Local Civic Pride and the Internet

This post has been inspired by another wonderful post by Phil Kirby which has provoked quite a lot of debate in various bits of the Internet.  Phil’s point, which seems to be shared in a lot of quarters, is that the people who are paid to promote his home city are failing the place, in that they don’t seem to understand its true nature and clearly lack the insight and passion of the people who live there and care about the place.

Quite by coincidence, on the day I read Phil’s post, I also had a conversation with a regeneration officer from Leeds City Council. It was a conversation which I found quite encouraging because it suggested that this officer at least (I cannot vouch for his colleagues) was thinking about whether property-led regeneration was really effective.

Both of these experiences got me thinking about the issue of Civic Pride and the Internet. For some time now, I have been an admirer of how the bloggers, tweeters and hyperlocal journalists of Birmingham have collaborated with each other (sometimes formally and at other times randomly) to hold the politicians and administrators of the city to account, promote positive images and news stories of their local areas, and build new forms of civic infrastructure. I hesitate to single out individual initiatives, because there are so many of them, but Birmingham It’s Not Shit, Digbeth is Good, BCCDIY, Big City Plan Talk, Podnosh’s innovative use of podcasts, Help Me Investigate, and, of course, the original Social Media Surgeries, are some that stand out.

While I do not wish to be unkind about any of the many people who work hard in public agencies, it can sometimes be the case that some of the people who work in them treat what they do as “just” a job, something to be forgotten about at 5 o’clock. Often promotional work is done by agencies bought in from outside and they just don’t understand the area. On the other hand, the people who live in the place do understand it, and often feel passionate about its positive aspects, and have inside knowledge about what needs to change. The reaction to Phil Kirby’s views about Leeds suggests to me that Birmingham might not be the only city where grassroots civic pride might bloom if people who feel strongly about the place can use the Internet to express their views, find each other, and build a collaborative movement.

While there is still a long way to go, I understand that Birmingham City Council has made some tentative steps towards making positive use of this new phenomenon (I am sure those involved will correct me if I am wrong here – it may be an optimistic view). I believe that local authorities should find ways of working with movements like this to mutual benefit. While Social Media tools may be nice to play with, ultimately, I believe they should be judged on their effectiveness in enabling and empowering people to find their voices, and then find each other to work together on issues of common interest.

I hope I am right that this is the start of a real grassroots Civic Pride movement in Leeds. And I also hope that it is happening elsewhere too. I am sure there are many such movements in the country that I don’t know about.

The Social Media Train?

This is a fanciful idea at the moment, but it may come to fruition.

The idea is this. To coincide (roughly) with the opening of the new station bar at Sheffield station (after a 40-year break without one) in December, we run a Social Media Train on the Penistone Line between Sheffield and Huddersfield.

The Penistone line is a beautiful scenic railway, which wends through Pennine countryside. But, I hate it, for three reasons:

1. It takes an hour and 20 minutes for a journey which, by road, is 26 miles and can be driven, at off-peak times in 40 minutes

2. It is populated by some of the oldest, dirtiest, most uncomfortable, rolling stock on the UK rail system; and

3. Although it runs through beautiful countryside – after dark, this benefit is lost completely, and, as much of the journey is through areas with no lighting, you can sit there for ages not being able to see anything outside the train. The experience of sitting on a dirty, rattling train, hurtling through total darkness, is what has led me to call it the Ghost Train.

The Penistone Line Partnership does a great job of making life a little better for the people who use the line, running music and beer trains on a regular basis. My idea (which is not really my idea, but taken from an original concept of @timdifford ) is that we run either a Social Media Surgery, or, perhaps a Social Media Cafe on the train one evening in December.

My concept was that we do this on the 18:36 from Sheffield; returning on the 20:13 from Huddersfield, and finishing up in the new Sheffield station bar.

What do YOU think?

Campaign for better connectivity on trains

If you are reading this, you probably know that I spend a lot of time on trains. This is because I travel around a lot in my job, and I live close to a train station, so it makes sense. Usually I can work on the train, and I much prefer to do that than spend dead time sat behind the wheel of a car.

