Connecting Bristol

To help achieve our vision of a truly inclusive Digital City, Bristol City Council are developing a scheme to make available a free (or low cost) recycled computer to individuals and families who are on a low income or who experience other disadvantages.

More than eighty five expressions of interest in the Council’s recycled ICT scheme have already been received only days after details of the scheme appeared in the Our City magazine. The image below plots the locations of most of the applications and shows that many areas of the City already recognise the value of this.

If you would like to register your interest in receiving a refurbished computer you can use one of our forms below. Once the scheme is up and running in the Autumn we will get in touch again. Your contact information will be treated confidentially and will only be used to keep you informed about the computer reuse scheme

If you have a friend or relative who isn’t yet online, it might be worth asking if you can fill out a form on their behalf.

If you have a working email address please use this form

If you  don’t have an email address please fill out this form

This RIBA South West/ Green Register conference, subtitled “Money Does Grow on Trees“, will be examining the ways for  organisations to work towards achieving the Government’s ambitious target of an 80% reduction in CO2 by 2050 and remain economically active.

It will explore the cutting-edge themes of the new green economy, the business case for using sustainable technologies and incentives, and the balance between prosperity and economic growth.

Date: 23 November 2010
Time: 08.30- 18.00
Venue: Watershed Media Centre, Bristol

You can download an application form here to book your place.

Citzalia is a 3-D online role playing game and social networking forum intended to help users understand how the European Parliament works. Anyone who has used online sites such as Habbo Hotel should be pretty familiar with this kind of game.

Using your avatar you can walk around, interact, network, debate the issues of today, propose legislation, vote and learn about how the European Parliament works for citizens. You can be a Member of the European Parliament (MEP), a journalist, a student or any role you want to create.

The developers are currently looking for beta testers. If you want to participate in the beta test you can register via the site.

You can now send a petition to the European Parliament and get it signed by people across Europe.

We are trialing a process which allows people in Bristol to raise online petitions for consideration directly by the European Parliament. These europetitions can be viewed and signed by citizens in other member states. This is part of a European pilot project.

The European Parliament will consider petitions about environmental matters, consumer protection, free movement of people, goods and services, employment issues, social policy, your rights as a European citizen, recognition of qualifications and other problems in relation to the implementation of EU law.

If you are passionate about any issues that concern the European Parliament you should raise a petition at the Bristol Europetitioning site. Choose ‘European Parliament’ as your target and you could soon be gathering supporters across the UK and in Spain, Italy, Sweden and The Netherlands.

Bristol has a long tradition of supporting democracy and citizen engagement, both off line and on-line. Bristol was one of the first councils to develop an online consultation portal (www.askbristol.com ) and in 2004 was the first Local Authority, with Kingston,  to trial ePetitioning.

Find out more about the European pilot on the Europetion website, or by watching this short news video.

This is a free event, intended for all those who commission or manage local public services, who are looking to make their work more efficient, cheaper, and targeted at supporting those most in need.

It is your opportunity to ensure you are ready, well informed and have the contacts necessary to meet the challenges facing those delivering today’s public services.

With tighter financial settlements, local providers are looking for innovative and more effective ways to deliver services, and respond to the new coalition government’s themes of localism, efficiency and the Big Society.

Venue: Rich Mix, 35-47 Bethnal Green Road London E1 6LA, www.richmix.org.uk
Date: Wednesday 6th October 2010

Register for your free place at the See IT in Action website

On Monday 20 September the Festival of Ideas and Watershed, will be hosting a live screening from New York of the TEDxChange event – The Future We Make

This is a live transmission from New York of TEDxChange, an event co-hosted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and TED.

TEDxChange marks the anniversary of the Millennium Development Goals: Ten years in, where do we stand in the work to save and improve lives around the world? And what will the future hold? Speakers include Melinda Gates, Graca Machel and Mechai Viravaidya.

TEDxChange: The Future We Make, Monday 20 Sept 15:00 – 16.30 (GMT) @Watershed

To book a place send an email to: ideas@gwebusinesswest.co.uk. We anticipate it being very popular – so please sign up quickly.

