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:
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:
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.
