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!

We have now closed the nominations for the Talk About Local UnAwards categories and will make final decisions as to which of the categories we are going to open up for nominations over the Christmas & New Year break.

The highly coveted UnAwards will be presented at a ceremony which will take place a little later than we first said and somewhere other than the West Midlands.

We have been speaking to a sponsor for the next Talk About Local UnConference and we are currently investigating some venues in the the North of England for an event in the first quarter of 2010.  Once we have got a confirmed venue we will give you more details.  The UnAwards will be presented at a glittering ceremony after the UnConference.

All that remains is for William, Nicky, Clare and I to wish you a very happy Christmas & New Year.

Busker by Dan Green

I was pleasantly surprised to discover an old friend from my home town of Cardiff, photographer Dan Green, has started a brilliant local photography blog Big Little City – ‘a window into the lives of those people who help give cities their unique character’.  The site was born out of his first major exhibition, Cardiff Characters, which he has developed in his online space with pictures of people who epitomise Cardiff and reflect its ‘unique vibrancy and soul’.

The focus will be on highlighting communities and the people who make them tick be they a rugby star, a bus driver, a lollipop man or lady, an artist, waitress, café owner, musician, dancer, or eccentric.

It got me thinking about how people really make a place, and most communities have a few characters that you couldn’t imagine being without – be it because they’re local heroes, a bit eccentric, or just that they and what they do is such a long-standing local institution.

I can think of few from my neck of the woods, Digbeth, off the top of my head.  John Tighe, landlord of my local The Spotted Dog, who won Birmingham it’s Not Shit’s Brummie of the Year 2007 for his fight against a Noise Abatement Order.  His finest hour on Digbeth is Good is a film of him getting his head shaved for charity. Adam Crossley, author of Keep Digbeth Vibrant and Chair of the Digbeth & Highgate Residents’ Association, is always organising great local events with John and starting up quirky local websites.

And then there’s Mr Ralph.  Mr Ralph is something of a Digbeth institution, invariably found in one of the many Digbeth pubs, peddling customised goods from his battered old suitcases.  Rumour has it he holds the last existing Birmingham pedlars license.  I found Mr Ralph quite fascinating so I wrote a blog post about him after he kindly agreed to it, including photos of him and his Mr Ralph branded goods.

Do you have any key local characters like this?  People who really make your neighbourhood what it is?  Talk to them, see if there’s a way you could present them and the great stuff they do online somehow – be it with photography, film or just writing about them with passion.  Perhaps they’d like to contribute themselves, either on a regular basis or as a one-off with a story they want to tell. Try getting them and their voice onto your site, either by letting them speak for themselves or, if they’re a little shy, by telling as much of their story as they’re comfortable with.  That way your site starts talking about ‘who’, as well as about ‘where’ and ‘what’.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8YQ6eoLUQ4]

By far the most inspirational talk I heard at Open Tech 2009 conference was from Robin, a member of Space Hijackers, who spoke about ‘Community and Democracy in Hijacked Space’.  I’d recommend you listening again if you have the time.

It was a great to hear about play being used as a surprisingly effective and disruptive method of protest.  Space Hijackers, who attempt to ‘corrupt the culture of architecture, and destroy the hierarchies that exist’ by staging hilariously anarchic happenings, got me thinking about putting the fun back into local campaigning, which many hyperlocal sites find themselves involved with.

Obviously, justifiable anger and reasoned argument about issues causing serious damage to the community is a great and worthwhile thing, I’m not denying that.  It’s just that sometimes you’re met with problems so ridiculous the best option may be to fight like with like.

For instance, Birmingham pub The Rainbow has recently faced closure after Birmingham City Council served a Noise Abatement Order in response to complaints from one lone tenant, who lives in an apartment block built long after the pub was.  The council seeing fit to threaten this renowned live music venue because of one complainant, but aspiring to develop the area’s cultural character in their Big City Plan, seemed kafkaesque enough to warrant a game.  After hearing Robin speak, I was pondering on some noisy, twisted version of musical statues, or a loud complaints choir outside the council house.

The fun doesn’t necessarily have be physical, you can have it in your online space too.  Keep Digbeth Vibrant do a great job of tempering their obvious frustration with Birmingham City Council Environmental Health, with quirky creations like the spoof Stella advert above and The Digbeth Whisperer newspaper.

On my site Digbeth is Good, when Birmingham City Council Leader Mike Whitby commandeered a Big City Plan public consultation bus from my neighbourhood for a photoshoot on the other side of town, I initially responded with righteous indignation.  My emails and calls to the press office were met with a wall of silence until the fantastic local satire site Lolitics helped to bring it to a wider audience.  Soon after a lolled image of Mike Whitby appeared, closely followed by several of a walrus bemoaning the loss of his bus, I received an apologetic statement from Director of Planning and Regeneration Clive Dutton.  The increasing amount of attention from other sources the incident was getting seemed to make them realise ignoring me was not making me go away.

So next time you’re met with local plans, politics or problems that would be funny if they weren’t so angering, perhaps just try highlighting the funny.  Point out the silly and match it.  The results this approach gets from The Man may be limited, as he’s not known for his sense of humour, but it will make engaging with the issue much more fun for your readers, and give you a bit of light relief from feeling just plain mad.

