I’m proud to be on the advisory board of Futureshift, which has evolved in a tiny part from some of the story gathering we did with the Community Lover’s Guide to Birmingham It’s an “an invitation to design and build a new civic initiative” and very potent and practical approach to support innovation on improving …
Smart City Birmingham – an action plan.
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 …
Lean urbanism: getting over Big Civic.
The Knight Foundation is an American organisation which funds innovation around the internet, news organisations and civic change. They have funded many experiments in hyperlocal media. Here they write about there support for Lean urbanism… “Big Civic” is disappearing. The days when CEO roundtables, mayors for life or a few big foundations were the primary …
The Sprit of BCCDIY rides again – an open data platform in a day in Birmingham
I often talk to people about BCCDIY. 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) …