White Llama

On a clunky 2011 and our new powers

2011-12-30T20:27:00.003Z

For 2011 I wrote a list of achievements and predictions called Agile Stoke. While I would say that it has been more clunky than agile, 2011 has been noteworthy because we hit mass adoption of the web. Before reflecting on the local area, I'm going to pick out three interesting examples that show how mass behaviour can make change happen.

First we had Occupy. I loved the mashing together of the old and new, the rapid spread of ideas and the bravery and inventiveness of those who took considerable personal risks to further a cause which could not adequately be communicated through our older structures. Occupy is complex, messy and thought-provoking - exactly what politics needs.
Second the riots, subsequent clean-up and political/punitive aftermath.
Third, concern over many retail chains. Was this due to unemployment, lack of confidence in the economy, people's switch to online shopping or the start of a move away from corporate chains? Probably a combination of all of these things.

As many pointed out, outbursts like riots and occupations are not new. Nor do they exist because of web tools. This is the kind of dull argument that distracts from what is interesting about these happenings, because for most people web tools are no longer shiny, new things to be talked about as brands, they are woven into our lives. They are simply like the pavements we walk on or the houses we live in. It is no more newsworthy to say that riots were organised using BBM than it is to say that people live in tents. Both things may be of interest to those interested in technology or housing, but journalists will have to make more of an effort to keep our attention. We need more curation in 2012.

In Stoke, the Facebook ad process says that I can now reach 124,000 people over 18 within Stoke-on-Trent. Now that number needs to be treated with a pinch of salt, because some people will not have registered themselves in Stoke, others will be younger than 18, some will have more than one account and others may be living outside the city but have registered themselves with the nearest city. But bearing all that in mind, it's still a very high number. It is - if I've done the maths right - 61% of the amount of people registered to vote and 109% of the number of ballots issued in the 2010 general election. Yup, roughly speaking, more people have signed up for Facebook in Stoke-on-Trent than turned out to vote. Draw your own conclusions.

This indicator of the internet's popularity had other effects. For earlier adopters, Twitter because less like a few communities of interest and much more difficult to keep track of. Early in 2011, David Elks of the Sentinel could easily find nearly 100 people to snap up places for a Tweetup (and around half that actually turned up, which isn't bad in the web world), but finding coherence in follow-up actions proved difficult. I felt less able to stay in touch with many people I like enormously because there are just so many of you buggers. Indeed, everytime I try to weed people out I am just reminded of how interesting, nay inspiring, you all are. Add to that the awareness that there are so many more great people I have never connected with and it's easy to feel overwhelmed. It's a difficult problem for people who love the firehose because we can actually drown ourselves. I try to make sure I switch off (almost) as much as I dive in, but definitely felt that I missed a lot this year and I also lost a lot of time just trying to tune up my filtering tools, especially in light of changes they made.

What had been called the Stoke Twitter community lost some of its energy and a few hyperlocal blogs fell along the wayside. I felt at the time that this was inevitable and that bloggers should not feel under pressure to keep things going for ever. Partly in response, Facebook groups got quite busy but again those conversations seem to be waning a little. These pulses should, I think, be seen as part of the natural order of the web. People will gather and disperse again like shoals of fish and we don't need to create feeding frenzies just to get them to our ponds, we just need to make some more canals between them. Pitsnpots had a rocky year but ended it with the announcement that it is to be a pioneering project of the Journalism Foundation - well deserved recognition of the part it has played in Stoke's democratic history over the last couple of years and very promising for the future. Meanwhile the Sentinel started a digital column, great for local digital activists to reach paper readers, and 6 Towns Radio and My Tunstall both continued to thrive and develop. On my own projects, Delicious's decision to take down tag clouds took the wind out of my Social Stoke sails, but luckily this has now been reinstated and I have my tagging enthusiasm back again - with some help from the WEA volunteer Andrew we've now reached 1,548 links.

Despite all the challenges it will face, many of the advantages Stoke has make it well prepared for a good year. We have a mature sector of people working and volunteering in new media and a supportive old media. Everyone knows each other - that's always been the case but now Facebook and Linkedin makes it easier to see. We're a city of interconnected towns and villages with plentiful cheap buildings and land. Outside investors come and go - the commitment of Prince Charles' charities in particular gives hope for 2012 - while the dominance of the council in saying what can and cannot happen is being shaken up, albeit gradually. Many of our strengths were on display at the Stoke Stories conference which was ably organised by Tristram Hunt's team and the RSA. The conversations continue here.

What people need now to break through the gloom that is so pervasive is knowledge about the opportunities that mass adoption of the internet creates. Nearly all of us, including nonliners, are now connected to people who can reach each other with the click of a button. The exception is truly isolated individuals, for whom special attention - ie funding, not cuts - is needed. Our personal networks are excellent jumping off points to find forms of power that in many cases aren't new, but are more accessible to those who were previously disconnected from them. The other new thing about them is that they're made possible not by the web itself, but by the fact that we have these networks that can amplify and share what we do. Returning to the first three examples I quoted, they all showed how change can happen because we can now be more aware of each other's thoughts and feelings. The consequences of this can be good or bad and we can all play a role as influencers.

One of the reasons I highlighted the rise of online buying is that while it may well threaten retail jobs, there is an opportunity for people to start selling directly to customers around the world. We need policies and bold politicians that support people within an economic landscape that is likely to move very rapidly and unpredictably. We need to be able to seek and capitalise upon the good times, as well as support people through the bad. While the council's Mandate for Change vision is quite good on the former, no longer just putting all its eggs into one poorly-spelt retail basket, as a Labour controlled council they should, in my view, be fighting tooth-and-nail to maintain and even improve core services and community spaces.

So I've made another list: ten powers that we have now that more of us are online. All of them involve some learning and none of them should be seen as easy, but they are all things that I have seen other people achieve using the web. Many of you reading this will know how to get started so if you do, please help someone who doesn't. And if you know someone doing one of these things, take a second to retweet or share.

Now that we are (nearly) all online, we - you! - can do all this:

trade
connect with people you admire
find work
report your own news, and your town's
run a TV channel
build our own websites, networks and applications
learn about almost anything
contribute to policy and debate
start big local or global movements
raise funds

More ideas, and examples of the above in action, are very welcome. Happy New Year!

A list for Boxing Day

2011-12-26T11:24:00.000Z

Historians are divided on the true meaning of Boxing Day. It could be the day when maidservants took boxes of gifts back to their families, released for a day from the toil of service. Or it could be the day when relatives unleashed the frustrations of each other's company with some bouts over the leftover turkey.

Since Downton Abbey gave us few answers on this point, I decided to go for the first interpretation and made a list of virtual boxes for you to give to family members that you might see today. Remember nonliners don't know what you're doing while you read this on your smartphone, they don't think you're being sociable, they think you're just tapping away on that small machine. So why not tempt them into the world of the web with one of these 26:

Recipes for cocktails and cake
Celebrities
TV shows
How-to videos
Protest movements
Songs
Family history
Kittens
Your friends and family
Space (as in stars and stuff, not decluttering)
Courses
Videos of people trying to park
The whole world's knowledge (and when they spot a mistake in Wikipedia, show them how to edit)
Free software
Maps
News and comment
Banks, services, comparison sites
Health information
Games
Museums
Your house on Streetview
Learn about different cultures
Start your own business advice
Dogs dressed in Christmas outfits
DIY forums - actually, forums about anything
Pictures of places where they used to live.

Remember: don't mention Twitter or Facebook and don't get your uncle signed up to any racist communities. If he ends up in jail by next Christmas, you'll get the blame.

Happy Boxing Day!

“I don't buy barbed wire, I just dig wells”

2011-11-07T20:57:00.002Z

I am on the verge of packing up my bookmarks and taking them to Pinboard. I have a really heavy heart about this. My love for delicious has been expressed in a lot of blog posts over the years. It was the frontend of a service I have been quietly nurturing with some other volunteers for several years to make Stoke-on-Trent's websphere more comprehensible, to make a visual cloud of Stoke links. It felt like it was just on the verge of being very useful, then Avos switched it off. The reason I'm on the verge of leaving is not because they've discontinued the tag cloud. The people of the internet will fix this in time. It's more a deap-seated irritation at the business-model that drives this kind of decision. The decision to take out the tagcloud is inexplicable, but it has been replaced by some development that is trying to make the service more like a channel, a platform that you stay on. A walled garden. They haven't switched off RSS, the birds that power the free web, the channels that enable free sharing, but by killing the tag cloud they took out one of the features that made delicious so useful and powerful. It's hard to keep faith in owners that so fundamentally misunderstand the way their community were using the service. He giants of the internet did an amazing thing by showing how content, platforms and software want to be free. That people can build sustainable businesses around sharing and cooperating. What they need to remember is that users, too, want to be free.

On the peacock-feather sellers of London

2011-08-07T10:28:00.001+01:00

I wanted to flood the peacock-feather sellers (4 for £2) in Trafalgar Square and Brick Lane with questions. Where have they come from (peacocks and sellers)? Do they sell enough feathers on the streets of London to make a living? Are they ethical feathers, gathered from behind peacocks with acres to roam, or plucked from within a cramped farm?

You could never sell four peacock-feathers for £2 in Stoke-on-Trent. Only the other day I got five peacock-feathers for free from my friend Helen, who rehomed a peacock from the Bucknall City Farm. We would all know a source of cheaper peacock-feathers and would use this information to mercilessly drive the peacock-feather seller away from profit. That is, unless peacock-feathers became part of some advertising and word-of-mouth boom, or if they became part of a social custom. In those cases, we would flock to join moody queues and battle old ladies for the last bunch of feathers, which would mysteriously have increased in price to £1.50 each, or 4 for £4.

The amateur economist can draw several lessons from the fact that peacock-feathers are sold to the tourists of Brick Lane and Trafalgar Square.

Packed Brick Lane market seemed to be teasing recession-hit Stoke with its tables of mismatched Wedgwood being picked up and turned over by enthusiastic hunters. But then you'd think of their overheads. And of how hard it probably was to get a spot in this teeming market. It is bad form to begrudge anyone a living, but as soon as I stepped off the train back in Stoke, I felt the familiar rising feeling of anger at missed opportunities, silence and passive barriers; envy for Burslem and its quiet streets. At the same time knowing gloom, blame and helplessness is a bad habit, preventing us from just getting on and working towards the city we want to see.

The many successful traders of Stoke are like the peacock-feather sellers. They find or make something simple and beautiful and take it to where the crowds are. The global pottery industry developed in a way that was untainted - relatively if not completely - by slavery and exploitation. We can learn much inside and outside of the Potteries.

Maybe next time I'm in London I should ask those questions.

Dare we hope?

2011-07-09T10:53:00.004+01:00

Are we witnessing the start of a crumbling News International media empire in Britain? Only sales figures will tell.

Thinking back on the decades since Murdoch owned the Sun, his influence has been significant. It was the flight to Wapping and subsequent strikes that are in my consciousness as the equivalent of the miners' strikes, showing how unions could be broken and working conditions gradually stripped back, not because of a lack of rights but because workers willingly entered into jobs or continued them in an industry they felt passionate about. I moved away from that industry, as I've stayed out of party politics, under the assumption that I could never change the things that made me feel uncomfortable, even fearful at times.

And yet things are changing.

I have renewed respect for the Guardian, whose relatively quiet work on this story has underpinned all that we now tweet and retweet. The patience that the editor has had in commissioning journalists goes against the belief I had developed that all newspapers only chase the fast story, the easy conflict. There are other journalists with stories that will be equally, if not more important, whose time could still come. The unpredictable thing about online mobs is that, like a swarm of bees, they can land anywhere.

There is the possibility that buyers of newspapers will look again at what they're reading and look around, try one of the different, very good newspapers that are still being produced. That they might think a little more about the sources of the stories that are so compelling and wonder whose privacy has been invaded, whose door has been knocked upon, to get it. They might, as they did this week, think "What if that was my family?" Newspaper sales may have declined, but there is still a market there of millions, and the potential to grow many more with investment in news that people want to read. Newspapers, after all, have been running on the web model of micropayments and advertising for centuries and most of the infrastructure is still there. Time may be up for newspapers that simply rewrite what we can already find online, that don't allow their journalists to do the job that we need: curate, reflect, dig deeper, ask questions.

As Nick Davies said in much more detail in Flat Earth News, phonehacking was a part of the churnalism culture. It's cheap and easy to do from your desk. You don't even need to send an agency hack round for the deathknock. There were no ethical considerations before it was made illegal because they were just responding to the market. Why would millions of people buy a product or advertise within it when the means of making it would, apparently from this week, disgust them? We can only assume that they didn't know, or they hadn't thought about it. And that, in itself, has a lot to do with an addictive, fast-moving culture that wasn't a Murdoch invention, it was being written about in the 50s and probably before that. Stuff that drives the emotions, gives people a sense of belonging, provides enjoyment.

Could we imagine a market for regional and even local newspapers, working with the web, the millions of voices that can be so easily found now, to provide newspapers that are enjoyable as well as useful, where they can say "nobody was hurt in the making of this newspaper (except in the public interest)".

Dare we hope for more diversity in mainstream journalism in the future; a change in the industry that, maybe without intending to, produces the same homogeneity we see in politics? That communications officers might be hired to share messages, not 'manage' them? And that the Labour party might stop blaming everyone else for a second and talk about why they spent so many years inflating the power of people who, at the end of the day, just run some newspapers? And rather than calling for new laws (which will be completely unenforceable now we can publish from anywhere), look at why our existing laws weren't applied?

Twitter is an intense place to be at the moment and emotions are running high. It has, after all, been an amazing week for news. I guess I'm writing this blog as a reminder to myself to step back, to take a bit of time to think, and to encourage more of the careful, thoughtful work that we have seen so much of this week, from powerless people as well as the big names. Let's not get too addicted to the thrilling rush of the next twist. Let's not, as newspapers might, overplay the power of 'social media' which is as meaningless as saying it was the News of the World that hacked those phones.

Luckily for us - on the whole, we are lucky to live in a country like Britain - our version of the Arab Spring won't see us overthrowing a brutal dictator. But there are parallels, especially for those in my generation and younger who have never known a world without Page 3 (for any overseas readers who might stumble upon this: topless women seen as soon as we open a number of tabloid newspapers). And there are also serious questions to be raised about some of the things that have been ignored over the years. I hope politicians and grassroots activists will feel emboldened to tell their stories and speak out about things they have been frightened about in the past. None of this will be easy. It requires exchange, education and probably all sorts of other things I haven't even thought about yet but I'm sure others have.

Because if there's one thing I know which makes me hopeful, it's that there is an amazing world of good people making rapid new connections and, maybe, shifting old power structures, even just a fraction.

If Twitter was a nation state...

2011-07-07T19:50:00.002+01:00

...it would be Sparta.

Disciplined, it makes its members perfectly concise, not like those verbose chatterers of Facebook and Google+. The harsh isolation of Unfollows for those who transgress against unwritten rules. A stern framework with boundaries. Full of strange rituals, games that appear on the surface so pointless. There be wolves and other dangers and tests which all young tweeters must face.

But it's so frikkin' cool! The ladies so tough and sexy, its citizens standing up and fighting for what they believe in!

Twitter looks like a mess at first. But suddenly the enemy realises there are hundreds, maybe thousands of tribes, all standing together with one voice when they have to,

Shouting: this is Twitter!

(admitted: I learnt everything I recall about Roman history from the film 300)

It's time for an entente cordiale

2011-07-04T18:09:00.003+01:00

As anyone who bothers reading my updates on Twitter or Facebook knows, I got very excited indeed about Google+, finally got in and have been enjoying playing with it for a few days now. First impressions are very positive, with the usual reservations of any beta Google product and the excitement that us early-adopting geeks always have when we get to link to the same people in exciting new ways.

Google+'s engineering is very snazzy indeed - although it doesn't have as many features as many of us imagined, we have faith that they will come and with a very few glitches what it has built works very well indeed. An exciting sign is that Google's generally fairly antisocial founders are using Google+ to share and an interesting one is that Mark Zuckerberg is lurking there, not sharing in public but making some circles. It's intriguing enough that he has already been ranked as Google+'s most popular user. Yep, geek gossip heaven, this stuff.

My biggest request now is not new features, but a friendly agreement. The big three - Google, Twitter and Facebook - are so ingrained in our lives now that it's hard to imagine us drifting away from any of them, but so it was with Myspace. I don't doubt that everyone expects to see a massive battle to the death with one winner, but I'd prefer another path.

For someone like me, Google Circles is already an interface that I really like using. I want to make my public updates broadcast straight to Twitter. I would prefer however, to continue to read most updates on the Twitter interface because the updates there are snappier. The only reason anyone can follow more than 1,000 people on Twitter is that we say very little on there. Perfect.

I would love to have a circle called Facebook, where me and people who were happy to authorise the link could communicate, with me on Google+ and them on Facebook. Then, while they play on Farmville, I can be reading and +1ing the latest geeky discussions in my stream. Or Reader articles; Reader needs to become incorporated into Google+ forthwith, they could simply merge it into Sparks. Oh yeh, and I want this blog post to automatically go into my Circles stream - *obviously*.

What I'm trying to say is we all want something different: we want to concoct our own unique mix, a little bit of Twitter here and a little bit of Facebook there, a few of Google magical interfaces pulled together into one page. For that to happen, we need the big three to give us the ability to push and pull our data very easily, to link up our contacts rather than duplicate groups and to manage our communication in whichever ways work for us, not the way websites lay on for us. Each site will always have features that you have to visit the site to use but we should not have to feel like we're dumping old friends by spending more time in new communities just because we like a new interface more (or just because we're super-twitchy early adopting geeks). Twitter, Google and Facebook all have an interest in making 'their' site the universal website, but equal interest in defending an open, social web and making it easy for us to connect communities. I mean genuinely easy too, not just 'we'll make it really easy for you as long as you come over to us' easy.

Facebook has everyone I love (at least all of them who have joined Facebook), therefore I have a lot of affection for it. Twitter and Google have my trust because they work so well I barely notice them and they connect me with information and people I like and respect. Love and trust are very emotional ways to talk about websites, but this illustrates how much these tools have become part of our lives and the way people interact. There are billions of unique individuals using the web and website developers do not need to seek universal use. By improving on the different strengths of their sites and their communities as they evolve, they will create stronger loyalty amongst their users and this in turn makes it more likely that we'll build up more detailed profiles and be served more useful, efficient advertising. And while all of you enjoy your riches, the rest of us can enjoy the rich variety of the ecosystem.

The Royal Wedding - the webfan view

2011-04-30T08:43:00.010+01:00

As the dresses, the cake, the trees and everything else will be picked over in fine detail, I thought I'd write about what I know and praise the social media yesterday.

For all our reservations in the run-up to the wedding (some involving fine Staffordshire mugs), the day itself was an opportunity for millions to indulge in the fairy-tale romance of it all and wish the happy couple well.

Clarence House has been tweeting with great confidence throughout the engagement and yesterday's wedding did not disappoint: a nice mixture of the formal facts, ceremony PDF, the stuff *everyone* wanted to know about, retweets and rooftop views of the flyover.

All their channels were just as slick. The Royal Wedding website is credited to Google Apps and Accenture and had the common touch of a blog with embeds and links to Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and Facebook. Take note: you can recreate them all for free if you want your own multimedia wedding, though it was also a good advert for different premium services.

There was a good call to action for those swept away enough by it all to send a gift. Metric-watchers will be interested to know how much the world's attention converted into donations. It will be a small fraction, of course, but should still make a significant amount for the couple's chosen causes.

Finally I noted that Clarence House staff swiftly swept through the site to ensure that William and Kate's new titles are fully reflected in their biographies and even the URLs. (Yes, I have been reading it all)

What Clarence House didn't get into was comments and moderation, except for a curated message page. I think this was wise. After all, we were were on Twitter to see what the worldwide congregation was saying. The main hashtags were #rw11 and #royalwedding. Don't think you can bury your bad news (much) any more though, other topics like #stokescroft and the NHS were being interspersed and retweeted. A reminder to the media that our little heads can take in more than one story at once. Sniggering at the back from the US dormboys came from #QILF - I'm not saying what that stands for but suffice to say there were a lot of queens and future queens jostling for attention in the Abbey.

As well as tweeting for the rest of us who had finally succumbed to romance, Fashion Critic was quick to post photos of the dresses and her thoughts on them.

There should also be plenty of hyperlocal street party action being posted over the next few days and if anyone out there wants to help gather them, I'd suggest the tag 'rw11hyperlocal'

While this was definitely a day when you want to be glued to a largescreen TV when you're not sipping Pimms in the street, having the web around enriched an historic day no end - with more pictures, wittier commentary, a host of extras and the voices of the crowds. Loved it.

My favourite picture of the day, via Popsugar & Getty

All pictures are screengrabs for illustration only, follow the links for originals and full source information.

We are energy

2011-04-22T18:24:00.002+01:00

This post is part observation of what communities (particularly, but not exclusively, digital communities) are doing, and part manifesto: me thinking that if we did even more of the things listed below we would overcome a lot of the city's challenges.

North Staffordshire is a complicated place of villages, towns and a city. Our area was one of the heartlands of the industrial revolution. Our ideas and products spread across the world and we retain easy links to the rest of Britain and further afield. We are surrounded by resources but for many people it can also be a very challenging place to live. For example, in Stoke-on-Trent many people live in substandard housing and experience poor health. Opportunities can be difficult to find and access. The city itself can be difficult to navigate. On the flipside, it's a low cost place to live and when the sun comes out and at least one of the football clubs is doing well, the spirit of the city is lifted.

People coming together in groups help to keep communities healthy by raising wellbeing from simply spending time in each other's company, spending money together, making decisions collectively and exchanging information.

Together, we have more energy and more power.

These are some ways to access what's positive and do something about what's negative by building up people's skills, confidence and ability to:
+ find and navigate everything around us such as opportunities, events, spaces, resources
- challenge decisions, navigate and improve systems, overcome challenges and live more sustainably

take part in opportunities to learn
share our own knowledge and skills with others
help to make links between people and organisations
curate and collate information to make it accessible to more people
share information about opportunities, spaces and services
listen out for the positive and negative in the conversations around us and online.

As I said at the beginning of this post there are a lot of people already doing this. On Social Stoke I collect links to some of the good stuff that I've spotted.

A note for sharing

2011-02-23T18:33:00.001Z

In my day, you were lucky if someone knew what you were talking about when you said "telephone". In the next few days, magical digital events are going to be coming faster than tweets during a student demonstration.

There are two major festivals, DATfest and Stoke Your Fires, with packed programmes involving pixels and bytes, about which more information is below.

If you'd like to share your super social media skills with people who've never had the opportunity, please come along to help at any point of the Social Media Cafes in Hanley library, details below on the DATfest website. You'll be very much thanked and rewarded with cake.

And on Wednesday 2nd, one of the ideas from the last Tweetup is going to be planned in more depth at a mini-tweetup meeting. Stoke Twestival is just over three weeks away and we've missed all the deadlines so nearly everything has yet to be organised. If you'd like to come and watch the world's fastest moving fundraising party take shape before your very eyes, leave a comment to this post with "Yes I'm free on Wednesday night" and I'll email you final details.

Over the next few days please can you do your bit as a digital citizen to talk about DATfest to all the people you know who aren't online. There are lots of great opportunities to get hands-on and learn all about technology in ways that aren't scary at all and the organisers have worked really hard to put together a pioneering digital programme right here in the Potteries, so please support it as much as you can.

THIS WEEKEND: Datfest: http://www.datfest.org.uk/

Stoke-on-Trent’s first ever digital arts and social media festival takes over venues and streets across the city centre for a weekend of events. Almost all of it will be free, with some events being ticketed and many drop-in.

The festival kicks off on Friday night with a multi-media electro-acoustic concert event at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery performed by musicians from Keele University Music Technology Group.

On Saturday we take to the streets with B Arts’ 100 Stories – a unique walking tour around the city centre looking at Stoke’s hidden histories that blends live performance, projection and digital soundscapes.

On Sunday we end with a special bITjAM performance #mediafail. The digital discards we all have cluttering up our hard drives – out of focus photos, phone messages and video of the sky – will be transformed live into magical sounds and images.

As well as performance events there’s a full workshop programme that encourages all ages to join in and get creative. At the Central Library there’s social media surgeries for the over-fifties that will have you Flickering and Facebooking in no time; Lego animation workshops that will create brickfilms from your minifigure collection; and Mediafail workshops that provide a final resting place for your digital mistakes.

If you’ve got a suggestion for an event or would like to know more do get in touch at bitjam@me.com

Keep up with all the DATFEST news at www.datfest.org.uk

NOW TO MARCH 4th: Stoke your Fires http://www.stokeyourfires.co.uk/

Stoke Your Fires festival aims to be the creative heart of the West Midlands region for film and digital media in the eyes of artists, designers, producers and other industry professionals, critics, and of course the public.

Stoke Your Fires is a place to celebrate, innovate and stimulate exciting new work and creativity through these dynamic media but also provides a forum for the exchange of ideas, founding of new partnerships across commercial & public productions and a nurturing catalyst for career development.

The festival started in 2008, and has rapidly built an internationally recognised programme in animation and hopes to continue this across all genres of the moving image.

If you have any questions or would like to get involved please email info@stokeyourfires.co.uk

Agile Stoke 2011

2011-01-01T18:33:00.013Z

I wanted to revisit the predictions and hopes that Carl and I made last year, before 2011 got too far in. It was an exciting year, so busy that I feel like I've had very little time to write about it all, but there's something I'll try to change as a New Year's Resolution...

So with thanks to all the fab folk of the different communities on Twitter and elsewhere, and apologies for all the things I've missed, here goes:

Best was the tangible sense of a tipping point, as use of social media spread beyond the early adopters and started to become firmly embedded into many (not all yet) areas of Stoke life. There was the fantastic Teachmeet event at the new Sixth Form College, a really invigorating series of short presentations. Councillors and officers in the council are using Twitter with real confidence and we saw some firsts, like live tweeting from a council meeting and councillors tweeting each other inside them. Businesses and charities from what I think of as the mainstream establishment of Stoke life have adopted social media as well, which has a knock-on effect in raising the profile of the internet across the city and widening market access for the companies themselves. Jellifish and Boomerang PR are just two examples of local companies building up super success without having to plough millions into big city bases. A number of us enjoyed a trip down to Stafford with Talk About Local and had proper cross-county talks, leading to the establishment of local Race Online activities.

The maturing social media scene gave Stoke some great stories. Building on the platform of a mention in parliament right at the beginning of the year, Pitsnpots has grown up into a fully fledged Community Interest Company, Potteries Media CIC with the addition of 6 Towns Radio. Both of these are brilliant in their own right, but also vitally important for improving plurality in our local media. From the world of old media, the Sentinel is finding its digital feet, being able to amplify the stories that people are publishing through social media. If it could be bold enough to put more investment into combining old-fashioned journalism roles with this new wealth of local information feeds, it has a fantastic opportunity to build on its large and loyal readerships.

Four out of six of the towns now have their own well-established blogs. Just to pick on one, My Tunstall really shows what can happen when a man with the power to develop Drupal sites puts something together for residents with bees in their bonnet. Roads were adopted, huge amounts of money raised, stuff got cleaned and cleared up - it's the Big Society!. Tunstall has a lot of problems but is still one of my favourite towns and My Tunstall is a much-needed platform. I'd love to see every town and village in the city getting its own, which of course just depends on the people with the kind of passion these sites take being connected with the skills.

Last year we were dabbling in Ruby on Rails (which, like most of my pursuits in programming I didn't find the time to make much progress on) and this year's blog title picks up one of my current interests. Agile is a philosophy in programming that values (quote from Wikipedia):

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

I know, too many syllables. But squint your eyes a bit and substitute some key words and there's some good stuff in here.

2011 is going to be a difficult year for Stoke. We had a lot of plans - I'm one of the few people who makes a hobby of reading them (squinting my eyes and looking for the good stuff) - which now may or may not be abandoned altogether. Here, this doesn't just mean plans, it means land. From a low base Stoke has been hit hard by recession and cuts for a while but it's really biting now. Threat or opportunity looms, depending entirely on your perspective, knowledge and the various skills you might have had the fortune to pick up in your life. It will be a tough year for many people.

There's a lot we can learn from the culture of digital innovation, but more importantly this goes more with the grain of Stoke than many of the ideas that have been airdropped onto us in the last few decades. Generalising wildly as usual, we tend to value people and interactions over processes, things that work over endless documents and responding to change over following a plan.

“In sport, agility is often defined in terms of.. an integration of many components each used differently”. (Wikipedia)

To stretch the analogy a little further, if the Agile priority is working software, and Tom Berners-Lee's working code, then perhaps ours is a working city. You can interpret that as you want. For me, it's a city full of opportunity, flourishing in every aspect, freer from life-limited illnesses and early deaths. Every town, village and community valued as part of a diverse, sustainable city. Utopian, maybe, and certainly complex, but the web and our own history both show us that revolutions are possible in a very short time.

