“a non-profit group of Helsinki entrepreneurs started a website called Open Ministry to allow people of voting age to propose initiatives online. The website uses APIs from banks and mobile operators to confirm identities. Recently, the Finnish Parliament approved the platform after verifying that the electronic identification process is secure.”
Of course building a whole new one of these wouldn’t be so smart – borrowing from the one already built would probably be better
Futureshift: civic innovation in Birmingham and the black Country:
I’ve mentioned Futureshiftelsewhere – but if you have ideas for civic innovation in Birmingham or the Black Country this is the time and place to share them.
Elliot review of food safety comes to Birmingham – and we’re working on it alongside New Optimists.
My 10 Things about NHS Citizen – some reflections o a programme being pulled together by some of the best in the digital civic works – including our friends/collaborators Demsoc and Public-i. With encouragement from Tim Kelsey.
I sat on the Birmingham Smart City commission – my main two pennorth was to try and providing thinking about community level activity and how plans and changes might relate to that. I was also trying to encourage planning for simpler ways of achieving civic good.
Yesterday the commission made it’s roadmap/action plan public. This isn’t a consultation document – it’s a list of things that the commission wants to get on with making happen. They will either happen through existing initiatives or funding will be sought to get things going.
If you think you’re doing something to contribute to Birmingham as a smart city you can share that here.
You can read read the full document that gives context. pdf
It’s all been put together with a lot of effort from Digital Birmingham.
I have mixed feelings about Smart City as an idea, even a phrase. It feels too corporate and too much about large global businesses getting their teeth into how we run our cities. It can though be much more than that – and I do believe that the growing flow of data about what we do in cities will shift power and change relationships between civic and commercial organisations. So to help make that as human as we all want getting involved makes more sense than tutting from teh sidelines.
In 2009 a group of local developers and bloggers got together and built an alternative to Birmingham City Council’s website. They called it BCCDIY.
They wanted to demonstrate that information could be better organised and more easily accessed. They did it in a day (with some preparation) (you can see a version here) . The council’s new website had taken one of the countries largest consultancy firms four years and they had charged £2.8 million pounds.
BCC DIY taking shape in 2009 – image Dan Davies
When I tell public servants and residents about the cost of the council website they gasp. They’re not surprised, but they are angry. When I tell them about BCCDIY they also gasp – with a sort of mischievous happiness. They are delighted to see people taking things into their own hands and showing where bad decisions lead to wasted money and effort. A councillor involved in spending the £2.8 million pounds response to BCCDIY – when I explained it to them – was “we didn’t have the knowledge.”
Now you do, or you can (come and talk to any local developer – they’ll help you learn).
And now is not the time to repeat the mistake of just doing what the big consultancies tell local government is right.
The lesson of BCCDIY was not learnt when the Library of Birmingham website was built (by the same contractor) for £1.2 million pounds. I don’t know how much it should have cost – but I’m confident I know local agencies who would have been delighted to deliver it at a sixth of the price and to maintain it for much less than the current annual cost.
So let’s not make a similar mistake a third time, when the council eventually creates a place to put and share Open Data .
On Saturday Simon Whitehouse and some others will be building an Open Data platform for the West Midlands – in a day. You can join in, if you like. In effect he’ll be doing the equivalent of BCCDIY before a silly sum of money is spent by the public sector…
We’ll spend the day finding and collecting the data that people are interested in and we’ll put it all together in one place online, in the West Midlands Open Datastore. Once we’ve done that, it makes it all a lot easier to do something useful with.
If somebody can’t find the data that they are interested in then we will help them to write a Freedom Of Information request to ask for it. When those are answered we will add them to the Open Datastore.
I’m really pleased that Data Unlocked, the co-operative venture that I’ve recently helped to co-found, are providing the website for people to work on during the day, and that we will continue supporting it afterwards. We’ve helped to organise the day along with Open Mercia and RnROrganisation.
In Emer Coleman’s recent post about the City as a Platform she says that she has seen quotes of up to £200,000 for Data Platforms. We think that we can do a lot with some free open source software and the goodwill of people volunteering their time and skills.
Emer Coleman goes on to add that any datastore should be deliverable well within a developer budget of £20k. It seems that Saturday might get local authorities in the West mids off to a flying start.
