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Out Of Hours Hyperlocal is launched

Yesterday we ran the first ever Out Of Hours Hyperlocal, a new meetup for hyperlocal producers, community bloggers or those interested in the area. “Another one?” I hear you ask. “But there are already so many of these things I can’t go to. They’re always in big cities and I work full time, I’m going to miss the boat again.” Not this time. OOH Hyperlocal is designed to deal with those issues. It’s held in the evening, at 9pm and more importantly, it’s online.

We have already been using Google Hangouts on the Creative Citizens project in our content analysis, allowing researchers from Cardiff and Birmingham to work collaboratively without setting foot outside of their office. The hangout can be set up with an open door so anyone can drop in or out, with an associated Google+ Event page that’s an easily shareable URL for inviting people via social media. Some people noted on that they would be attending, but we had little idea how many actually would. The point though is there’s very little risk compared to a physical event - no costs to cover. In the end we had a good turnout and the room was full at times. Representatives from four hyperlocal blogs attended, as did a vlogger, and a council worker with interests in how councils can build relationships with hyperlocal media.

The discussion lasted nearly two hours, possibly longer than I’d expected, and covered a range of subjects. We started with a paper describing research that compared participants’ memory of Facebook status updates with other kind of similar media. And then moved onto issues around crime reporting and some of the ethical issues, comparisons of different community makeups across the hyperlocals, how people source stories, relationships with other organisations such as the police and councils and of course, the snow and how that affected hyperlocals this week. Feedback after the event was great, with people saying they’d be back next week.

In addition to the video chat, some people contributed via the text chat panel and this is something that may be made public from these meetings in the future. There was some thinking that we would start to record sessions in the future, but in the main we won’t, as attendees said they’d be less likely to be comfortable and candid in their discussion. It may be that some specific discussion sessions are planned with the specific idea of them being recorded, more of a panel discussion that a free chat, but it will always be clear when these are taking part.

If you’d like to find out more follow the Twitter tag  and look out for the next meeting which will likely be next week, Wed 30th or Thursday 31st at 9pm again. Our ‘keynote’ next week will hopefully be from of the .

In terms of our research this will be useful in engaging in current discourse and unearthing the everyday issues facing hyperlocals.

Posted in Hyperlocal
3 comments on “Out Of Hours Hyperlocal is launched
  1. says:

    Great write up of a great event! I really enjoyed taking part and look forward to future Hangouts.

    And for the record, whilst I appreciate people may not want all of these sessions recorded I think it would be advantageous to record some of these. At the moment only up to 10 people will ever see them or take part, where as if they were recorded a much larger audience could benefit from the knowledge shared in the sessions - and that’s got to add value to the Hyperlocal community.

    It would be great to record sessions around specific topics so we don’t wander off topic though!

  2. Jerome Turner says:

    One approach might be to spend the first 10-20 minutes discussing the specific topic, or keynote, then stop the recording, and do all the other ‘off topic’, any other business stuff unrecorded.

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