Author: Nick Booth

“Can we talk?” – a new measure for liveable cities.

I’ve been asked by MADE to write 200 words for the Birmingham Post. They’re gauging opinion before the Technical and Environmental  Mayor of Copenhagen speaks in Birmingham next week. Klaus Bondam will be at Town Hall on April 6th to share with us how he expects Copenhagen to stays a wonderful place to live.

I was asked about an hour ago and the deadline is tonight.  Here’s a bashed out draft of what I fancy saying. Please encourage, discourage amend etc in the comments. Does anyone have details of that survey that put us the 2nd best place for social media behind, is it Chicago?

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Is this a good place to talk?  It’s not a question we often ask about cities.  After all the whole point of a city is that we can connect, trade and work.  Non of that happens without talk, does it? No it doesn’t, and neither does innovation.

Conversation is about scale, it happens where it’s easy for people to gather in small groups.  The ICC is evidence that we know about audience on a grand scale, but how well do we do small scale gathering?

We need many places where we can meet, deliberately or by accident.  That means a city which is easy to walking but above all has many interesting and modestly scaled places that people want to go.   It means a tolerance of other’s ideas and interests, a city where people also like to listen.

These are partly planning issues and partly cultural issues. How good are our public services at setting the example and being interested in us, how good our our planners and designers at encouraging the interesting?

And of course we don’t just want to talk to ourselves. Birmingham needs take part in a global conversation.  So our schools need open access to the internet and our school teachers and pupils helped to have the confidence to take part in sharing and developing ideas with people across the planet.

Oh and Birmingham doesn’t have free internet access in the city centre, whatever our PR folk may so. So Birmingham Fizz needs to be turned of or turned into a proper free wifi service, so we can finally start hearing each other speak.

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Well?

Stuff I've seen in the last couple of days

These are my links for March 28th and March 29th:

  • Living with rats: Why communty activists are angry. – Julian Dobson: “communities aren’t built and nourished on information, useful as it is. They’re built on relationships – forged by people who have found common cause, who’ve had arguments and battles, who have learned to celebrate success together. People who are focused on the next policy objective or yesterday’s ministerial demand don’t have the time or the energy to build such relationships, even if they want to.”
  • Audiences central add a social media module for their customers. – One of the organisations I’ve worked with over the last few months gets it’s head down to share their knowledge of social media with arts orgs in the West Midlands.  Abby Corfan includes one example: ” Birmingham Contemporary Music Group have been busy capturing audience reactions to their recent concert, and have created their first video broadcast. This was done very simply (and cheaply) using the video setting on a digital stills camera- tv on a shoestring! You can keep up to date with BCMG’s latest news on twitter @BCMG”
  • Nicky Getgood on Where is the Whitby Bus? – Where is the Whitby Bus? A game for Brum Twitter crowd concoted on the pub after last week’s social media surgery for voluntary groups. Nickys says: “In his response to the Big City Plan bus-thieving debacle, Clive Dutton said, ‘I really do hope we can move forward beyond this unfortunate experience’. Can we heck, where’s the fun in that? So if you’re on Twitter hop aboard and play Simon Howes’ ‘Where is Whitby’s bus?’ game. If you can make it stop in Highgate you’re already doing better than the council.”

Links – Twitter job loss, Googlewatt, play, NHS and Jade Goody, flashswap and flashlit pull content!

The cautionary tale of how not to use twitter to tell folk you don’t like the job you’ve just been offered.  “Use your brains. The internet is a very public place. More so even than the water cooler. Exercise the same common sense and decorum you would in “real life” social situations.”

Participo on the home energy monitoring software Googlewatt: “Ambient data management, and visualisation at a personal level, along with the massive aggregation of zillions of households, plays right into Google’s core strengths…a lot like the really interesting Google Flu Tracking initiative that uses their search data to detect trends in search terms that predict early outbreaks.

The NHS has had the wisdom to spend some money with google for the search term Jade Goody – it point people to the site which encourages take of of the jab which can protect against cervical cancer.
Tessy at Thriving Too has this quick post about a whole resource of tools for what she calls purposeful play:   “An amazing resource for learning through games has been created by James Neill. Neill is a lecturer at the Centre for Applied Psychology at the University of Canberra (Australia). His highly valuable collection of Games and Activities is one of the very best I have seen.”

Flashswap was a huge success, with loads of professional and hobby photographers swapping prints to support the campaign for a Birmingham Photospace.

Screen West Midlands on it’s first joint funding with 4iP – yoosk.com

Museum 2.0 reviews have 2004 project to get people to find their own content in museums: “Which brings us back to Sweden. In 2004, the firm Smart Studio created a unique flashlight-based interpretative interface for exploration of a historic blast furnace site in the old Swedish steel town of Avesta. The site itself has no interpretative material–no labels or obvious media elements. But each visitor is given a special flashlight, used both to illuminate the space (for general exploration) and to activate interpretative experiences include light projection, sound, and occasional physical experiences (i.e. smoke and heat). There are indicated hotspots in the site which activate interpretative material when the flashlights light on them. Smart Studio launched with two layers of content in the hotspots–educational (how the blast furnace works, explanation of certain elements and history) and poetic (imagistic stories from the perspective of steel workers, based on historical content). Visitors can walk through the blast furnace site and receive none of the interpretative material if they choose, or they can use their flashlights to activate content.”

It’s great to see how Birmingham’s Jubilee Debt Campaign groups has begun to get guest authors for the blog they set up through the social media surgeries.