It's been a while since I've Talked About Local. 4iP, Channel 4's digital media investment fund, announced it's investment in Talk About Local in June 2008. As investments go this is one sits firmly in the public service camp. I'll talk more about how we spread our bets between public service and commercial investments in a later blog post.
To refresh your memories, Talk About Local is a project to give people in their communities a powerful online voice. Their aim is to teach people around the country to communicate and campaign more effectively using all forms of social media. Through web and face training they're empowering people to influence events in their local area.
Now that the project has been up and running for four months I thought I'd summarise some of the excellent progress made and show where this initiative is having a real effect on the ground.
- Excellent team hired: Not even the all conquering Will Perrin can run an initiative as ambitious as Talk About Local on his own. So he scoured the land and hired the wonderful Nicky Getgood (@getgood) the talented Mike Rawlings (@mike_rawlins) and super-sharp Clare White (@ClareWhite). Nicky lives in Birmingham and runs Digbeth is Good a site covering the news, activities and interesting happenings in the Digbeth area of Birmingham. Mike is one of the team behind Britain's best council chasing website Pits'n'Pots in Stoke on Trent. Clare also hails from Stoke and is an all round social media activist and guru.Clare also manages projects for WEA and for Stoke's Community Health Project. It's great to have such a talented team on board.
- Incredible un-conference held: At the beginning of the month TAL held their first of many official events. Hosted by Staffordshire University Faculty of Arts, Media & Design the event tempted over 100 people to leave their bedrooms, home offices and local community halls to share ideas face to face on how best to run community websites and locally orientated digital services. Sadly, I couldn't make it myself but judging by the tweets, blog posts and coverage from traditional media it is clear that enthusiasts, both professional and amateur, are cooperating to pool their resources and knowledge.
- Pilot Sessions Running: Rolling out a national programme involving thousands of people course requires time, effort and lots of tweaking. The trial Talk About Local sessions are being held in and around the West Midlands. Highlights include 2 sessions in Kington, Herefordshire, which resulted in the Kington Blackboard site http://kingtonblackboard.org/. An early paying customer lured talkaboutlocal out of the West Midlands which led to w14london.ning.com. In the last couple of weeks the team has trained over a dozen trainers to deliver tal sessions in uk online centres embedded in deprived communities.
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