Podnosh

David Wilcox has pulled together the elements of an impassioned and public spat about a Demos Report called The Dreaming City and the Power of Mass Imagination on the future of Glasgow. It has ideas relevant to any major UK City, especially Birmingham. You can get a taste of an early response from Demos here, but one of the key quotes mentioned by David is from Melissa Mean of Demos, who wrote the Glasgow report.

In terms of new ideas to sustain the urban renaissance, our cities are running on empty. The cultural arms race of mainstream regeneration policy has become formulaic and is delivering diminishing returns for people and places. When every city has commissioned a celebrity architect and pedestrianised a cultural quarter, our cities are at risk of all becoming the same.

Ouch. The spat aside, what the report is saying is that we need a series of institutional hacks:

…the Glasgow experience hints at widening gaps between the needs of cities, their people and the kinds of local action governments at different levels are configured for. The problem is deeper than city hall lacking the right technical fix; instead there is a more profound loss in the vitality of urban imagination about the kind of shared futures we want in our cities. Richard Sennett sets out
the problem:

‘ Something has gone wrong, radically wrong, in our conception of what a city itself should be. We need to imagine just what a clean, safe, efficient, dynamic, stimulating, just city would look like concretely — we need those images to confront critically our masters with what they should be doing — and just this critical imagination of the city is weak.’

In it’s conclusion the report continues with:

In 1942 the great social economist Beveridge identifiedfive evils for society to conquer: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness, and with them laid the groundwork for the birth of the welfare state. More than 60 years on the people of Glasgow identify their own giants they wish to see the end of, which reflect something of Beveridge’s spirit: poverty, bad housing, inequality, poor health, poor education and unemployment.

The report suggests six new giants:

1 Cosmopolitanism

2 Mental Aptitude

3 Civic pride

4 Crime & Safety

5 Grime

6 Eco-Logic

Most of these fit somewhere in every cities’ strategic plan with the exception of mental aptitude, which may of course be the biggest barrier for imagining a great future for our great cities.

For more have a rootle around these:

Glasgow 2020 – project site including project overview, stories, events image gallery, del.icio.us bookmarks,
The Dreaming City – download of the report
Glasgow2020 video – stories from hairdressers
Running on empty – Melissa Mean in the Guardian
‘Formulaic’ regeneration projects failing to improve quality of city life, argues Demos – press release
Think-tank attacks city’s rebirth – BBC news online
Row breaks out over think tank’s 2020 vision of Glasgow – Glasgow Herald
A dear green place divided by the benefits of regeneration – The Scotsman article
Glasgow 2020: tale of seven cities – Glasgow Herald article
Glasgow is not short of ‘mass imagination’ – letter in The Herald
When dreams cross over into the real of fantasy – Glasgow Herald article
Can we really soup up our city with acronyms, jargon and gobbledygook? Probably not – Sunday Herald article

See also Scottish Roundup  and  John Connell for Scottish blogs linking to this post.
technorati tags: demos city cities regeneration imagination

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Less than 4 weeks ago I was sitting in the Birmingham office of Oxfam talking to them about how they might use podcasting and blogs etc to drive their part of the your voice against poverty campaign. With apparently little experience, but intelligence, energy enthusiam and passion they’ve already produced this blog and the first podcasts of the one hundred brummies who want their voices against poverty heard. Amongst them is the endorsement of BRMB voice Tammy Gooding:

I think one of the greatest things about us Brits is our conscience. We’re a charitible nation and when the chips are down, it’s the UK that tends to dive in with a big heart.

Well I know Brummies have a reputation of not being afraid to speak their minds so I’m really pleased to be joining in with so many of you to speak out against poverty. I was approached to lend my voice to a cause, I simply couldn’t say no.

They’re now crashing towards a deadline of June 2nd for the World Can’t Wait Rally in London prior to the G8 in Germany next month. These voices want the G8 to honour their commitments on debt relief – although Oxfam also has a second message on funding carbon neutral development.

