Help us to develop a blog for Nottingham's creative community

CreativeNottingham.com launching 21st Sept

I’m really pleased to announce that we have a name for our blog, Creative Nottingham.com (big thanks to David Hyslop at Nottingham City Council for helping us secure that!) and a launch date of 21st September when we’ll go live with our very sparkly new site full of beautiful pictures and stories about what is happening in Nottingham (and not forgetting Nottinghamshire) encompassing all things creative.

We’ve chosen the tagline ‘CreativeNottingham – connecting Nottingham’s creative communities‘ to reflect how we want the site to be – not it’s own turret but more like inter-connecting walls which link together all the other interesting plot of land, castles, houses and things in between.

We’ve been working together as a team of four developing the design (with the invaluable technical help of Phil from Wheldon Computing, as his site says he’s a brilliant IT problem solver!)  and will run the site every week as a team which is a great way of collaborating to make a site that will, we hope, be more diverse for the sum of its part.  I’ll let the team introduce themselves on the new site.

Thanks to everyone who’s contributed ideas, moral support in the development of this project.  The development of CreativeNottingham will continue to be a journey driven by the ideas, inspirations and needs of the city’s creative people.

Here’s the ‘official’ press release to tell you what it’s all about:

Starts:

Sept 2009 – For Immediate Release

New website launches to connect and celebrate Nottingham’s creative communities.

September 21^st sees the launch of a new website which has been created to connect and celebrate the achievements of Nottingham’s diverse creative, arts and digital business communities, established by an independent team of creative practitioners.

CreativeNottingham.com is an interactive website which highlights the latest news and events, and celebrates achievements by creative practitioners from across the county.  It compliments major initiatives to develop the city’s creative businesses – like Antennae, a creative business centre opening in September and Nottingham Contemporary gallery – by promoting creative activities to audiences and the business community.  The website’s founder, Susi O’Neill, Director of consultancy Digital Consultant, explains:

“As the 15,000 creative workers in our city already know, Nottingham is a pioneering city for arts and creative events and a great place to run a creative business. However, the limited public funds to support the city’s burgeoning creative sector – compared to neighbouring cities Birmingham, Sheffield and Leicester – places the city at a competitive disadvantage.   Social media technologies, particularly blogs, enable communities to publish and celebrate our achievements using shared resources with far lower costs than traditional publishing, which has enabled us to set up the project without any start-up costs. In a time when the recession is hitting independent businesses and the national media associate Nottingham for crime rather than design, through working independently and collectively to promote what’s good about our city we will create new opportunities for collaboration.”

The project is championed by local creative entrepreneurs.  Iain Simons, Director of GameCity, the computer games festival taking place this October, comments:

“It’s impossible to ignore the groundswell of community and positive engagement that has emerged over the last year or so in the city, so the emergence of Creative Nottingham as a centrepiece for that activity is as brilliantly exciting as it is inevitable. What I think is especially encouraging is that the site functions – and even came into being -  as an expression of confidence, not simply a list of apologetic reasons as to why we’re ‘as good as London’. At last, home has a homepage.”

Debbie Bryan, a designer who has recently opened her own studio and shop in St Mary’s Gate in the Lace Market, comments:

“The launch of Creative Nottingham fills me with optimism that Nottingham and its creative community will have a platform to shout about how great Nottingham and its creatives are.”

Mark Shaw, who is soon to launch a weekly column focusing on the creative industries in Nottingham every Tuesday in the Nottingham Evening Post, adds:

“This new website will be a great way for everyone to stay in touch on the latest thoughts and ideas from the creative sector in Nottingham – everyone should check it out and make it a part of their lives!”

The website will be run by a pool of four editors from different creative disciplines.  Editor and software sales executive Phil Williams said:

“We’re all starting the Creative Nottingham blog on a voluntary basis because we believe it’s exactly what businesses in the city need.  Eventually we hope to make the project sustainable through advertising revenues and other services.  So far the response has been fantastic.  Nottingham City Council gave us the web domain to launch the project.”

The website will link with existing business networks and publications like Nottingham Creative Business Awards, Left Lion and NottTuesday to profile the work of different creative groups, showcasing the best work produced by local businesses and practitioners from the city working internationally. Editor Camilla Zajac, Director of Green Light Copywriting, hopes the website’s remit will evolve:

“Initially we aim to join the dots, connecting together what’s already happening in the city.  This will gives us a platform to galvanise the creative business community, giving us a collective voice. From January we will invite a series of guest bloggers from across the creative, digital and education sectors to talk about the work they do in the city and offer their views on how the city needs to develop.”

More activities are planned, according to Editor Charlotte Thomson, an artist and illustrator: “In 2010 we’ll be hosting a couple of special events to showcase the diverse creative talent in the city.”

Creative Nottingham is inspired by business community websites like Digbeth.org and CreatedinBirmingham.com which have helped to develop audiences for events and new business connections.  Local websites are now seen as important ways of connecting communities since the decline in local newspaper readership. Ensuring individuals have the skills to communicate using online tools is high on the government’s agenda, as public-funded projects like Digital Mentors, Talkaboutlocal.org and the recent Digital Britain report testify.

