Podnosh

Many, many evenings of voluntary work went public last night with a site to complement Birmingham’s Big City Plan consultation.

www.bigcitytalk.org has been built by Jon Bounds who’s worked patiently with other Birmingham bloggers Julia Gilbert, Nicky Getgood, Michael Grimes and myself to translate council speak into clearer speak. Stef Lewandowski has also been among a number of people who’ve supported and encouraged this, not least through conversations with the council.  I don’t think it’s flawless – so please feel free to comment about the site, but more importantly please use it to comment about the big city plan before February 6th.
We want to help move beyond the traditional consultation approach of citizens or organisations making comments to government and for government. Instead we are keen to create an online place which will encourage a more public conversation about how we will shape the city centre over the next 20 years.

Fortunately it has been met with some enthusiasm from other people.

Midge describes it as “something that Joe Public could actually get involved with AND comment on”. Shona has already used it to have her say on the options for Digbeth. Mark Steadman wants people to use the site – pronto (consultation on this phase of the plan ends on February 6th), one Simon is chuffed to see the it built on free and open source software Wordpress whilst another Simon is impatient to see more people commenting.

BiNS reminds us of one fundamental truth about planning for our city: “You know how big and complex Birmingham is, well it is. Very.”   Digital Birmingham reflect on this as “another example of how far ahead Birmingham is in its use of social media. Digital technologies coupled with a highly-motivated group of citizens makes for a very powerful combination.” Something I think is very true!

For me Dave Briggs gets to one nub here (I declare a situation can be double nubbed)when he asks two questions:

Readers working within local government: how could you make the most of the civic energy in your area, to work with residents to create something really worthwhile?

Everyone else: What’s going on in your local area that you could take a bit of time out to help out with, or improve?

So I’d like to add that extra nub with a third question aimed at publicly funded media like the BBC: Should you be doing this sort of stuff? If so how will you need to change your rules of engagement?

The National Trust creates this google map which helps people find National Trust properties and make their way there. No substantial techy shakes,  but what is most significant though is a sense of collboration here.  They tell us it’s a beta and ask for our iddeas about how to imporve it.  That attitude is good news.

The people who contribute to online communities are special – don’t lump them in with the rest of the members, urges Museum 2.0

“And so imagine if, instead of launching a community project and stating, “this is a place where anyone can contribute,” you launched and said, “Only one in a hundred people will share something here. Are you that one?” The idea that the user might be someone special, someone in the minority, is evocative and immensely appealing. If everyone can do it, why bother? If only YOU can do it, the motivation goes up.”

Andy Duncan of Channel 4 talks to Nesta about the future of digital Britain. (hat tip Dominic) He reckons:

1. we must have universal access to broadband services.At the moment we rank fifth of the OECD countries for access, but in terms of speed we are some considerable way behind countries like Korea and Japan.   If we are to
   be a fully digital society, then every citizen must be able to participate.  Anything less would be an implicit denial of full citizenship to some.
2. stimulate demand and here the best way forward must be a combination of public policy and private provision.when by the government’s own admission only 20% of schools have really ‘got it’ in terms of exploiting digital technology to drive next generation learning, we need to ramp up the integration of digital technologies with our formal and informal learning services.   Media literacy is as essential to a full and productive life today as basic literacy was in the world of our grandparents.
3. My third boundary marker for Digital Britain concerns what you could call the supply side of the equation.  For example, there’s the hugely complex question of how to regulate and reward the exploitation of intellectual property in the digital world.  Children and teenagers don’t differentiate between content they access on television and what they access on the net, but our regulatory system still treat them as totally separate.  One way of dealing with this may be to learn from the advertising industry where responsible self-regulation has been a
   success, and it’s clear that, however they do it, the big internet service providers need to take more responsibility for the services they carry.  I’m not pretending it’s easy.  If ever an issue belonged in the ‘difficult box’ for parliament and for society at large, this is it.  But we can no longer dodge it.

MySociety reckons we have 6 days to prevent MP’s burying the details of their expenses.  Click here to see how you can act: “NB. mySociety is strictly non-partisan, by mission and by ethics. However, when it looks like Parliament is about to take a huge step in the wrong direction on transparency, we’ve no problem at all with stepping up when changes happen that threaten both the public interest and the ongoing value of sites like  TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow.”

Seth Godin reckons that

“Newspapers took two cents of journalism and wrapped in ninety-eight cents of overhead and distraction,” and that “if we really care about the investigation and the analysis, we’ll pay for it one way or another. Maybe it’s a public good, a non profit function. Maybe a philanthropist puts up money for prizes. Maybe the Woodward and Bernstein of 2017 make so much money from breaking a story that it leads to a whole new generation of journalists.”.

He is very, very right. (hat tip Ed Moore)

Interesting read from Charlie Beckett from a seminar at my old University, Sussex.

“Any media, be it small scale community projects or a more mass news media organisation, will always be more sustainable and relevant if public participation is built in to all aspects of production and consumption. This all feels part of my vision of future media as more Networked.”

Above Marc Reeves sums up why The Birmingham Post must change. After 150 years as a broadsheet, he told tonight’s launch party that nothing this radical has yet happened to the paper. The loss of the Saturday edition and the change to stapled tabloid size are the the most visible changes, but to my mind the most important ones are happening elsewhere.

They will be found in the new relationships being forged online (and in the real world) that will see reporters change from people with contacts into people with real relationships. It is something that Marc and Jo Geary (and others at the paper) have been experiencing for many months.

The curious thing though is appreciating the scale of the operation at the new Fort Dunlop HQ for the Post and sister papers.  500 jobs is a huge amount to support in a changing world with business models breaking by the day. By that measure this is just the start of a communications revolution which will take brains, courage and flexibility to survive.

So lets take a moment to be proud.

Here in Birmingham the Post is changing fast to find new ways to understand how those business models will be framed.  Channel 4 has come here with 4IP to do the same. Hello Digital is looking to help us get digital faster. Independents from small companies to community groups and local bloggers are learning faster than almost anyone.

We are gaining great pleasure from plunging ourselves into solving one the key problems of the start of the 21st century.

Birmingham is learning to break and remake the rules all over again.

—

Other Reactions:

Editors Weblog.

PaidContent “We cannot carry on as we are”

Birmingham Post Cartoonist retires (I remember Bert Hackett from work experience and being at school with his daughter).

Grovesmedia:  “a tentative thumbs up for now”.

D’log,   Steve Bowbrick muses on whether we could nationalise newspapers, and Mark Steadman.

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: cons08 conservative party tory party conservative  party conference birminghamuk

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.

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.

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