In this video, I visit Kerry Thomas and Dave at Fused Magazine.
We talk about the past history and success achieved, and Kerry gives us an insight into what the future holds, both for them, and also for print-based media, and the creative industries in Birmingham.
Anonymity- we can all use the safety cushion that technology and the internet provides us with if we so choose. Ample opportunities abound on many fora to simply register some meaningless email address, sign-up with a bogus identity, load bullets of text onto an open platform as a troll, and then watch your enemies fire warning shots across your bow or score direct hits on target.
My personal opinion about this practice is one predominantly of cowardice by the anonymous user.
Of course there are exceptions in extreme cases, where freedom of speech invokes a fatwa, or daring to express one’s opinions leads to disciplinary action from one’s employer, but in the western culture (with the exception of inciting racial hatred or contravening the UK Terrorism Act 2006 by disseminating terrorist publications) generally the freedom to express one’s views and opinions in public, whether that be written or spoken, is a human right and forms part of standard daily discourse.
This however does not remove the ‘fear factor’ when dealing with subject matter that is known to be opposed by colleagues, evoking argument with those that hold opposing views. Conflict is never easy to manage or engage with in any circumstance, but imagine this situation: the stage is yours, the podium is your battleground and you have an audience that have attended specifically to hear your speech. But, on the stage alongside you are the representatives of the very organisations you are about to criticise. Then, add into the mix the subject matter you are about to discuss is the Catholic faith itself, globally the second largest religious practice.
Homophobia, contraception, child abuse. The content is sensitive material. The approach is one entirely of attack and criticism, born from issues that directly oppose the speakers views, simply because they affect the very essence of his daily life. The motion under consideration is “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world”
The presentation style is helped greatly by the fact that the speaker is a respected celebrity, an educated man, an eloquent speaker. The words spoken use passion as a weapon, and personal experience as a shield.
So, it’s 3.19am, I’ve just saved 3000 words as a draft, and I spot a tweet from Hannah: “A watched Posterous never autoposts.”
So, now I’m stuck for creativity and inspiration, it’s time for some fresh air.
The heavens have gently, silently delivered another 2 inches of beautiful virgin snow outside. “Ah what the hell, it won’t hurt” thinks I. So, with my iphone in hand, out I go to the garden, and grab this:
Snow Tree
So, now inspired (and cold), I search for “snow, trees and video” on Google, and it comes up with this:
Inspiration and platform found in one go. Thank you Ommwriter- you look delightful…tomorrow I’ll have a play.
Now it’s time for a quick Balvenie- hell I’m going to go get all natural with it- usually I’d add a little water, but there’s snow outside, and it’s wonderful.
This time I’ll put a coat on, and add a small scoop of snow into the glass.
Who says I don’t think about the environment.
Filmed in early December 2009, I manage to catch up with Clare at home, immediately before a performance with Notorious Choir in Birmingham city centre, and straight off the back of a trip to India.
I ask about what drives her, where her passion comes from, and what sort of things in her work make her happy with what she achieves.
Featuring exclusive rehearsal footage, we see a short insight behind Clare’s daily life…
Some of the photographs within the above video were kindly supplied by Andrew Dubber and Jez Collins. You can find more about their India project at http://dubberandjez.posterous.com/, part of the Un-Convention series
Following a recent presentation I gave to BCU lecturers last week, the question of “What is Gov 2.0?” was raised, and by pulling aggregated information from various sources, I set about explaining. Then on Thursday, I gave a short presentation to the Solihull’s Councillors that are kicking around ideas based on developing their own social media strategies to help them engage further with their constituencies (well done to them all for embracing this idea- it’s good to see them all having a go, supported by local volunteers of course).
Drawing from Pete Ashton’s blog post, explaining his interpretation of “What is Web 2.0?” – “… is about online services talking to each other using standardised data. The reason Flickr is a Web 2.0 service isn’t because it hosts people’s photos. It’s because you can take photos of your city, mix them with Wikipedia pages about your city, add in some Twitter messages from your city and plot them on a Google Map of your city. Automatically. That’s Web 2.0.”
