4iP Projects Announced

4iP, Channel 4‘s innovation fund for digital media, has started announcing its grant awards and it’s good to see that Birmingham has a part in them.

Will Perrin‘s Talk About Local is a collaboration with UK Online Centres to establish a network of tools with support for individuals and community groups to set up their own online presence.  Because of the strength of blogging talent in Birmingham, more particularly the many people using social media to increase civic engagement and give people a voice in their community, Talk About Local will be doing a lot of it’s early work in the Midlands.  Much of this will be in Birmingham but the Black Country and Stoke should get a look in as well.

Help Me Investigate is a project conceived by Birmingham City University lecturer Paul Bradshaw. Currently still in private testing mode, but soon to go live, it will allow users to ask questions that might need some investigation.  Examples might be, how much did the M6 Toll Road make last year? What are the plans for those derelict houses opposite? or, well, or just about anything that might need some investigation, I suppose.  Now it might be that a question can be answered immediately, but the more interesting part of the project is when a little more digging is required.

Help Me Investigate can then act as a collaborative investigative journalism resource. One member might be able to break down what needs to be done to get and answer to a question.  Another person or set of people might be able to help with tracking down some of the answers that are needed and so on.

I saw David Simon speak at Hay last weekend and he made a couple of interesting comments. Firstly, he didn’t agree that the Internet has killed newspapers.  His opinion is that the owners had already precipitated the current decline by not valuing the content enough, running too much copy from news agencies and scaling down their investigative functions long before we all got online.  He also said that there was no model to replace the long term investigations that newspapers have the money to fund.  Or did have.

Help Me Investigate is a really exciting project because it proposes a new way of finding stuff out that uses the power of the web; with the possibility of people coming together around a common purpose for potentially quite short periods of time, while also cultivating a persistent resource. And that could help address the problem of producing the slow journalism that Simon refers to.  I’m excited by the promise that it holds.

Share Posted in Digital Birmingham, Digital Business, e-participation, Inclusion, Internet, technology by Simon Whitehouse
Keywords: 4iP, Channel 4, Help Me Investigate, Talk About Local, UK Online, Will Perrin