It's easy to get bogged down in Stoke's problems (yah, no kidding, says my weary reader), but I hope we becoming known for playing to our strengths, not arguing over our weaknesses.

We made pretty good progress in these things:

... the establishment of many social media cafes, where people can supplement in real life the connections they make online [here's the link - Mike has sketched out a monthly schedule for this in 2011 and the more volunteers involved the better]
... joining in the Global Twestival again [we did! This year?]

... that we can build on the knowledge of a few to spread understanding and innovation in online literacy, web applications, programming and development through peer-to-peer learning [much to link to here].

... that we hold more unconferences in Stoke and support more national and local conversations, giving people space to explore ideas and collaborate. Particularly for Stoke itself, I hope we can have some more time and space to think about how information and the web can be used more effectively for delivering public services, community empowerment, engagement in politics, employment and economic development
... that we make greater use of what is on our doorstep. I've been thinking I should develop and promote Social Stoke more - it's building into quite a nice little resource [1,162 links and counting]

Still on the to-do list:

... that some big digital players come to Stoke and experiment with our empty spaces, our talented people full of potential, our blossoming enthusiasm for digital technology and our natural understanding of creative industry and community. The Director of Digital Engagement & his [now her] office? Google? [Twitter?]

... maybe we'll finally find the use for Google Wave some of us dream of [?]

What new ones shall we add?

Hopefully a few of us will be getting our voices together on 6 Towns Radio so if you have any predictions or hopes, tweet them or leave them here...

Maybe it's not Facebook's fault

2010-12-30T18:13:00.002Z

Like many people, I have mixed feelings about Facebook. When I say mixed, I mean mostly negative. The only good things on Facebook are all the people I like(™) there. Because of them, I spend a lot of time there. I'm happy to accept too, that there's some good things about the way it automatically makes links of cats and photos of my boat easy to share. It helps me keep connected with people in ways that don't require too much thought or physical movement, which is great when you're (1) far away from many of the people you've made friends with in your life and (2) lazy. Little warms my heart as much than designing a virtual cupcake for a friend on her birthday, or steaming in with a little fertiliser for my mum's enormous Farmville ranch.

Beyond that, I harbour lots of resentment.The way they tinker with stuff for no good reason. How you have to go through no end of dilemmas about friend requests from people you can't remember, didn't like much or who you don't particularly feel comfortable knowing in *that* way. The privacy stuff-oh-my-god-yes: you have to watch your privacy settings like a hawk, because Zuckerburg has just flicked the switch that allows your neighbour's cat to tell the local burglar that you are out. I dislike its blue borders and the sense it's got me, whether I like it or not.

Unlike Twitter, I can't choose the method I use to speak to my friends beyond web or mobile (both of which look pretty much the same), and I can't stop using it because many of my friends don't use anything else online. It's like having a flatmate who gets on your nerves but nevertheless you have to see every f-ing day and who insists on showing you their sunny holiday photos despite your clear, silent, disinterest. And who, while they're at it, rearranges the furniture while you're out.

What annoys many most of all about Facebook is the sense that it is becoming a separate internet of its own. A private island, locked away from the open web, with more users in the UK than any other site except comparethemeercat.com.

But in a sudden seasonal turn, I thought – what if we're being unfair on Facebook? It's not Facebook that's closed off Facebook. It's us. We, the collective we, have decided that if Twitter and Linkedin are public, Facebook is private. In theory (although I've never seen it work in practice), Facebook has the same capability for RSS feeds as anything else. People who don't change their privacy settings can have all their stuff broadcast as easily as if they'd tweeted it. Equally, of course, private tweeting is just as acceptable. There are no rules except those we create ourselves.

I don't intend to change the way I use Facebook. It's the place where I go to say things that are way too dull to unleash on the open web. I like checking in on what old friends are having for tea, or who had a baby this week. Although I'm too paranoid to put much up that is genuinely private, it's still got photos of things that I don't want to share with everyone by default. But, having made that choice myself, it's not very fair to pin the blame on Facebook for holding closed data about me. The other choice would be to open it up completely. I could connect with everyone I've ever known for any length of time in a mission to create a complete, open social web of my life. But I don't really feel like doing that. If I do anything to reconcile my use of Facebook with the desire for a complete, open web, it'll just be to nudge some of my friends who are posting up Facebook content that really deserves a wider audience into blogging, or tweeting.

One of the things I have hazy memories of from history study was the concept of private and public spheres. This was a dividing line between men and women that, we learned, emerged in the Victorian era. Women spent most of the twentieth century trying to hop over the fence back into the public sphere. As a(n) historian, I now ask, how do we make these collective decisions? Looking back, will we find that Twitter = Public sphere & Facebook = Private sphere was a permanent decision, or will it shift once again?

Only time will tell. But in the meantime, I open up it up for the last few hours of your holiday entertainment – are we being unfair on Facebook? Discuss.

Coproducing our future

2010-11-05T09:48:00.007Z

November's coprodnet conference in Manchester left my head full of stimulating ideas and renewed excitement about what can be done through collective action.

There was a lot to take in and digest. It was also clear that the word itself is open to wide debate and interpretation. I'll leave that to other people and just share one of the stories I learnt a lot from.

A story from Harare

"We realised that we cannot just sit and wait and hope... You are planning to build a house for me and it's not a house that I will like... the people who can get the paperwork will get the house and then they will just sell it"

Five years ago Zimbabwe embarked on a clearance programme. This was not clearance in the English sense, with bland notices, tense discussions, placards and compulsory purchase orders. This was just bulldozers with the label 'Drive out rubbish'.

"There are different circumstances in different countries, but being poor is being poor".

The story from Zimbabwe was one of hope and great achievement in circumstances that don't get much worse. We heard that the Zimbabwe Homeless People's Federation were doing some amazing things:

- built a membership of over 40,000 people

- supported neighbourhood savings and credit schemes

- negotiated for land and built houses

Their story is just one of many members around the world of Slum Dwellers International and they were able to get support from this and other NGOs and universities to make a difference.

How did they do it? How did they get so many people involved? The first step they described came as a surprise to me, but then I may not have been thinking about the real problem.

1. The group had to develop recognition. The urban poor weren't seen by anybody, their settlements were given different names by the authorities and they were told (forcibly) that if there wasn't work for them, they should return to the rural areas. Before they could do anything else, they had to organise in order to establish their right to exist.

2. They then gathered and recorded information to support their case for recognition. Things like how many people lived in their settlements, its history, the names they were using, what the community wanted and needed. This meant they had their own resources to take to the table: knowledge and information.

3. They built up local savings networks. 80% of their members are women and the clubs are based on very small networks. Once the banks collapsed, they stopped taking their money to them. Now they can save a little bit of money each day and make use of a revolving fund for crisis loans and income generation ideas. Most importantly, the tiny resources of the individual can be matched with the larger fund and in turn contributions from other organisations. As well as their savings, people can contribute sweat equity and their own skills to buildings.

4. With knowledge, money, information and the pooled resources of their community, teams identify land and begin negotiating with whoever owns it. They are now coing from a different position. They stopped saying yes to any offer ("bad land" far away from from the city centre) and made the point that the urban poor had a right to live close to the business district because they didn't have cars.

5. They draw on expertise and training as and when it is needed for legal services and building design. Sometimes they pay for this themselves, in other cases it is funded by the NGOs. This means the housing they build will be what they want.

6. A fundamental consideration is health. The networks share information, teach each other and "give each other the courage" to get tested for HIV.

The network is made up of small circles who save and learn, forming a community that in turn draws on the knowledge of other places around the world.

It was a joy to talk to Davious and Catherine from the Zimbabwean People's Federation. I'm sure there's a lot more to the story, many more hurdles and problems than we had time to talk about, but it was inspiring to hear their story and see their determination to build better homes for their communities.

2010-10-04T08:37:00.001+01:00

"You know what - after nearly a year of searching the official sites regarding [this] and calling all the proper people - this one Facebook post has been the most helpful thing by far. "

Mysteries of Sneyd Green

2010-09-23T07:13:00.002+01:00

"AUCTION" it says in pink printer-ink on a poster taped to the door of the exceptionally well-priced off-license that lies within the snaky roads off Milton Road.

No more details except the time and location - which, apologies, I forgot to Twitpic - and "Vendor's arrive at 2pm".

An auction for what? Would the reckless bidder be raising his hand for fine art, cast-off Doulton figures or repossessed homes? Cars?

Meat strikes me as a distinct possibility.

In Burslem some years ago, the meat van was one of the Friday fixtures, with a man attached to a loudspeaker whipping the ladies up into a frenzy to buy his shrink-wrapped cuts covered in all manner of sauces. This was replaced later by a meat lottery at a local pub, apparently equally crowd-pulling.

I wonder but dare not ask. Does anyone know?

Web apps for healthcare

2010-09-21T20:48:00.001+01:00

At the moment I'm trying to gather some communities stories about health and other aspects of wellbeing as part of a WEA Stoke community involvement project. Later in the year we hope to bring together some willing developers to help build these tools.

Here are a few ideas that I noted down from discussions at the first hack/hacker/hacky coffee in Birmingham:

A sort of Mapumental for choosing GPs, where GP data can be visualised on a map and information highlighted depending on what is important to the user, for example by satisfaction ratings, language, whether particular languages are spoken, how appointments can be booked etc.
A text service where you send your postcode and the phone numbers of the nearest 5 GPs who are taking on patients are sent back.
A map of hospitals showing waiting times, ideally in real time or by trend.

If anyone knows of these tools already being developed, knows data sources or would like to have a go, please speak up.

One more useful pointer for anyone developing content-rich website was this: the vast majority of people finding your website through a search are looking for the most basic information, such as opening times. So keep it simple.

A social media strategy in brief

2010-08-26T10:43:00.004+01:00

1. Get accounts where the people you want to reach are*

2. Start joining conversations. Always link back to a clear 'About' page

3. Share stuff.

* If your IT department blocks the sites you think will be useful, add these steps:

0.1 Get a laptop

0.2 Get a mobile broadband account

0.3 Proceed to step 1.

Social Stoke nears 1000 links

2010-08-13T22:47:00.001+01:00

At the time of writing, Social Stoke is only three away from reaching its 1,000th bookmark. What will it be?

The aim of Social Stoke is to build open, reusable lists of all the websites in Stoke-on-Trent, plus a useful resource bank for people in the city with ideas, products, resources and services from outside the city. It has been created using Delicious, a free 'social bookmarking' tool owned by Yahoo. Since then many alternative bookmarking tools have been suggested, but Delicious has become a habit. It was born, as so many things are, out of irritation. Every time I tried to find a business in the city on Google, I got some reputable business listing website which failed to link to the website itself. Many businesses, it turns out, spell their website name wrong on their vans, leading only to frustration for those (like me) who note them down to look up later. So this site has become an archive of some of the obscure local services we have here, at least those that have got online so far. The site also has a spin-off blog with links to such useful stuff as what people are saying about Stoke-on-Trent on Twitter.

The tag cloud has become a reflection of the state of digital use in our city. Many more of our towns and villages have a presence than was the case even a year ago. Longton, for example, has a blossoming range of sites for its residents associations and others who love it. The tag cloud shows that we still have numerous potteries - and there will be still more to add. Hopefully by looking at what others in the city are doing, it will be easier for groups and small businesses to start their own sites. It's exciting to see how many more local people and organisations are using Twitter, and well.

There is, however, a lot missing because the cloud follows the interests and whims of its volunteers. If you have a mildly compulsive streak and would like to add to the tag cloud, you can do so by signing up to delicious and adding bookmarks, including the tag 'for:socialstoke' and any tags you feel should also be included, for example place and topic.

You are welcome to use the lists as well as add to them. Perhaps you would find it useful to have a list of other residents associations on your own site, for example, or different businesses. If you have a site that allows it, just take the RSS feed (intro to this here) of the list you're interested in and it can be added to your own site, or you can follow new links using feed readers.

A nostalgic tea towel for my generation

2010-06-09T08:45:00.002+01:00

We were the kids who listened to
Together in Electric Dreams
And dreamed.

We copied pages and pages of code
and if we were lucky, got a BASIC ping pong game.
Our life's work was stored on a 32kb floppy disk
We waited, thrilled, around a dot matrix printer
and got our Ataris to speak to us.

Campaigns for gadgets and colour TVs took years
We accumulated boxes and boxes of videos, cassettes and defunct machinery
(that we can't bring ourselves to throw away)

We read about email in magazines,
but in our schools
internet access was barred.
We messed about with
wires and bits
of grey hardware.
And one day we heard the
screams and high notes
of a dial-up connection

And we waited.

And one day,
we were connected.

It makes me wonder:
What do the young

dream of
today?

Happy Silver Surfers Day!

2010-05-19T09:13:00.004+01:00

Favourite places

2010-03-13T16:27:00.004Z

There is one car park in Stoke-on-Trent that I don't shudder at the thought of parking within. Just one where I happily put my pound in the machine for the sheer joy of just throwing the car into a space and leaving it for two hours.

When I sweep in, I can look around at a vista that takes in Tunstall's epic Catholic church, the orange and brown rooftops of Chell, Stanfields and Acreswood, Port Vale and the Hamil Road flats, Burslem's mixture of new and old buildings, Wolstanton a world away beyond the lakes and forests and finally back to Tunstall market and old high street. In the foreground the metal-shard-ceramics structure makes a nice centrepiece to the new retail development upon which the jury is still out but is certainly popular with our city's shopping multitudes. The carpark is an empty oasis of calm before one negotiates the familiar crowds of Tunstall Market and its kind traders.

I will not tell you where it is, you will have to find it yourself.

UK Local Gov Camp 2010

2010-01-24T14:01:00.001Z

As the far-right descended on our city for a spot of light rioting, it was a joy to get away from it all for the day at Google's Headquarters and listen to some very clever people at the Local Government Barcamp. Huge amounts of content is available via the Twitter feeds (hopefully this, and the videos from the day, will be captured and edited). These are some pretty raw notes and thoughts to which I'll add more when I'm on a better broadband connection and have had more time to read through everything else. I've started gathering links on delicious to add to any others with the same tag here: http://delicious.com/tag/ukgc10

The first session I went to was a chance to learn where people are from and how they are tackling the challenges of the modern world. “I'm not here officially, that's how well we're doing”. It is clear that interest in online communication is growing throughout councils and the case that they should be talking to people out there is clear enough, the challenge is how. Much of the conversation is moving beyond barriers and towards solutions. The barriers are going to take a long time to break down, but here are a few ideas from the councils here today:

don't ask for permission: workers within councils have made great links by using social media and then demonstrating the positive outcomes. This may be easier said than done and it is sad to note that a culture of fear is pervasive for many.
you have to start somewhere: using social media is harder if you are not familiar with the space and conventions. You can't get good at it without starting.
there is always risk, but take care to explain what you are doing and why. Most organisations see the benefit of engaging with the public and well-meaning, thought-through engagement has demonstrable benefits. Things can and will go wrong, but in order to innovate we have to be able to fail.
think about using social media for internal collaboration as well as external communication – a closed space may be a good way of developing trust and social media skills. There are plenty of free platforms that don't have to be public.
find hard figures – councils are probably most interested in cost savings, so make comparisons with other areas of spending. For example, if you are piloting a Twitter account (which costs nothing), track the number of tweets and the number of followers, plus examples of engagement like replies and retweets and compare it to the cost of a mailout or leaflet drop.
Use external tools and systems instead of waiting for the IT blocks to come down. By working with your social networks, you can get a lot of help. Mobile internet is making most social websites accessible wherever you are, so you don't need to be disconnected. “Once you start a hub, people join and help”.

“If you've got the passion, use it and ask the rest of the network questions when you need help”.

A number of resources are already available and a resource point is currently under development by iDEA, so if you need examples of strategies or evaluations, have a look round and you might find an example to work from. These might include acceptable use policies and acceptable behaviour guidelines that might already exist, but may need updating to enable council workers and councillors to more effectively engage in conversations in their community whether offline or online.

Some quick suggestions for councils from the session on local content:
Don't publish newspapers – think about how you might stimulate the creation of websites and give people the skills – embrace the people talking about you and treat them equally to the press – open up your data so people can build useful things with it.

I then got a little insight into some of the development platforms that people are using to build those tools, including the data.gov.uk site which is built in Drupal. While this is completely not in my area of knowledge, it was an exciting learning experience. There is clearly masses of choice for the home developer to learn about and the communities building the tools are collaborating on new modules all the time. Hopefully someone has uploaded an photo of the platform comparison the group discussed.

Afterwards I asked Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation if he could make some suggestions of access points for the curious beginner. He said that Python is a fairly easy programming language and that if people just want to make a start with data they could help collaborate on wheredoesmymoneygo, which doesn't involve programming skills, just the time to delve around council websites finding information and adding it to spreadsheets.

Back into my comfort zone, we had a session on how conversations – especially a mass of messy conversations – can be turned into action. This was introduced from the point of view of the private sector, for whom Promised Community undertake consultation processes. We heard a positive vision from Harry Metcalfe, creator of tellthemwhatyouthink, of a “friendly and collegiate” atmosphere of constant consultation. We started to unpick the difficult dilemmas like whether we ask people at the right time and whether we genuinely want 'everyone' involved in decision making.

A few good suggestions emerged, including:
Good outcomes are more likely if all relevant communities are involved at every stage. They are more likely to be content with the decisions and feel that there is transparency in the decision-making. This is difficult, particularly in tense political climates, and heavy on resources. Leaders and political representatives should be encouraged to write or communicate through video regularly.
Feedback mechanisms can solve smaller problems. For example, users of Patient Opinion can highlight problems that can then be fixed, or if health workers have permission to give a direct explanation this can allay anger

We are moving from a time when our only communication channels were the media, meetings and one-to-one contact, to individualised information feeds, opportunities to publish everywhere and the wide availability of free tools that make virtual collaboration not just possible but easy. Could greater self-expression, reflection and dialogue lead to healthier communities?

Finally, a stimulating discussion about data got us thinking about the future. Which datasets still haven't been turned into tools? What would be the dataset that the government really regrets releasing? Which future data-driven tools will have massive public impact and which will make their makers rich? Is data the new oil?

This final metaphor bought forward some interesting points. The service economy around information is easy to see and won't be threatened by the free availability of information, which lowers entry barriers for those who want to develop services. Data's value is not necessarily in its raw form, but in the connections people make between them and the more open source datasets that are developed – for example filling in the gaps in compatability and tagging - the more advanced our tools can become. As well as data, demand will rise for content, particularly government-produced content that can be presented in more effective tailored ways if it is available to reproduce.

It was a fascinating day with a strong mix of different actors. The most encouraging thing to see is the rise of collaboration and a widespread development of confidence. While last year, many of the conversations at gatherings like these were about the problems, this year was much more about the work that has to be done. As well as meeting many of the lovely people who I already know through Twitter, I came away with lots of new contacts and new leads for local skills development. This is how we can build bridges between the areas where this stuff is still either totally unknown or vaguely known and terrifying, to the collaborative organisations and individuals who are keen to get their hands dirty and start building useful things. It's a massive learning curve, but one we will have to face for the rest of our lives.

Ruby on Clay - what are your digital dreams for 2010?

2010-01-01T17:13:00.007Z

Inspired by Socialmediageek, here are the things I would love to see happen in digital Stoke this year...

... the establishment of many social media cafes, where people can supplement in real life the connections they make online
... joining in the Global Twestival again
... that some big digital players come to Stoke and experiment with our empty spaces, our talented people full of potential, our blossoming enthusiasm for digital technology and our natural understanding of creative industry and community. The Director of Digital Engagement & his office (you know you want to!)? Google? Any West Coasters out there looking for adventures in a new UK base?
... that we can build on the knowledge of a few to spread understanding and innovation in online literacy, web applications, programming and development through peer-to-peer learning.
... that we hold more unconferences in Stoke and support more national and local conversations, giving people space to explore ideas and collaborate. Particularly for Stoke itself, I hope we can have some more time and space to think about how information and the web can be used more effectively for delivering public services, community empowerment, engagement in politics, employment and economic development
... that we make greater use of what is on our doorstep. I've been thinking I should develop and promote Social Stoke more - it's building into quite a nice little resource but could be much more powerful with more links and more proactive socialness (things like volunteers roaming blogs and sites linking people and things to other people and things
... maybe we'll finally find the use for Google Wave some of us dream of :)

What else?

Watery Llama

2009-12-28T17:06:00.005Z

Where Josiah Wedgwood, the Staffordshire Sentinel and every shopper from across Stoke-on-Trent came, so White Llama has followed. We find ourselves in Etruria, in a marina in the middle of Festival Park.

Etruria is all new-build, only appearing on the map some two centuries ago. Wedgwood named it after the influential civilisation where all the pots were made when he left Burslem to start a new factory. The air was cleaner in Etruria and it was handy for his new family home and the canal that winds along the ancient valley between Stoke-on-Trent and Newcastle under Lyme. The commute to London, so swift by train, is slower by canal, with a staircase of locks between the marina and the station.

Some time later Wedgwood's factory was sinking and the smoke had caught up with Etruria, so it was off to Barlaston with Wedgwood and Etruria was left to be taken over by the fiery pools of Shelton Bar. In 1984 the site was developed for a national garden festival. This became Festival Park, a city playground with marina, pub, water park, cinema, disused Quasar, ski slope, drive-in restaurants and one giant shed for every clone store known to man. This sucks the six towns dry of shoppers, a tragic hurdle to those who wish to see Hanley become more like Birmingham. Stoke people go where the parking is free. The Sentinel did a Wapping and built its own shed on the old Wedgwood site, with giant printing presses that supply many of the daily newspapers to the north of the UK.

Not being connected with one of the old towns, Etruria's communities feel a little disjointed, but are well-established despite the upheavals of change. There are the old terraces with their last-remaining pubs across the dual carriageway, newbuild estates and then the friendly residents of the marina who seem to live in a parallel universe to the retail frenzy all around. All a little quieter since a high court order banned racing and cruising from Fezzer, ending this modern-day version of the towns' romantic monkey runs.

Inbetween all the sheds, behind Wedgwood's house and the ski slope, are hidden hilly grounds - permission to roam kindly granted by St Modwen - round every corner a faux-ancient ruin or soft green glade, totally ignored by everyone except the odd dog walker and grafitti artist. In front of Wedgwood's house a neglected relic from the Garden Festival: a thin ornamental tower of local brick and tile, two ponds, stone pillars and then a trail of water features leading the eye irresistibly, like a 1980s Taj Mahal, to Waterworld. If you tire of exploring Festival Park, there are the canals which lead in many scenic directions through Stoke's backs.

And so, despite not being a real place, Etruria has just about everything you could want.

Skypephone memory failure

2009-12-20T23:21:00.002Z

I'm posting this here because the original post I found is no longer accepting responses, which affects future Googler's ability to help each other find the solution.

I had the same problem, which was that the memory was coming up as full all the time and stopping me from sending or receiving texts. After trying to move and delete everything I could, but finding it made no difference, I reset the java application settings and Bluetooth settings. I'm not sure which of those worked, but one did and I haven't had the problem since.

First notes from the Wave

2009-10-15T17:56:00.003+01:00

(warning: this article contains a lot of geeky jargon)

So after months of waiting, hinting, cajoling and finally the age-old medium of pleading by lolcat, I finally got onto Google Wave. It was the lolcat that swung it and my friend Riaz, whose gift of an invite finally makes up for all those years bitching about my computer preferences. And I'm sure some of you are eager to hear my first impressions on how it could be useful for the hyperlocal blogger. Still others, I know, don't want me to say another word about it. I'll get some screenshots up as soon as I can find time - and in case you were leaping to ask, I haven't been given any invitations myself yet.

Wave is is a big learning curve. The official welcome does little more than tell you how to play Sudoko and gets you started on extensions with a nice little questionnaire. There are some incredibly useful guides out there, but you need to be willing to look for them and if you're the sort of person who gets irritated when you get given a load of free tools that don't work exactly as you think they should, well you might not like Wave.

Here's the most useful thing I have learnt so far that wasn't obvious: "with:public". Once you've got on, run around excitedly, stuck a pin on a map and pinged all your contacts who pop up when you arrive, the search phrase "with:public" will counter that terrible feeling that you're waving on your own and it'll give you the best way to start learning. After the reassurance that you're not alone comes the crushing weight of chatter, but just like on Twitter you need to be selective. And also perhaps more patient: the public waves are heavy on processing power and getting rid of them can be a bit slow because Wave is still quite buggy. It has fair crushed my poor ageing Mac.

Here's the key thing: Wave is an early version of a set of tools. Nothing more or less. You learn how to use it by finding out what you can do and then working out how you do it (and all the time bearing in mind that it might not work at all just yet). I'm rethinking my visions of it as an all-purpose control centre, although hopefully it will make publishing a lot quicker and easier as more robots and gadgets are adding. I don't see yet that it is an easier way of organising information than an iGoogle page. I think its real power is going to be in rich collaboration on focussed tasks. It's going to be ideal for groups who want to work together to speed up researching, writing and editing blogs. It's a fantastic environment for peer support and learning, once you've overcome the initial barriers. Conference reporting can be done much more accurately by crowds and the potential will be there to push all the content out to other sites immediately.

The big limitation, unless the interface becomes significantly clearer to those from a non-techie/hackie/adventuring background, will be that you wouldn't want to let all your friends loose on it just yet, else you'll get howls of anger on a scale familiar to anyone who has tried to get IE6 users onto a Ning. Normally I tell newcomers not to worry, they can't break anything but actually the scope to break a wave with all the powerful tools at your fingertips is pretty wide. Lower access levels might help with this, sort of entry-level waves where people can just edit certain sections, but that would be no different from a Google Doc or Mediawiki page. This would not be Wave at its most potentially powerful but it's probably a necessary step for the full opening of Wave to work well.

A better solution is that we need to work on the underlying culture shift that others have already identified the need for. Developing confidence in exploring, hacking, fixing and searching is going to be really important if people are going to be able to use collaborative systems effectively. It will also be a test in whether we can all get along and play nicely together. It will be interesting to find out how people work around limited web connectivity. Wave is going to be as big a success or disaster as we choose to make it.

2009-10-07T18:11:00.000+01:00

Do It Better Yourself

2009-09-14T21:42:00.003+01:00

The tools are at our fingertips and maybe a tiny bit of the world's frustration is beginning to ebb away as we enter the era of DIBY. Don't complain, have a go yourself. Whether that's music, newspapers, TV or institutional structures. It's "yes, we can" maybe just creeping into the edges of our society (best to do something while we wait for our Obama). Most recently, we've witnessed the storm over Birmingham City Council's website turn swiftly into citizen organising; fast and dirty reorganising of BCC's content.

It's good in many ways. First, and not necessarily foremost, councils and government are starting to realise that stuff just works better if we create it ourselves. Second, it has the potential to save them (/us) a fortune (even if they might need to pay someone a fortune to do it badly the first time round). Thirdly, the more people are involved in a service, the more they will understand it.

We can get out of the era that says one solution will work for thousands, even millions, of people. The version of the BCC website that is built by a few Birmingham hackers might only work well for them, but if that is so at least they have done it cheaply and it's just as easy for the next group to come along and do it themselves. While once we would have said "yes, but it's not my job to build that", we can now collaborate with others to spend a small amount of time building something that works for us. The time and cost of doing so is collapsing to the extent that it's easier to build a new way of finding what you want than to tortuously find it each time you need it. Much less frustrating.

It also gives people a way of proving themselves in a public arena. If the commissioners can stop taking offence when something goes down badly, if the raw material for every data-driven piece of work can be made available in an API, then it gives people a chance to build very valuable tools that can be further developed and replicated. Then the people who built them can be commissioned to do more.

Much smarter.

Empty shop count

2009-08-19T07:26:00.004+01:00

I did a rough count of empty shops for this survey in Queen Street in Burslem last night - I had to move along quickly because we'd just read about the new Naan Bakery in Waterloo Road and had to shoot down there to try them (mini-review: they were delicious).

Before that I had tried to count by the Google map and got depressed. I'd estimate that 15 market stalls have gone since this satellite view was taken - there are none left on Queens Street. 2, sometimes 3 stalls come to St Johns Square now selling fruit, vegetables and flowers. Please support them.

View Larger Map

In Queen Street there are 25 shop units and 27 buildings if you count the Wedgwood Institute (empty) and the School of Art (full). To get it to 20 I will take out the council-owned shopfronts around the market, all but one of which has been empty for a while and currently being refurbished. Their successful tenants have tended to be web or design companies, but the majority of them have struggled to be filled and have contributed to a perception that the council is not letting non-creative shops open. While this has proven to be negotiable, greater flexibility by the council to fill the shops up at a rent that reflects the risk shopkeepers are taking would be a positive thing for the town. Having said that, a fruit and vegetable shop in St Johns Square closed again fairly soon, showing that even when the one thing opens that everyone says we need, our shopping habits may not bring us back into Burslem often enough to keep it going.

