This brought residents, web people and local government together.
The format is simple and powerful. A few speakers to inspire. Circulate a pre-collected list of residents’ wishes.
Then with the residents, sit down and try and work out a solution using digital tools.
This was the presentation I gave on Flickr. Hopefully it helps answer the questions: what is Flickr? How does Flickr work and how can it be used for civic good?
It has a summary of how Flickr works and four case studies of it in action.
Case study 1:
The Walsall Town Hall Flickr meet. How photographers from the community can take pictures of a landmark. You can see more of the images taken at the event here.
Case study 2:
How Flickr images taken by the community can be used by a public sector website as a way to celebrate the area and individuals’ work.
Case study 3:
The Caldmore Village Festival. How Flickr photographers recorded an event and shared the images to a wider audience. It’s mentioned on this blog too. Here are some shots taken at the event.
This arrived too late for me to include in the presentation but acts as an excellent way for residents and local government to connect. Paul Clarke took a shot of a street scene when he was back in his native Ormskirk.
When he spent time looking at it properly he was appalled at a right yellow canopy from a cheque cashing outlet. Traditional routes failed but using Flickr and whatdotheyknow.com pressed planners to take up the case. You can read Paul’s excellent blog on the subject here.
Should local government fear this route? No. Not if people want to deliver a better service.
That shows that photography doesn’t always showcase the best of a borough.
Sun rise above Quarry Bank in Dudley. An image posted to several Flickr groups and celebrates this corner of the Black Country.
That’s a point echoed by Mike Rawlins and Nicky Getgood from Talk About Local.
Shaming pics of abandoned cars work on a community blog and can help prod a council into action, they argued.
A functional pic of a pothole can work on fixmystreet.com as a way to report a problem.
A shot of the sun rising over an allotment, stained glass in Walsall Counci House or Spring bulbs celebrate an area.
Each stream is just as valid but has an entirely different character.
Jerry Springer built a TV career by making people in dysfunctional relationships sit down and talk to each other.
With burly minders flanking the stage Billie-Jo and her ex-lover Seth from an Arkansas trailer park would set-to in front of a studio audience.
Gripping stuff it was too, but you had this feeling nothing would change.
Two parties in a sometimes strained relationship came together at Hyperlocal Govcamp West Midlands in Walsall.
The session ‘What does a good blogger – press officer relationship look like?’ saw bloggers sit down with press officers.
For some, it was the first time they’d ever spoke to the other side.
Like a parish pump Relate, there were sometimes a few choice words. But unlike the warring couples on TV there was a growing appreciation of the points of view.
It’s a session that has been extensively covered.
Local government officer Simon Gray, who is not from communications, blogged brilliantly about the session here. When he said neither side appeared with full credit, he’s right.
He’s also dead right in calling on both sides to cut the other some slack.
Paul Bradshaw writing a guest post for Podnosh made some excellent points in how local government should make information easier to access.
Mike Rawlins, of Talk About Local, who also contributes to Pits N Pots in Stoke-on-Trent has written an excellent post from his perspective on this and dead badgers and does, as Simon suggests, cut some slack.
Sasha Taylor has also blogged from the session from a police perspective.
Twelve months ago I wrote a blog post on how the blogger – press office relationship was a source of conflict.
The 10 points I wrote then I still stand by. The full post is here. The edited highlights are boiled down to this
FIVE THINGS A PRESS OFFICE CAN DO:
Treat them as journalists.
Put them on press release mailing lists.
Use blog comment boxes as a press officer.
Accept not everything bloggers write is going to be favourable. Complain politely – and constructively – if things are wrong.
Respect what bloggers do.
FIVE SUGGESTIONS FOR BLOGGERS:
If you have courage of your conviction put your name to what you do you’ll find your voice getting heard far better.
Don’t be afraid to check stories.
Respect press officers. They have a job to do too.
Be accurate. The same rules for newspapers apply to blogs.
Buy a copy of McNae’s Essential Law For Journalists to save your life and potentially your house.
But listening to the both sides talk at the session, there’s also a few things a bright press officer can do.