Today, Dominic Campbell posted this link, to a video compiled by O’Reilly Media, and hopefully this offers a few more interpretations, to help you draw your own opinions:
The adoption of Gov 2.0 and Web 2.0 practices are going to continue to grow and develop here, and I dare say that some key points will be used as carefully selected election campaign principles over the coming 12 months by all parties.
There’s certainly a lot of movement in this area happening right now, and it will be interesting for me to see how this all turns out in the long run.
Here’s Tim Berners-Lee’s recent interview, purely for a little background info.
UPDATE (7th December 2009)- Peter Alexander has posted some developments today; “Here is the draft Government 2.0 Taskforce report Engage: Getting on with Government 2.0. The Taskforce is seeking your comments and input before finalising the report to go to Government.” http://gov2.net.au/blog/2009/12/07/draftreport/
Publisher, agent, social entrepreneur, company director, serious networker and a busy busy busy lady.
Justice tells me what sort of things really drive her forward, and how she feels about the current plans and programmes that are offered to young entrepreneurs like her, and the people she works with.
A few home truths within, this comes straight from the heart- deliberately unedited.
Echoing the words of Dermot Finch, Justice doesn’t sit on the fence here- “Birmingham doesn’t sing enough” “Give Back” “Get Creative” “Take Risks” “Less talk- More action” … you’ll see what she means just by clicking the Play button.
Walk into a bank or go see a business adviser, ask them for support, tell them that your business plan involves being a pirate, and I wonder what their reaction will be. Perhaps you will be welcomed as a ruthless profit-hungry captain of industry, or maybe your costume will lead to security guards removing you from the premises.
Marxist and Hippy “lets all share stuff and be creative friends” working practices may work well on communes, where there is no money exchanged, and vegetables flourish. This principal may work well for deploying a successful social media strategy, but the focus of the recent “Big Debate” event was about financial gain for the UK, not how well Birmingham can pat itself on the back and chat amongst each other. The strap line brief behind the event (hosted by Birmingham City University and supported by the Birmingham Post) was “Can the Midlands’ creative industries revolutionise the UK economy?”
Familiar faces from the digital industries attended, and an audience research exercise was completed during the day by the university. Charles Leadbeater gave a speech at the start of the day that seemed to inspire the attendees, the audio of which you can listen to here:
Interestingly, Mr. Leadbeater’s book, We Think, employed a wiki style writing and development process, involving 257 contributors, none of whom appear to have received any financial gain from their creative input to the book. At first glance, it seems that the financial winners from this have been the book publishers and Mr. Leadbeater himself. The volunteer contributors are perhaps happy with the gratification and knowledge that their creative work has been published and recognised, thus following the context of the book itself, and the wiki philosophy. However, gratification and pride do not put bread on the table, or a roof over one’s head. If We Think were to make significant profits for Mr Leadbeater, it would be an interesting exercise to see what the volunteer contributor’s reactions would be. Is Mr. Leadbeater following a business model based on principles historically employed by Bartholomew Roberts (1)?
At the event, there seemed to be an over-population of local professionals involved with the digital industries in attendance, as was expected. However, there appeared to be a distinct lack of business leaders, strategists, venture capitalists, manufacturers (of physical goods as opposed to online publishers and designers) and representatives from the Chamber of Commerce and the financial sector. This in itself was a significant realisation for me. Yet again, the focus appeared to be inwards; one of internal self congratulation and mutual support, as opposed to external market dominance and global sales success.
Revolutionise – a strong word indeed. The word revolution brings me thoughts of complete change, an extreme opposite direction, led by a strong figurehead, and ruthless practices, employing winning tactics where power is seized and used for maximum gain. This is what a pirate was throughout history- not some sort of cavalier, romantic character from a Hollywood block buster movie.
