On Saturday the 17th of April, Alastair Tibbitt representing Greener Leith, and Tom Allan from the Guardian Edinburgh blog took a trip to Leeds. Together we made up 100% of the Scottish contingent at the Talk About Local 2010 "unconference."

The event brought together 'hyperlocal' bloggers, media organisations, journalists, techy people and community activists from all over the UK to discuss a range of questions, like the challenges and opportunities faced by neighbourhood websites in areas of 'social disadvantage,' how neighbourhood websites can reflect the identity of the places they serve, legal issues, finance, relationships with 'big media' and of course - election coverage. 

It would be impossible to report back on all of the sessions as I could only go to a small number of them but if anyone is interested in the detail you can find detailed coverage from the Guardian here, and the 'Cover it Live' archive of tweets here.

What did we learn?

"Hyperlocal" covers a multitude of activities, from private businesses aiming to compete or somehow reinvent the local newspaper, individuals blogging for fun - to community projects and various other non-profit or 'activists' who do it for some kind of community benefit. Whilst Greener Leith falls firmly into that latter category, one of the strengths of the conference was learning from people who are dealing with the same problems, but from an altogether different angle. 

It must be noted as well, that Will Perrin, who organised the event, expressly mentioned that he'd avoided inviting too many people 'who talk strategy bollocks' and that decision made the conference feel tremendously practical and focussed. 

For example, it was interesting to hear how one London based commercial website sells advertising, in a much more competitive environment than Leith - and makes a lot more from it than Greener Leith does! And similarly, the opportunity to do a little informal benchmarking with peer sites, and learn about 'market research' techniques was also really interesting.

As a consequence, we're now considering a readers survey to find out more about what you'd like to see from Greener Leith, and this website. 

The session led by Nick Booth from Podnosh on Social Media Surgeries was also refreshing. Nick reminded everyone in the room of the value of getting community organisations on-line - but also that the main barrier is not technology or cost - afterall many of the tools are free. In fact, social media 'surgeons' spend most of their time helping their 'patients' work out what they want to say, and giving them the tools and the confidence to say it. He also gave everyone an early look at a new website he's launching, www.socialmediasurgery.com, that aims to support the growing numbers of regular social media surgeries that seem to be running.

We also attended the session on 'story telling' that focussed on how local websites can reflect the character of local neighbourhoods, rather than focusing on 'news' all the time. Spitalfieldslife.com is a great example of a site that is almost entirely about local characters. Meanwhile, we heard about the growing cult following gained by Mr Caulkhead, who releases regular audio explanations of Isle of White coloquialisms, like the one below. Certainly food for thought.

We met Chris Taggart, the man behind Openly Local, who is reverse engineering every local authority website in the UK in order to make information on council meetings and local councillors more accessible for other web services - seemingly with no external funding of any kind. It's an awe inspiringly huge mission, and it's a great shame the the Edinburgh City Council website is one of the more difficult ones to figure out. However, Chris is adamant that he will add Edinburgh eventually and we're looking forwards to the day when we can make use of the tools he's developing. For example, he's just released one that will display a calendar of forthcoming council meetings on any website.

He also has a hyperlocal website directory on a map, covering the whole of the UK to make it easy to find sites near to where you live.

The Unawards

To round off the Unconference the were a batch of Unawards handed out too. Much to our surprise, Greener Leith won the 'Best Specialist Hyperlocal' award, for which we're most grateful. We're still laughing at the plastic umbrella (price tag unremoved), tiny plastic trophy and the camouflage hat that made up the prize . We heartily recommend that you check out the other, much more deserving, winners too - and of course we'd like to thank all the organisers for putting together such a great event.