Leeds Digital Festival

We’ll take a punt that there are more than a few unsung heroes working within the place we love to throw dung and tomatoes at, our city council. Amongst thousands of workers it would be weird if we didn’t know of a fair few, yet they rarely get the honours they deserve. Sometimes we expect our public servants to be more perfect than we could ever be ourselves…is that fair? Anyway we’ve dug a maverick up for you, and would be happy to shine a bright torch on others too. Next time you feel yourself getting hot under the collar, take a deep breath and remember that we all need to get our hands dirty rather than gripe! So without further a do here’s more about Leeds Digital Festival, and one of the people involved!

Leanne Buchan, you seem to get involved in events for the council all over Leeds, how is this so?

I’m lucky I guess. We’re a small team and there isn’t really one central marketing team in the council’s City Development Department www.leeds.gov.uk which means I get to work on lots of projects with lots of different teams. It’s good because I get an insight into what other people do and I find out about things that I might otherwise not know about, or things that would be good for other projects that I’m working on.

It also means that while my working life is always busy it’s also varied working on anything from City Centre Vision Conference and Leeds Architecture Awards to Leeds Museums and Galleries and Holbeck Urban Village. Being in a small but busy marketing team also means that I get plenty of freedom to try new things and be a little braver.

Now one thing we notice is you like to support a bit of quirkiness, is that allowed? or How do you get away with this?

Hahaha yeah it’s allowed just depends how you do it and why you do it. I feel for the council a lot of the time because it gets portrayed as unadventurous or risk averse but for every person who loves clean art or graffiti or huge public art projects, there’s always another person who hates it and sees it as a waste of money and the council has to balance these views whilst still providing a service and moving the city forward.

Being quirky and finding new ideas and solutions is very much allowed and there are plenty of people in the council who do it and do it well, but it has to be well thought out and have a real purpose to it. For example Wonderwood which was paid for and delivered by the city council’s Holbeck Urban Village team, was a response to a lack of public space in the area, the sudden stalling of development across the city as the recession hit and the need to encourage people to take a fresh look at the area. The resulting pink rabbits and bright yellow tree were a quirky indulgence courtesy of  the arts commissioning agency The Culture Company who were instrumental in realising the space.

So as much as I love things like animal construction barriers  and huge wooden pegs  I wouldn’t expect to see these or half the things I collect on my twitter stream appearing in Leeds anytime soon. Not as a result of my intervention anyway…

Now imagine we were aliens from another planet, and explain in the simplest terms what Leeds Digitial Festival is, and why we should get involved?

Leeds Digital Festival is simply a celebration of the city’s creative and digital talent. The idea is to host events, seminars, workshops and informal meet ups across the city and encourage people to get to know each other, collaborate, and celebrate what’s great about the digital sector across Leeds.

It’s a fairly simple and unoriginal idea to be honest but one that works well for other industries and other cities. With the DADI Awards coming to the city and bringing more than 500 other creative and digital professionals with it, we had an opportunity to for the Leeds industry to shine on a national stage, so three years ago we took that opportunity and hastily cobbled together the first Leeds Digital Week.

Since then we’ve done Yorkshire Digital Week where we worked with partners at Huddersfield Media Centre, Woodend Creative in Scarborough, Workstation in Sheffield, b-media and National Media Museum in Bradford. It was a great experience but when you have no money to deliver it and lots of different agendas and politics it may have been a case of trying to run before we could walk. So this year with no money and a slightly more realistic ambition a partnership of Leeds Media, Holbeck Urban Village, Marketing Leeds, Leeds York & North Yorkshire Chambers of Commerce, Screen Yorkshire and Leeds College of Art decided to focus on what we could achieve in Leeds and evolve the idea to become Leeds Digital Festival.

What is Digital these days anyway, where does being in the Digital sector begin and end? Is it just for geeky people? Or cool chin scratchy types who like apples and gadgets?

Digital is a bit of a misnomer as it means so many different things to so many different people. Most people think of websites, computers, software and the usual geeky attractions when you say ‘digital’ but it can be anything from things that most of us use and understand like photography or video games or television and radio, to more technical and engineering industries – the people who make Twitter, for example, rather than the people who use it.

Digital and creative are pretty broad terms and one of the ambitions for the festival this and in future years is to broaden its appeal so that it becomes a festival that everyone can take part in from those working and making a living from the industry to the man on the street and other sectors across the city who bring a different perspective. We’ve never really worked with the arts sector and people like East Street Arts or the Light Night team as much as we could have and there’s plenty of opportunity to do this with a bit more time and planning.