That leaves us with 14 units that are occupied and six that are empty. At one end the empty ones are the old Woolworths and the Old Wives Tale building and at the other the large Cooperative department store, most recently a Mark One. The council-owned shop units mentioned above take up about a quarter of the street, as does the Wedgwood Institue which did house the library and, once, a full centre for arts and science. The library is now a much smaller service in the School of Art, with hardly any of the space that used to make it a welcoming place for people of all ages to go and spend time reading or using the internet. Inbetween these is the 1909 Central Hotel building which has been defaced by red shutters for several years. Any local ex-land surveyers that might be knocking about providing small business support could probably make a good guess at the actual amount of empty square footage in the street.

The occupied shops overlooking Swan Square (the opposite side of which is all closed) are an estate agent, the well established Kismet and the Queens Head. Then the live-work units house 5 shops (I think) and 10 more creative businesses above - all are full, giving the town arts and crafts shops, Beslem the internet cafe and Unity, which just won a national social enterprise award. The success of this development is the model for the plans for the Mark One store and hopefully with similar management it will work just as well.

Past the School of Art there is a hairdressers, an insurers and a butchers, all long-established, locally owned businesses. Then a card shop, a Wrights Pies and a pizza chain. A sixties block has a small Boots, Dave's fabulous electrical shop, an opticians and a travel agents. Opposite those there is a large sports equipment shop, recently expanded and a pharmacy. Just after the empty Woolworths the unit is occupied by the marketing suite for the new flats being completed on the corner of St Johns Square.

An overly long response, I know - and possibly innacurate as I'm not the best counter; all corrections welcome. It's left me with a real sense of the mixed picture in Burslem. Some things have worked and can be built on, but the overall emptiness of the street gives a sense of loneliness that has a psychological effect on most people who visit, particularly those who remember when thousands of people flocked in from the surrounding factories for lunch, which was only a few years ago. This leads to generalised statements that spreads widely that Burslem has nothing to visit. The line that you can't buy groceries in Burslem, while not completely accurate (the butcher and grocery shop on Swan Square both sell some), sticks even if someone tries to change it.

The divides between traditional trades and the arts are gradually breaking down, mainly where trade links are formed between the two and the increase of creative people living in the town will help bring back regular trade for the small shops. There are businesses for very different audiences operating successfully side-by-side. There is also a great deal to be admired in the tenacity of many of the business managers who have stayed in Burslem as much of its wealth left and retain good customer bases and provide niche services promoted through word of mouth.

I haven't counted Market Place, which is actually the main street in Burslem, but that would be the subject of a whole other epic post. In case you were thinking of visiting, it has several banks, pubs, takeaways and a post office. There are also plenty of nice takeaway choices in Waterloo Road, including a traditional oatcake shop and a range of Indian food.

There are very limited options to buy clothes anywhere in Burslem now and little evidence that the customers of the stores that used to be Kwik Saves, now B&M and Home Bargains, come into Burslem to shop. That might change if the road connections can be made more pedestrian-friendly. The other change the council could make is to allow short stay parking for free, as *everyone* has been asking for years. This would make it a lot easier for people to call into the town. Without wishing to make sweeping generalisations, there is a marked contrast between the success of Burslem-led initiatives and those led by national businesses or the Civic Centre. I'm not sure that much has really worked in Burslem's favour since Federation in 1910 and so conclude that the return to town centre management is the right thing to happen. As the new regeneration board establishes itself and helps broker relationships between the townspeople and the management staff, we are seeing better communications leading to good take-up of projects, perhaps most markedly the Townscape Heritage Initiative project which is returning many buildings to their original beauty.

As the Arts & Cratfs Festivals twice a year continue to show but as most of the population remembers, Queen Street thrives when it is full of people. It has all the basic businesses in place to become a lovely little shopping street again. It needs everyone's support to help it grow.

Summary: 20 shops counted, 6 empty, 15 missing market stalls.

Little Ducks appeal

2009-08-06T07:52:00.002+01:00

Babies having basic supplies should be the least we'd expect in Britain.

Little Ducks are the kind of small, local charity run by volunteers that many people never hear about and they help parents and babies at a point of crisis. Now they are in urgent need of donations to see them through into, hopefully, a funded future.

If you can, please help: http://www.justgiving.com/NCTLittle-Ducks/

Sentinel story: http://www.thisisstaffordshire.co.uk/news/Appeal-help-save-vital-work/article-1211859-detail/article.html

Little Ducks website: http://www.nctlittleducks.org/news.php?article=0

Please think about whether you can help by donating money or equipment on the evening of August 3, or simply by spreading the word about their appeal.

Shifting sand

2009-06-22T08:17:00.006+01:00

Sending round the creative editor freelance job role for the North Staffs Creative Economies Forum (NSCEF) today, I realised how much the landscape is transforming. When the role was first included in the forum's strategy, it was thought of as 'Creative Times Editor', someone who would put together a regular publication to share information and build the profile of the creative industries in North Staffordshire. For a long time, electronic communication by anything other than email (and that mainly to professionals) was a limited option, you simply couldn't rely on enough people spending the time online to find websites.

As we've been finalising the job spec, we've kept the 'old media' option open but it is clear the role has to be a lot more flexible to take account of the different likely media that we'll be operating with. They will have to share information and stories, but this could just as easily be through a photostream on Flickr as a tabloid paper picked up in music shops. Crucially, the audience has grown dramatically over the last 18 months, with creative workers - and those people who you simply might call creative - connecting through social websites and gatherings such as Talk to Elvis, the Talking Shop and HeadTalk, amongst others. The emphasis, you might note, being on talking. In a place where people come from so many different directions, the talking is really crucial to developing the collaborations and networks that we were lacking. If anything, our circles of conversation need to widen even further, to more diverse groups.

Stoke-on-Trent can sometimes be portrayed as a bit of a desert, culturally-speaking, with many attractive but neglected buildings and a sense of sadness. There's a bit of an ebb and flow in the city, but it's still fair to say that if you don't know about what is going on, it's just in a place you can't see. The creative networks and organisations are more accessible now as most of them have some sort of presence online and there is growing use of online tools. If anything, there's an abundance of meetings, new exhibitions, ambitious startups and mature businesses finding new niches. Hopefully, with the creative editor and the beta launch of the Creative Central web portal (hopefully in the next month; I've seen previews, it looks very beautiful), the scene will become clearer, making it easier to navigate, participate - and let us not forget, make a living, in North Staffordshire's creative industries.

A brief guide to Social Media in Stoke-on-Trent

2009-06-01T22:12:00.000+01:00

So, I was asked to write something to sum up Stoke-on-Trent's social media 'scene'. Tempted as I was to respond "Hey! Stoke is messy! Back off with your straightjackets and your simplification agendas!", I understand that a clean link makes life easier. And since my idea for Andrew Stott is at number 7 (7!) in the ideas list, we'd better start presenting our tame, helpful side. Let us begin.

Social networks are a good way to access Stoke. Physically, the place doesn't make a lot of sense. Mentally it's a bit, well, tired and emotional. Stoke *is* messy - and by the way, when I say Stoke I might be talking about the city itself, North Staffordshire, the Potteries or just Burslem (though probably not Fenton), and I will give no explanation - but with a willingness to spend a bit of time in the conversation, Google and some good social connectors, you can find just about anything you're looking for here. It'll be an adventure.

The pioneers
When I landed back in the city four years ago, there were very few local websites, but a couple of them remain rich resources: ThePotteries.org and Creative Stoke. Although the original site doesn't seem to be up any more, Mindblogging was a great early UK (Early. In 2006. I know, what were we doing?) example of digital mentoring for specific groups. D'Log's other site, www.middleport.org.uk, sadly didn't survive the housing clearance, while Mike Wolfe's blog abruptly ceases in May 2005 but still remains live, an early example of consistent, engaging blogging - something that we're all now trying to persuade elected representatives to do more of.

Local Edition, now an ex-newspaper, still has many of the best pieces of writing and art you'll find online (I can say that, I edited it) about northern Stoke, while Stoke Sounds, a spin-off that took on a life of its own, is one of the best centres of writing and photography on our brilliant music scene. By the way, if you have a bit of time and some speakers, start a tour here of Stoke musicians and bands on Myspace - you won't be disappointed.

The bloggers
David Elks, the Evening Sentinel's Jo Geary, has helpfully compiled a list of blogs which I won't try to surpass and pitsnpots also has a list of a few more of the political ones.

The Tweeters

Stoke has a vibrant and growing Twitter scene and its early adopters were all involved in making sure Stoke had its own Twestival. Oh, is that me at number one? I hadn't noticed...

Digital communities
Facebook, though not big enough in Stoke user numbers to warrant having its own network or advertisements, is nevertheless keeping people from the Potteries in touch. We even have our own gifts app, a dialect group and a man paying tribute to Tunstall.

Flickr's Stoke group has been running for several years and is very active, with over 200 members, regular meetups and a collection of thousands of amazing photographs.

Though only going since late 2008, Blurb Online has amassed over 300 members and is a great showcase for the area's creative talent. It has also become a centre of organisation for Wasted Space amongst other cunning schemes and a very well-stocked events section. And because creative social websites are like buzzes, you won't want to miss Culturing Stuff, started by the evil geniuses behind Sex Up Stoke and Shop Caretakers.

Real-life gathering points

Bitjam has been running since 2006 and is always drawing in new people to get involved in its mixture of music, art and creative expression which is quite unlike anything you'd expect to find at the Rigger.

Talking Shop and Head Talk are regular gatherings for artists and other creatives - both are very welcoming and friendly.

We have a fledgling Ruby on Rails School meeting on Tuesdays at Beslem in Queen Street, when people can make it, it also has an email list for remote participation.

Some Fridays at 11 we have a social media cafe (OK, we call it that because we don't want to be left out, but it's just coffee on a Friday). Sometimes lots of us show up, sometimes nobody. Indeed, much like the remains of Burslem market (please buy your fruit and flowers there if you can). This article suggests we really should do a proper one.

Plenty of artists are now use blogs to add value to their work, such as Tomorrow Longton and Big Red Studio.

Though not directly digital, the Burslem Arts & Crafts Festival has a lot of creative workshops, photographers and musicians about and is well worth a visit.

And as this post was going to screen, I heard Keele University are having a Tweetup!

The campaigners
Online comment and blogging about local politics - the Sentinel and pitsnpots, I'm lookin' at you - have a passing resemblance to the boxing ring or bullfights of old, but that is not dissimilar to our real life arenas. Both sites have people working hard to maintain spaces where people can have their voices heard and enter into debates. Online networking and the connections made through discussion sites have, in my view (and it has been challenged) been instrumental in increasing the sense of empowerment and community expertise amongst those people who are active online. HAVOC and a string of Save our Schools websites (such as Save Trentham High) got the ball rolling and the Coachmakers Arms is gathering quite large numbers of signatures on its Number 10 petition.

Without a shadow of a doubt, the very best story about a social media campaign in Stoke (I await your challenges) is of Steve from Goldenhill whose friends whipped up a campaign to save his house.

What have I missed? Please leave a comment, Tweet using #followstoke or, you know, speak to me...

Many reasons why the Director of Digital Inclusion should have a base in Stoke-on-Trent

2009-05-27T17:07:00.010+01:00

1. High speed rail links - less than 90 minutes from London and within easy distance of most other cities and the world.
2. We've picked out a nice empty building for you right by the station.
3. The best place to deliver digital inclusion is from somewhere with real issues of exclusion
4. We *get* social networking: Stoke-on-Trent has the lowest levels of 'anomie' in the country. Where we need investment is in the interconnections and the links outward. You'll be able to help with that.
5. You'll have an amazing array of creative talent, two universities, a flexible workforce and a fledgling developer/social media community on the doorstep who can help build the engaging little apps you'll need.
6. We were at the forefront of an earlier round of globalisation, connecting ideas about science, trade, religion and evolution and developing efficient infrastructure. We also created wealth while still campaigning for human rights.
7. Stoke station is five minutes from Longport station, a ten minute walk from Burslem, the best town in the world, where you'll want to have your lunch most days and take your visitors for dinner and drinks. With a government department around, we expect the train frequency will improve immensely, connecting this Pathfinder area to other cities much more effectively than is currently the case and improving the prospects of the regeneration plans for the area.
8. We're very friendly and very passionate, but we'll also keep you on your toes - no cosy consensuses here.
9. Many other cities have thriving social media movements, but try and choose the best and it'll all kick off. Stoke is unassuming, but quietly confident, and everyone can get there relatively easily.
10. Here's how cool the building used to look (and it's pretty similar now, but with cars)

And if you agree, please vote!

Plucky Focal needs our help!

2009-05-22T07:38:00.001+01:00

Focal Radio, based in Stoke on Trent, started broadcasting to the area at the beginning of November and was saved from administration in February by businessman Mo Chaudry.

Now the multi-millionaire has made the decision to shut Focal with the loss of 23 jobs.

Station Manager, Verity Hilton said “I told the staff about Mo’s decision on May 8th. They have worked relentlessly through this difficult time to sell advertising and obtain investment. Although the station has 23 members of staff, the majority of them are freelance and once again they face the possibility of not being paid for the work that they have done. This is a fantastic station with a growing listenership and it would be a tragedy if it had to close. Focal Radio has received interest from listeners who would like to own a share in “their” radio station – but we need to ensure that there is enough in the pot to buy the equipment off Waterworld Holdings and re-pay Mo for his investment.”

Focal Radio was partly the brainchild of Potteries broadcasting legend Sam Plank and he has personally paid the staff since May 13th in an attempt to keep the station broadcasting while an investor was found. “ I am saddened over the way the situation has developed,” said Sam. “However, there is now a golden opportunity for the listeners of this area to invest in a radio station that is truly theirs and looks positively at what happens in their patch! I would love to hear from anyone that feels they can help us move forward at this moment in time! We are now shouting “Broken Arrow!”

Broken Arrow was a call sign used in Vietnam to alert available troops to support quickly and that is exactly what the team at Focal Radio hope will happen over the next 24 hours.

Anyone who feels they can support this venture - from as little as £10 - should contact Focal Radio on 01782 574580 or 07888 730061.

"I'm on it"

2009-05-15T19:35:00.000+01:00

I have an old friend, Nick, who is somewhere close to finishing his first degree despite being only 16 (or something). We met on Wikinews where, with a whole lot of others, we would occasionally write big stories and otherwise quietly work on discussing and revolutionising how news was put together. Wikinews is still a great project with potential that has never been quite unleashed.

Nick had a nice little phrase that I remembered in passing the other day. When you asked the wikisphere for help with something he'd post "I'm on it". And off he would go to sort something out, or build a new thing.

In real life I try, and usually fail, to respond as swiftly when I'm asked to do something. After all, it's not the quizzical look or the discussion about whether that's the right thing to do that's useful, it's the doing it. Online, the thinkers and the doers have a more equal power relationship than has been the case in the last few decades of organisations and that's possibly what makes the collaborative web so effective.

It's even easier to help each other out now than it was in 2005, with little calls for help being swiftly answered on Twitter. I don't even think Nick is on Twitter, but I hope he'll be pursuaded one day.

How to organise a web 2.0 event in real life

2009-04-15T07:54:00.010+01:00

I've seen a few of these work well and not so well, and here are my tips:

To hold a successful event, you will need:

- a vision
And keep it under 100 characters for easy retweeting. Put it out there and see if it flies. If it doesn't, you've only wasted five seconds. If it does, you and your prospective volunteers will need to make a commitment to make it happen, otherwise it won't.

- a structure
A website which will lead you, intuitively, through all the key decisions once you've entered your location. Twestival had images, videos and copy that could be easily re-used for pretty posters and posted onto social websites. That saved a lot of time for local organisers. The Big Lunch has gone a step better, with very cute tick-boxes to indicate whether you will have music, home-grown food or limbo-dancing.

- not too much structure
You will need people to take the lead in their own locality and you won't have complete control over what they do. If you don't like the sound of that, better to stop now.

- ...but just enough
If you don't have a strong core vision, people will have trouble communicating it onwards. Participants will express irritation that you didn't give them enough direction (I know, only above we learnt that they don't like being told what to do, but people are like that).

- nice pictures
See Twitter, I Can Haz Cheezburger, Twestival and the Big Lunch. Pretty pictures (preferably of animals) make us warm to your furry inner heart rather than just seeing you as a cold screen. Why? I don't know. But Obama knows people are much more likely to rush to read about his new puppy than his economic policy and then trust that his economics will be OK because he kept his promise over the puppy.

- a very, very simple website that doesn't rely too much on people signing up
Because they don't. If you've got a small core of organisers and volunteers who can capture content in the run-up then you can avoid that awkward feeling that nobody is involved.

- ...launched not too early... and not too late
I know, this sounds like the three bears. But it's true. A holding page when people are following links to you is really bad. You need to capture people while they are interested and then send them compelling emails (not too often) to make sure they come back to your site. Some people will get involved at the early planning stage, others only when it's time to go knocking on doors, but you need all of them on your database or Twitter follow list.

- the right amount of real life people
One person can create a brilliant event on their own, but they will work incredibly hard at it and most likely get a bit annoyed that they did it on their own. Two people can collaborate on a website, but it won't necessarily go anywhere in the local area. From experience of volunteer organisations, I reckon you need at least six committed volunteers working offline to make something great happen. If those six are on Twitter, things can happen quicker and more often than they would have done when you were just a committee.

- a few borrowed ideas to sprinkle over the top
Steal ideas from the Americans. Especially if you're doing a video. I don't know why American videos are so much cooler than British ones, except that I know that the word awesome sounds awkward from a Stokie but cool from a Californian. If you can work it out, you're probably on the path to being as sexy and web 2.0ish as they are.

Get to it! Be awesome!

The places inbetween

2009-03-30T18:02:00.001+01:00

Chain Reaction discussion feedback for Stronger Communities, Stronger Economy

"People are starting to say 'I need something'"
"I'd like to affect some kind of change"
"Maybe we need to introduce flexibility into systems"

A small group gathered at Staffordshire University in response to the open invitation by the Council on Social Action. We were not there to represent any organisation or community but we could draw on links to many different communities and experience in other places. Our group's work included education, enterprise, health and the arts and we all live or work in the midst of communities highlighted as having high levels of multiple deprivation in 2007.

Stoke-on-Trent has been hit hard by the recession with jobs in all sectors being affected. People with insecure housing or high levels of debt are vulnerable and there are unhealthy lifestyle factors related in different ways to a sense of hopelessness and lack of opportunity, as well as a legacy of a harmful environment. Having said that, many of us feel part of a "very exciting atmosphere". The desire to collaborate, connect and share is increasing. Divisions remain where there is lack of information or misinformation. "It isn't people's fault that they have skewed information". Where people have information, they have more understanding of each other. Although there are negative perceptions of other communities (from different ethnic groups to the jobless/well paid), conversation often uncovers empathy and sympathy and where people have a clearly communicated request to help with something, they do not hesitate. One of the benefits of connection is "hope". Perhaps those who have hope, as much as those who have money, can afford to be generous in drawing people they know who have lost both into new connections and opportunities.

The pottery industry had a major presence in our discussion, as indeed it retains a place in the local economy despite some perceptions. We discussed striking examples of innovation at Ainsley, Wade and Moorcroft, which are repositioning their place in the market in different ways. Once rivals, potteries are cooperating rather than lose out to outsourced companies. Most other successful potteries are cottage or studio-size and we noted that Staffs University are reviving many of the skills and developing very commercial, high-end work. They are working on a mentoring programme and employ people from the potteries, but recruitment can be challenging because of the bitterness left by large-scale redundancy rounds in potteries as recently as at Wedgwood. This damage, stemming from redundancies as well as a culture that often didn't value workers, needs to be recognised - "A lot of the creativity was knocked out of people". People and businesses are becoming creative out of necessity and media coverage has helped to raise the profile of the positive contribution creative industries can make on a place.

We avoided much of the 'official' language of community engagement. In some cases this was deliberate, a sign that some of it lacks credibility. However, many of our ideas overlapped with those in the CoSA propositions and the conversations we could see online. Our discussion also focussed on Common Space, which we defined as being where communities overlapped and something new could emerge through the energy of people supporting one another. Two of our group even had a word for it - spoinging - the places inbetween, the magic, the fairy dust. Examples of where this happens is in a pub, the Old Corner Cupboard in Shelton, which has been able to attract many different ages and races from its locality, and a community house in Blurton started by three women that had an impact on lowering street crime. We strongly believed that there is a great deal of knowledge, skills and value here - "people here are resourceful and have the answers". We believed in our ability to influence at any level, particularly through the consumer choices we make and thought that where people make decisions that are not obviously beneficial to the local economy (eg buying goods whose production has been outsourced), this may be due to a feeling of "gratitude that anyone at all opened here".

Interestingly, there was very little reference to inward regeneration investment, except to define successful places where an investment centre has had a positive effect on surrounding communities (given as Manchester as opposed to than Canary Wharf). Rather, we had much discussion on the value of things where money does not change hands: the negative value of empty, degrading buildings, wasted space and energy as opposed to the positive value that can be brought by people occupying those spaces: security, labour for refurbishment etc. People having the opportunity to trade in a shared, cooperative space shares the risk and is more likely to bring in customers. These could become centres for goods, food and services, trading cooperatively rather than competitively, creating teams where large opportunities for work come and diversifying their income streams in line with their best skills.

More than investment, we called for flexibility. Trading points and the streets are important points of overlap between communities and therefore major opportunities to stimulate connectivity and prosperity. Freedom to gather and perform makes places more festive (Durham was given as an example). Generating positive value within a building should be recognised for its value. The absentee landlord makes little positive value to a town, but could perhaps be persuaded if there was a clear, measurable value and they could be a positive connection to a richer area. Towns should have a 'sinking fund' to facilitate flexibility in times of crisis. Evidence was reported that the empty property rate relief abolition has had a positive impact in this respect as landlords cut rent or negotiate deals with people in local communities in order to fill their properties. This has been assisted in Burslem by the Bizfizz coach, who has been able to create links between people moving towards trade and property agents. It may not be the case in areas where no such personal links can be brokered.

We recognised our own responsibility to reach out to those people we feel suspicious of. While we wanted to see well-paid regeneration executives coming into our communities and speaking to local people every day, we all knew this was difficult without somebody who could welcome them and help to make them feel comfortable. A town like Burslem looks very different when you just 'land' there, rather than when someone is willing to show you round and highlight what makes them passionate about it. We share a love of Stoke-on-Trent and its diverse communities and thought that the name 'Stoke-on-Trent: City of Six Towns' could make explaining our distinctivement much easier and work in harmony with celebrations of our identity as part of smaller and larger geographical communities. Actions we committed to included helping to develop some shared 'brands' that could convey love for the city; working on an alert system to connect visitors to welcoming people and 'flashmarkets' for people to trade whenever tourists visit or there is a warm day; finding ways of creating band spaces or busking spots.

Would our regeneration strategy be taking a different course if communities were in control? In many cases, they would be the same - there are many overlapping ideas. In other cases, decisions would have been made differently, for example clearance would have been quickly followed by more suitable housing or spaces that the community needed rather than being an early stage in very slow masterplanning processes. The best way for a developer or officer to find out what would be effective or profitable in a place, we felt, would be to ask the community. This is not with reference to a piece of paper, official board or survey, but by searching conversations where people are genuinely open about the outcome. Our culture has relatively low levels of written literacy, but the communities we know are curious and articulate, with a thirst for information and debate. The much-reported friendliness of Stoke people is genuine and goes alongside a frank honesty that forces comfortable professionals to hone their ideas more carefully. Strategies have virtually no meaning in the consultation phase. This is not unique to a community like ours, participation in consultation processes is low at the best universities. Come and talk to us about your ideas. The use of well-written strategies that synthesise ideas and experience is as a tool: to steer the work of those working on its delivery, to articulate a clear routemap with which others can collaborate and to hold those delivering it to account.

In a reshaping economy, the government has much to learn from communities like those in Stoke-on-Trent. We have retained traditional cultures, industries and ways of living. Many people have lower costs of living and more time for creative thinking than in other cities. Our talents are under-used, self-esteem can be low and so a volunteer talent bank that included a focus on confidence-building could be very successful here. We have strong social networks that are becoming increasingly interconnected through technology. As people contemplate a return to human values and to flexible, shifting careers instead of a 'job for life', they will find much experience in our city and we are ready to share.

Present: Mark Brereton, Carolyn Powell, Clare-Marie White, Lou Reynolds, Lisa Wilding, Chris Litherland, Carl Plant participated online

Our discussion in Stoke was helpfully informed by the starting point in the Coffee Lounge in Birmingham with Michael Grimes and Claire from Frankley, where we discussd overlapping communities and the added value to workers created by social networks (offline as well as online).

Further content:
More points, but more concise, on the Twitter stream: http://twitterfall.com/scse
Blog post by Carl Plant: http://chain-reaction.crowdvine.com/posts/4158071
Ideas for SexUpStoke: http://affiliate.kickapps.com/_SexUpStoke/blog/221814/69169.html

Chain Reaction conversations

2009-03-13T08:29:00.005Z

What if anybody who wanted to participate, could?

The tools to enable people to collaborate more easily have been around and freely available for many years, but it's interesting to see how significant the jump in usage has been in the UK. It's not their existence that matters, it's the sense that people have that they are invited to be involved which prompts them to have a look at the tools, interact and share them. When the use of those tools reaches a tipping point, the people using them become unstoppable. If you're an optimist like me, this is a good thing.

The Council of Social Action, whose Chain Reaction conference took place in November and was ace, is now inviting people to become involved in a chain of conversations linked to the development of a new report. Agreed, "Stronger Communities, Stronger Economy" will make many of your eyes roll, but don't throw sticks at me yet.

The idea is to have a purposeful conversation, without too much organisation, that anybody can join in with. Meetings will have around 20 people each and then be linked by a variety of electronic means, with the opportunity to send feedback to the council. If demand for places goes way above 20 people, then people can organise their own meetings.

The meetings also link in with the We20 initiative as they take place shortly before the G20 Summit in London, when world leaders from the most powerful countries will be gathering to discuss stimulating our economy in various imaginative and strangely worded ways. The effects of these meetings are far-reaching and people in places like Stoke are often on the sharp end. Can thousands of ideas in hundreds of global conversations make a difference to the views of a few (mostly) men in suits? Some ways of feeding in to this should be announced over the next few weeks, doubtless involving all sorts of websites with funny names and friendly graphics.

More importantly perhaps than the chance to ask governments to send more money our way, the meetings are a chance to create change in our own communities. The key question at the end of these meetings will be "What will you do next?"

I was asked yesterday whether this is a new organisation to get bogged down in, by someone with that look of someone who has had too many emails from me (I am trying to give them up).

It isn't. It's just a meeting, a good chance to get a group of people from different backgrounds together at a signficant time for our societies. You can register for the Stoke or London meetings (other cities are in the pipeline, I just think they haven't got round to adding them yet - but you're very welcome to come to Stoke of course!) or find information about holding your own here.

Dangerous ideas and change through a recession

2009-02-18T16:18:00.003Z

There's quite a lot of us plugged in now in Stoke, talking about what's going on round here. And so, a new idea has been born. Feel free to repost, refine and adapt.

The Recession Rapid Reaction Force (Stoke)

What is it?

The Recession Rapid Reaction Force (Stoke) - #rrrfstoke - is an open network seeking to share ideas on how to combat the recession and for people to benefit from the opportunities that additional investment bring.

Using a Twitter stream, del.icio.us tags and any other tools that seem useful (as basic as a note pinned to a wall) as well as meetings, members will share ideas and connect initiatives to ensure that people are making the most of projects that are already running, as well as speeding up the development of ideas that need little or no funding.

How can I be involved?

Just join in. The network will work on the principle of trust so share everything you are allowed to share, ask questions and tell people about what you see. Help others and you will find a community of people ready and willing to help you if you need it.

Is this a long-term solution to the economic crisis?

No. Nor does it seek to be. That’s for the strategists to deal with, though many of us will be in those roles. This network is about capitalising on the opportunities that are available right now to get extra training for people and to think about the economy in a new way. So from something as simple as a skills-swap or a short training course, people might start to think differently about their prospects for employment.

What about people who aren’t online?

We take digital disconnection seriously. The stuff that can be shared online is only useful if it can also be shared offline in community centres, homes, pubs and the street. This can be done through screens pointed outward that can show Twitter channels (like an electronic noticeboard), printouts of information you think might be useful and by keeping an open mind with people you are speaking to so that you can tell them about things you have picked up from the network if it is relevant and you can also share useful things if they ask you to. Conversations are the only way to bridge any divide.

