Shift Time in Shrewsbury

In July Shift Time, a festival of ideas, is happening in Shrewsbury. It last for a week (3rd – 12th) and sees a host of things happening based around Charles Darwin’s bicentenial. The big event is Theo Jansen who will be building a new Stranbeest in the town. You might remember Jansen from his TED talk a couple of years ago.

I know I did when Anna Douglas, the festival director, told me about it. Here’s some blurb from the programme:

Dutch engineer and kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen has been creating mechanical, skeletal creature-like devices named Strandbeests since 1990, Made of really basic Blue Peter stuff – plastic electrical tubing and 2 litres water bottles – these gigantic, complex beings get their energy from the wind, so they don’t have to eat like regular animals. Theo’s ultimate wish is to release herds of these new species to roam the world. And while he doesn’t quite get to do that in Shrewsbury, you can see his latest species Umerus – all 13 metres long of it – in The Quarry Park. Come and watch Umerus ‘being born’ on Thursday and Friday with Theo and his team.

Anna asked me if I had any ideas about using “social media” to not only promote the festival but integrate it into the town and I got thinking. After a few weeks of working it out, talking with Jon King (Darwin 200 Officer at Shropshire Council) and securing a bit of funding to make it happen this is the plan.

We’re going to get Shrewsbury itself to report on the Shift Time festival. The buzz phrase here would be “citizen journalism” but I’d like it to be more interesting than that. I want to see this event act as a catalyst that will help grow Shrewsbury’s local blogging scene and embed social media skills in groups and organisation that don’t already have them. And I want to see them take full ownership of this on their own sites in their own voices and not as part of some ill-conceived massive community website.

The issue, and it’s a pretty big issue, is I’m not from Shrewsbury and have no real contact with any online activity happening there. I’m very aware that if someone from another city were to come to my area and, with the best of intentions, try and help everyone start blogging my reaction would be “who the hell are you and could you not be more patronising?” I’m also in danger of making the “build it and they will come” mistake of providing a solution without seeing what the problem is, if indeed there is a problem.

I’m writing this post so I’ve got something to point people towards as I research this and start making contacts in the Shrewsbury area. Unsurprisingly I’m quickly finding a fair amount of stuff:

• Heathly amount of conversation happening Twitter within 15 miles of Shrewsbury
• A fairly active Flickr group for Shropshire (and a less active Shrewsbury one)
• The Shropshire Geek Society who met in Shrewsbury last week.
• A couple of newsfeed-y blogs: ShropshireLife n Twitter and thebestof.co.uk’s Shrewsbury division

That’s from 10 minutes of searching and I’m sure I’m barely scratching the surface.

The plan here is two-pronged. On the one hand we’re approaching and working with organisations and groups in Shrewsbury who don’t have a particularly mature social presence online – this is being done by Rebecca Owen who has the distinct advantage of actually being from Shrewsbury. My job, at this stage, is to see what’s already happening online and to see what the people who are doing that stuff might want or need from me. Or, more interestingly, what I might want or need from them.

Here’s a possible example. Platform appears to be a regular music/arts/etc event happening in a venue in Shrewsbury. From the MySpace:

How do I get involved in Platform?

Platform is all voluntary, so if you want to get your stuff on display you’ve gotta come and do it yourself. It doesn’t matter what you do, we wanna hear about it, we’re open to just about everything. In the past we’ve had painters, sculptors, photographers, puppeteers, fashion shows, live music, djs, dancing, drawing, cartoons, drama, poetry, creative writing, and plenty of fun. We have regular meetings so contact us by phone, email or myspazz to find out when & where.

Their website, platformalteration.co.uk, is currently empty. Would they appreciate some help it developing a blog-style site that could act as their online base? And in turn would they be interested in using their voices to talk about Shift Time?

In summary, we’re offering a number of workshops and resources to show people how they can use online social tools with the intention that once they’ve used Shift Time as an exercise they continue to use them in their communities. There are lots of parallels with Will Perrin’s forthcoming Talk About Local and if the timing we’re better we’d be looking to hook into that. But it’s not so we’re in relatively uncharted territory. Who wants to help us chart it?

Leave a comment below or get in touch.