Social web & social media, consultancy, training and advice from a flâneur of the internets. Blogger, writer, broadcaster and runner of Birmingham: It's Not Shit. I also do the odd bit of art.
May 25th, 2010

New York, New Politics

I’m off to the city that never sleeps next week for the PdF (Personal Democracy Forum) Conference — a conference on how social technology changes how politics operates. Very much looking forward to seeing Clay Shirky, Jimmy Wales et al speak and also to giving the Civico platform it’s first major test.

Civico is an offshoot of Rhubarb Radio, which I’ve been a member of for about 14 months. Rhubarb is an online community radio station, and Civico is an extension of that platform to cover democracy and events. Last year we covered the PdfEU conference in Barcelona, with what was little more than the streaming audio and a whole lot of hard work.

For this conference we hope to be able to use the newly developed Civico player. This has two great developments, one is that it integrates with the Twitter API to capture tweets alongside the audio or video. The second is much more exciting (and proud to say, developed from my original concept).

Once the audio, video, tweets (and more in development) are captured then users can share any fraction (or all) of the coverage — highlighting the best line, the biggest laugh or the most damming miss-speak. In other words it makes it easy to share the bits that you want to share. And share them by link or by embedding wherever they like.

Here’s an example from a recent conference in London, by link and by embed (this is still a beta, excuse any foibles or downtime as the player is worked on):

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November 4th, 2009

Make things

I’ve recently worked on the social media coverage, on the day but also a few “wrap up” pieces, of the Hello Digital Festival in Birmingham. There were interesting talks, I found those outside my areas of expertise and interest (the Innovation in Gaming panel especially). Sion Simon’s address, which I didn’t have time to concentrate on live, but have just listened to again) mentioned that it was my “destiny” (using me as a name to represent talent in the local social media scene, I think) to have a statue much like the ‘carpet salesmen‘ (Brum’s industrial fathers) have in the city centre.

The Carpet Salesmen by M R Fletcher

The Carpet Salesmen by M R Fletcher

I’m not sure what it means, The Lunar Society is an oft used reference whenever it comes to thinking coming out of Birmingham — but those thinkers thought of science and industry and “made things”. I’m wondering if I need to “make things” too, or is “helping others make things” (a way to think about consultancy work) enough?

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– Sion Simon MP at Hello Digital














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