Archive for July, 2009

It’s probably time you had an update on where Digital Birmingham has got to with the Timely Information for Citizens project we announced back in April. As it happens I gave a presentation on the subject to a room full of representatives from other city councils yesterday. There’s a post over at the Improvement and Development Agency website which I was impressed to see had gone up within a couple of hours of me finishing my talk. The video below gives you some idea where we’re at with the project:

More - Timely Information for Citizens - half time score

Simon Whitehouse, Dave Harte and John Heaven, all from Digital Birmingham, joined Nick Booth and Paul Henderson from Podnosh and Raj Rattu from Community Consultancy to deliver Lozells’ first social media surgery on Tuesday evening.

Local residents of varying abilities came along to find out about social media tools from Wordpress.com to Flickr via YouTube. Some blogs were set up on the spot — lozells.wordpress.com, boathousecafe.wordpress.com, and http://jenniferbent.wordpress.com — so we’ll be keeping an eye on those to see whether they become regulars on the Handsworth & Lozells social media scene!

The Lozells social media surgery followed on the success of social media surgeries in the city centre. BeVocal is part of the Open City project, managed by Digital Birmingham’s Dave Harte following a successful bid for funding under the Department of Communities and Local Government’s Timely Information programme. BeVocal aims to promote the use of social media for civic good and to gather ideas for the tools that the Open City project should create from datasets released by public bodies.

We intend to continue with further social media surgeries in Lozells so that people who attended on Tuesday can come back and refresh or depend their skills and new people can come and satisfy their curiosity. Details will be on the Life in Lozells blog and BeVocal.

From next week (w/c 13th July), a new directory will be launched containing up to 15 million mobile phone numbers. This will enable individuals to search for mobile phone numbers of other people, just by putting their name into a website. The telephone directories for landline phones has been around for years, but it is a surprise to many that this will now exist for mobiles.

The numbers have been obtained from three different sources, none of which are from the phone owners themselves.

More - Mobiles becoming like landlines

Chris Pinchen works as a web content manager for Citilab, a “Space for Creating and Experimenting with Technology” in Cornellà, a municipality close to Barcelona in Catalunya.

Citilab in Cornellà

He had been hearing so much about the vibrant social media scene in Birmingham that he decided to come over last weekend and visit the Birmingham Social Media Cafe and the Moseley Barcamp and Amplified events as well as going down to the Custard Factory to take a look around.

Chris saw quite a change in the city.  Born and brought up in Rugby, his stated memory of Birmingham goes back twenty years to when he would “get off at New Street, go to a concert at the Odeon, get beaten up by some Mods and then get the train back, licking my wounds all the way”. More - Citilab: IT at the heart of a Community