5:37
Andrew Mitchell telling us how great Birmingham is, and how the Tories enjoy coming here, and how thriving a blogging community we have. Creep

5:37
Last time they came the Tories had a lovely reception from the people of Birmingham. That’s partly why I moved here too.

5:39
“If we don’t dictate things the market will” (Andrew Mitchell, paraphrased; a lot)

5:40
Birmingham’s coalition council has been good for democracy apparently, and is a good model.

5:41
“The whole concept of the Big Society … is an answer to the self-evident fact that the state can’t do everything” – Andrew Mitchell

5:42
“There is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same as the state” (Andrew Mitchell). Hmm… :-/

5:42
Baroness Warsi will be joining us later, apparently.

5:44
“There is a strong opportunity to change the way our civic activity works…” (Nick Booth, worrying that we’re retreating from that).

5:46
“The trick is not just to put everything in the public domain, but to put it there in a way that’s accessible” – Andrew Mitchell

5:47
“Is there any tension between Cllr Whitby and David Cameron” re elected Mayors? (Simon Gray). No, according to Andrew Mitchell.

5:48
Is AM ‘Minister for Birmingham’ or not? Question now being asked.

5:49
Difficult having a regional minister, because there are so many regional interests. – Andrew Mitchell

5:50
Rather than rushing in, we’re going to think about it. (Andrew Mitchell re regional ministers and mayors, etc)

5:50
Having trouble hearing…

5:51
Sorry if this reads a bit randomly, I’m also having trouble focussing.

5:52
Alison Smith: what are the Conservatives’ digital priorities?

5:53
“People who have disabilities … should not be impeded in any way by any changes that we may make” – Andrew Mitchell

5:55
Digital content (eg streaming) tends not to be accessible. If disabled people are expected to engage with politics accessibility needs to be better. (I think that was the gist of what Alison was saying.)

5:56
Nicky Getgood: what can you do to help people do interesting things with local, redundant spaces?

5:58
“In the past the balance of power has rested far too much with developers and not the local people” … areas surrounding people’s homes has been too much in the hands of developers, who hold neighbourhoods to ransom in that respect. AM

5:59
Oh hear we go, he’s slagging of John Prescott. Yawn.

5:59
‘Here’ we go, I mean. Sorry.

6:01
“Any smaller plans [for Sutton Coldfield development] now that the larger ones have been put to one side?” – Najm Clayton

6:02
Apparently they’ve asked lots of people and have a ‘permissive’ blueprint; engine is economic investment and growth, so until then… erm, no. I think.

6:03
But he’s doing everything he can to make Sutton Coldfield attractive.

6:03
And he’s off. Many thanks to Andrew Mitchell for his time, that was quite interesting.

6:05
Some centre-right policy wonk is handing out business cards. They’re blue.

6:11
Baroness Warsi has arrived.

6:18
Had a quick and interesting discussion with Baroness Warsi on why social media is worth taking notice of. Many of us wouldn’t be in this room now if it wasn’t for Twitter. Interestingly her Question Time non-appearance was due to an eye infection, and that if it wasn’t for social media-ites people would still be unaware of that. So she’s not completely dismissive.

6:20
Alex Hughes has been drawing cartoons. Hopefully I’ll be able to link to some later.

6:25
Sam Coates (their ‘digital’ man) says the point was simply to get ministers to meet alternative media publishers. In which case I applaud them.

6:25
And now I go, because I’m running low on battery.

6:41
I’m back briefly to give you Alex Hughes’ artistic interpretation of the meeting: http://bit.ly/cMdeab

6:41
Erm, don’t follow that link. Apparently it’s a zip file. Hang on…

6:47
…Here it is: http://www.dropbox.com/gallery/564489/2/Drawnalism/ConConf2010?h=4bb671

• Possibly related posts

  No related posts.

I’ve no idea why, or what the format’s going to be; but I shall attempt to liveblog it anyway, and I shall try and put questions to them from Twitter etc (if I get a chance). I’ll be using the hashtag #tpcblogmeet.

Anyone who’s seen my previous attempts at liveblogging will know that I’m crap at it, so lets hope I make a better job of it this time.

It kicks off at 17:30 (that’s 5.30pm to those of you who can’t handle the 24-hour clock). You can follow my liveblog here (providing I manage to keep it up).

Update

That was all yesterday. I’ve now posted the results, in full.

• Possibly related posts

  No related posts.

My MP is standing down, so I used TheyWorkForYou to see how her successor had voted on particular issues in Parliament. I didn’t like what I saw, so I used YourNextMP to contact the other potential candidate who I might be willing to vote for.

