If you are worried about losing your community site with the closure Community Website Builder service from BT & Recipero, don’t panic, Talk About Local can help you.
We can help you use free on-line platforms to maintain your community website on-line. If you have some technical ability you can use the Talk About Local step by step guides to setting up a WordPress.com site. If you would like some training in how to use this free platform, please do contact us, in many cases we can provide the training for free to community groups to help you get the best out of these robust free services.
If you would like to speak to use about our services and how they can help you with your current BT Community site please contact us
Tomorrow afternoon William will be presenting at the Connecting Stafford event at the Postgraduate centre at Stafford Hospital, Weston Road Stafford from 3pm. William will be talking about creating easy and effective local websites, and ways of using these to help the community through the challenging times in store for Stafford and pretty much everywhere else in the UK:
Over the next few years Stafford is going to be suffering real problems. We know that there will be a lot of redundancies, and a lot of cuts in public services. We will need to find ways of creating new opportunities for ourselves. By connecting online we can get through this. An active Hyperlocal site will give us some of the tools we need to do this.
[Diana Smith, Stafford Direct]
After William’s presentation he, Mike and myself will be remaining to help deliver a social media surgery that goes on until 7pm, so if you’re in the area and would like some advice on using the web to communicate, connect and organise, then please come along and say hello! You can find further details on the Stafford Direct website.
Well don’t be downhearted because Talk About Local are listing the UnHundred, a slightly tongue in cheek but entirely legitimate & serious list of the top 100 people and sites from the hyperlocal and alternative on-line media communities. Like the Talk About Local UnAwards but better.
We want the people who run the sites that make you laugh, sites that make you think & sites that help you with your hyperlocal projects or people who have done something for the benefit of their community or the wider hyperlocal community, or just something that you like. We are looking for things like:
On-line community radio stations
Local Twitter feeds
Message boards
Facebook groups
Podcasts
Using Video
Using Pictures
Local news sites
Satire
Most helpful person
Useful resource sites
If you nominate a site try and tell us who it is who is behind it, the awards are for people after all, if you don’t know don’t worry we’ll try and find them for you.
There are no categories that you need to fit in to, it is totally open to any sites that fit in to the basic criteria of, not being mainstream media and should be predominantly online.
We’ll have a panel of judges from the hyperlocal & on-line media communities who will discuss each nomination and compile the final 100.
Nominations are open now by leaving a comment below. All we need for you to nominate someone is a name & a URL but the more info you can give us the better and 1 or 2 sentences about why you are nominating them.
The top 10 of the UnHundred will win a VIP wristband for the next Talk About Local Unconference.
Did you know 10 million people in the UK are still not using computers and the internet? Research is showing that ‘fear’ is the main thing stopping them from embracing the online world.
People who visit this website are digitally engaged and you may be working with people to get them more digitally engaged. Now is the ideal time to find someone who is scared and disconnected and help them overcome their fears.
Our partner UK online centres have launched the ‘Face your online fears’ campaign to support ‘Silver Surfers’ Day on Friday 21st May and we are working with them to promote their campaign.
This is probably one of the easiest campaigns you digitally connected bandwidth hogs can be involved in, all you need to do is, well, just what you do everyday, help people get on-line. The only thing different is if you haven’t already done so in your social media cafes & surgeries, just refocus a little bit and find someone over say 60 and help them overcome their fears.
UK online centres are running ‘Face your online fears’ events at 700 UK online centres across England so you could signpost your local UK online centre to people who would benefit or why not help them to get started at home or at your next SMC/S with the free ‘Face your online fears’ game which will give them an understanding of how to use a keyboard and mouse, online security, and even online shopping.
If you have a website you can use any of these banners on your website, either by right clicking on the image and select Save Image As (saving it to a directory on your website). You can then add the banner directly into your web page using your preferred content management system or HTML application such as dreamweaver.
Or, if you would rather just link to the image rather than save and upload it to your own server, we have provided a html link next to each image, this can be copied and pasted directly into the HTML of your web page.
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!):
Social media is all about connecting with people you want to communicate with. Engagement through a trusted person/source is key.
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.
Reach out to people through their preferred medium, such as Facebook and add value/quality to their existing engagement.
Create a safe, free space where people feel free to express themselves, like On Road Media did with Savvy Chavvy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Talk About Local Un-Conference 2010
We are pleased to announce that the Talk About Local Un-Conference 2010 will be held on Saturday 17 April at Old Broadcasting House in Leeds. Old Broadcasting House is an excellent venue in Central Leeds, in the Civic Quarter just off the Ring Road.
We are delighted that this event will be in partnership with The Guardian’s Local initiative
As in Stoke-on-Trent in October, we will be using the Un-Conference format and we hope to have some of the very best hyperlocal publishers and special guests attending on the day.
After the success of the Pork Pie rounders, arranged by our own Nicky Getgood, there is a rumor that a skool sports day is being planned for one of the sessions, more than that we can’t yet announce, yet….
50 Tickets will be available on EventBrite from 1400 today (8 February) with further tickets being made available after we have ensured that local bloggers in Yorkshire and the North East have got their tickets.
Talk About Local Un-Awards
The glittering Talk About Local Un-Awards ceremony will take place on Saturday evening after the Un-Conference at a venue yet to be confirmed. As you will no doubt remember we were going to hold the Un-Awards in Birmingham earlier in the year, but after much procrastination and it being left on a low light we decided that it made logistical sense for us to hold it in conjunction with the Un-Conference.
Tickets for the the Un-Awards will be available on Eventbrite as soon as the venue is confirmed.
The sites above are only a very small sample of the hyperlocal sites that are out there. For a more exhaustive list please have a look at the excellent Openly Local Hyperlocal Sites Map. We may update this list from time to time but recommend that if you run a hyperlocal site you add it to the Openly Local Map.
