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.
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.
Our news feeds can be subscribed to by clicking on this link. We not only provide information about our own work, but also link to other website and news items from across the city, region and country.
If you want us to pick up on a digital news story of your own, please contact us on digital@birmingham.gov.uk and put NEWS in the subject title.
Recent news stories include:
National Digital Inclusion Champion in Birmingham
Majestic SEO secures investment partner
New rail hub exterior designed
The link to our news site is http://www.digitalbirmingham.co.uk/news. Happy reading!
Digital Birmingham are going to have a busy autumn with a real focus on digital technologies. As part of Birmingham’s Digital week of events 18 – 22 October, we are organising and bringing together linked events that will include the Eurocities Knowledge Society Forum, Beyond 2010, Birmingham City Council’s Local Government Day ‘Sharing Experiences and Shaping Public Service’, the Hello Digital business conference, and the Say Hello public programme.
These are all part of a wider Hello Digital programme of events and activities that is enabling the widest possible audience to engage with technologies and explore new opportunities and innovations.
We are currently scouting around for speakers and we thought it would be interesting to canvas suggestions from the public. If you’re reading this, then that’s you. So, have you seen somebody speak who made you walk away buzzing with ideas? Is there somebody that you think would be ideal for any of the events that we are holding?
As part of the Martha Lane Fox visit to Birmingham, we ran a workshop to engage people working in digital inclusion with those in economic development and regeneration; staff promoting jobs and skills with those advising businesses and helping communities. The aim of the workshop was to examine the importance of the digital inclusion of citizens and businesses (i.e. their access, confidence and competence in using digital technologies) to enable economic recovery.
Catherine Marshall, Member of the Digital Inclusion Task Force who attended the workshop has kindly provided us with her reflections on the workshop:
As a member of Martha Lane Fox’s Digital Inclusion Task Force, I was delighted to be invited to attend the event hosted by Digital Birmingham Yesterday
Supported by an impressive turn out of delegates from Birmingham City Council and the surrounding Boroughs the event gave an invaluable opportunity to discuss some of the barriers that prevent those who are most socially excluded accessing digital technology, and explore what intervention or strategies need to be applied to overcome these difficulties.
As always, there is no one size fits all, and as Digital Inclusion is inextricably linked to Social Inclusion, understanding the complexities of the task at hand is as intricate as the solutions need to be.
All recognised the solutions needs to be applied at grass route level; and being provided with snap shots of on the ground work that is taking place, is always a constant confirmation of this, proving how being digitally connected dramatically improves peoples life chances and opportunities.
The event was incredibly positive, acknowledging that getting people on line is a matter of urgency, and the need to make an impact, by promoting social responsibility and the common goal, with the need to encourage pledges from all areas including the private sectors, to get on board and work together to close the digital divide.
As Martha concluded, “working together, there is an opportunity to achieve something really special”
It is clear that Digital Birmingham has the determination to make a real difference and achieve the ‘really special’ results it is looking for.
Catherine Marshall
Member of the Digital Inclusion Task Force
As the person within the team whose responsibility it is to carry out desk based research, I thought it is about time to share with you what I find, and find useful, regarding the digital agenda.
I am not an expert or even a researcher by trade – but I enjoy looking, have quite a lot of luck at finding useful material and my colleagues have cottoned on to this fact (and it is in my job description!).
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.
….or at least that’s the fancy title of the pilot project we’re running with funding from the department for Communities and Local Government. As announced by Hazel Blears, Birmingham is one of ten English councils who secured funding for a ‘Timely Information for Citizens’ pilot project.
The idea behind ‘Birmingham – Open City’ is to develop a community of practice around developing new resources to empower citizens. When Digital Birmingham were working up the bid we went on the basis that we shouldn’t presume what kind of services could be developed, or indeed, what kind of data sources could be made available to develop them. Instead we’re focusing on putting some resource into generating the collaborations, discussions, creativity and debate from which new services can spring.
Digital Birmingham is a Birmingham City Council initiative and part of a city wide strategic partnership of more than 40 public, private and voluntary organisations
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