• Facing up to the financial facts | birminghamnewsroom.com – Birmingham City Council's Chief Exec Stephen Hughes: "The truth is, that if we are to protect the public from the consequences of these spending reductions, we need revolutionary change in the way we provide services."

  We are going to have to look at ideas that might have seemed inconceivable only a short time ago.

• Slices of soup – towards a new definition of local media | ASH-10 – "….the future of online media looks a lot like soup. There will be carrots and they will be important but on the whole it’ll be a murky and opaque and very hard to perceive as anything other than a whole."
• The 2010 Social Networking Map / Flowtown (@flowtown) – 2010 map of social media
• - ‘Do not sue’ Part II: stories and leads wanted! – an Easy-Waiver (loosely based on what you’d sign to hire a mountain bike, go paintballing etc).
• Your guide to organising a street party or fete – Communities and neighbourhoods – Communities and Local Government – "We want to make it easier for you to hold these sorts of local events, without having to plough through mountains of forms and red tape. So we have produced this simple step by step guide to how to hold a community event in your local area. It includes one simple form for you to use to let your local authority know about your plans."

She had, she told me, persuaded 80 or so scientists from the West Midlands to write a few hundred words in response to the question “what makes you optimistic?” Jenny Uglow (the historian who wrote the brilliant story of the Lunar Society:  The Lunar Men) had agreed to write the foreword.

At the time I thought oh yeh…I was very wrong to doubt Kate, even for a moment.  I’m now working a little with her and she’s one of the most focused and determined people I know.  She has set up a non profit publishing arm, is launching the book at the British Science Festival in Birmingham next month and the collection has become a brilliant reality.

So we now have 81 very clever people and their ideas for the future.  As Jenny Uglow describes it:

“The New Optimists is the most exhilarating of books. It looks to the future, not through rose-tinted glasses, but with a clear vision, aware of difficulties and challenges yet convinced that research and experiment can help the human race to overcome them. It seems entirely right that scientists should step forth and speak out in this way, on the 350th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Society. Right too that the 2010 meeting of the British Science Association should be held in Birmingham, a place that has always been a town of forges and anvils, of making and invention, a crucible of ideas.”

To get a copy go here or here.

• I couldn’t possibly comment: Westminster commercial noise map – experiment with Google Fusion Tables – Will Perrin… "It isn't perfect, but it's easy. If you can use a spreadsheet you can take some real public data and make a map to make a point."
• Reflections on the Birmingham Hacks & Hackers Hackday (#hhhbrum) | Online Journalism Blog – Paul Bradhshaw: "a different skill to that normally practised by journalists – we were looking not for stories but for ‘nodes’: links between information such as local authority or area codes, school identifiers, and so on. Finding a story in data is relatively easy when compared to a project like this, and it did remind me more of the investigative process than the way a traditional"newsroom works
• Response: The digital era has not made publishers defunct | Comment is free | The Guardian – "The idea that publishers "now appear frozen in the headlights of the onrushing digital revolution" is simply untrue." (Is it?)
• UK Sound Map – This is wonderful….. "Join the British Library in creating the first nationwide sound map. Take part by publishing recordings of your surroundings using the free AudioBoo app for iPhone or Android smartphones or a web browser. When uploading soundscape recordings via Audioboo, add the tag 'uksm' and they'll appear on the SoundMap"
• Socialreporter | There is no Big Society Big Plan – and that’s no bad thing – There is no Big Society Big Plan, and no-one is in charge.
  Unfortunately, in the journalistic sense, it’s not much of story.

He echoed a huge number of my thoughts on linear media, transmitters/printing presses and local-ness.  Will  challenged the government’s concentration on Local TV with a series of statements (for Will’s expansion on these visit his blog post here.):

• Why use television as a medium of transmission at all?
• TV is not local
• For small audience local TV there is no need to regulate news in the traditional way.
• The footprint for any of the 80-odd transmitters is orders of magnitude too large for a real big society impact.
• If you start with the internet, instead of TV low cost public service models are apparent.
• Of the hundreds of good local websites in the UK very few regularly use video to tell stories.
• Public service news done in the traditional British broadcast way is too expensive for local TV

There are a number of other thoughts I could add:

• The local web scene is more sustainable because it doesn’t rely on the financial viability of one or two organisations
• It has plurality (and I would suggest accountability) built in.
• Impartiality is now a difficult idea, the best way to develop trusted media is to expect/require it to be transparent.

But it was this one that got me thinking about what happens in my home city:

• Birmingham UK v Birmingham Alabama is often used as an example. Birmingham UK has a superb set of local, volunteer run grass roots internet media covering news, entertainment, events and culture.

The answer needn’t be Local TV

Here in Birmingham I think we take for granted the city’s very local web scene. Perhaps now is the time to shout about it. What is happening here (and in other parts of the country and the world) has in it the start of what the government should really nurture instead of Local TV.