Creative Nottingham will be live on the web from 21st September at the address: http://www.creativenottingham.com

For further enquires contact:
Susi O’Neill
Tel: 07981 222799
Email: susi@digitalconsultant.co.uk

Ends

How can we produce Creative Nottingham’s blog sustainably?

By Susi O’Neill

I went to an event last week about ‘digital inclusion’ as the council were seeking views on how to bring all members of the community online.  Naturally I bigged up the potential for the Creative Nottingham blog, and other projects like Web 2.0 Surgery as examples of the community to become empowered by information, created for and by themselves.

Local blogs and community managed websites are hugely important, as the 4iP (Channel 4′s digital content investment fund) investment in Talk About Local testifies, who have now created social media roles to help others around the country set up their own localised blogs (including Nicky Getgood from the hugely entertaining Digbeth Is Good blog).

As the Creative Nottingham blog project takes shape (we’re still in a nameless limbo, I’m working on a domain – in complex negotiations to try and acquire something perfect – watch this space!) with a terrific, diverse team of bloggers and designers (more on who shortly), we are starting to form a plan of what we think will work for both the needs of the community and from a practical perspective of developing the project on a voluntary basis, sustainability underpins all of our talks.

Whereas hyper-local blogs create a social graph that catalyses people around a suburb, or even just a few streets,  our blog aims to link up a fairly large community (15,000 workers, according to Invest in Nottingham’s 2009 publication) across a city, but focused around a broad set of activities we could label ‘creative’.  This doesn’t just mean the usual funding creative industries definition, but whatever-the-hell-we-think-is-creative.  So it’s a broad brief, but one we feel is stronger for linking up things as diverse as high-tech networking group to open art studios to creative retail.

There are a few ‘cousin’ websites celebrating creative communities in other cities, like Manchester’s Creative Times, but as a website that took a truly web 2.0 approach, using a basic blogging platform and encouraging user-contributions, and even encouraging the audience to set up their own websites, Created In Birmingham (CiB) was the little website with big impact.  With a modest budget and resources, the team, through the vision of one editor who passed the baton to another each year, proved that a community could become stronger and more empowered to embrace the digital age, winning national awards and acclaim along the way.

So it’s a little sad that while we’re embracing doing the same over in Nottingham, that CiB’s current editor, Adrienne, is questioning how the blog can continue.  Basically, the blog was supported for several years from Arts Council and City Council grants which have subsequently ceased. As those involved in public funding know, all too often a successful project ‘meets its targets’ or won’t be re-funded after three years due to state aid rules, as the successful E-Business Club, offering online commerce and marketing training, found to their peril.

CiB’s readers offer a range of advice: making the blog more opinionated and less reportage coverage; relying on a savvy editor to signpost people to what’s good and new; showing it’s a vital tool for outside businesses who want to survey the city for investment.  In 2007 the site’s inaugural blogger Pete Ashton had a vision for the site:

“In an ideal world I want there to be lots of blogs like CiB and a whole load more that are nothing like CiB. In fact I’d love it if this blog wasn’t necessary.”

Pete has provided a lot of ideas around the setting up of our Creative Nottingham’s blog, making sure the vision for the project isn’t diluted by the whims of ‘stakeholders’ and has a practical, community-led remit. Current editor Adrienne muses:

“When CiB started, Pete identified this need to highlight and link, because other blogs were scarce and weren’t already doing this.  Now, in 2009, blogs are everywhere and people are much more alert to opportunities to publicise, promote and link.”

So perhaps CiB has run its course.  Or perhaps it’s run aground from a reliance on an unsustainable model of one funded editor, without looking to raise advertising, sponsorship or get others involved in the editorial – all things Creative Nottingham seeks to do, mindful of the lessons learnt elsewhere.  We have five bloggers which will hopefully make the views more varied, with the old maxim ‘many hands make light work’, while we find our way to see what (if any) incomes can be had from the venture to support our ongoing work.

In business they say you should always start with the end in mind.  In three years time I would love to see Creative Nottingham’s blog finish.  It should run its course as a thousand individual business, and collective city-wide blogs and subscriber-friendly websites spring to life to connect our city’s diverse, chaotic and exciting creative communities. Now that’s what I call utopia.

The next step for Nottingham’s new blog

By Camilla Zajac

“There’s not much going on in Nottingham.” Strangely, this is actually something I hear every once in a while. It’s as mistaken a view as the suggestion in the national press that  nothing of any artistic or cultural interest occurs outside London. 

Look around Nottingham and there are unique and interesting events happening in visual art, gaming, dance, music…etc etc. Nottingham is the setting for events and activities that range from the surreal to the sublime (I still have flashbacks of a man in a lion suit dancing to Britney Spears’ Toxic…). This new blog has grown directly from a desire to highlight that and to bring it all together. Right now there are plenty of separate channels out there to communicate what’s happening – dedicated websites, listings sites, one off flyers, quirky DIY pamphlets – and more.

This isn’t about reinventing the wheel, but linking all the cogs together. It’s about having a first place to share and to find out about initiatives and projects. With information being the first step on the road to discovery, this blog aims to make it a smoother and potentially more interesting journey. We know there are all kinds of projects developing out there. So tell us how you think this new blog could help highlight yours. What do you want from a new blog for Nottingham’s creative communities?