birminghamuk

WxWM2

POSTED IN Conferences & Talks, social media | TAGS : birminghamuk, history, hyperlocal, internet, jon bounds, local blogging, wxwm2 8 June 2009

A week or so ago I did an impromptu talk at WxWM2 (a gathering of the social media interested) in Brum — it was very much an unconference format so I wasn’t sure I was going to say anything at all. However a slot arose and I talked for about 20 minutes about how I came to be running a “community” website — almost by accident — and how it’s important to understand the responsibilities that people who (voluntarily almost always) end up providing useful online services are taking on. Often, if there isn’t a lot of support, it can end up feeling a burden, however much the people care:

Jon Bounds at WxWM2 from Nicky Getgood on Vimeo.

Thanks very much to Nicky Getgood for capturing as much of it as she did.

Birmingham – Open (Data) City

POSTED IN del.icio.us | TAGS : birminghamuk, work 8 April 2009

Interesting news about central government funding for Birmingham to pilot opening up city council data online, could be excellent news if it doesn't get too bogged down in process and uses the "open" idea for everything it does. I have high hopes. [link]

A degree about Facebook, Twitter and Bebo

POSTED IN social media | TAGS : birminghamcityuniversity, birminghamuk, masocialmedia 30 March 2009

I was going to write a long post in defence of Birmingham City University’s new MA in Social Media after it got an inevitable, but still sad, “shock horror” response from the press (eg. in the Telegraph), but luckily David Stuart has already done that for me:

“Being able to use blogs, social networks, twitter, wikis, podcasts etc, is obviously not the same as understanding the role they play in society, but acknowledging that would have got in the way of a ‘good’ story. Obviously it is only a good story for the ‘gone to hell in a handcart’ brigade, but those are idiots who read the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph.”

In essence, it’s important that real research and quaility (that means academically minded and structured) training goes on in this field — it’s almost unique in having a huge amount of information available for research, but very little work being done well.

Google Street View fly-by

POSTED IN birminghamuk, geekery, my projects, video | TAGS : alcester road, birminghamuk, google, google streetview, king's heath, video 19 March 2009

Using a route planner for Google Maps, and a screen capture app to capture the screen. This is sort of what it would look like to drive from King’s Heath towards the town centre — the route was going further, but there were gaps in which roads were covered by Street View.

Speakers you shall find

POSTED IN misc | TAGS : bhs, birminghamuk, British Home Stores, hawker 11 March 2009

I don’t think I’ve been into British Home Stores since I was dragged there to get some forgotten item of school uniform, probably a shirt or a grey V-necked jumper. Is it possible to by grey V-necked jumpers anywhere else?

Maybe the grey V-necked jumper and cream chino market has fallen into fast decline. I blame those bloody schools that sell sweatshirts with logos on, and men over 40 who think they have any right to wear anything other than cream chinos and lightly-checked shirts under their car coats. Sweatshirts for small children? Children who — at least used to — run around all day in states of high excitement, think of the olfactory organ headmasters and governors. Maybe that’s the reason kids aren’t as energetic these days, they’re too afraid of wet patches under the arms of their grubby blue jerkin things.

So, no I’ve not been into British Home Stores. I have, however, been past the outlet on New Street in Birmingham this week. At first I thought the shop had closed and been taken over by one of those ‘anything for £5′ shops, those boils on retail that blast awful chart ‘rnb’ at you as you hurry past (and who said they could use ‘rnb’ as a genre? R’n'B is early Stones, early Who…). But no, the management of the venerable BHS have decided to employ the lowest market tactics available. They’re not competing on price, quality, ambience, or heaven forbid ‘cool’. No.

They’ve employed someone to shout “come here, come get your luveryly V-necked school jumpers and cream chinos”, and not in a chirpy cockerny market stall way either. A dull monotone hawker skulks out of sight, drawling about “store credit cards” — the mating call of the terminally feckless shopper — through a PA too small to do the job in anything more than buzzing compression.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Bhs, you may as well pack up now.

The Big City Plan – Part 4 – Did it work?

