Flickr’s Director Of Community

How apt that Heather Champ, flickr.com’s director of community found the Birmingham flickrmeet group and arranged a photo meetup while she was in town for the Hello Digital festival 2008!

Embrace the Chaos
Heathers talk at Millennium Point on the Friday was very interesting, talking about how flickr started and how the project could have continued to be an online game with a community aspect. However a vote was taken and so one of the best photo sharing websites started, subsequently the project was taken under the wings of Yahoo! and now hosts around 2.6 billion photos (over 4 billion as of December 2009)! Heather talked about some of the changes to the site, including the use of video and offered some colourful uses of geotagging as well as highlighting how quite often flickr users know a lot more about how to do things than it might at first appear. It’s not just about photos, a lot of it is about people.

Flickr has for me turned into a slight addiction, a healthy one, because of the range of content and also the friendliness of the people I encounter on the site. I guess flickr users also get to see the world in a different way, there are so many photos, spanning the entire aspect of human life. Heather highlighted this as a strength of the site and a great part of her job as anyone can share personal stories as well as insights into news events that you might never have seen in the main stream media, and crucially get feedback and comments from entire strangers. In a similar way people get feedback on their photography skills, there’s also the chance that flickr becomes a different sort of microcosm of the world, with commenting not just on composition or lighting, but the stories that people are telling with their photos. How long before there are more flickr photos than people on Earth?

The most interesting points for me were about the social aspects of the site, from the online groups to the offline relationships that were foster through the site. I know many people offline, I would not have known if I had not been active in local flickr groups. There was a QandA session at the end hosted by an FT.com journalist. I raised the prospect of flickr being more supportive online, of the offline communities that spring up through the site and perhaps in the same ways we have an explore page for photos, we could have an explore page for people. The site could ask where you are from and suggest local meet up groups.

Her closing comment was to Embrace The Chaos!

The Flickrmeet
Flickrmeets for me have become a great hobby and escape from the normal way of looking at the world, I see things through photography that I would have otherwise been too busy to see. Going around in groups of people also gives you the confidence to take photos that normally might appear to be strange or bizarre, or get you ridiculed by family, plus there’s the aspect of safety in numbers and often I find myself chatting to people more than taking photos.

We are lucky in the midlands that we have a large community of active meet members, who are just great people, as I’m sure up and down the country and around the world many other population centres have the same joy of exploring photography with other people because of flickr.com, I guess perhaps that really has steamed from the sites starting point of being a gaming community, but the meets are more about having fun with photography than taking it seriously.

We were treated with swag too by Heather, which we are very thankful for and it was really cool that she took the time to hear our feedback, plus I hope I helped raise a couple of things about how hidden the offline meet up communities can be and how to make flickrmeets a lot more visible outside of upcoming.org. The Hello Digital festival, was the first of it’s kind in Birmingham and I hope it grows in future into an essential event for the creative industry in the Midlands and surrounding areas.

Posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008