“Caldmore is a multi cultural area on the edge of Walsall’s town Centre. For many years it has been the natural home of Walsall’s artists and artisans from many cultures around the world.” — Festival’s Blog

Organised by a massive effort in the local community, you have to admire these guys for getting this off the ground and making it work. A main stage was put up in a school green, hosting live music, dancers, poets and all manor of live enetertainment. Satellite venues provided further events and places of worship held open days, to top it all off there was a parade through the village green, involving things made by local people in workshops. It was a great thing to see in our town.

Community Photographers Found!
The reason I found myself taking photos there this weekend is because the organisers reached out through Walsall Council to our wonderful pool of talented photographers via Flickr. I posted a message up on the group discussion board which attracted a lot of interest and we had a core group covering the events over the weekend. Not every photographer sees the same thing in the same way and I’m really looking forward to seeing the diverse variations and angles from the weekend. This is what I love about getting the photography community involved, in the mix you get a wider range of shots.

It was a great show of various cultures coming together and saying, “you know what, let’s have a really good time!”.

Why did this work?
Simple, community! Everyone pulling together and at times like this when funding is tight you really have to applaud the efforts made. It was a great show of various cultures coming together and saying, “you know what, let’s have a really good time!”. And once again the council showed that they can reach out to the creative community and get us involved too!

Links

• Caldmore Village Festival Blog
• Best pictures from Flickr Community
• My Photoset

Again this was a great way that the council were engaging with the local social media crowd. You can enjoy more of Walsall Musuem’s pictures on their flickr group, here is a slideshow of the treasures that they have.

It was a great day and the small group that we had, really found some jems and of course we were able to produce some quite artistic photos of the items, which is why we were called in, with our eyes the details!

Much kudos is owed to, Dan Slee from Walsall Council (who wrote a blog entry), Steph Jennings for making the meetings and calming fears over copyright issues and Catherine Clarke, for guiding us around there and making the musem flickr group happen. It was a great day and the small group that we had, really found some jems and of course we were able to produce some photos quite artistically to show things in a different light than the standard white background which was sort of the whole point anyway.

© Barry Carpenter – Curious Cats!

This photo is actually the main parade centrepeice item taking a breather from the energetic race up Park Street, they certainly do have a bit of character for paper monsters :)

Much kudos to Dan Slee (see his blog post on the day here), PR and Social Media Guru at Walsall Council for getting in touch and inviting our flickr community into the inner sanctum of the council chambers to photograph. Together we managed to round up a small bunch of local photographers and Dan took us on a guided tour of some of the things in the Council House you wouldn’t realise were there! A highly sucessful day, leading to further collaboration and I think a great use of Social Media to calm the Modus Vivendi that often exists between local goverment and taxpayers.

Walsall Council tweet from @WalsallCouncil, often link in their tweets to the Walsall flickr group to highlight a picture of the day from any of the groups growing membership. The Council use Twitter to triage complaints, inform the public of events happening in the town and sometimes just have a chat with the local Twittorati!

What amazes me is the range and skills of the people involved in Walsall’s digital future, for example I discovered an amazing online hyperlocal news hub dedicated to Walsall and the surrounding areas called The Yam Yam. With a major network upgrade coming from BT 21cn soon, that’ll place fibre optics under our streets, Walsall could just be one of the places you might, just might not want to dismiss as a place to set up a digital online business!

Birmingham’s premier Irish Band named The Teds asked if I’d like to sort out photography for them on parade day, jumping at the chance of course I said yes and so this photo here of The Rainbow public house was taken from their float on the day. Head over to The Teds on MySpace.

It was amazing to be part of this project, initially accosted to take part in this in a Coffee Shop at the back of New Street Station to test the website, along with other Birmingham flickr users, I found myself submitting image after image to the website. At times even taking photos specifically for the project. A clever way of tagging photos already on flickr allowed them to be sent to the project with ease. Overwhelmed by the response from folks who simply had a camera and took photos of their pets at home, the final result was too big to actually be hung up and was laid out on a huge platform at Millennium Point. I was chuffed myself to see one of my photos along with a photo from a fellow Walsall flickr group member projected on a slideshow at the opening reception ahead of the unveiling.

This project shows how powerful social media can be in working together to create something that wouldn’t have been really feasible otherwise in the time given. The actual photo chosen to form the mosaic was 17 year old Lucy Moore’s photo of her Granddad in his boxing days in 1926. At the unveiling the emotion that she had invested in this became clear and everyone was so chuffed because the photo meant a lot to her family and all our tiny photos had been put together to recreate this image.

• The Big Picture Website
• Video Courtesy of Nick Booth