The internet opens up incredible opportunities for us to voice our opinions on matters that shape our culture and society. Many people have embraced that opportunity to broaden understanding and support debate on the issues.

The anonymity that the internet can afford us allows individuals to share personal or sensitive information about themselves and gives whistle-blowers a platform to release material and knowledge they feel the public should be party to.

Others seem to have seen different, more mischievous possibilities. Those minority of people who post inflammatory or offensive comments online have been given the nickname Trolls.  Whilst most troll postings are blunt vulgarities or personal comments about other posters,  more sophisticated techniques have begun to emerge. Concern Trolls post to internet forums or newsgroups, claiming to share its goals while deliberately working against these goals attempting to divide the community, derail debate, or damage the groups reputation.

Steven Clift, a pioneer of online communities and leading expert in eDemocracy, has discussed in this week’s Guardian Tech Weekly podcast that the way to manage a more civil debate online is to have users sign up with their real name to online forums. There are some strengths to Steven’s proposals.  However to maintain the vital protection that anonymity affords to those users who would find it too dangerous or damaging to post with their real names users must  supply their real name with their content to a moderator who can post the comment anonymously if its considered to be appropriate. In certain local contexts where the author might know the moderator in the real world this could prove problematic.

There is an old cartoon (its been around for 15 years so its old in internet terms), claiming ‘On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog’. My view would be that so long as you are consistently the same dog, and honestly represent your opinions and experiences across all your online interactions I’m happy enough with that. To some extent we do create a new personality online and by investing time in developing social networks and posting our thoughts or advice we can build a level of credibility, trust and reputation that is as just as powerful as our real world name, and more relevant to online debates.

In 2009 Sir Time Berners-Lee, cited by many as the innovative mind behind the development of the world wide web, encouraged the audience at one of his talks to join him in the chant “Raw Data Now!” (10mins 50secs). The arguments for open data (and even the chant itself) had been developing over the previous  few years.

Berners-Lee returned to speak at TED again the next year and highlighted  some of the very early impacts that have begun to be realised as data sets are freeded up.

Today was the closing date for submissions to the Bristol B-Open competition and I am delighted to hear that we have had 11+ proposals for innovative open data projects from Bristol companies. The expert panel (and me) will be shortlisting over the next couple of weeks. Fingers crossed we will be able to commission 3 really good ideas!

I only returned from leave on Monday and I was interested to get an update from Mark N (our open data project manager) about the requests for council data that we had received during the application process. It seems that not all council colleages share Councillor Mark Wright’s view that “Bristol City Council only has two forms of data – that which is confidential and that which can be shared”. We have other categories of data – “that which we sell” and “that which is expensive to collect and therefore we can’t just give away”! It is easy to dismiss then latter argument (whose money is it anyway…) but I have been troubled by the former arguement.

The example I was given relates to traffic accident hotspots. We had a request for this data but Mark was told that we could not just give it away as the Council sells it. My own view is that BCC has some sort of ‘moral’ responsibility to make this data available even if it means relinquishing an income stream, but in these austere times, I wonder what other people think… should the council (and Government) maximisize the revenue that might be gained from selling data, or should we give it away on the basis that we can encourage use for the greater good? #opendata #beopen  Any views?

Chris Quigley, founder of Bristol based eDemocracy Consultancy Delib has been speaking to the Guardian about his involvement in the online activities of both the Obama administration in the States and the Coalition government here in the UK.

Chris is a firm believer in policy crowdsourcing and has recently been working on the Treasuries Spending Challenge and the Your Freedom initiative.

Bristol Streets is a web site that provides map based information about transport, and individuals opinions of the city of Bristol. Local web firm Logogriph developed the map mash up, working with a range of transport data sources, including buses, cycle routes, trains and ferries.  There is also a layer to comment on the things you like, or don’t like, in the city, and your suggestions for how it might be improved.

Don’t forget, if you are have your own creative idea for using digital media to present information about the city you have have less than a week to get your application in to the Media Sandbox B Open competition.

