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.

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In their own words:

“Birmingham, England, was the centre of the world pen trade for more than a century, employing thousands of people, pioneering craftsmanship, manufacturing processes and employment opportunities especially for women [...] Located in a former pen factory, The Pen Room recalls the history of some of the companies involved in the trade”.

Visit The Pen Room

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Nikki and Charlie, who facilitate the BARG events, organised a bunch of us to meet at the vegetable market yesterday afternoon (it’s empty – and relatively clean – on Sundays).

Table-tennis on Birmingham's market stalls (Photo by Nikki Pugh)

We bought sets of bats and balls from a pound shop, but quickly discovered that the balls were useless. No matter how hard you hit them they seemed to give up after the first bounce. As Antonio pointed out, “when the ball starts going backwards you know something’s not right”. So we splashed out on some better quality balls, which worked a treat.

There were about nine of us altogether, but we were joined by at least three passers-by who wanted to play.

There are at least 32 tables though: imagine filling them all with games of table-tennis on a Sunday afternoon?

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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.

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Actually that’s not quite true: Nicky doesn’t actually have a shop. What she does have is a website, a Flickr account and a load of junk.

It was rather an unsual shop because it didn’t sell anything. You see, everything in that shop window was a thing that somebody had once lost and Nicky had found…

That bit is true. Nicky finds junk lying around the streets of Digbeth and blogs about it.

…And brought home to DiGpuss. Nicky’s cat DiGpuss.

Actually the cat in question is called Flossy, but hey; the point is that Flossy now has a lot of junk. You can see her latest acquisitions here.

I keep meaning to write about this (now spurred into action by spotting that Nicky Getgood has finally blogged about it too) because it’s partly my fault that DiGpuss exists. It was the brainchild of Shona McQuillan many moons ago – although of course Nicky’s been collecting her rubbish for some time – and I promised to turn it into something visual. Five months later I finally came good on that promise.

I say ‘good’; the images don’t display properly in Internet Explorer and the links don’t work in Opera, but everything’s ok in Safari and Firefox. One day we might fix that. It’s all done with HTML and CSS; no scripting except a bit of php to pull the rss feed from Flickr.

But it’s fun. So go on, pay a visit to DiGpuss.

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The site of the old BBC studios has been clear for more than four years. The University has plans for a Science and Technology Park which is apparently due in 2015, but the only pages I found on their website with any dates refer to nothing later than 2006. And (at the time of writing) the Birmingham City Council‘s search engine is broken, so not very fruitful.

I’ve posted a question to the new Help Me Investigate website (currently in private beta, so for now you need an invitation to join), in case anyone has light they can shed on it.

Knowing me I may have been completely oblivious to frenetic development activity, and that there’s actually an enormous glass cathedral of science now sitting where the BBC used to be. Hopefully though I haven’t missed much, and this blog post is still relevant.

So are we still to expect a glossy university science building bang opposite the Nature Centre (handy for medical experiments), or may we use the waste ground to play on?

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This started from a comment I posted on Paradise Circus months ago, and a subsequent conversation with Chris Unitt (also months ago). I had initially intended this to be just a blog post, but in trying to organise even a small amout of information it has turned into a full-blown blog. (A wiki would have been more collaborative, but my experience is that other people find blogs much easier to get to grips with. And I can always address any editing issues should other people want some control over content.)

As with most things I start it probably won’t get very far, and the chances are it’s not needed anyway. But I certainly find that jargon, mysterious names and acronyms crop up unexplained with alarming regularity.

What I find most confusing is not knowing what pedigree these organisations have: are they government funded, local council, charities, a bunch of drinking buddies; who’s in control of them, who’s funding them, which ones are in bed with each other?

Certainly the ones with the money and stature – ie those in public or private sector partnerships – appear (understandably) to be in each others’ pockets. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but without a little digging it’s hard to know what these organations do or how they fit together.

Which is why I’ve started Understanding Birmingham; mainly for my own amusement, but if other people find it useful then so much the better.

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Actually it’s a great idea for showing our physical presence to the nay-sayers, so please come along if you can. And it’ll be fun. Honest.

Visit Birmingham Twitter Flash Mob

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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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Visit Birmingham Forum

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