Deep Impact

Brum’s Twitterati have been tying themselves in a tizzy asking the question “So what the heck is an Impact Hub and why is it so epically awesome?”. Normal people probably don’t care, but might find the answers interesting anyway.

We sent Danny Smith out to get us pictures of the Spider-Man, but he came back with this.

Before Christmas a Kickstarter began and the link got passed around with some curiosity. The copy seemed to be all buzz words and no clear explanation. The question “What is an Impact Hub?” was on everybody’s lips. Not in a good way. Fans of the English language were in varying degrees bemused and angry at its obtuseness (shut up – that’s a word). This, coupled with the truly huge goal set, its relentlessly upbeat nature, and its seemingly discounting of all the hard work that already goes on in the city popping up in people’s various social media streams generated more bad feeling culminating in a few posts where this bad feeling was thrown about.

I went down to meet Immy, the author of the Kickstarter, to have a chat and look around their new space (it’s nice). Immy is small and passionate and when she gesticulates small bells tinkle from the bangles on her wrists.

Various things were said during the interview that were ‘off the record’ but none of these were to protect her or the Impact Hub, they were in general explaining when various people and organisations had screwed over her and the project as a whole.

IMMY: It’s been a real steep learning curve for us, from the moment we did go more public and found out how unprepared we were for what was going to come. There’s a portion that have been really supportive and really great but then,  psychologically you think more about the gap, about the people that are saying “what’s going on?” and I think it overtakes that. For me it’s a big learning curve because we put it out there like “wow we’ve been doing this for two years” and we were a little “wow look at the amount of talented people”.

ME: Cards on the table I was going to write a column that was a take-down of the language, which is pretty impenetrable, and also I wanted to poke fun at how excited you were at everything.


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