Tomorrow, Friday 10th March see the launch of a project that we initiated 15 months ago by inviting Bristol City Council to jointly pitch for funding from the ODPM e-Innovations fund.
CampaignCreator was conceived as a way of levelling the playing field of community voices. Many grassroot campaigning groups were able to build a significant voice because they were fortunate enough to have supporters with design and programming skills, but too many others failed to make an impression because they lacked those skills. CampaignCreator was designed to provide grassroots campaigners to chance to have credible campaign communications without necessarily having the skills to produce them. It is an online tool that marries offline and online media in one seamless design. Visit www.campaigncreator.org.uk to use the resource yourself.
The project hasn’t met with universal acclaim. David Wilcox of Partnerships Online was initially opposed to the project, but after learning more about what the project wanted to achieve has seemed more supportive. Others have been skeptical (although not online) about the motives of the Council in supporting the tool: is it an attempt to own and control the campaign environment?
I think it will prove to be a small but valuable resource in helping provide ordinary people a chance to gather around an issue and lead in their community.
The only gripe I have with the project is that Bristol City Council make no acknowledgement of the work that we and Invention Media (who did the technical build) put into the development. In fact the only official mention of Gallomanor is on the ODPM’s site listing us as partners in the project. I hope that I get to post an update over the weekend correcting this anomaly.
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