Alongside the main Shift-Time Festival we're running a project to get Shrewsbury and the surrounding area blogging. We want people to use the festival to experiment with all sorts of "social media" services be they weblogs, photo and video sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube or Twitter. The end result, we hope, is to give Shrewsbury the tools to talk to itself about things that matter, whatever they may be.

This blog will act as a hub, collecting and linking to online activity that is either relevant to the festival or Shrewsbury in general, and posting things to to help and inspire you to blog about Shift-Time.

So get involved by setting up a blog or sharing your photos and videos online and let us know what you're up to so we can mention it on the blog.

About the project

by Pete Ashton

The Shift-Time Blogging Project started with a conversation I had with Anna Douglas, the festival director. She wanted to know if they could use the new-fangled Social Media stuff in an interesting way and I got thinking.

A few years ago I started a blog called Created in Birmingham which was about arts and culture activities in the city. These two aspects pretty much define what I do these day - helping artists and cultural organisations engage with the social internet and looking at how these tools can be used at a local level to connect people, strengthen communities and so on.

So when Anna Douglass, the festival programme director, asked me how this Social Media stuff could be used by the Shift-Time festival in interesting ways my answer was pretty simple. Get Shrewsbury itself to report on it. Rather than simply talking at the town through the usual media outlets encourage and empower people to host the discussions and debates on their own sites on their own terms. That, I said, would be interesting. And once the festival was over that experience would be embedded in the community to be used however the community wanted.

This idea went through the usual development processes which brought in Shropshire Council through Jon King the festival manager. There’s a lot of talk at the moment about how local government might need to adapt to a world where citizens are using these tools to communicate and this was seen as a low-impact way for them to dip their toes in and understand it better.

The project remains simple though. We want to get people in Shrewsbury using all manner of social media tools (blogs, photo sharing, video uploading, etc) on their own terms for their own reasons. While coverage of the festival online would be great it’s really a gateway to something larger.

The impossible goal (and all projects should have an impossible goal) is for the town of Shrewsbury to have a vibrant, active and comprehensive network of online communities that complements and strengthens the traditional means of communication and news distribution throughout the area. We’re not going to achieve that over the time of this project but hopefully we can plant some seeds.

To get involved all you have to do is start a blog. Or add your photos to a Flickr group. Or upload a video to YouTube. Let us know about it and we’ll link to it on this blog.

And if you’re stuck for something to write about, well, how about this fantastic Festival of Ideas that’s happening in July? There’s bound to be something there to start you off.