POSTED IN good practice, my projects, social media | TAGS : big city plan, birminghamuk, council, local government, online consultation 17 February 2009

The Big City Talk site collected 274 comments, not a huge number perhaps — but from my point of view they were all helpful, considered, and intelligent. There was also clear evidence of commenters building on the work of others, and better ideas forming. It is also very possible (and I’ve seen from anecdotal evidence) that people were using the plain English version of the site to inform their comments put though the “official channels”.

Pending a FOI request to find the exact number comments generated by the Council’s consultation methods (which also included two large-scale facilitated consultation events, a number of smaller ones and a “consultation bus“) the local paper reported: “more than 1,600 people express views, including over 500 opinions online in the city’s blogging community.”. Whether they’ve been confused as to where blogging comments came from, or have overestimated both, it doesn’t matter — 274 comments out of a total of 1600 is a good amount.

Had we not had to follow the structure of the Big City Plan “Work in Progress” document, or had to provide direct “translation”, or expend a lot of effort making the purpose of the BCT site clear — had we been able to have the site available for the full eight weeks (it took around four to make the plain English, commentable version) — then the number of comments and the standard of them would have been higher. That is not to mention the effect of the expensive advertising campaign pointing to BigCityTalk.org.uk rather than BigCityPlan.org.uk, or the kudos gained from being the official site — who knows what effect that would have had.

My Conclusions

The resources needed to produce the Big City Talk site were only time (the domain name cost £2.99, and I used existing hosting), the skills we used would have been readily available within the council structure — and experience if needed is already in the city. The only thing stopping Birmingham City Council running a “social” online consultation was the organisational will. I think there may be more of that now.

The Big City Plan is still a long process, having finished this consultation period the next step is to write a final plan — which again has to be put out for consultation.

I will consider the Big City Talk project a success if that consultation’s online component is a lot more like our way — and I won’t hesitate to repeat the exercise if it isn’t.

These are only my conclusions and views, and the “organisation” that produced the BCT site is a classic case of “organising without organisations” as Clay Shirky puts it — everyone will have thier own opinion. I’d love to see as many opinions and views, and constructive comments on how this sort of thing should work — please leave them here, blog yourself, or link to any you find.

The Big City Plan – Part 3 – How

POSTED IN blogging, Conferences & Talks, good practice, my projects, web development work | TAGS : big city plan, birminghamuk, online consultation, wordpress 17 February 2009

After sounding out interested parties, mainly via twitter, a number of us met up at December’s Birmingham Social Media Café — at this point the clock was already on us, we’d only been able to see the Council’s online shortcomings once the official consultation period (legally pegged at eight weeks) had started.

It quickly became clear that we would need to produce a site that was independent from any current web presence — to counteract any fears of us attempting to unduly influence the process. I had already quickly produced a WordPress site to use — intending that “we” (whoever was interested) would use it to produce a translated version.

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My partner Julia, has done a lot of work using “plain English“ and she convinced me that it was a suitable framework for us to use — she even spent a long evening translating part of the “work in progress” document as an example. The plain English campaign also offer advice and guidance via their website that would prove useful.

I chose WordPress not only because I am very confident with producing sites with it, but because its back-end interface was well known to many of the potential bloggers/translators — there wasn’t time to train people in new skills. There were other options (including CommentPress, a forked version of WP just for online document commenting), but we also had the problem of attempting to show both the original document and the plain English Version alongside each other — something that I wasn’t confident of achieving quickly with a (to me) untried system. It quickly became obvious that WordPress was the only choice in the short term.

In the meeting we decided that:

we had to break the document down into as small a chunks as was possible
the plain English version had to be absolutely free from any opinion
the version we produced had to match the original document structurally, so comments could be easily sorted
both versions needed to be viewed simultaneously
our version needed to be as searchable as possible, utilizing tags, metadata and whatever tools we had
we would collect links to information not stored within the original document, and invite further explanation from users
comments would not be held in moderation, and only offensive comments would be removed (in the event none had to be)
comments would be threaded – to facilitate debate amongst commenters
and it had to be done as soon as possible.

