Engaging Communities
As a species, it is an indisputable fact that our success is the result of the communities we have built. The cooperation and shared learning within these communities facilitated our evolution to dominance on our planet. Our communities continue to drive this evolution, new technology does not emerge from silos. Innovation can always be traced back across multiple communities and our social support systems rely on them to function.
Communities are something we should develop and nurture as they have the power to bring many of us together with a shared purpose for good. Imagine how powerful this becomes when we bring multiple communities together.
I’m going to tell you a story of how we’ve made this happen in Brixham using the town’s stone steps as a catalyst.
Let’s begin with a little background. Brixham is located on the South Coast of Devon. It’s a bustling harbour town defined primarily by the fishing industry. Catches have been landed here for centuries and the market has grown to be England’s largest by value of fish sold. Yet the town manages to retain its touristic charm with a picturesque harbour as its focal point. Brixham sprawls upwards into a natural bowl built out from this harbour, with densely packed colourful brick houses forming dense winding streets.
These streets are interconnected by stone steps. At least 50 sets are sprawled across the town, all of them named, each one of them unique, all with stories and memories attached by residents past and present. My street, located near the harbour, has three sets of steps that I walk regularly.
Our story begins with the Brixham Arts and Theatre Society (BATS), a group dedicated to the development and promotion of the arts and culture in Brixham. They had been pondering the idea of mapping Brixham’s heritage and culture, using the map to encourage locals and visitors to engage. As a representative of a local company with expertise in digital mapping, I was invited for a chat. We got on like a house on fire.
Nautoguide is on a mission to develop technology that promotes and supports well-being. Here was a project that encompassed everything we wanted to do with technology; get people engaged in culture, get people outside, involve the community and finally work with “location”, as it’s what we know.
Between us, we decided to create a site that would unify all the things that make Brixham special into a single portal. The site would allow anyone and everyone to contribute to it. And finally, it would offer a set of guided walks encouraging anyone to get out and experience it for real.
And so https://brixhamwalks.org was born.
The next question was, where do we start? We considered various aspects of Brixham’s heritage; World War II involvement, fishing history, and local viewpoints but then discussion came around to our steps. These would make a fascinating set of artefacts to research and also would make for a very interesting set of walks. The steps cover almost every area of town and a set of walks linking them up would be an incredible local showcase. And so the meeting ended with a resolution to make this happen. BATS marshalled their resources to engage with the Brixham community, to build the history of the steps, map them and design a set of walks. I returned to the office, wiped the whiteboard clean and the design of Geovey began.
We knew that Brixham Walks would only thrive if we built it to empower the community rather than taking the shortest technical path. The site needed to be curated, updated and expanded by the users without needing us continuously involved. Furthermore, they need to be able to do this without deep technical knowledge. Ideally, they would draw a route on a map, click to add locations, directions and start/endpoints and use a simple set of editing tools to include text, video, audio and photographs.
BATS had a list of themes within which they wanted to create additional walks and maps. So we needed to support themes as well as routes. Soon the whiteboard was full and we had our design. Many long days and late nights later Geovey sprung into life and we were ready to create our first walk.
BATS had done an incredible job in researching the steps of Brixham. They handed us a hugely detailed design encompassing five walks. This included multiple photographs of each step, video footage, audio of interviews with locals and transcriptions of this audio. They’d mapped each route in detail and documented directions and cues for those walking the routes. Each set of steps had been graded (they counted every step!) as had the walks.
We used this information as the first test of Geovey. We’d got it mostly right but there were a few “gotchas” that needed a bit of extra functionality. BATS had created branches and options on some of their routes so we needed to add this in. A few more days of testing and checking saw Brixham Walks go live with its first walk.
We were all so pleased with the result. Every single set of steps was mapped and documented, brought to life by the voices of the locals and beautifully portrayed with pictures from the archives and a local photographer. This had been an amazing community effort to bring to life with all of us investing our own time, effort and resources to make it work. The project involved technologists, artists, musicians, photographers, historians, a myriad of local residents and of course a huge amount of calories burnt testing the routes up and down the steps!
The story doesn’t end there. Nautoguide, had configured the Steps walk, but could we achieve our objective of handing this over to BATS to run? We wrote a detailed manual for Geovey and ran a training session with Cecilia who had run the project. A set of login credentials were handed over along with a support email address.
We anticipated a raft of questions, but in the following weeks, we heard nothing. Maybe they were taking a breather after all of the hard work on the Steps walk. But Cecilia and the BATS are far too tenacious. The next email I received started as follows:-
“Hi Dave,
After sweating blood on researching all the murals and street art around Brixham, I have now had a go at loading a new set of maps — Brixham Murals and Street Art.”
I took a quick look and was amazed. Brixhamwalks had a new theme “The Murals & Street Art of Brixham”. This theme had four walks; all of them mapped and illustrated with photographs. Each had detailed directions and one of them had an optional branch. Our involvement had been nil. Cecilia leveraged her networks and community to get out there and create a new, engaging view of our town.
Furthermore, BATS drafted four more themes and is currently running a local campaign to recruit researchers and testers to fill these with content. Brixham Walks has not only grown a set of legs, it is off and running. Posters were created with QR codes linking to the walks and they are now in the windows of many local retailers, on car park notice boards and all over the local library. These posters will engage our visitor community in the town’s culture and heritage.
We’re understandably proud of the investment we’ve made in Geovey. The Brixham Walks project has taken it from a route publishing tool to a platform that facilitates community engagement. The service delivers social value even if the walks are not traversed, which they are as our analytics show an ever-increasing rise in traffic.
Our investment in Geovey continues as we widen our scope outside of Brixham. We’ve got some exciting new projects to announce soon where Geovey is being used to connect other communities of interest.
Could Geovey apply to your community? We’d love to help you find out.