Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral

We Love Ashton Court: grassroots outreach

Bristol’s local community festival (Ashton Court Festival) has a racey history from its pure free festival origins to today’s contextually pragmatic negotiations with the bank manager, council, police, etc. etc. etc.

Hundreds of local bands get to play in front a big audience who pay a relatively small entrance fee (£8 - £10), and the big audience gets to see hundreds of local bands (as well as other activities involving comedy, real ale and cider). It’s great and I can cycle there.

As well as being one of the great ongoing Bristol ‘debates’ (we love a good disagreement down here and this is one of our favourites; no worries about fence-sitting), it is in debt and might not happen.

So some mates and I agreed to do something small but hopeful about it, and set up a ‘campaign’ called We love Ashton Court Festival.

• It’s a small badge people can download and present on their websites/blogs/myspace pages which links directly the festival donation page
• Its sole aim is to help the festival’s donations by letting the bands and the punters show their support by encouraging people to donate
• It’s a group of volunteers trying to keep their festival alive
• It’s also network facilitation experiment; we agreed that we don’t want to create any new communities around the issue, we simply want to kick off and support a useful meme to ripple through the pre-existing communities who want to see their local festival survive these turbulent times.
• It should be interesting; we’re going to do a bit of measurement and see what happened