Wordblog

I was encouraged last night by the enthusiasm, at a Debenham Arts Festival meeting, for the idea of wider community involvement in the creation of of content for the festival website.

In the run-up period people who are participating in the festival are being encouraged to write, upload pictures and embed videos related to themselves and what they will be doing at the festival.

And during the four days of the festival we are planning to have a team covering the events, making videos and writing reviews.

The festival is very much a community event, reflecting local talent and skills. We want as many people as possible to be involved and opening up the website in this way will enable people to be more closely involved.

You could call it a citizen journalism project, but that sounds a little pretentious. Certainly it is widening the access to a tiny bit of the media. And it will give me a better idea of how a longer running news site could work.

The Joomla contents management system has been designed to facilitate participation with front-end submission of stories and editing, again from the front end, by volunteers. The site is live but still under construction and will develop as we discover how people want to use it.

My hope is that it will demonstrate that there is a real appetite for community involvement in providing the news as well as reading it.

Looking at other festival websites I see that most are very much based on the print tradition of from the few to the many. In Debenham we have a strong tradition of community events and I hope the festival website with help build on that.