4iP funds local community website project

Talk About Local is aiming to "empower 3,000 people directly in 150 places across nine English regions with a focus on the most disadvantaged areas." by offering free advice, training materials and support to anyone who wants give their community a voice online.

Run by Will Perrin, the project is starting up in the West Midlands with funding provided by the 4iP/Screen West Midlands/Advantage West Midlands partnership.

Talk About Local plans to work with UK online centres to give people the coaching and skills they need to use simple publishing tools such as popular free blog platforms.

4iP's Dan Heaf outlines the two main reasons for funding the project on the 4iP blog.

Firstly, it stimulates alternative voices bringing fresh perspectives to the web. This project is all about giving those without a voice online a chance to get themselves heard. With the emphasis on creating local sites we hope the majority of the sites will be local in flavour helping to fill the gap being left by the retreat of traditional local journalism.

Secondly, by giving voices to local activists the project continues to hold those with money and power to account. Again we hope this will take up and enhance the job once done by local newspapers.

Reading all of this made me think of BirminghamB29 which I started almost two years ago and has been gathering pace of late due to the attentions of pindec and citizensheep in particular.

There's nothing particularly "activist" about the B29 site but as an experiment in local publishing it proves that a truly local site, covering an area small enough to walk around in a few hours, will be of greater relevance and interest than most of the supposedly "local" services offered by the more traditional media.

In fact, my favourite learning from BirminghamB29 site is just how much there is to investigate, to write about, and to get out there and do, in such a relatively small area of the UK.

In case you missed it, the Talk About Local project even gets a specific mention in the Digital Britain report.

4IP and Screen West Midlands are making a major investment in Talk About Local to create hundreds of new community websites by giving community activists the simple skills

I hope that the T.A.L. team don't get overly hung up on the negative, almost political, focus that the 'community activist' tag suggests.

Often the power of a community lies in it's ability to have fun, to play together, and not simply when a group or individual feels that something needs to change.

...and I still wish that the ridiculous use of the phrase 'hyperlocal' could be banished forever! It's not hyperlocal, it's just local.