Getgood Guide

On the evening of 11th November I joined Jon Bounds with a sizable gang to take part in the after -dark round of his ‘psychogeographical epic’ 11 Bus Project.  The idea is that everyone has ‘a window of eleven hours to complete a circuit of  Birmingham’s number eleven bus’, recording their observations and findings as they trundle along in whatever way they see fit.

It was the first time I’d ever traveled on the 11 Bus, and I stupidly misread the timetable and thought a full circuit took about an hour, so thought my Flip’s memory of 60 minutes would pretty much cover it.  Therefore my initial means of recording the experience was my Flip, some gaffa tape and a handy pole at the back of the top deck to film the bus’ interior as we sat on it:

This resulted in the rather surreal and badly edited film above – most of it is speeded up to the iMovie max with the first and last few seconds at normal speed (I wanted to keep the explanation we gave to a stranger who asked us what we were doing, and everyone waving goodbye at the end).

Of course I was completely wrong about the timings. As Jon said, “Birmingham’s a big place, you know,” and it took us almost two and a half hours to get around.  So once my Flip ran out of juice I got out my camera and started taking pictures of people on the bus.  Those within our happy 11 Bus crew were aware of me doing this but strangers on the bus, whose backs I snapped, weren’t.

What I found most interesting about the doing the circuit was how our large group changed the normal seating patterns on the bus.  Younger, cooler kids kept walking onto the top deck and looking longingly at the back seats we occupied before settling for the seats at the front end.  We seemed to upset the usual social order of 11 Bus riding and turfed the kids out of their comfort zone.  Me and Ben Whitehouse chatted about this and more on this audioboo he took during our journey.

All in all it was a really fun thing to do – I got to meet and share sweets with new people, see a bit more of Birmingham (including Perry Barr, where you can be a star) and enjoy some post bus-ride drinks at the Hare and Hounds with friends.  I think next year I’ll definitely go in the daytime, so I can see and record more of what’s outside the top deck of the bus.

Nicky Getgood on Digbeth and local blogging at WxWM from Jon Bounds on Vimeo.

It’s time for my very long overdue post about WxWM, brainchild Shona McQuillan’s local alternative to SxSWi. What was most amazing about it was that, within the space of about a week, a BarCamp-style event with back-to-back interesting panels had been organised.  My very favourites were:

Nick Booth: Me and My Troll

A necessary reminder that the internet isn’t Narnia and, just like in life, there are mad and bad people out there who may want to do you down.  There was an interesting discussion around how some environments (such as YouTube) are more tolerant of this behaviour than others (like Flickr).

I feel that I don’t really make an effort to conceal much about myself or my life when writing on the internet, figuring no-one will be nasty or bothered enough to use the details I give out in a negative way.  Some of the stories that came out of this panel were therefore quite frightening – not only how malevolent people can be, but also how ineffective some online communities and the police can be at dealing with it.

Jon Bounds: Internet Memes

The funniest of the panels, not least because of the last-minute editing Jon had to do to protect young, innocent minds. The theory behind the meme is that if you pop something on the internet, people will want to make it have one or all of the essential meme components:

• The rude
• The weird
• The cute

The time this takes to happen – the ‘time to penis’ – is becoming shorter and shorter.

Jon’s parting note was truly inspirational – that we, as the type of people who do Meaning of Briff, are guardians of the rude, odd and weird.  We should let memes evolve without fear of our bosses or parents and, above all, BE WEIRD. Oh, alright then, since you insist.

Ben Whitehouse: Once Upon a Time

An absolutely lovely talk on how we can tell stories and tall tales online.  This has been quite recently demonstrated by Dull Accountant on Twitter, who for a few days had us believing he’d nicked the company credit card for a G20 summit protest bender before admitting it was a well thought out April Fool’s prank.  Ben was most interesting when he was talking about Twitter, and how the people we follow and interact with is us reading the stories of each others’ lives.  I was horrified when he asked the question: ‘What happens when one of us dies and that character is gone forever?’ A sobering thought.

A local blog for local people

Not a favourite (because that would be horribly big-headed), but my panel talk about the local blogging journey I’ve been on with Digbeth is Good (film narcissistically inserted at the top).  The discussion afterwards was interesting, especially when it got around to where things should go next.  Peoples’ (very welcome) suggestions prompted John Hickman to ask Whose Blog is it Anyway?