But, I have been getting increasingly frustrated recently about lack of connectivity on trains. I have had a 3G dongle for about three years now, and it seems to me that I am getting more signal problems than ever before. This is exacerbated on Cross Country Voyager trains which have specially re-inforced windows, which are very safe in a crash but terrible at letting mobile signals through. Virgin had the same issue on its Pendolino trains, which I occasionally use between Manchester and London, but they have recently fitted internal signal boosters, which I have found to be excellent in maintaining a signal. I took part in a conference call for the entire journey from Manchester to London a few months ago, and only lost the signal twice, both times when the train was in a tunnel. Virgin have also introduced wifi, but you have to pay for it, a move I am not in favour of. On a Virgin train I prefer to use my dongle picking up the enhanced 3G signal.

I also use National Express East Coast trains between Leeds and London a lot, and they have had free wifi for some time. As well as the anomoly of their use of a Swedish ISP, so Google search results are returned with the offer of a Swedish translation, sometimes the connectivity to the outside world can be non-existent for most of the journey, which makes it just as frustrating as using the dongle.

I remember being told once that the mobile phone companies made it a priority to ensure good coverage on motorways when they were building their networks because, in the early days, car phones were the most prevalent cellular device. What I want to know then is, why hasn’t thinking moved on, and why are not train lines a priority these days? I think that a reliable Internet connection would be a powerful tool in persuading more people to give up their cars and use the train as a mobile office. Surely that would increase revenue for the train companies, make people more productive because they would be working in a train rather than sat at the wheel, and achieve all sorts of environmental benefits.

So; I am starting a three-pronged campaign for:

mobile phone companies to make train lines a priority for improved 3G coverage

train companies to offer free wifi on board; and

those train companies who already offer free wifi to improve its performance and coverage

All this would make my life easier; but, more importantly, it would be good for the environment and the economy.

Please add your comment below to join the campaign

Every City, Town, Village & Neighbourhood should have a Social Media Surgery

Last night was the first anniversary of the Birmingham Social Media Surgeries.

I could explain what a Social Media surgery is, but Nick Booth, one of the instigators of the Birmingham event, does a much better job of it than I could ever do

The Birmingham surgeries have built a growing reputation, showing the effectiveness of the approach, in that a number of social media “experts” are prepared to give up their time to pass on their knowledge to people involved in voluntary and community organisations.

Over time, a number of other surgeries have been established, and I happen to think that every community should have one. At the time of writing, a number of colleagues are helping to get one up and running in Leeds, the first Surgery in Huddersfield is imminent thanks to Steven Tuck and his team, and Jag Gill and friends have also been making things happen in Sheffield.

Having experienced the Birmingham event first hand earlier this year, when I was in the city on other business, I made a special trip to the first anniversary event, to record a flavour of what happens there, in the hope that others might be inspired by it.

I am grateful that Nick Booth decided to interview some of the participants at the end of the event, and I was thus able to follow in his wake and benefit from his vastly superior interviewing technique.

A Flavour of the Scene at Fazeley Studios

Surgeons in Action – Nicky Getgood

Surgeons in Action – Gavin Wray

Gavin Again

Surgeons in Action – Nick Booth

Nick Again and Alan Colson

Interviews – Gavin Wray, Nicky Getgood & participants

Interviews with Participants

Interview with Chris Pinchen – who came all the way from Barcelona!

Trains……………

I travel around a lot in my job, and I prefer to travel by train if I can, because I live near a railway station, and I can work on a train in a way that is just not possible if you are sat behind the wheel of a car.

I have been intrigued, if perhaps not a little disturbed, by the reactions of people who follow me on Twitter to the fact that a lot of my tweets are from trains. A guy called Peter Hindle (@petehindle), who I have only physically met once, invented the #uktrain hashtag and dedicated it to me, so I suppose I ought to look after it. In the last few years I have gone from being someone who drove 60,000 miles a year, to someone whose car is mainly used as Dad’s Taxi, and I have come to feel quite strongly that we should all use public transport if we can. That is not to say that the UK public transport system is anything like fit-for-purpose, and I don’t really go near buses unless I really, really have to.