What does this prove about non-profit organisations, campaigning and new technology? For me it’s the old truth that the technology is not the point – it’s the desire to change things which makes the possible do-able.

By the way if you like this Oxbrum campaign please vote for it on upyerbrum – Birmingham’s local Digg for the things which make the city great.

technorati tags: makepoveryhistory g8

This is our second podcast from Change in Progress, a gathering of UK based neighbourhood activists in Birmingham. This time Adam Askew from Oxfam UK tells us about the ten steps which can help you improve your public speaking, get your message across and manage those nerves.

If you’re looking for other tips which may help you campaign in your neighbourhood then you might like to listen to this earlier podcast on the mysterious art of lobbying politicians and the powerful.

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Hat Tip

Yep – that’s right.

According to boing boing, four films on Youtube have been watched by 1 in 9 Croatians and an argument over who put them up has plunged their government into crisis.

Active citizens do it all the time, but what does it take to lobby effectively? This programme hears from two people about their experience of lobbying politicians and councillors. David Babbs works for Friends of the Earth and belongs to their group in Hackney. Georgie Bigg lobbys as part of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England – expecially in their efforts to resist the expansion of Bristol Airport.

Please scroll down to listen first. Here is a list of their most important tips in the order they emerged in the conversation:

1 Understand who has what power. Lobby the people who can make a difference and aks them to do things they have the power to do.

2 Find out what people think. The first step of lobbying is to ask those in power what their position is. They may already agree with you.

3 Work out what’s in it for them. What incentive might they have to help you? Do they have a personal passion which may be relevant?

4 People in power don’t always appreciate where public opinion is. If you believe the public is forging ahead of those in power tell them so, and most importantly prove it, perhaps with a petition?

5 Know what you want to achieve. This should probably be number one on the list. Be clear about what change you want to see before you meet someone. Stay focussed on that in the meeting.

6 Facts are critical. They persuade. Politicians are usually generalists so provide them with the information and ammunition to be experts in your subject. If you win their support show them how to act – give them the tools to be on your side and make your case.

7 Link the lobbying to a wider public campaign.

8 Don’t get angry – use the right tone of voice.

9 Try and get any commitments make in public – either in the press, at a public meeting, perhaps in parliament or on the minutes of a council meeting.

10 Be human – they are (I added that one – you may not agree!).

Lobbying and the blogosphere, some slightly random links:

Legitimate Lobbying,  Bulletinthehead, Richard Edelman, PR Speak, Ray Collins, Digital Destiny, Paul Linford, PRWatch,
David Maister.

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Moseleyblogger needs to understand what this list is about. My thoughts: some burk has accidently printed out the tag cloud from the MI5 intranet and this is the list of greatest threats to B13. Someone should tell them that Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are dead.

technorati tags: moseley b13 upyerbrum MI5

“Institutional Hack” is a delicious, contradictory new phrase for me. Paul Miller (of the School of Everything and from time to the think tank Demos) used it earlier today in this post on his personal blog.

At first you might think an Institutional Hack is one of those cynical folk, the type who’s skill, energy and expertise is focussed on working the politics of their organisation principally for personal gain.Not so. Paul’s idea is the opposite.

His “institutional hack” is the the bold, adventurous action which can cut through the atrophied arteries of organisation. Paul uses it to praise a group of people who have invented just such a hack for the key issue of how government innovates.

The Open Innovation Exchange is a loose coalition of organsiations and individuals who got together to bid for a £1.2 million pound government contract. Their innovation has been to eschew conventional commercial wisdom and collaborate online and in public to write their bid. (Just think about that for a moment!)
Yes that’s right, their competitiors could watch what they were doing. Their competitiors could take their best ideas and use them themselves.

The genius of the approach is that everyone and anyone is welcome to contribute, in this case drawing ideas and input from hundreds of minds, a refreshing and energising alternative to the more normal bid written behind closed doors. It all happens in the open, so credit is clear and credit is shared, hopefully generating a virtuos cycle of generosity with knowledge and ideas. If they win the collaboration goes many steps further. The bid says that one of the first things they’ll do is talk to their competitiors.

