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

Daily Mail cartoon whipping up hatred of 'gipsies'

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I took the bag, more out of bewilderment than anything else. Lost inside it were a LighterLife chocolate bar and a couple of leaflets telling me how to lose weight.

I object to this on a number of levels, but two things particularly irked me.

Firstly, what an outrageous waste of resources. I don’t need a plastic carrier bag, especially as its contents would have fitted in my pocket. I don’t care that it’s ‘made from 100% recycled material’: presumably it’s not itself recyclable as it would have screamed that at me, and I suspect the majority of people will simply chuck it in the bin.

The other thing is that I hate people telling me that a tempting bar of confectionery is a healthy alternative to lunch. Maybe the bar in question really is better for me than a ham salad sandwich, but it’s still a chocolate bar. No wonder the nation’s health is in trouble if we’re encouraged to view munching chocolate snacks as equivalent to eating well.

Bah.

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There are always those who ignore the rules, which only serves to make other people indignant and angry. And let’s face it, few people are going to ask a hooded youth to turn his music down.

I avoid quiet coaches now because I’m happier dealing with legitimate noise than feeling like someone is selfishly invading my space.

Simply sticking a sign on the window (which actually is surprisingly easy to miss) isn’t going to deter people who don’t give a toss. Making the place feel more subdued – dim the lights, put curtains on the windows – would help.

And beds. Beds would be great.

But as it stands, doing away with the quiet rule altogether would make journeys in those carriages a lot more tolerable.

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A group of us wanted to help the process of engaging public opinion, because we felt the documents produced by Birmingham City Council were difficult to understand. So we took it upon ourselves to re-write it in plain English, make it available online for comment on www.bigcitytalk.org.uk, and liaise with the Council on how best to feed back to them any information that we gathered.

I’ve been putting off writing this post because I was uneasy about voicing my opinion. I wanted to be positive and encouraging, but my experiences were leaving me tired, deflated and deeply discouraged.

But now the public consultation is officially over.

That’s right: the citizens of Birmingham, whether they knew it or not (probably not; who ever takes notice of a poster on a lamp-post, let alone takes down the web address?), have had their chance to feed back on the Work in Progress (pdf) document that outlines the Council’s plans. Hark! Can I hear alarm bells already? Surely that extensive document should have been written after a consultation, not before: otherwise what is there to consult on?

Indeed, when we started re-writing the document it became quickly apparent that the thinking behind it was very muddled. For a start, in each section is a bit of background information followed by a number of options. Who are these options for? If they’re for the reader does that mean we’re going to be asked to vote on which of them is implemented? Probably not, because actually the options appear to be nothing more than a wish-list dependent on budget. In which case they’re not ‘options’ at all and so should not have been included in the document in the first place.

Then there’s the language. Remember that we were re-writing this in our free time, voluntarily: we are intelligent, enthusiastic individuals, unusually keen to engage with civic life. Yet even we found it incomprehensible, jargonistic and alienating. And there were only six of us. How on earth do they expect to enthuse the other million residents of Birmingham?

And then there are the acronyms that weren’t explained, and the inconsistent numbering of sections in different documents (a consultation leaflet was also produced which, confusingly, didn’t match the structure of the Work in Progress document).

The crazy thing is that it’s not hard. Producing a consultation document that the average member of the public can understand is easy, if you really care. Birmingham itself has plenty of top class graphic communicators, journalists, copywriters and sub-editors. The Big City Plan is such a massive undertaking that there are, presumably, the financial resources to make sure the public is consulted properly. It seems that it’s just the will that isn’t there.

Add to this the disturbing disdain shown by Birmingham Council Leader Mike Whitby, and you could be forgiven for thinking the council actually wants to alienate its citizens.

The truly depressing bit is that it isn’t a conspiracy. I truly believe there are lots of people in the council who really want this to work. But the bureaucracy of Birmingham City Council seems incapable of understanding how public engagement works.

Instead of talking and listening to people, they want to control. Take for example the Council recently banning its employees from using Facebook, which the Post reported by singling out two members of the Communications team. If a communications team isn’t allowed to use the popular methods of communication, then it’s being prevented from doing its job. Yet rather than encourage understanding and best use of these new technologies and methods of working, the council simply seems to try ignoring them.

So we’ll just have to see what happens. I hope they know what they’re doing, and that they’ve learnt some lessons for next time. At least they have now acknowledged, and taken custody of, the information we gathered through the bigcitytalk website.

Note

This post was originally drafted two weeks ago. Since then there have been a few public consultation meetings (although after the official closing date).

A number of other people were involved in the Big City Talk project, in particular Nick Booth, Jon Bounds, Julia Gilbert, Nicky Getgood and Stef Lewandowski.