Any way, I had this really mad idea for #uktrain radio – the basics of which is that someone (maybe me) sits in the corner of a railway carriage broadcasting live on the Internet (good luck with that on most trains, even on the ones that have free wifi) and interviewing random passengers.

A mad idea, I thought. But then a couple of people said they thought it was not that mad.

Please, please tell me it’s insane and impractical……

Out of Office Message

Hi,

I am currently 5 feet or more away from my desk, and, as I have not noticed that it’s the 21st Century, I have no interest in keeping in touch with what is going on in the world.

Your message will be printed off by my secretary and go to the bottom of a very large pile which will probably end up in the bin before I get round to reading it.

Reflections on a session with @podnosh

Listen!

On Radio Sheffield 10th September 2009

I was on the Radio Sheffield Breakfast show on 10th September talking about Twitter and Totally Online Barnsley

Barnsley Twestival 10th September 2009

I will be speaking at Barnsley Twestival on Thursday 10th September 2009 at around 5:30pm UK time. As part of a “Big Debate” I will be putting the case for Twitter, being opposed by a proponent of face-to-face networking. The irony of this is that I am a great fan of face-to-face networking, and will be saying so in the debate, and I think Twitter is a fantastic adjunct to f2f, it finds me new people to f2f network with, and helps me keep in touch with them between f2f contacts.

I would very much like to demonstrate the power of Twitter during the debate and I hope that you will help me out by feeding in comments, particularly your experiences of how Twitter has helped you build and maintain your professional networks. It looks like we will be using the hashtag #tweetbsly Please help me by contributing from the many and various talents of my Twitter community and re-tweeting the message which led you here

THANK YOU

Would free-to-air televised cricket not ultimately make more money?

During the rain break, which would ultimately lead to the abandonment of toaday’s Twenty20 cricket international between England and Australia, Sky TV showed a programme about the lead up to the establishment of Kerry Packer’s World Series cricket in 1977. For those not familiar with the story, I won’t recount it here, you can look it up there.

It got me thinking about the issue of there now being hardly any cricket on free-to-air television (last Friday’s Scotland v Australia game on BBC2 Scotland, being an honourable exception). I read somewhere that something like 10 times as many people watched the last day of the 2005 Ashes series on Channel 4 as watched the equivalent stage of this year’s series on Sky. It cannot be denied that Sky TV puts a lot of money into English cricket, and the ECB, which controls the UK game, argues that it invests a great deal of this money in grassroots cricket, encouraging young people to take up the game and develop their skills.

And yet, I wonder whether this is not a short-sighted attitude. I love cricket, but I wonder if I would have ever got interested in it without it being available on terrestial TV. As a kid, during school holidays, I used to sit and watch children’s TV in the mornings. On frequent occaisions, the BBC kid’s programmes would end early to accomodate live cricket coverage. For a while, I was irritated by this, and wanted my programmes back. But, eventually, I started to take an interest in the game, and, over time, I came to love it. Subsequently, I discovered Test Match Special on the radio, and began a long love affair with the entertainment from the radio commentary box, sometimes cursing the end of a rain break which interrupted the flow of banter between commmentators. How many kids today are coming across cricket by accident and learning to love it by themselves like I did? I know that my efforts to interest my son in the game have been pretty ineffectual. In today’s age of multi-channel TV, kids are not encouraged to explore new things, they can watch whatever it is they are comfortable with 24 hours a day if they are allowed to, and need never see anything challenging or different.

I heard one of the Australian cricket commentators commenting on how strange it felt to come to the UK and not see any cricket on terrestial TV. I certainly feel that one of the reasons why there didn’t seem to be the same sense of public engagment with this year’s Ashes victory was that so many fewer people could see it on TV.

So, I wonder, is the ECB spending Sky’s millions (or some of them) on nurturing grassroots cricket a more effective strategy than offering coverage free-to-air and exposing more young people to the game? Certainly, the Sky route is much more lucrative in the short term, but, is it short-sighted, and will it ultimately result in interest withering and dying?