I’ve written about this elsewhere, exploring whether this is a New Model or New Madness (the link also takes you to a short audio interview with one of the team).

But here I simply want to come back to Paul Miller’s notion and ask you how could your aims benefit from the spirit of the “institutional hack”?
This was first posted here.  Thanks for the reference.
technorati tags: institutionalhack

Cllr Zoe Hopkins is urging us to stand up for Birmingham in a national competition.  Robin Pye who works in her Kingstanding ward has been shortlisted for the Council Worker of the Year Awards. You can watch Robin here and to find out how to vote for him please go here.

Scroll down and you can listen to David Wilcox talking about what I suspect is a unique experiment in producing an online open source collaborative tender for the £1.2 million Cabinet Office programme to create an Innovation Exchange for the Voluntary Sector. David explains the process with relevant links here , and you can see where the online collaboration took place through this link. The picture (find it here) is of Simon Berry of Ruralnet UK delivering the bid documents last week. The smile says a lot.

So what’s it all about? The Third Sector Minister Ed Miliband was looking for “a partner to deliver a new £1.2m Innovation Exchange – a programme to support the third sector’s capacity to innovate. The Innovation Exchange programme aims to provide third sector innovators with access to the people and potential capital they need to make their ideas a reality”

In short share knowledge to improve the way the sector delivers public services.

As David explains in the interview he and others wondered why such a bid couldn’t be created collaboratively and in public. As he says, their consortium thought about playing some cards (their best cards) close to their chest, then chose to go the whole hog. Everything they were proposing could be seen, and evolved in public. So what can we make of this:

New Madness?:

Clearly competitors know what you’re proposing and can nick the best ideas and neutralise or undermine others. The collaborators though placed copyright restrictions. Anything lifted from the bid had to be credited. If it was then developed and evolved competitors were asked to put that back onto the site. Naieve? Perhaps, we’ll know eventually.
Who does the government deal with? A shifting collaborative process has many stakeholders, but ultimately the people handing out the money will want to know who’s head is on the block – who is resonsible for delivering. hat may give and internally generated single organisation a stornger hand.

After that though I’m struggling with the problem of madess because for me it is a really a
New Model:

Closed doors, closed minds. Cards to the chest bidding can lead to bidders being blind to the best ideas. The open source tender had at least 500 minds involved.
Planning and delivery are different.… Often the people who will have to deliver are not involved in the bid. Someone comes along to them afterwards and says we thought you could do this for this much money. The open process could solve many of those problems earlier.
It raises everyones’ game. With an open source bid in the frame all the competitiors have find ways of beating that bid in terms of ideas and value for money. that can be good news for the public.
It builds flexibility into delivery. By collaborating openly at all stages it should be much easier to innovate along the life of the contract. It also creates transparency in delivering, which should make it easier for full feedback whilst the contract is delivered.
The winner can still involve the losers. As david says, if their bid wins one of the first things they’ll do is talk to the losers. likewise if another bid wins it may make sense for them to approach the consorium for input.
You never know where the ideas will come from. Online collaboaration improves the chances of bright new notions coming form unexpected places.
It challenges old ways of working - which with government can often be a great thing.
Losing is a good thing – well not really, but if an open source bid fails a much wider range of people have learnt from the process and learnt from the failure.

So all of this is why I’ve nominated this project for the Modernising Government category of the New Statesman New Media awards. Anything which brings more minds and more doers to the business of solving public problems is good in my book.

The bid partners are

RNUK Ltd, Delib Ltd, nfp 2.0, Partnerships Online, UnLtd and Warwick Business School. Contributors included Policy Unplugged, Sheffield Hallam University, National Rural Exchange, Common Purpose, Team Rubber, Work Empowerment Foundation, Unique Social Enterprise, Matrix Research & Consultancy, Switch On Shropshire, Local Level and others.