The historical success of a pirate involved entrepreneurial planning, direction, navigation, stealth, and above all, strong leadership that employed the ruthless practices of plunder, murder, theft and total destruction of the opposition. This was competition at its most extreme, where survival of the fittest was the ultimate goal. Pirates did not need a design committee, steering or focus group.
Translate this into business practice, and appear alongside a competitor with the fluffy communal sharing values as described above, deploy your cutlass, and victory will be yours.
Business is not a meal around a table where everybody makes a nice dish and shares amongst friends. It is a battle for market share and dominance- where shareholders are king, demanding more bounty for further greed and expansion, and failure to deliver the treasure leads to someone walking the plank, for sure.
Business success directly translates to profit. To achieve this, good case studies (of which there are many), have proven that planning and focus on the task in hand are of paramount importance. This means that a business model follows good leadership that is supported by a strong financial model for profit and gain. This does not involve a creative process- it is a simple rule of good business practice. Whatever creative process is involved in developing the product, there comes a time when profit must be gained to ensure continued sustainability and growth. This means manufacturing a product for one price, and selling this for a profit- a simple, straightforward and proven strategy. To deliver profit requires successful planning, definition, leadership and direction, not a creative experiment. The product can be developed via a creative process, but there comes a time in any business that the focus must switch to the importance of actually making profit.
“Can the Midlands’ creative industries revolutionise the UK economy?” If the Midlands continue to deploy the values discussed at The Big Debate, the real pirates will win the battle for sure.
To contact your nearest business-focused pirate, their headquarters are not located at a dock at the Gas Street Basin. To find them, I suggest you head to London. Some have already set sail.
(1) Charles Johnson (1724), A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, p. 250.
Image supplied under the Creative Commons License. Photographer: Florian Prischl , available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details.
Following the recent issues highlighting and discussing digital inclusion into events for disabled people, I’m really keen to find out why (in Birmingham at least), that there seems to be a very large portion of event audiences that are predominantly white.
Why do we not see more physical attendance at events from the BME communities that make up our diverse city?
Hosted at Fazeley Studios, and organised by Digital Birmingham and Birmingham City University as part of the http://www.creativemetropoles.eu programme- this video is the Panel Q&A Sessions that came after the formal presentations.
Taking part are: Dave Harte (Birmingham City University), Chris Price (Digital Birmingham),
Hardy Rudolf Schmitz (Berlin Wista Management), Dr Steve Harding (Birmingham City University) and Chris Pinchen from Citilab
2PM
So, it’s Friday afternoon, and as part of my social media MA course at BCU (now in day 2), the group have enjoyed a networking, idea development and ‘meet the local folk’ session over at the Birmingham Social Media Cafe. The coffee was all paid for by Birmingham City University, so thank you to them all for that. Some more good people were met, and contacts details were exchanged.
Now though, we’ve journeyed across Birmingham to Moseley, and I’m writing this from inside the Moseley Exchange
Why Moseley Exchange you may ask…… well, it’s all because of the new Birmingham City Council website- http://www.birmingham.gov.uk , which at the time of writing is completely borked (sorry, technical term for broken, not working, unavailable).
The figure of £2.8million has reportedly been spent to build the official BCC website, which by anyone’s standards is a simply staggering figure of money for a website (even if it does include hosting and staff training etc).
This story originally started with a question raised on Help Me Investigate, where the progress and cost were brought under public scrutiny. The investigation kicked off, and following a Freedom of Information request, some rather awkward and embarrassing questions were reluctantly answered by those holding positions in ‘officialdom’. The new official website launched on September 7th, and later that night, Twitter came alight with local (to Birmingham) users expressing various criticisms, observations and highlights of failures in the website’s functionality. News soon spread nationally and internationally within minutes- such is the power of Birmingham’s social media networks.
Speaking of Help Me Investigate- a delivery of 10/12 pizzas has just arrived, sorted by Paul Bradshaw and all paid for by the HMI team. Thank you folks- a great idea to keep this army of volunteers marching on They don’t last long!
