Tag: Citizen Journalism

Wonderful video of Simon Berry at the G20 rather nervously showing Bob Geldof his colalife carton. Slow-ish start but please keep watching, it turns into two dads talking about condoms.

Find the original film here. Update – for Lloyd’s view of the same please click this link.

31st March 2009

“Can we talk?” – a new measure for liveable cities.

I’ve been asked by MADE to write 200 words for the Birmingham Post. They’re gauging opinion before the Technical and Environmental Mayor of Copenhagen speaks in Birmingham next week. Klaus Bondam will be at Town Hall on April 6th to share with us how he expects Copenhagen to stays a wonderful place to live.

I was asked about an hour ago and the deadline is tonight. Here’s a bashed out draft of what I fancy saying. Please encourage, discourage amend etc in the comments. Does anyone have details of that survey that put us the 2nd best place for social media behind, is it Chicago?

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Is this a good place to talk? It’s not a question we often ask about cities. After all the whole point of a city is that we can connect, trade and work. Non of that happens without talk, does it? No it doesn’t, and neither does innovation.

Conversation is about scale, it happens where it’s easy for people to gather in small groups. The ICC is evidence that we know about audience on a grand scale, but how well do we do small scale gathering?

We need many places where we can meet, deliberately or by accident. That means a city which is easy to walking but above all has many interesting and modestly scaled places that people want to go. It means a tolerance of other’s ideas and interests, a city where people also like to listen.

These are partly planning issues and partly cultural issues. How good are our public services at setting the example and being interested in us, how good our our planners and designers at encouraging the interesting?

And of course we don’t just want to talk to ourselves. Birmingham needs take part in a global conversation. So our schools need open access to the internet and our school teachers and pupils helped to have the confidence to take part in sharing and developing ideas with people across the planet.

Oh and Birmingham doesn’t have free internet access in the city centre, whatever our PR folk may so. So Birmingham Fizz needs to be turned of or turned into a proper free wifi service, so we can finally start hearing each other speak.

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Well?

18th February 2009

Links: Fake websites, Digital Literacy, Deirdre without the Lol and Membership Organisations

Yoosk Birmingham. Question some of Birmingham’s political figures including Deirdre without the Lol.
Fake websites used to teach real digital skills in a US school. “Ms. Rosalia, the school librarian at Public School 225, a combined elementary and middle school in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, urged caution. “Don’t answer your questions with the first piece of information that you find,” she warned.”

Mark McDonald at Gartner “The public sector mission is a powerful tool and reflects the best of what it means to be in public service. Use the mission as a leadership tool, because it’s never been more important than right now.” (Via Devon Enterprise Architects spotted by Carl).

David Wilcox: “Clay Shirky really pins down what any organisation relying on members or supporters for its life must do if it is to stay in business as people increasing network online. That means change for campaigning charities, trade associations, and membership bodies who may have worked in the past through a mix of newsletters, events and perhaps not very special services. If they don’t offer more value, members and supporters will stop paying their subs. I’ve suggested this before, Clay says it much better.” The interview is by Amy Sample Ward.

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Finally: Obama’s folk say Twitter is a Gimmick: “The problem is that the new tool on the block tends to distract. It’s easy for a lazy and unimaginative campaign flack to sell story of “politician on twitter!”. Case of shiny object moving to shiny object. For organisations that need to invest in deep relationships, new services like twitter are scattershot and dizzying. They burn political capital. Besides, they don’t talk to the people you want to talk to [case of early adopters not being very useful to political campaigns? I’d still consider Twitter to be an early adopter service – won’t change until it has 60 million users, not just 6 million].”