Passing over the hyperlocal baton

I have recently left as editor of Bournville Village. It has been an enriching time and has taught me a great deal about which stories work on community websites, how to work a beat while leaving in the community you are writing about, and lessons in hyperlocal reporting, gathering and production.

I now move on back to Cardiff, a city I have an immense love and passion for, to work as the Cardiff beatblogger for the Guardian Local project. I’ve been lying low for a while until this announcement so apologies for the silence.

Taking my place as editor of Bournville Village is Dave Harte, who has been with me from the conception of the site, writing as a contributor and helping with the design and a couple of technical bits and bobs. Dave has tons of ideas and embodies the original ethos for the site:

The community is at the heart of the website. Posts should provide news, information, and features which help residents and those passing through Bournville to engage with their community, understand their local authority and be inspired to become active citizens working together to make a difference.

Handing over a hyperlocal site is problematic for a number of reasons. Without an already established group of contributors, the editor is still the main force for producing content and as a one-man enterprise the website is bound to inherit a large amount of their personality, interests and background. Finding a suitable new editor may be difficult if the site has been propelled by one person on a voluntary basis, especially if you want the website to retain much of it’s former ethos and aren’t too interested in profit.

I know other young journalism graduates have started hyperlocal websites while also being at the beginning of their careers when location is subject to change. The best way to prepare would be to recruit a deputy editor in the early stages of concept building.

Ed Walker, for example, had to find someone to had over Blog Preston to when he too moved to Cardiff to start his job as Online Communities Editor for Media Wales. Finding someone who has the time to take over and maintain the site with the relevant journalistic and web skills isn’t easy.

I was lucky – I know Dave will do a great job. There have already been some fantastic posts in my absence such as this snow post with a gritting priority map and Birmingham’s Poet Laureate showing his support for Bournville and some absolutely excellent coverage of the Cadbury/Kraft take over in the last week - causing a number of media organisation to get in touch for comments. I’m looking forward to seeing Bournville Village develop and grow.

Find out more about why I started the site here and on the about page on the website.

The power of social media

The Christmas season is officially over and the usual traditions have been trudged out across the globe, but there have been some new additions to this year’s celebrations breaking away from the norm – and they came from the power of social media.

Someone once said social media is taking us back to ages forgotten – but in new forms. The campaign across social networks (the Facebook group boasts 1m members) for Rage Against the Machine to top the Christmas chart with their old anthem ‘Killing in the Name’, over X-factor’s deer-in-the-media-headlights Jo McElderry not only shows the real ability social media has to make change, but has also taken us back to a time when chart battles were a staple feature of advent.

The digital revolution rocked the boat for a while – the music industry worried it was the end of profit and the death of pop band industry. But a couple form Chelmsford, Essex, have proven the public still love real music, and will pay for it online, whereas force-fed manufactured stardom is not approved by the masses – the ability for the internet to give people an instant voice re-asserts the power of democracy.

Copy and paste hyperlocal blogging

As the hyperlocal phenomenon spreads across the UK, those who have been doing it for a while now are coming up with easy models for hyperlocal bloggers to adapt for their own website.

Philip John has been a very busy bee, working on a number of plug-ins (which you upload to your site as a widget – boxey amorphous things on the side of your blog) which hyperlocal bloggers would do well to download and pop on their website.

First up, the TheyWorkForYou widget shows you exactly what you local MPs are up to – listing recent activity from the government – this is only the first version of the widget and hopefully it will soon show what your local MP is saying in parliament.

The WriteToThem widget allows you to type in your postcode and write a letter online to your local MP/MEP/Politician – priceless.

GroupsNearYou will highlight groups you can go to in your area based on the postcode you provide.

Last but not least, the OpeningTimes widget is a niftly little plug-in which will show you all your local shops/supermarkets/newsagents opening times – from the Opening Times website which you can edit as it’s a wiki, like Wikipedia. Pretty useful for Christmas Tesco times.

If you want to see what these widgets look like on a hyperlocal blog, head over to Bournville Village. com where I’ve plugged them in to see how they work – they’re on the righthand side of the blog.

There are also a number of people working out hyperlocal wordpress themes which would take away the job of searching and searching for a a wordpress design which suits local blogging.

And there’s news on the grapevine of more local data widgets coming along to so this space…

Getting down and dirty with data

Over the weekend a small tremour was felt across Birmingham. The distinct rumble was caused by a group of web developers, data hackers and HTML magicians who had gathered to do something wonderful – and the result was explosive.