Later that week, I attended the 4iP event, Recasting the Net. Councillor Paul Tilsley was on the panel, and in addition to some mighty fine presentations, it proved to be a rather revealing session, with some excellent and probing questions giving answers of variable depth, detail and information.
Here’s the video I recorded at the event- please forgive the quality- bandwidth was non-existent at the venue. Thank you to Aquila TV for hosting this for me.
Then, on September 22nd, @stef headed in a new direction- he had an idea to pull together a more usable, relevant and open website, at a much reduced cost, developed using Web 2.0 tools and techniques. Not intended to compete with, but more to compliment the original, here’s the brief for the plan and Stef composed his own thoughts on how the new idea (called http://bccdiy.com ) could take shape.
Earlier today, I had put in a telephone call to Paul Tilsley’s office, inviting him to come over to Moseley Exchange. His (very helpful) PA said she would pass on the message, and if he could make some time available, he would drop in to see everybody, and join in the activity taking place. This was good news I thought- a real opportunity for Birmingham’s community to link in with Birmingham’s leaders, and I was encouraged to hear that the idea had been embraced with a positive attitude, and not one of immediate rejection (as I wrongly suspected may be the case). Then a colleague (who must remain nameless) told me that Cllr Tilsley would not be able to attend, but Glyn Evans would possibly put an appearance in on behalf of BCC. This was encouraging news, and I had high hopes that something really positive was about to happen.
So, here at Moseley Exchange (a fabulous community facility & co-working space by the way, brand new) there’s a gang of about 25 local people, many of whom have experience in writing content, image generation, design, script, writing code, blogging, tweeting- just about anything to do with web 2.0 in fact. Plus, some of the students on the BCU MA Social Media and Online Journalism courses have made the journey also.
Now, I’m not professing to be any sort of skilled cameraman, and I don’t have any video editing software either. Jon Bounds was a star as ever, and he transferred the material from the camera onto my memory stick for me (thanks JB), so what you are about to view is completely raw material, which is kind of in the spirit of the #bccdiy project too, so here goes …
I pulled my video camera out of my bag, and started recording on our way into the venue- after a quick chat with Rob Adams and Lex, I arrived just in time for Stef to give us an introduction to the project idea. Here’s part 1:
3PM
So, then it was down to work for everyone. Ideas were swapped and the real work started. I was set the task of finding out information about when domestic refuse bins were collected, on what day in what area. I followed links on the official website (none of which worked), and ended up making a telephone call to the central department, who were very helpful, but unable to provide any immediate information about the collection services I wanted. They were able to tell me what day collections were for a specific one-off postcode based on a data entry on their internal system, but could not provide any overall info about the entire service delivery. I suppose that this is kind of okay for an individual who is looking for info relevant to his/her home, but you still need to make a call to get the most basic of questions answered. What I was trying to achieve was simply type in your postcode, and click to see the appointed day- simple, no? Apparently not it seems. There is no database that exists, each search requires manual entry by a BCC telephone operator onto their system, and all of this costs both time and money- something that could be much better spent in other areas.
Also, to get the information to build the database, it would involve a physical visit to all 4 depots, copying the route maps run by the transport managers and the diary system run in tandem.
All in all, a lengthy operation, which would involve much red tape and negotiation, permissions, negotiations, telephone calls, and at least 5 meetings in total.
So what’s the answer to getting the information then? Social Media of course. How?
Crowdsourcing. Simple.
One tweet to all followers, re-tweeted across the many networks working on the project, asking the simple question: “Tell us what day your bins are collected, and your full postcode please.”
Within 2 hours, we had collected the relevant information from over 200 postcodes, fed them into a user-generated database, and made it a searchable function on the bccdiy website. The answers are still coming in, and the database is growing. All in all, it’s only taking a couple of hours to collate the information, no meetings, telephone calls or negotiations involved in the process at all.
