Posts Tagged ‘David Cameron’

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Social Media Surgery movement wins the Prime Minister’s Big Society Award – hurrah!

Posted on 16th February 2012 by

Big Society Awards 2012 logo looks like a street name plate

I’m very excited to be able to say that the Prime Minister has recognised social media surgeries with a Big Society Award for 2012.

The Big Society Awards were set up by the Prime Minister in November 2010 to acknowledge individuals and organisations across the UK that demonstrate the Big Society in their work or activities. The aim is also to galvanise others to follow.  David Cameron said this about the surgeries:

“This is an excellent initiative – such a simple idea and yet so effective. The popularity of these surgeries and the fact that they have inspired so many others across the country to follow in their footsteps, is testament to its brilliance.

“Congratulations to Nick and all the volunteers who have shared their time and expertise to help so many local groups make the most of the internet to support their community. A great example of the Big Society in action.”

Thank you for such kind words – to which we responded formally with:

“It’s wonderful to have recognition for everyone who has organised a social media surgery or turned up to volunteer their help.  I think the surgeries work because they are simple.  They are very easy to organise, fun to do and not in the least bit intimidating for people who want some help. They give active citizens and community groups the confidence and skills to use social media to campaign, organise and hold power to account.  They’ve grown because of the passion and energy of bloggers and voluntary groups up and down the country.”

Background

The idea of a social media surgery originated with Pete Ashton – who used them with people who were looking for free help from his consultancy supporting arts organisations. We then applied the relaxed approach in a new way, scaling it up and putting together two sets of people – lovely helpers from the Birmingham Bloggers group (started in 2007) with the fab active citizens I’d had met through (more…)

Posted on 16th February 2012 by
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Posted in Big Society, Government, Grassroots Channel, Hyperlocal, Neighbourhoods, Social Media, Social Media Surgery, Third Sector | 38 Comments »

Fanning the flames of GovSpark

Posted on 30th September 2010 by

govspark energy use in government

Very late on Tuesday night I was asked a question on twitter – can you help get a government site up in short order?  The question was prompted by this.

GovSpark is a simply wonderful idea from 16 year old coder Isabell Long that emerged from Emma Mulqueeny’s Young Rewired State.  Isabell wrote last month…

I came up with the idea because the government had just released some live and historical energy consumption data, but it was all held on the respective department websites and not central anywhere. GovSpark aims to be the central website for people to go so that they can see what the energy consumption of a certain department is at that time. The government also have targets to reduce usage by 80% by 2050, so I thought it would be a good tool to show how well one department is doing compared to another department.

Because it was Emma asking we said yes.  Glyn Wintle had already sweated to build an API which ran off live data for energy use in government buildings in Whitehall.  We were given less than a day to help push it across the finishing line by deciding what it ought to look like and making it look that way. Josh Hart coded like a lunatic and the talented and calm Ryan Dean-Corke of Substrakt sorted out some visuals for us.

As the Downing Street website reported this morning…

The Prime Minister has today challenged Whitehall Ministries to compete to slash the energy used in their departmental headquarters over the month of October.

The league table application, called GovSpark, will show data from the 18 Government Real Time Displays. The original prototype for GovSpark was developed by Isabell Long, aged 16, during Young Rewired State 2010, an event run for young developers aged 15-18 working with open government data.

It’s always a pleasure to help something good happen, in fact that’s what we are here for really.  The best bit was a short e-mail from a clearly chuffed Isabell

It looks amazing – I really love it! Everything has finally come together! :)

In less than a month in total Isabell’s idea has turned into site which is running a blindingly simple competition to help civil servants use less energy.    It gives civil servants the information and incentive to switch things off, or find way to cut emissions.

We can only take a tiny bit of credit for helping.  The site was sponsored and funded by The Stationery Office and the real work, before our last scramble, came from Glyn and Emma Mulqueeny.  Thanks very much to Sarah Marshall for spotting Emma’s cry for help and asking us to get involved.

Posted on 30th September 2010 by
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Posted in Leadership, Open Data | 2 Comments »

Balsall Heath and the Big Society

Posted on 11th June 2010 by

This video by Demos tells the story of how my neighbourhood and the people in it are doing work which fits with the governments Big Society idea.  David Cameron has visited Balsall Heath a number of times and Dick Atkinson who’s in the video, was at the Downing Street launch of the Big Society.  Nowrah the main woman in the film is one of the people helping us run the Balsall Heath Social Media Surgery.

That’s all I want to say at the moment – lots of thoughts bubbling at the moment on the Big Society – but enjoy the video.

