Podnosh

These are my links for March 29th through March 31st:

• The fundamental media bias | The Democratic Society – " “narrative bias” – the fact that newspapers favour reportage that create narratives over stories that are factual. The strong narrative line is that we’re in a uniformly disastrous situation, and the PM, or Obama, or whoever, can personally shift the global economy for good or ill. The weak narrative line – as ever – is that it’s very complicated and hard to read the signs "
• The power of serendipitous findability and the end of bullshit – "Why am I more optimistic now than at any time in my life? Because I think we’ve never had such good small-group making tools or such good information-connecting tools. We’re developing a global social nervous system. As a result, I think bull-shit is in trouble.
  And it’s all because of serendipitous findability—the odds that you will fortuitously connect with someone you don’t know but share an interest with, or the odds that you will learn something timely or surprising or valuable to you."
• Matt Lock Commissioning for Attention Part 1 – Read Me! « TEST – "‘commissioning for attention’, a phrase I’ve been using for a while to describe what I do at Channel 4 Education. I hate phrases like ‘360 content’ or ‘multiplatform’, as these encourage people to get hung up on technology or to have a box-ticking mentality to where ideas can exist, rather than really focusing on users and understanding what they’re doing."
• Wirearchy · Hierarchy is a Prosthesis for Trust … – Just to quite: :We are increasingly using attraction and negotiation to arrive at what needs doing, by whom, for when and with what. Many (but certainly not all) areas of economic and societal activity still operate with traditional hierarchy, and more and more often the trust it offered or symbolised is being betrayed in order to serve the interests of those who hold the power. History suggests that 1) it has ever been thus, but / and that 2) when practiced to excess, dire consequences eventuate."
• Ten Tips For Creating a 21st–Century Classroom Experience – Tessy Britton writes about David Barrie's ideas on what would create a great classroom experience, including:

  "2. Create from relevance. Engage kids in ways that have relevance to them, and you’ll capture their attention and imagination. Allow them to experience the concepts you’re teaching firsthand, and then discuss them (or, better yet, work to address them!) instead of relying on explanation alone.
  3. Stop calling them “soft” skills. Talents such as creativity, collaboration, communication, empathy, and adaptability are not just nice to have; they’re the core capabilities of a 21st-century global economy facing complex challenges.""

  Great read

I’ve been asked by MADE to write 200 words for the Birmingham Post. They’re gauging opinion before the Technical and Environmental  Mayor of Copenhagen speaks in Birmingham next week. Klaus Bondam will be at Town Hall on April 6th to share with us how he expects Copenhagen to stays a wonderful place to live.

I was asked about an hour ago and the deadline is tonight.  Here’s a bashed out draft of what I fancy saying. Please encourage, discourage amend etc in the comments. Does anyone have details of that survey that put us the 2nd best place for social media behind, is it Chicago?

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Is this a good place to talk?  It’s not a question we often ask about cities.  After all the whole point of a city is that we can connect, trade and work.  Non of that happens without talk, does it? No it doesn’t, and neither does innovation.

Conversation is about scale, it happens where it’s easy for people to gather in small groups.  The ICC is evidence that we know about audience on a grand scale, but how well do we do small scale gathering?

We need many places where we can meet, deliberately or by accident.  That means a city which is easy to walking but above all has many interesting and modestly scaled places that people want to go.   It means a tolerance of other’s ideas and interests, a city where people also like to listen.

These are partly planning issues and partly cultural issues. How good are our public services at setting the example and being interested in us, how good our our planners and designers at encouraging the interesting?

And of course we don’t just want to talk to ourselves. Birmingham needs take part in a global conversation.  So our schools need open access to the internet and our school teachers and pupils helped to have the confidence to take part in sharing and developing ideas with people across the planet.

Oh and Birmingham doesn’t have free internet access in the city centre, whatever our PR folk may so. So Birmingham Fizz needs to be turned of or turned into a proper free wifi service, so we can finally start hearing each other speak.

—

Well?

