As is tradition with our unconferences, at the end of #TAL12 we held the much-awaited Unawards ceremony to mark the very best in hyperlocal innovation and excellence. Below is our list of winners, who were rewarded with some very special prizes purchased from Latifs (‘Where Choice Meets Price’). The winners will also receive a ‘#TAL12 Unaward winner’ badge for their websites. Watch John Popham’s video above to relive the Unawards fun!
Best story – Annette Albert of W14 London for London riots coverage
Best community engagement – Steph and James of WV11
One piece of advice Dave Harte gives to community website managers in his fantastic post ‘Hyperlocal till I die‘ is, strangely, ‘to have some children’. Or, more specifically:
…something that keeps you tied to an area…The longevity of your blog is directly connected to your life circumstances…‘staying put’ is the best chance your blog has got of a long life. Knowing I’m staying put helps me not worry about updating it 10 times a week; I know my hyperlocal blog will be around and part of the media landscape for quite a while to come.
If you’re starting a community website, it’s always a good idea to be fairly certain you’ll around for the forseeable future and able to commit enough time and energy to get it going and well established. However, things and circumstances can very well change over the years and you might find that ‘staying put’ isn’t always possible.
When my family’s circumstances precipitated a decision to move back to my home town of Cardiff late last year, I found myself facing the question of what to do with Digbeth is Good, which I’d managed since it began in May 2008, before I left Birmingham. There was plenty of advice online available to help me consider:
William Perrin wrote about the ‘hyperlocal life cycle‘ in July 2011 asking ‘what makes hyperlocal sites resilient?’ The answer was a sharing of skills and control and broadening the base of a website’s contributors.
Ed Walker has written about his experience of ‘Handing over a hyperlocal site‘ not once but twice, and advises those doing the same to build up a team of good contributors, give a thorough handover before leaving and be on hand to offer help and support for long afterwards.
Hannah Waldram wrote about her experience of ‘Passing over the hyperlocal baton‘ of Bournville Village to Dave Harte in early 2010. She tells those who are kick-starting a community website when their location is subject to change to ‘recruit a deputy editor in the early stages of concept building’.
Luckily for me the solution for Digbeth is Good was in place before the issue arose – Pamela, Secretary of Digbeth Residents’ Association and a relative newcomer to the area keen to get involved in local life, had started contributing to the website in early 2011. As she was posting with increasing regularity on the site and her involvement in the local community grew, Pamela was an obvious safe pair of hands for Digbeth is Good. I can’t wait to see what she does with it.
Shared skills, ethos and outlook
Working in communications and marketing at a local university by day, Pamela was no stranger to publishing online and a simple WordPress.org dashboard, which meant I didn’t need to train her (although this wouldn’t have been a problem – I was working to share my skills locally with Digbeth Social Media Surgeries last year). Having built up a relationship with her through Digbeth Residents’ Association and socially, I also knew Pamela was community-minded and wasn’t looking for commercial gain, so I didn’t need to worry that the website’s focus would shift beyond recognition.
What’s in it for them?
Although Pamela isn’t looking to make any money from Digbeth is Good she hasn’t taken on the site for nothing. Digbeth Residents’ Association is currently looking to build up its profile and support and Pamela is using Digbeth is Good’s audience to help her do that. The focus of the site hasn’t changed beyond recognition but it is featuring and promoting Digbeth Residents’ Association’s interests and activities more, which is brilliant.
Whoever you hand your hyperlocal website over to will want to use it to further their own interests (just make sure they’re ones you support) and will need to have the autonomy to do that otherwise their enthusiasm will wane. They will want to make changes, do things differently and cover new issues and will need to have the freedom to do so.
Holiday cover
This isn’t the first time Pamela has found herself taking care of Digbeth is Good. Illness (mine and my family’s) meant I went a bit quiet online several times last year. Pamela increased her contributions to Digbeth is Good when this happened. So Pamela taking control of the site now isn’t a completely new thing.
