Today, the Birmingham Mail lifted the covers off  Birmingham Mail Communities, a hyperlocal area of the Mail website which we hope will bring us much closer to the city’s hyperlocal community.

We’ve been working on it for about a year and were determined to do something different. As I’ve said elsewhere, I’ve been convinced for a while that that hyperlocal sites and traditional media can work together – often, both share a similar goal. It’s just a case of finding a way to make it work.

While it would be arrogant to say we’ve found that way, hopefully we’re taking a step forward.

As Will Perrin has said elsewhere, the most important thing is that those working with us feel they’re getting something out of it which justifies taking part.

Through talking at length to people like Will, Nicky Getgood from Digbeth is Good and Paul Bradshaw, we’ve hopefully come up with a plan which appeals to people.

In return to allowing the Mail to use content in print (with correct links and credits), hyperlocal sites taking part can have access to Mail pictures (the ones the company owns the copyright for) and get prominent feeds to hyperlocal site content on the Mail site.

A fund from the Birmingham Mail Charitable Trust, the Mail’s charity which donates money to good causes in the city, will be allocated on suggestions from the hyperlocal and community sites taking part.

The Mail has also offered to run four workshops a year for the hyperlocal community – if those taking part feel there is something which would be useful for them.

We ran a trial with Lichfield Blog a few weeks ago, placing content from the blog in the Mail, with credits to the authors and links back to the blog. The reaction on Philip John’s blog was interesting – but convinced us that we’re going in the right direction.

There will probably be two main criticisms of what we’re doing. Some journalists will say this is proof hyperlocal sites will put reporters out of jobs. Others might point to the fact we’re not offering payment for content.

The first criticism simply isn’t true, and while it’s true that we aren’t paying for hyperlocal content, we hope we’re offering enough in return to make it worthwhile for all those who have signed up so far.

The parts we’ve announced today are just the start. We have ideas around collaborative data, commercial opportunities and shared investigations.

For now however, this is our plan – hopefully we’re on the right track.

Are you disappointed that you didn’t make it in to the Guardian 100 most powerful people in media?

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.

The Treasury press office asked me to put them in touch with a few hyperlocal web sites – this arose as part of their regional media plan for the budget.

My favourite was Ally Tibbit in GreenerLeith who put the diagrams and a link to the info up and then trawled the murky depths of the local Twitterati for a visceral reaction…

Mike over at pitsnpots did a straight treatment of the material and the CX budget speech, with a traditionally robust discussion in the comments.

Simon and Sally at Ventnorblog played it straight, making it clear where the copy came from.  They also compiled their in speech tweets into a rapid web page summary.

Philip John didn’t i think run the material on his Lichfield Blog (illness in the team) but instead posted it on his Journal Local site for anyone to use.  This helpfully opens up the tendency of press offices to create favours by giving rapid instant access to material (to be fair in this case tho HMT did put all the stuff on their website, which promptly stalled).

In Kings Cross i didn’t run the HMT regional material.  It was too one sided by omission – talking about roughly positive things for London but not mentioning what impact the vat increase and DLA changes might have.  In general I don’t do national politics on the site and in Kings Cross with lots of people in social housing and one of the poorest SOAs in the country this was too skewed for me to post happily.

Nicky in Digbeth didn’t run it either – not all local sites do traditional news.

I didn’t put Richard in touch with HMT but he didn’t need it as  Saddleworth News got a v good angle – spotting the change in tax treatment for holiday homes owners so rang around local b&bs.  It is possible that he generated the only positive budget coverage outside the Murdoch press and Cider Trade publications.

Overall it was good to see HMT have a go at reaching out – this has to be applauded. I hope other government departments will try.  But the content really need to be more granular than the (obscure to non government types) adminsitrative regions.  The real appeal of hyperlocal sites is in the name.

