By Susi O’Neill
I’m excited to say things are progressing well with the development of the Creative Notts blog project. The offline – and online response – has been enthusiastic – many people see the need right now to be shouting out about the city’s achievements from the perspective of people and businesses based here, now, making it happen.
And a team of people who share the vision for connecting and celebration the creative community are coming together to make it happen. More news on who’s involved and the blog’s launch in the next month. How we make it sustainable – both through the community’s contributions and those of the writing and development team – will be critical in our discussions. Grant funding has been ruled out for now as both too slow, unlikely in the present climate, and risky given the legacy of previous arts projects which have done great things only to have grants cut and no sustainable solution to fall back on. So we’ll be looking at ways of bringing in commercial incomes however we can, and I’d welcome your suggestions on this: what has worked for previous projects – either cultural based or local online publishing more generally?
But first I wanted to share with you my motivations for setting up this project. From my work as a producer and advisor to the digital industries I’ve seen several trends unfolding which has positive and potential revolutionary applications for growing local business communities, particularly in Nottingham: without boring you with detail, essentially firstly it’s about the ease of access to information and publications – and with it means of growing new markets and audiences – enabled by all the web 2.0 technologies (by this I mean things like social networks like Facebook and Twitter, websites where users can interactive with content either by re-using it or adding comments, much like blogs). Today, access to knowledge is less dominated by institutes – like universities, funding bodies or the BBC – or even the social maven in the trendy bar – but information is shared and ideas, relationships and collaboration takes place as a result of that sharing, and a lot of it starts from online networks and groups.
Often these culminate in real-world things happening – whether it’s a flashmob mass moon dance in Liverpool St to celebrate the life of Michael Jackson, or establishing MediaCampNottingham, a user-generated conference using this wiki to collaboratively plan the events and sessions, a conference with no major costs or organisation that was free for everyone to attend and encouraged participation. MediaCamp included a collective response to the Digital Britain report which was as part of a national movement of user-responses to government policy, all started and enabled – you’ve guessed it – through using free, online media tools and social media platforms. The weird thing about social media users is, well, they’re social. They like to get together and talk about how all these things can be used for the common good, whether business,community or political, as the national scope of Reboot Britain conference testifies.
Back on the ground, interesting things are happening in Nottingham - a city with a legacy of creativity, but one that hasn’t for probably a complex mesh of reasons, really started to compete with the profile of creative or technology hubs in other cities like Birmingham, Sheffield or Manchester. Even our neighbours in Derby are showcasing and connecting its creative community through the CIN organisation. But things are happening, not because of a big government policy initiation or from a tranche of funding (wishful thinking currently) but by individuals seeing the potential of setting up business communities and networks that stretch beyond their own interests and start to connect a wider community. Online media hasn’t made that possible but it’s shortened the gaps and speeded up the process for making those connections happen.
In my field of digital media, just this year Adam Bird established Nott Tuesday, a monthly get-together for high-tech and digital businesses, Elsa Bartley re-ignited Girl Geeks Dinner, a monthly dinner and talk bash for female technologists and Martin Wright set-up Web 2.0 Surgery, an event for people to get free advice from a panel of experts on how to make use of the latest trends in online technology. I’m sure that just touches the surface with all the other things in the world of arts, crafts, IT, design and marketing I don’t yet know about – and I’m excited to find out about all the smorgasbord of stuff going on once we launch the blog. And in the meantime, there’s plenty of activity from practitioners: digital arts organisation Active Ingredient are recently back from the Brazilian Amazon in a project linking up Sherwood Forest, and have a brilliant new exhibition at Broadway as part of the Screenlit Festival, ‘Are You Looking At Me?’ which lets people to create ‘user generated content’ of their own celebrity interviews.
So the (offical name pending) creative Notts blog, I see, as acting as a curator of all the networks, a little spider in the middle weaving togehter the various hotspots of activity or a periscope surveying the landscape for action. Or to drop the metaphors, just an easy, centralised way for people to read and find out about interesting stuff happening in the city’s creative, digital and cultural community and making direct connections to the people/projects/ideas themselves. A sort of signpost to other more interesting things, with maybe a few maverick viewpoints thrown in by some of the great thinkers and doers in the city.
Over to you. How do you think this connectivity can be best achieved?