A team player
Pamela isn’t holding the Digbeth is Good fort on her own. Midge is continuing to post his music-related updates, which he’s been doing since March 2010 and just before I left Birmingham I held a little Digbeth is Good social media surgery, getting local people who’d expressed an interest in contributing logged into the website and accustomed to the dashboard and publishing posts. Hopefully this extra capacity can support Pamela when she needs take a break from the website.
Lurking in the background
Despite living in Cardiff, I’ve not left the Digbeth is Good team and am still listed as a contributor who ‘sometimes chips in from afar’. I intend on being on-hand for support, one-off posts about stuff I might come across online and pretty much anything else for as long as I’m wanted.
Exit strategy
If I’m honest, having the perfect person to hand Digbeth is Good to was something that happened by accident rather than design so I’m counting myself very lucky that things have worked out well. So if there’s one piece of advice I’d offer to hyperlocal website managers it would be to start thinking of how you’d hand it over now, even if you’ve no intention of doing so in the near future. New businesses are always told to consider their exit strategy when starting up and I’d suggest it would be a good idea for website managers to do the same.
How would your website fare if you were run over by that bus tomorrow? Are there more contributors who can keep generating content? (If not, could you identify some suitable team members and get them posting?) Does at least one of them have the necessary logins and information to be able to keep things going? If you want your website to outlive you or the time you can commit to it, then these are all things to start thinking about sooner rather than later. That way, if life throws you a curveball, what to do with your hyperlocal website can be one less thing for you to worry about.
As you can see, we’re pretty busy here at talk about local gearing up for the #TAL11 unconference next Saturday 2nd April. However we also recently held a somewhat smaller and more intimate event in the shape of Show and TAL in Birmingham, to catch up with our West Midlands friends and reflect upon the story so far with the talk about local project.
Fenland Farmers ‘Huge Agri potatoes ‐ can anyone better these?’
Karen Strunks also talked about her hyperlocal journey with her Wake Green Park website, a video of which is above. Karen’s very busy at the moment, not only with talk about local but also working towards the next big date of her popular 4am project on Sunday 24th April 2011:
The 4am Project aims to capture a view of the world at that often unseen time of day. It’s not just a photography project, but a global collaboration built by a world wide community.
The photography project is often a hit with hyperlocal sites as it serves to capture a picture of the local neighbourhood at ‘the magical time of 4am’ as well as contribute to a global picture. Digbeth is Good, Kington Blackboard and Guardian Cardiff are just some of the hyperlocal sites to have taken part in the past. Think about setting your alarm clock for 4am this Sunday 24th April and find out how your area looks at 4am!
There were some particularly inspiring and thought-provoking sessions at UK GovCamp 2011 last Saturday. The ones I found most enjoyable were:
The session on trade unions led by Paul Evans, starting off with a rough aim to make trade unions more open and democratic and ending with ideas for a Rate My Union, Rate My Workplace and a mumsnet style online community space for people to talk about their working life which is well moderated and managed to ensure conversations don’t equal dismissals.
The Localism session led by Will Perrin, which he has written about here. During it Nick Booth had some interesting things to say about the type of people who tend to develop effective community sites (sociable, community-focused people who see adding to them as a personal passion rather than an item on their task list) and how social media surgery style training can be a stepping stone for them making use of relevant open data.
The creative collaboration session led by Lloyd Davis (who has created some interesting online mass participation projects such as Most Interesting and Journal Racing) which questioned what makes certain ideas capture people’s enthusiasm and imaginations, people’s motivations to participate and the power of Lloyd’s own social capital as he prepares to become the object of his new project Tuttle to Texas.
I myself didn’t go to Local GovCap with the intention of leading a session but as people started pitching, I realised I could take the opportunity to have a conversation around something that’s been on my mind for a little while.
Me pitching by Paul Clarke
Before Christmas I was lucky enough to be invited to a Community Engagement Methodologies workshop that the King’s College London team behind Strandlines had organised.
