In case you don’t know what I do for a living I’m a kind of champion for use of digital stuff by businesses in Birmingham. And the easiest, no-cost, digital stuff to get your head round is Social Media. I’m always hunting down examples. I love the fact that Herefordshire-based Wiggly Wigglers have blogged,  podcasted and Youtubed their way out of tough economic times. I love that they dumped their expensive bought-in customer lists and built a customer base around their facebook group and twitter followers. Those are loyal, repeating customers, helping each other get the best from this company’s products. No expensive helpline needed - they help each other.

I work in partnership in my job. Trying to slip my thinking into other people’s strategies. That £17m support package for businesses announced yesterday? In amongst those big fat projects to be delivered through Business Link and the Universities is some of my thinking - there’s a sprinkling of digital stuff. I sit on the sub-group of the Birmingham Economic Development Partnership that helped draft them. I can play an influencing role there, those people in the group know me as that guy who thinks social media is useful. None of them are great users of social media themselves but they aren’t dismissive, they understand there’s a change happening, a change that might be useful for all businesses to understand and take note of.

So it’s kind of crushing to see a representative of the partner who most connects to businesses castigate social media out of hand. John Lamb’s piece in the Post is atrocious. At the end of the piece it says: “John Lamb’s views are not necessarily those of Birmingham Chamber of Commerce.” As I say on my own About page, I use the same head for work as I do everywhere else. My personal views are wrapped up in my work views. If I’m expressing a disappointment here on my personal blog then that’s how I’ll be feeling next time I go to a meeting with Birmingham Chamber.

Actually, I know the Chamber is taking an active interest in new digital tools, which is great but having a key representative take such umbrage to their use just makes my job that much more difficult and that much more disheartening.

*Sighs*

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• data set of parking tickets - WhatDoTheyKnow - FOI request results in three sets of spreadsheets for every ticket issued in Birmingham. There's flipping thousands of them! Fascinating and awaiting mashing up I think.
• Discover Digital - "Birmingham City University is one of the most comprehensive suppliers of training and talent to the creative industry within the UK. Working with major industry players, small freelancers and an ever growing dynamic industry, our academic community provide support, innovation and stimulation through our array of highly talented students, latest equipment and research to review, tease out and develop digital opportunities."
• Creative beacon - Wolverhampton Light House - Nice profile from Wolves Uni of Light House Media centre and Frank Challenger. Worth a read.
• Living with rats: I'm sorry, Clay Shirky, nobody knows you around here - Summary of an event I presented at in Bradford. What a useful day it was - some useful insights from Julian Dobson on the increasing distance between the 'twitterati' and the rest of the professional middle class.
• NESTA Connect: A Twitter Manifesto to Reboot Britain - "I was tweeting pretty hard all day so instead I've decided just to capture my favorite comments below as a mini manifesto that emerged from the day"
• Making Life Playable through Data - "A presentation Toby Barnes gave at Ogilvy Games Lab on Mudlark's approach to making life playable." Stuff on role of data in supporting new game development.
• ASH-10 » Coworking and Internet Culture - Great intro to concept of co-working.
• Build your stuff with our stuff! - Lichfield District Council - "We're always looking for new ways of making it as easy as possible for developers and website owners to access data held by Lichfield District Council in ways that they want - allowing you to remix, mashup and share data easily. Here's a list of what we provide so far, this list is not exhaustive, and we'll be adding more and more datasets as time progresses"
• Open source community for liberating gov data | DIYcity - "The City of SF has undertaken an experiment to develop an open source platform with the community that will help improve public access to raw government data in machine readable formats. We see a great opportunity to work with other cities and developers in creating technology that is re-usable, free and open source to solve a common challenge. As members of DIYcity, this might be of interest."

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This one was a version of the presentation I gave at wxwm2 the other week:

‘Mileage data to Inspire’
Published Monday 6th July (hey, that was my birthday!).

“Years that end in odd numbers usually make for dull sporting summers as the Olympics and the major footballing tournaments only occupy the even numbered years. However, as well as annual tournaments such as Wimbledon we do have a World Athletics Championship and The Ashes to look forward to this summer.

But given how concerned the government are with obesity levels it’ll take more than the sight of a group of blokes throwing balls at each other to persuade a nation of sport-loving couch potatoes to do something about their own health and wellbeing

All the data tells us we’re fat and we’re getting fatter. In fact not only are we fat but our kids are fat and even our pets are fat. Given the state of the economy the only thing that isn’t fat is our wallets. So what’s the approach taken to deal with this? It’s simple – an advertising campaign to remind us how fat we are that goes out of its way to blame computer games and television as the main culprits.