This is just one example of a good use of social media for common good… there’s plenty more examples that have come out of today, all of which have influenced the shape of the website.
Function Before Form- a simple matter of getting the website to work before designing how it looks.
Well done team- a cracking job so far.
4PM
The centre carries on being busy, with more people coming in for a few hours, dedicating some time to coding and shaping the website, having coffee, chats and discussions as it all grows.
My task now moves on to trying a new approach to generate some funds to keep the server running.
Right now, we are thinking of using the itagg system to bring in micropayments to pay for the server costs that provide hosting of bccdiy. Think of an automated sms/text service that reminds you to put your bins out, vote, pay your council tax, when to move your car so the streetsweeping truck can clean etc- a quick acceptable reminder service, at minimal cost to you, but lots of them mounting up to keep the server running. I’m sure you get the picture.
Time for a breath of fresh air- Stef calls us all outside for a break and chat about progress updates, and plans for things that need putting right, models taking shape, and what contributions the remote-working army of volunteers are doing behind the scenes.
Here’s video part 2. Before the team chat, I go grab a short interview with a local chap outsid the bar next door, just to get his views on what he would find useful, and the sort of information he would want from a council website. Interestingly, he raises an issue about connectivity and access, which directly points the debate to Reboot Britain and the Digital Britain report- but that’s another discussion for another time…
6PM
Such a lot has happened, so many people have dropped in and contributed “stuff”- we’ve even had cakes delivered (thanks Emily).
The online activity has been frantic now that people have finished their proper day jobs- lots of photos have been uploaded remotely, and folks are editing pages from home or offices after work, uploading and editing the wiki, twitter has gone wild with the #bccdiy pushing updates through at by-the-minute intervals. The effort going into this project is truly staggering to see- so much information, design, coding, and general good wishes, some of which is now being picked up by regional, national and international bloggers.
I’m now going to shoot off to collect my son.
On the bus into Brum to grab a train, I manage to grab a quick Audioboo with @alncl who has made the journey from Newcastle upon Tyne. He’s contributing and learning at the same time, but I’ll let him explain it in the boo:
7PM
Now I’m back in Moseley. There are more people that have arrived, there’s a lot of faces I can’t put names to. Looks like @cybrum has been busy- the letters on my laptop keyboard have all been worn away! I return to find @catnip getting into the creative writing and copy for the bccdiy homepage. Stef is busy writing code for embedded links to work, and @citizensheep and @djsoup are pulling together the homepage functions whilst @catnip tries to keep up without setting her fingers on fire!
There’s bound to be lots and lots of people that have contributed that I have not mentioned, and that’s completely my fault entirely, and something I can only sincerely apologise for. Twitter went crazy towards the closing stages, and I was struggling to keep tabs on the work tasks people were performing, especially as time moved towards our 8pm deadline.
7.55PM
Time’s up.
Everybody is totally cooked, having done a tremendous amount of work in such a short number of hours. Eyes are starting to hurt from screen glare, the cakes and coffee have all gone, so before we all head off, Stef pulls us all together on the comfy sofas for a quick summary and round up of the day, and to briefly discuss work to be completed after the weekend.
However, without wishing to be critical or negative about BCC officials, I really do wish that at least one representative could have come down to Moseley, if for nothing else than to meet the people involved, and just try to understand the work that is happening here. Then, maybe, just maybe, a level of understanding could have been gained, simply to show that what everyone is trying to do is just build something usable for the local community, a facility that compliments, not competes with, or works against the official website. Hopefully this physical and technical link/engagement process will come a little later once the minor bugs have been fixed and the red tape and bureaucracy can be put to one side (crosses fingers).
Time to go to the pub. Thanks for reading/watching.
I have to say a huge CONGRATULATIONS to absolutely everyone that took part in this #bccdiy hack day.
You have all been total stars.
Somehow, I think this is just the start…
Oh, and just in case you’ve read though all this, and missed the link, it is: http://bccdiy.com/
