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.

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!

On 15th November I was lucky enough to grab a ten minute chat with Andrew Brightwell of Hasbrum, the new website of ‘Birmingham Hyperlocal News’ created by a group of students on Birmingham City University’s MA Online Journalism course.  Hashbrum is a true experiment – the team do not have a clear long-term goal for the website, they just want to test the possibilities of delivering local news online.

The idea is to try and find out a bit more about how local news can be in the future, so we’ve decided to try to cover bits of Birmingham and try to experiment with our coverage by using different forms of media coverage – video and audio as well as writing and we’re just having some fun really…We’re letting it all hang out and see what happens!

These experiments take various forms – for instance, like many local news sites Hasbrum aggregates relevant content from other local websites, but it’s aggregation with a twist rather than just regurgitating the information.

What we’ve discovered is if we use other people’s content in clever, different ways then we’re happy to do it, we’re not just going to aggregate content in the normal way.  We’re using maps, for example which is a good way of aggregating content. If you take stories from elsewhere and put them into a map then you’re giving a new twist to it.

However, Hashbrum focuses on generating original content rather than presenting other people’s.  In doing this the has team found that, because of their different backgrounds, this content varies in form and feel.  Andrew, who worked as a professional local journalist for several years, is more inclined to stick to that facts with his storytelling whilst others with a blogging background inject more opinions to their pieces, which gives the website ‘a real mix’ that highlights the difference between the two types of delivery.

I’m trying to learn how to do things in a more opinion-based way because what you find is if you do just factual stuff people don’t necessarily have a relationship to that….It’s not something that you would necessarily want to respond to.

You can definitely see their personal bias when looking at the news items they choose to focus on.  For instance, the site has a feature page about the plight of historical Birmingham swimming pools.

We’ve been quite selective in what we do.  Birmingham’s a big place..we’re not trying to cover all of Birmingham, we’re not trying to pretend that we’re a proper sort of news product like the newspapers or even the radio stations. All we’re trying to do is pick out things that have been neglected to some extent…we’re choosing what we do and I guess we’re having an impact on that as well….we’re bringing our own view to it.

Andrew hopes Hashbrum’s readers will start to play a part in directing this focus – steering the site to cover topics they want to learn about.  This seems to be the reason the team haven’t fixed upon an overall goal for Hashbrum – they see it going where the audience wants to take it.

I can’t tell you exactly what it’s going to be….the goal if you like is for other people to tell us what they want. For there to be some kind of relationship between the readership….and us as the creators of content and for those two things…to be equal. So other people start to contribute to what we’re doing and they also direct what we’re doing as well…Our audience can be our editor.

This audience-led environment is a far cry from the one Andrew prepared for in training as a journalist.  The new world professional journalists now face was something he’d discussed earlier that day on Rhubarb Radio’s Sunday Local with Birmingham Post Editor Marc Reeves, Peter Fletcher and Michael Grimes. During the show they touched upon the definitions of and differences between journalists and bloggers, and came to the surprising conclusion that it isn’t as important as some might think.

There isn’t really a difference necessarily…There have always been people who have become journalists…people who are interested in what they’re doing who have got some kind of expertise and they’ve been able to use that to become journalists.  They haven’t necessarily been trained as journalists but they’ve been able to make that step.  Lots of bloggers are doing that.  There’s a huge difference between someone who just gets on the internet and sounds off…and other people who are going out and finding news and bringing it to an audience.  And that’s where journalism starts and obviously it develops into something else eventually.

Far from being fearful of this new playing field, Andrew sees a role emerging for journalists of gathering the news, footage and content that website managers and bloggers can use for discussion with their audiences.

Maybe we can be part of some new model in the future where there are full-time professionals who are going out to the coalface and bringing in news and then other people are using that for their own blogs or for their own audiences.  That relationship could be good for journalists because it might give them a career that they don’t have at the moment…I’m interested in finding out if there can be a relationship between these two worlds that would be mutually beneficial.

It looks like the outcomes of the Hasbrum team’s experiments will be something we can all learn from, not just in terms of innovative online news editorialship and delivery, but the place they find for themselves within that.

