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.
Almost every community has a campaign on the go – they define and unite communities like nothing else. Both positive and negative campaigns unite more than they polarise, whether raising money for a childrens playground or campaigning against a noisy pub . And all campaigns need a voice – online publishing is by far the most cost and time effective way of supporting a local campaign.
Here in London’s Kings Cross, we have run dozens of campaigns through our community site www.kingscrossenvironment.com. The site (run on Typepad) acts both as communications push and a store of reference material about how the campaign has run. Specific campaigns will often have their own category on the blog, or if we can, each post will carefully link back to a chain of prior posts. We are normally transparent in how we run a campaign – we post letters to people and their replies. The biggest local campaign has its own ‘daughter’ site on the same Typepad account at no extra cost, using a similar template. The daughter site prevents the parent site being swamped with campaign messages. We also use video hosted in YouTube and embedded in the blog by posting the embed code.
We can update people such as government or council officials, politicians or journalists on the camapingn by just sending them a couple of links and letting them read their way in. If helps you pass the ‘nutter test’ you often have to go through when brushing up against officialdom or the corporate world.
The Cemex campaign was one of the first I ran in 2006. Cemex is the world’s biggest concrete company and they have a noisy run down plant in Kings Cross. I wrote a letter to the UK President, rang their switchboard to get a few names and emails and posted the basic info. As the campaign grew i gave it its own category so i could find all the posts in one place and send the link to others. I made some video clips on my digital camera, stuck them in youtube and eventually embedded them in posts. Sending the links to the video clips to the Council’s noise officers helped them build an evidence base without having to make loads of visits to the site. Eventually the Council came down hard on Cemex who cleaned up their act remarkably well (see here). This wasn’t an entirely online campaign of course – i had to get on the phone, go to a few meetings, keep a noise diary etc. but the online element made me impossible to ignore and gave me leverage.
Having a history online and fully visible helps me reactivate the noise complaint with the Council when Cemex start to misbehave (as they are doing at the minute). To my amusement i now star in a Cemex UK environmental awareness video for their staff.
Would be very interested to hear other people’s experiences of online campaigning in their communities – what works, what doesn’t.
Communities depend on effective communication. Using simple, cheap online media we can build stronger communities by unlocking the huge communications potential in local people. Dozens of great community sites demonstrate what can be done – particularly for ultra local issues of huge importance to people but below the radar of print, radio and TV. The ease with which you can get some civic action going to improve the neighbourhood using a blog platform should see an explosion in ultra local voice that is good for democracy and for communities. But that doesn’t always seem to be the case.
After a discussion over at Gary Andrews site i thought i would start somewhere devoted to ultra local online media for community building and community action. This site will celebrate good community online publishing and cover the theats and opportunities posed by the decline of traditional local media.
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.