These are my links for March 28th and March 29th:

• Living with rats: Why communty activists are angry. – Julian Dobson: “communities aren’t built and nourished on information, useful as it is. They’re built on relationships – forged by people who have found common cause, who’ve had arguments and battles, who have learned to celebrate success together. People who are focused on the next policy objective or yesterday’s ministerial demand don’t have the time or the energy to build such relationships, even if they want to.”
• Audiences central add a social media module for their customers. – One of the organisations I’ve worked with over the last few months gets it’s head down to share their knowledge of social media with arts orgs in the West Midlands.  Abby Corfan includes one example: ” Birmingham Contemporary Music Group have been busy capturing audience reactions to their recent concert, and have created their first video broadcast. This was done very simply (and cheaply) using the video setting on a digital stills camera- tv on a shoestring! You can keep up to date with BCMG’s latest news on twitter @BCMG”
• Nicky Getgood on Where is the Whitby Bus? – Where is the Whitby Bus? A game for Brum Twitter crowd concoted on the pub after last week’s social media surgery for voluntary groups. Nickys says: “In his response to the Big City Plan bus-thieving debacle, Clive Dutton said, ‘I really do hope we can move forward beyond this unfortunate experience’. Can we heck, where’s the fun in that? So if you’re on Twitter hop aboard and play Simon Howes’ ‘Where is Whitby’s bus?’ game. If you can make it stop in Highgate you’re already doing better than the council.”

What can you say!

58% of Aussies take part, southern hemisphere starts early.

The cautionary tale of how not to use twitter to tell folk you don’t like the job you’ve just been offered.  “Use your brains. The internet is a very public place. More so even than the water cooler. Exercise the same common sense and decorum you would in “real life” social situations.”

Participo on the home energy monitoring software Googlewatt: “Ambient data management, and visualisation at a personal level, along with the massive aggregation of zillions of households, plays right into Google’s core strengths…a lot like the really interesting Google Flu Tracking initiative that uses their search data to detect trends in search terms that predict early outbreaks.

The NHS has had the wisdom to spend some money with google for the search term Jade Goody – it point people to the site which encourages take of of the jab which can protect against cervical cancer.
Tessy at Thriving Too has this quick post about a whole resource of tools for what she calls purposeful play:   “An amazing resource for learning through games has been created by James Neill. Neill is a lecturer at the Centre for Applied Psychology at the University of Canberra (Australia). His highly valuable collection of Games and Activities is one of the very best I have seen.”

Flashswap was a huge success, with loads of professional and hobby photographers swapping prints to support the campaign for a Birmingham Photospace.

Screen West Midlands on it’s first joint funding with 4iP – yoosk.com

Museum 2.0 reviews have 2004 project to get people to find their own content in museums: “Which brings us back to Sweden. In 2004, the firm Smart Studio created a unique flashlight-based interpretative interface for exploration of a historic blast furnace site in the old Swedish steel town of Avesta. The site itself has no interpretative material–no labels or obvious media elements. But each visitor is given a special flashlight, used both to illuminate the space (for general exploration) and to activate interpretative experiences include light projection, sound, and occasional physical experiences (i.e. smoke and heat). There are indicated hotspots in the site which activate interpretative material when the flashlights light on them. Smart Studio launched with two layers of content in the hotspots–educational (how the blast furnace works, explanation of certain elements and history) and poetic (imagistic stories from the perspective of steel workers, based on historical content). Visitors can walk through the blast furnace site and receive none of the interpretative material if they choose, or they can use their flashlights to activate content.”

It’s great to see how Birmingham’s Jubilee Debt Campaign groups has begun to get guest authors for the blog they set up through the social media surgeries.

Sorry it is such short notice. The next social media surgery for voluntary groups is this Wednesday March 25th 2009, as a drop in from 5.30 to 7pm.  We have a plush new venue, which is a few minutes walk from BVSC. For all the details and how to sign up please visit the link below:

http://www.paradisecircus.com/social-media-surgeries/

The surgeries are run by a group of volunteers, mostly from the Birmingham bloggers groups. They are willing to show people from the cities charities and voluntary organisation how they can make best use of social media.   If you want to see what people have made of the first three surgeries you might like to watch this video on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEPbtfdIkVY

I hear-by outlaw the tiresome term social media. ( thanks )

Really good clear suggestions from the World Wide Web Consortium on, amongst other stuff, how some basics need to be put in place to allow the web to really play a part in modernising the way we govern ourselves. You can find the whole report “Improving Access to Government through better us of the Web” at this link.  Here’s an extract:

How Can Participation and Engagement Be Achieved?

Access of Public Servants to Web Sites that Citizens Are Using

Public servants need to be given access to the Web sites that citizens are using in order for them to be able to engage. The “lock-down” culture that exists in many government IT departments often restricts access to the more interactive Web sites for security reasons. This badly hampers the effective engagement with online communities by public servants.

Clear and Simple Rules for Public Servants

Governments need to set clear and simple rules for public servants to follow so they can be confident about engaging online without risking their career.