Nlarge Photography are a group of young people between 13 and 19 who have undertaken an extensive programme of training in all aspects of photography. They meet every Tuesday at Knowle West Media Centre. The group are always happy to welcome new members. If you are interested in joining them you can contact them on 0117 9030 444 or  nlarge@kwmc.org.uk

The exhibition at the Create Centre is a retrospective showcasing their work from 2003-2010.

Make it Local aims to encourage collaboration between local authorities and digital media developers, to provide innovative, web-based services for their communities. Connecting Bristol launched a similar competition earlier this month.

Nesta recognise that Local Authorities hold data that digital creatives can use to build useful and compelling application. The competition is offering three local authorities up to £30,000 to spend with a digital media business in their area. If you are interested in developing an idea with Bristol City Council contact us. The closing date is 20 August 2010.

The Government has delayed delivering on its commitment to ensure that every UK home has access to broadband speeds of at least 2 megabits per second (mbps). The original target had been to achieve this by 2012, but this has been revised to the end of the current Parliament in 2015. There are in the region of 2 million homes that are not able to access broadband speeds of 2 megabits, and approximately 16,000 which have no access to broadband services at all.

Local Authorities have an obligation to have a process in place to accept petitions from citizens. By Christmas this year they will need to be in a position to accept ePetitions.

Petities.nl, the Dutch national petitioning website has produced this video to explain in simple terms how to make the most of your opportunity to engage with your authority in this way.

Bristol City Council was, with Kingston,  the first local authority in the UK to pilot ePetitioning six years ago. BCC is now piloting a cross-border europetitioning system which allows citizens to bring their concerns directly to the European Parliament. The system also operates in the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and Sweden. Petitions are translated so that support can be raised across a range of European member states. If you have an issue that you feel they can respond to post a petition at Bristol ePetitioning website and select the European Parliament as your target.

The Annual Good Communications Awards recognise achievement in all areas of public sector comms. This year Connecting Bristol has been shortlisted alongside Kent Connects and Hertfordshire County Council for the IT Partnership Award.

I’m currently testing the excellent (and free) instant webcasting application Bambuser, and will attempt to webcast the announcement of the winner live from the venue in the window below (this is dependent on a reasonable internet connection being available). Check back around 9.30pm this evening.

Update: Congratulations to Hertfordshire County Council who won the award. I’m afraid I didn’t manage to webcast the event live but this photo was taken just as Nick Owen was announcing the winner.

Barbara Janke, the leader of Bristol Council, has been producing regular video updates exploring a range of issues and concerns across the City.

The latest video in this series looks at the opportunities which should emerge in Bristol’s property sector as the City begins to emerge from recession.

The UK’s Digital Champion Martha Lane Fox has launched an ambitious manifesto aiming to bring the whole of the UK workforce online before the end of this Parliament. She hopes to achieve this vision by making the most of the skills, networks and equipment we already have by recycling kit, joining up existing infrastructure and exploit the assets and the skills that we already have.

In setting out the compelling reasons why we need to enable and encourage everyone to enjoy the benefits of being online Martha Lane Fox says;

We need to be ambitious, ‘think internet first’ when we design services, and put the needs of the hardest to reach at the heart of industry, charity and government. There is a social and moral case to make sure more people are online but there is a clear economic case too. We will all be better off when everyone is online.

As well as being joint winners of the ‘Building Community Networks’ category at the SustainIT National e-Wellbeing Awards, Knowle West Media Centre were singled out for a one-off accolade. The judges presented them with a special award to recognise the centres true, long-term commitment to digital inclusion, and the considerable social benefits that it has achieved in the area.

This video was put together to demonstrate some of the work that has been taking place and the positive impacts it has achieved;

Click here to view the embedded video.

Clay Shirky was at the Watershed this week presenting his theory of Cognitive Surplus. The event was very well attended in Bristol, but was also live webcast to an audience at the Corner House in Manchester (who showed their appreciation by twittering a round of applause at the end).