A wonderful idea picked from work David Barrie was doing in Middlesborough. Designing a town/city/community/region around food supply. Perhaps this is a way forward for the £50 million Lottery bid for the Black Country Urban Park.
Category: Leadership
The Revolt of Common Sense – Larry Lessig
Highbury 2.0
In the 1989’s Birmingham’s leaders gathered at Highbury Hall in Moseley for a summit meeting. It was the second time such a gathering had happened and Highbury 2 spawned the idea to break the concrete collar which was stranggling the growth of the city centre.
With the ring road down it is 2007 and Stef Lewandowski is now proposing a crowdsourced future for the city centre, using us and a wiki to shape where next. Highbury 2.0 has my support, how about you?
The Big Green Challenge Hits Birmingham – a new podcast on the Grassroots Channel
NESTA was in Birmingham today to entice us into innovating. The Big Green Challenge is a two year climate change project with a £1 million pound prize at the end. Any community group (or similar) can win if they find a communal and repeatable way to cut CO2 emissions by 60%. Easy then!
There were queries/criticism at the launch (which you’ll hear in the podcast), some on the blog post of the media partner for the prize.
I approve of ideas with ambitious targets. Too often public life offers mediocrity born of easy targets.
As one Brummie told us (if anyone remembers who please tell me) at today’s regional launch it may well work best if people collaborate on ideas. Indeed I was wondering of the prize fund could have been split to reward a winner and reward those who collaborate to innovate – something on the lines of that audacious open source bid for the Third Sector Innovation Exchange.
Listen to our podcast at the bottom of this post, watch Sarah Beeny’s video, read the website, subscribe to their blog and let us know if you apply.
By the way I heard interesting ideas from Jerome Baddley of Nottingham Energy Enterprise – so hello Jerome. The prize is also on partnership with Unltd. Birmingham was the first launch, more dates in other cities throughout November.