Held at the Aquila TV studios, Birmingham, Hackitude took place from Friday 11 to Sunday 13 December. One onlooker, Danny Smith, explains the concept in non-tech speak on their website:

“The one word that is bouncing about is ‘data’, and the project that is being attempted seems to be the impossible, as Hackitude creator and chief smart person Mark Steadman explains: “find any local place, event, or data” and the end result, as far as I can make out, is a website that allows you to access any available local information and search it in a coherent manner.”

Mark Steadman (@moxypark) decided people were beginning to get a bit all-talk-no-action about data mashing. So he quickly organised the event to bring together a number of people with the skills and motivation to make things happen – see my interview with him over on the BeVocal blog here. Hackitude aimed to capitalise on local digital creative talents in Birmingham to solve some of the city’s problems using data and the web. He said on his blog:

Hackitude is what I’d like to think of as a “problem solving weekend”: two nights of designing and building solutions to problems posted by the people of Birmingham. They could be anything from mapping public transport routes to adding data to building a community site to putting together an iPhone app to monitor the city’s pigeon populous. Really, anything.

Creating a murmur…

Murmur is a project which started in Toronto.

They call it a ‘documentary oral history project which records stories and memories told about specific geographic locations’ – which doesn’t really capture what it is. People record an audio of themselves talking annecdotally about a location – and these locations tend not to be those featured on tour buses and guides – but smaller details of a city which are usually overlooked. They tell a story about the place, what it means to them and what they know about its history, and what it means in their history.

These soundbites are all plotted on a map on the murmur website - but also a little murmur card is stuck on the location – allowing people walking around the city to rung a number and listen to the story about that particular site. What makes murmur a unique way of telling local stories rather than a local’s guide to the city is this:

Some stories suggest that the listener walk around, following a certain path through a place, while others allow a person to wander with both their feet and their gaze.The stories we record range from personal recollections to more “historic” stories, or sometimes both — but always are told from a personal point of view, as if the storyteller is just out for a stroll and was casually talking about their neighbourhood to a friend.

It’s history from the ground up, told by the voices that are often overlooked when the stories of cities are told. We know about the skyscrapers, sports stadiums and landmarks, but [murmur] looks for the intimate, neighbourhood-level voices that tell the day-to-day stories that make up a city. The smallest, greyest or most nondescript building can be transformed by the stories that live in it. Once heard, these stories can change the way people think about that place and the city at large.

I particularly like this one from Edinburgh. Now they have a murmur site for São Paulo, Dublin and Vancouver. Could you do one for your area?

Open data campaign given high-five by PM

Martha Lane Fox and Gordon Brown at the Smarter Government conference yesterday

Yesterday some significant ground was covered in the war to free up public data when the government announced it would move towards making Ordnance Survey maps freely available from April 2010.

Gordon Brown signed up the www inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee in June earlier this year to help the UK government reach levels similar to its US counterparts in terms of freeing up mapping data to the public. At the Smarter Government conference at Downing street yesterday afternoon Brown said:

“I think we’re on the verge of a revolution that can transform public services and the public sector. I’m speaking very specifically about how government can change to meet the needs of the times. I think we are determined to be the first government in the world to open up public information in a way that is far more accessible to the general public.”

Norway has already been leading the way in freeing up maps. Limited to individuals and not-for-profit organisations, from 1 December 2009 users can freely access maps from the Norwegian Mapping Authority, in the hope these users will come up with good solutions to a number of problems.

What journalism students need to know: New skills for a new model

After attending the C&binet conference in London, which saw an impressive group of media representatives and government officials get together to discuss the state of the media and the future of journalism, the importance of passing on this information to the next generation of journalists seemed imperative.

At City University New York, journalism students are taught entrepreneurship and business. Jeff Jarvis is clear a new set of skills for burgeoning journalists is essential for the changing climate of news. Students should learn to be stewards of journalism – learning how to set up hyperlocal sites and invite and train collaborators and turn the news site into a successful business.

Details of the hypothetical news model from CUNY can be found here - and it is in the process of being translated for the UK.

It is clear from developments in the US – which the UK will and is beginning to duly follow – journalism students need to be taught or encouraged to do entrepreneurship to make sure they take off in the new climate – rather than fall flat on their face because their traditional skill-set no longer stands up to what is required.