Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral

We Love Ashton Court: the plot thickens

Having started as a simple button to spread a viral meme around the internet, ‘We Love Ashton Court Festival‘ has expanded to provide a brand and information support for all of the fund-raising activities ongoing around our local festival which we love very much and hope will be here in mid-July. Further to my original post about this, things have moved on somewhat (but not our original intent):

Here are a few things we did for free (although one must always count the cost of our time and expertise) using freely available, easy web community stuff, in one week:

1. A simple central space at the URL, with a list of things people can do, contact points, and a strong call to action (all simple text files which we ftp-ed with sftp software). This space would show the photos and gigs listed in the groups (2,3).

2. We set up an Upcoming group so that the official benefit gigs can be formally listed in one central space (also avoiding previous experiences where promoters said theirs were benefit gigs but weren’t), and fed that through to the WLACF site with an RSS reader.

3. We set up a flickr group so people could share their photos, and placed the group’s ‘badge’ onto the WLACF site pages to show them there as well.

4. We set up a myspace presence so that the myspace-ers (most festival fans are dyed in the music lovers) could add us as a friend and then we could disseminate our posters through this network.

5. We also set up a blogger blog for news etc. which was really easy and, like the groups, can be maintained and updated by anyone with the rights.

6. We are measuring the site with Google analytics and a web stats package on the server. The buttons are being measured with an open source ad tracking system called openads.

All of these groups facilities are open access and moderation can be done by anyone with an internet connection (and the access rights), ie - control is removed - whoever is working with the festival in the future can easily pick up these responsibilities and run with them with a minimum of fuss and training.

This is important because we aren’t trying to build a big community as such, we want to push out one idea through existing communities in the different environments in the contextually suitable ways (e.g. a button you put on your blog can’t be put in myspace, you have to take a different approach). ie We were dedicated to de-centralising the message, not owning it.

Jenny from the festival did some really beautiful design work as well which has been laid across the bare bones of our site (although many years ago a curmudgeonly CTO beat website images out of me I have to accept it looks fantastic), which will also now be used as tee-shirts, stickers, posters, etc.

So it looks like a website, but actually, it’s a bunch of people using community tools in other spaces, pushing out one idea across cyberspace and the physical world. And all the volunteers learned things they had wanted to try out, and we did something we are proud of.
Well done all!