Community+Challenge

=Community Challenge=
 * Main Country of Operation:** UK
 * Other Countries of Operation:** Various
 * Contact:** Steve Thompson
 * Home page**: http://tvcm.co.uk/the-community-challenge/

The Community Challenge was developed as a tool for community engagement during the RESIDER (ERDF) funded project Tees Valley Communities Online. Basically it was a lot of fun!

In the year 2000 we saw the very first online pubquiz between Skinningrove in Timms Coffee House and the Black Bull in Trimdon. Skinningrove won! This was a great boost for Skinningrove for a number of reasons. Firstly Skinningrove were just recovering from two massive floods. The other reason was that the Black Bull had what they thought was an ace on their team – Prime Minister Tony Blair (pictures below).. This led to a whole string of Community Challenges which grew in size until it covered the entire country. There was even a [|Euro Challenge]. We had a TV crew with us at the time so you can enjoy the atmosphere at Timms in the video below.

This event was in the very early days of UK online and captured the interest of the network and came to the attention of BECTA and in particular a guy named Alastair Clark. Through Alastair of Becta and Teesside Uni through Steve Thompson and Dave Eagle who developed some software the idea grew and grew. After the first one there was a challenge across the UK and there was the Euro Challenge – [|Click Here For Skinningrove Eurostars] It all culminated a 52 team UK wide community challenge and the moderators were trained in Skinningove.

Lately we've dusted this off and ran the [|Two Tribes challenge] between two pubs in East Cleveland (I guess it doesn't //have// to be a pub!) This time we used [|Ustream] from both locations so they could see each other. We even had online Karaoke which one pub loved and the other hated. We're contemplating developing the software further as once again we have transnational interest. We're considering making it a total cultural exchange where the quiz is a focus but all sorts of other exchanges take place including text chat, images, video, audio. We may not even use any software at all and just build a web 2.0 plugin mashup !

Below the very first Community Challenge

NOTE TO SELF - darn it - broken Ning links - put this on YouTube