Category: Local Government

Birmingham's Local Strategic Partnership on Youtube: Cutting CO2

[youtube:http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=gvO4_oT5NQE]

Here’s a short film we made last week for Be Birmingham, the city’s recently revamped Local Strategic Partnership.
The film is a short piece which includes Dame Ellen MacArthur talking about the launch of the partnerships CO2 challenge for 2008 – that each of us should look for way to cut 100kg of CO2 in the next year. The yachtswoman is passionate about how we are wasting resources and used her own blog to say how impressed she is with the energy building up here in brum.

In the 100 seconds are also some tips from people on what you might want to do. If you start changing your behaviour to save CO2 you can also sign up here – so your tally is added to the cities huge target of cutting carbon by 60% come 2026. All part of last week’s enjoyable yet controversial Climate Change Festival.
You can comment on the film here and I’d love it if you did.

Hands up whose blog helps them learn? The Charity Commission thinks you're wrong.

I’m frowning at a consultation report published in March 2008 by the Charity Commission.

Public Benefit and the Advancement of Education March 2008 is the commissioners trying to clarify when an educational institution (private school) can or can’t claim charity status. However on page 18 they write:

There are two main aspects to educative merit or value:
• is the subject capable of being of educative value; and
• is the process such that it delivers educative value?

Fair enough, except by way of illustrating point 2 they add:

A modern example might be a ‘wiki’ site which might contain information about
historical events but, as the content is superficial and this information is not
verified in any way, it would not be accepted as having educational value without
positive evidence.
The Commission, having been satisfied on the evidence before it, accepted in a
particular case that an interactive website was a process capable of delivering
educative value as it was capable of delivering learning through improving the
student’s analytical and learning skills.
An individual’s blog, on the other hand, is not likely to be of educative value, as
neither the subject matter nor the process is of educational value.

As an explanation of why key social media tools are mechanisms with limited educational value I would say the report appears to be superficial and I can’t see that the information is verified in any way. I learn huge amounts through my blog and from wikis.

So which of you find your blogs to be of educational value? Which of you have been able to use wikis as a way of learning?

If you want to give the commission feedback on this consultation there doesn’t appear to be a way of commenting online on the document. It would of course be much better on the web not as a clunky pdf but as a wiki or maybe even a blog with a series of pages so we can comment on different aspect of the consultation – and then everyone can learn from it.

The only email address I could find was pressenquiries@charitycommission.gsi.gov.uk – which is OK to use because the press office will show a close interest in how the commission communicates and its reputation online.

Fair Play – a brief review of this partly online consultation for young people.

I’ve just played the online consultation game from the Department of Children and Families. You can find it here www.dcsf.gov.uk/playspace. Sorry to the folk at the department if I’ve slightly skewed the result. I ticked the over 13 button (which is true) as were the rest of my answers.

I expected to be very dismissive of the game but I was instead interested. It was an intelligent way to use a simple game to narrow down who was sharing their opinions. Allowing choices of things to go on the playground as a reward was a good idea (I immediately chose the treehouse, tunnel and den – why wouldn’t you!). The main problem with the game as a tool for consultation is I have no real incentive to work my way through to the the end. However it might work as a social object – to encourage a group of people to talk about what they want from play areas. It is also only one game – so inevitably won’t be well enough targeted for different age groups.

There is a separate online questionnaire, which I imagine is where the department is really expecting to get useful data. This, and all the other information could do with being more smoothly integrated. At the moment the game has it’s own set of pages, the rest simply appears on the web in a way which suits the department internal bureaucracy rather than the user. The game ought to have it’s own site with all the other information radiating out from that. It also would work best as w widget or some sort of onlne object which can be integrated into other people’s sites, myspace pages etc. Then the audience can distribute the consultation.

Summary:

  • A good stab
  • Not in the slightest web 2.0
  • Would have benefited from being executed with more conviction.

Twitter commentary on Birmingham City Council Live election results streaming

Twitter Birmingham Election Streaming 2008

To read more twitter responses to the very enjoyable and very local live streaming of the election results in Birmingham please look here. I enjoyed the streaming (hosted by Adrian Goldberg) but the text service (link here) was clumsy and the media pack only available as a pdf – which is bonkers ‘cos it should also have been full web pages (a culture that thinks in print/document terms?).

Election Bloggers Elsewhere:

Getting on the telly does help bloggers get comments – have a gander at Alix from the Lib Dems, Luke for Labour and Iain Dale for the Tories who were the BBC’s election bloggers. Even Ewan Spence managed a bit of the action. The BBC’s Emily Maitlis kept updating reports but no comments function and no trackback means that wasn’t my idea of blogging.

Other Links:

Birmingham 2008 Election results here.

Upyerbrum.

Vale Mail.

West Brom Blog.

At 3 am May 2nd Wikipedia was not updated.

Yahoo Pipe bashed together by Paul Bradshaw.

and a Journalist asks for sympathy!

Major thanks to Jon Bounds for starting and encouraging the shared election twitter. Update The morning after, this is he how he summed up the experience:

The actual conversation bounced between pub-style debate, willful surrealism, and the kind of listening and reacting to the actual words that microblogging really helps — collating the “did he really just say that?” factor between other viewers rather than waiting for the host to pick the politician up.

Four hours of it made us all flag, but it really was a worthwhile experience and in two years (when the local elections come around again) I really hope the council harness the conversation in some way too. It doesn’t have to be twitter (which, considering the UK local elections borked it, may not be around) but it was really powerful – and if publicised widely could be really useful.

Whilst Pete Ashton describes the evening here on the Birmingham Post blogs