1. Create blog friendly content – A conventional press release is tailored for the print media. That’s not necessarily blog-friendly. A short film posted to YouTube or Vimeo is. A two minute film to explain with an interview the points made in the release would work.
2. Add pics as a matter of course – Even if it’s a stock pic. Mike Rawlins of Talk About Local made the point that there is a demand for images. They’re going to source a pic from Google images anyway. Why not provide a good one?
3. Judge when to respond – the excellent Michael Grimes of the Citizenship Foundation re-purposed the US military’s flowchart of engagement with bloggers. It’s good advice when to engage and when to ignore the internet troll.
4. Build relationships – In print media you know you’ll get a better story about countryside placing it with a reporter who is passionate about green issues. So why not do it online too?
6. Learn about open data. It’s not a geek topic anymore. It’s come into the mainstream and bloggers are at the forefront. Local data advisor and hyperlocal blogger Will Perrin has pointed out that press officers will need excel skills. Why? Because you’ll need to interrogate data sets just as you’ll need to leaf through council minutes.
Creative commons credits:
No papers today – Katmere http://www.flickr.com/photos/katmere/51065495/sizes/m/in/photostream/
Antique clippings – D Sharon Pruitt http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinksherbet/4799271086/
Some of the best ideas are dreamt up in a pub or over tea and cake.
Many of those pearls just never get past the beermat scribble stage.
Once me and a mate had the idea for beeridea.com. This would have been a site to sanity test great pub ideas that may have emerged after pint number five.
It never got off the ground.
One wheeze that has got out of the pub is Hyperlocal Govcamp West Midlands.
Staged at Walsall College on October 6 the aim is to be a half day unconference for local government with added flavour.
Who is behind it? some bright people from local government and hyperlocal blogging. Namely, Simon Whitehouse of Digital Birmingham, Stuart Harrison of Lichfield Council, Andy Mabbett of Birmingham City Council and Mike Rawlins of Talk About Local. And me.
What’s the added flavour?
Two things: first, hyperlocal bloggers. These are either an important emerging news platform or untrained citizen journalists playing fast and loose with the law. Depends who you talk to.
The second? The open data movement. Once dismissed as box bedroom anoraks they are now slowly making an impact. In time this will be massive, I’m convinced of this.
For me, in Autumn 2010 Local government people, hyperlocal bloggers and open data geeks are at three points of the same Venn diagram.
It doesn’t make any sense to stage an event that doesn’t incorporate those elements.
The trick, if we can achieve it, is getting the three elements to talk and understand more.
Why a half day? We thought it interesting to see if the unconference format could fit into the day job. Events on a Saturday have worked well in the past but they attract the deeply committed. Would a mid-week event expose the 9 to 5-ers to inspiring ideas?
What is an unconference? It’s an informal conference that allows the agenda to be chosen on the day. I’ve lost count of the number of people who look back at Localgovcamp in Birmingham in 2009 as being a major source of inspiration.
Why Walsall? We’re from the West Midlands and the thinking was it may be good to do something in one of the Black Country boroughs. It’s also a town that does some surprsingly good things online.
Why Walsall College? Because they’re very nice people and they’ve got a Star Trek-esque 100 meg broadband.
Who are the nice sponsors who are allowing this to happen? Big hand for Public Sector Forum, Jadu CMS and Local Government Improvement and Delivery (formerly IdEA). Also very supportive have been: Replenish New Media, Talk About Local, Vicky Sargent at Boilerhouse, SOCITM, Walsall Council, Digital Birmingham, Birmingham City Council and Lichfield Council. And Russell at Walsall College.
Here are a couple of places to go in Walsall if you’ve never been before. New Art Gallery Walsall and the Leather Museum (it’s right next to the venue. The cake is very good.)
Get out of the social media bubble, talk to real people and you may be surprised.
Digital skills may be valuable online but offline they’re part of a mix of things needed to make an event work.
One blogger has argued that its such a part of her life she didn’t think of ‘social media’ as such anymore. It’s part of life.
That’s fine for digital natives. But that’s not the case for people like Walsall artist Alan Cheeseman.