Posted on 11th June 2010 by
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Posted in Government, Local Government, Neighbourhoods, Third Sector | No Comments »

Stuff I've seen July 28th and July 29th

Posted on 29th July 2009 by

These are my links for July 28th through to July 29th:

  • David Cameron’s missing a Twitter trick | John Prescott | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk – Interesting and true: “More and more politicians are blogging, vlogging and tweeting. Interestingly, according to the Hansard Society, MPs like me born before 1940 are more likely to blog than their younger colleagues.”
  • Rewired State Projects – Young Rewired State is a weekend event emulating the success of ReWired State’s National Hack the Government Day, but this time with hackers aged 15-18.
  • Data & Stuff – Neil Houston so enjoyed doing some spare time data journalism he’s started blogging about it.
  • localcommunities – Who’s who – David Wilcox has pulled together a very fine summary of lots of community digital media activity.
  • Autocar – New tech to cut congestion – Dominic Gill, Microsoft regional manager, said: “This is the first application to use available data intuitively to put real power in the hands of individuals to make and refine travel plans.“The strategy of linking with information sources so they can react to an individual’s changing circumstances will transform people’s travelling experiences.”

Posted on 29th July 2009 by
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Posted in Link Love | No Comments »

Stuff I've seen June 27th through June 30th

Posted on 1st July 2009 by

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.
  • Reuters Editors » Blog Archive » Rethinking rights, accreditation, and journalism itself in the age of Twitter | Blogs | – Reuters understands hat social media can also be journalism: "To a 23 year-old athlete, used to putting out a “news feed” of every detail of her personal life and training on various social media platforms, there simply isn’t a distinction. Her life IS a news feed. Her blog IS a publishing platform. Her Facebook page IS the daily newspaper of her life."
  • 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.

Posted on 1st July 2009 by
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Government cancels Parliamentary vote following internet campaign on MP's expenses

Posted on 21st January 2009 by

Early this week My Society urged us to write to our MP’s to insist that the new Freedom of Information Bill should not be used to conceal MP’s expenses.  I sent this to Lynne Jones:

I was really concerned this week to read reports in both left and right wing biased newspapers that parliament is moving to conceal the receipts for MP’s expenses, not simply from open public scrutiny but also from FOI requests.

To be confident that MP’s are spending public money fairly we need that process to fully transparent.  I do hope hope you will do everything you can to ensure that’s the case.

She replied:

I am not sure exactly what we are going to be asked to vote on as yet but I am opposed to special provisions that would exempt MPs from disclosures that other people in other public sector organisations have to make. So as to be accountable, I will put something on my website next week.

Today Tom Steinburg of mySociety tells us that their campaign has worked. Clay Sirky describes it as victory for transparency. Let me give you everything Tom says says:

The vote on concealing MPs’ expenses has been cancelled by the government!

In other words – we won!

This is a huge victory not just for transparency, it’s a bellweather for a change in the way politics works. There’s no such thing as a good day to bury bad news any more, the Internet has seen to that.

Over 7000 people joined a Facebook group, they sent thousands of emails to over 90% of all MPs. Hundreds of thousands of people found out about the story by visiting TheyWorkForYou to find something they wanted to know, reading an email alert, or simply discovered what was going on whilst checking their Facebook or Twitter pages. Almost all of this happened, from nowhere, within 48 hours, putting enough pressure on Parliament to force change.

Congrats – the internets and the mainstream media work together, plus of course the Conservative Party withdrawing their support for the Bill.

Posted on 21st January 2009 by
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Posted in Citizen Journalism | 1 Comment »

How much government money is spent in your neighbourhood? cons08

Posted on 2nd October 2008 by

So how much? Add it all together: policing, benefits, health, road repairs.  The lot.  How much?  You don’t know, in fact it probably cant be done.

That is what Dick Atkinson realised 15 years ago. He runs the Balsall Heath Neighbourhood Forum and he wanted to know just how much public money was sunk into his patch each year.  he wanted to see if he could help spend some of it better.

Dick has written about this in many of his books and pamphlets. More importantly he has argued the case year after year as politician after politician came to visit his court in the pyramid building where the forum his based.  Among them the Tories.  David Cameron has visited Balsall Heath at least three times to my knowledge. He’s stayed here to find out more about inner city living.  He gave a Chamberlain Lecture (link to mp3 Chamberlain forum here) on civil renewal in a small church in the Seven Streets Neighbourhood.