It made me realise that, thus far, Digbeth is Good has had the freedom to grow quite organically.  But now there sometimes seems to be an expectation to follow certain types of models, be it a Created in Birmingham style handover or Kings Cross Environment style team building (which I’ve actually come round to and am working on).  I suppose John’s post reminded me that, although I can take advice and look at others’ best practice, there is no law that says I have to go down a set path.  In fact, Digbeth is Good got interesting for me when I stopped following the hymn sheet and made the blog more of my personal take on the area.  So perhaps straying from path is no bad thing, even if I do sometimes get a little lost.

Other interesting points raised were:

• Monetising the blog – If anyone has any further advice on this I’d be grateful.  One of the biggest obstacles I’ve hit with Digbeth is Good is finding the time to commit to its development.  Finding a way of being paid for the time and resources I’m currently giving to it for nothing, without detrimentally affecting the editorial freedom, would be brilliant.
• Quality not quantity – Andy Mabbett really struck a chord when he told me he’d rather read one or two good posts a week rather than a daily stream of them.  This made me realise I should slow down and concentrate on creating posts with insightful content rather than trying to keep up with everything, which is just impossible.

Phew.  It seems that no sooner do I have time to stop and take stock of the first WxWM than the next one is being organised – Moseley Barcamp, part of Mozfest, is on 29th June.  There’s also a BrumBarCamp on the cards.

Before Christmas Birmingham City Council released the Big City Plan, a lengthy consultation document about how Birmingham should be developed over the next twenty years.  The document was also put onto the Big City Plan website for members of the public to comment on.

But there were more than a few problems with it.  The document was not only massive but written in impenetrable management speak, it made me glaze over after a couple  sentences – hardly writings that would capture peoples’ imaginations and motivate responses.  It as also full of unexpanded acronyms and references to other key documents that weren’t explained.  It had weird ‘options’ at the end of each chapter that seemed to be mutually exclusive, ‘pick one’ choices but apparently weren’t.

The Big City Plan’s website initially gave the impression that all comments posted would be  published, but they seemed to think better of that later on, so only a few selected comments were published.  This meant that people had no idea if their comments were being listened to and, more importantly, that no conversation around the document could take place – no-one could react to a point another respondent had made and have a discussion that others could join in with.

The way the consultation was conducted bred a fair bit of cynicism.  I often heard people saying they felt their opinions didn’t matter, that ‘decisions have already been made’.  Some felt it was more of a PR exercise than a genuine consultation and incidents such as missing the promised consultation bus didn’t help. People I spoke to felt alienated rather than engaged – a comment on Digbeth is Good calling it a ‘pointless “consultation” scam’ spoke volumes.  I really don’t believe that was the intention, but I can understand why people felt like that given the flawed way in which things were executed.

The Birmingham blogging community felt that something needed to be done to enable a better understanding of the Big City Plan and an open discussion around it.  A few of them knocked their heads together at the Christmas Birmingham Social Media Cafe and it began to take the shape of Big City Talk – a blog with all the sections as individual posts with a plain English translation alongside.  All comments (within reason) were published so people could discuss other people’s responses and ideas.

When I heard about Big City Talk I thought it made perfect sense and offered to help out.  So, along with Jon Bounds, Nick Booth, Julia Gilbert and Michael Grimes I got started on translating sections of the writing into plain English text.  I kept my translations pretty much local, working on the Digbeth, Eastside and Highgate chapters.

It was horrible, slow work, I don’t mind saying.  Not just translating the words into plain English, something I’d never done before, but also trying to work out what they were meant to be saying in the first place.  I’ll never forget me and Michael Grimes, who listened to my cries of woe and helped me out with the Digbeth section, spending half an hour trying to translate one sentance.  It took a phone call to Jon Bounds to finally get there.  I was incredibly relieved when it was all finished.

I was even happier to hear that the work hadn’t been in vain.  Big City Talk collected 274 comments, all of which will be fed into the Big City Plan.  Debra Davies, Birmingham City Council’s PR Director, thanked us for going the extra 9 yards and was pleased at the level of input and discussion.

Here’s related posts from the others involved in Big City Talk:

Jon Bounds has written about the whole process in a series of 4 posts:

• Part 1 – Constructive Activism
• Part 2 – Why?
• Part 3 – How?
• Part 4 – the results (which, admittedly are far from settled at this point)

Michael Grimes talked about exactly why it needed doing.

Nick Booth talks about how it’s a perfect example of Brummies using social media to make a positive difference.

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