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Two weeks ago a bus of council employees was scheduled to visit the Highgate area of Birmingham. The purpose was to consult local people on the Big City Plan. This didn’t happen: the bus was rescheduled at the last minute so people turned up unawares.

That is unfortunate, but in itself not scandalous. What is scandalous is that, according to Paul Dale on the Birmingham Post website, the bus was commandeered by Mr Whitby for a photo shoot.

If that’s true, it’s the the clearest signal yet that those at the top of Birmingham City Council have no interest in what their citizens have to say about this Big City Plan.

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In the meantime though I just want to help publicise the bus that’s doing the rounds in Birmingham.

The council is seeking people’s opinions on its Big City Plan (a massive development plan for Birmingham), and the more they get the more they’ll have to listen to them: because failure to listen will mean alienating a whole swathe of Birmingham’s citizens.

(You can probably already gauge the tone of the post I intend to write!)

I won’t encourage you to get involved with the online consultation, not yet anyway: your sanity is far too precious for that. But please, please visit the bus over the next few days and chat to the good people there about the council’s plans for Birmingham. They will write down your opinions, and hopefully the council will read them: and, dare I say it, take notice of them.

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• Blog more regularly.
  At least once a week.
• Write my ideas down.
  I have loads (usually rubbish), and tend to be too daunted to do anything with them.
• Set myself a project every month.
  And see it through.
• Watch a TED talk every day.
  Follow Steve Bridger‘s example of trying to start each day with a TED talk.

This list is a bit random and not at all earth-shattering, but hope it will help me focus and clarify what exactly I want to do with myself. Unfortunately I probably won’t get any further than writing this post: feel free to poke, cajole and bully me.

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Dominic Campbell drew my attention to the way IBM uses the term ‘social innovation’ on one of their websites and I too took exception to it. So I used their online contact form to send the following message. Let’s see if they respond.

Sir/Madam,

I am very concerned about the (deliberate?) misuse of the term ‘social innovation’ on your website (http://tinyurl.com/5ykzgt).

In every other encounter I have had with it the term applies to strategies that strengthen civil society, NOT to the use of social technologies to further one’s business objectives (see Wikipedia: http://tinyurl.com/4znj6j).

I accept this may just be case [sic] of bad research, and not a deliberate attempt to mislead people into believing your motivation is for the public good rather than private profit.

Therefore I hope you take this issue seriously and review your use of the term.

I look forward to your response.

Yours faithfully,

Michael Grimes

Admittedly the Wikipedia definition does seem to allow for IBM’s use of the term:

“Over the years, the term has developed several overlapping meanings. It can be used to refer to social processes of innovation, such as open source methods.”

But I still maintain that it’s misleading and that they should change their terminology.

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These graphics can be seen on trains in the UK. The one on the left was seen on First Capital Connect, the other on London Underground.

What do you think they mean?

Let’s find out…

The one on the right means ‘don’t put your feet on the seats’. The one on the left means… erm… the same. It appears to be saying ‘please do put your feet on the seats’ but actually the message they want to convey is the opposite, as we’ll see.

For the purposes of this post I removed the accompanying texts. Let’s put them back in:

So far so good. And the other one?

Not so good.

The graphic on this sign is at best completely superfluous as it adds no value to the message being conveyed. In fact, it would be better if it wasn’t there at all. Take away the text (a non-English speaker, for instance, would rely on the graphic alone) and it gives completely the wrong message.

It irritates me no end that people are still creating information graphics that fail utterly; that there are still people who think the graphic is there for the sake of it, and have not realised that its entire purpose is to help communicate their message: if it doesn’t do that, it shouldn’t be there.

A note on the images

You may notice that the photos are a bit distorted and have been patched up a little. This is because they were taken at severe angles on moving trains with a mobile phone, and so were Photoshop-ed a little to make them easier to read. The only substantial alteration was the removal of text for the first example.

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According to the ASA, the television advert for the iPhone misled viewers by claiming users had access to the whole of the internet, when in fact the phone doesn’t support Java and Flash technologies. Apple’s argument was that the claim in the advert referred to the availability of web pages, and not to the visual appearance of them.

Two people complained about the advert, which consequently Apple has been asked not to show again in its current form.

This worries me.

Anyone involved with creating web pages will know that it’s incredibly difficult – and generally not even necessary – to make all web pages look the same in every browser, even without proprietary technologies such as Flash. Therefore it would be impossible for any device to claim that they did: it is the author who controls a page’s usability, not the browser.

Which brings me to my chief concern: by upholding these complaints, does the ASA inadvertently give the impression that the user agent – not the author – should be responsible for making web pages accessible to its users? Which would be a very grey day indeed for web standards and accessibility.

iPhone ad rapped as ‘misleading’ (BBC News)

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