The message ran:

I’m as yet undecided who to vote for in the General Election. I would therefore very much like to know how you would have voted on the following issues:

[list of issues that have been debated in Parliament and that I'm interested in]

A simple ‘for’, ‘against’ or ‘abstain’ will do, but please give your personal view and not simply the party line.

Twenty minutes later I had an email with those issues listed and, next to each one, his voting preference.

I was very impressed. And I liked what I saw. And if he wins the seat I shall keep an eye on him using TheyWorkForYou, The Public Whip and YourNextMP.

• Possibly related posts

  1. Talk About Local unconference 2010: Election coverage discussion
  2. The Digital Inclusion Champion hasn’t convinced me that she understands what she’s championing
  3. ‘Digital Citizens and Democratic Partipation’: discussion outcomes

The research was undertaken last week by online pollsters YouGov, on behalf of the Citizenship Foundation. Almost 4,000 young people between 14 and 25 took part in the survey.

In answer to the question ‘How much, if at all, do you trust the following to tell the truth?’, journalists fared poorly. The scores for ‘little to no trust’ make worrying reading:

Or do they? Is it in fact reassuring that The Sun isn’t trusted by its vast readership, or that newspapers don’t necessarily hold as much sway over the public as maybe we believe?

Further information

• Survey results summary (pdf)
• Full survey results (pdf)

• Possibly related posts

  1. Young people don’t value the political power of social media, but they would vote
  2. Would you like more digital engagement knowledge-sharing events?
  3. Ordnance Survey OpenData: what is it? Come and discuss it at Moseley Exchange

Whilst I appreciate that the report is framed as “an active industrial policy” (in the introduction by Lord Mandelson and Ben Bradshaw MP), I do think it has missed the importance of the voluntary aspect of digital engagement.

Creating for love not money

Lord Carter’s report does acknowledge that people are using and sharing stuff differently now, and appears to acknowledge the blurring boundaries between creators and consumers of content and services. But, at the same time, it seems unable to comprehend the ‘marketplace’ as anything fuzzier than ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’. The report itself seeks new models for payment and rights, and the strategy document of the Technology Strategy Board (the body charged with implementing the government’s strategy) considers the challenge of “how to identify opportunities for content producers to generate revenue from consumption of their content”.

But, as Jon Bounds pointed out in a discussion group last week, a great many people are creating content, systems and services without requiring any sort of payment. They may do it because they enjoy it, or they see a need for it, or simply because they can.

For example (and I use ones from Birmingham simply because I know of them), Big City Talk is a translation of Birmingham’s development plan into plain English, by a group of friends who thought it needed doing; Matthew Somerville pushed the web accessibility agenda by autonomously producing an accessible version of the National Rail Enquiries website; Nicky Getgood put Digbeth on the social media map with Digbeth is Good because she just liked writing about it.

As a result, people (generally understood by the Report as ‘consumers’) often become as useful to the commercial ‘producers’ as the producers are to them: except they do it for no financial reward. They are benefiting the economy and society, often in spite of the market.

Physical infrastructure needs support, but so does social infrastructure

This is all possible because people can now share easily, widely and instantaneously. Social interactions can be much faster, more productive, more democratic, less financially constrained and less reliant on the market than before.

The tools that enable these interactions become (and indeed are known as) our ‘social networks’.

Twitter, for example, is to the digital infrastructure as train companies are to railway tracks. Although the former relies on the latter, it is the former that makes or breaks the social advantage offered by the latter. Commercial decisions by train companies can have profound effects on society: for example, if they close a rural line because it isn’t financially viable, the community it served is suddenly cut off from the rail network. The companies are providing a service that uses a physical infrastructure, but the service itself is surely part of our social infrastructure. In the same way, Twitter is as important a part of the social infrastructure as the servers that it relies on are part of the physical.

Team DB (as the Digital Britain team were known) has put a lot of energy into thinking about infrastructure, but – as far as I can tell – this is understood simply in terms of pipes and access: what about the systems that provide our new social infrastructures?

When Twitter goes down it can have a profound effect. For example, when the Iranian authorities tried to black out media coverage of its recent election, Twitter was used by the public as a key tool for communicating news to the rest of the world. However, Twitter had planned an hour of downtime right at the point when Iran needed it most, and so took the commercially dangerous decision to postpone it until the next day. A laudable move, but the downtime still happened while the situation in Iran was unstable.

In the Iran example the downtime was due to planned maintenance, but Twitter buckles under the strain quite frequently: it’s not as reliable as we expect it to be. For example, I now rely on Twitter for managing my social life – in much the same way as many people now rely on mobile companies – so when the service fails I am suddenly cut off from my supportive community.

