Our Year in Review 2013
Having run Creative Dundee as a voluntary blog for 5 years, 2013 has been a year of really big changes – we became a registered social enterprise and got ourselves a business bank account! Here is a rundown of our activities this year:
- Pecha Kucha Nights Vol 5 and 6 happened at Chambers East and we ran Vol 7 for the first time ever at Bonar Hall.
- Partnering with the forthcoming V&A Dundee, Creative Dundee launched a call for their first ever designer to collaborate with them.
- We restarted our Mid Week Meets bringing creative people together on the first Wednesday of the month.
- We ran This Much We Know, an event which looked back and heard from those who had made Dundee’s cultural scene happen.
- In December we ran Stop, Collaborate and Celebrate, a Christmas get together with a difference!
We Dundee, our big year long project:
At the beginning of this year, we were (surprised and delighted!) to be invited to join Dundee’s bid team to become the UK City of Culture 2017. We thought about what we could offer the city/bid and that although we didn’t have a cultural venue or programme, we did have a growing community across the city. It’s due to this that we came up with the idea to create We Dundee, an online crowd sourcing platform which has been an integral part of shaping Dundee’s bid which captured citizen’s imaginations here and across the world.
The initial aim of We Dundee was to enable citizens to be actively involved in developing Dundee’s bid. During the initial design phase we decided that it needed to be an independent site, as many people don’t use social media sites, but do want to contribute to discussions online. Since the site launched at the end of March this year, We Dundee has now attracted submissions from 4,000 contributors, from over 1,000 cities around the world and has been visited over 57,000 times.
We invited everyone – people who live in the city, those who have left it, and visitors who love it – to share their city insights and ideas for the future. This enabled our ‘extended’ 4,000 person bid team to co-curate ideas which directly shaped the bid and also created a great sense of pride in the city. City officials have told us it has been one of the most successful campaigns for the city ever.
Although a digital project, it’s been the community who have driven its success. Content, connection and collaboration have played their roles:
Content
We made sure that we were as transparent as we could be, about the competition. Content was shared publicly on the site and on social media, regular ‘backer emails’ updates were sent, and the story of Dundee’s bid journey was collated – not just media coverage, but from individual’s perspectives.
We recognised that everyone’s culture is different and everyone has a view which should be heard. We didn’t dictate what culture is and simply created a blank canvas for people to tell us about their city and their culture.
The thoughtful, passionate, entertaining and moving contributions have been instrumental in engaging people to return to the site again and again. The average site visit was 4 minutes at its peak – not bad at all for a brand new community site.
Hidden data was made accessible, by sharing analytical data in interesting visual ways, on things like: top visiting cities and most popular contributed submissions – this encouraged discussion and the community to grow.
Connection
It genuinely has been a team effort – from public likes and tweets, to businesses who raised awareness with their communities, to highly creative creatives and the hugely supportive local media, everyone has got behind We Dundee.
It isn’t just for digital natives. Masters of Design Graduate, Karen Lyttle took her We Dundee Connect pop-up consultation stand to communities across the city to ensure their voices were heard. People also handed in 100s of hand-written ideas to their local libraries across the city.
Thirteen year old Andrew Batchelor set up an inspiring Dundee 2017 Facebook page and we’ve worked with Andrew to share information and make him part of the We Dundee team.
Content
We made sure that we were as transparent as we could be, about the competition. Content was shared publicly on the site and on social media, regular ‘backer emails’ updates were sent, and the story of Dundee’s bid journey was collated – not just media coverage, but from individual’s perspectives.
We recognised that everyone’s culture is different and everyone has a view which should be heard. We didn’t dictate what culture is and simply created a blank canvas for people to tell us about their city and their culture.
The thoughtful, passionate, entertaining and moving contributions have been instrumental in engaging people to return to the site again and again. The average site visit was 4 minutes at its peak – not bad at all for a brand new community site.
Hidden data was made accessible, by sharing analytical data in interesting visual ways, on things like: top visiting cities and most popular contributed submissions – this encouraged discussion and the community to grow.