Yesterday – as one of the Birmingham bloggers invited to the Tory Party conference – I bumped into Alistair Burt MP.  He too has visited Balsall Heath and told me that Dick’s wish is close to coming true:

[youtube]ntnronGjdCw[/youtube]

I’ve had a rootle around and can’t find much more detail of how this idea of a Sustainable Communities Statement does or will work.  He wasn’t the first person to mention it here.  Greg Clarke, shadow minister for the cabinet office (is that Tom Watson’s shadow or Phil Hope’s), also mentioned this at an NCVO fringe event held at BVSC on monday. So where’s the real detail on how much easier it is to count public spending in your neighbourhood? Will it work or does is simply apply to traditional boundaries, such as constituencies? Anyone help?

Other Birmingham Bloggers who were also at the conference:

Dave Harte on posh tories.

Alex Hughes fabulous flickr cartoons.

Deirde lines up the lolitics fodder.

Jon Bounds learns ten things and ponders why few MP’s really blog.

Simon Gray mostly shared his thoughts through flickr.

Praguetory is still composing his after having a camera nicked.

Dan O’Doherty at Birmingham University Conservatives thinks Cameron should be pm – shocker.

Posted on 2nd October 2008 by
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Posted in Government | No Comments »

What is a Birmingham Blogger doing at the Tory Party Conference?

Posted on 30th September 2008 by
Tory women in heels

That’s what I kept asking myself, and I wasn’t alone. Other members of the Birmingham bloggers’ group who’d registered to cover the conference were also considering what they might write, if they should right anything. Why were they there?

I know why I was there. Because I was invited.

It a huge occasion and I’m delighted I went. One blogger has described this invitation to local web folk as a charm offensive. Well charmed I have been. Partly by the warm and relaxed welcome from Rishi Saha, the Conservative’s head of social media, but also by the sheer scale and energy of the event. It is the first conference in Birmingham I’ve found with such a huge fringe. Events leach into the rest of the city centre. One massive conversation, much of it in very high heels.

It is also the only conference where it is not just up to us as a city to make a good impression. Sure we need to be our normal hospitable self, but equally the Tories need to make a good impression on us.

I’ve been to Conservative party conferences before as a BBC political reporter. I’ve covered huge events in Birmingham – notably the G8 conference. That was easy. I knew my job was to tell the overall story – the mainstream consensus. If possible I should also find an exclusive something – but that something still had to satisfy a mass audience – or rather the editors who judge what interests that audience. This time it was harder.

Then it dawned on me why a blogger should got to any political party conference: to write about the things they normally write about.

My niche is that curious overlap between active citizenship, citizen journalism, social media, mainstream journalism and local government.

It is a mishmash of a place and any party conference is riddled with material that fits my normal area of interest. Oddly this only occurred to me late this afternoon.

Tis the fringe stupid: Bloggers are perfectly suited to one particular part of a major conference – the fringe. It is there the fit happens, the wider the range of blogging interests present the greater the depth of coverage we will get from these events.

So tomorrow I’ll be back to share a story or two and hopefully they will be the things my normal readers want to to read.

technorati tags:

Posted on 30th September 2008 by
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Posted in Citizen Journalism | 11 Comments »

This is a no brainer for the UK.

Posted on 27th September 2008 by

Free Debates is an important democratic movement. They are demanding that a condition of a network getting to screen presidential debates is that they make the material available with open source/creative commons licensing, so it can be rehashed and mashed etc.

It is a great idea and any public sector broadcaster like channel 4, ITV, BBC  here in the uk should be delighted to make the resources available for what could be a blossoming of political engagement. So David Cameron, Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg just imagine citzenship lessons where people are mashing video of political debates.

This is their open letter to Barack Obama and John McCain:

Dear Senator McCain and Senator Obama,

We are a coalition of people and organizations across the ideological spectrum asking you to make this year’s presidential debates more “of the people” than ever before by bringing them more fully into the Internet age.

Specifically, we ask you to embrace these two “open debate” principles for the 2008 debates:

  1. The presidential debates are for the benefit of the public. Therefore, the right to speak about the debates ought to be “owned” by the public, not controlled by the media.

    2. During the primaries, a large coalition asked that media companies release rights to presidential debate video to ensure that key moments can be legally blogged about, shared on YouTube, or otherwise shared without fear of legal repercussion.CNN, ABC, and NBC agreed to release video rights. But one media company threatened legal action against Senator McCain for using a debate clip to spread a message. Such control over political speech is inconsistent with our democracy.

    We therefore call upon both candidates to commit to a principle that whenever you debate publicly, the raw footage of that debate will be dedicated to the public domain. Those in charge of the video feed should be directed to make it free for anyone to use.