What the hell is ‘#rrrfstoke’

That’s called a hashtag. It’s an easy way of creating a ‘feed’ that anybody can contribute to, share and follow. It can be used on Twitter and as a tag on del.icio.us (which can in turn be automatically fed into Twitter and other websites) It’s easier and quicker to type rrrfstoke than Recession Rapid Reaction Force Stoke and quite fun, too. Try it!

Goodbye to our friend Rose

2009-01-18T20:50:00.002Z

This week many of us attended the funeral of Rose Peacock, a community leader in Middleport whose death was a great shock. She chose to have Jerusalem as one of the hymns:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green
And was the holy lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen

And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among those dark Satanic mills

Bring me my bow of burning gold
Bring me my arrows of desire
Bring me my spears o'clouds unfold
Bring me my chariot of fire

I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
'Til we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land
'Til we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land

Words written by William Blake

Social reporting at events: a brief guide

2009-01-08T22:19:00.001Z

In 2008, Social Reporters (and others without names) took conferences out of closed rooms and into the wider world.

This is a short guide to show what a flock of social reporters can do for you.

What are they?
Social Reporters can be professionals - coming from fields like journalism, consultancy, web development - or volunteers. They bring various skills which all help increase quality, but anybody with a willingness to chip in and help can find a role in social reporting for your organisation, event or meeting.

What do they need?
Social Reporters are friendly creatures and fairly easy to please. They definitely need a table, plug points, laptops are useful if you can supply a few spares and a wifi connection. Ideally, they like coffee and food. If you need social reporters with a definite role who you can rely on then you'll need to give them free tickets and most likely even payment, but you should ask all delegates if they'd like to take a role, at the very least through Twittering with a chosen hashtag.

What do they do?

Blog, Twitter, film and report in ways as various as you can think of. It is well worth you or your social reporting team thinking this through in advance and ensuring that common reporting methods are in place:
- a blog feed on the main event website
- a well-promoted Twitter hashtag (which doesn't necessarily need the hash) so people can follow and contribute during and after the event. An example to illustrate.
- plenty of ways to comment and contribute from outside as well as social networking tools so that participants can connect.
- flexibility on your website to add RSS feeds so you can add tagged photos, videos and other content from different services.

Whatever you do, keep it as simple as possible and use mainstream tools. Few people will have time to edit a wiki during a conference (unless this is a specific project you have decided to embark on) and people are less likely to register for a whole new service than one they are already on. Remember too that the best laid plans, or wifi connections, are frequently prone to be less reliable than you might have hoped for and people will be using different computers, so you need to keep everything accessible and simple.

But will anyone be watching?
More than likely, yes. Social reporting is a very good way of ensuring that all those who couldn't make your event due to time or money constraints can still join in the discussions if they want to. Don't kill yourself making everything too neat and slick, it's better to get some 'stuff' on than nothing. The tidying up and editing can come later. As well as helping people take part during the event, a good stock of content will help people refer back and follow up afterwards. Plus, of course, you don't know who will stumble upon you via Google or other sources.

So where do I start?
Find some of the established digital networks in your field and contact people within them about whether they would like to be involved. This will also pay dividends in promoting your event in advance. The best places to look are the social sites themselves: Twitter, Flickr, even Facebook. Of course, this approach will be more likely to succeed if you are already in some way engaged in the right communities, so if you haven't been so far now is a good time to start.

What are the benefits?
Social reporting adds value to your event by ensuring many of the good ideas and content don't just disappear when everyone goes home. Social reporting adds many more levels to a conference: instead of just all sitting there watching a bunch of slides, people can connect, collaborate and add content to your speakers' words even while they are on the stage.

What are the risks?
Undoubtedly, opening up your conference to social reporting has the same risks as any other engagement with the social web. Basically, you have no control. There is nothing to stop people using your tags to criticise your event and its speakers. Social reporters are very unlikely to toe your line, because you're probably not paying them enough. Some very cynical people are on Twitter. That said, the willingness to open up your event or your organisation to those risks at least suggests that you are genuine about building engagement - and while the conversation may be difficult, it is likely to be rewarding in the long run.

The other issue to be aware of is that if you are going to encourage social reporting, you might get blamed if somebody is quoted or photographed without their permission. Social reporting makes a conference space truly public and that might need to be explained to delegates.

Blame them (again)

2009-01-03T22:15:00.005Z

We're all a little bit addicted to pointless outrage these days. If there's one thing that always gets me spitting feathers, it's the sight of well-paid journalists desperately clinging onto their jobs and ever-declining readerships by inciting a bit of racial hatred. Shocking though it might be that there are millions of people who still get up every single morning and decide there's nothing else they'd like to spend 30p on than a grey and red newspaper filled with lazy press release rewrites and rabid opinion, it is a habit that even on its current trend will take many years to dissipate.

This week the government handed the media a nice little story about how immigrants are to blame for the poor's feelings of discontent. I don't know if that was the spin the government chose to put on it, but it gave enough scope for reports about how the voiceless poor are feeling overwhelmed by the waves of immigrants and are too strangled by political correctness to say anything about it.

Where do I start? Well, I'll skip over the voicelessness bit because regular White Llama readers will have seen it all before, but I will pick up on the ghost of political correctness. Everyone knows someone who has seen it, but that doesn't mean there's any strong evidence that it actually exists. Political correctness is just another weapon in the armoury of politicians, bishops and journalists who can drag it out of the cupboard whenever they have a point to prove. Its manifestations are merely signs of unhealthy management and leadership. Policies that are being wielded like weapons when they are supposed to be upholding equality deserve to be challenged - anybody who tells you that you can't have a Christmas tree on your desk deserves a slap, not the honour of a bitter story in your local newspaper. People self-censor because they feel they should around people they don't know and especially around people with clipboards. Therefore instead of telling researchers what they really think, they will tell them what they think they want to hear.

None of this means that immigration is the problem, despite what our friendly national media might tell us. The Jews weren't the problem in the German recession of the 1920s, but that didn't stop them becoming a target. The fact that we have immigration simply means that there is opportunity here for people from other countries, just as there is the opportunity of sunshine in Spain for Brits. Global migration is something that isn't likely to change and neither would it be in anybody's interest to change it, especially not the British to whom the doors to virtually every country in the world are open. The fact that there are opportunities for foreigners means that there are opportunities for us too, niches that can be filled. If people felt as strongly about immigration as the media suggest, the market for take-aways and corner shops would soon dry up.

So what is the problem? Voicelessness and powerless, as well as poverty, is at its core. In that the survey has perhaps bought something important to the government's attention (again). Disconnection from opportunity, even very basic opportunities like a house, causes resentment. The house price rises of our 'booming' economy over the last fifteen years means it only takes a very basic grasp of maths to know that the housing ladder is out of reach to anybody on a low income, therefore the council house queue grows. It's never nice being in a queue and it never takes much to start a fight. Nice as it is of the Express to give credibility to local rumours, unfairness most likely runs a lot deeper than houses being given to some Poles. There is a wider unfairness in the fact of hundreds of thousands of empty properties, of cash buyers being able to jump in and profit from the current downturn instead of first time buyers who are being denied mortgages for amounts that would have been considered a pittance a few months ago. There is unfairness in the banks being bailed out with billions but failing to pass on that generosity to businesses, who are now going bust leaving thousands more jobless, and borrowers from whom they have done very nicely during the good times. It is unfair that banks deny thousands of people banking services, pushing them out of the mainstream economy.

And what could the government do about it? I see one of the causes of resentment as being increasing decentralising of government (local and national) services. Communities are built and maintained through conversations and it is much more difficult to have conversations with someone on the other side of a glass window in a huge processing centre. In many disconnected communities, the only remaining businesses are betting chains. On a better note, I've been impressed to notice that the Cooperative have been quietly investing in numerous food shops and pharmacies in Stoke over the last few months. As well as the services here and the fact that as a member organisations they won't take out excessive profits, most of the stores have cash machines. The absence of cash machines in poor areas has an obvious link to the lack of money being spent there - if people have to go to another town to get money, or to the supermarket that takes cards, they will do their shopping there too. This applies to the people who have bank accounts at all and there is another bright spot on the horizon with the imminent opening of the Staffordshire Credit Union. Stoke is the worst place for access to financial services, so far from just being a place for people to borrow money from, this could introduce thousands of people to mainstream banking for the first time. This has knock-on effects that don't even occur to most people who live comfortably on a salary: with a bank account you can get on to a payroll and after saving for a few weeks (once the Union has built up its reserves) members will be able to borrow small, short term loans with interest rates far below those charged by loan sharks and the high street lenders that would have said yes to these groups before.

The government could go to every street that has a Coral or a Coop and invest in small centres that will provide training, services and computers. They can hire local people to run them, constantly developing their staff to open up new opportunities for them and so draw in new people as others go on to other places. They can host other organisations, social enterprises and projects, charging rents appropriate to the local economy. They can make sure there is at least one person in the centre who is well connected to all the other projects and services and can provide a signposting service that genuinely responds to what people wants rather than any targets (which, within an atmosphere of trust, would stand a much better chance of being met for the other projects). With the community relationships that will build up after around 18 months of operation (6 if you're lucky), the government will have an immediate barometer of feeling in communities that they currently lack any meaningful connections with. This will bridge the disconnection that is at the heart of community anger. The business plan is on a 'spend to save' model with the return on invesment coming from greater income tax receipts and less benefit expenditure.

This approach is simple enough to not need any strategy papers at all to be written and it gives the government to put their money where their mouth is and invest in communities at a time when it is likely many others will pull out. It would be nice to think they could cooperate with local councils, who have the same problem of having lost touch with the people in most need of safety nets.

Deal with the real, underlying problems and the fears over immigration will pass, as they have so many times before.

Powerpoint presentations

2008-12-09T18:09:00.003Z

Rather like forms, I have developed quite a deep hatred for Powerpoint presentations. I didn't quite understand why I could find some talks incredibly inspiring and useful, while others make me really twitchy and irritable.

After spending as much time today ranting about them as I did watching them, I stumbled upon this article which might explain - scientifically like - why it is so very, very frustrating to watch people circling around bulletpoints with their voices like aimless sharks, just failing to catch my attention. It's not just me being a negative grumbler, you might actually be frying my brain.

Ur doing it rong. So stop it. Pls.

A site I shall explore further.

Stoke: many modern communities with they key to happiness

2008-12-01T21:51:00.011Z

This might be the most positive story you will ever read about Cobridge in the mainstream media.

The census results, obscure though they might be (anomie? what's this, a referendum question?), pin down the reason that many of us find hard to articulate about why we love being in Stoke. We feel a sense of belonging to our community, or perhaps several different communities.

And what's so good about this is that it's so thoroughly modern. As I've tweeted in passing (hooray for this new thought trail), a morning in Burslem is not unlike one in Twitter. Conversations everywhere, news to catch up on, links to follow up. It's what makes people love Burslem and feel so sad when it is empty.

Just like the web, these communities run the risk of operating in silos (the current voguish word, I prefer to say trenches). They can chatter away and never cross paths. But that in itself is not the problem. The fact that these communities have had to compete in an ever-diminishing job market, with decreasing opportunities to mix and with limited educational opportunities, has caused divisions. As the Cobridge article shows, the community builders and connectors are plentiful in Stoke. The most invigorating meetings I go to are full of grassroots organisers, fighting their different corners and finding connections. These people have been ignored for decades, but maybe - in the new connected world where you don't have to go to London to get anything done - their time has now come. With the right support, we can become better at finding connections and building capacity without additional funding. With greater investment, we can develop enterprising communities in which everyone feels they have a part to play.

The interest shown by the government over the last few months in social enterprise has made me wonder whether they would consider putting as much investment into social enterprise centres and support as is planned for retail. I don't know whether it's too late to divert the £220 million pounds that are going to be spent clearing the Coachmakers and some piles of concrete to build yet another shopping centre, but it would be nice to think that more of our shops could be like this, instead of like this.

Does that show a lack of ambition? Maybe. But if we've already defeated "anomie", aren't simple opportunities to make a decent wage doing something we like all we need to aspire to?

Review: Gordon Hendricks at the Victoria Hall

2008-11-24T08:31:00.003Z

Burslem old-timers would have you believe Elvis appeared at the Queens Theatre in its heyday, along with *everybody* else. It’s one of those local myths, like Askey’s Giant Wartime Fish or the Revised Town Centre Masterplan. The truth doesn't really matter, no-one would be a true Boslemite if they didn’t find it perfectly credible that if Elvis had made a secret call to England during his GI days, he would have included the Mother Town in his visit.

It’s also not hard to believe that if anywhere should produce a voice to come close to matching the King’s, it should be Stoke-on-Trent. In common with certain other cities across the globe, we have a deep understanding of soul; of dispossession, anger and hope.

Having only heard of Gordon Hendricks a few days ago in the Focal Radio studios, I was nevertheless excited to be in the retro environment of the Victoria Hall, squashed into my metal seat with a proper Stoke crowd, people from across the six towns who find Hanley the best meeting ground to revive old friendships, romances and fights.

And when Gordon took to the stage, this was proper rock n roll, exploding sound systems and all. Like Elvis himself, nobody was taking this too seriously, despite the obvious talent on the stage. Gordon himself was delighted to be “back where it all started” with the people who had given him confidence to unleash what has become one of the most renowned Elvis tribute acts in the world, not least by Presley’s band and writers. Indeed, it was his familiarity with the crowd that hopefully lessened any hurt he might have felt over the unseemly stampede to the bar well before the end of the first half.

And in this unusual theatre environment, part Memphis, part Cheshire Cheese, a truly amazing show emerged. Gordon and the band’s style avoided too much basic imitation and were great performers in themselves. Gordon’s voice needs to be heard to be believed, absolutely authentic and without a hint that the most epic of Elvis’s classics were a strain to imitate. And while we can recreate moments from Vegas for generations, it was the single ‘Where Would I Be’ which really makes one dare to dream. Written by Geoff Morrows, this is unmistakably Elvis, but its freshness sparks the possibility that we could stretch even further than what we were lucky enough to get before Elvis died in 1977. Incredible, of course, in his own right, Elvis was also part of a package. A product of tumultuous times, Elvis was the individual bold enough to stand at the front of a stage and change the world. What else might be sitting in a writer’s cupboard, waiting to be recorded? How might That Voice interpret more of the greatest songs of the last three decades?

In Gordon Hendricks, Stoke has produced another great talent of whom we can be proud. We might have got more of a glimpse of his innate creativity in his home town - it is hard to keep up an American accent when you’ve got people shouting “‘iya Gordon, ‘ow’s yer dad?” - I hope he allows that spark to really flourish.

- website
- Youtube clips

Reflections on digital exclusion and the mentoring project

2008-11-09T12:01:00.011Z

I wrote these thoughts in response to the ongoing digital mentors development and in particular, this post about whether it will simply be the white middle classes that benefit from the project. I've expressed exactly these concerns myself in many different contexts, but there's always been a response at the back of my mind that where internet access is relatively easy to get to, people still don't take part.

So, what I've tried to address is a question: if people are invited to participate, why don't they?

Apologies, for the length, it is a bit of an essay but I've tried to break it up so people can skip through and anyone is welcome to extract any useful bits. Also it's a work in progress but if I don't hit publish now I could go on forever. Acknowledgments to Clay Shirky and anyone else whose ideas I might have absorbed in passing.

Looking globally, it is not the case that only the white and middle class are digitally included. In many countries still considered 'developing', groups and individuals with access have been able to collaborate basically as well as anywhere else. A number of projects have focussed on developing this with different models, meaning I could more easily communicate online with some people working in orphanages in Rwanda than in community centres in Stoke. Sure, super-fast broadband and hot gadgets make everything look nicer, but there's no fundamental difference as long as you have the two elements I'm writing about here: technology (however basic) and time. Even literacy becomes less of an issue with increasing use of video and audio tools, but it nevertheless remains the case that education is probably the main dividing factor.

Online collaboration doesn't care about anybody's point of view. In a world where we've segregated ourselves on the basis of race, class, religion, politics while becoming ever more likely to bump into each other physically, it is the fact that we can work together often without knowing these aspects about each other that contributes to the richness and power of collaborative projects and things like community campaigns. It doesn't matter if we fundamentally disagree on religious matters if we both want to fight to save the local swimming pool. However, in the real world, something like different religious views might be one of the factors that would stop us ever talking to each other.

Digital exclusion is a problem because we are still missing out on the contributions of so many talented people.

Why is being online important?
The internet is a platform for anybody to work, play, pay for things or do what they want for free. With internet access, anybody can look up information or join in conversations, for example extending the reach of broadcast media and other aspects of society that could also have been considered 'broadcast', such as politics. Without internet access, simply, they cannot. While a local library has a certain amount of information for people, it is in no way equivalent to the searchable index available at our fingertips. Meetings are a definite positive complement to online interaction, but the internet takes the cost out of all basic organisation. It avoids the need to have meetings at set times when 80% of your community might need to be elsewhere looking after kids or working. With web 2.0 sites, even the time consuming aspects of building are removed. It enables anybody to contribute to their own strengths and decentralises responsibility - as well as control.

What and where is the conversation?
While you can look and learn online, it is all about interaction. You don't just happen to open your web page and see a site, you browse into it, find it through Google or get referred to it by an advert, another website, social network or directly from a friend. You might ask someone with power for information and as soon as they show you where that information is, you become informed rather than frustrated. Because of the sheer volume of 'stuff' online, you need some sort of prompt and that is often where 'the conversation' comes in.

The trickiest part of online participation is that it is really about your capacity, not least your time, to join in conversations. There are, obviously, millions of conversations going on all over the world in different languages and in different places. Although many of these conversations are open, barriers to involvement include your ability to read and type in the right language and the time you have to get to know the context and build up trust within the community. The conversations you join, therefore, are those you want to dedicate time to.

The simplest answer is that the conversations is actually only between the individual and the screen. This is exactly the same as the information you access - the choice to participate is an individual one. However, once you have found your area of passion, your ability to contribute is huge. To give one example, if we worry that language is a big barrier to communication, then just go and see the online community that contribute to Global Voices, translating and editing global posts to provide a more multi-layered view of the world than has ever been provided by the mainstream media. It is a project that could never be achieved on the same scale by a company alone, but the partnership between Reuters, the team they funded and the volunteers that make it happen. Taking part requires a certain level of familiarity with the community and its rules, you can't just jump in and start (although the best communities usually make it possible to do just that on some level). We see that just getting on with solving the problem, however small the initial contribution, is more powerful than merely defining, redefining and arguing over the problem. That is why, from the entirely unequal position of having paid staff on one side and voiceless community members on the other, we are now entering a time when community groups or other collaborating groups can move faster than traditional organisations and win arguments that they weren't even being invited to have before.

So what do people need to participate?
All people need is access and time. This is a big 'all'. Unpicking this, use of social media is a luxury. Access to basic equipment is enough for basic interaction, but the technology you have dictates whether you can access features like broadband. When internet access has a price, time becomes limited. Your ability to have an ambient awareness of the passing world depends if you are near a screen much of the time, for example in a job that is both computer-based and where access to social sites has not been blocked.

Joining in the many-to-many conversations online takes longer than face to face, but it is at least more possible than actually moving to the same gathering points. Twitter's strength is that it is virtually as quick to post as it is to read updates, so many-to-many conversations have become quicker and more open than email. Unless you protect your updates, you open up your interactions for anybody to follow. When Twitter becomes widely accessible by mobile phone again it will become easier for this to happen away from computer screens.

What has changed in the UK?
It goes without saying that there were plenty of active people online in the UK for the last decade. However, there has been an underdevelopment in UK communities. The active people I knew were generally part of international communities. Twitter has contributed to a change. In the blog and email era, it was just as easy to interact with people in other time zones as our own. On Twitter, the general chatter is in the same time zone as you, unless you have the time to scroll back at what happened while you were asleep. I have a fair spread of people I follow in the UK and America, but I'm much more likely to keep in regular touch with the people in the UK, including those I didn't know before Twitter. While there was an online community before Twitter, its connectivity seems to have sped up in the last few months and I think it's partly thanks to Twitter. It's also connected to the increasing professionalisation of a generation who would have got their first email addresses towards the end of high school or college and are now reaching the stage of making decisions in organisations.

There's something that is slow to change and that's the culture change that comes in an open, digital society. In a society where everyone is invited to participate, people still need to know they have the invitation. I look at Twitter or Wikinews and assume that it is fine to participate in the conversations (as long as I know a Twitterer I am following has followed me back, otherwise they won't hear me), but there are many people who will assume they are not included unless they receive the embossed invitation in the post. Part of the culture shift of the social web is the assumption that all are invited to participate and in communities that are hierachical by nature, this is a bigger shift than people from the educated classes might realise.

To illustrate further specifically to this area:- In two direct examples, a person has told me that he will not go to a meeting with a chairman because he has been made to feel unwelcome and another has said he would not go to the majority of community meetings because he is a different race and considerably younger than the people he would expect to see there. It goes the other way - I know plenty of managers who would not dream of walking into certain pubs. Hardly anybody who is white in Stoke has visited a mosque and hardly anybody who is Muslim has gone into a pub (excuse the inconsistent capitalisation, anything else looks wrong). With all these invisible walls, the internet is the best place where we could have direct conversations or, better, widen the impact of the community projects that seek to build bridges and bring people together in neutral, friendly spaces.

Particularly in the realms of politics as in corporations or any form of infrastructure, the conversation needs support to be effective. In the case of, say, an MP, a good rapport can be built up while only a few people are emailing them but as soon as all 60,000 people start taking up the opportunity you need some serious admin support to avoid unanswered emails and angry constituents. This is no longer about engaging when you need votes because scrutiny is now constant, but engaging all the time, beyond politics. This is partly a matter of making information as intuitively available as possible.

Right now in Britain (especially areas relatively new to the social web and political spheres) we're seeing the anger of exclusion bubbling up into the internet. It starts quietly and then turns into a flood. Then you get the clash of angry people. Accuse me of rewriting history if you wish, but I'd argue that America was at this stage four years ago, way back when we used to hear about hanging chads and the like. A few long, long years later and we have the incredible site of Barack Obama sending the whole world crazy.

What changed? In my view, what changed is that the people who do participate (adapting Wikipedia's statistic probably less than 1 in 100 of people who are even on participatory websites) brought their online interactions into the real world. Obama and his team have managed to bring together the traditional party system, which remains the only way you can take political power, with the collaborative power of people who couldn't care less about politics. They have completely disproved the notion that online activists can neither influence people outside their immediate circles or that they have no financial power. They have also shown that vast swathes of people who have given up, who don't think there's any point getting involved because they're always let down (but who were never, as often labelled, apathetic) can be brought in to the ballot box.

What is the role of digital mentors in the real world?
If programmers have built a world where their tools can be shared and reshaped, then it is now up to the communicators to bring that same culture into the real world. Communicating, luckily, requires fewer special skills than programming. Digital mentoring should be open to anybody with a passion for the social change that the digital sphere can bring who is willing to share that with other people, particularly with those communities that remain voiceless.

The community of digital mentors will be able to share projects and areas of practice that have worked, particularly getting over those tricky situations when you've spent ten minutes explaining the joys of Twitter only to blank stares and suggestions that perhaps it's time you stopped playing and got a proper job.

Who funds it all?
It is perhaps underappreciated, because I rarely hear it said, that the architecture of the digital revolution has, on the whole, not been provided by governments or philanthropists but by the commercial sector. The fact that community groups need not fill in a funding application to get a website built for them but can simply sign up for a blog on Blogger is perhaps why not all of them do - we have a voluntary sector that often relies on funding and assumes that the end of funding means the end of a project. It is neither necessary nor desirable for governments to build a suite of tools equivalent to those freely available from the big companies and while you can (and should) consider whether you want so much information to be held by Google and Yahoo, I think there is greater benefit than cause for concern in the fact that anybody can sign up for everything from an email address to a group wiki for free and also anonymously.

If the internet and the social web is the modern equivalent of roads, especially in an era where transport is going to become more limited, then there is a Keynesian argument for the government to be investing in people to help make those connections. The roads will be formed by people once they have had their starting points. We haven't yet got the British equivalent of Google (have we?), but there's no particular reason why that shouldn't happen if we - the public and private sector - invest in creative, collaborative people who can respond flexibly to our ever-changing global circumstances. It's a far, far better strategy for regeneration than retail parks, I'd suggest, with one eye firmly pointed at those people making decisions for North Staffordshire.

The concern that digital mentors would simply be going round telling people what to do is, hopefully, not what is going to happen if people who understand social media become the ones who take the project forward (most importantly, not just those who see it as an opportunity to "bung a few banks of PCs in community centres". Teaching is a pretty old fashioned form of broadcast. Mentoring is more about developing participation, it's the modern version of show and tell, but without the tell. When I think about the people I'd try to involve I have one friend in particular in mind, Mark. He started out by emailing a campaign via its website and quickly got immersed in the debate. Two hugely successful campaigns later and he remains a central member of the group. He has taken part in some community development training with the local university, making him almost as qualified as many of the fresh-faced consultants that parade through our communities at the start of each new tender process. As well as emails bouncing around the group, Mark now runs a one-man online attack on an array of local and national government figures, wheedling out individual contacts from big corporate departments. He's not the only one in the group and their advice has spread further, helping campign groups in other parts of the country to force council rethinks. What I like about the digital mentoring project is the fact that the DCLG must realise that they're going to create a generation of people who are going to make their lives a misery, but that ultimately we will have a more connected, empowered society.

Becoming a Mentor
What was it that first got you excited about the web? I'll guess it started with something you read or heard from someone else, possibly after hearing all sorts of things that you ignored, that got you curious. After that, it was just you and the computer screen, along with the tools and the people out there - the communities. It was when you found enough to be passionate about that you become an advocate, even an evangelist for the web. That, along with a bit of experience and enthusiasm for building or contributing to communities yourselves is really all you need to award yourself the title of Digital Mentor.

We need to find a balance between giving people adequate reward for their time (particularly where we see priority areas, to ensure digital mentoring is something adequate numbers of people have the time to do rather than assuming they will all be those that can afford to do in their spare time) and opening our knowledge and experience up to ensure that anybody with online experience who wants to share that for community benefit can find the role and take it on voluntarily (along with the other titles that have struck a chord with people such as blogger and social reporter, and no doubt there will be many more to come). We need transparency in recruitment for the paid positions and the possibility of being trained into the paid roles, or other paid work using the skills.

I think alongside a large organisation taking the lead on the proposal, we will need some of the leaders identified in this exercise, and those who emerge in the future, to be national connectors who have the ability to roam the country making sure small organisations know about each other's work (as we know, however good we might be are at online networking and getting better all the time, you do still miss a lot when you can't have real conversations with people). Clearly this needs to be matched with connectors on the ground and this is where it becomes less likely that the government-led scheme alone can afford to.

I see it shaping up into a type of open source collegiate community which needs enough resources to bring people together and enable people to work in communities (perhaps on lead, 'model' projects), while also drawing in people all the time to make a contribution to the project and to digital engagement, therefore deepening the core work and unlocking further resources, both people/volunteers and further grant funding, for example small community grants for computer centres that could be equipped with a free suite of key social sites and then that centre can be added to the Online Centres network.

Perhaps, since this does have the government angle, this sort of connecting role is also something that MPs could be encouraged to take part in. (don't look so surprised!) Furthermore, we need to spread the idea that digital communication is something that more workers are given time for within their jobs.

There will always be those people who feel they have missed out once something is up and running without them, but one of the unwritten rules of the social web is that it is better to build a structure and then see what happens than to wait until you have everybody on board and absolute agreement. Failure as a possibility is acceptable but if you don't have a defined outcome then all outcomes can be a success. As long as the Digital Mentor project has an open and welcoming community and aims to collaborate with anybody who wants to throughout its lifetime, then it will have more success in joining up the circles of online and offline conversation than all of the traditional, top-down, expensive projects that so often land upon us.

Finally
We move into a more constructive social media community when we realise that spending your precious typing time arguing and complaining about being excluded is really not as good as just doing it. Doing what? It's entirely up to you.

Action for Congo

2008-11-04T19:30:00.002Z

Since I'm full of concern but not many original ideas on the situation in the DRC, I'm reposting this blog post by Fred Robarts, for more information please visit http://www.ir2p.org

The last time eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) had this much media attention, it was full of refugees from Rwanda who had arrived intermingled with the extremist officials and militia groups that had orchestrated the 1994 genocide. (People who are armed or have committed crimes against humanity aren’t eligible for refugee status under international law, but neither the Congolese authorities nor the UN prevented the genocidaires from keeping their weapons and running the camps.) There were stories of cholera outbreaks and a massive relief operation, but then the news moved on. There was very little coverage or outcry when the same exiled genocidaires staged gruesome raids on Rwanda, or when in 1996 the new Rwandan army crossed the border and carried out massacres of its own, hunting down Rwandan Hutu rebels and refugees alike before sending some 600,000 back to Rwanda.

