I heard about it because I now work with Stuart Halford, one of the organiser’s. I get wildly jealous every time he tells me stories of the trip.

Sadly, although the team were eventually welcomed to Baghdad by over 3 million Iraqis filling the streets in one day, the story made little impact in the British media. Luckily, they made this film which I recently discovered and I humbly recommend you check it out.

The video itself goes on for over an hour and I watched the whole lot. But if you don’t have time, pick it up from about 58 minutes in, as they cross the border between Jordan and Iraq. Even then, you only get a small sense of the scale of their achievement and what it must have meant to the Iraqis as well as to those who were on the bus.

Technorati Tags: activism, activists, campaign, charity, communications, friend, polit, politics

This morning I read Kate Jangra’s post about the fact that new and existing allotments are now under threat from a review of local authority duties. Basically, the government have announced a “Review of statutory duties”, which are intended to identify then reduce local authority’s duties which they perceive to be a “burden”. One such duty they are looking to remove is the duty to provide sufficient number of allotments for people in an area. This apparently includes existing as well as newly constructed allotments.

I felt motivated to act because I believe allotments are a really important part of the social fabric of our community value networks. More pressingly, we really need to increase access, not reduce it, since demand is soaring. Luckily, Kate neatly plots out a simple sequence of actions anyone can take and, inspired by the Model Answers for the Statutory duties web form courtesy of Hollin Lane Allotments, I set about completing the government survey.

In case you’re interested in completing the survey yourself and protect our allotments, then the survey is here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GP7BKKT. And if it’s of use, here are the answers I gave to survey questions 6 and 9, which are adapted from Hollin Lane’s suggested framework:

6. What do you consider are the adverse effects of removing this duty and who would this effect?

There would be little benefit to removing the duty. Instead, we would lose access to local allotments at the worst possible time — just as they’ve become hugely popular again with many sections of the community, following the ongoing financial crisis which began in 2008. Allotments are a simple but effective intervention both in terms of exercise and also providing a healthy, locally sourced diet for individuals. And that’s not to mention the effect they can have on strengthening food security for the entire nation.

9. Would you like to add any general comments about this particular duty?

Local government allotment provision has functioned well and at very little expense for many years. Recent evidence of enormous demand woefully out-stripping supply clearly indicates the value allotments have to the general public. However, those benefits are difficult to measure. I would suggest it would be worth investigating approaches to monitoring and evaluation of their value. But I would suggest the impact they have reaches beyond allotment holders themselves to their families and the community at large.

Have at it!

Technorati Tags: campaign, environment, sustainability, transitiontowns

Technorati Tags: communications, creativity

Technorati Tags: activism, politics, transition

And our own Kensal to Kilburn transition brand is still very young and hasn’t really had time to develop properly yet (I’m kind of making it up as I go along principally because I’m still so new to the Transition movement myself). I’m not certain yet whether to take it in a more organic, rough and anarchic direction or to leave it where it’s going right now, which is more urban and hard-edged; almost like a nightclub poster. Although this flies in the face of most Transition Town visual styles, I feel that for a London area where we’re trying to attract young professionals this is the sort of look and feel which will “go to where our audiences are already” as Rob Hopkins often suggests.

In fact, this is a very different style to those I’d normally employ for an environmental movement and feels a bit “old school” but there’s a very definite reason for this — I’ve used very generic fonts “Arial” and “Arial Black” which almost everyone has on their Windows PC which means that anyone with access to a PC will potentially be able to create good-looking materials on their own desktop without my involvement.

It goes without saying that if you live in the Kensal Rise, Kensal Green, Kilburn, Queens Park or Willesden areas of North West London and you’re interested in environmental issues, climate change, living sustainably, growing your own food or rediscovering your community, then come buy some tickets and come and see us. We’re really interested to meet you!

Please leave your design input and thoughts in the comments! Go on, it’s my birthday.

A3 Promotion poster for TTK2K Harvest Festival and Ceilidh

This is the front of the flyer we’ll be handing out to promote the festival

And this is the reverse of the flyer which publicises the evening do

More materials will follow shortly.