Lol being shown around the new West Midlands Police website by Digital Service Manager Stuart Davis
Working with the Community Safety Partnerships in Birmingham has allowed us to help partners start great conversations across the city.
In North Birmingham a whole host of police officers are now tweeting and community groups are starting to organise themselves online. In South Birmingham a whole spectrum of people from the Community Safety Partnership now blog & tweet to help inform their community of the things that matter to them. In East Brum? Well in East Brum we have Lol .
We’ve written about him before, but Lol Turstan is a resident who loves where he lives so much he hasn’t waited for any of the local partners to get online, he ran with it himself and created B26 Community – A hyperlocal website for the community of Sheldon, where Lol can help spread the message from his Neighbourhood Watch group.
Lol has been working to forge partnerships locally to make the most of his site for the local residents, including strong links with his local police team.
I caught up with Sgt Hanif of Sheldon’s Neighbourhood Police team to find out what they thought of Lol and working with the B26 Community Blog;
“Lol is a very active, influential, member of Sheldon’s community, and already has vested interest in our area, so when we saw the opportunity for our team to attend the social media surgeries he was an obvious choice for us to take along. When it was first suggested to him he couldn’t dream of being involved – he was scared his age would be a barrier to understanding the technology.
But he went along with some of our officers and a few weeks later when I saw him next I was just, well WOW! He’d set up a website and was doing everything he could to make it as useful as possible.
Every time we have a community meeting he brings handouts to promote the site and is always asking others to get involved. We’ve worked with Lol to share our messages and make other things happen in the area – but some credit has to go to our PCSO Steve McGrath too. He’s worked especially close to Lol to get things on the site.
Together they’ve coordinated local schemes like installing locks on residents sheds after a spate of break ins and and recruiting for the street and neighbourhood watch groups.
We forward everything to him not just police stuff but anything that’s relevant. It gets it out there and it works because people tell me they’ve seen it on the site – and this level of communication was especially important to us after a murder in a local public house.”
Reassurance
“The day after the murder took place, because of the nature of the incident, we had to get a reassurance message to the effected communities as soon as possible, and while technically it happened in our neighbouring ward residents don’t recognise those boundaries we had to act fast.
There had been a shooting, and a possible case of mistaken identity and we wanted to help allay any rumours. I was informed at 11am and within 2 hours we’d got key members of the community together at the station and gave them what information we could for them to share.. We had a time sensitive message to get across. We wanted community we had gathered together was to share that message with other people.
Lol used his website and the contacts he’s made there to circulate this for us. We know his distribution is vast so for us it’s a short cut to the community. An officer on the beat or any other member of the community by word of mouth may have only reached out to 20 people they bumped into – with Lol and B26 Communty we reached potentially hundreds in a short space of time.
Moving forwards, as his contact list builds we would like to work with Lol to use his website to spread other key messages – we can reach a much wider audience than before and as a result we have a better informed community – which means they can make safer choices for themselves.”
Direct Link to Local People
Hannah Fitzgerald, West Midlands Police East Birmingham Communications Officer had this to say about the usefulness of communicating through community websites;
“Having someone like Lol running a site like B26Community is really useful for Sheldon and East Birmingham as a whole. There is no really localised press coverage in that area so he’s a direct link to the people there.
He’s hosted our live webchats for us on his site. The last one we broadcast was around Anti Social Behaviour and as Sheldon Park has suffered from episodes of Anti Social Behaviour in the past it was good to be able to communicate directly with the community there.”
Richard Eccelstone, West Midlands Police Social Media Champion added;
“We used to promote our webchats on our Twitter and Facebook pages – but that would attract comments from the whole of the West Midlands even when we wanted to focus on a specific area – that would really dilute the conversation but by connecting to local blogs we were able to use their audience to focus the talk and make it more relevant. This is true of B26 and other hyperlocal websites across the midlands.
We are looking to focus more of our communications on a local level and working with hyperlocal blogs such as B26Community is a fantastic way of doing this”
What’s great about the approach the police are taking to local communication is how effective it is. Our work with all the community safety partnerships has proven that talking with local people using the tools they understand improves communication right across the neighbourhood and in turn improves the perceptions of safety in those areas and helps make things happen. The video below is of Safer Places Office Austin Rodriguez, he’s talking about how using digital tools to communicate locally has benefited his area – evidence that partners working with the community – talking to them at a local level, works.
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