At this point we didn’t worry too much about how to feed the comments back into the official process — the opinion that we would “print them out individually and post them if necessary” was voiced. Time, with the Christmas break upon us, was the main factor.

Micheal Grimes and myself volunteered to take time over the holidays to break the consultation document down into manageable chunks and pull it into the blog structure — in the end this was more difficult to do that we anticipated due to inconsistent numbering styles and the sheer size of the piece. It also took a fair bit of WordPress hackery to get the document to sit properly in order.

Stefan Lewandowski had been part of a group of people consulted at a much earlier stage about the Big City Plan, and his contacts would be useful in smoothing the way as we were all concerned that, whatever our personal views, there was no sense in antagonising the powers that be. In fact there was tacit agreement not to talk about the plan in anything but glowing terms until the site was finished.

The Translation

The Birmingham social media community is wide, and contains a lot of talents, but for differing reasons (personal or work commitments, conflicts of interest) — while there was a lot of support and advice available to us — the number of people available to take on the translation was more limited. In the end myself, Nick Booth, Nicky Getgood, Julia Gilbert and Michael Grimes were the ones that took on the task.

Each will tell you that the job was not easy, that it was not a simple job of changing long words for shorter. I heard the Big City Plan being referred to as having been written in “regeneration-speak” and that’s what it was. Full of passive sentences (which are bad for readability), as well as unexplained acronyms and references to unexplained policies and documents. I would estimate that the team spent around 5-6 hours each an evening for three weeks working on it, which is on top of the work done on the website itself.

Testing and release

As soon as the translation was complete (and in fact just before) we released the site to a few people to test — and to comment, aware that there’s nothing as intimidating to a commenter as a blank “page”. From this we gained a lot of valuable feedback (especially from Mathew Sommerville and Tom Martin) and a good sense that the site we’d produced would be easy enough to use.

Once tweaks were made, and people blogged about it there wasn’t much turning back — we hadn’t explicitly told the council what we were doing, nor had much idea of how they’d react. Personally, I know I was worried about how it would be received — Birmingham is still quite a small town as far as personalities go. There was (still is?) a chance that it could have damaged our reputations.

Feeding comments into the consultation

At first we were pleased with the “official reaction” to the Big City Talk site (we gained links from both the offcial site and the council-run Facebook group), but attempting to organise how to feed the comments being generated into the consultation proved more problematic.

The site quickly and steadily gained a lot of intelligent comments, that it was possible to see were building on each other — in a way that the official process (online at least) didn’t facilitate. We were aware that submitting a large volume of comments needed special handling, and so tried to make it as easy as possible for the consultation workers.

It seemed that despite direct contact that there wasn’t a lot of will in the BCP team (those eventually to deal with the comments) to work with anything that that they hadn’t already planned for. We repeatedly offered to format and deliver comments from the Big City Talk site in any way that could be done, but we received no guidance. This was disappointing, but the instructions for submitting comments formally were very clear — we were able to submit the comments on paper and also by email. While this was not as convenient as it could or should have been, all the comments were delivered in a manner that ensured they were part of the consultation. Help from the Council’s Communication Team was valuable at this point.

But, has it had a worthwhile effect?

The Big City Plan – Part 2 – Why

POSTED IN good practice, my projects, social media, web development work | TAGS : big city plan, birminghamuk, council, online consultatio 16 February 2009

I enjoy my free time, so why did I (and the rest of the team) give up huge swathes of their Christmas break and January evenings to help our local council through a consultation process?

Simply, we are all people who care deeply about our city and also believe passionately in the power of online and offline collaboration. The official online consultation system wasn’t something that we saw as able to provide the best chance to the citizens of Birmingham.

We wanted to blog about it, nay were encouraged to do so by council officials — but blogging would have been a futile and time-consuming exercise. To pick out a small part of the plan (which consisted of many different, some complementary, some opposing, wildly different options) would be to have written something inconsequential and without context.

There was also the problem of explaining the options without editorialising — as the document was very very dense and complex, that it also referenced a large number of other development plans and studies didn’t help matters.