That was the opening act of two really nasty wars, followed by a power-sharing agreement and a transition to democracy. But these achievements were built on flimsy foundations, and were not shored up by meaningful reforms and effective nationally-led efforts to improve security, end impunity and improve living conditions. All manner of foreign and home-grown armed groups flourished in the security vacuum and profited by selling Congo’s fantastic mineral and timber wealth to the highest bidders.

Now the international press is back in Goma in numbers that seem remarkable, given stiff competition from the financial markets and the US elections. So there is much more material than usual to draw on for the background material and news articles below. But some humanitarian workers are also uniquely-placed to report on the consequences of the violence, as Helen O’Neill of MSF does here (audio):

“One week there is a bustling village and the next week our mobile medical teams return to discover it’s completely empty - a ghost town. Thousands are on the move - a constant stream of humanity on the road. Who knows where all these people will end up? The families settle in inhospitable areas, many of them in the bush, where there is no chance of accessing healthcare… Malaria is endemic in the country, as is cholera, which increases whenever people are on the move like this or crowded into unsanitary camps… The people I met are also hungry, as they can’t go to their fields to harvest. It’s just too dangerous. If you are out alone trying to get to your land you can be shot or raped.”

Policy recommendations

The following 10 steps have been taken from a variety of sources (listed below) and consistent with ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine:

1. Apply sustained, coherent and even-handed international pressure to ensure dialogue between the protagonists to work on acceptable problem-solving mechanisms instead of seeking to profit through dangerous alliances with proxy forces.
2. Strengthen the UN mandate and answer UN requests for more, better-equipped troops (preferably including Special Forces) for MONUC, including through rapid deployment of a UN-mandated European Force.
3. Maximise efforts to help impartial specialist agencies like MSF and the ICRC get humanitarian assistance to those who need it.
4. Regroup the Congolese army (FARDC) and bring it under firm control and new leadership as a matter of urgency. Senior officers must be vetted; no national army can succeed if it is led by war criminals and racketeers. The troops need better training and discipline, but also better conditions.
5. Through political, economic and military pressure, isolate, diminish, disarm and disband all foreign and local militia groups.
6. Enable more inclusive dialogue in DRC and Rwanda to address deeper problems including citizenship, property rights, management of natural resources and the return of refugees. In the process, listen to and inform the rural population and multiple minorities of the Kivus.
7. Examine and control the mineral trade, including through more intrusive sanctions monitoring (e.g. flight inspections) and instruments such as the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and the UN Global Compact.
8. Investigate and prosecute human rights abuses and war crimes through the DRC courts and the International Criminal Court.
9. Monitor, challenge and prosecute hate speech from politicians and the media in DRC, the Great Lakes region and the Diaspora
10. Review development assistance programmes to ensure that they abide by Do No Harm and OECD principles for engagement in fragile states while helping to build democracy and uphold the Rule of Law in DRC (and Rwanda).

Sources of policy recommendations, with sample quotes:

* Council on Foreign Relations: “The problem in eastern Congo is analogous to the problem Sierra Leone faced in 2000, when a British intervention stabilized the country.” (With audio)
* The Economist: “Plainly, the peacekeepers need reinforcing fast, with the right sort of troops. Instead of wringing its hands, the UN Security Council must resolve to send a robust force of extra troops forthwith.”
* Human Rights Watch: “It’s up to the Congolese government, not Nkunda, to protect its Tutsi citizens.”
* Minority Rights Group: “The grievances of the Tutsi cannot justify the abuses committed by the CNDP.”
* UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Great Lakes: “We should not return to the status quo. This crisis should be the occasion to redefine the international commitment to the Congo so that there can be a more effective effort to address the causes of the conflict. If we leave the fundamental problems to fester under the surface, all our other efforts – and the UK’s laudable investment in helping the Congo – will be built on sand.”
* Amnesty International: “Deliberate or indiscriminate attacks against civilians and peacekeepers carrying out their duty of protecting civilians is a war crime, punishable under international law.”
* Enough: “All sides must be held to account for the crimes committed, and the International Criminal Court must work with MONUC to investigate war crimes and crimes against humanity by all sides”
* The Guardian (Comment Is Free): “Unless sufficient determination can be mustered to follow up with more inclusive dialogue to address deeper problems including citizenship, management of natural resources, government legitimacy and return of refugees, violent instability will continue to plague eastern Congo and unsettle the entire region.”

Further action

If you agree, the following are some actions you could take. (No doubt you can think of other ideas, perhaps inspired by other campaigns - please let us know.)

* Write to your elected representative. Better still, ask to meet them. Bring a persuasive friend. (For those in the UK, there is likely to be a special parliamentary debate this Thursday. Refer to They Work For You to get your MP’s contact info.) Ask them what they think about these proposals, and ask if they have any links with the Congolese Assembly or the Rwandan Parliament. Find out if your country is currently a member of the UN Security Council. Ask how your government is responding to the humanitarian emergency, and whether this is proportionate to the needs.
* Most news sites, blogs and radio shows encourage you to comment on the big stories. Add your voice, and draw on the material on this page and the links (please send us a link to your comment as well).
* Media coverage will slip during the US Elections. Why not write to the editors (and your MP again) to let them know you want to know what happens next?
* Find out which humanitarian and human rights organisations are doing valuable work in the Congo. Join one of them.
* If you are already a member of a club or organisation, consider how events in the Congo may be relevant to them. Discuss it.
* Find and get to know any Congolese people in your school, college, workplace or neighbourhood. They may be surprised to know you care about what is happening there.
* If you have a blog or website, link to this page and use the resources to write your post.
* Email the link to this page to friends and colleagues, with a personal message from you to introduce it.

October 23 2008: Plodding to the polls

2008-10-23T08:12:00.008+01:00

The only feeling that I can take from today’s referendum process in Stoke is that nothing much has changed for our "damaged" system of governance.

The question resembles a camel with two legs: curious looking and, well, not very mobile. It has been put together by too many people with an eye on electoral law who forgot that democracy starts with clear language that actually makes sense. To be fair, of course, the council have already been through this process in two ways, getting two different answers.

So it has been left to the campaign groups - two different groups who chose the same name - and the local media to translate the question for the general public. Try as I might to feign an interest, my eyes went glassy the very second the No campaigners started talking of councillors trying to take away my right to choose who I wanted to lead the city.

Meanwhile, the Yes campaigners, apparently submitting to the commonly-held view that to interest people, you have to terrify them, have come up with a mock-up of The Sun showing the rioting and flames that would result should we keep our mayor. Their message is that the BNP are going to put up someone very charismatic and sexy to woo us all before May. Who this charmer is, is not clear, but if it seems a good enough reason to you to scrap the entire mayoral system, then be sure to vote Yes today.

What this has to do with unpicking the merits of governance systems before us is anyone’s guess, but the Sentinel have taken the same tack for a different result, with a confusing story based on an anonymous poll of councillors that informs us that if we vote Yes we will also get the BNP leading us next May. For BNP politicians and supporters, all that’s needed is to stay quiet and take the free publicity while all around them politicians sink under their own spin and squabbling.

The only thing that can give a convincing way forward is a large turnout today, and that's assuming we think everyone understands the question. My impression from conversations with those people who don’t take an active interest in city politics - the majority, and who can blame them - is that people neither understand nor care. People are widely referring to it as an election, meaning they will be confused when they find out they're not voting for people, but for a system. Translating the question outside the ballot box for people is fairly easy, but whether or not any of us will remember what the question means once we’re inside is unclear. You’re voting No if you want to have a mayor; Yes, if you want the councillors to choose a leader or you just want rid of the mayor. If you’re in the considerable camps of people who (a) think councillors should have more power or (b) would rather the councillors were all gone tomorrow, well then there are no options for you. I could go into the wider plans of the governance commission, which have been agreed but not acted upon by the council, but I suspect you lost interest a few lines ago.

The only reason to vote today is to contribute to the turnout, because we must use our votes when we get them. My own view hasn’t changed over the last six months: the system we have doesn’t particularly matter as long as we can have a city in which everybody can contribute and have their voices heard through different avenues of representation. In the last few weeks, far away from the political arena but sometimes involving the same people, I’ve seen some very encouraging signs that the grassroots organisations of Stoke could be enjoying something of a renaissance, inspired perhaps by the visit of Desmond Tutu back in July. Online, there are more Stoke people blogging than ever before – even if large swathes of our city are still without free internet access this is a sign that we could be entering a more healthy era of discussion and debate in which the people’s voices cannot be ignored. The day when even poor ignored Tunstall has a Facebook group dedicated to its charms is a good day for our city.

The campaigners for Trentham High School, who have been bravely standing up and dragging attention back to themselves even when all seemed lost, have in my view won the battle and should be given the prize they want. If walking to London to deliver a petition wasn’t convincing enough, the achievement of the students, teachers and parents in making their school the most improved in the city deserves our respect and more importantly that of the Building Schools for the Future architects. People are more important than buildings and our reliance on demolition and displacement needs to be put behind us. Our appearance on Question Time last week was a clear message to national government that the people of Stoke have, through bitter experience, learnt to articulate issues of deprivation, fear and unfairness as they affect our communities.

As Stoke-on-Trent creeps closer to its centenary year as a federated city of six proud towns, we could be about to enter very interesting times indeed.

Beyond poverty

2008-10-15T17:11:00.011+01:00

Wherever you are in the world, a lot of the work around poverty tends to be focussed on funding and policy. Not funding for those in poverty, naturally, but funding for the bureaucracy that seeks to alleviate poverty. This means that those who develop most success, whether working on a very wide or very local level, tend to be those who learn to play the game of government targets around deprivation.

I was interested to hear a comment today by a very inspiring woman who complained about the short-termism of funding for a women's project she ran. It struck me that we have no choice but to move beyond our reliance on funding. Otherwise, the groups have no choice but to keep emphasising their problems in order to get the funding they need to continue. The development of social enterprise as an encouraged option moves on from that, but still puts organisations under pressure to grow and develop.

For me, the present climate makes either of these avenues increasingly difficult to sustain. The global problems are going to mean there are simply too many problems for governments to adequately fund. In addition, trading is going to become harder and those companies that made funding available for community projects are likely to have less to share. To put it simply, there is less money out there now to solve our problems. We need to rely more on our own creativity and what can be done for free.

So that makes it timely that, as is outlined well in Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody and by others, we're in an era where our costs of organising has collapsed. For all the uncertainty about what the Digital Mentor idea could look like, its greatest strength is the recognition that, by teaching people in deprived communities about digital access and use of free tools, you effectively plug them in to much wider opportunities. It could lead to two outcomes: first giving people the tools to organise whatever disruptive things they want to (and I like the fact that the government seem to be going down this route when they clearly aren't in control of the outcomes); and second transcending the basic modern reality that to be successful, you have to be willing to travel anywhere in the world: get educated, get mobile. We could start tapping in to the under-utilised resources of people who are in deprived areas, hearing their voices, hearing about their skills and making links to markets anywhere in the world. Again, the government could take the lead on this by supporting remote hubs to connect people to higher quality jobs even if they aren't in the major cities.

By building up the self-sufficiency of localised deprived areas, we can build confidence in those communities and people can actually take power, instead of waiting to be given handouts.

I think we need to start cherishing the small contributions that can lead to transformative change. One activist in a community can have a significant impact. Online, that impact is magnified. In Stoke alone, we've seen some examples of decisions being overturned because resistance could not be ignored as it would have been in the past. Indeed, even at the end of major battles, we've seen a development of greater respect for groups that would previously have been ignored. People will different skills can work together, so literacy is not necessarily a barrier to participation (although it is an issue). Through greater online dialogue adding to personal meetings, we can start to move beyond the anger and divisionism that has been fuelled by decades, if not centuries, of deprivation in our communities. People can participate in more creative ways than the standard hierarchies like resident's committees and they can be asked to volunteer more easily.

To break it down into a trite, but Twitterable soundbite:
Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day
Give him broadband and he'll be able to download instructions on a wide range of fishing methods.
(and perhaps the location of a nearby community group offering a fish-supper or the ability to form one himself...)

Reviews

2008-10-11T17:59:00.001+01:00

2005 was probably the year when I turned from blogger to connected global citizen.

In June, I was in Rwanda on a rollercoaster of a week. Meeting with wonderful friends made by email as we developed a discussion on how journalists could play a part in preventing genocide. Enjoying stimulating conversations on topics that still provoke my thoughts today. We ran a conference on how the global youth could ensure ‘Never Again’, it happened to coincide with the visit of the president of the World Bank to Africa and, Rwanda being quite a closely connected place, we got him to come to our conference. After his address, I shot up to the nearest computer lab and reported the speech on Wikinews (http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/World_Bank_president_addresses_global_youth_forum_on_genocide), which, in turn got a mention in the Financial Times.

Less than a month later, I heard the sound of a bomb close to my office in Tavistock Square. We didn’t know what it was, but I was already communicating with a fellow ‘wikinewsie’, Dan Grey, about explosions on the underground. At 9.56am (the log says 8.56) I immediately posted a report heard from my editor and work experience student who had run out to see what was happening. I then deleted it again, worried that it might not be true, but it was and Dan was already weaving it in to the developing Wikinews story. He later wrote (http://osdir.com/ml/org.wikimedia.foundation/2005-07/msg00060.html) that we were the first people to report the incident online. In 2008 I imagine it would have been quicker still, posted on Twitter via mobile phone from the scene itself, but in 2005 nine minutes was considered pretty fast.

Everybody brushes with news stories from time to time in their lives. The difference between then and now is that then the public’s contribution to a story was merely their answer to the bland question ‘how do you feel’. Now, we can shape the story, write it, respond to it, comment on it.

I’m now reading, simultaneously (because I’m *that* hyperconnected), Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, and CrowdWired by Tom Watson. The first is a good example of how you can carve out your niche and make money: seeing the book recommended on a few sites I trusted I marched in to Waterstones and demanded a copy, even paying extra so I could read it on the train. The second has been sent as a review copy, thanks to a connection with Tom Watson on Twitter, so I can make my own sprinklings of recommendations through my own networks so that in a few months someone else will shell out real cash for the fruits of Tom’s labour instead of just reading his blog for free.

Both books are fascinating and very readable. They represent the maturity of a movement, the time when academics can take a step back from the fast-moving events and start writing a history. 2005 is an important year in both these histories, with the 7/7 bombings and the New Orleans floods representing a step further on from the connectivity that could already be seen on 9/11 and the 2004 Tsunami. Both books are really useful as guides to those who are still waiting for the spark. I’ve already read the criticism somewhere that Shirky’s book doesn’t say anything new. Although that criticism is untrue, in my view, I can see why the online ‘natives’ may be unmoved by the story of a lost/stolen phone that could be found again by the power of the crowd.

One of the many interesting insights for me is that in the connected world, we can be very relaxed about failure. Indeed, we can afford to fail because the investment in organising is now zero. For a long time I was a little downhearted about the amount of ideas I’d started that hadn’t really got anywhere, the tools I’d built that hadn’t been picked up and used by as many people as I’d hoped. My view now, which has been backed up by the evidence in this book, is that putting ideas out that may or may not be picked up is simply part of a new process that is now done in public where it once would have been private.

Free digital revolushun. Ur doin it rong.

2008-10-11T14:25:00.010+01:00

The sudden closure of Burslem Library last week left me feeling really disappointed.

Sited inside the city's finest building, the Wedgwood Institute, the library is one of those places whose value often goes unnoticed. When I first moved to Burslem, two rooms of the crumbling listed building were being used and through the window you could see some fairly dusty-looking bookshelves. By the time I found myself in Burslem during the day, the library had shrunk into one room, with the rest of this fine building taped off to all those without hard hats.

Despite its very obvious neglect, the library was a haven for me and many others. Inside I could spend the odd hour for free, discovering long-gone voices of Burslem shoppers, child miners and characters. There was the internet.

A long time ago, as can be seen on Stoke council's website, millions of pounds were granted to refurbish the building. Expanded library space would have been shared with business units and the lecture theatre would have been restored. See and regret that the completion date should have been August this year.

Instead, the project got dragged into the very complex and expensive business of reshuffling North Staffs agencies and 'put on hold' while a coherent vision for everything could be developed. It is still on hold. While it is fair that money should be spent carefully, this was funding granted to restore a specific building of great significance to the city. Nobody would have argued that the building needed to be restored, so it would have been better to get on with it than have it eventually shut down altogether after becoming a danger to the public. That a fine building with such an illustrious history should have been allowed to degenerate is not the fault of any individual but of systematic failure going back generations. It's a far cry from the original vision, built by public subscription to widen out access to education.

Today, because no plans could be put into place for the library, it has shut without any warning. This is, hopefully, temporary, but this is a very stretchable word in Stoke. The closure means that between the A500 and the Haywood Learning Centre (virtually the whole of the Burslem South ward), there is no free internet access available to the public (if there are any exceptions to this please let me know).

With all the government efforts towards digital engagement, the fact that this could happen in one of the most deprived wards in the country should be a cause of concern to politicians nationally. Not least because we have two important processes going on right now: the Slater Street Public Inquiry and the masterplanning process for Middleport. Those on broadband can follow these processes online and can have our say by email, blogs or on discussion boards should we so wish; we can read updates on websites. In a library, even the web-averse could read about this matter of public interest in the Sentinel for free. If you can't afford a computer and broadband, or you can't get through the credit check to have broadband then you go back to being as disconnected as you ever have been.

Like so much, people will point to alternatives. All that is in Tunstall, they will say, or Hanley. Haven't got a car? Just get a bus. Walk, it's good for you! All of which is of little use to those with limited mobility, no money, those feeling a little isolated or frightened to take to the streets or to gamble with the public transport system. There's a certain time and feeling in Burslem, after about 3 when most of the shops have usually closed for the day, when you don't have quite enough money even for a lemonade in the Leopard. It's a time when your heart can really sink as you look over the empty buildings and the closed shops. The antidote to this feeling was the library, not in Tunstall or Hanley or up any hill, but in Burslem.

The closure also came in the same week as twinkly-eyed minister for culture Andy Burnham launched a debate on the future of libraries. To which our only answer can be "yes, we'd like one of those please".

So, as is right and proper in these circumstances, I've set up a Facebook group to retain a virtual community in support of, first, having a library at all and secondly, to have a fully developed and fabulous library in the place that our forefathers built for us. So, if you can get online and feel so inclined, please join and show your support with a little gentle badgering of your elected representatives.

Lessons from a former newspaper editor

2008-09-26T09:49:00.005+01:00

Back in July, at the end of a very difficult week, I started to accept that my dream, the newspaper Local Edition, was not going to continue in paper any more. On the same day, I was lucky enough to see Desmond Tutu speaking in Stoke. Of all the miraculous coincidences, nothing could have inspired me more than his speech that focussed on the small things and reflected back on a path that took Josiah Wedgwood from Burslem to Nelson Mandela in South Africa, free from prison after a centuries-long struggle against racist oppression.

Next week, I start a brand new role, on which I will undoubtedly be saying much more. So it's a good time to reflect on what I learnt.

I still don't believe that newspapers are dead. But their business model cannot work in the current climate. The weight of commercial funding needed is dragging newspapers - and more importantly, print journalists - down. Exciting as the new era may be for those working on the new business model, there are generations of reporters still being crushed in newsrooms across the country by groups seeking to hang on to their 30% profits. Much as the mainstream is getting on board with the internet, I still think there is a major point they're not getting. I don't believe Google is hugely profitable because it does everything it can to chase money. Rather, their vast profits have allowed them the freedom to experiment and develop tools that are as good as they can be and improving all the time. Lucky Google. Lucky us.

More and more of us are now finding ourselves in a period of exploration. Whether you grew up thinking you'd be a miner or a banker, there are no safe job routes any more. Those of us who are lucky will be able to find avenues we are passionate about, but there is no reason any more to give your life to any organisation in the hope of future rewards. At the point when I was ready to stop the newspaper, I realised I'd be happier labouring for a living than trying to sell another advertising space to a reluctant shop that hadn't made any money for a week. I was even more sick of trying to sell 'community benefit' to a millionnaire business-owner who wasn't about to start giving something back with my paper. The weight of the cost of paper was simply too much to sustain, I was risking my own reputation trying to fulfil too many roles and I wasn't making any money from it.

However, running Local Edition for as long as I could still created incredible benefits. My faith that there was more out there that people like to believe paid off and the paper pulled together contributions from fantastic writers, photographers and artists, all with the most generous spirits. Enough organisations and businesses put their money into the paper, an unproven concept, to keep it going at a break-even point. I had endless, dizzying conversations with people whose voices never seem to be reflected in centres of power. Our stories were followed up, amplifying the voices of ordinary people. I could start to imagine what these networks could look like if they were listened to and resourced. I had to grapple with a spectrum of political views far removed from the safe spaces we create for ourselves. We had to react to events, rumours and different truths that put me in mind of terrifying scenarios and possibilities. We showed it was possible to run a newspaper full of constructive news and that it would be popular.

These are some things I would tell people thinking about going down the same path:

- don't burn yourself out chasing the money you need to follow your dream. Get the money to sustain your food, essentials and a broadband connection and then carve out the time for your passion. Even a few minutes a day spent on a collaborative project makes an impact.

- the people who tell you not to get into debt are right, unless that debt is with the Princes Trust who will be one of your most steadfast friends (assuming you are in Britain, that is). There are many more organisations who will be just as wonderful and I haven't got time to list them right now, so seek them out rather than the ones that make things difficult while saying they're helping you.

- if your project is unusual, asking people who operate with a different vision for money to do it won't work. Again, use free tools to make your impact so that you're not relying on anybody else. If you prove your point, then risk-averse organisations will support you, but probably well after you need them. Be ready to know when to stop waiting.

The project has led to some great work for me and many of the people who have been involved in the paper (many of whom didn't need any help but it's still nice that Local Edition has been part of their journey). www.localedition.org.uk continues as one of the richest archives of Northern Stoke life on the internet and a communication forum that anybody can use. www.stokesounds.co.uk is without doubt the best music website in North Staffordshire. The company, Social Media CIC, will continue simply to provide a structure for ideas, without the burden of cashflow forecasts that demand endless growth to feed the machinery of business. It will instead create social capital and connect with other small organisations all over the world that are doing the same. Exciting times ahead...

PS If you're reading this thinking "but she's still got to send me that receipt/letter/form/cheque/etc/etc", I will tie up all the loose ends in the end, promise, things have just been a bit hectic recently... :)

Is this helpful?

2008-09-05T09:38:00.008+01:00

Time is valuable. Whenever we undertake something, we have to make a brief calculation in our head about whether the time it will take is worthwhile. This is even more the case if you're working freelance or running a business.

That's why quick activities so often get far more people to participate.

The one thing I hate more than anything else at all is bureaucracy. (hopefully you understand that I'm not comparing forms to torture or genocide, I am merely being dramatic). Forms send me spitting feathers all over the place and whining like a teenager as I scrawl half-heartedly on the stupid boxes and ratings. It's only slightly better if somebody fills in the form with me.

"On a scale of 1 to 10, how dehumanised does this form make you feel?"

That's a question you rarely see.

I'm not dyslexic, but I am left-handed, so there are parts of forms that I tend to miss out because I didn't see them. I find filling them in genuinely stressful and very time-consuming. I tend to get suspicious of the usefulness of the form the longer it goes on. I start to think evil thoughts about the people who created the form. I wonder at the expense of entering data that I know for a fact is already in their overstuffed servers and wandering memory sticks. Very often, I give up, unless given another biscuit or told I can't leave the room till it's done.

More than anything, I resent the fact that part of my interactions with government bureaucracy are because I'm someone in need of 'help'. The only reason I sign or fill in the bloody things at all is because I have been part of various government schemes that have really helped me and normally there is a wonderful person on the end of the form saying "Sorry about this, but it's for the funders". Because I have been through different schemes with differing levels of bureaucracy, I know that evaluation is applied differently.

I obviously see the value of evaluation and the necessity for monitoring. A bit of reflection on your work by an impartial observer is also often very useful. Even the need to demonstrate value for money, except that I think this very often destroys actual value in the process of spreading your money as thin as it can go. I don't like the fact that because I don't have my own money to do whatever I like, I have to trade personal details for help. I would rather spend that time doing something of value instead.

I'm becoming convinced that nearly all the time-consuming evaluation could be replaced by one simple question:

"Was this helpful?"

Yes or no.

If this question was applied at the end of every interaction by a publicly-funded person, or added to the end of every web page funded by a government scheme, then we would very quickly have a body of evidence to say what is helping people most and what isn't. In other words, what works. Suggestions and refinements can always come later, with the time freed up by not having to fill in stupid forms.

Two examples:

You spend four days supplying excessive amounts of information for a branding grant that, ultimately, you were rejected for because you were the wrong sort of business (even though you had checked beforehand and your intermediary had been given the wrong information).

Was this helpful?

No

(now, isn't that quicker than composing endless vitriolic letters and complaining to everyone you meet?)

You had a conversation with someone you know at the council who told you you would probably be eligible for a refurbishment grant on your house that you hadn't heard about before and then asked the person running the scheme to call you. You were eligible, so you got the grant.

Was this helpful?

Yes

One of these examples wasted stupid amounts of unpaid time and contributed absolutely nothing to government outputs. The other contributed to outputs and ensured that someone in need got something they were entitled to. The difference is in the time people are allowed to have conversations with people.

Particularly in areas where online access is low, you can forget connecting with people if you're not released from your desk to speak to people. Conversations are extremely valuable. Information can be passed on and put into context. Conversations layer on each other. Most people are more likely to take action because of a conversation, or even several conversations, than they are from websites, mailshots or even newspapers. Certainly, these add to the mix and are vital to ensure you are getting accurate information and have something to refer to, but that is combined with the spark that made you look at them in the first place.

Call conversations, if you like, the Twitter feeds of real life and you might appreciate the importance of conversations once again. Journalists, take note.

I've gone off on a bit of a tangent, but when they release the next competition to do something clever to make government work better, this will be my suggestion. Wipe out every form with more than two fields and replace it with the name of the project/person/odd new computer system in a waiting room/paper-based information given to people, a name (if you must) and a yes or no answer.

Feed it into a central space and...

We might suddenly find out what's working.

Reputations

2008-08-21T19:16:00.005+01:00

It is quite often the case that people feel isolated when they have a problem with a company or organisation.

Many people may not be aware of the powerful search tools that can help them find out more about an organisation's reputation than you will get from their official websites or the often PR-led mainstream media.

Google blog search and Twitter search, which recently incorporated Summize, are both becoming increasingly stronger tools as more people express their views online. Because you can skim through snippets, you can get a quick overall picture of positive or negative comments and also delve deeper into stories that might show national trends. It adds greatly to our ability to hold organisations accountable as they increasingly try to build big walls around themselves.

It adds to the usefulness of main Google which, as I've blogged before, will often get you to answers that are missing from corporate websites. This week I tried to visit Stikipad and just got a holding page, suggesting it would be up and running soon. Later, a Google search took me along the same track as many more people to a blog post that revealed the site had actually been down for several months and showed no signs of revival. What started out as one person's frustrated blogspost became a focal point and the link rose further up Google as more people linked to it. The post became a bubbling, collaborative space to the extent that once personal phone numbers and details went up the original author asked everyone to leave when the party looked like turning nasty (or rather, libellous).

It highlights two important points. First of all, if you're having a frustrating time with a company it is worth documenting your experience online somewhere, if you feel ready to, because it should get picked up by others, possibly including a quick-witted person from the organisation. Second, it is a reminder that most forums, and Twitter, are public and if you're working for clients you might think twice before slagging them off online in any place that can be traced back to you. You don't know whose desktop it might pop up on...