I’m not denying that the Change for Life campaign hasn’t persuaded some people to get off their backside but there’s so much already happening that we could celebrate rather than just play a familiar blame game. Take running for example. On any random weekend there are about 50 organised amateur races happening around the UK with about 50,000 - 100,000 runners taking part. In total that’s up to a million kilometres covered. And that doesn’t even include all the people just running by themselves for training or those running around Sunday league football pitches.

Many runners use GPS watches or other devices to track routes and record mileage. Now imagine all that mileage data gathered on a single map – a map that instead of sending a dour message about our laziness would celebrate ordinary citizens’ everyday sporting activity. What a powerful message that would be that might inspire others to join in.

We’ve got an Olympics coming up in 2012 and so far the only mass participation angle seems to be focused around the Cultural Olympiad. Nothing wrong with that but amateur sport is something that gets overlooked too often. It’s a shame as it’s got the mass participation thing down to a tee in a way the arts can only dream about.

So why not badge up Sunday morning football games as ‘inspired by 2012’. Have every jogger blog, tweet or map their runs as part of a national celebration of sporting engagement leading up to 2012. A digital campaign that visualises mass participation could inspire us all to get off our backsides.”

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I’ll keep this brief but last year for my 40th birthday present I got a voucher to fly in an old aircraft from the Imperial War Museum at Duxford. For one reason or another it took a year to redeem the voucher so on my 41st birthday I managed to do the flight.

The plane was a 1930s Dragon Rapide. It was tiny for a passenger aircraft, only seating eight people and the pilot. The sound it made comes straight from a 1930s film. It was a good ride and given the age of the aircraft felt very secure and safe.

Here’s an in-flight video I took. We flew over Cambridge, Ely and Newmarket race course:

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• Study into new contemporary art museum linking Arcadian with Digbeth | Birmingham Post - News - West Midlands News - Note that 'film centre' gets a mention but no funding to investigate the potential to develop one. Contemporary art really does have the cultural high ground in the city at the moment. That's great but it reinforces the idea that cinema is something that's only worth funding at the production end, not the distribution/exhibition end.
• My Tiny Plot » Blog Archive » A Little Piece of Gardening History - Lovely piece on finding an old seed catalogue and the history it revealed.

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• Pixel Perfect Pre-Raphaelites - Latest News - Digital Birmingham - "Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery will be the first museum to offer an unrivalled resource for studying the art of the Pre-Raphaelites, using Microsoft's cutting-edge Silverlight technology to bring pixel perfect definition to the screen, as if seeing the real artwork in a museum. By mid-June, over 2,000 fine and decorative artworks with never before seen clarity will be available through Silverlight, a plug-in that offers the Pre-Raphaelite website and its users an amazing Deep Zoom functionality."
• Light House – One of the Best Film Venues in Britain « We are Light House - Damn right it is!

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So I tweeted an idea when I got to this part of the Digital Britain report on ‘Getting Britain Online’:

“[it will] will require provision of appropriate support including outreach, skills training, and demonstration of how people can get the most out of the digital revolution, delivered through tailored, local, community-based programmes building on existing networks”

And I thought that’s something I’m always being told Birmingham is ahead of the game at. Take a read of Be Vocal - there you’ll find plenty of examples of tailored, local, community-based. Why doesn’t Birmingham take a lead here, put a marker down? Not to presume a superiority and show everyone how it’s done but, just like the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice does (to which I have a connection and think is fab), provide a resource point for excellence to be nurtured, developed and made useful. That’s why it’s a centre FOR, rather than OF.

Now if you read Digital Britain it talks about Digital Participation in quite a specific way (and in doing so casts aside the much used term ‘media literacy‘). Participation would in effect be the responsibility of an organisation doing the equivalent job of Digital TV switchover and be charged with: “coordination and a clear and co-ordinated series of messages about the benefits [for being online]“. I’m thinking it’s gonna be a bit trickier than Digital TV switch-off which has an extremely compelling offer at its heart (”you won’t be able to watch TV as we’re going to switch off the analogue signal you know and love”). 