The Government News Network offers RSS feeds for the (obstruse) regions.  Looking at this one for London you can see from the careful insertion of place names in the first lines of the press notices that it would presumably be easy to geo tag these much more locally (a la FixMy Street).  That would be a good start, allowing me to subscribe to news within a given radius of my site.  It would also remove the bureacratic obsession with adminstrative units (Kings Cross for instance isn’t an adminsitrative place that has any sense on the ground) and allow people to define a more human geography.

Greater story customisation to a local area would make information more useful.  Some might say that it’s tricky to customise genuinely national stories right down to the excruciatingly local lens of hyperlocal sites.  But I’m not sure that it is, especially with the budget.  The vast amount of data and computing power at HMT’s disposal they ought to be capable of producing much more local lenses on budget changes than adminsitrative regions. The broadcasters all manage to create simple calculators – HMT should copy the carbon calculator and produce something others can use and embed.  It can be done, like this handy tool from ONS.

There’s a big society angle here too – to be a well informed empowered local citizen i need to know what is going on in my neighbourhood.  Very granualar data and information from government can be really powerful in making a case for local change like those deprivation statistics.  To paraphrase McKinsey – if it can’t be measured you can’t campaign on it.

If I have missed anything good please add a link in the comments.

Update 20 May:  I finally got around to scanning in the piece of paper with the seating plan given to me before entering the room.  The angle from which pictures were taken meant that some folk were not visible.  There has been some interest in the attendee list which hasn’t made it out yet – i should imagine that cabinet office are simply ridiculously busy – so i hope this helps.

Today the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister kicked off the big society work with a seminar in No10 around the cabinet table.  I was privileged to be there with fellow hyperlocal web person Ally Tibbit of Greener Leith and web campaigner Martha Lane Fox.  There were a host of luminaries from the community activism sector about 20 in all . I’ll follow up with the some detail later, but this is an impressionistic write up shortly after the event (mainly written in the back of a taxi picking up a new cat from Battersea).

For me, as an old Whitehall hand (my day job before talk about local) this was the first time the coalition thing has really sunk in.  It was remarkable to see two leaders of different political parties sit opposite each other at the cabinet table and govern together.  The big society is perhaps easier common ground, the deputy prime minister said that the liberals and the conservatives had been talking about the same thing but with different labels.  For the DPM a big society that embraced community grass roots action and self empowerment was core liberalism.  The Prime Minister said that he wanted a major part of his legacy to be a government that ‘laid the foundations for the big society’.
The PM and DPM were in listening mode and responded positively to the attendees.  I made points about how the web can help people be more effective and active citizens by bringing engagement into the modern age from the C19th, the importance of open data to transparency and accountability and the importance of Martha’s work on digital participation.

The last couple of months, all the big society chatter in the civic society and volunteering sectors has been ‘do they really mean it?’. Nat Wei has been highly effective in the background convincing people one on one.

In the theatre of Whitehall, symbolism is important.  You don’t get a much more symbolic commitment than your issue being the first joint outing on policy issue by the new prime minister and deputy prime minister.  So today was a strong symbolic ‘yes’.  As ever with any government, especially a new one you need to be vigilant and hold them to their word and i shall do my share of that.

Martha Lane Fox has already tweeted that ‘I am putting aside all cynicism’. I believe that a massive increase in civic activism and engagement would have a profound impact on making Britain a better place.  It’s great to see such committed government leadership on the big society and i am happy to play my part.

So that’s it all over and done with, for now at least.

#TAL10, our second un-conference had a lot to live up to after #TAL09 but again managed to surprise us with not only it’s popularity but also the quality of the people who attended and the sites that they run, that is before we start looking at their ideas for the future!

We had booked Old Broadcasting House in Leeds to capacity for the event and ended up with it about 3/4 full, the weather and lack of flights in to the UK were responsible for some of the non attendees. While others I’m sure decided not to attend as there were no food based sports like Pork Pie Rounders.

As expected the whole event was blogged by almost all of the attendees and reported on most accurately and efficiently by Sarah Hartley from the Guardian along with Hannah, John & Tom from the Guardian Local Blogs. Their reporting on the day can be seen here.

