Digital Birmingham is a Birmingham City Council initiative and part of a city wide strategic partnership of more than 30 public, private and voluntary organisations
Birmingham Open City
Birmingham City Council is one of ten English councils who have been awarded funding from the Communities and Local Government department to create new digital resources to enable citizens to better contribute to local decision-making.
The 'Birmingham Open City' project will develop an online community that will enable local people to influence the planning and delivery of services. The Open City Plan is a web 2.0 approach to generating collaboration, discussion, creativity, debate, data mash-ups and open source tools to enable the people of Birmingham to contribute to service planning and performance monitoring.
As well as seeing an improvement in access to services, residents will benefit from more opportunities to influence local decision making as councils will have to be more transparent and accountable.
David Harte, who developed the project said: "this is a great chance to demonstrate to citizens and government that Birmingham is ahead of the game in developing innovative new digital services for the public sector."
"We've got a vibrant development community who we hope to work with and a strong network of community organisations that are seeing the need for new ways for their members to influence local decision-making. This project can help create the right conditions for new engagement tools to be created."
The project involves the development of a resource centre for undertaking exemplar data 'mash-ups' that would benefit community groups. There will also be events to showcase the work and to highlight this area of work as a growing part of Birmingham digital economy.
A recent development to this project has been the launch of BeVocal, visit the website and find out more about this exciting aspect of the Timely Information Pilot.