Technorati Tags: collateral, graphic design, promotions, transitiontowns

As we listen to someone speak, subtle variations in intonation, volume, speed and rhythm contribute more to our understanding than words alone. Conventional typography communicates pure, refined content, stripped of most of the emotion. Unless we highlight a word with italic, any information about someone’s tone of voice must be annotated into the text. Such a marked difference between speech and text means that we have one voice for speaking and another for writing. Dictography tries to bridge this divide.

In dictographic notation, conventions of typographic and musical notation are combined and augmented. The four basic properties of speech: pitch, volume, tone and speed are divided into separate channels. These elements are then encoded according to a set of rules which use relative position, visual weight (boldness and condensed-expanded) to background and text colour, word spacing.

That basic framework is further augmented with symbols relating to individual vocal characteristics: key signature gives information on overall tone, the speakers’ sex, nationality and accent and standard pitch of the voices (think bass, baritone, treble and soprano). The ends of phrases or sentences are marked with a large blue dot. Phrases needing exclamations or question marks add Spanish-style inverted marks before the phrase, issuing advanced warning to readers. Any non-specific vocal sounds such as a tut or a click of the tongue is indicated with an orange star. Likewise, a trembling voice is represented by a trill mark. Finally, en dashes are replaced with a discrete arrowhead because of the risk of conflicts with the stave lines.

The inside front cover looks, at first glance, to be entirely abstract but is in fact a rendering of the Archers episode as a sample:

Analysing a 5 minute scene from BBC Radio 4’s The Archers took a huge amount of work, codifying each speaker’s pitch, speed, volume and emotional cues. It should be possible to automate this using a software tool, or perhaps one day even to automate speech recording directly into dictographic notation. That would give a different look to Hansard!

This close-up view shows the level of detail I had to go into in order to produce the transcript:

Obviously, this system still has serious limitations. It cannot truly portray the vast subtlety of vocal dynamics, harmonics and the barrage of other variables inherent in anything as complex as human speaking.

But by offering several more layers of data into the text stream, it can offer a richer reproduction than conventional text and annotations can convey and I hope that might be of value to certain professionals for whom conveying meaning through speech has a value.

Technorati Tags: design, idea, music, notation, personal, system, typography

You can read more about the experiment on Ed’s blog at the Transition Network site but in essence, Richard and I will be taking over the Twitter account for a short while and exploring new ways of working with Twitter in order to figure out the best strategies for raising awareness of Transition on Twitter as well as engaging with other people who are in Transition already.

Ed’s a braver man than me, since I’m not sure I’d be so eager to allow my Twitter account into someone else’s hands!

I’m really flattered to have been offered the chance to help with such an interesting project for such an amazing organisation and I’m looking for interesting and exciting news stories and people to connect while I’m involved in the account. Please send me anything you feel would be of interest to those who are interested in the international Transition Network. There are some interesting developments happening right now so it should be a fascinating experience.

Technorati Tags: socialmedia, transition, transitiontowns, twitter, volunteering

Anyway, to appropriately mark the passing of such an important part of all our lives, the professional lovely lady Beth Kanter suggested I carve a memorial tombstone (using JJ Chandler’s Tombstone Generator tool).

This is what I came up with but please add your own suggestions in the comments:

Technorati Tags: creativity, email, humour

Technorati Tags: 10:10, activism, activists, climate change, comedy, energy, environment, peakoil, politics, transition, war

The basic content page is a fairly bog-standard three column model with a wide range of regions which collapse based on block allocation, via the usual Drupal theme layer conditional regions. However, we are exploring using Context module or Panels to assign blocks and region visibility.

Standard content page

Wide content page

This page demonstrates how region visibility allows for variable width content.

Map page (wide, no blocks)

Feedback needed

Please feel free to comment on any aspects of the visual design, information architecture and other usability or Drupal development issues if you can spot any technical problems. For instance, I read recently that it’s actually quite hard to write a “Read more” link into the header of a Block header.

Technorati Tags: design, drupal, linkedin, transition, ttmvt, website