DiGpuss is the online shop attached to Digbeth is Good, my hyperlocal site about Digbeth’s ‘culture, pubs and a whole lot more’.

Now, DiGpuss is rather an unusual shop in that it doesn’t sell anything. You see, everything in that shop window was a thing that somebody had once lost and I have found. And brought home to DiGpuss. My cat DiGpuss…

If any of this sounds familiar it’s because these are the opening lines to the classic children’s TV series Bagpuss, which DiGpuss was inspired by. It was born from the fact that, because Digbeth is rather a messy place with seemingly no street cleaning to speak of, I’m continually finding things. Most of it is general rubbish, admittedly, but after a while of walking the Digbeth streets I became aware of certain trends emerging.

The first thing I noticed was a plateful of discarded food at around the same time Gordon Brown was encouraging us all to be frugal and eat our leftovers to beat the credit crunch. I took a photo, and put it in a post stating ‘Digbeth says no to food saving’. I would have left it there but I kept discovering more and more food congealing in the surrounding streets – scotch eggs without the eggs, a drain blocked with corned beef hash, a whole loaf of bread tossed into the canal and ignored by the ducks. It just went on and on, and I kept on posting the photos until they warranted their own category ‘Digbeth Food Wastage’.

After a while, I began to realise that it wasn’t just food I was finding, but human and household objects too. There seemed to be an awful lot of people shedding clothes in Digbeth such as hats, coats, gloves and Cinderella-style lone shoes. Some of my finds were incredibly strange, such as a brand new pair of Moss Bros trousers still in the bag and a photo of a biker girl on holiday.

It was whilst discussing my discoveries with some friends in the pub that a DiGpuss shop was suggested by Birmingham artist Shona McQuillan. It immediately struck a chord with us all and we hatched grand plans for interactive shop windows and Digbeth-themed mice songs. Michael Grimes offered to make the technical magic happen and build it, as I really didn’t know where to start. But perhaps that’s the point – we had the idea and looked at how to make it a reality afterwards because where there’s a will, there’s almost always a way.

Discussing it in the cold light of day, Michael and I decided that singing mice might have been a bit time-consuming and ambitious, so it was scaled down to something simpler that still captured and communicated the essence of the thing – I’m going to hand over to Michael at this point, who has kindly written up the science bit:

Digpuss is intentionally minimal: a sort of grittier, no-nonsense version of Bagpuss. I drew a sketchy parody of the Bagpuss logotype and underneath it plonked the picture of Nicky’s cat Floss. Nicky also supplied the picture of some grotty Digbeth window; a far cry from the quaint set in Emily’s shop, but much more in keeping with the sort of tat that Nicky finds to put in them.

Building Digpuss was a bit of a challenge, because I wanted it to be standards-compliant and not rely on any scripting (such as Javascript); I wanted to write it entirely in html and css. The items in the windows are pulled in from Nicky’s tagged images on Flickr (this did require a little bit of scripting, but it’s done server-side in PHP and so relieves the browser of any compatibility issues) and displayed as items in an unordered list. When they’re clicked on the user is taken to their page on Flickr.

I used two versions of the shop windows image: one untouched and one with the windows cut out. I then sandwiched the list items between the two. As a finishing touch I added opacity to the list items so that the image behind shows through, giving them the appearance of being behind the windows: when moused over they display more clearly, apparently further into the foreground.

However, because I chose to build Digpuss this way it only works as described above in Firefox and Safari; and, I was excited to find, it works beautifully in Safari on the iPhone (the 3GS at any rate). It didn’t work at all well in Opera , but surprisingly didn’t fare too badly in Internet Explorer. The main issue is opacity, as this is a css property that’s not supported in many browsers (yet). There are also issues to do with positioning which may well be to do with my html and not browser problems at all, but I’ve yet to look into it.

Have you noticed something slightly odd about your area that you might like to present in a more quirky way? You may want to present a trend collectively, rather than in a trickle of disjointed posts that wouldn’t communicate a bizarre build-up. You could try playing with maps if they span an area (like I did with my Faunography map of Digbeth animal life), or some kind of slideshow of images, or a mashed-up YouTube movie of film clips. Or you could try building something like a shop from scratch, if that’s what you really want to do. The most important thing is to have a think and a talk and a few laughs over some thoughts, let them take shape and then worry about how you’re going to achieve it. Never stop a good idea in its tracks because it’s beyond you technically.

For instance, William posed a creative quandary to me the other day – my DiGpuss finds are a collection, but Digbeth Food Wastage still remains a category of lone blog posts with no explanation that may seriously perplex newcomers to the site. How might I present them as a whole, rather than in their little pieces? So I thought, and pondered, and today a little light-bulb came on. All the photos as a film slideshow of images with the soundtrack Food Glorious Food. I don’t know how to do this, so I stuck my hand up and asked. Twitter is a great place for doing that. And if you get no joy there, try asking the Talk About Local team by emailing helpisathand@talkaboutlocal.org. If we don’t know, rest assured that we’ll find someone who does!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ho0MYPW9YUs]

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.