For the last few months we’ve supported Birmingham City Council with their Fair Brum social inclusion process. We worked with groups and individuals to show them how they could take conversations they were having with residents of Birmingham about social inclusion over to online places, to try and engage with even more people.
We supported council staff, academics and others interested in using social media to share their stories, experiences and findings of social inclusion in Birmingham. We provided them with the skills that meant they were able to contribute to, or comment on, the process via the FairBrum blog – or on theirownsites – and tweet via their own accounts using the #fairbrum tag. We also helped create content and conversation by social reporting from some of their events.
As of 4th September 2012, we found the #fairbrum tag on Twitter has been used 1,600 times and appeared 1,591,590 times. That’s the gross number of times the #fairbrum tag has appeared in Twitter users’ timelines since the start of the process. (Yes, it’s an enormous number – we know not that many pairs of eyes have clocked it!)
Those numbers continued to rise. When we looked at the figures this morning the tag had been used a total of 2,479 times and appeared 2,170,039 times.
All this interaction, along with the findings of offline interactions, has been looked at to see what Birmingham’s needs are. As a result, a green paper was produced with recommendations on how we can work together across the city to address social inclusion.
They are all available to view, discuss and comment on, online at fairbrum.podnosh.com.
The consultation has been running for a while now. This weekend is the last chance for you to have your say, as the consultation closes on Monday, 5th November.
Follow the links above to view the groups of recommendations and click through to individual posts to add your thoughts. You can also let them know if you work for an organisation already doing what’s being recommended and add yourself to the map.
Birmingham Leadership Foundation hosted a debate asking “what does it mean to be a Brummie?” at their third Monday Masterclass at the end of August in Handsworth. I shared my notes from the debate last month. This video by Punk Zebra gives you a great flavour of the debate and the passion that young people have for the city.
The masterclasses are a mix of inspiring talks from young leaders and entrepreneurs, together with a social media surgery run by Podnosh.
The debate was part of the MyBrum consultation, led by Councillor Waseem Zaffar for Birmingham City Council’s new social cohesion and community safety scrutiny committee.
These are my links for August 4th through August 19th:
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.”
These are my links for February 24th through March 1st:
GSA Dialogue App Demo – "From establishing any kind of web presence at all, through increasing understanding of the nuances of online interaction to pioneering a technological innovation; whether it's a case of expanding the uptake of proven methods or better joining up online activity with the 'real world' process, how can government organisations more effectively connect people with governance and decision-making online? We want your ideas, suggestions and comments – as front-line staff or as citizens."
Telegraph invents comparative degrees of atheism. Dawkins = “athiest” | Online Journalism Blog – "The vitriol is being generated because volunteer moderators who have invested hundreds of hours building an online community, and the members of that community, have had their community summarily yanked from beneath them, and had their means of communicating with each other turned off. "
VentnorBlog Denied Access to Coroner’s Court | Isle of Wight News:Ventnor Blog – We were told by the coroner’s officer, Richard Leedham, that the coroner, John Matthews, didn’t recognise us as a member of the press (despite VB publishing articles for four and a half years and NUJ membership for longer) and he didn’t want us in “his court.”
This, we argue, is the wrong approach as it undermines the ownership and applicability that makes local solutions effective in the first place. Rather than stretching particular solutions, mass localism means supporting mass innovation.
Thoughts on OSM design, and looking forward and back – OpenGeoData – The problem of community at Open Street Map: "Everyone in OSM has basically been contributing for the kinds of extended periods of time as above, not the minutes or hours. Many see someone contributing so little as wrong or pointless. I say just the opposite. The people who spend minutes or hours disappear because we just don't welcome them."
These are my links for December 1st through December 3rd:
Thinking Big – the cabinet office use Bebo to harness ideas. – “In total we received over 12,000 votes across all polls in reply to questions on how to improve schools, concepts of identity and whether Britain ought to have a death penalty.”The polls, in turn, drove young people to want to contribute more on a serious debatable topic. Rather than giving a simple yes or no answer they commented to explain their opinions and provide new ideas. In total the Bebo profile page had 6,798 comments while the Big Think teaser video that was added to the Bebo homepage was viewed 1,592,643 times.
Delib’s Local Authority Audit | Delib Blog – “Here is a general report on our findings with an overview of online consultation pages in local authorities and top tips we have formulated from our research . Individual authorities have been sent their own audits – which we hope will prove useful in finding opportunities to improve their online public consultation and engagement.”
Talk About Local » Government data on the ground, making a difference – The challenge for John Denham’s Department is to get local authority held data published and then stimulate creativity in truly local applications of national and local data sets. There are some simple and cheap ways – a competition with small prizes for good ideas, run a hack day with say the LGA or Dave Briggs.
This week sees the launch of www.birminghambeheard.org.uk – a database of consultations about and from Birmingham.
Typically the consultations stretch back about 3 years and involve the various organisations which form Be Birmingham, the local strategic partnership.
The site itself has been made by an internal team at Birmingham City Council. We were approached to make a a promotional video, which ended up being very practical: a simple to guide to how to start using the site:
You’ll notice one other thing which has happened since we made the film. The site has an RSS feed. It gives you general updates and the moment and I’m sure they’d be willing to consider a wider variety of rss feeds – for example by ward or constituency if you think that would help you. So there’s room to offer feedback here, use it if you get a moment.