Michael Grimes also made notes on the sessions he attended during the day.

Journalism.co.uk also reported on the Un-Awards which were presented after the un-conference had closed. The Guardian also reported on the Un-Award winners here.

Un-Award winner Josh Haliday from SR2 Blog gives us his thoughts on the days events on his personal blog.

Philip John gives us his account over at JournalLocal as does Damian Radcliffe onDPC. The excellent Greener Leith report by Alistar Tibbitt and finally and by no means least Matt from My Tunstall writes

Twitter was, and still is, awash with the #TAL10 tag which link to many interesting posts which we have archived here.

Pictures are being uploaded to our Flickr Group.

We are working our way through the different DIY social networks to find an alternative to Ning for hyperlocal community activity.  Talk about local helps people find a local voice online as a public service.  We don’t have a magic answer to the Ning problem yet – it may be that Ning’s charging regime is benign for genuine local community groups.  Their recent post is helpful, starting to redress the appalling communications handling of the initial announcement.

Today in talk about local land we had a look at Webs, Socialgo and Grou.ps We used the time honoured scientific method of piling in and having a go to create a network, post some pics, invite each other to join and maybe embed a video with a view to whether we could train basic, cautious web users to set up a network.  It’s not quite a Top Gear road test nor a restaurant review – we welcome comments in case we have mis-understood.

Webs none of us took too.  The interface seems well suited to designing web pages but it the repeated return to a WYSIWYG editing interface was confusing.  Nicky managed to get a social-network looky site first time but it took me three goes.  The biggest problem though was Webs taking an hour or two to send out the invite and confirmation emails – we wouldn’t be able to train with this long a lag for the confirmation loop.  Maybe that was just a glitch today but there wasn’t a notice on the site saying so that we could find.

Socialgo (thanks Nathalie McDermott) was pretty straightforward – Mike and I quickly got something set up that looked just like a ning.  Nicky however had huge problems getting her username and password reset after it snagged and shut her out.   None of us like the rather crass banner ad for some IT kit at the top of the page.  We shall return to this.  The company behind Social Go is based in Wiltshire, UK with financing of $600,000.  The charging increment for widgets is either realistic or steep depending on your point of view. But we shall examine more.

Grou.ps (thanks Paul Webster) was also straightforward – Nicky had something running very quickly.  I had some trouble with the email login and some long lags here and there but that might have been the local internet here.  Mike though didn’t immediately take to the interface – which wasn’t quite a intuitive as socialgo.  Grou.ps has raised some finance but only 10% of Nings and is part based in Turkey.  It has open sourced some of its code.

We shall persevere with these to test their suitability further for hyperlocal groups and we’ll be having a go at some others in the next few days. Any suggestions welcome.

Just a quick post with some excerpts from the main party manifestos that are directly relevant to hyperlocal media.  It is a little invidious to extract just the media bits – the hyperlocal stuff has to be seen in the wider context of approach to communities.  If I have missed any bits elsewhere in the hundreds of pages please let me know and I shall amend. I expect that some of this will come up at TAL10.

Labour:

We are committed to maintaining plurality in regional news provision. We will fund three regional news programme pilots from the digital switchover under-spend in the current licence-fee period.

Page 7:6

Conservatives:

Our plans to decentralise power will only work properly if there is a strong, independent and vibrant local media to hold local authorities to account. We will sweep away the rules that stop local newspapers owning other local media platforms and create a new network of local television stations. And we will tighten the rules on taxpayer-funded publicity spending by town halls.

Page 76

Liberal Democrats:

A strong and diverse media, free from government interference and pressure is essential to a free and democratic society. We will: support a diverse regional and local media. We will help to maintain independent local sources of news and information by enabling partnerships between TV, radio and newspaper companies to reduce costs, and by limiting publicly-subsidised competition for paid advertising from local council free-sheets.

Page 46

Views welcome in the comments without descending into party political bile or mud slinging – you can find plenty of that elsewhere on the web.

