As I said in this interview with Localmouth, I put my involvement in CiB down to being in the right place at the right time and count my lucky stars for that.
When Pete introduced me to the CiB readers he said that he’d lost interest in running the site to some extent and that the ideas for taking CiB forward were “kinda complex and needed some serious planning”. Someone else (that’d be me) would run the site for six months while that took place.
I took over in May this year. At the end of October six months will have whizzed by. Now, I’ve still got plenty of enthusiasm for the site, although I’m starting to feel the demands it makes on my time now that I have a run of other (possibly kinda related) projects stacking up.
So here’s the conclusion I’ve come to (for now at least, conclusion correct at time of writing) – I’ll probably pass on the baton in the new year, using January 2009 as a transitional month as it should be pretty quiet then.
Who will take over though? Hmm, that’s the question.
I’ve got more time to think about it than Pete did, so some criteria is slowly forming in my noggin. This isn’t set in stone by any means but I reckon the person taking over should be:
- comfortable with blogging and (if you’ll excuse the buzzword) social media generally.
- on the fringes of Birmingham’s art scene (if a part of it at all). A narky commenter once described CiB as ‘the blind leading the blind’. Erm… well yes, that’s kinda the point. It’s meant to be someone feeling their way into the nooks and crannies of Birmingham’s creative scene.
- not putting lots of time into a good blog already. CiB is meant to help foster blogging around Birmingham, not nick the people writing the good ones
- time rich. There’s so much more that could be done with CiB (heck knows the ideas and opportunities are out there) but it takes time to keep on top of 400 or so RSS feeds and however many emails arrive daily. It’s not really compatible with a regular day job (I work evenings and weekends a lot).
- friendly. Of course.
- new to CiB, who hasn’t done anything on the site before.
Should I add anything to that list? Or should I stop thinking about it so hard?
The problem is that list strikes off every good person who comes to mind. Still, someone will pop up and be perfect for it, I’m sure. There’s plenty of time between now and January to find them.
Anyway, the idea of this post was to get my thoughts in order more than anything – it’s NOT an invitation for applicants to put themselves forward so please don’t treat it as one (and certainly don’t email me about it unless you want the email copy/pasted into the comments below). If you’re interested then the best thing would be for you to be blogging regularly and ‘well’, not that I’m a judge of that or anything.