Certainly the digital infrastructure is crucial, and Lord Carter is right to investigate ways of encouraging innovation and investment in order to ensure it reaches everyone. But government also needs to appreciate the importance of supporting the new social infrastructures (such as Twitter) that are enabled by the digital ones, and to ensure that they’re not undermined by commercial imperatives: as we saw to a degree in the example of Twitter and the Iran election.

People are volunteers, not simply consumers

Yes we need to be commercially competitive if we are to survive and thrive in a digital world; but why? For the sake of it? Or, ultimately, for the sake of people? Surely the economy needs to be healthy in order to benefit people, not the other way round?

People are not just producers or consumers, but individuals who operate on far more complex social levels, driven by love, need, interest, recognition (the list goes on): they are, in the broadest sense, volunteers. As such (and as mentioned earlier) they use the new tools not just to consume, but to create, share, and affect change.

For us all to do so effectively, for us to get the most out of the new tools and infrastructures, requires high levels of digital literacy. Simply knowing how to use the tools is not enough; we need a profound understanding of how to maximise the benefit of those tools and how to adapt them for new circumstances.

The role of the formal education sector in developing skills and aptitudes is acknowledged in Lord Carter’s report, but what about the voluntary* sector? That is, the sector which is – by virtue of being relatively out of reach of government control – often best placed to understand people as people and volunteers, rather than as workers and consumers.

Many charities and community groups are already supporting people in using and understanding digital technologies: how they can be harnessed for personal development, personal wellbeing, civic engagement and social change; all the stuff that people do voluntarily, without expecting any sort of payment.

Add to those voluntary bodies all the loose groupings of individuals who give their time simply because they care (for example Birmingham’s Social Media Surgeries, the recent LocalGovCamp, Rhubarb Radio, numerous bloggers such as Nicky Getgood and Charlie Pinder), and it becomes apparent that a whole swathe of useful talent has been overlooked by Lord Carter’s report.

That talent doesn’t just use tools that are made available by commercial outfits (such as Twitter), it relies on them; more than that: although Twitter (for example) is a commercial venture, it is the users who are shaping its social significance.

For Digital Britain to be a success, there needs – I feel – to be an acknowledgement of the hold that commercial bodies have over our social infrastructures, and a mechanism for managing and regulating that.

In case I’m talking rubbish…

I’m neither an academic nor a researcher, so these thoughts are based alone on my experience and limited reading. Therefore read everything here with critical objectivity (which, to be honest, you should do with everything you read). I had intended to blog this elsewhere, but I’m posting it here first in order to test its credibility.

* In this instance the word ‘voluntary’ is used specifically as part of the label ‘voluntary sector’, which is an umbrella term for charities, community groups and other not-for-profit organisations.

• Possibly related posts

  1. Would you like more digital engagement knowledge-sharing events?
  2. Tweets from Digital Britain Report event in Birmingham
  3. Digital Economy Bill: my email to Lynne Jones MP

As a crude record of what I wrote, what follows is my Twitter stream for that event. All I’ve done is take the html from Twitter Search and pasted it here without its stylesheet. The tweets appear in reverse chronological order.

• Possibly related posts

  1. Digital Economy Bill: my email to Lynne Jones MP
  2. Twitter flash mob in Birmingham tomorrow
  3. Digital users are volunteers as well as consumers

Oh, and here’s the disgusting cartoon that accompanies Littlejohn’s inflammatory article about gipsies:

Daily Mail cartoon whipping up hatred of 'gipsies'

• Possibly related posts

  No related posts.

I’m looking for fifty people in Birmingham who are in the public eye but who seem to wield very little power.

I’m doing this in three steps:

1. You give me some names (using the comments form at the end of this post);
2. I put the names to the vote;
3. We discuss why those people are well-known but powerless, whether they should be either, and what needs changing to rectify the situation.

Please note: The point of this is to scrutinise Birmingham power a bit more, not to get personal or belittle people.

• Possibly related posts

  1. Making sense of Birmingham’s creative community
  2. Vote for Created in Birmingham
  3. Whitby commandeers bus in contempt for public consultation

She is asking other Members of Parliament to sign her Early Day Motion in support of putting parliamentary procedures online. At the time of writing 28 have done so.

If your MP is not on the list, please encourage them to sign. You can contact your MP easily via the online service writetothem.com.

• Possibly related posts

  1. Using online tools, I compared, quizzed and made an informed decision about an election candidate: in 20 minutes
  2. Best Online Collaboration Tools 2009
  3. For digital inclusion to work, wifi must be freely accessible