These are my links for October 24th through October 25th:
What I (nearly) said at Government 2010 – Neil has some very well structured thinking on government, online consultation/conversation and who's job it is: "People have jobs already. Busy ministers and officials can be forgiven for thinking it’s my job and that of my team to communicate online for them. Challenge is to understand their world, the pressures they’re under, the things they want to achieve, and show how digital can help them do that quicker/better."
genzai·chi » MuseumNext: wild ideas about participation – Nikki on Museums: "I gained a lot through speaking with museum (and psychology!) professionals of all sorts and it has really helped me to better appreciate the sorts of issues institutions might be trying to address through the use of games and playful experiences. Also what the main concerns they may have in doing this and where likely pitfalls may be."
Urban Interface Policy – VURB – "In the smart city, what is written as programmatic software ‘code’ can easily become defacto ‘law’ as it imposes permissioning schemes and identity regimes on it’s participants. So far, the internet, and the open source software that powers much of it, has remained remarkably adaptable to the ideals of democratic and egalitarian societies. Every infrastructural advance, however, goes through a watershed moment where the governing design principles of the technology itself begin to influence the types of societal experiences they might produce. We need to attempt to understand the cultural ramifications of such infrastructural design decisions in this context"
Who’s not using the internet? | Culture | The Observer – "Access to the internet, and the ability to navigate the web has, for example, been shown to produce a significant rise in social confidence among 60 per cent of those who had previously been excluded, while in recent studies of internet usage among individuals who considered themselves to be depressed, "feelings of loneliness" decreased in 80 per cent of cases once people got online, and depressive symptoms were "cured" in 20 per cent of cases. Virtual conversations and interactions are now widely argued to be just as important as "real world" encounters in making people feel attached to a community, or part of a network."
Why town and parish councils are important #nalcconf09 #localgovweb – Paul Geraghty sticks his neck out – Great piece from Paul: Town and parish council websites should be the aggregators of all local information "Town and parish councils are neither cash-rich nor tech-savvy, so the only way they are they going to be able to swim in these streams is if they can develop and adopt a shared code base, using the SAAS (Software as a service) model to make a tool which – thanks to "place" (location) – unlocks data feeds from around the web."
Are you taking the mick? « Talk About Local – Humour in community activity: "next time you’re met with local plans, politics or problems that would be funny if they weren’t so angering, perhaps just try highlighting the funny. Point out the silly and match it."
Promising Practices in Online Engagement | Public Agenda – "For those who believe that citizens deserve the best possible opportunities to become partners in problem-solving, the public cannot be viewed just as an audience to politics or merely as customers of government. Instead, the public should be treated as a vital resource for effective problem-solving and community-building." via @simonwakeman
What really needs to change? « Co-creating an open declaration on public services 2.0 – Co creating an European e-government manifesto: "the aim of the above is to pull together a clear focused group of ideas that on the one hand, people can identify with (i.e. be able to say: “yes, I support that!”) and on the other, give a clear message to governments and a clear standard against which their response (and actions) can be judged."
These are my links for August 12th through August 13th:
mySociety » Call For Proposals 2009 – My Society wants suggestions on what they should do next: “We need your help to decide what mySociety builds next.
Our previous calls for proposals have led to WhatDoTheyKnow.com, WriteToThem.com and Pledgebank.com.”
Brooklyn Typology – “The subject of continuous residential development since the mid-1600s, every trend in American architecture and urban planning has inscribed itself onto Brooklyn’s moraine and salt marshes. Brookyn Typology is an investigation of borough’s population and urban form. It consists of 2100 photographs taken in a sample of blockgroups in Brooklyn, plus detailed Census, historical, and typological data about the residential and housing in area. Together, the interlinked photographs and data form a portrait of the urban fabric of Brooklyn.”
These are my links for June 27th through June 30th:
Poynter Online – Youtube Launches Citizen reporter Support – The site has just unveiled a new effort to improve and promote videos that are newsworthy: the Reporters' Center. The Reporters' Center launched Monday with about 35 instructional videos from professional journalists on how to handle a range of reporting challenges, including: understanding privacy issues (and staying out of jail), shooting video with your cell phone, fact-checking assertions, conducting a good interview and covering a humanitarian crisis safely.
Building Britain’s Future: the next step to better policy discussion online at Helpful Technology – "a fair crack at how we might present big policy documents online. To me, this is one of the big challenges in digital engagement right now: we have a fair number of tool options for consultations, and are getting better at applying the ‘classic’ social media tools of Twitter, YouTube and Flickr – but the practicalities and small-p politics of presenting large documents in anything more than a downloadable PDF are still daunting. Like Digital Britain or New Opportunities, BBF is not (primarily) a consultation, so has to struggle with the thorny question of what to do with feedback and whether to solicit it at all."
http://mypolice.wordpress.com/ – MyPolice.org is a web-based service that fosters constructive, collaborative communication between communities and the police forces which serve them. MyPolice originated at (and won!) Social Innovation Camp, June 2009. Sicamp is a challenge to turn back of the envelope ideas which use the web to tackle 'stuff that matters' into a reality. In just 48 hours.
The Conservative Party | News | Speeches | David Cameron: Giving power back to the people – "Information is power – because information allows people to hold the powerful to account. This has never been more true than today, in the information age. The internet is an amazing pollinator, spreading ideas and information all over the globe in minutes. It turns lonely fights into mass campaigns; transforms moans into movements; excites the attention of hundreds, thousands, millions of people and stirs them to action. And constantly accelerating technology makes information infinitely more powerful.
