Will Perrin has a plan. He wants to train thousands of people to set up community websites in their neighbourhoods across the UK. And it’s very likely a lot of this work will take place in Birmingham. Here’s Will talking about the community blog he runs in Kings Cross which inspired him to develop the idea further:
That talk was given at 2gether08 last summer and there’s a nice report from Dave Wilcox chock full of links and commentary.
Will came to Birmingham last week to address a meeting organised by Digital Birmingham to talk about the implications of the Power of Information Taskforce Report which has been generating a fair bit of buzz lately. When Dave Harte will publishes his notes from that meeting (yes, that’s a hint Dave!) I’ll write more about it but the neighbourhood blogging, along with the side effects of that activity, is a key part of illustrating its importance.
The plan for Talk About Local, which Will sumarises here, is to use the network of 6000 UK Online Centres to deliver training and support to local bloggers. I’ve not been partial to the details but the scale of this seems reasonable to me. The basic skills need to get a blog running are pretty simple to get across and in Birmingham we’ve already started down the road of disseminating this information with the Social Media Surgeries we’ve been running for charities voluntary groups. (Here’s Nick’s report from the last one.) One of the revelations from the surgeries is how low the bar to teaching this stuff is. We’ve had people come expecting to get help who’ve been recruited into helping because they know how to set up a blog or use Flickr. Or, more importantly, they’ve got experience in participating in online communities. There’s a sense that this sharing of knowledge can spread like like a virus once the myths have been dispelled and the tools explained. Enabling enablers to enable enablers, and so on.
The biggest trick is putting the tools and knowledge into the most effective hands and that, I feel, is what’s going to require the most work. It’s by no means impossible – I believe there are enough similarities between offline and online community activity that once you spot one you can apply the other to it – but it’s bigger than that which a few dozen bloggers and advocates can achieve. Which is why Will’s strategy of using UK Online is so exciting. Along with support from the 4ip fund this would put a rocket behind the work we’ve been doing. Watch this space.
Sorry Pete, and others, yes notes are coming from the Power of Information/Birmingham meeting. I need to make sense of them first but I’ll post up on the Digital Birmingham blog when done. Perrin bringing Talk about Local to the West Midlands is very good news indeed.
pete and dave (sounds like a comedy duo) thanks for this and for the good session on the power of birmingham.
birmingham has a strong cluster of talent in the social-media-for-social-good space. so if we get talk about local going i would like it to be in the west midlands, drawign upon the native talent in bham, stoke, coventry, warwick, kenilworth etc
on the proposal itself, listening to you and others we might move the emphasis away from ‘training’ per se more onto creating local community sites.
there is a broader set of things that go into creating sites – skills and training is only a small part. as you say this is more about making people aware that they can publish to the web easily, that it is cost and time effective, that it has a powerful impact if used well. and then giving people the confidence to start and get over early hurdles.
an interesting challenge will be how what can be a touchy-feely coaching process can be turned into a product that to be delivered through a national network.
cheers
w