Archive for April, 2011

The Digital Birmingham Team would just like to bid farewell to

Diane Morris who retires today.

We thank her for all her hard work over the past couple of years, not forgetting the wonderful cakes she baked and shared with us! You will be missed!

When: Saturday 16th April, 2011

Time: 2.00-6.00pm

Where: The Edge,79-81 Cheapside, Birmingham. B12 0QH

Commissioned as part

of Hello Digital’s ‘Say Hello‘ programme, Friction Arts have created a digital project ‘3 Minute Heroes’.  

On Saturday 16th April, Friction Arts brings this on-line world, off-line.  Join in with the series of interventions and installations with nominees, and their nominated local heroes & heroines as part of this thoughtful, playful and subtle exhibition. 

Working with people across the city, individual ‘heroes’ and ‘heroines’ have been identified, whether famous, unknown, local or global, and created individual on-line artworks to celebrate and reflect their heroes. The results have been both heart-warming and heartbreaking and participants’ heroes have ranged from the inspirational to the intimate, with stories of love, loss and triumph revealing the extraordinary in the ordinary. 

 For more information about the exhibition, please click here.

Birmingham City Council supported by Digital Birmingham submitted a response to the recent consultation document Creative England: A Consultation on Strategic Priorities for Film 2011/12.  A fuller review of the film industry is planned later this year

and we hope that we have the opportunity to contribute to this major ‘review of film policy’.

The existing Digital Birmingham Executive Board came to a formal close in March 2011.

With DB’s strategic move into the Development Directorate of the Council, a newly devised and closely defined Management Board, which will be chaired by the Deputy Leader and 11 non BCC members, is currently being recruited

for. This Board will meet quarterly to support Digital Birmingham in the strategic delivery of its programme along with a wider Stakeholder Group (which all the existing Executive Board members have been invited to be part of) which meets twice yearly.

For those who attended the last Board meeting, here’s a moment we managed to capture….

The DB Executive Board Meeting on 16 March 2011

2010/11 was a busy year for the Digital Birmingham team where we

delivered key objectives within our four key working areas; Succeed Economically, Sustainability & Climate Change, Digital Participation & Engagement and Raising the City’s profile, as well as the office move of course! 

Please click on the document below to view our project highlights from 2010/11 and also a snapshot into the 2011/12 priorities.

We thank all of our partners and colleagues for all their support in 2010/11 – we look forward to working together and forging new relationships in the year to come.

The Thursday before last I was delighted to be invited along to The Studio in Birmingham city centre for Said It Online. This was an evening put on by Yep Media to celebrate the work they have been doing with some

Birmingham families as part of Say Hello‘s “Say It Online” project.

Parents, along with one of their teenage children, had been selected by the team to go to different arts and cultural events around the city and then review them on their newly created blogs. From what I learnt on the evening most, if not all, of the parents were new to blogging while most of the young people were used to creating content online, but not in as structured a format as a blog post.

Jane at the Said It Online awards ceremony

More – They're Saying It Online

I wasn’t able to make the Talk About Local unconference in Cardiff this weekend, which is a shame as it looks to have been a great event. Amongst the conversation that was going on across Twitter, I noticed a comment from Andy Mabbett: “Convert Facebook profile to page: http://on.fb.me/eK3Zr3“.

This has been a problem with organisations and companies for a while, where a profile is established instead of a page. Creating a profile entails putting in a person’s

name, gender and date of birth, and so it is clear that Facebook don’t intend for profiles to be used by businesses and organisations.

Facepalm by Joe Loong reprinted under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

More – Facebook: playing our "Get Out of Jail Free" card