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The official “consultation portal” used the Limehouse software, that had some obvious shortcomings (lack of RSS for one) but does allow commenting. However the council department responsible took the decision not to publish comments for the duration of the consultation period — as yet they still haven’t.

As I told them:

“the limehouse software was clearly set up for users to leave comments, and to view the comments of others (there’s a search function just for this purpose).

To invite comments and then for people see no evidence of either:

a) their own comments appearing – as they would on the BBC or any newspaper site or any blog

or b) anyone else leaving any comments – which indicates that this is an unloved (unwanted?) plan

created a very bad impression.

If a site isn’t going to publish comments it should clearly say that they are being “sent to the team for consideration” and not imply that they are going to be shown.

To publish the comments is to invite debate, it could stimulate conversations around the questions — people building on other people’s ideas are more likely to both be constructive (it would lessen the chance of purely anti the “question” comment) and to be better comments “the wisdom of crowds” in effect.”

To be fair their are many people within Birmingham City Council that could have solved these issues, but for whatever reason they were too far away from the decision-making process in this instance.

The comment problem wouldn’t have been as bad if the document was easily understandable to everyone, whereas conversely if people could have used the comments online to help each other understand the document then the inaccessible language it was written in would have been mitigated against.

To fail in both ways made the online consultation — to my mind and to those of my fellow social-media types — very poor indeed. We had the skills and the motivation to do something about it.

The Big City Plan – Part 1 – Constructive Activism

POSTED IN blogging, good practice, my projects, portfolio, social media, social media work, web development work, writing work | TAGS : big city plan, birminghamuk, online consultation, power of information 16 February 2009

Birmingham is getting a real reputation for being a place where social media doesn’t only happen, it organises and does things that are intended to create social good. From the Social Media Surgeries (developed from a concept used by Pete Ashton by Nick Booth to something almost the whole of the blogging community takes part in) to specially created social enterprises like We Share Stuff (which aims to use social media to help with digital inclusion) there seems to be a collective aim to use the technologies to help as many people as possible. The reputation has spread wide enough for Swedish journalist Axel Andén to come here just to see what we get up to and our motivations.

One of the largest projects has been our volunteer-created online consultation for Birmingham City Council’s Big City Plan — the work which Axel called “constructive activism”.

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The Big City Plan is one part of a larger plan by the council for the future of Birmingham, but it has been heavily promoted as being about “the next twenty years” of the City Centre (and by extension has an impact on the rest of the city). Over Christmas and stretching into early February 2009 the official consultation period on the draft plan (referred to by the council as the “Work In Progress Document”) happened — there were high profile events, advertising hoardings, taxi advertising and even (which I can’t really understand) awards awarded to a draft plan.

Yet there wasn’t really an online version that worked in a good and social way — which lead myself and a group of bloggers to spend huge amounts of our once free time creating a comment-able version of the document that also used plain English.

The Big City Talk site (still live although comments are closed) collected comments and passed them through the official channels, and managed to work without unduly antagonising the Council — whose work it tried to help (although by its existence was perhaps implicitly criticising).

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I think that the exercise was a success, it has been well received online, perhaps as expected, but also been mentioned in the Cabinet Office’s Power of Information report.

Since the creation, process and reasoning are perhaps interesting for differing reasons I’ve decided to blog about the whole thing in a series of posts:

Which I’ll post in order as I write them.

Seven things you’re not at all interested in

POSTED IN misc | TAGS : birminghamuk, blues, catnip, central tv, chain, church, drama, meme, Michael Grimes, Pontins, Radio 4, star wars, suicide, tagging, tomatoes, villa 28 January 2009

I don’t usually take part in these blog tagging things, normally because they tell you to write about yourself. Now I’ll admit that a lot of things I write (here, on the work-type blog, on BiNS, on the Birmingham Post blog, wherever anyone lets me) are tinged with personal thoughts, experiences and the like — but they’re not about me.