The social reporter

2008-08-19T16:39:00.003+01:00

I like David Wilcox’s definition of the social reporter. It sounds friendlier than the two rather ugly words citizen journalist, although that name might be too far developed (in good ways) to change now.
It defines very nicely the work I’ve been doing over the last 18 months. It wasn’t until I had to take stock for a funding application that I realised that my team would have had around 35,000 exchanges on the streets of Northern Stoke in a year. None of us were working in the area before, so that is 35,000 connections that would not have happened otherwise. I always felt that the conversations were as important as the newspaper, both reinforcing networks and provoking action. We supported networks and new projects, we passed on information and we countered rumours if we were able to.
Before call-centre journalism became normal, journalists were community-based (at least in the realms of power) and conversation-based. How would journalists operate if it went back to that, with the addition of technology? Less of the smash-and-grab vox pop to get some bland quotes from different ‘sides’ and perhaps a recognition that the reporter, as the person who is speaking to both those in power and those without, can support a dialogue between them instead of exacerbating a conflict.
Perhaps they would give a bit more thought to the other bits of information people tend to tell you as you’re gathering a story (that is if you give them enough time). Someone got a broken fence? Why not give them the number of someone to report it to instead of filing it away until all the fences in the street have been broken by a serial vandal, the point at which it might actually become a story in the eyes of your news editor. If some people have specific questions that they want asked, let them know about the freedom of information act. Find small, quick ways (Twitter) to report small things that might be of interest to other people and encourage the people you meet to use email and Twitter to let you know anything they want to, you don’t know what might lead to a story.
I know this approach doesn’t necessarily lead to the productivity that the current mainstream media is looking for. But the way things are going, more journalists are going to struggle to find work anyway. Perhaps while we are looking for other ways of making a living, we can use our skills and instinct to report for the good of our communities?
On the other hand, I remain sure that the only way to stem the decline of the newspaper industry is for the big powers to stop centralising everything and put the same investment into community-based reporters whose remit would be to produce rich, stimulating content that is vital to its audience. All the investment in technology will be for nothing if you lose the connection with people altogether - an important point, I think, for both the media and government.

The new business diet

2008-08-15T09:08:00.001+01:00

This week marks one year since I started my own business. A year since the last pay-cheque dropped into my bank account and I feasted every weekday on a Krispy Kreme donut for breakfast and a healthy, balanced, two course meal in a subsidised work restaurant for lunch. Oh, happy days.

But I have to admit looking over my Facebook albums, I was putting on a little weight in those last few weeks in London. Since then, I’m getting towards a second dress-size down from when I left. How do I know this? Well, obviously, I haven’t been able to afford new jeans since.

So while the life of a startup entrepreneur may be hard, it has its upsides. With these tips I explain how you too can lose weight in the quest to gain pounds. Or, er, dollars.

Network to eat
In the world of new business, you should find yourself invited to all sorts of free networking events designed to help you learn the mysteries of making your first million. And what’s the best thing about these? The buffets, of course. Be sure to exercise a bit of subtlety. While standing by the buffet table don't just wolf down your plate like some orphan waif, it'll make people suspicious about the viability of your business.

Assume an ‘open networking’ position and make connections as people join you to get food with some smalltalk about how there’s never enough wine at these things, haha. Talking more means eating less so be sure to ask the person standing with you lots of questions. While he’ll think you’re fascinated by what he’s doing and like you more, you’ll can eat enough to keep you going all day.

Location, location, location
In the modern world, most businesses can operate anywhere with a broadband connection. So why spend all your money on an office in a swish city when you can find some pre-regeneration area where the rent is cheap and the people interesting? It you pick the right sort of town where coffee culture hasn’t quite taken off yet, you can save money and lose weight merely by skipping lunch – by the time you get hungry at 3, all the cafes will be closed. If you're missing the high life, just watch an episode of The Apprentice and you'll soon be reminded of why you wanted to get out of corporate life in the first place.

Shop smart
If there’s one thing that will make you appreciate the life of a small trader, it’s being one yourself. No more casual handing over of the plastic in an impersonal supermarket, if you’ve got a few pounds in your pocket, be sure to make sure they benefit the people who might end up giving you some business in turn. And since you’re not sure when the next payday will be, it makes a lot of sense to eat all the food in your house before buying anything else.

Pound those streets
Cashflow forecast says you’ll have a sales manager by month three? Yah, right. Once you’ve found that the only person willing to work on commission is yourself and that sending emails all day results in no response, you’ll be doing the sales calls before you know it. While you’re at it, maybe you don’t really need to plough your cash into a car anyway, you can get by perfectly well on foot. All great for the waistline!

Clare-Marie White runs a social enterprise in Stoke-on-Trent, UK. All approaches by investors or people willing to buy her a cake are most welcome.
This article was originally published on Knewsroom in May and I was a bit slow getting it onto here...

Response to the Governance Commission report

2008-05-29T08:20:00.003+01:00

Yesterday was a very important day for Stoke-on-Trent. The Governance Commission reflected back a picture of Stoke politics that everybody will recognise. You can read the full report here.

Given how many people who had given evidence were in the room, it was surprising how quick people were to distance themselves from its findings. Unfortunately, the same habits of divisionism and negativity that have turned off most of the people of city were all evident. The cabinet were accusing the Independents and BNP of causing all the problems while simultaneously claiming they wanted to move away from negative politics. The main campaign group was asking for an entirely different option that the ones we are able to choose. The vast majority of people in the chamber were white and over 40. In the press conference afterwards, the cabinet, who were quite clearly in the firing line, seemed to be denying that their leadership style had in any way contributed to the report. Meanwhile the national Guardian newspaper have been to Bentillee and gave the world a three-page view on the rise of the BNP in Stoke. Brilliant.

So, what choice do people in the city have? Nothing, except to get involved right now. Unless you want the same people who have caused this demise to create the solution, you need to find a way to be a part of it. I've been discussing the report with a few people so far and everybody has some view on what should be done. 'Leaders' may decry apathy but people are far from apathetic. I believe where they are missing the point is by failing to realise that where there is a lack of trust it's no good asking people to be involved in the sky-high policy, it is the issues on the ground that they care about and the short term. Just take parking as an issue. If the people of Burslem have been able to have absolutely no dialogue with anybody on an issue that they almost universally agree adversely affects the town, how can you say they are being engaged?

Little things have a massive effect on people's lives and the council need to accept that if they're in a huge fight over them, that's not good leadership. Dialogue can prevent issues and build trust. Of course it's hard to get people involved, but that's your job. Why did the closure of Dimensions need to turn into a petition issue instead of being discussed with Residents Associations and, dare I say, the users of Dimensions? Who has ever been asked about whether parts of Hanley should be rebranded, wiping its name entirely from roadsigns? Not the communities of Hanley, I'll suggest.

The report is well thought-through, leaving options open for discussion where possible and clarifying the areas where choices are more limited. Reporting it simply as a row over whether we have a referendum for a mayor rather misses the point: that our system is so damaged that the system doesn't really matter. If we accept the Commission's view of the problem - and there is no reason why we shouldn't because it echoes all of the views expressed every day in the City, at least the parts I see - we need to accept their solutions. The council need to take immediate action to fix the breakdown in engagement and start to show people it is worth getting involved again.

The World is watching

2008-05-20T23:03:00.000+01:00

“When I climbed to the boat pier, I saw a corpse of a young child, wearing a rubber band on his wrist. Thousands of lives, thousands of innocent people, lost in the water, lost on the land.”
- Nyi Lynn Seck

If May 2008 will be remembered for the massive tragedies in Burma and China, it could also be credited for being the month when the global community stepped up and became a real force for action.

In years gone by, the aid response to Cyclone Nargis might have remained an issue for governments and aid agencies to fight over in the corridors of the UN. Now, the immediate direct reports of victims via blogs and Twitter feeds mean that few people in the world can say they didn’t know.

Few governments will openly say they want to kill off their people and would normally rely on the darkness of media blackouts. However, the ongoing work by organisations like Reuters-backed Global Voices, and web users themselves, to encourage blogging in countries where self-expression has always been dangerous now means that we have direct reports from countries whose people have had no voice. On Sunday, Myat Thura translated a report by Nyi Lynn Seck, quoted above. With the honesty of the citizen journalist, Myat Thura writes: “When I read Nyi Lynn Seck's article, I really wanted to cry” and the article ended with links to pages where people could donate.

While bloggers could bring individual human experiences to world attention, Google Earth swung into action immediately to support aid agencies and the UN agency UNOSAT in using maps and satellites to view the area affected. Even if visa restrictions mean that the vast majority of them have not been able to get into the area yet, they can be better prepared for when they do and any of the 200 million users who have reportedly downloaded Google Earth can see the extent of the devastation and relief work.

In China, Google were also able to provide services for people to find lost relatives and track relief efforts, which may give critics some assurance that they have been able to have a positive impact even while they have played to the Chinese government’s rules. In addition, Google is matching donations to relief efforts in both China and Burma.

At the time of writing, over 8,000 people had signed a petition calling on the UN to apply the new doctrine ‘Responsibility to Protect’ to enforce international aid. Few governments have endorsed the idea of taking on Burma’s military regime but the public response has given weight to diplomatic efforts by the UN and governments.

While in the Olympic year the Chinese government were unlikely to leave the victims of the earthquake, there’s no doubt that they will have seen the advantage of their fast reaction: hundreds of rescue pictures being beamed around the world, perhaps helping to fade memories of the protests about Tibet and associated web coverage that doggedly pursued the Olympic torch.

Governments, no matter how bad, will rarely declare that they are out to let all their people die and so rely on international ignorance and apathy to let crimes against humanity pass by. The fact that the Cyclone aftermath has been so high profile will certainly have had an impact on the Burmese government’s willingness to engage. The fact that there are more voices than just those in the West also means that they are not being backed into a corner by British and American governments waving aid. On Sunday the British diplomat Lord Malloch-Brown explained to the BBC that although they would like to see aid moving in faster, they were reassured by the fact that Association of East Asian Nation countries were able to broker a link that the "Burmese can work with".

The events of the past two weeks have shown that while ‘responsibility to protect’ has some way to go before becoming a fast-track to prevent mass deaths, the global community are willing to react and have a sense of common humanity. The next challenge for global activists will be to find out how the same power can be harnessed to prevent the ‘slow burning’ crises such as Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As pressure continues to let aid through in Burma, the world will continue to watch and wait, and pray, for the survivors of May’s natural disasters.

First published on Knewsroom

Why you can no longer buy the media

2008-05-20T11:21:00.003+01:00

First published on Knewsroom
(with thanks to the kommuknity for the incredibly ego-boosting 41,860 watts :) )

Social Media Marketing is increasingly popping up all over the web as the bandwagon of choice for communications strategists. While there will be plenty of helpful contributions like this article, I fear that there will be some very tedious and expensive attempts to hijack the internet for commercial or political use, which will fail. In the meantime, the risk is that advertising revenue will decline, putting at risk the very model that much of the social media depends on while companies try to market themselves on the cheap.

The great development of the internet is how far individuals are in control of what they view. People decide what to open themselves up to based on trust. The links are between individuals grouped into communities. Best of all, people recommend things to each other because they want to, not because they are paid to. Attempts to cut into those relationships with marketing messages are binned as the spam that they are.

The public relations industry has been able to take advantage of the mainstream media's refusal to invest in journalism (see: churnalism) but the internet gives us the chance to bypass media pointlessness and go straight to the source. If journalists stop worrying about the effect of all this on their own jobs, they could do what they were always meant to do - report what's new in a way that is clear and simple to the reader who wants to find out what happened this hour/yesterday/this week. They could signpost to what's online and add healthy amounts of real-life questioning and investigation. Novel, no?

Where does it leave the PR workers? Well, since so many of them turned from journalism to PR out of necessity, there's nothing to stop them using their talents to feed more information onto the web and stopping the obsessive drive for control that makes it so difficult to find out anything about what is happening in our institutions. If you were asking me how Stoke's extensive public relations budget should be spent, for example (and I don't suppose for a minute that anybody will), I'd suggest one PR officer for each of the six towns (yes, even Fenton), whose role would be to channel information between councillors, council workers and the community in whatever ways were most appropriate, whether that means talking (yes, talking) to people on the street (bejeezus!), writing articles for their own web presences or sending information to the local media.

If politicians and businesses really want to take advantage of the potential of the social web, they need to relax and realise that what people are really interested in is authenticity and the chance to build trust. I've been quite impressed by Gordon Brown's Twitter feed in the last couple of weeks. There's very little spin you can fit into a 140 character tweet, so the unnamed tweeter (tweeterer?) just posts updates about what Gordon is up to. He also follows all his own followers, meaning that you can get into a direct dialogue - again, there's no room for long boring discussions but you can give instant feedback or ask short questions. Undoubtedly, some media pundit will try to say how very cringe-worthy it all is, but since we've all stopped finding the time to read what they say, it doesn't really matter.

And because of that Twitter feed, what did I, an avid hater of the Labour party, find myself doing yesterday? Posting Gordon's comments from the press release and the BBC report onto Knewsroom in a story that subsequently got 'invested' onto the front page. Free PR in the old-fashioned sense, and purely because Gordon said something that I thought was useful and would be of interest to the Knewsroom audience. I would be very happy to follow any of my political representative's Twitter feeds if they started them, because it cuts out the party political rubbish and simply lets me know what they're doing.

Moving on to businesses, it is a similar lesson. People need to think of the way they do business or make buying choices. Increasingly for me, it is about personal connection. We all know and accept that everyone has to make a living, but we'd be more likely to work with people we have come to trust through some form of collaboration. It's about giving as much of yourself as you want to, but being clear about what it is you are selling. I am about to change all my business bank accounts to a new bank in Burslem, firstly because they were recommended to me and secondly, when I went in to open a separate account they were kind over my chronic inability to fill in forms. Thirdly, I was reminded in the branch of the advertising that I liked on TV and I thought "Oh yes, I like them". Amazing what a pretty cartoon and song can do for a business's reputation.

This combination marks several brands that I like and I'd name Apple and Honda as good examples. Their advertising is well-made and sticks in the mind, making their products more desirable. Advertising reinforces personal recommendation and gives me specific calls to action. Targeted advertising is often useful to me. Sites have enough of my personal information and even the words I am using to mean that the ads alongside my web use can be complementary, while still separate from my surfing.

So to conclude this terribly long article, it's the combination of advertising and people-resources that will set apart successful marketing strategies. By investing in advertising, businesses are much more likely to get themselves close to the audiences they want to reach than by indulging in passing fads like viral marketing, which are much more risky, or by producing old-style PR which will increasingly be ignored. If they want to use networking as a method, they need to invest in people to spend time establishing themselves in communities and building trust by making a useful contribution to the internet. Those people will need to believe in what they are doing and have the freedom to tell the truth and use their own initiative to add value to their company's work. The new wave of big websites have got it sussed out, it remains to be seen whether the old regimes can change as effectively.

..."like herding cats"

2008-05-07T20:42:00.004+01:00

This is one of my favourite phrases. It gave me a moment of delight during a particularly tiresome few days spent in Brussels with a group of multi-national, multi-age Quakers. Delightful though they were, trying to manouvre round a city with them was as frustrating as the time I had a go at walking an ill tabby:

Let's go here...

No... let's look here ...

RUN!!!!!!!!!!! .... and stop ... & escape ... and ...

let's look here.

Hmmm.

And so on.

So anyway, this post by David Parrish reflects on the similarities between creatives and cats, centring on one company's difficulty in 'leading' these high and mighty pests. It's a good article and he asks if anybody has any further thoughts...

My view's this. It's not just creatives, cats are the best personality type for anybody to take on. Any talk of herding suggests that what you really want is sheep. Human beings, I would argue, were never meant to be herded. Signs that they are being herded suggests something unhealthy, dehumanising in society. And I don't include armies in that (except the most unhealthy armies). Good armies are disciplined teams.

What David doesn't mention is the reason why cats and humans became so vital to each other in the first place. People may have worked out how to harness nature and create fields of delightful foodstuffs, but without the cat, rats and mice would have eaten the whole harvest before man got it anywhere near his bread-grinder. Cats played an essential role in the development of society. Nobody drew up a contract with the cat, they just formed a happy partnership based on their skills.

The same people who tend to be compared to cats have a tendency to be highly effective in the right circumstances: they are self-motivated, they work out what they need to do and they do it well and they're not afraid to take the initiative when they see an opportunity scuttling by. Partnered with the right organisations who will provide them shelter and let them be themselves, they can be transformational. Many web 2.0 companies have this sussed. Provide free board, nice snazzy bedding and a toy or two and your cats will create the likes of Wikipedia or Facebook. The most advanced companies have trusted their users with their code and have found that, far from stealing the baby's breath, they've changed society again and again. For providing the infrastructure, they are very well rewarded.

I worry a little every time I see mention of 'leaders' anywhere near consultants (not counting David as I've heard very nice things about him). It tends to go alongside an assumption that you have, or need, a compliant population and that with the right leadership everything will be better. Your people are your problem and we, the well-paid consultants, can show you how to change them. Personal empowerment doesn't really come into it. Recent developments in the business support model are following other government trends by creating structures that are overly paternal and creating deep mistrust amongst the people they are supposed to be trying to help. And no matter how good your intentions are, if a cat doesn't like what you're trying to do it will opt out of your system and find some other way to be happy.

This is important in the context of the creative sector because in our area, creatives are being feted as the potential catalysts for growth. If we do well, we will need coffee shops, food shops and the rest. It is the case in Burslem that because we have a very low cost base and from that many remarkable collaborations have sprung up. This week, we're putting together the Arts & Crafts Festival that will hopefully fill the streets with fun. Why are we doing it? Because it's good for business and we want to. But creatives aren't different from anyone else. Britain's future, I have heard a senior minister say, is not in the jobs where you need to be a gentle cow, the jobs for life where no imagination was required. Where that leaves the mass service industry is anybody's guess. But looking at it positively, it requires a population of people who work hard for their own means, in small partnerships, following their passions, whether that means running a cafe, a newspaper, gardening company or an IT company. The owners of small businesses work harder than anybody else, increasing productivity (if undercutting the minimum wage). The only effective way to deliver this change is to give people the confidence to find their own niche, to become the cat.

The difference in approach is one of trust and having faith that people's actions are for good intentions and will have good effects, even if the outcomes are not the ones you have on your stupid bloody outcome ticksheet. Let people off the lead, but provide a supportive atmosphere and we could really change things.

OK, I've probably taken the analogy far enough now, someone else should have a go :)

Ooh

2008-02-10T19:58:00.000Z

You can get the answer to (almost) any problem on Google. I was so impressed with the last example of this, I had to share.

Gmail stopped loading on my laptop. Firefox had just updated but it was still working on my main computer. It was just flickering and reloading and frustratingly blank, though I could see the message headers on RSS feeds. It was also working on Safari but I didn't want to have to start switching to that, thank you very much.

The solution? Clear all your cookies and page history. You don't need to clear passwords.

It worked.

So if it happens to you, you'll know what to do.

And that's why we all rely on Google...

Not much changes...

2007-08-29T17:32:00.000+01:00

For the present day, the word 'dead' has been banned from any editorial coverage of Burslem in my newspaper. The word rings around too much like a mantra for me to want any part in reinforcing it, as it does no service at all to all the living, breathing people working hard in the town*. You'll find the script here if you scroll down the depressing Doulton story and even more depressing bulldozer comment, by 'Burslem resident'.

Today I was told about a video from the 60s in which people talk about the decline of Burslem, which surprised me. To hear about that period today, you think it was the most bustling, thriving time. It reminded me to dig out a passage in the Old Wives Tale, coming up to its centenary next year, with Sophia's reflections upon returning to Bursley after a few decades getting rich in Paris:

In its contents the Square had not surprisingly changed during the immense, the terrifying interval that separated her from her virginity. On the east side, several shops had been thrown into one, and forced into a semblance of eternal unity by means of a coat of stucco. And there was a fountain at the north end which was new to her. No other constructional change! But the moral change, the sad declension from the ancient proud spirit of the Square--this was painfully depressing. Several establishments lacked tenants, had obviously lacked tenants for a long time; 'To let' notices hung in their stained and dirty upper windows, and clung insecurely to their closed shutters
...
The Square really had changed for the worse; it might not be smaller, but it had deteriorated. As a centre of commerce it had assuredly approached very near to death. On a Saturday morning thirty years ago it would have been covered with linen-roofed stalls, and chattering country-folk, and the stir of bargains. Now, Saturday morning was like any other morning in the Square, and the glass-roof of St. Luke's market in Wedgwood Street, which she could see from her window, echoed to the sounds of noisy commerce. In that instance business had simply moved a few yards to the east; but Sophia knew, from hints in Constance's letters and in her talk, that business in general had moved more than a few yards, it had moved a couple of miles--to arrogant and pushing Hanbridge, with its electric light and its theatres and its big, advertising shops.

The heaven of thick smoke over the Square, the black deposit on painted woodwork, the intermittent hooting of steam syrens, showed that the wholesale trade of Bursley still flourished. But Sophia had no memories of the wholesale trade of Bursley; it meant nothing to the youth of her heart; she was attached by intimate links to the retail traffic of Bursley, and as a mart old Bursley was done for.

* However, it does make for a great Facebook group title.

Voices from Burslem, Tunstall, Middleport, Cobridge...

2007-08-07T09:12:00.000+01:00

As I think I've written here before, Global Voices is one of my favourite websites. It collates world voices in a way that amazes me - volunteers who manage to put together views of their region that are both comprehensible and complex. From my computer I've felt closer to people and countries that I may never visit but that tempt me with their stories of culture, current affairs and, often, food.

One of my criticisms of the site - though I understand the reasoning - is that they don't include disenfranchised voices from the so-called developed world. In an area like Stoke, blogging has not yet taken on the importance that it has in many of these countries. The internet is taken for granted as a tool for entertainment, education perhaps, but rarely self-expression. D'log and Two Up Two Down are two great local blogs that lead the way and Mindblogging has also made a good start with a directory of blogs encouraging people to write about mental health issues as well as everyday life. The bloggers in the group are exploring the medium, supporting each other and using blogging to engage in dialogue with each other, rather as they do in areas covered by Global Voices where bloggers have formed communities. There is a form of self-expression on the website of the main local paper but... I would cause myself problems if I wrote anything more about how soul-destroying it is.

In the first month of my new project, the articles I'm probably proudest of (many not written by me) have been those that give a flavour of local voices. A front page article had a hint of dialect in one of its quotes. “Them that’s got vehicles, they’re OK and I don’t begrudge them, but there’s a lot of us old ones today who never learnt to drive and can’t get very far now.” Bob Adams, whose handwritten contributions I'm loving even if they have to be typed out, writes about Burslem's past in a way that evokes local conversations about history, and again there are bits of dialect in there. "Mum and Dad however weren’t struck on Blackpool. “Your money goes too quick there, you’ll be spent up in no time.”" And a recent article included quotes from a public meeting, giving a voice to residents of Slater Street. Although the dialogue there is continuing, it felt important to reflect the anger expressed at the meeting in a way that gave the sense of the meeting (in Quakerly terms). I didn't include, but liked, the phrase "As far as I can see, you've gone all the way round Burslem and come back again".

This area is one of constant conversations. In Tunstall people are in more of a hurry, but in Burslem many now know me or know they can come to the shop to talk about some aspect of the area. When giving the paper out, it is normally impossible to cover the length of the shopping area on market day without having given out all my papers while talking to someone or other. In the first issue, we had an article about Sytch Village, one of our displaced/demolished communities, and people are still coming to tell me about their lives there. In Burslem, the past is constantly layered upon the present as older residents remind each other of what used to be where. Sometimes this is couched in negativity, but not by everybody. Our shop, for example, used to be Slacks, and because of the stories of so many people I can forget the bleakness of a quiet day and think of it when it was the place where girls used to wait for their dates for the evening. Those that could afford it went to one of the two cinemas on Bournes Bank, while those with less money, or no date, just walked round and round Burslem with their friends, meeting each other and eyeing each other up. Sometimes they would spot a celebrity near the Queens Theatre, but they wouldn't have been as interested in them as in the everyday interaction amongst themselves.

The constant conversation is also an education. Nothing is ever simple. Far from the safe office world where you are roughly in agreement in everybody, you have to grapple with your own views in the face of real experience of racism, crime and economic deprivation. After three weeks full time in Burslem, I suffered a real bout of culture shock, no longer knowing where I fitted in amongst the groups that we tend to classify: the people often bought in from outside trying to regenerate the area, the economic underclass, the creative workers, the traders, the powerful, the powerless... I could see parts of myself in all those groups and felt in danger of falling between the cracks. It doesn't help that there is a level of personal scrutiny that I was unprepared for. In this area, you have to constantly guard against bitterness here and where everything is a risk you have to avoid looking for people to blame. Luckily, I've got a support network of inspirational people who help me embrace the struggle to succeed and who affirm that it is worthwhile to try.

And so, in all, it's a lot of fun. And with more resources I hope that my project will draw more local voices out and help to represent this indefinable area in its true light: vibrant, problematic, diverse, exhilarating... just as other places have been able to do through Global Voices.

Which space?

2007-07-21T09:54:00.000+01:00

Sad to see that Omidyar.net is closing down (login probably needed). O.net always seemed to me to be a great place of potential but I never had the time for it. It had an overload of discussion and it was frustrating to start reading an interesting conversation only to find it had been going on for two years and you were never going to absorb enough information to join in. I made some good connections there though and liked the project that enabled each person to sponsor a breakfast in Uganda. It was quick and simple.

Obviously every space can't be as simple and instantly-gratifying as, say, Facebook. But the online eco-system is something we're not making the most of yet. We move between overload and meaningless interaction. What would work for me is a space where:
- 'everybody' is and I can read their profiles to see if we have anything in common
- we have structured, timed conversations or seminars where I could learn something and go away with at least one action point, something manageable
- we move away from the instant-response model that we're moving towards online where if you don't act on something immediately the chance has passed, perhaps going back to a wiki-like structure that can be built upon by anybody to evolve but ideally without having to understand every layer
- we can access the information we need quickly and not always rely on others to answer questions for us - I guess this requires a collation of everything already out there by Google or somebody
- words & ideas can be tranformed into action by anybody, anywhere
- the burden of organisation is lower than that of action

Any ideas?

2007-06-09T09:07:00.001+01:00

I couldn't help myself. Up at 7am to start building templates and instead gave into temptation to get onto Last.fm.

So two hours later, I give you the White Llama playlist, currently indulging my deepest 90s memories... it's a bit flaky so far. Apparently I have to spend the rest of the morning on it too. Oh hell.

Progress!

2007-06-07T17:36:00.000+01:00

This post will work just as well here as on the new Local Edition blog and is a helpful reminder to readers that I'm still here, though commuting much less.

Today I received official confirmation of my Unltd Milennium Award, given to support social enterprise. As long as I can get the forms sent back, this will be a great boost and it is a fabulous network to be involved with.

According to their website, 'UnLtd's social entrepreneurs are real visionaries - people who want to change the world. That doesn't mean they necessarily develop complex, global solutions to large-scale issues; often, social entrepreneurs simply take a problem in their own community and make a commitment to tackle it.'

They also demonstrate (quote):

Vision

Determination

Passion

Self motivation and self belief

Flexibility

Resourcefulness

This is a very nice description and I have enough self belief to think it all applies to me (that's the benefit of being an only child). It carefully misses out their (or at least my) lack of form-filling ability, fear of cold-calling and a slight tendency towards wasting too much time on the internet. And a terrible track record for turning up on time to anything, ever.

The best thing about this project so far has been all the support I've had from other people. People say it's a brave thing to set up a newspaper alone, but I haven't felt alone once in the whole process so far. It is difficult to sell the idea of free newspapers to people, especially in a place where suspicions run high, but when they have become clear on what the paper is setting out to do, they have wanted to help and be involved. Next week, of course, I'll be knocking on a lot of doors following up those offers, so be warned!

On which note, if anybody would like to start writing for the paper please get in touch with your ideas. Everything that comes in will be edited to fit the vision that is currently all in my head and indescribable (it will be great though) so it's the raw ideas I'm most interested in rather than if you're a highly experienced writer. As well as news and information, there will be opinion slots and features about everything that has a relevant angle. Sport is going to be covered by Anthony Munday, who comes very highly recommended, and obviously the more information people send us, the more we can include.

Apologies if my sentences have taken a very long turn. It's been a very long day.

2007-06-04T17:28:00.000+01:00

I don't really like it when people write about Facebook, especially in the papers. It seems rather like jumping on the bandwagon, or worse, risking scaring everybody off. There's the inevitable fate becoming so popular that it becomes hijacked by the PR companies and eventually brought up by some media mogul who can take our data and manipulate us in all sorts of wicked ways. There's also the tedium of journalists blatantly putting together stories from their desks based on nothing more revelatory than the fact that 'celebrities' have friends in 'real life'! And we can find them seven degrees away through our own friends! Hold the front page!

But it is worth writing about, so forgive me for a post. I've done my fair share of evangelising and physically forcing people to sign up to the site ever since falling for the newsfeeds that make it so alluring to come back to and so easy to update. Most of the sites I've dragged friends onto have proven difficult to maintain and even that simplest of communication tools, email, has ground to a halt under sheer weight. I know I'm not alone in rarely reading them properly anymore and in spending far more time sorting my inbox into neat folders designed to manage time than actually ever getting round to responding. As a very useful article once said, all 'action' trays, whether physical or virtual, are simply there to hold everything until it has become old enough not to matter anymore. Which in today's world is about four hours.