So the ‘Centre’ wouldn’t be interested in leading any ad campaigns for getting online. Rather, it’s about thinking through that participation bit. Participate in what? with whom? to what end? I think it would do the following:

• Identify best practice
• Nurture digital champions
• R & D new engagement tools
• Outline useful strategies for engagement
• Show how this stuff works on the ground

It would be one way in which those charged with the participation stuff as Digital Britain describes it knew what good stuff looked like. It would give them insight, new tools, compelling stories.

In my mind it has a front door with a receptionist and long opening hours. I’m prepared to be swayed on that one but I’m not sure it should be tucked away on a campus (but I do think universities have a role here - at least one thinks this area worthy of study). Birmingham needs a big front door to digital participation or it does up until the point we’ve got everyone online and participating.

So I’ve had enough people now say, yeah, sounds interesting, let’s talk about it. I now plan to continue talking about it in a way that suggests everybody else has already agreed to it and it’ll be here before you know it. If you see me in the street I might mention it.

Oh and funding - not a clue at present but we’ll see….

Thoughts?

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• Look Brum, I'm on TV! | Metro.co.uk - "you’d think I’d be excited at the news that Birmingham is getting its own TV channel in the next few months called City TV. But then, I’ve spent far too much time trawling through the higher ends of Sky Digital programming, where channels claiming to promote the likes of the Isle Of Wight pop up for a month, display some of the worst camerawork you’ll see this side of Hollyoaks, and then disappear just as quickly."
• Putting Government Data online - Design Issues - Clearly I need to read and understand this…..
• eGov monitor - A Policy Dialogue Platform | Promoting Better Governance - "In Birmingham last week Carter – rather charmingly - said it was down to individuals like me to be the social voice of the digital future. I’m quite happy to take that on, and keep on fluttering gently but persistently away at the glimpses of light clearly visible at the end of the policy tunnel."
• Birmingham 'ideal' to pilot digital future | Birmingham Post - Creative industries - Piece based on Digital Birmingham's response to the Digital Britain report.
• 10 Things that are great about Brum | Be Vocal - How could I not bookmark this? Spot on in all regards.
• Be Vocal : Using social media and public data in Birmingham - A site about social media for social good in Birmingham and using the internet to turn public data into something useful.

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• Yoosk today! - All Topics - Yoosk Digital Britain page for Birmingham event.
• The Digital Mission Regional Tour is coming to Birmingham! - "A series of regional workshops are happening around the UK to talk about the Digital Mission series to the USA taking place in Autumn 2009 and Spring 2010. The events are a perfect opportunity to find out more about the Digital Missions, their objectives and talk to those who've had the opportunity to attend a previous mission."
• MA Social Media - Blog of the MA Social Media at Birmingham City University, UK. It starts in September. Occurs to me that maybe more courses should have their own blogs - not just those that teach blogging as part of the course.
• The online marketing expert blog - Does what it says on the tin - useful insights into online marketing.

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Suffice to say I’m still vexed. And I’m even a bit more vexed because having now aired the topic in public I could see that I wasn’t alone in feeling frustrated at the current state of film exhibition in the city. For those new to me moaning about this take a read of the original post that resulted in this event being created. I was joined by a fantastic panel: Roger Shannon - Film Producer & academic; Ian Francis - film festival curator; Rachel Carter, Film Producer and co-founder of Fullrange Media.

All agreed that yes, it did matter that some films tend to only get to Birmingham on their second-run. Not all in the audience agreed but in general the discussion covered:

• the dominance of film programming by the few to the detriment of the many;
• questioned whose role audience development is in the region;
• pondered the cultural priorities of a city where Digbeth can have three modern art galleries but no cinemas;
• debated the link between a thriving culture of exhibiting the weird/leftfield/arty/independent and the impact that might have on the films that we produce out of the region.

Roger brought with him a whole bag full of consultants’ reports from the past 20 years that in one way or another touched on the issue of whether Birmingham needs a new arts cinema. He drew our attention in particular to a recent report by Tom Fleming ‘Mixed Art-form and Media Venues in the Digital Age’ (link to PDF).

There was some reference to the Arts Lab/Triangle era and there was much nodding at the suggestion that what we need now is perhaps the best of that (its radical edge for a start) combined with the dynamic and vibrant social media scene that’s currently setting the city apart. That’s perhaps where this discussion should go next.

For me though it still comes back to competitiveness. Those in the city with access to resources and the power to influence decisions need to understand that when Norwich are getting interesting films ahead of us then the time for action is now.

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