Together with a team of like-minded volunteers he helped stage a festival in the Caldmore in Walsall in the West Midlands.
Walsall Council chipped in with funding and support. So did social housing provider whg, the National Lottery and one or two other places.
Where’s Caldmore? First, it’s pronounced karma. Narrow Victorian terraced streets crowd around a small green hardly big enough to host a cricket square. Legend has it that Boy George lived there in his Walsall days.
Sari shops, balti houses, pubs and shops that sell cheap calls to the Indian sub-continent dominate the shopping area.
It’s a place where migrant workers settled amongst the indiginous English to take low-paid jobs in factories. The communities have remained while the factories they came to have gone to the wall.
It’s a place a mile square of three churches, a mosque and a Sikh temple.
It suffers from deprivation, crime and suffers the stigma of a prostitution problem that has eased.
But as the Caldmore Village Festival shows, the place has a powerful resilience and a creative and community-minded people.
In part its scores of micro-communities around the mosque, the church, the pub or the temple.
For this event they came together.
More than 11,000 came to 15 venues across three days for the festival.
Kibadi, Bollywood dancing, live music and dance brought people in. So did the Pakistani sport of stone lifting. An amazing sight where men lift carved stone.
Ask Alan what made it worth while and its not the numbers that excite him. It’s the little stories. It’s getting the tearaway kid to put a volunteer’s orange bib on and give him what could be the first piece of responsibility he’s ever known.
But what role did social media have in all this?
“Things like the internet. That’s for educated people really, isn’t it?” says Alan.
“I’m not sure how much of what we did actually helped.”
It’s a fair point and you have to admire Alan’s honesty.
In Walsall,the percentage of people online every day is below the national average of 60 per cent.
Caldmore is the place the Talk About Local project was invented for.
An initiative to bridge the digital divide and equip communities with an online voice the initiative trained Alan and set him up on a blog.
Sessions open to all backgrounds were run at a neighbourhood resource called Firstbase by community worker Stuart Ashmore where the basics of WordPress were explained.
As a tool for communities this blogging platform is as powerful as a printing press in the 19th century.
Easy to use and simple to master it gives an online presence to anyone with an internet connection.
Alan explained: “We used the blog. We’d update it maybe once a month and we had links to it coming from around 50 other sites.”
Alan was quietly impressed at the digital waves he did make: “I was quite suprised to see 1,000 hits in the week before the festival started.”
But as Alan says the main lesson is to see digital as just one part of the jigsaw. That’s something some forget. It may reach some people. It won’t reach everyone. So what does?
“Networking helps,” says Alan. “A piece in the local paper helps. So do leaflets.
“We made contact with several organisations and we found that their agenda was similar to ours in many places.
“But face to face is really helpful too. It is like a jigsaw. By doing several things you’ll reach a lot of people.”
In effect, Alan was doing the things that work on the web in the real world.
The message to the online community? Online is part of the answer. It’s not the answer on its own.
Or to put it simply, the equation is this:
Face-to-face + networking + leaflets + digital + newspaper support + community groups + public sector + council staff + ward councillors = a successful community event
The Caldmore Village Festival’s digital footprint…
Blogging – A WordPress blog with monthly updates.
Flickr – Walsall’s Flickr group members were invited along to the event too were made welcome. Some amazing pictures came out of it. A group was created as a repository for images.
Plug into the blogging eco-system – Walsall news aggregator The Yam Yam – named after the way Walsall people are supposed to speak – plugged the event through its website, it’s Twitter and Facebook streams.
Twitter support – Walsall Council Twitter stream @walsallcouncil linked to new blog posts.
Link support – Links to the blog ended up on around 50 sites.
YouTube – A short film of the stone lifting attraction helped raise the profile.
Ideas for future online activity…
1. Twitter — A face to the organisation on the @hotelalpha9 would work brilliantly. Or simply a festival stream.
2. Facebook — In Walsall, Facebook is the platform of choice with 197,000 people registered in a 10 mile radius. A fan page for the festival will capture that support.