  2. “Town hall” Internet questions should be chosen by the people, not solely by the media.

    3. The two campaigns recently said of the October 7 debate, “In the spirit of the Town Hall, all questions will come from the audience (or Internet), and not the moderator.” We agree with the spirit of this statement. In order to ensure that the Internet portion of this debate is true bottom-up democracy, the format needs to allow the public to help select the questions in addition to asking them.This cycle’s YouTube debates were a milestone for Internet participation in presidential debates. But they put too much discretion in the hands of gatekeepers. Many of the questions chosen by TV producers were considered gimmicky and not hard-hitting enough, and never would have bubbled up on their own.

    This “bubble up” idea is the essence of the Internet as we know it. The best ideas rise to the top, and the wisdom of crowds prevails. We’d propose debate organizers utilize existing bubble-up voting technology and choose Internet questions from the top 25 that bubbled up. We ask you to instruct the October 7 debate planners to use bubble-up technology in this fashion.

    This is a historic election. The signers of this letter don’t agree on every issue. But we do agree that in order for Americans to make the best decision for president, we need open debates that are “of the people” in the ways described above. You have the power to make that happen, and we ask you to do so.

    Thank you for your willingness to take these ideas to heart. If you have any questions, please contact: OpenDebateCoalition@gmail.com

    Sincerely,

    Lawrence Lessig; Professor, Stanford Law School, Founder, Center for Internet and Society

    Glenn Reynolds; Professor, University of Tennessee Law, and founder of Instapundit.com blog

    Craig Newmark; Founder, Craigslist

    Jimmy Wales; Founder, Wikipedia

    David Kralik; Director of Internet Strategy, Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions

    Eli Pariser; Executive Director, MoveOn.org Political Action

    Adam Green; Director of Strategic Campaigns, MoveOn.org Political Action

    Mindy Finn; Republican strategist, former Mitt Romney Online Director

    Patrick Ruffini; Republican consultant, Former Republican National Committee eCampaign Director

    Arianna Huffington; Founder, Huffington Post

    Markos Moulitsas; Founder, DailyKos.com

    Jon Henke; New media consultant, including for Fred Thompson, George Allen, and Senate Republican Caucus

    Mike Krempasky; Co-Founder of RedState.com

    Matt Stoller; Founder/Editor, OpenLeft.com

    James Rucker; Executive Director, ColorOfChange.org

    Robert Greenwald; President, BraveNewFilms

    Kim Gandy; President, National Organization for Women

    Carl Pope; Executive Director, Sierra Club

    Micah Sifry; Co-Founder, Personal Democracy Forum and TechPresident.com

    Shari Steele; Executive Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation

    Josh Silver; Executive Director, Free Press

    Carl Malamud; Founder, Public.Resource.Org

    Roger Hickey; Co-Director, Campaign for America’s Future

Posted on 27th September 2008 by
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Posted in Citizen Journalism, Local Government | No Comments »

Community Docking

Posted on 26th June 2008 by

Unity-Zarya-Zvezda_STS-1061.jpgWhen I speak to council officers and civil servants about community engagement the conversation often conjures up mental images of docking space stations.

The officers are sincerely trying to picture interesting ways to approach the community, connect with it, create an airlock where they and the community can talk and then back into their own orbiters, reseal the doors, flush out the airlocks and return to business.

The conversation is so often based on the assumption that ‘services’ are separate from the people they serve. They have things to get on with regardless of what the folk around them do. The service is in its own orbit and conversation with the community is a nicety, not a necessity.

This mind set is riddled with contradictions which were exposed at last weeks fab Comunities & Local Government meeting to discuss social media and the forthcoming Community Empowerment White Paper.

The reason why this view perpetuates is because services are rarely delivered by the community they are intended to serve. They are rarely delivered by those who are already ‘engaged’. As one of the participants so elegantly put it – the government is trying to retail services when it should step back and structure itself as the wholesale part of the delivery chain. That would create huge opportunities for empowerment in the people led retails sector.

Of course local government has always been part of the retail arm of central government and increasingly local government is looking to create neighbourhood operations to push the retailing closer to the ground.

But these are organisations that still have a very different culture, or perhaps atmosphere from the groups of people they are designed to help. And until that atmosphere is breathable by both the service and served we will continue to dock when we should be engaged.

See Also:

Dan McQuilan’s excellent post on how the social web will make greater empowerment inevitable, the questions for government is how to relate to it.

Dave Briggs explanation of how social media will do this.

Posted on 26th June 2008 by
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Posted in Citizen Journalism, Government, Local Government | 2 Comments »

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