It would be nice to think that Leeds Digital Festival could become something that people look forward to and are proud of in the same way that London Design Festival  and Bradford Animation Festival and Leeds International Film Festival are in the calendar every year and people know they are coming, get involved early and support them. Although these are pretty big events and we need to do a lot more work and find a lot more money first!

What would you hope the festival will achieve?

In a lot of ways for me personally the festival has already started to achieve some of the things I wanted. The digital community are not shy about telling you and/or the world what they think and the festival didn’t escape the wrath of twitter. But what’s fantastic this year is that people didn’t just whinge, they saw an opportunity and got involved. Thanks to people like Si Wilson, Sean Parker , Alex Craven, Matt Pallatt, Monica Tailor, Karen Lewis , Dave Eccles, Dom Hodgson, Guy Redwood, Jim Moran and many, many more the festival this year not only has a great programme of events, it’s helped to start something bigger that could give the Leeds digital scene a strong identity.

Your site is no stranger to discussions about the Leeds Identity Crisis and whether or not we are better / worse than any other city across the UK. I would like to think the Leeds Digital Festival  and events like it could help to create pride in the city and what we do have here. If the festival makes people want to get more involved in their city, even if it’s just going to events and meeting people or something more, then I think that’s a pretty big achievement.

In the future I hope the festival could grow and become something that other people and other cities aspire to or want to recreate. I recently found a graffiti festival which took place in Turin which looked amazing. The festival happened because the local authority enabled it but artists and creative people from across the globe delivered, it would be amazing for Leeds to have something like that or for this festival to have that level of involvement and engagement.

What’s been the biggest challenge this year?

The biggest challenge that festival faces is having no budget. Everything is done in kind and sponsors are sought on an individual event basis which makes planning hard and means that the festival programme has so much more scope but needs support to get there. We’ve had fantastic support at very short notice this year from companies like Bloom Media who have sorted out the social media for us and taught me things as we’ve gone along and Hodgetastic who managed to put together a 24 hour Leeds Hack Day in about three weeks. Whilst budget would be nice, once you know who can give what even if it’s just ideas you realise that it’s possible to achieve a lot with little – you just have to be realistic and an eternal optimist.

The biggest challenge on a personal level was knowing where to start. There are so many partners involved and so many people who wanted to be part of it all with different ideas, priorities and agendas, almost all of whom knew better than me what would work. It’s hard to know how to manage expectations but keep people feeling part of something and take on everyone’s ideas and suggestions. Lots of people had similar or conflicting ideas so the most sensible thing to do was to get people together at one time in one place and then it pretty much took care of itself as people started to do their own thing or form collaborations. Unfortunately I’m plagued by a need to try to fix things so the festival has been a massive learning curve with plenty of highs and lows

Is it true you can’t please all of the people all of the time?

Hahahahaha yes!
I’m sure there are areas and opportunities we’ve missed this year but we don’t profess to have all the answers and we need people to work with us and tell us what they want but also people to help us to do it. There will always be somebody who says they didn’t know about it or they would have done it differently or they don’t like the design or the premise or anything about it. You can’t ignore those views and I spend a lot of my time meeting people and asking what they would like instead and explaining why things are the way they are and tying to find some kind of middle ground. Sometimes I succeed, often I don’t, but I still think it’s important to try.

Often negativity comes from people’s frustration at wanting to be involved and not knowing how to get involved or not having all the information and this is something we need to get better at. Hopefully this year’s festival will be the start of that. The nice thing this year is that it was individuals rather than organisations who really wanted to take the time to get involved and help to develop Leeds Digital Festival. And, even better after about five weeks of meetings, planning and discussions, they all still want to be involved next year!

What would you hope people would experience during the festival?

A sense of pride in the city and its creative and digital talent. There are loads of events and some won’t be everyone’s cup of tea but if people are at least aware of the events, the buzz about the sector and the opportunity to create something more for future years then I will be happy.

What’s this we hear about numerous meetings in pubs plotting and hatching…will there be a few surprises this year?

It’s all true.

People who said they wanted to be involved didn’t want to get sucked into politics and formal agreements, partly because they don’t have the time and partly because it can sometimes stifle the creativity and alter the ideas you might decide to share. So we meet in pubs every Thursday night and just talk about ideas for the festival, and sometimes for the wider digital scene in the city. There are a few, very focussed people who are great because they stop the meetings being a lot of talk and turn it into actions and get people passionate enough to give their time.

Besides the pub is my favourite place to meet people who write opinionated blogs, to explain myself – I like to take comfort that if I get lynched at least I’ll be in easy reach of the black stuff 😉

Leeds Digital Festival starts 8th -12th November, visit the website to decide the where, what, when. But don’t moan you didn’t know it was on!