Author: Nick Booth

15th April 2010

Report: April's Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery

Jon Law and James Robertson — Jon Law (left) and James Robertson at Apri's Central Birmingham SMS

Last night was a really interesting surgery at thestudio – not least because it saw the first introduction of the Social Media Surgery Plus website.

We were blessed, quite surprisingly, with a large number of people happy to help others, which was great to see. Nick Booth helped the Civic Centre Residents’ group with their efforts to use Scribd with their residents’ blog, which they set up a few surgeries ago.
Karen Caine was helped by Andy Mabbett and learned about using data sets in conjunction with her long-established site, BrumCityCentre.com, for Birmingham City Centre Neighbourhood Forum.
John Newson was helped with his blog by Danny Smith.

Nick Helping the Civic Centre residents — Another busy Social Media Surgery

Heidi Blanton very kindly came down to help as a surgeon for the first time and helped Nancy Langfeldt with the blog for the South Birmingham Food Cooperative, which she had set up at a previous surgery. Jon Law of the Balsall Heath Housing Co-operative was helped by James Robertson with his site.

As I indicated earlier a great number of other people came along. And we had more people ready to help than those needing help, including Mary Horesh of Birmingham Friends of the Earth.

23rd March 2010

Scrutinising swimming pool facilities

I’ve been a bit annoyed with the provision of swimming facilities here in Brum for a while. Nick Booth suggested I compare them with those of the other core cities to see how Birmingham rated. So I’ve just had a little go.

What I did

First I went to each council’s website, found its list of leisure facilities and then checked each one to work out which were swimming pools. Occasionally, in the case of Manchester, that was easy because it was quite handy. In other cases it was a pain, because the council had different ideas about presentation. Anyway, I managed to make a crude tally of the number of pool facilities.

I wanted to do more, but as this spreadsheet shows it’s hard to get all the data.

Newcastle_swimming_pools — Newcastle Swimming Pools

Some councils provide more information than others, some are completely inconsistent about what they do present. You’ll also see that, scandalously, I’ve added some Scottish cities and left out the likes of Sheffield in my list.

I then had a look on the same sites for population statistics. I didn’t always find them. On some occasions the website provided a mid-2008 census estimate, and sometimes it was just the numbers from the 2001 census. Sometimes it was in a nice HTML format, and other times it was buried in a PDF.

What I produced

I managed to collate the information into this incredibly crude spreadsheet, where I divided the population of the city by the number of pool facilities.

Swimming_pool_comparison — Swimming pool comparison

I then used Many Eyes to upload my spreadsheet and turn it into a visualisation, which you can see here:-

Now, this isn’t a great analysis. After all, Birmingham has Moseley Road Baths, which is something like 20m long, while the Manchester Aquatics Centre has two 50m pools in one facility. Yet they each get a score of one. Deeply unfair. If I could find out how long and how wide each pool was then I could add it all up and then compare the total swimming area to population. But that depth (pun intended) of information isn’t available.

So what does this mean?
For me this is a scrutiny issue, because working out how Birmingham compares to other cities in terms of facilities helps us to understand whether it needs to improve. But the information isn’t there, or if it is it’s inconsistent. And it’s not just geeks who’d like to know how big a swimming pool is, how long it’s open for and even how warm it is. It’s all information that’s relevant to users.

What can be done?
Making comparisons between councils’ services would be made easier if we all were engaged in a discussion about what information needs to be made available and in what formats that information is presented in.

As this little experiment demonstrates, it’s not technically challenging to collect data and then use a free, web-based tool like Many Eyes to interpret it. And, for the time being, I’m considering setting up a site that looks specifically at swimming pools to work out how that process could become more useful and accurate.

23rd March 2010

April’s Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery

Social Media Surgery in March at the Studio — March's Social Media Surgery in the Studio

After a couple of brilliant and very busy Central Birmingham Social Media Surgeries in February and March we’re looking forward to our next surgery, which is now on April 14th at thestudio, 7 Cannon Street, B2 5EP.

It’s the same night as the Birmingham Bloggers’ meetup, but that seemed to work OK last month, so we’ve opted to try doing it the same.

Members of voluntary and community groups are free to drop in between 5.30pm and 7pm. Below I’ve included a form to fill in if you’d like to come, so we can keep track of numbers and what kind of help people need.

