Talk about Local Unconference 2009: oatcakes, community media and hope

Went down to Stoke-on-Trent yesterday for the Talk About Local unconference. It was a gathering of local and hyper-local bloggers, some community activists, people who run community websites and people who run tools that can help community websites.

There was a great mix of people. Immediately I identified a split between people like myself who had some journalism training and were setting up, or have set up, a community blog/website for their area to act as an alternative to the local media. Others had just set it up because they wanted something different.

An unconference is a great format. You arrive, eat some Staffordshire oatcakes (amazing) and put post-its on a board about sessions you'd either like to run or see be run. These sessions are then moved around, some are merged together until a session schedule becomes clear. There's another board to put post-its about who you would like to meet at the event and another one to put URLs of your site or others you feel are relevant.

I put a post-it up offering to run a session about Blog Preston and Blog Local, explaining how we wanted to expand the Blog Local idea with other blogs. We got mashed into a session about social media surgeries and using social media to empower communities.

The first session of the day I went to was on data. The government's Director of Digital Engagement, Andrew Stott, had come up from Whitehall to explain how the government is trying to free up public data and make it available. There was a very technical discussion about data formats but the key thing for people running community websites is that this data is searchable, with some basic technical skills, to find content about your local area. So, you might be able to query health data and find out how many hospitals offer a particular service in your area. Priceless, local, information.

The second session saw us team up with Nick Booth (Podnosh) to run a session about social media surgeries and expand on the Tweetup events that I've been running with Blog Preston. It was great to see people really interested in replicating what Nick and I had done, but as Nick stressed it's important that you find the 'social capital' in your area. Don't start from scratch, find people who are blogging, taking photos on flickr, using Facebook, using Ning and on Twitter and get them together. You'll be amazed at the results.

Over lunch we mingled and I met a fair number of people who were running hyper-local websites, but wanted to be part of something bigger. This is where Blog Local could come in. While Talk About Local is there for support, advice and I think building a knowledge base/community for hyper-local blogging - Blog Local operates on a more local/regional level to run Blog [insert location] and act as an aggregator for some areas to showcase that hyper-local content.

After lunch we attended a session about comment moderation. It was a great session, with the team from WV11 sharing their experiences (after six weeks of operating) about the problems they were having with comments, there was a lot of debate about whether you should allow anonymous comments on your blog - or whether you should enforce a name and email address. We brought the discussion back to whether people felt they were journalists, and therefore wanted to have standards, guideliness etc on their sites, or whether they were community volunteers. My take on it was that we are publishers, if you hit the publish button and put an article on the web you are a publisher - and you have responsibilities and constraints like any other physical publisher. I think that for hyper-local sites to be taken seriously they need to try and ensure quality, not just in their own content, but also in the contents - and anonymous postings won't give you that. See the Great Internet Dickward Theory for a short but sweet reason why anonymous posting is not a good idea.

The final session of the day was about collaborative journalism, with a bit of Birmingham City Council bashing thrown in for good measure. Tom Steinberg from MySociety did a quick five minutes on useful tools that his sites can offer to hyper-local sites and there is loads of good stuff, so much that it deserves a post of its own on the tools available. Nick Booth then presented Help Me Investigate that I've recently joined up to and this is yet another great way of getting content for your hyper-local site. Michael Grimes gave five minutes on the inspiring Birmingham City Council website sagae, and the BCCDIY site that has been built by volunteers and hasn't cost millions of pounds - and appears to be better than the official site. Sarah Hartley finished off with a quick look at the future of journalism, and it was interesting to see the reaction in the room from people who run hyper-local sites. Are we journalists?

I think we are and all the tools that were outlined in the final session are ways to create content and that's one of the things journalists do. Anyone running a community website, blog, forum is in a way a journalist. We ask questions, we edit content, we shoot video, we write stuff. We are community journalists and the future of journalism definitely has space for us - because we've always been there. In the past, with print, it was the community newsletter but with the onset of web publishing this is changing. It's so easy to setup a village website and become the dominant media in a hyper-local area and the traditional media can't do that.

I came away from Talk About Local with a very, very, positive attitude about what we're planning to do with Blog Local. It was inspiring to meet other people who are hyper-local bloggers and I was pleasantly surprised at how many people had seen Blog Preston and really liked it. Plus when we talked about Blog Local and what we want to do, we found that many were with us.

Thanks to the organisers of Talk About Local 2009. It was a fantastic event and I was really impressed with how smoothly it ran, the quality of the discussions and I'm afraid to say it, I even liked the bit of Stoke-on-Trent that I saw.

See some photos from the Talk About Local unconference

Image credit to Laurence Hardy