Author: Nick Booth

A new form of planning gain: Supermarkets share their data with the public (sector)

New Optimists listening to the conversation about food at last night forum
New Optimists listening to the conversation about food at last night forum

Below are some questions but first the context:

Last night I was working on the first of a series of conversations about how Birmingham will feed itself way into the future.  The New Optimists Forum is organised by Kate Cooper who has the very powerful idea of getting groups of scientists from different disciplines and policy makers to think about this thorny problem.  She argues, I think rightly, that getting practical about problems and places helps us understand best what we need to change now.

One of the scientists was Ian Nabney who talked about the opportunities that will come to make better decisions about complex problems when we have more data and more power to crunch and use that data.  Here’s what he said.
Ian Nabney – the future of food and opendata ? (mp3)

It made me ask the question what if we created a new form of planning gain: supermarkets share their data with us rather than build a new badminton court. 

Could knowing what they know about our eating habits help us lead healthier and better lives?

Mark Braggins Tweeted this this morning:

Mark Braggins tweet on depersonlaised data
@markbraggins on twitter

And it also tickled a local MP’s curisosity.  Richard Burden (who’s Northfield constituency may have a few urban “food deserts”, another idea kicked around at last night’s forum)  tweeted this question about half an hour ago:

@richardburdenmp
@richardburdenmp

So here are some questions:

  1. Is asking supermarkets to share their data a good form of planning gain?
  2. If so in what form would we want it – opendata, depersonalised or maybe full data to be share just with civil servants
  3. What would be the arguments against (so we can anticipate) or just how naive is this! ?
  4. How would Kate Cooper of the New Optimists go about talking to sainsbury’s about this?
  5. Would you rather have a new pavilion at the local park?

Odd what comes out of combining real world conversations with online stuff!

Update

Looks like Adrian Short was thinking about supermarket card data as a public good back in April – scroll to the bottom of this post.

Emerging Leaders in London, Ontario Canada and the social media surgery model.

Last week I talked to the Ma Social Media Students at Birmingham City University about social media surgeries for community and voluntary organisations. I was explaining how they emerged from a wide range of activity that was building social capital here in Birmingham.

It’s a story I’ve told before but never really in such a concentrated way – in fact I told it twice in one day. The students were a guinea pig for the talk I was planning to give at Michael Overduin’s Science Capital event on “Networks, Nodes and Knowledge: from local enterprise to global engagement”.

The slides are here but what I’d like to share if what one of Dave Harte’s students made from the talk. Dave shared the whole thing with his overseas students who study the degree remotely. He asked them to:

This week I would like the distance learning students to reflect on the talk by Nick Booth and consider how you might go about setting up a social media surgery in your own town. What would your strategy be? Have a read of Nick Booth’s ‘recipe’ listas a starting point.

Your response should be a short (5-10 mins) video that tells us the following:

  • What’s your town like? – rich? poor? digitally deprived??
  • Is there a way to connect to voluntary groups and community organisations (an umbrella organisation of some sort)?
  • How would you go about connecting to other digitally minded folk to persuade them to help set up a surgery?
  • What’s stopping you doing this?”

This is a question about social capital and innovation, where is it, how does it happen. Can you nurture or grow both.  Dave highlighted one response from Jeff Sage.

http://youtu.be/lvJESMqHRBg

Jeff  talked about how a group in London Ontario developed “Emerging Leaders” a network for connecting people.  As yu can see they also work with different agencies in the city to help improve their community.  Principles that struck a chord with the social media surgery ethos include:

never duplicate efforst of others or create silos and making mistakes should be a goal, rather than something you’re tryng to avoid.

Also very much inline with the work Tessy Britton is doing at social spaces and David Barrie’s Militant Optimists,

One coincidence – Michael Overduin, who asked me to compile the initial story on the surgeries – hails from Ontario.

#tnofood Food, Science and Birmingham – The first New Optimists forum.

These are the faces of the latest bunch of New Optimists and if you’re interested in the future of Birmingham and the future of how we feed ourselves you may just want to follow their conversation as part of job we’re doing tomorrow  (Wednesday 2nd November 6 – 9 pm) .

We will be live blogging the first  New Optimists Forum – a conversation between these fine folk…ten scientists, an architect (last year’s RIBA President no less) and the city’s development strategist take part …. They are Eugenio, Hanifa, Peter and Gareth  (l-r, top row); Rosemary, Jim, Peter and Ruth (l-r, middle row); David, Helen, Ian and Liz (l-r, bottom row).

It’s the first of a number of events which will concentrate on the fascinating issues of how we feed ourselves, and happens to fall in the week we welcomed the babies that pushed our population over 7 billion.

The simplest way to follow and join the conversation is through the twitter hashtag  #tnofood (The New Optimists on Food).  We’re not live streaming this first one but will be sharing material as it happens.

If you’re curious about the New Optimists it’s a Birmingham based not for profit organisation set up by Kate Cooper.  She started by asking scientists what makes them optimistic and ended up publishing a fab book called The New Optimists – still available on Amazon.

 

Community-led neighbourhood planning in Balsall Heath

This is a short video with Joe Holyoak, a resident of Balsall Heath, an inner city area to the south of Birmingham.

Balsall Heath is one of the first 20 neighbourhood planning front runners chosen by government to write their own neighbourhood plan. The idea, part of the Localism Bill, is that instead of neighbourhood plans being written by professional planners in local government, the plan should be written by the local community itself.

Joe is working for Balsall Heath Forum. They are at the start of a six month process to write the plan (from September 2011 to March 2012). They are consulting local people, finding out what they want to see in the plan, what their priorities are, asking residents what they want Balsall Heath to become. The aim is to create a set of proposals, which will form part of Birmingham City Council’s official plan for the city.

This video was recorded at the first meeting of the Neighbourhood Planning Network, 29th September 2011, hosted by MADE in Birmingham.