3. Flickr — Use the images from year one to promote year two. Bring the Flickr group back for a second year.
4. Foursquare — Add the venues to the geo-location game. Leave tips for things to do.
In Ben Stiller’s blockbuster ‘Night at the Musem’ exhibits burst to life when the public aren’t around.
Cowboys and Indians come alive and a giant dinosaur plays fetch with a bone.
Walsall museum stores aren’t quite on a par with Washington DC’s Smithsonian but one thing is the same: You’d be amazed what you can find.
Thousands of items are stored as only a fraction can be put on public display at one time.
So how would social media connect a museum stores with residents? Here’s how. In a way that is way cooler than Ben Stiller.
THE EVENT ITSELF…
One Spring Saturday, photographers of the Walsall Flickr group were given special access all areas to take pictures at Walsall Council’s museum stores.
Street signs, an ARP helmet, and typewriters were just some of the treasure trove.
So were items of the nationally important Hodson Shop collection, a huge collection of working class clothes from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Eight photographers spent more than two hours poring over hundreds of artefacts.
What resulted in an amazing explosion of pictures of often rarely seen treasures. Take a look at some of the shots here.
More than 150 images were posted on Flickr in the days after and more than a dozen positive comments were posted on the group’s discussion board.
PLANNING FOR THE EVENT…
Why bother? Why arrange this?
It’s as simple as this: what’s not to like about pictures of Walsall artefacts taken by Walsall people?
Simple as the idea was, three months of planning led to the event itself.
Much praise needs to be given to talented photographer Steph Jennings (@essitam on Twitter) and the forward-thinking Walsall museum curator Jennifer Thomson supported by collections officer Catherine Clarke. Why praise? Because both parties started from different positions and arrived at not just a workable compromise but a groundbreaking piece of work that sets new standards.
REACHING AN AGREEMENT ON COPYRIGHT CONCERNS…
At the heart of everything was copyright.
Museums traditionally are very careful to guard copyright of their artefacts.
On the flip side, photographers are very careful to guard their copyright too.
In the past, museums have allowed photographers to take shots only in highly controlled circumstances with copyright signed away.
The Walsall approach was different.
The compromise that was brokered was this: photographers retain copyright so long as they accepted that they wouldn’t be able to bring tripods to take saleable pro shots.
That was fine as the Walsall Flickr members didn’t want to sell images.
The group also agreed to limit the size of the shots they uploaded to 1MB and agreed to ask permission before they used the images.
Crucially, what made this process work was the genuine commitment to make the event work by both Steph and the museum team.
When social media works well it sees a two way discussion. Brilliant things can happen.
An unexpectedly marvellous spin off led to the setting-up of a museum Flickr group to encourage people to submit images.
AN UNEXPECTED SPIN-OFF…
This isn’t just shots of the museum but a place where, as Steph suggested, pics can now be submitted for ‘shadow’ exhibitions. Planning an exhibition on seaside holidays? That shot of Great Aunt Maude paddling at Weston-super-Mare can be submitted and used as part of a revolving powerpoint of similar images. That’s something the whole family can go and see. Excellent.
This isn’t a Walsall Council success story, for my money. This is a Walsall success story. It was the coming together of museum staff, the communications unit and most of all the enthusiasm of the borough’s thriving and talented Flickr group that made this work.
What we found can work here can easily work anywhere.
Hosting a Flickr meet: Five benefits to the museum.
1. Connecting with non-traditional audience.
2. Showcasing exhibits and helping to find an online audience for heritage.
3. Art. Great pictures are just that. Art. What better way to showcase your artefacts?
4. A set of marketing pictures. At Flickr members’ suggestion the group were happy for their images to be used by the musem. Many amateurs are keen to get an audience for their work in return for a link to their Flickr page and a pic credit.
5. Pictures to link to via a Twitter stream.
Attending the Flickr meet: Four benefits to the photographer.
1. Rare behind-the-scenes access.
2. Being able to retain copyright of images.
3. A unique photographic challenge.
4. A chance – if you are happy to – to showcase your work through council marketing.
Thanks to: Jennifer Thomson and Catherine Clarke from Walsall museum. Steph Jennings and the members of the Walsall Flickr group who attended the session.