But that's another issue. For now, Facebook is in a honeymoon period. As every social networking tool has tried but only Facebook actually appears to be succeeding in, it is providing millions of people with an eco-system for trivial interactions and passing viewpoints (OK, that might be a good description for all the web, but this one presents it particularly well). I think it is those in their twenties and thirties for whom this is going to be most significant - the point when its members are old enough to have children in their twenties or thirties could, I suspect, signal the exodus. This audience needed a lot of persuading to sign-up, unlike the sparrow-like hoards of teenagers who will sign up to a Nigerian lottery site if the rest of their class does. Some of this audience have never really experienced internet addiction before on this level, the quick fix that comes with a snippet of information that you can respond to just as quickly. Others have been addicted for years and are just glad other people have now joined them.

I was very pleased to read the story today of workers in a law firm who just won back their right to access Facebook, particularly after commiserating with a friend who has just been banned and will now miss out on the hours of newsfeed that reel away other bored friends' status updates and public wall gossip. It is positive that that people are demanding their right to this interaction because while it may be trivial, it is no less so than the smalltalk workers make around the watercooler. At least on Facebook people have, to a greater or lesser extent depending on their personal definition of what constitutes a 'friend', chosen to be in touch with that person rather than accidentally ending up in an office with them. Now I'm lucky to have had wonderful colleagues for the last few years but know plenty of people work in environments that are little better than Stalinist states. The ones who ban Facebook, for example (you know who you are). This particular law firm, backing down, came out with some spurious excuse about video streaming on Facebook taking all their bandwidth. You might ask yourself what else is broadband for? Then you might remember that few people upload videos to Facebook and the real culprit of such bandwidth-banditry is usually ugly, ugly, noisy Myspace.

The law-firm accepted the networking advantages of Facebook in their climbdown. While I fear slightly for a world where professional networking involves that much disclosure of your private life, it doesn't surprise me so much with lawyers. I was going to use the description 'coke-addled vandals' but this isn't a convenient time to be sued, so we'll move on.

Happy workers are those who can meet their friends, spend a little time laughing at a joke made by someone they like. Who can shriek, Wooster-like, at seeing old chums, all as they alt-tab back to their spreadsheets and databases. Happy workers are productive workers and far less likely to take a sick-day if they know they will see their friends at work. Only true addicts would really take whole days off or completely abuse their Facebook privileges, because it is quick, pleasing gratification that we crave, not more overload. It is our safe space where we can catch a glimpse of our friends' worlds, where we can share our good and bad news, emotions and opinions. Much like the pub, but cheaper, quieter and on tap all day and wherever we happen to be. Lovely.

But it isn't real life, so in case you're in the vicinity, here's another blatant plug for a real life gathering place (with its own Facebook event page, natch*):
Come to the Burslem Festival on June 23!

* Ooh. Memories of Just 17 just came flooding back.

Venturing into Burslem

2007-05-14T19:55:00.000+01:00

A few months ago, readers may remember, I helped organised a trip for several Londoners to Burslem to find out all about the exciting opportunities on offer in the town for creative young professionals. I had no idea that the trip would so convince me of my own hype that I would be handing in my notice a few weeks later.

Now I find myself just about to welcome the new production manager of The Friend and handing over my job in order that I can start my new venture in Stoke. Call me superstitious, but I am hesistant to put the full details online until I have the company all set up and am absolutely sure I won't be going cap-in-hand for a job at some big Northern newspaper group, but the project is a real one and has already received an enormous amount of encouraging support.

I have been experiencing many of the support systems for businesses that I extolled on the Londoners' trip. It has been an interesting experience. I would still certainly say that if ever there was a time and a place for starting a business, Burslem provides a really attractive option, especially to anybody used to London prices.

It's a bit of a turbulent economy. Locals are having to get used to paying the same prices as everyone else for food in pubs - because energy costs are the same anywhere in the country - but we still have buildings selling for far under the national average and a lot of empty space. I'm not very worried about leaving London permanently because I assume I can still get a train back easily enough, but have been a bit perturbed to discover that the price of a railcard-less open return is the same as four-and-a-half weeks rent in a starter unit. Some article I read last night said that the West Midlands economy would have 10 billion pounds more if it only grew to the national average, which I didn't understand but seemed pretty monumental. Although I'm obviously one of those taking the route of 'if there aren't any jobs for you, create your own', it troubles me a little to wonder if the scope for start-ups is really quite as big as is implied. After all, you might get 1000 new ideas for startups employing five poeple each but are the next 1000 also going to have fresh ideas or will they compete with the first wave? And even on those employment levels, you're still not matching the massive employers that used to surround Burslem. But I'll leave such troubles in this cage for now as these are exciting times.

Writing as a form-phobic, the application processes for funding and business admin has been difficult but not impossible. One real problem is that while there are hundreds of grant and loan schemes out there, the vast majority of them have some exclusion in the small print that makes ploughing through many of them largely a waste of time. A genuinely transparent, useful and open system would see all the money pooled together and managed by organisations who would get to know your idea and then match you up to funding. A decent panel could make sure this wasn't abused. This approach - without the funding - is roughly equivalent to that taken by Bizfizz, whose coach Carolyn I say without a hint of hesitation has made it possible for me and many others to actually take the leap into business. Without frightening me with a single form, Carolyn's approach lured me into writing my own business plan *because I wanted to*.

So in a month, all being well, my project will be a real thing. I discussed giving up White Llama with Riaz, partly because it seemed so linked with the long distance commuting, and also because I was starting to fear the director and managing editor of the new company might start to see the blogger as a loose cannon. And that could lead to schizophrenia.

But Riaz convinced me to carry on, arguing that people would be interested in the adventures of a new media social enterprising entrepeuneur cutting its way through the edge of Britain's most exciting region. Well, I doubt that. But since another regular visitor, Jess gave me a little award, upon which I haven't even had the time to reflect and glow but intend to do so in another post, I will try to continue bringing you the new chapters of White Llama's adventures. Just remind me, if I start to rant too much about councillors, mayors and regeneration, that while the journalist without opinion may be a mythical beast, the quiet Llama is perhaps more likely to make friends.

Back on two wheels

2007-03-22T22:13:00.000Z

After several months apart taking cowardly refuge in the warmth of the car, Warhorse and I (that's us two in my profile photo) are back together again.

Warhorse, clad in silver after being expensively repaired - a year is a long time for anybody to stand with a bare chest - came roaring out of Foleys and we quickly reacquainted ourselves with the joy that is Stoke traffic in a blur. 'Never stop!' Our mantra, except of course when it is safer to do so.

I nod again at all the bikers, caring not a bit if they ignore a scooter, because in my heart I know I am a biker with biker's blood, an armoured jacket and the words of my CBT trainer who said it would be a 'tragedy' for me to go back to the scooter after learning to ride a geared bike when I retook my CBT. A tragedy it may be, but I whisper under by breath that Warhorse, with her powerful forward thrust, is a greater bike than the Honda 125 and why use all that energy trying to remember where the back brake went, how to engage the clutch and what gear can I possibly be in? I hardly dare write it in a public place but it is so - Warhorse and I are very happy together.

We take up no more space on the road than we need, we - did I say it before? - skip past the endless traffic jams of Stoke while keeping beady eyes out for aggressive road users. ('What do we know about cars?' Said the trainer during the CBT. 'BAD....' we baahed in unison. 'That's right', he said, and we turned to another grim video set in the hospital) Being Spring, this is the time when all the youngsters are awarded scooters as part of their Asbos and so the little tykes are causing trouble everywhere, giving the rest of us a Bad Name. But we don't mind, we sail gracefully on, doing our death looks over our shoulders and at the cars all around. We hope for another summer of warm air (though accept there will be some soaking days and we praise our thick sturdy wheels) and for not joining the ranks of 'statistically, you will probably have an accident'.

* * * *

I had thought to take a camera with me to take a typically boring photomontage of the White Llama commute, but abandoned the idea after accepting that the train was moving too fast most of the time and that people look at you funny if you start snapping away out of the windows. Presumably you are plotting something terrorist or something.

And then, what happens? A virtually empty train and we stop at a lovely view.

Swollen river babbling away below the train, badger birds* flitting in the trees, wide expanses of green field spotted with white swans relaxing in the morning sun. In the background, barely visible amongst the old trees, rustic manor houses.

Bah.

* These stripy birds are my favourite and are actually called long-tailed tits, but you can't say that in England without raising a snigger or bringing more unsavoury visitors to your site than since the last time you wrote about Mischa Barton. They are distinctive for the way they constantly move, flying with a bobbing motion and chattering all the time quietly and lower than most birds. They hang out in gangs and if you can sit and watch them quite closely you can see that they are very colourful. The tedious White Llama photo montage on the right has a couple of photos of them, but, as you would expect, they fail to do them justice.

Listening to the Voiceless

2007-03-08T17:02:00.000Z

'If our poverty is the cause of our being ignored then I fear for the future. Where there is interest there is energy and I fear we will lose the energy. We will keep shouting to the end and keep suffering.'

This was said during a meeting in Kigali in 2005 and has always stuck with me, partly because I quoted him in an article. I believe it's based on an Abraham Lincoln quote. The participant speaking was from the DRC.

Today I found myself digging out the quote while I thought about Middleport, Stoke-on-Trent. It has taken a lot of shouting before I've really understood the point of view of the people of Middleport and I find myself listening more carefully to them at each meeting of the steering group for the area.

Middleport sits on the canal between Burslem and Longport. Frankly not a place you want to stop in at night. But an evocative place where there are still enough terraces to get lost in. It looked as if all those terraces were going to be knocked down like vast swathes of Stoke-on-Trent have been before. When I first heard the arguments against it I was pretty unsympathetic. It's got high crime, slum landlords, damp, unmodernised homes. Clear it and start again. Why not?

Well, the biggest why not is that it isn't just a few rows of old fashioned houses, it's a community of people who do not want to be uprooted. Many are very responsible, friendly citizens who just had the misfortune to live for decades in what is now deemed a 'blighted area'. So, turn the question round - why should those people be uprooted, displaced, rehomed while everyone around them lives in fear that the demolition ball will get them next? I've sat in steering group meetings where it has emerged, quite gradually because people are tired of expressing their anger, that the vast majority of people round the table think this will happen to them. For generation after generation, people in Stoke have been dispersed through interventions like this and communities have been broken up. It's not hard to see why people might feel powerless.

But, the action group have not let it just happen. In a clever move, they took their case to the Audit Commission, who have ruled that no decisions can be made until the masterplanning process is complete. RENEW agreed to this and have put all decisions on hold. And on hold they are. But meanwhile, youth and outsiders who think the place is being knocked down have moved in. Houses are being vandalised, stripped of their copper and the whole area is being made even worse. People's choice right now if therefore leave, before your house is pulled apart or your life is put at risk, or wait. They are already asking whether there will be houses left by the time the masterplanners' options come through.

This isn't choice. And though I am in favour of the steering group, it suits people like me, who essentially want to be involved in a process that will see house prices go up and the area generally become more successful. Who live in houses that are already seeing appreciation and who don't mind that we have borrowed to get on the housing ladder. It's easy to forget from the perspective of myself and absolutely everybody involved in national politics, that this is not the culture everybody exists in. With housing for so many people now out of reach, it may not be long before we are all reminded very strongly indeed.

House price rises do nothing but create more fear for many of the people of Middleport, who are perfectly well aware of the gap between the £65,000 the council is offering for their houses, the £40,000 or so value some are going for in the blighted areas, and the houses on the regular market which are up to £20,000 more for an equivalent. None of those figures make sense to people who have probably never spent more than £10,000 on a house in their lives and may not even be earning a salary anymore. Their only option is aid from the agencies to put them in another house, possibly putting a loan against their name and all in all ensuring that the developers get their profit on the houses they've built, with affordable houses subsideised by easily accessed mortgages for everybody deemed rich enough to borrow eight times their income.

At the moment there are two options, both passive for the residents:
- demolition & rehousing
- refurbishment through grants

I would like to suggest two more:
- community land ownership - the money granted to purchase people's houses passes on the land to a community trust rather than a developer and enables people to stay in their houses and only resell them at a reasonable rate for the whole community
- refurbishment by the community, which could start right now with residents associations, local artists, other community groups and agencies working together

If anybody has any other ideas, please comment. We will know in a few weeks what the options are going to be and how much genuine community involvement there will be.

In the meantime, this is a little part of Britain that deserves our attention. I don't think they would appreciate me wading in suggesting the best thing for them, or anyone else. But the more ideas that are out there, the more we can uphold their right to have their voices heard so that they can't be told 'this is the only possible way'.

They've been shouting and I hope their energy is not killed off by neglect.

Dear stressed commuter,

2007-03-02T09:36:00.000Z

I see you two or three times a week and you’re always shouting at someone. You seem to have more mobile reception than anybody else gets, except I don’t believe there’s anybody hearing you at the other end.

Have you ever wondered why everything is so difficult in your oh-so-high-powered job? Has it occurred to you that if you didn’t spend your time from 7 in the morning shouting at your minions and your family, life might go a little smoother for you? I saw you this morning, having a go at the innocent ticket inspector, claiming you spend £250 on a return ticket. That’s a lie. You travel standard class with me. Don’t exaggerate your woes with people who can’t do anything about the power failure in Watford, it just makes you look silly.

Can’t you calm down a little? I fear that you will kill yourself. The Virgin train is not a place for angst and stress, it is a place for sitting back, putting the phone on silent and watching the fields go by while you make the most of your time offline to plot and dream. We don’t like your seething frustration, it makes a mockery of times of genuine crisis. If you are so genuinely important, go away and sit in first class and stop mithering and moaning in our vestibules all the bloody time.

Yours sincerely,
White Llama

National Quaker Week

2007-02-28T08:41:00.000Z

National Quaker Week is coming up in September and I, for one, am looking forward to the chance to become a Quaker for a week. Centrally, a programme of newspaper adverts and publicity is being planned and local Meetings will be doing their bit to bring people in off the streets or gather them in the market places and hills as in old.

It should be fun. Just as Fairtrade fortnight is a chance to indulge in good chocolate, coffee and again decide you will buy fairtrade clothes instead of cheap bright things from H&M, National Quaker Week will be a chance to enjoy some silent Meetings and worship in your own style. Be sure to give up violence (physical and structural) for the week, especially if you are an arms dealer, prime minister or manager. Wage real, active peace and discern some brilliant ideas, being sure to find collaborators who can change the world with you. If you really want to go for the Fox style of Quakerism, wear simple clothes, drop all titles for the week, wear a hat at all times (especially if asked to remove it) and step into pubs to verbally abuse the revellers in such a way that actually persuades them to come out and join you in a Great Gathering.

I hope that Quaker Week will spread internationally too, with all the great new Friendly bloggers sharing their journeys online. Online Meetings will undoubtedly take place but it's also worth checking out a real Meeting in your area where hopefully they will be holding some at better times than Sunday mornings (in my experience a time of silent slumber without me having to get up to sit in a circle with other people). The Meetings I've taken part in during busy times have been the most valuable, injecting inspiration and energy into the day from an apparently quiet time.

I've decided that the only way to celebrate National Quaker Week is through a Facebook group. Let's hope my addiction hasn't moved on by September. I'm now looking for real-life Quakers to be the elders and overseers of this enterprise so if you're on there, come and find it!

Modern times

2007-02-15T15:25:00.000Z

Yesterday I went to the Publishing Expo at Olympia, after a four hour journey to London Paddington via Reading. Paddington is lovely, shame about the rest of West London. The curious thing about the exhibition, but entirely expected if you think about it, was having a barcode on your entry badge scanned all time by people at the stalls and as you went to the lectures. Now as they have my work contact details and will probably want to write to me about services I can choose to use or not, I didn't much mind.I would probably find this more bothersome if I had paid to go in.

Apart from the books of fonts (as Chloe said: mmmmm), there was one thing that really impressed me. A tool to turn our whole world interactive.

There are links displayed all over the place nowadays. But the trouble with links is that you have to remember to go and look them up when you get onto your computer. And there's so much else to do online – once you've checked your email and updated your Facebook status you're in a whole different realm and what ou saw on the side of a bus has disappeared from your mind completely.

So there I was, a-wandering round the show, thieving as many pens as I could. 'Do you want to see our stenographics', he says [actually I have a feeling this might be a longer, more dinosaur-like word]. 'OK…' says she, one eye already on the bowl of sweets at the next stand. We peer at an ordinary looking page with pictures of clothes on.

And then, he whips out his mobile phone, takes a picture of a rather nice dress and before you know it, the phone is connecting to a website with more pictures and information on how to order the dress. Ooh! If you look very closely, you can see how it works. In the background of the
image, a faded yellow jumble of symbols acts rather like a barcode – but it's much
less ugly and indeed you barely notice it. Suddenly, with that, life is breathed back into the dead medium of paper. Your newspaper could become a truly interactive experience. You would be able to point and shoot at adverts on the bus or paintings in an exhibition and find out everything about it. That instinctive tactile feel we have for the web, where we click away wherever the whim takes us, will apply to the real world. Soon, I ponder, they'll be imbedding this stuff on plants so we can instantly tell if it's a daffodil or a pansy. After all, our memories, like hard drives, need to keep space free, so who wants to remember whether that's a chaffinch or a goldfinch and how far each migrates, when all this stuff can be accessed at the press of a button?

It's bloody amazing, that's what it is. And it's in Japan already, so expect it here in, well, probably less than ten years… Google it on the Fujitsu site to get a much more technical description.

Cats, cats, cats

2007-02-09T10:19:00.000Z

I had to post this after watching it for the third time this morning and laughing just as much - it has everything that is amazing about cats: genius, stupidity, dexterity and a miraculous moment of a cat bouncing on water

Tuesday's Observations

2007-01-24T10:13:00.000Z

1. Steven Milliband suggests that all Londoners will one day carry carbon credit cards, probably attached to their Oyster, all-seeing-eye ID cards (trying saying that in one go). I'm happy with the idea of an individual carbon allowance but more worried about the idea that there will be benefits to not using your carbon allowance, such as being able to sell points. I hate to sound reactionary, but wouldn't this become some sort of alternative benefits system. Either you charge people to use their points, which is a disincentive to work for those who often have the least choice in their working hours or locations*. Or people can sell their points, which is (sounding more like the Mail by the word) an incentive to do nothing. If you sit in your flat, lights off, TV off, heating off and don't travel anywhere, you get paid by some gas-guzzler from Hammersmith. Is that going to keep the economy moving? Or, you have no incentives or disincentives but simply an allowance which, if my generalised view of the British is correct, will be treated as a target. I'm not sure of the way round it but I have a feeling that anything styled like credit cards is bad news in the current English climate.

* That assumes you have to travel to find the best jobs, which is currently often the case. Maybe the carbon allowance should provide more inventives for businesses to provide for working from home?

2. In The Commitments, a film whose soundtrack often makes it onto my phone-MP3 player, the link is quickly made between soul and sex. Nowhere, in my slightly nervous state of mind, is this more apparent than in the song 'Take me to the River'. There's a certain frisson to the invitation to take me to the river and wash me down (wash me down).

There's also a certain religious feel to the song and there is, you might argue, a parallel between the song in this film and the scenes of Oh Brother Where Art Thou where the beautiful girls are in the water being baptised and, in another scene, seducing the heroic felons while in both cases singing. Singing-water-sex, and not forgetting of course Danger. Like a lot of soul classics, Take me to the River has its roots in gospel and, as in Southern America, there are strong links in Ireland between music, religion and secret sex, probably on riverbanks.

The church, let us not forget, is/was the path to the marriage bed, although in truth I suspect this was never the untrodden destination it was billed as. Singing is the union of voices. So, think on.

This isn't going anywhere, just some passing themes and intertextuality to spice White Llama up a bit and remind this blogger of those happy media studies A-level days.

Isn't it getting nippy now?

There may be ice in Texas, but here we got hurricanes

2007-01-19T14:14:00.000Z

(warning: this is long, and probably fairly dull)

Here's a few tips if you ever find yourself arriving at Euston for your regular train home, only to find all the lights off.

Don't take the first answer you hear. That person will tell you to go and find a hotel. Obviously, that's madness. How are you going to get a hotel with 1500 others banging at the door? Keep asking the people in the red coats and clipboards, persuing various route options with them on their computers if you must, until someone tells you something you want to hear. Hang around the people with the radios. Nothing, but nothing is traveling north of Wolverhampton, they will insist, clipboard in hand as, eventually, a tannoy sends you all off in a better direction. They will run some trains if they possibly can, you see, because the staff want to get home. So follow the staff. My train, the one that should have been inpossible, ended up going all the way to Manchester.

Once on board, wait a little while then go and investigate what treats are on board for you to have. If you're really lucky, there will be some free coffee on the go, but since the staff have been negotiating the Isle since dawn, they will more likely have abandoned the shop with a box of cakes, sandwiches and water bottles. If you're really lucky and go hunting early on, you might get juice. Go easy on the supplies though, you don't know how long you're all going to be stuck together and you don't want it turning into some savage zombie movie.

Mull over the CBB racism row for a while, giggling at the picture of Gordon Brown with the Indian finance minister. Poor sod.

Think on: If you're going to be racist to anyone, make sure it's the biggest star of the biggest film industry in the world. This was obviously the thought flitting around Jade's head as she embarked on a bullying campaign with fellow white contestants of Big Brother. It has given us the best headline in the Sun this year: 'halfwit Jade starts race war with India'.

If it's any comfort, passing Indians, nobody likes Jade or Danielle (?) much in Britain either. With any luck, their self-elavation to the status of biggest pariahs in the world will ensure they need to be kept in a cave for the rest of their lives. What is less comforting is the idea of two nuclear powers letting this escalate to the point when somebody, a fan of Shilpa or Jade perhaps, 'accidentally' hits the red button. After all, people on army bases monitoring the dusty old nuclear deterrents probably have a lot of time to watch telly. That, friends of the House, is why we'd be better off spending our money on polar bears than the Trident replacement. Listen to the Faslane 365 (419 arrested so far, *4* charged if I remember rightly – which I probably don’t)

Anyway, what people don't like to admit is that they * love * massive weather catastrophes in Britain. OK, you don't love them if your lorry is blown over or your roof is torn off et cetera et cetera, but on the whole there's nothing that brings the British (at least the travelling ones I brush shoulders with) more pleasure than getting on their phones and secretly outdoing the people near them about *how* late they're going to be and *how* bloody awful the information was. Most of all, it's a chance to show off your intercity knowledge as you vie over possibilities for interconnection, preferably to your bored child who you've put on standby on the home computer in order to find routes for you so you can then get your wife to pick you up from the nearest possible county and spare her the *hassle* of going 75 miles when, if you plan it right you can probably get 45 miles away from home and she can pick you up in central Birmingham. And won't she love that. Secretly, she's wishing you had stayed out for a quiet night with the secretary so she could just watch Emmerdale in peace.

Hail the bright lights of the Midlands spy-centres. Suppose they were built to brighten up Arnold Bennett's boring journey north, but probably a bit late.

Hope, somewhat, that it won't be like this next Thursday, when your author is due to be introducing several young Londoners to the delights of Burslem. Come to Stoke! Commute to London! But maybe not in January (wind), February (snow) or July (heat). Or October (birthday).

Get as far as Stafford, where hordes of stranded Virgin staff have converged to form a trainful of red uniforms wneding its way, slowly, to the North. Bargain with the coachdrivers outside until you have formed a gang wishing to go to Stoke and democracy wins out over the person who wants to get to Congleton. Joined by someone who will be taken to Liverpool and wonder at how optimistic they must have been feeling when they jumped on a train to Stafford in the hope they would find their way another 80 miles.

Home for ten, well into the 8th hour of commuting, feeling quite lucky. Decide to work from home tomorrow.

Back to Burslem

2006-12-08T16:44:00.000Z

Last night I went to the second meeting of the steering group which will work on a(nother) 'masterplanning' process for the area around Burslem, Middleport and Etruria Valley, a mysterious area of canal and derelict factories that has only trolls living in it but will one day be transformed into the height of waterside luxury.

It started out pretty bleak, one has to say. Another pottery has gone under, the George has shut, there's not a trader left, let alone a chamber of trade, and Burslem is merely a big road for cars to queue in on their way to late-night shopping in Hanley. Meanwhile people are facing demolition in their homes and are, we were told, still without an idea of where they will go or whether they will be able to afford to go there.

Everyone got pretty depressed and it was observed that the government needed to intervene. What this intervention would involve, I'm not quite sure but I suspect it would involve a big pot of money, some consultants and, hopefully, a community steering group with the ear of everybody. Which is what we have, so more reason to be cheerful, even if there's a nagging feeling that maybe it's Too Late.

Places like Stoke may be experiencing the downsides of globalisation. But this isn't new. The great majority of Stoke's industry was wiped out over the last thirty years, even before that work could be unreliable, dangerous and fairly narrowly focussed. Looking back, we will probably see the closures of the last two years as simply the tail-end of a long collapse, though traumatic for those who managed to hold onto their jobs for this long. The skills of the Potteries need maintenance and diversification into exclusive, beautiful studio pottery has been shown to be possible, even if its employment prospects are more limited than the big potbanks.

My view is that the population needs to take some responsibility for its fortunes, raise itself out of years of perfectly justifiable disappointment and get creative. Why should a proud set of towns become dependent on state aid, constantly looking for help? As was pointed out at the meeting, we've had thirty yearsof 'intervention', to the extent that the population now pretty much ignores it. We've got used to failure. So any more than what we've got won't help - we need to make the most of what we've got - the Renew process - and make sure that it transforms the city into something sustainable. The state money won't last forever.

The population as a whole has specific responsibility in two areas. We heard about affordable housing. Apart from in managed schemes, housing will only be sold at the market rate. It isn't any government that decides how much a house is worth, it's people willing to pay inflated prices in the hope that someone else will pay them a price even more inflated. If nobody can afford to buy a house, then prices will collapse, but in the meantime people will borrow more and that means everybody has to borrow more. This is clearly in the interest of banks, estate agents and the tax office. Drawing a line between those who are allowed to say that they 'don't want to' take on debt and those who have to go through normal channels to own a house is divisive. I do think it is unfair that buy-to-letters with ready cash can buy up new developments while they are still affordable and would like to see people facing demolition being given preferential access and help, but overall it will be the market that decides price - and at the moment the market is being greedy. We all have choices, even if they're not the choices they once were. Mine was to move out of London, where houses average 300,000 pounds and commute to a place where they are a third as much. I'd rather not see Stoke go down the same road - people should be content to put a little extra value on their houses rather than expecting them to triple every five years. It might be you left at the top of the pyramid when it collapses.

Another aspect is shopping. Burslem is currently trapped in a vicious circle of decline with nothing to buy if you do get there (at least that's what it seems like). There is a lot of support for new businesses. Shops can't open unless there is community support and some research to show what will make a sustainable business. If everybody who lives within walking distance of Burslem chooses to drive to Hanley to shop then nothing will change. I'm not suggesting we make Burslem like Hanley (God forbid). A market, a good coffee shop and a bookshop (oh London, London, how I cry for you) would probably be enough to get me there instead of Tunstall. Maybe not even the market, as Tunstall's is very good and along with Hanley may be all that can be sustained. But the lack of a market (and the big market building that has been closed for years) is a psychological drag on the town. It was a centrepoint to draw people in.

A local shopping base is going to be more stable than the more valuable but less consistent input of tourists and getting this moving is particularly important while Burslem has no hotel and, er, not many potteries. Building the heritage and studio side is important, but tourists will be more likely to shop in a thriving town than one that is empty. Writing this, I've realised that unlike in the majorty of towns, no youths hang around Burslem. I guess you get them in KFC but I couldn't even be sure of that.

What the area around Burslem needs is a substantial exchange of ideas and some commitment. What businesses would local people want to run? What businesses would local people support? What would get teenagers in town instead of burning cars round the greenways? What are people's needs in their local town? Units for small businesses are available as are grants and support. Online training is doubtlessly available to help people sell online as well as in town. Locals who may not have been to Burslem in the day for a long time might respond to a publicity campaign outlining what is already there. If the areas uses the skills it has to create a pleasurable shopping environment that local people commit to walking to and supporting, then other people will start to come, first from other parts of the city and then from further afield as people buying beautiful things on the web want to come and see it being produced. This is deeply rooted in Stoke's heritage as well as having a sustainable and practical base. But it will take local support and locals taking responsibility for where they spend their money.

It is difficult for a city to maintain seven town centres, but each town has a different character and if they develop their own niches, people can revive that old sense of pride in their own town. I'm looking forward to the winter arts & crafts festival tomorrow and hope that it will be full of crowds willing to give Burslem a fresh try.

From Burslem to Brighton

2006-12-01T17:40:00.000Z

Thursday brought the chance for a super-city day as I embarked on a day-trip to Brighton to see the new Xserve Mac server and a demonstratotion of sleek new Leopard (even if *some of us* have been running it for months). Afterwards, I was hoping to fit in a stop at Birmingham for some evening shopping and was looking forward to finding out just how far a saver return to Brighton might allow for weaving round Britain.