We had to move the surgery, which had been booked for April 7, because of the Easter holidays, so sorry if you can’t make it. The next two surgeries are both at thestudio, booked for May 6 and June 8.

The surgeries are organised by volunteer members of the Birmingham Bloggers group. Surgeons work as friendly advisors giving informal one-to-one help to show you how to make the best of social media. If you’ve never been to a surgery before then it might be a good idea to look here. And, if you’re interested in finding out a little bit more about what the surgeries are and their history have a look here.

How do I get to the new venue? From New Street Station walk down the ramp out of the Pallasades, turn left onto New Street (past H&M) and Cannon Street is the first road on the right. The studios are further up on the right (opposite Jigsaw), and the restaurant is on the second floor.

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21st March 2010

Civic Engagement as part of a National Broadband Plan

Chapter 15 of the US Govt’s National Broadband Plan is very well worth a read.

There’s plenty in it, it gets specific about what needs to be done to grab some civic engagement benefits from the web and it says some blindingly obvious but important things. It’s main proposals are:

Create an open and transparent government

The primary legal documents of the federal government should be free and accessible to the public on digital platforms.
Government should make its processes more transparentand conducive to participation by the American people.
All data and information that the government treats as public should be available and easy to locate online in a machine-readable and otherwise accessible format in a timely manner. For data that are actionable or time-sensitive innature, the Executive Branch should provide individuals a single Web interface to manage e-mail alerts and other electronic communications from the federal government.
All responses to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by Executive Branch and independent agencies
should be made available online at www.[agency].gov/foia.
The Executive Branch should revise its Data Quality Act guidance to encourage agencies to apply the Act more consistently and facilitate the re-publishing of government data.

Build a robust digital media ecosystem

Congress should consider increasing funding to public media for broadband-based distribution and content.
Congress should consider amending the Copyright Act to provide for copyright exemptions to public broadcasting organizations for online broadcast and distribution of public media.
The federal government should create and fund Video.gov to publish its digital video archival material and facilitate the creation of a federated national digital archive to house public interest digital content.
Congress should consider amending the Copyright Act to enable public and broadcast media to more easily contribute their archival content to the digital national archive and grant reasonable non-commercial downstream usage rights for this content to the American people.

Expand civic engagement through social media

The Federal Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council should accelerate the adoption of social media technologies that government can use to interact with the American people.

Increase innovation within government

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) should create an Open Platforms Initiative that uses digital platforms to engage and draw on the expertise of citizens and the private sector.
The Executive Branch and independent agencies should expand opportunities for Americans with expertise in technological innovation to serve in the federal government. Modernize democratic processes
Federal, state and local stakeholders should work together to modernize the elections process by addressing issues such as electronic voter registration, voting records portability, common standards to facilitate data exchanges across state borders and automatic updates of voter files with the most current address information.
The Department of Defense (DoD) should develop a secure Internet-based pilot project that enables members of the military serving overseas to vote online.

Good stuff – mostly.

Since it was published earlier this week it’s received a range of responses. Creative Commons wants other parts of the plan to go a bit further on opening up copyright use for ediucation

The FCC has recognized that robust broadband infrastructure is crucial for citizens to participate effectively in the 21st century digital environment. Open licensing is a piece of this critical infrastructure.

The plan is also being preceded by Google’s competition to offer a 1gb cable into a us community that makes the best case for it – the Boradband Plan says every US community should have one – for the benefit of public services.

The Knight News Foundation rightly highlights other parts of the plan which focus on digital literacy, although I sometimes think this gets mixed up with basic computer skills – yes being able to use a mouse and search the web are important skills – but digital literacy is much more about whether you have an appreciation of how you can use those techniques to change the thinsg you do and your place in the conversation. Meanwhile their Digital Media Centre chews over the implications of Chapter 15 for Journalists from making more data/draft legislation available.

Journalists and others who are accustomed to following and explaining legislation might find business opportunities to layer context on proposed legislation—making it easier to understand what’s going on, what happens next, optimum timing for comments, and also getting citizens’ questions answered (since often people have questions before they can formulate comments). This is an example of applying journalism skills as a direct service, rather than simply as a means to create content that’s supported by ads or subscriptions.

Bill Schrier – the Chief Information Officer for city hall in Seattle is very keen on the plan, including elements in it which will make it easier for local government to provide the ambitious (but essential) 100 mgbits of acess to home in America.