Written on January 30th, 2008 by Nick Booth
Click here for more video and audio from the Grassroots Channel.
Is there a solution to street racing in Birmingham? Masood Ajaib of the Washwood Heath based community enterprise Commpact thinks there is. He has signed up for an experiment to find a communal way of turning a dangerous Saturday night on Landor Street into a peaceful pastime somewhere safe. Listen here for the conversation or watch here for a sense of the problem:
Birmingham Community Safety Partnership
Digbeth Trust
Commpact (link was broken – but expect it to fix itself!)
Click below to listen to the podcast
Click here to download the podcast
Written on January 29th, 2008 by Nick Booth
Congrats to Pete Ashton from Created in Birmingham for winning a beautiful big blogging award from the Media Guardian. CiB is a shared endeavour with Stef and justified a glowing lead story on the BBC Birmingham website which encouraged the beeb to throw out some links to other Birmingham bloggers including this one. Thanks.
Tis of course ironic because the Guardian recently overlooked Pete or any other brum blog in it’s survey of blogging outside the capital.
Written on January 29th, 2008 by Nick Booth
There’s an established link between grime and crime, which is why Kingstanding Neighbourhood Forum is using public money to crack crime one fridge at a time. This podcast and the youtube video you can see here or here explain how the forum has been using £10,000 from an experiment called the Neighbourhood Performance Reward Grant.
Run by the Birmingham Community Safety Partnership and the Digbeth Trust, this pilot has just come to an end. The reward is that meeting targets wil release a further £15,000 grant. Sustainable? Credible? Well listen and see what Les Smith and Rita Griffiths make of six months of the experiment.
Also see what’s happening in Sparkbrook.
Click below to listen to the podcast
Click here to download the podcast
Click below to listen to the podcast
Click here to download the podcast
Click below to listen to the podcast
Click here to download the podcast
Click below to listen to the podcast
Click here to download the podcast
Click below to listen to the podcast
Click here to download the podcast
Click below to listen to the podcast
Click here to download the podcast
Click below to listen to the podcast
Click here to download the podcast
Click below to listen to the podcast
Click here to download the podcast
Written on January 29th, 2008 by Nick Booth
A short film and a podcast, all part of a series of four pieces on an experiment on in Birmingham which is allowing residents a more control over how public money is spent. Here you can see and hear Neville Davis of the Sparkbrook Neighbourhood Forum talk about the pro cons and a huge effort they made to clean up rancid sites in their neighbourhood – all with a £10,000 grant from the Birmingham Community Safety Partnership and it’s Neighbourhood Performance reward Grant.
The reward in all of this is that if residents hit targets with the first £10,000 then a further grant of £15,000 is to hand.
The four-neighbourhood pilot is currently being evaluated bu the Digbeth Trust.
Click below to listen to the podcast
Click here to download the podcast
Written on January 28th, 2008 by Nick Booth
Benjamin Zander, Conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, plays the audience at Davos. The job of leaders, he tells us, is to “awaken possibility in other people”.
Hat tip.
Written on January 26th, 2008 by Nick Booth
Written on January 24th, 2008 by Nick Booth
Tim Davies tells us he’s off to the pub having just finished a substantial revamp of the Hear by Right website. Hear by Right sets out standards and principals designed to help organisations involve young people in what they do and how they do it.
The mapping tool looks promising as a means to encourage collaboration between organisations, although there seems be a bit of a gap where brum sits. It’s great to see Tim so closely involved because he is working methodically and intelligently to explore how social media will improve participation. With the site they aim to:
Create a space to share learning from the many 100s of authorities and organisations using Hear by Right to map and plan for change.
Curate and share some of the best resources to support the participation of young people in decision making Encourage organisations to be more open about the challenges and successes in engaging young people in decision making.
Make clear the neccessary link between participation in decision making and real change for the lives of young people.
Our experience with podcasting as a tool to encourage conversations (and using the microphone as a tool which a lot of people find gives them a bit of extra power and confidence) is that we can relatively easily share skills and engendered huge amount of enthusiasm. However maintaining the momentum is the challenge – it needs to be planned for from the start.
Loads to learn and this site is a great place to start learning.
technorati tags: hearbyright participation youth work vcsmatters
del.icio.us tags: hearbyright participation youth work vcsmatters
Written on January 24th, 2008 by Nick Booth
A cheeky site campaigning against extending the runway at Birmingham Airport
Written on January 24th, 2008 by Nick Booth
This is good. It’s the site created by 3form for Audiences Central as part of a partnership between the BBC in the West Midlands and the Arts Council.
It’s called the Big Picture 2008 and the technical jiggery pokery linking google maps, flickr and the site is dead clever.
So what’s it for? Well on the face it this is an attempt to create the world’s biggest photo montage – to pull together images from across the wider West Midlands to create one huge mash-up of what and where we are as a region. 100,000 pictures and 100,000 record breakers.
“We are painting a picture of a region full of life, humour, vitality and beauty – a really fitting picture of the West Midlands and the people in it.” (Audiences Central blog)
Why would we want to do that? That’s the important question.
The motivation behind this is not simply art work. My understanding is that the “big picture” part of The Big Picture is public involvement in art. Thanks to mobile phones and low cost digital cameras, photography is one of the most accessible forms of permanent art (I’d say singing is more widely accessible and colouring-in is under estimated as an art form).
So the aim is to seduce more of us into creating art and, through prizes and events, experiencing art. That’s partly why the site is also curious about who we are. The people behind it need to find out whether they’ve made an impact.
But the questionnaire that appears as you are using the site has mithered one enthusiast. Simon Hammond posted that “as I work through age, ethnicity and disability status I’m feeling myself shrinking to a data point for someone else’s ends.”
At a time when publicly held data is being liberally scattered around the planet on lost laptops and misplaced disks people are growing impatient with data gathering.
Perhaps it would be wise to use some of the elegant about space to not only say how you can use the site, but to share some of the motivation behind the site. When I know why you want my data, I can make a better decision about what I want to share.
Statement of interests: When reading this you might like to know that at the moment I’m doing some work for Audiences Central and one of the key people behind the project, Jon Bounds, also works closely with me on this site, Upyerbrum and other projects. I’ve also recently worked for the Arts Council in the West Midlands, oh and I used to work for the BBC.
Written on January 20th, 2008 by Nick Booth
A short film introducing the work being done in Kingstanding by residents trying to tackle the connection between crime and grime. It was shot for a residents conference in The Hague at the end of this week. No intended to be comprehensive, more a way of allowing groups from The Hague, Birmingham and Glasgow to get a sense of each other’s neighbourhood, aims and problems. Obviously short films can raise far more questions that they answer, which is good because that encourages conversation.
Kingstanding Neighbourhood Forum has been taking part in Bimringham’s Community Safety Partnerships Neighbourhood Performance Reward Grant. The pilot, with four residents groups, has been run by the Digbeth Trust. Each group gets a £10,000 grant to meet some agreed targets – often to do with rubbish and grafiti. If they hit their targets the group is arewarded with a £15,000 bonus.
More films coming, plus 4 podcasts from Birmingham which give much more detail of the reward grant.
Tags: youtube, kinstanding, nprg, crime+grime, nptech, birminghamuk, upyerbrum, podnosh, den+haag, hague, residents, active+citizens, activists, nptechuk, nptech