One of the many thought-provoking projects I was introduced to during the course of the day was the Mass Observation Communities Online project, which builds upon the work of Mass Observation, which has been collecting recordings of everyday life in the UK through diaries, questionnaires and observations since 1937.
The JISC funded Mass Observation Communities Online project (or MOCO for short), which took place in April-September 2010, has ‘expanded on Mass Observation’s tradition by inviting community groups throughout the UK to develop an archive that reflects life in 21st century Britain.’ The material created by groups and individuals from all over the UK was then collated and shared online on the MOCO project website.
This online collection of recordings in the shape of observations, day diaries, photographs and questionnaire responses got me pretty excited from a hyperlocal angle, so the next day I started looking through the site to try and find and share locally relevant content. However, I soon found this wasn’t as simple as I’d hoped it would be.
This is by no means unusual with archive material, most of which isn’t online at all, which is sad – heritage and history on a hyperlocal website brings the content to a local audience that may not go searching through archives and is often a great driver for discussion and sharing of memories in the comments box. So I was eager for a UK GovCamp discussion around how archive materials might be better stored and shared online in ways people can easily find and use them. I started by outlining the main obstacles I’d stumbled over with sourcing archived materials online, namely:
1. The material isn’t shared online
Film Archive for the South West of England
A dictionary definition of an archive is ‘a place or collection containing records, documents, or other materials of historical interest.’ It seems the primary purpose of an archive is to collate, catalogue and store those records so they are preserved to prevent future damage.
However, those records are being preserved for a reason – because they are historically or socially significant in some way. This makes them interesting to pretty much anyone looking at their subject matter or topics they touch upon – be they academics, journalists, people writing for a local website or merely someone with a passing interest. If records are being archived with the intention of sharing as well as preserving them, they should be published online where possible as that’s where most people will be searching for them.
Obviously where there’s a big backlog of records there may not be the capacity to get the material online straight away but if this is the case, at least consider publishing the catalogue in an easily searchable format online so people can know what’s in storage. I’ll do a bit of compare and contrast here just to illustrate between South West Film & Television Archive and MACE (Media Archive for Central England). The South West Film & Television Archive’s webpage is very much just a description of the collection they hold, no details of individual films held by the archive are available to search through and no films are available to view on the site. However the MACE website allows you to search through the archive on their website. Only some of these films are available to view on the website but where they’re not full details of the clip’s contents (such as date, genre, summary and production company) are listed.
2. Online archive material is difficult to find and filter
The MOCO project website
Where the material is published online, it can be difficult to source and filter through. For instance as a project created to get a snapshot of life in the UK the MOCO project has inevitably produced a lot of locally relevant information, especially for Brighton. As there were two community groups from here taking part (Brighton Housing Trust and Brighton Nightwriters) it may well contain content of interest to the hyperlocal website Brighton and Hove News. But I’m unsure the content will be easy for the website’s editors to find because:
It’s not published in an RSS feed so won’t appear in subscriptions to specific searches (I rely heavily on Google alerts for a search for ‘Digbeth‘ to flag up local online content).
Original posts don’t seem to Google up terribly well, e.g. no MOCO project pages appear in a search for Brighton history/heritage/archive/photography.
The on-site search facility has no filter options and the search box rarely yields results (however, a Google Site Search Query does work better with the site’s content).
To those creating an online archive I’d suggest publishing the content in an RSS feed and tagging it well, so it appears in people’s searches and alerts. Also consider publishing items on a ‘sharing’ site where people traditionally search for content (e.g. Flickr for photographs and YouTube for film) – they can always be copied over/embedded from these sites onto your own platforms.
