I read that in The Bugle’.” he laughs.

Peter says he keeps up-to-date with how other community websites are progressing via the Talk About Local website, getting tips for improving his own site and sharing his support for new initiatives via Twitter.

He now hopes to develop the site further and encourage some more contributions over upcoming issues such as consultations on where local amenities should be housed and the proposals for a merger of local schools.

“I think it’s very early days for these hyperlocal sites and it needs some big major problem to bring the local community together.

“It’s a slow process, an organic growing process”

* The Cricklade Bugle is at http://cricklade.info.

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Creating a village in Caldmore

January 6, 2012 One comment

caldmoreIn the second of this series looking at some of the remarkable hyperlocal blog and websites Talk About Local has been involved with I visited a Walsall community which successfully celebrated a new identity for the area.

When the Caldmore Village Festival organisers came up with the idea of an annual event to bring the community together little could they know how things would escalate.

An online training session with Talk About Local to help get started with a blog followed in 2009 but, as the current website manager Kerry Hodgkiss explained, there was no particular expectation for the site.

We wanted a platform to tell people about the event. At that time I was just taking the minutes, I had dabbled a bit online but I never had anything I wanted to talk about on a blog until that point.

Two plus years on, and not only are the organisers looking at their funding options for the annual festival but they are also co-ordinating regular events to clean-up the area, helping organise live music in curry house events, taking over a disused caretakers’ house for community use and working out how to breathe life into a donated piece of unwanted land.

But one of the biggest achievements for the group has been around the pride and identity of the area.

As an area that had become synonymous with prostitution and drugs, Caldmore revisited its past to find a new identity.

Local councillor Mohammed Arif, vice chair of the Caldmore Village Festival, said: “A few of us sat down six years ago. We were fed-up with Caldmore’s old reputation and we wanted to rebrand it.

“We thought about the best the community had to offer and build on that. Caldmore has such inspiring diversity and has a strong reputation for food with many balti restaurants.

“At first we brainstormed and gradually things snowballed.”

And so started a change of emphasis which has now resulted in the area being gradually rebranded with that village feel – even down to finding funding for new signage for the area to reflect its new image.

Cllr Arif:

I’m so proud of community spirit in Caldmore and how a small number of committed people have rejuvenated this area culminating in Walsall Council changing the the status to a village. So much of that is down to the festival and festival group which grew from that first meeting.

Planning for the 2012 annual festival is already well underway but now the small committee are facing new issues associated with running a successful event rather than an unknown entity – organising funding.

See a slideshow of images from the group’s Flickr pool here.

There’s also concerns about how to best collaborate with the local and popular Mela, how to raise awareness further afield and how to keep everyone in the loop with the myriad of spin- off activities which have come about because of the festival but which now take place all year round.

Having the blog as a focal point has helped to galvanise the community – but what’s next?

Kerry said the next online challenge would be to incorporate the blog into other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook and ultimately get more people involved.

“I am hoping that people will start to write their own posts to upload, initially people were a bit scared of the technology but now they can see there’s not much more to it than creating a word document.”

* Caldmore Village Festival is at http://caldmorevillagefestival.wordpress.com

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Looking forward to the year ahead – and back at past success

January 3, 2012 No comments

Welcome to 2012! Here at Talk About Local, the team is getting stuck into some exciting new projects for the New Year. But, before we start on all that, I’ve taken a look back at some of the success stories of hyperlocal websites and blogs we’ve worked with so far.

Between ourselves we’ve been calling these case studies ‘the remarkables’ because each of them has something distinctive that makes them exactly that – remarkable.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll share those tales here as we all look forward to helping more communities tell their own remarkable stories during the next year.

First, is the wonder of W14, Annette Albert.

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