You can listen to my full interview with Andrew below:

Interview with Andrew Brightwell of Hashbrum by getgood

Here’s a film William made at the second talk about local session in Highgate, Birmingham which let us go beyond the set-up stages for the community websites we created in the first session and helped the group develop the websites’ content a further.

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!

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.

The talk about local team are busy getting well underway with the West Midlands pilot of the project, and as part of that we’re holding a couple of social media surgery style sessions over the next couple of weeks, to help people from local communities and groups set up and develop effective community websites.

The first is this Wednesday 14th October in Burton-upon-Trent at Trent & Dove Housing’s offices, 10.00am-1.00pm.  The session has been arranged via Community Action & Support – East Staffordshire (CASES). 

The second is a lot closer to home at Stanhope Hall, Ketley Croft, Highgate, Birmingham B12 (map here) next Monday 19th October at 10.00am-12.00pm.  With talk about local land being just ten minutes away in Digbeth, we were keen to do something in Highgate and Sandra and Lee at Friction Arts were kind enough to put us in touch with the community centre’s womens’ group, who are enthusiastic about creating an online voice for the area.  They are open to others’ input so come along if you’d like to contribute! 

Both sessions are open and completely free, so if you’re nearby and would like to learn how to set up a community website, or perhaps need help with a site you already have, please come along and meet the talk about local team.

On Saturday 15th July ‘Pindec’, of BirminghamB29.com, led a walk around the B29 postcode perimeter. But this was no summer stroll, this was a Tortoise Walk:

Apparently, in 1840s Paris, it was very trendy to wander around with a tortoise on a lead to make sure you were gong at the right speed to truly experience the city – so can anyone lend us a tortoise?

Unfortunately, no-one had a tortoise to spare that day but a sufficiently slow pace was set, ‘recording our feelings as we go, in the spirit of the flâneur (“a person who walks a city to experience it”).’

Exploring their surroundings in this unusual way meant the walkers started to notice things that had escaped their attention before, and wonder online what that plant is, or why someone saw fit to place a pylon right next to someone’s house. They concentrated on derelict buildings and building sites, reflecting on what was there before and what’s to come. They explored local historical sites, discovering the Weoley Castle ruins ‘completely by accident’ and taking the time to wander around. And they discovered ‘random things’ that just happened to catch their eye whilst they had the time to stop and investigate further.

And the best bit about it was the whole B29 perimeter walk odyssey was recorded on the site by Pindec, who incorporated everyone’s comments, photographs and audioboos into her blog post about the day. This meant readers were able to share the walkers’ journey – read about their findings, see what made them stop and think and listen to what they had to say out loud.

Taking a different style of journey that makes you look at your area in a new light like this is a great way of generating interesting and unusual content for a hyperlocal site. You could try a Tortoise Walk like the B29ers, or try something a bit different if a snail’s pace isn’t your style. If you’re stuck for ideas The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel is a good starting point, and the website has an Index of Experiments for you to dip into and play with. Fancy ‘Taking a Line for a Walk’ or ‘Blind Man’s Buff Travel’? Or how’s about a messy hybrid of the two? Mis-guide.com is also worth delving into, leafing through their book A Mis-guide to Anywhere has given me an idea or two.

Have a think and go exploring your area in weird and wonderful ways, either as a group or on your own if you’d prefer. Just be sure to record each new discovery and how you came about it, so your readers can share in your adventure.

Digbeth is good tickled my fancy – an irreverent, cheerful, colourful site that perhaps confounds the expectations.  Digbeth is (or was) spiritual home to Birds custard, Typhoo Tea and a lot of manufacturing, prior to the 1980s but now undergoing huge regeneration. Nicky Getgood has an wonderful up, irreverent and dynamic voice on this blog.  Like many ultra local sites Nicky gets a high Google position for her area – a good example of how a site like this can help promote an area.  I like this post inparticular about a local guard dog.

A different point of view comes from the protest site Keep Digbeth vibrant – which is a voice campaigning against development – something i can sympathise with from Kings Cross.