About 100 people from the UK’s hyperlocal web community will come together in Leeds on Saturday 17th April in an unconference called TAL10 – see some of who’s coming here.  We are delighted to be organising this unconference with the Guardian.  We have got a good chat going over on the google group about likely sessions.  If you are coming along and what to talk to people about things just shout.  We shall have about five rooms with maybe four or five time slots in each – so up to 25 sessions.  As ever the running order will be decided at the start of the day and will evolve throughout.   If we all get bored and want to go to the pub that’s fine too – we are planning some heavy drinks with the ‘un-awards’ after the conference finishes. You are welcome to suggest a session(s) on the day  – or use the group or this blog post to drum up interest or refine your session.

For the full story go to the group and sign up but here’s a preview as of Friday morning 9 April (it changes every hour or so….):

2010 elections – general and local – how do you report these on a hyperlocal site?  Most sites day to day don’t do much Local Politics and hardly any national stuff. But we all do local information about things that are happening.  And we know that different people being elected will make a difference to a whole range of local issues.  But how do you give your readership information about how their vote might make a difference locally, without getting into the whole political bearpit?

What next for hyperlocal sites? – some sites have become big and important parts of their local civic life, making a difference on the ground, exceeding the wildest dreams of their founders.  Most sites weren’t set up to be a disinterested observer nor a commercial news machine – they intended to do civic good.  Site owners don’t want to storm the Town Hall but can or should the huge communities have a more formal part in local civic life – maybe as the current government advocates become new parish councils or should they look to the Conservative notion of ‘neighbourhood groups’?

Working with the traditional media – there’s been a hard won evolution in some areas from the ‘these local web people can be safely ignored/patronised/ripped off’ to an acceptance that the local web has an important role in the changing local news market.  We have a few people coming from the trad news gathering organisations who get the local web and there’s interest in a session on the terms of trade – what might volunteer hyperlocal sites want from commercial news companies and vice versa.  This will be important if either the government’s IFNC s go through or the even more radical Conservative suggestions for hyperlocal multimedia companies.

Money – a few people in the UK have managed to make money from their local sites.  Many others have volunteer sites with a large and commercialisable audience and wonder what to do.  Others have a site that has taken over their lives and they need it to make money to live.

As i type this new suggestions are coming in – a session on research into the impact of citizen led local sites, a surgery for newbies, something on buddypress (the wordpress social network thingy) and wordpress, a geeky huddle on local data and tagging.

We have released he next bunch of tickets to the waitlist this morning so check your inboxes.

The preferred bidders for the Independently Funded News Consortia will receive government money to provide a new type of local news in the UK.  The government process is almost unique in the world – intelligent action and innovation rather than handwringing or thoughtless subsidy for more of the same.

The government said of the IFNC that:

‘…They will be able to deliver a broader local and regional news offering through multi-platform delivery. A contestable selection process will extend the base of content providers and increase the scope of innovation, quality and journalistic diversity.’

As a member of the selection panel comprising people from the full breadth of the media industry, I was delighted (and a bit surprised) to see traditional newspaper publishers, TV and radio companies making a big effort to understand hyperlocal publishing, the motivations of the people who do it and the contribution to the news process.
The winners are large media groups that demonstrate a good understanding of the potential for bottom up, grass roots hyperlocal news in the future news environment.  Each of the awards will emerge differently but we should see a far greater inclusion of hyperlocal sites in the local news ecology and thus an enhanced local (as opposed to just regional) news service and greater plurality all around. The IFNC process should give hyperlocal publishers a seat at the table, in many cases for the first time.  The public should see better telly, better papers (better radio in some cases) and better local internet.

The challenge for the IFNC bidders is to use the space the IFNC subsidy and cross media freedom gives them to understand, manage and harness the radical cross platform changes happening to local news – some outlined brilliantly by Alan Rusbridger in his Cudlipp lecture.  Whatever government the nation has after the impending general election this learning of how change works in practice will be vital to the future health of our media.

These are my personal views reflecting on the process today – for the definitive statement please see the government’s statement on the DCMS website.