So it’s been a month since the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games came to a close and the flag was passed to the Australian Gold Coast for 2018. It’s been all go at the Digital Commonwealth office as we begin to pull together all the finished content from our 57 schools, over 200 community media participants and creative outputs from the Creative Voices projects over the south west of Scotland. We will be showcasing these projects from now until Christmas – but until then, here is an update to what we’ve been up to since the Games.
The biggy is that we were on the Community Channel representing Digital Commonwealth on Freeview 63/Sky 539/iPlayer from the 31st of August as part of the Media Trust’s Brilliant Scotl programme. It includes our training tour in May, where and I travelled to Orkney and the North Highlands to delivery 4 rounds of Digital Storytelling workshops for the project- the TV show also features the Community Media Symposium at the Big Lottery Scotland HQ that we organised back in January and the #citizen2014 activity from during games time, where a group of us operated as community reporters from the Beyond the Finish Line shop-space in Trongate.
We’ve given a few presentations on the run up to the games. The first was at the UWS learning and teaching conference in June with my colleague on the “University in the Wild” focusing on impact first, research later at the heart of a engagement project such as Digital Commonwealth (blog post to follow, I’ve to work on it for another session on research innovation in the new semester) – and a paper at the Leisure Studies conference in July with project lead David McGillivray on event-led digital participation and how Glasgow 2014 can be used to empower communities to produce grassroot responses to major events. Both of these papers are now in the stages of being developed further ahead of the SCVO’s Comms Rewired in October and the Creative Citizens conference in London on the 18th-19th September.
We were also invited to deliver a social media surgery for the PR and Comms group associated with Youthlink Scotland, building on our links to community development organisations through exploring the opportunities and challenges of improving digital literacies in Scotland.