Training, Support and Cultural Change

There needs to be training and support for public servants in the use of appropriate tools and techniques to use the web to engage, particularly for the development of public policy. Engaging with online communities over the development of public policy will involve significant culture change in government. To achieve it will require clear leadership at senior levels. As the use of the web for engagement is so new in government there are few people with both the practical knowledge and the seniority and experience to provide this leadership.

Allow Comments on Policy Documents

Policy documents need to be presented in formats which allows for comment and discussion in a granular way. Fragments within such documents need to be directly addressable. In consultation documents for example, the relationship between the questions for discussion and the proposals to which those questions refer need to be made explicit. The RDFa [RDFA-PRIMER] based ArgotConsultation [ARGOTC] which was developed for the UK government is an example of the type of technology required for publishing consultation documents in ways that enable engagement.

Interesting to see that even the government recognises that attempts to control copyright infringment on the net may soon turn out to be a waste of time. That’s not going to stop them trying though.

In the new paper (pdf here) on a future Digital Rights Agency, there is a plan to introduce legislation to ensure that Internet Service Providers can and do have folk for peer to peer and free downloads of copyright material.

Our vision is for the legislation proposed and the rights agency to form an
integrated approach to content online, and we need to ensure that taken
together they create an environment where investment in creativity online is
rewarded, and deliver a practical solution to online infringement.  This would
provide a comprehensive framework that helps legitimate and attractive digital
content to flourish while ensuring it is not fatally undermined by people taking
creative products for free and without permission, either through peer-to-peer
file-sharing or other threats that may emerge in the future.

We have set out here a model which allows industry to keep control of how
this environment is created.  This model depends on a strong rights agency
that can and does require specific actions of its members.  We do not wish to
be more prescriptive in legislation – that would not be the best outcome for
anyone – including rights holders.  We recognise that we would run a real risk
of legislating to require specific actions that may turn out in practice to be
ineffective and to address only the short term problems, without the ability to
flex to deal with new situations as they arise.  However, if we are not
convinced that industry is willing or able to deliver an effective rights agency
we will need to think about alternative ways to approach the issue.

On top of that the government has no desire to act as a regulator. Instead those who have most at stake in control will be asked to create the rights agency.

we are inviting industry to come together to create a body that could tackle those parts of this agenda that are for industry to deal with.  In pursuit of that we are happy to work with industry as a convener and a facilitator in this process.

The problem with this approach is that it risks handing too much control of what we do on the internet to large businesses, which will presumably seek to further control us as an audience. That in turn is likely to stifle the open-ess that makes the web a powerful tool for innovation.

I’ve just received an e-mail from Richard Rees at the city council encouraging me to mention the digital challenge which the council is throwing out for anyone who wants to contribute more to the big city plan process. Thanks for prompting me to do this, I meant to write something when the competition launched last month.

The council want you to use video or still photography to express your opinions about the plan.  You can win a flip camera. It’s a great idea and I would encourage you to use any combination of video, still and or audio to show what you want changing in the city centre.  How about a two minute world wind tour of your neighbourhood?

Sadly I can’t enter because the rules appear to prohibit people who are professional image makers from doing so.

If you want to take photos or make a short film then the closing date is April 20th and the rules are here.  If you want to read the big city plan (work in progress)  as the council expresses it please go here, if you would also like to look at a plainer English version please go here.

Some of you may know I took part in creating a plain English translation of the plan for the bigcitytalk site. It was mentioned as an example of the future of consultation (link to mentions of Birmingham) in the Cabinet Office sponsored Power of Information Report:

The original Power of Information report was one of the first to be re-worked and presented on CommentOnThis as an experiment.  CommentOnThis was an early innovator in reworking government consultation documents online so that they can be used more easily.   More recently a team of civic bloggers in Birmingham has translated and re-purposed Birmingham’s ‘Big City Plan’ on the web in Big City Plan Talk.

These technical developments could improve the effectiveness of policy development in consultation, but will require new skills amongst policy makers and communicators.  A plan for supporting the change needed in policy development skills should be developed by Government Skills by end 2009, with a concomitant training plan from the National School for Government.

The big city talk site saw a conversation emerge involving 274 comments.  Not sure how those comments have accounted for in the consultation report itself. The council tells us:

All attributable comments submitted to date have now been processed on our consultation database and are visible to all. As of 4 March, a total of 1,864 comments from a total of 273 contributors have been logged as follows:

Directly into the consultation portal:  719

Via e-mail:  679

Post 409

Other 57

I’m imagining big city talk would best be covered by other? What do you think?