Archive for the ‘Digital Birmingham’ Category

The Aston Community Festival 2010 is a free for all event taking place on Sunday 27 June 2010 at Aston Villa Football Club, Witton Lane, Birmingham. B6 from 12pm - 7pm.

The event will host live music, a fun fair, food, face painters and much more.

For more information, please click here.

The Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery are monthly events held to help community and voluntary groups use the social web to benefit their organisations.

The next event will be on Tuesday June 8 at the Studio, 7 Cannon Street, off New Street (B2 5EP).

Digital Birmingham supports these surgeries and have in the past provided advise and support with social media issues.

If you belong to a Birmingham-based community or neighbourhood group or charity please come and join us. You can drop in any time between 5.30pm and 7pm.

To sign up for the event or for further information, please click here.

The surgeries are organised by volunteer members of the Birmingham Bloggers group. Surgeons work as friendly advisors giving informal one-to-one help to show you how to make the best of social media.

You can find out what normally happens at a Social Media Surgery here.

The Saturday before last, Digital Birmingham were happy to sponsor Andrew McKenzie’s Mapitude day at Aquila TV. This followed on from the successful Hackitude event held there in December last year. Both of these events are based on the idea that if data is released to the public then we will be excited enough by it to create stuff.

Andrew put together a really interesting programme of events over the day, under his strapline of it being a “workshop to develop understanding and practical collaboration between web developers and mappers.” There was one group of people getting excited and making things and another group who were exchanging presentations about mapping.

I wasn’t able to make the event, but speaking to Andrew afterwards he was really enthusiastic about what was achieved. The people getting excited included Chris Taggart of Openly Local and Stuart Harrison of Lichfield - Open Data who focused on the application building, along with Gavin Wray, Michael Grimes and Heidi Blanton who worked on locating the data and constructing the webpage that uses the application to display it.

More - Mapitude: Looking ahead at open, public data

Silver Surfers’ Day is the biggest, national campaign to promote use of digital technologies by older people. It is run by Digital Unite and was started in 2002, this is the ninth annual event.

On Silver Surfers’ Day Digital Unite support people and organisations all over the UK to open their doors and give local older people a taste of what the digital world has to offer them at a Silver Surfers’ Day Event.

Anyone can become an Event Holder – if you’re already working with older people, if you are passionate about supporting them to be digitally literate, then this is an event for you!

For more information and to find an event near you, please go to the Digital Unite webpage.

Officially launches on Thursday 13 May 2010!

It is a new Working Neighbourhood Fund/ Birmingham City Council project which aims to support the local small business community by making opportunities to supply the City Council, our suppliers and partner organisations more visibly.

When buying goods in future, Birmingham City Council Directorates will now be using this free web-based service to source goods and services that cannot be sourced from existing supplier contracts.

Businesses and suppliers can sign up and register for free for access to local contracts, support, networking events, seminars, and job opportunities, helping you to stay ahead, get noticed and more importantly win bigger and better contracts for your business.

Register at www.finditinbirmingham.com.

The poll for the Best Online CampaignThe Ninth Midlands Media Awards, taking place at the ICC, Birmingham next Thursday, 13th May are now up at the Birmingham City Council Newsroom site.

Top level outcomes on how how the election will effect Birmingham City Council.

Council seats won were: Labour 20, Conservative 11, Lib Dem 8, Respect 1

Total on council is now Conservative 45, Labour 41, Lib Dem 31 and Respect 3 

No doubt there will be national focus on Birmingham who have been running as a leadership of an alliance of two parties (Con & Lib Dem) for some time now.  

Watch this space… 

The Ninth Midlands Media Awards are taking place at the ICC, Birmingham next Thursday, 13th May.

This will be the second year that Birmingham City Council have sponsored the Online Campaign award which will be decided by public vote again this year.  This award recognises an “individual or group that has used social media tools to make a difference” and with that description I figure that we ought to have a whole heap of hopefuls vying for the prize.

Last year’s winner was Donato Esposito with his Black Country version of Facebook and it’s good to see that the group is still going strong with over 33,000 members as of today.

Nominations are now open, but be quick as you only have until Friday to make them.

Arif Latif, Donato Esposito, Anna Latif

Digital Birmingham’s ‘Digital Business’ campaign, in partnership with the Birmingham Post, was set up last year to support a business to improve its standing in the community by improving its communication channels, use social networking sites to advertise and get feedback from its customers and attract new ones.

More - Digital Busy-ness!