Category: Local Government

3rd November 2011

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

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.

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:

So here are some questions:

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

1st November 2011

#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.

19th October 2011

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.

23rd August 2011

Local Government please don’t sack the connectors.

I’m just reading the very promising report on the future of public services written as part of the University of Birmingham Policy Commissions. “When Tomorrow Comes” began life with this discussion on Big Society at the Conservative Party Conference last year.

Now published the work describes a world very close to my heart, active engaged citizens using their networks and communications skills to help shape or lead public policy and public services. It also, though, identifies qualities we will need from public servants:

Key new roles include: storyteller, communicating stories of how new worlds of local public support might be envisioned in the absence of existing blueprints; weaver, making creative use of exisiting resources to generate something new and useful for service users and citizens; architect, constructing coherent local systems of public support from the myriad of public, private, third sector and other resources; and navigator, guiding citizens and service users around the range of possibilities that migth be available in a system of Local Public Support.

First of all these are not new roles – they already exist to a certain degree. We spent the best part of a year working with neighbourhood managers in Birmingham helping them with the tools and the skills to be storytellers, weaver’s and navigators. We do the same with the citizens they work alongside, not least through social media surgeries. Likewise we’re working with the Wolverhampton Strategic Partnership to help them advance their wonderful community empowerment learning programme, which helps public servants and citizens work together to be better weaver’s architects and navigators. We do similar work with housing associations – who value the connecting and empowering skills in their staff

Appreciating these qualities can sometimes feel like a tricky message to get across. I remember a fascinating afternoon on The Hague with Tessy Britton and Maurice Specht. Both of us were talking to senior officials in central government in Holland about the impact of potent networks, self organising citizens and militant optimism on how will will govern ourselves. “What should we do?”- they asked. Learn to get out of the way, perhaps offer very lightweight support I urged them. Invest in the connectors was Tessy’s advice. People like the initiative brokers we met later that week.

To late?

My fear is that these skills are not being truly valued now. The neighbourhood manager role has gone in Birmingham and in the process the council has lost some remarkable people who’s passion for connecting ideas and people made government much more accessible and I’m certain more efficient.

Other’s who are connected nationally regionally and locally are being pushed back into more definable jobs, turned back into box tickers in pre-ordained processes. These latter jobs are the ones we can eventually automate and prescribe. So as funding dries up for the jobs best done by connectors – please local government management, make sure you find ways of keeping them in fruitful work and onside – because you will be needing them.