I’m quite a dull person, much happier cocooned away in my own world of rarely-completed conceptual art and worrying about where the next fiver is coming from than doing anything as extrovert as diary writing. That said, having spent a good portion of Saturday willingly annoying Michael by calling him: first Mike, then Mick, then Mickey, I feel I should play along with his game too.

So the concept is, seven facts that people don’t already know about me. Let’s go.

I don’t listen to Radio 4, hardly at all.. It’s a heresy to admit it in some circles, but I don’t listen to Today, or World at One, nor intriguing documentaries about the plight of indigenous peoples. I’m so rarely in the mood for that sort of stuff and habits long-formed are for music radio, or football-based speech. I don’t get on with recorded material, time-shifting audio doesn’t move me. That said I’ll listen to Hitchhikers over and over again, keep up with the Archers, and I’ve got Radio 4 on now — I’m too busy to get up and switch over.
I have seen Star Wars — well, a bit of it. I’ll often tell people that I’ve neither seen, nor have any interest in Star Wars, Indiana Jones or Lords of the Rings — and it’s true. I’ll accept that Star Ward has has a huge impact on popular culture (so large in fact that I now see no reason to watch it, the plot characters and iconography are freely available), but I missed the time and there are so many more interesting things to be catching up on. But when about ten on holiday at a Pontins hotel in Margate they showed Star Wars One at midnight, in the ballroom, on a projector screen no bigger than a double bed-sheet. I watched a bit at the start — robots in a desert — dozed off bored, and was put to bed.
Although an atheist, there was a time when I went to Church twice a week. I went to a Church of England School in Handsworth, St Mary’s, the churchyard of which has many of the Lunar Society buried in. It wasn’t a particularly religious school, certainly not Christian religious (more Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, everything but), but we did have to go to a proper Church service on a Wednesday. Couple this with my joining the Boys Brigade (mainly to play football), and its compulsory attendance at Perry Barr Methodist Church on Sunday, and I was numbing-my-bum on pews for at least two hours a week up till the age of 11.
I had to have remedial spelling and handwriting lessons at secondary school. Odd for a person who has moved from journalism to publishing to writing down almost all my thoughts on the Internet, but sure enough I was taken out of Geography lessons on Tuesdays and given whatever was the literacy equivalent of electric shock treatment for an hour. It didn’t work, and I still don’t fully understand what an ox-bow lake is.
I was invited to join the Central Kids Televison Drama Group, but didn’t go. I showed no mean talent for acting in my youth, and was sent a letter inviting me to go to the TV studios on Saturday mornings to do drama stuff. My dad told me I could choose between that and football, so my drama career was over. It was the route that a kid from school took to being in Crossroads and eventually becoming the “did she just shake her tic-tacs at me?” guy — I coulda been a contender!
I used to support the Villa. Indeed, yes, I know. While I was born in the shaddow of the Trinity Road stand (or at least within earshot of the roar of the Holte), I was brought up a Blues fan by my Dad who had spent his formative years living in St Andrews Road. But in the coming years I was brainwashed into becoming claret and blue by my Granddad (Mum’s side) and uncles — Villa winning the League and then the European Cup (I have a photo of me with it) as I was growing up didn’t hurt either.By 18 I had a Villa Park season ticket (even so I still spent some Saturdays on the Spion Kop).My best mate, guitarist in my band, and bluenose killed himself a few years after that — I went to a very dark place, and when I came out I supported the Blues. Maybe something to do with attempting to replace him, and I’m sure psychiatrists would have a field day if I believed in them.
I don’t like vegetables. A hardship for a vegetarian, but I don’t like carrots, peas, any type of beans, swedes, turnips, parsnips. I like fake meat and fruit. It’s Linda McCartney sausages and tinned tomatoes for tea.

I’m meant to nominate seven other people to do this now, but I did this because I felt like it (and a sort of Rabbit Hole Day entry a bit late) so although I’ll list them I don’t care at all if they do it. Julia Gilbert, Abby Corfan, Danny Smith, Stuart Parker, Mark Steadman, TWM_Driver (now he has no buses to write about) and Deirdre Alden.