3. The content isn’t easy for people to use and share
1963 news clip of Escaped Bull in Birmingham on MACE Archive
Of course the first thing I want to do with this film is share it with a local audience on Digbeth is Good but there doesn’t seem to be a simple way for me to do that – there’s no embed code available to copy. Jon Bounds managed to share it on Birmingham it’s Not Sh*t through ‘hunting through the source on the MACE site’ but admits ‘it’s not easy’ – so not something someone less technical (like me) or someone working with a free wordpress.com website would be able to do.
Bull in the Bull Ring on Birmingham It's Not Sh*t
I’m guessing one of the reasons for this is the sticky issue of copyright, which I’m far from an expert on, but it would be great if these issues could be resolved for some older materials and new archives created were shared under a Creative Commons license.
The UK GovCamp discussion on the topic covered some interesting points such as:
“What if Flickr dies?†Caution needs to be taken with relying upon what might be temporary online platforms to store and share archive materials – if these platforms disappear so will the content! However, I still feel they are useful places to share content even if they cannot be solely relied upon to store it.
Many organisations that store archives struggle for funds and rely upon sales of their material as a source of revenue. Understandable that they need to cover their costs but the idea of historical records being inaccessible to those who can’t afford it does make me uncomfortable.
But as is always the case with these things, it seems there’s no easy answers – we couldn’t come to one during the hour we spent talking about it at UK GovCamp. If anyone as any ideas or food for thought on this subject I’d love to hear it!
Hyperlocal sites across the British Isles are using their Google juice to help define the area in the face of a bad reputation in the traditional media. When people want to find out about an area they search for it online – they don’t pick up the Radio Times or turn on the news. Hyperlocal sites quickly rise up Google and often do better in search than TV and print media – allowing people who live in an area to define it to the world, not salacious commentators…
Drimnagh/Crumlin, in my opinion, is now going through a…process of “stereotyping†by the media. Don’t let them win; use all the resources at your disposal to fight back! Show them that the decent people of Drimnagh/Crumlin have no truck with the criminal scum who drag the name of your community through the mud!
These days, one of the best ways to ‘fight back’ against negative stereotyping of an area is to do what Pauline Sargent has done for Drimnagh – create and develop a simple hyperlocal website that presents a more balanced picture to the world and watch it rise up the Google rankings.
When someone wants to find out a bit more than they know about a subject or area (like Drimnagh), they don’t go to TV3, they Google it. Above are the results for a clean Google search for ‘Drimnagh’. Drimnagh is Good, a positive voice that celebrates the area, comes fifth – no mean feat considering it’s just eight months old.
Taking a closer look, I can see it comes underneath the Wikipedia entry (in which Drimnagh is Good is listed under External Links), the local church site drimnaghparish.com and then it’s a Google Map of Drimnagh and the dublin.ie Neighbourhoods Page, both of which are obviously not ‘of Drimnagh’. Quickly scanning the Google results, Drimnagh is Good seems to be the first website that appears that’s from and about the Drimnagh area.
So although Pauline is understandably frustrated when things like the TV3 gangs documentary come out, by taking hold of the online presence of Drimnagh and portraying it in a completely different way (highlighting the positive and celebrating it) she is making a massive difference to how Drimnagh is perceived. Pauline has created a website that essentially defines Drimnagh online and will be many people’s first introduction to the area.
I found this to be an unexpected by-product of Digbeth is Good, a community site I manage for my neck of the woods in Birmingham. As I saw it creep up the Google rankings and spoke to more people who’d found me and the website that way, I realised I could use it to show what makes Digbeth brilliant to the outside world and hopefully entice a few more people into the area.
Of course, these independent voices of an area that emerge online like this are not always overwhealmingly positive and can have the opposite effect to the likes of Drimnagh is Good, painting a bleak picture to newcomers. I’ve never visited Corby and after watching Graham Williams’ brilliant yet brutal film ‘Corby, Welcome to Hell‘ (which comes third in a YouTube search) I’m really not sure I want to.
How to fully realise the potential of the power that independent websites gain to define their areas online when they Google up well like this I’m not sure, but that power is there for the taking.