The Secretary of State Jeremy Hunt’s department has a structural reform plan (links to a pdf) which states it’s second priority as supporting the Big Society – “a new era of people power”.  One way they wish to do this is

“foster the development of a new breed of strong local media groups, by removing local cross-media ownership rules to encourage local TV”

In this speech Jeremy Hunt says

I have long believed that the lack of high quality local TV is one of the biggest gaps in British broadcasting.  Why? Because, ironically, in an age of globalism people feel the need for stronger not weaker connections to the communities in which they live. And this government is committed to strengthening those ties by giving local communities far greater control over their own destinies. (my emphasis)

I think that is exactly what local online media is doing here in Birmingham.  Not only that but the burgeoning open data movement (encouraged by both the last and this government) is also making it easier for those same groups to hold power to account in new ways.   In the same speech Jeremy Hunt committed to broadband roll out.  The government understands the power of the web in so many ways.

Show and Tell

If he were to come to Birmingham who could Jeremy Hunt meet and what locally grown bottom up Big Society media goodness could we show him to help demonstrate an alternative beyond Local TV?

Here’s my starter:

Examples of local information and news:

• Live Brum, a crowd sourced listing site where the cities citizens keep each other up to date with events.
• Created in Birmingham an award winning site which reflects the breadth of creative activity in the city.
• Bournville Village is just one example of a very local news site, this one covers one neighbourhood and is run by volunteers – it has a sister site in the form of http://bournvillevillagecouncil.org.uk
• Digbeth is Good covers another and is again run by a volunteer.
• The Stirrer and Birmingham it’s Not Shit (Global City – Local Blog!) both cover the city in detail and from very different perspectives – again both run by individuals who are supported by a wider community.
• Hands on Handsworth is an example of a number of blogging neighbourhood managers (publicly funded) as is
• Birmingham News Room the city council’s tool for talking more directly to the public, rather than through the media.
• Birmingham Mail Your Communities is the beginnings of the local newspaper working with very local blogs

There are dozens of very local sites in Birmingham.  Openly Local records a few of them here:  and there are others listed on Be Vocal, but we still don’t have a full list.  Among my favourites are the allotments blogs like Court Lane Allotments with their own youtube channel and Neighbourhod Forum sites, such as the the one from Acocks Green – they provide a very local news service.

Examples of  online civic activism:

• BCCDIY :  the volunteer built alternative Birmingham City Council website.
• Big City Plan Talk another volunteer built site, this time an alternative to a rather shonky government consultation.

Support tools:

• Help Me Investigate A crowd sourced civic investigations website.
• Social Media Surgeries Birmingham born idea (now spreading world wide) where volunteers share their skills with community groups, encouraging the wider use of the web for civic good and community reporting.
• Talk About Local Will’s own organisation which is spreading the skills to run local community websites across the country – and indeed across the sea.

I know these sites are not telly. But people want local news and information, they don’t necessarily want to watch it.  All these sites use different media for different types of information.

What have I missed off?

Please add in the comments all the other sites I’ve missed off.  If you run a local website in Birmingham (even if it’s for your local neighbourhood watch) please also consider adding it to Chris Taggarts growing list of such sites here:

http://openlylocal.com/hyperlocal_sites

Thank you.

——–

Declaration:  We started the social media surgeries for voluntary groups in Brum in October 2008 and run the www.socialmediasurgery.com site.  I’m also a Director of Help Me Investigate Ltd.  Part of our work has been to help Neighbourhood Manager’s blog and run social media surgeries, Birmingham City Council started Birmingham Newsroom after some advice from us.

• Open data, democracy and public sector reform – This is an online report based on an MSc Dissertation by Tim Davies submitted to the University of Oxford, July 2010. It is shared using the Digress.it platform which allows for paragraph level commenting and hyperlinking to elements of the document.
• Alchemist dreams | El Pinchen – “how can a person who is doing things outside of the immediate understanding of many, survive and make a living. Make no mistake, this is not some bullshit from an artist in his ivory tower bemoaning the big bad world that doesn’t understand him. This is a new investigation from the person who has launched a thousand “social media” careers. Not only that, but he’s trying to find solutions – for himself, yes, but as in everything he does, public solutions which anybody could use.”
• MicroPatronage « Perfect Path – MicroPatronage
• Call phones from Gmail – Official Gmail Blog – “Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, “wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?”Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail. “
• Autism Radio UK, AutismRadioUK – Coming Very Soon! – AutismRadioUK was was established by Kevin Healey & is the first Autism Radio station in the United Kingdom, which will broadcast local, national & worldwide!

