Tag: Neighbourhoods

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.

Feedback from the Flip training delegates

In September we trained a group of citizens to use Flip cameras, so that they would be able to record events as part of Birmingham Local Democracy Week website. We documented this over at the Local Democracy Week website, and last week we sat down with some of them for a chat about how it all went and what they were able to capture.

One of the most striking things which came out of the conversation was how many of the active citizens interviewed think that what they do is unremarkable. But some of the stories which came out of this, like Claire Spencer’s interview with Local Hearts Award winner Luke McClean, show how dedicated so many people are to improving their communities. Read more

Stuff I've seen February 24th through to March 1st

These are my links for February 24th through March 1st:

  • GSA Dialogue App Demo – "From establishing any kind of web presence at all, through increasing understanding of the nuances of online interaction to pioneering a technological innovation; whether it's a case of expanding the uptake of proven methods or better joining up online activity with the 'real world' process, how can government organisations more effectively connect people with governance and decision-making online? We want your ideas, suggestions and comments – as front-line staff or as citizens."
  • Telegraph invents comparative degrees of atheism. Dawkins = “athiest” | Online Journalism Blog – "The vitriol is being generated because volunteer moderators who have invested hundreds of hours building an online community, and the members of that community, have had their community summarily yanked from beneath them, and had their means of communicating with each other turned off. "
  • VentnorBlog Denied Access to Coroner’s Court | Isle of Wight News:Ventnor Blog – We were told by the coroner’s officer, Richard Leedham, that the coroner, John Matthews, didn’t recognise us as a member of the press (despite VB publishing articles for four and a half years and NUJ membership for longer) and he didn’t want us in “his court.”
  • Unlocking the potential of mass localism | Left Foot Forward – government’s impulse is to identify what works locally and try to ‘scale-up’ the approach to other communities.

    This, we argue, is the wrong approach as it undermines the ownership and applicability that makes local solutions effective in the first place. Rather than stretching particular solutions, mass localism means supporting mass innovation.

  • Thoughts on OSM design, and looking forward and back – OpenGeoData – The problem of community at Open Street Map: "Everyone in OSM has basically been contributing for the kinds of extended periods of time as above, not the minutes or hours. Many see someone contributing so little as wrong or pointless. I say just the opposite. The people who spend minutes or hours disappear because we just don't welcome them."

Stuff I've seen September 20th through to October 6th

These are my links for September 20th through October 6th:

  • Pits’n’Pots – The Radical Press » Labour leader Barnes impersonates Pits’n’Pots! – "Labour Group Leader Mike Barnes has admitted to impersonating someone from this website to try and find information about a rumoured news story in another Authority."
  • Free music, courtesy of your library « Mabblog – "If (like me in Birmingham), you have an enlightened library service, they will have paid for a subscription to Naxos Music, so, by entering your library card number (you do have a library card, don’t you?) you can listen on-line, for free, to a “CD quality” stream of their recordings of Gilson’s music (or anything else in their vast and ludicrously high-quality catalogue). From home (or anywhere else, for that matter)."
  • Kirklees Community Technology Project « Yorkshire and Humber ICT Champion – ‘Local 2.0’ will work with community organisations, individuals, service providers, ward councillors and others within one neighbourhood and will look at how new web technologies can help people share information more effectively and bring more opportunities to neighbourhoods.
  • Feeding back citizen experience – Digigov – "We not only hinder the citizen in their ease of reporting (thereby potentially adding to their distress or preventing them from complimenting the service), we also lose something much more valuable – the ability to analyse where small changes across public services could result in maximum effect."
  • Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: A Methodology for Learning from Social Media Pilots: Reflection – Questions to Help Deep Reflection Occur

    1.What worked really well in this project?
    2.Did it accomplish goals or outcomes? In what ways?
    3.Did it fall short? Why?
    4.What would you do differently?
    5.What surprises came up during the project? What unexpected happened? What could you learn or capture from that?
    6.What insights did you get during the project?
    7.What processes did you use that worked well? Which didn’t work so well? Why do you think that was?