PEOPLE Work Conference Social & e-

inclusion
North-Brabant, Netherlands. 10-11 March 2010

Steve Thompson s.d.thompson@tees.ac.uk

Community Media – Institute of Digital Innovation, Teesside
University, UK

The powerpoint that accompanies this paper may be found here:

http://www.slideshare.net/stmedia/steve-thompson-people-eu-
web

First a little background: Myself, I was born in the steel making community
of Consett, County Durham, UK and naturally gravitated to the Steel
Works after school but then escaped into the Music Industry. I had little or
no education having learned everything I now know after leaving school
but I have learned experientially, not by training. Many things in my life
and career have happened by chance. By chance, towards the end of the
millennium I found myself working in further education (Performing Arts)
then Community Radio then Internet and found myself at Teesside
University in January 2000.

Since 2000 I have worked in Teesside on Community ICT initiatives. My

first project was RESIDER (ERDF for Steel Communities) Tees Valley
Communities Online and through various funding streams I have since
worked regionally in North East England and sub regionally on Teesside.
Several times these funding streams have included ERDF and this is also
currently the case. For this conference I am going to talk about a
particular area of Teesside, a rural area: East Cleveland.

East Cleveland is to the South of the region of Teesside and consists of the
southern-most wards of Redcar and Cleveland Borough. Using data
collected from the Census 2001, the main industries in these wards
appear to be manufacturing, wholesale & retail trade including the repair
of motor vehicles and health and social care. My perception is that the
area is very beautiful and suggests tourism ought to be a big industry. I
believe there is currently a desire to develop the tourist and creative
industries (ref Redcar & Cleveland Council Officer) The area is peppered
with the remains of declining industries, fishing, steel and mining. There is
evidence of some migration of young people. A colleague reported this
from discussions at a local school:

“Many young people feel this area (Teesside) has 'little to offer them now
or in the future' (Chair of Huntcliff School Council)”
I find myself working mostly with elderly people and school children but
this may be because young adults have other commitments that do not
give them the freedom to attend my workshops. However, it is the case
that with the decline of traditional industries, people have to go out from
these villages to seek employment. Many are unemployed.

From an early time I learned that if I wanted people to attend my

workshops and therefore provide me with project outputs I had to provide
what they wanted or convince them that what I could provide would be
advantageous to them. What I offered had to be engaging and interesting
and fun. Fun is such a small word and it smacks of the inconsequential. It
really should have more syllables, as it is so very important. For “fun” one
could read, engaging, interesting, and relevant. I try to understand what it
is the group is interested in and what they would like to achieve.
Sometimes their aspirations are low because they don’t realise the
possibilities and I try to encourage them to aim higher. The contract I
present is “tell me what you would like to achieve and I will do my best to
facilitate this”. It seems highly likely that they will engage with such an
offer, and generally they do.

I use the mechanism of a “Digital Village” as a means of community

engagement. A Digital Village is a space where a community expresses
their identity though ICT and Digital Media. This may be from an artistic,
heritage, or economic perspective or a mixture of all three. This can be
done through poetry, digital stories, community newspapers online, image
collections (old and new), audio (Internet radio, oral history), animations,
video, and text. To engage in the activities the participants need to learn
new skills and so the Digital Village also becomes a learning community.

I operate in the field of “community media”. The idea that with digital
technologies people can do the things that used to be the domain of
mainstream media and the BBC. I’m involved in two major events,
Middlesbrough Mela and Stockton Riverside Festival and I put together
teams of community media volunteers to work on these events. These
teams are made up of students and community members and although
both festivals are urban, people do participate from the rural
communities. There are also two East Cleveland events I help people
engage with, Saltburn Folk festival and a community animation event at
Saltburn Community Theatre. The animation event over the past few
years has been particularly successful because community groups are
involved in making the content as well as attending to see it. We have
featured some films made in Second Life that featured very important
community issues.
It can take a long time to build a trust relationship with a community and
all the while one must be aware that you may be only engaging with a
small section of the community and there is another, as yet unseen face
to this community (possibly several). Many communities are factionalised
and people like me who provide intervention must be very careful to be
“honest brokers” and not favour one faction over another. It becomes a
habit to recognise that there are probably other factions even though at
first this may not be apparent.

Making activities social is a great tool for engagement. I have already

mentioned events but we also ran a series of Online Pub Quizzes we called
the “Community Challenge” which led to a 52-team tournament across
the UK and even a Euro-Challenge. We ran this again quite recently
between the pubs in two Digital Villages and I called it the “Two Tribes
Challenge”. With colleagues at Teesside University were exploring the
possibility of re-defining this tool with the advent of web 2.0 to create an
even greater opportunity for cultural exchange (possibly transnational)

The tools I employ in this work are largely open source and free. This was
initially because I would visit a centre with very little or no creative
software and no budget so open source was the only way ahead. Now it is
a good established approach meaning that the tools people learn, they
can easily get for themselves so long as they have a computer. I’ve found
that many people who attend sessions in a community centre setting do
have computers at home nowadays. They come to the community centre
to learn or socialise or both. They do like to be able to do the things they
learn at home and they all have my email address. Whenever I am online I
am available to support participants. The tools I refer to are a mixture of
open source and web 2.0 all with the common factor of being free:
Wikispaces for Wikis, WordPress for Blogging, Audacity for audio, all the
Google stuff, I could fill pages!

In some of these rural community’s broadband is an issue but the

challenge is to find a way around the restrictions, doing what we can with
what we’ve got and making the case for a better roll out of broadband
service.

One thing is for certain, the interest in this informal Digital Village learning
is increasing. The participants are often not really aware that they are
learning: it just happens. Luckily the tools available today to do these
things are far better than 10 years ago when I arrived on Teesside and I
can see that some of these tools may also become useful to meet the
increased demand from communities to participate in this kind of activity
Some links www.tvcm.co.uk - www.ecol.org.uk - www.steve-
thompson.org.uk - www.destinations.uk.com/gold