• Read+Comment | Hassle-free publishing and commenting on your documents – Good for consultation…. ‘Commentable’ online documents are a great way to establish two-way dialogue with the people who care about your organisation. But until now, you’ve had to build them yourself, often from scratch, either hosting your own or working around the limitations of your content management system or free tools.Read+Comment is purpose-built on modern, open source WordPress technology with all the configuration and plugins set up for you. Sign up, put your content in, and make the site your own.
• Brave New World | John Popham’s Random Musings – A very fine man is now freelance: “There is a big difference between the last time I was a freelance and now, That is the rise of Social Media.”
• Can hyperlinks be libellous, or are they just mere footnotes? | Law | guardian.co.uk – Interesting…. “The case of Hird v Wood, decided more than a century ago, is often cited by legal commentators as applicable by analogy – it featured a man who sat by the side of a road all day smoking a pipe and pointing to a placard on which a defamatory statement was written by an unknown author. The court of appeal decided that this conduct was tantamount to publishing the libel.”
• Social Media Surgeries – A Mutual Learning Experience | John Popham’s Random Musings – “It was a genuine mutual learning process. I learned a lot out of it, the tutors involved all agreed they had found the process both informative and enjoyable, they took copious notes so they could pick up from where we left off when they got back to their own computers.So, I now have very direct and personal experience of what I have been telling people who are nervous of becoming a “Social Media Surgeon”. I very much enjoyed it, we are all learning all the time, and I, for one, never want to fall into the trap of thinking I am “expert” at anything.”
• Big Society: foretelling the end of confrontational governing? – Neighbourhoods – “…what happened when the Big Society idea was concocted was that Conservative thinkers realised that overt ‘I/You’ thinking is running out of steam, historically. Something called the network society is coming over the hill which is gradually bringing an end to hierarchical systems. The emphasis is going to be on governance not government; on co-operation and openness not command and control. What should we do? Let’s occupy some ‘We’ thinkers’ terrain, and control that. Just bring some of this collective mentality into the foreground a little, not too much.”
• Councils spending millions on website redesigns as job cuts loom – Telegraph – One council refreshed the look of its website eight times in a decade, another paid more than a thousand pounds for a spellchecker that comes free with word processing software.
• The New Optimists – what she’s working on is trying to make old age a less unhealthy, uncomfortable place to be

• NHS spends millions on websites that fail patients, says government report | Society | The Guardian – Here, here… ” A layer of NHS bureaucracy, represented by websites built by primary care trusts, foundation trusts and strategic health authorities, received “almost no recognition” from the public. “The question is raised why these sites were developed in the first instance,” the report says.”
• O2 makes text donations free for charities – Civil Society – IT – News – providing news and in-depth coverage of charities, voluntary organisations and not-for-profits – O2 has become the second mobile operator to pledge to deliver 100 per cent of all text donation value to charities in a move which could signal an industry-wide shift.
• Birmingham Post – Business – Business Comment – Business Columnists – Jerry Blackett: Science festival brings hope – The New Optimists asks the simple question: what are you optimistic about? The essays in response – many from academics working in the region’s universities – are exciting and exhilarating
• rebootbritain – Obstacles and their solutions – “….there is insufficient clarity about the cost of failure of the other ways of doing things. Hence innovation feels disproportionately risky and expensive.”
• A Surge of Open Data « Warwickshire Open Data – In the run-up to the last week of the competition we have some great new datasets to play with.
• Open Knowledge Foundation Blog » Blog Archive » Dig the new breed, Part II – open archaeology and ethics – “…archaeologists, for right or wrong, consider the implications of placing fine grained data in the public domain and “Ethical considerations” have been identified as a “barrier” to deposition. However, there appears to be limited guidance as to how to resolve these issues. This means that many archaeologists are re-inventing the wheel. The challenge is to provide some supporting “thing” that makes it easy for individuals and organisations to get to a clear, and hopefully unambiguous, ethical position. Such a “thing” will reduce uncertainty thereby removing one of the barriers to data sharing. The current default position is the equivalent of doing nothing: surely this must change.”
• Armchair Auditor – “Sometimes you want a high-level view of how much money is being spent by each council service or paid to each supplier. Other times you want to examine the details right down to individual payments.”Armchair Auditor lets you do both.

I talked, as I often do, about online civic activists, social media surgeries and the nurturing of neighbourhood level civic activity online.  The presentation is below but the 5 key points are:

• Permanent links to everything
• RSS feeds – lots of them by place and service
• Commentable pages
• Embeddable content
• Share your data openly – complete with its flaws

The film that appears on slide 3 is here (yes it does make me look like a git. The viseo was shot the morning after the power had coned our street in the small hours (because of a sports match) then started slapping tickets on cars – we went to bed legally parked and woke up illegaly parked, without warning).

Parking Attendant’s illegally parked whilst ticketing cars during the Ashes at Edgbaston from Podnosh on Vimeo.

Fascinating lesson from Cindy Gallop on how the internet changes our real world and the “pornification of culture”.  (have I just got this site blocked form every local government web service?)

“The single biggest impact technology is having on our most fundamental human activity, our sexuality”

Also includes a big challenge to understand social media around pornography.  Hat tip various on twitter.

See www.makelovenotporn.com

See also www.textsfromlastnight.com

Titus Dawo

I’m with Titus Dawo at the Balsall heath Social Media Surgery.  All I’m doing here is giving him and idea of how simple it can be to publish to the web.