So I caught the early train from Stoke, the train where you fall asleep and risk waking up to find yourself next to someone a bit dodgy from Tamworth 'Low Level'. Popped into the office for a free coffee and to work out where I'd be going in Brighton. Wonder what scale Google maps is and whether Brighton is walkable or a taxi type place. Raid petty cash just in case.

Then down to Victoria, admiring the beautiful girls through Oxford Circus. Grooming takes a leap in W1. At Victoria station, they have sectioned off the departure boards so that you can't easily find the next train to Brighton. Not as simple as Euston, I sniff. The South West trains look crowded and a bit grim when it pulls in, but is not too bad once empty. No plug points, but I had anticipated this limitation of the short distance trains and charged accordingly. The commuters do leave a library of Metros and Argus Metros, but these are swiftly cleared away.

Surprised by the river and Battersea Power station, and then on through the suburbs to Croydon. Croydon East in fact, 'home of Nestle UK'. Much like Stoke, Croydon never can escape slightly unsavoury connotations though it does benefit fromm some beautiful countryside around, much like Stoke.

By 1015 we are in pheasant country! And it is still leafy and autumnal, though the weather was not quite as sunny as I was hoping for a visit to the seaside. We're also, I think, in Quaker country, I recognise a few of station names and wave to some subscribers.

In Brighton, nice station. Shocked that the rather stroppy taxi driver didn't know where I was going, despite the place looking so civilised. But in the end I arrive at Solutions Inc, a temple to Apple, and spend five delightful hours hearing about Xserv Raid and Leopard Server. Between all the incomprehensible sentences, pick up some extremely exciting tips on the dusty corners of my Panther server which have never been poked into before - and then learn that most of them will work best only if I get an upgrade to Tiger at least. Wonder if 3,000 pounds is an inconcievable amount to sneak into next year's IT budget for the joys of iChat and computers that look just the same wherever they are logged into, which would save considerable amounts of confusion for those of us for whom a different Mac spells utter alienation. Decide that it probably is (inconcievable, that is), but that a Leopard upgrade may fit very nicely into our online strategy, what with its inclusive website/wiki/blog server, automated podcast (Talking Friend) creator and many other toys with animal icons.

And enjoy enough free latte to keep me going to the evening.

Back to London, persuading a fellow seminar attender who has moved to Croydon that he'd be just as happy in Stoke with a quarter of the mortgage. Have by now decided that the diversion to Birmingham, while desirable, can be put off. On the tube, the glamorous girls haven't stood up too well to a full day in the office which makes me wonder why they took the time in the first place. Unless they've actually spent the day pacing Regent Street as they appear.

On the 5.05 back to Stoke, bump into Joan Walley, Our MP, while charging through first class. Run through the trials and tribulations of regeneration in Burslem (main hotel - featured in many an Arnold Bennet as the Dragon - shut down, few traders left bereft of customers, but at least there's room for improvement) and plot a trip up for London's youth to see the delights that the Mother Town has to offer. Be warned, London friends. I complain about the local councillors, a new favourite theme which I've only blogged about in passing so far. but, oh, there's so much more to say.

Back at Stoke, the 'revolving ticket barrier' (six uniformed guards) isn't going down too well with those who think they should only be stopped if they are young and/or dark-skinned and I observe the pitfalls of being an MP: recognisable and automatically to blame for everything bad in Stoke (but nothing good). 200 jobs to go at Spode, says the Sent'null, cheerily welcoming us back.

In all, a very enjoyable ramble round Britain, if not the countryside, sorry Arnold. While I regret not adding Birmingham to Burslem and Brighton, a nice day with plenty of familiar faces.

Rambling through the Autumn

2006-11-23T11:57:00.000Z

Sad to say, I've been struggling to find a meaty bloggable morsel of late. There have been some rambles, but none of them have made it online before the shutdown point that my rather flawed portable computer (or rather my backup system) imposes on me, when roughly every time I think 'better copy that file before the stupid machine wipes itself again', it wipes itself. Again.

Finding material to blog about is a bit difficult since I have a few rules in my head about what not to blog about: friends (unless I feel they are part of the blog conversation and regular readers, but that’s more to them rather than about them, otherwise I think there’s something unfair about it), work (except in sweeping terms about Friends, Clare doesn’t want to be sacked), feelings/lovelife (not that sort of blog). I must pay tribute to Ooh Pretty, by my oft-partner in creativity who had a healthy disrespect for blogs but has now landed on the topic of Pretty Things from her collection – a topic that is both easy to maintain and beautifully executed since she has a great eye for Pretty Things.

Until I find something as wonderfully simple, I shall stick with popular favourites like counting fields and ranting in a simultaneously local and international peace and hatred sort of track. So what were some of those fragments, lost forever to the ether, all the less to bore you with? As far as I can remember, there was some horror at my first direct contact with one of my local elected representatives. It's not the first time I've seen them a-rabblerousing and a-scaremongering, no, they do that every Saturday in Tunstall as they fight the elected mayor system (sigh), but the first time I could see the whites of his eyes and feel, perhaps unnecessarily, uncomfortable about the union jack flag pinned to his lapel. It's not a direct relationship I feel with the councillors that represent me locally. More like a group of bubbles that float on their own, never to be pricked by any real contact with the public. Or at least not by the public I know.

A very interesting meeting in the Westminster Arms of London, learning about the separation that exists in Burnley, a Northern mill town with many similar issues to Stoke-on-Trent and also a certain love for the BNP. It emerged that two of the major issues for some communities in these places is lack of education - particularly when only a few people in the community speak English which gives a few people the power to read, write, interpret for the rest - and the spread of rumours. What is so striking about this is that Rwandans cite exactly the same problems in their society. And they see the consequence of these problems as manipulation of youth towards violence. The challenge for both of our societies is to stop it going into the cycle, to break down separation and fear and create connection. Which is what I will be trying to do the next time I peruse Burslem's bars and curry houses. Every little helps.

And an embracing of the joys of living outside the most glamorous places. My city may not have year-round sunshine, tax free living, high rise towers, a film industry, Lindsay Lohan, no, not even a Starbucks. But it is my home, bathed in Autumn colours, a place where I can build my home. It is full of dreams and visions for the future and imaginings of the past. I can be involved in its future, and it doesn't involve a big Olympics plan which if it really goes for it will cost more than the Iraq war (which will at least give us something to say instead of 'but you spent that much on the Iraq war last month'). Fruit that costs no more than a tenner, no matter how much you put into the basket.

Then there's movies, Flickr, Skype and relaxing tilting train journeys to type long muses that will later be lost.

delicious.juice

2006-10-28T16:39:00.000+01:00

Last weekend we bought a deluxe three-in-one-massive-machine juicer/smoothie maker/er, juicer and can now enjoy the benefits of eating far more fruit and vegetables through the much more tolerable medium of juice.

So far it's all very enjoyable with several frenzied evenings running around the kitchen looking for more things to juice to make the four hour washing up session worth it. I'm a girl of simple tastes, so here are my recommendations for the best juice combinations so far:

Orange
Apple - home grown
Apple - green
Green apple, celery and grape
Grape - just whack 'em all in before they go off!
Carrot, yum
Tomato & chilli
Tomato

Yum, yum. Later on I intend to try some more adventurous combination, coming back from the market with such exotic fare as beetroot, pineapple and peppers - woo!

Does anybody have any suggestions for juices? Ideally no more than 3 ingredients, please...

More long-distance musings

2006-10-17T20:20:00.000+01:00

Living in the wealthy West is all about having the luxury to tie yourself into knots about the ethical dilemmas that come your way.

Today I saw the quote that, for me and in a very simplistic way, swung it on the age-old question 'Should Madonna have adopted the little African baby'. Little David's father, who has been branded a simpleton by those who think he shouldn't have signed the child over, said: 'It is a blessing from God. He is so lucky, he will learn many things. I appeal to the self-styled lovers of David to leave my baby alone. Where were they when David didn't have milk when his mother died?' It's a good point, well made, you have to admit.

Later in thelondonpaper (yes, I'm still reading it and mostly happily), we read he of Ryanair, Michael o' Leary's throwaway comments about switching over to Fairtrade coffee, because it's cheaper than what they had before. 'We'd change to a non-Fairtrade brand in the morning if it was cheaper', he said in an open invite to all other bad coffee companies to bake a bid. As he probably intended, he wound up Greenpeace no end, who hate him for his low-cost flights around the world, fair-trade coffee or none.

I'm on a bit of a no-fly time at the moment, partly because I'm trying to use my money for other things (like no longer getting into debt) and partly because increasingly, we can do all our communication without having to fly across the world, even if it's not quite as nice as a hug. My friends drop in on Gmail from exciting places like Canada and Rwanda and I don't even have to leave the desk to find ou what the weather is like where they are. But you think I wouldn't be on that runway at the drop of a hat if someone offered to send me off to Dubai or Kigali tomorrow? I would you know.

Quakers in particular, and the poor deranged 'left' generally, are very good at arranging international conferences and then wringing their hands over the cost to the environment. We've always been a well travelled people (I write 'we' in the sense of someone descended from migratory Quakers) ever since George Fox trotted around Barbados and America to see how his followers were getting on being persecuted in warmer countries. They were on ships, of course, but I'm sure the odd moment was spent wondering whether they should be in their comfortable cabins while all the people being transported and enslaved were stuffed in below. Well, possibly one moment. I don't have a lot of time for such worrying, as whichever way you wring your hands you'll never reach a place where you're free of guilt.

What is clear is that we're lucky to have these choices at all. To be the child chosen by Madonna must seem something like winning the lottery and as with all such pieces of extreme luck, there are always downsides. I reckon little David will be able to afford to visit home and even, lo, move back there, should he so choose.

Ah, but. Later on still is a fine piece of vitriol lifted from the New York Post. Madonna, the monster, it says, is raping Malawi with her 'freakish slave auction' and should be crucified. Not metaphorically, no, *literally* nailed to a cross. Gosh, I obviously wasn't outraged enough. But since when did we think Madonna was responsibility for sorting out world problems? Why the anger at her, rather than all those politicians who actually keep this system of inequality going every year? Madonna wasn't at the Doha rounds last time I looked. Neither were the politicians, since the rich countries had a tantrum and shut it all down. Andrea Peyser's highly speculative article grudgingly says that Madonna has given $3 million to the orphanage that was David's home-before-Marylebone but that this 'may' lead to a Kaballah-based curriculum. Jesus. It's like the missionaries all over again. The money-bearing educating feeding religious bastards. On the other hand, we might get more balance if a few more atheists sauntered over there wielding their money and their belief systems but to be honest, I don't see much of that, unless you count Bill Gates, whose religion as far as I know is IT.

Isn't one of Angelina's pet children from Malawi? Didn't Prince Harry go there to help the little orphans? Or am I being stupid? I don't remember all this feather-spitting about them, whichever country it might have been. Surely people aren't really disappointed in Mad Madonna, having seen her strange sweary Live 8 performance and actually expected better? Honestly?

And on an entirely different note, related only to my train journey...

Breakthrough! Finally one of the new Killers tracks strikes a chord. I knew it would get there in the end. Lovely.

Postscript. So at the end of a slightly delayed journey, Warhorse and I shoot down the newly finished shiny freeway (not really called a freeway in Britain) known as the A500. A wonder of technical achievement, by Stoke standards anyway. On our street, in contrast, they have spent at least two weeks installing one brand new streetlight per person – and only switched one of them on. So we have a pitch-black street, lit only by the silvery reflections of a forest of useless lamp-posts.

Why?

Dividing us

2006-10-06T22:26:00.000+01:00

Yes, another rant from the pen of the long-distant commuter. Call it bridge-blogging for those of you that feel you need a spotlight on British current culture. Don't call it an obsession. I have other things on my mind, this just seems to be the best use of White Llama's stage at the moment - and some of you have been encouraging me!

In Rwanda they call it divisionism. They blame the media for stirring up the racial tension that led to genocide. Post-genocide, human rights organisations defend journalists from detention when they have reported something that has crossed the line.

In Britain, we call it inciting racial hatred, but the line is far harder to cross. Inconcievable is it that the journalist, much less the sub-editor, should be locked up for writing a controversial headline. Some might say controversy is encouraged, though nobody wants to read a story with a dull headline.

But today we see the Evening Standard, the primary paid-for newspaper in one of the world's most tolerant cities.

- Guide dog banned by Muslim taxi driver -

First of all, imagine why this is designed to infuriate the 'British', in the constructed sense of the world - white and generally English. The British love their dogs, they love their dogs even more when they earn their keep. So dogs that *help the blind* are just about as revered as it gets, top dogs if you like. Secondly, the British hate petty bans. Why wouldn't you let a guide dog, of all creatures, into your taxi? Why? After all, you let vomiting drunks in every weekend, we say, sweepingly. So, on the basis of a general wind-up-the-British-reader scale, a ban of a guide dog, anywhere, scores highly.

Then we come to the word Muslim. On a day when the Muslim veil has been on the majority of front pages (those that were not dominated by a writhing nearly-nude Big Brother girl, that happy symbol of British freedom). Of primary importance here is that under the code of conduct absorb by most journalists during their training, is the rule that you don't mention a person's race unless it is relevant to the story. There is no justification to mentioning the driver's religion. Unless, perhaps, the taxi driver had an objection to the dog because his religion teaches him that dogs are dirty, which may have been the case.

Now there are certain rules to being a taxi driver: you're not supposed to refuse a passenger when you've got your light on for example. But these rules seem mainly dreamt up in order to rile the London taxi-seeker when a cab sweeps past. Imagine if you will, that you had a certain distaste, perhaps even a terror, of spiders. For whatever reason, your customer wanted to place you in a confined space for some time with his spider. Now, you might try very hard to get over your sense of horror and revulsion for the sake of the person who is disadvantaged and needs his helpful spider (I know, hard to imagine, venomous creepy aliens that they are), but perhaps you just won't be able to do your job properly in its presence. Perhaos you would quietly apologise and suggest that the person find another vendor this time.

Now, I don't know that any of this happened. I'm simply basing my response on that headline, as many other people will. Particularly as nobody's actually reading the Standard anymore.

Yesterday we had a major story that a (Muslim) police officer was the subject of investigation after his bosses had allowed him to object to guarding the Israeli embassy. Now, that's a whole other post that I don't have the energy to write at the moment, but this series of stories about Muslims have a subtext, if you can call it that. Let's just come out and say it.

The awkward Muslims, who are invading our country in huge numbers and wish to turn our state to Sharia law, are refusing to fulfil their basic duties as citizens of our country. They probably want to blow us up, but if they can't do that, they will cetainly do their level best to make life uncomfortable for us, whether that be by wearing their veils, refusing to let us into their taxis or refusing to defend the embassy of a country that is very good friends with us and particularly with our security services. Why can't they just be like us?

What I really don't understand is why this message is being broadcast so loud and clear from nearly every national newspaper when it is so, *so*, SO far from the every day reality of the vast majority of British people. Why a debate about difference and inclusion, which is a perfectly healty thing, is being played out in the totally skewed world of the front pages, with an extremely limited cast of actors, most of whom we don't like and don't trust. I've said it before: these editors are simply trying to save their plummeting circulations, they will say anything they can if they think it will make you think we live in a world so scary, so serious that we need to buy a daily newspaper.

This construction of Britishness is also so outdated as to be farcical. Our everyday lives consist of multiple exchanges with immigrants who live here and work here. If they weren't here, the native British wouldn't be able to an enjoy the existence where every child can aspire to a middle class job, a home of their own and probably one in Spain too. Most of our inner-cities would have collapsed 30 years ago. We may keep ourselves separate, but it has always been thus with divisions more historically based on class than nation of origin. It is a country where every man's home is his castle and we construct walls round each other. Sometimes our suspicions are fuelled, but we are usually cynical enough to discount rumour and political spin. We also love the opportunity to interact, to mix our food, our language, our music and dance. We are a polite people and we like to enjoy ourselves and work hard. Every part of this applies to the people who have come to Britain, because they are a part of us too. My generalisations about Britishness can never only refer to the white population, because where does that leave my non-white friends who have been born and grown up here?

Freedom of religious practice is another British essential, defended instinctively and forcefully throughout the last Milennium. Whether Muslim, Jewish, Christian non-religious - a belief system in itself of course - or whatever else, there will be good and bad things that you do and you might say you're doing it because of what you believe. It's personal. If you don't harm someone else - the major definition of legitimacy - this is your right in Britain. We also laugh at other relgions and our own and perhaps this helps to diffuse the tension that could turn ugly. Itís not always nice, but I would suggest that you normally know from context whether there is malice in the humour or not, context which is completely devoid in a large-print newspaper headline.

What is worse - feeling uncomfortable talking to someone in a veil or feeling uncomfortable talking to someone without a veil? It's a personal struggle, what might be called a clash, but more likely something that two individuals can sort out for themselves; usually by being accomodating and polite enough to recognise each other's feelings. To keep your veil on if you want it on, but to know that you will find support if it is hiding repression and abuse and you want to take it off.

The glare of the press endlessly forces people to justify themselves, to apologise, to condemn. The press have a role to hold institutions to account, to point out wrong-doing and perhaps to vocalise the needs of the powerless. I don't for one moment think there is a public interest in the current obsession for 'Muslim' stories. I believe they are dividing our society and have seen people spouting racist theories that have the formula of newspaper generalisation. They don't deserve their place on every street and I would like to see the spotlight turned a little more firmly towards them.

White Llama will, of course, do its bit...

Scary movies

2006-10-02T14:00:00.000+01:00

Last night, after a long weekend baking and digging, we splashed out to go and watch Chlldren of Men at the cinema. Leaving aside the unbelievable price of the popcorn and drink (inexplicably the 'couple's combo' is 1.50 even more than the regular combo, which seems a bit unfair, so we pretended not to be a couple when the time came to pay), the lack of legroom and the teenagers who had paid a small fortune to come and chat out of the rain - it was a very good film.

It visualises the world that the Daily Mail thinks it is gently preparing us for, where all women are infertile and immigrants are being caged and sent to Bexhill for familiar-loooking hoodings and kickings. Set 25 years in the future, what gives the film an edge is its familiarity and realism, where fear has beaten hope and we all live in cages, waiting for the end to come. British film-makers are getting good at this sort of thing, moving from slightly depressing gritty tales to spectacularly violent and still gritty portraits of societies in the throes of destruction. In this sense, Children of Men had many echoes from 28 Days, a great British zombie movie. There's rarely much hope in them, one or two characters might make it to a happy place on the other side, but the rest of the population are dead and you don't really miss them. They'll still have a good dose of British black humour but it is a bit more invigorating than ballet dancers and kestrils.

The other recurring theme in current British drama, of course, is the sinister, controlling government and the complex, mysterious terror threat, in which the government may *well* be complicit. It mkes you wonder if Tony Blair ever ventures into the cinema anymore, what with all these loaded messages being thrown at him like popcorn. Spooks in another good example, it's the best British drama to be made in years and it bashes away at the government to the extent that you think maybe they're not as evil as all that, for surely they would have had Spooks shut down by now.

Meanwhile the editors of the Mail and Express, who don't have much to do with popular culture these days, are doing their best to bring the world of fear into existence. There's a new wave of immigrants being waved through by the EU machine, coming to serve us coffee and clean our offices, the grasping bastards. The front page of the Express last week sometime was all about the dangers to be found in fruit and veg. I haven't bought any since. And our hapless political parties are buying into it, with their strange swings between playing to The Guardian 'hug-a-hoodie' audience and the Mail's 'hang 'em and burn their thieving bodies' (oh or the slightly unbelievable subheading to the story - n the Lite I think but only got a glimpse - about a fare dodger being throttled in the station: 'next time buy a ticket!!').

Some Tories, in their latest round of infighting, have accused their idiot leader David Cameron of pushing voters into the welcoming arms of the BNP by failing to address people's concerns about immigration and crime. The only logical way out of this is to put through the BNP's policies for them, clearly. There's a perception, in the still largely white and middle class world of politics, that people have just come to this on their own. That so many of the Polish bastards serving their teas have pushed them over the edge into rampant racism. Do they truly not, even for a second, think that their constant pandering to the right-wing press actually has a reinforcing effect and that more people are likely to believe the ravings of ten cash-hungry journalists in a leader conference if the government sagely nod at the Express headlines and say 'yes, something should be done' while sending 500 civil servants further along the merry-go-round of plug-filling before water leaks in the next gap. If they simply held up five copies of the Express up side-by-side, one with the fruitloop fruit story and a few of the latest Diana conspiracy theories, then the immigration stories would soon gain some perspective. And possibly we can breathe easier for a while.

I don't usually read spam, but...

2006-09-05T16:27:00.000+01:00

this piece really is enjoyable:

Although heis your father I feel it is my duty to warn you to be wary of him.
Hello, said Estelle, Mrs Gudgeon speaking.
Youll never guess it, he piped gleefully.
And you cant frighten me, he declared emphatically. When I do kill him, I shall kill him with my naked hands.
I chewed myfingernails and looked across at Stanley.
How many times have I warned you about jumping over the fence andtrampling the grass?
What a pity you never had a motor-cycle whenyour mother was here, I murmured. And if they dont likeyou, they throw you out.
Chops, fried tomatoes and chipped potatoes, said Stanley. No, he replied, but Ill go straight up to Strathfield now, and getsomething. Easypayment; the savage irony of the term! He set a plate of porridge down before me and I stared at him. Stanley came out of his clinch as the girl looked around.
If theres any more of those damnedsardines and baked beans, I dont want to see them.
I stood to win one hundred and fifty, or flay mythirty pounds worth out of Stanley. I had wondered why you did not write each day giving particulars ofJ.
I decided to avoid Steak for the nonce,and took up a position near the track to watch the race. Come inside and Ill tell you about it, he said. Slowly he turned his head and looked at me.
Oh, all right then, he muttered peevishly.
He made a strange rasping noise conveying contempt. Agatha was straining every nerve todrag my name through the divorce court.
The plaster commenced to fall fromthe ceiling in flakes.
The other two letters were to Stanley, from Agatha andGertrude.
The bigger and oftener the cups, the less necessity for the observanceof trivial conventions. Oh, go on, he moaned in a stricken voice. He scratched his ear slowly with a ten-pound note and eyed mespeculatively.
I hurled Stanley in and threw myself on top of him.
I snatched the menu from him and tore it up.
Idemanded, mopping the gravy off my vest.
Stanley sat down and stared at me grimly. Neither am I, he replied, and bounded softly into the darkness of thelaundry.
Seven pounds, fifteen shillings, Mr Gudgeon.

The Battle for London part 2

2006-09-04T20:55:00.000+01:00

Hoorah! At last the garish umbrella comes out and I can be entertained (or not) by two free newspapers flung at me on the way to the train, London Lite and thelondonpaper (we'll call that tpl, gosh, it's already getting tedious). So let's see how the two shape up.

Front page: to be fair, neither could avoid looking a bit like the Daily Sport, though the Lite achieves this more with 'Croc Hunter killed by a fish'. Harsh, Lite, harsh - it was a stingray for goodness sake, not a goldfish. But even the front page of the Standard - making an honorory appearance here for you couldn't help but glimpse the 5000 copies piled up around its depressed seller - managed to be even more absurd with the headline 'killed for being British'. Well, Standy, I hate to state the obvious, but that's what war's all about. If he'd been killed just for being Pete Smith (apologies for sounding insensitive, but I don't know the specifics of this particular story), that would have been murder, as it is it's yet another victim of a war of the British government. It's no nicer to be shot for being brown and I don't remember you showing much sympathy for 'BOMBER' Menezes. It's not very nice is it? Heck, why don't we just stop the war?

And on. Oh, so tlp wins there, just for having a nicer headline font and looking less like the Daily Mail (naturally Lite had a disadvantage there). It loses credit a little bit on page 3, traditionally the fun page, by just crossing over the line of taste and fair jokes with a feature on the hilarious perils of being a naturalist in the spirit of 'That Irwin, if he would keep prodding those fish'. Now, if our frenzied double-working reporter had only checked the BBC website comment board, she would have been reminded of the fact that people at home are always genuinely upset about the death of someone they see on TV regularly. It's a tricky line but the Lite manages it better.

But Lite blows it again on page 4 by abandoning the news and banging on * again * about how they're the paper which wont get ink all over your hands. Seriously, if you take a page every day to persuade me to read your magazine even though it's * free * I'll start to think you;'re wasting my time. And vox pops? You think I care what other Londoners think? No. Being free from such burdensome knowledge is what makes London so special.

Pause for a moment to wonder why claims that the government of Sudan is still bombing civilians in Darfur is two thirds down 'world at a glance'. Er, underneath '100 ducks die in Vietnam'.

Skip through science/foetus nonsense and terror to David Cameron's extension. Give up and go back to tlp, which is still more pleasing to the eye. And it has a picture of a lazy black bear. Has Metro got a gentleman's agreement to have the animal pictures instead of Lite? 4-0 to the lower case Sun.

Finally Lite pick up a point for trailing a story about Goji berries on the front page with a picture of Mischa Barton, while tfn, er tfl, oh hell, tlp stick it in a corner next to the non-news that dinner ladies are to be taught cooking. You think we can even raise a sigh at that sort of thing anymore? Pah. No Goji berries - that's exciting! They've stripped the Himalyan mountains bare to bring them to London where their effects include increasing sex drive, decreasing cellulite and making you as fabulous as Mischa. I'm sold - can I find them at Tunstall market?

tlp loses another point (that's 4-2) and is lucky not to lose two by waking up far too late to the campaign to save the Astoria, which Sun journalists would only have known as 'that place that's GAY, yack' before they realised that thousands of their new readers have signed a petition to save the iconic venue. Followed by a convoluted story about David Cameron, who as well as tearing his house apart and upsetting Daily Mail readers, has been encouraging thousands of hoodies to his, er, hood, all looking for a hug and beating up local shopowners. 'They've got no respect', whined a local spin doctor as he pushed the story Rebekah Wade's way.

Finally, tpl gets something right by showing London transport junkies (that's every Londoner) what the tube map will look like in 2012. Pore over and see if your house price is likely to rise, or equally your rent. West London, we note with a snigger, will have no improvements whatsoever and is to be abandoned to the hoodies and the tories permanently.

And it sprints ahead with an entertaining interview with Ken, who speculates on the idea of Jeremy Clarkson standing against him as Mayor. Chuckle and imagine. Ken is obviously in charming mood for this interview, which you can only assume is his contribution to the slow battering to death of his enemies at Associated.

Oh goodness, we must be onto the features and tlp reminds us it's from Wapping with a full page on 'what women want'. Money. Men with money. That's all. Bloody women. Then it falls into the vox pops and whether Londoners think a baby can save Madonna and Guy's marriage. Didn't we discuss that above? Still don't care about what they think, OK?

Oh, how lovely. We get to meet tlp's editor, Stefano. He looks like the sort of man labelled 'hot' in the previous page. Still, they do a good job of selling the magazine (no nonsense about ink on your fingers here) and Stefano is partnered with a Polish columnist. Slick thinking! I'm a little disappointed that they put the man's job out to text vote and resist texting 'more!' hoping that the Poles will do their bit for their countryman.

Tpl romps home with a double page of the beautiful people with their thin legs in the sunshine (scoffing delicious Goji berries no doubt) and cram in two features which you hope they won't get mixed up: pet of the day and fast supper. Harry may be an unstarry choice for the former, but any picture of a cat gives them another point.

I expected it to be a close run thing with both publications vying, whorishly, for my attention with various new media tricks, but tfl has done ever so well, even if its features on women raise my rarely-sensitive hackles. A feature on coffee (especially one encouraging my preferred choice of instant) always has the same effect on me as a picture of a cat. Even for the purposes of this scientific survey, I can't face going back to the Lite, which as i recall only got one point on its own merit. Sod it, I'll plump for thelondonthing, or whatever it's called. Well done, chaps.

The battle for London

2006-08-31T18:10:00.000+01:00

I gather, from the nice man handing me a free paper this evening, that there's a newspaper war going on in London.

Rumours of a new free paper from the Express Group have been around for as long as I can remember and now the Sun is supposed to be joining the fray, though I have yet to see either. So the group that brings you the Daily Mail, the Evening Standard and the Metro have hit back at this spectre with London Lite. It seems to be a bid to rescue the thisislondon group of websites before the freebie papers destroy its sister Standard, but entertainingly, as there is no sign of the other papers yet, they are doing a good job of this by themselves. The usual Standard sellers at Euston are looking a little glum, since all the people who wanted a Standard have been given this Lite version instead. I also like the way that it sells itself with the news that Londoners don't have time to read (ie the long, boring features in the Standard) so they'll keep their content nice and snappy. Much like the Metro, which is now reprinting most of the Lite's stories the next morning, while the Mail takes the remaining ones. So if you do pick up the Lite each evening, Metro will only be worth reading for the implausible animal stories. I wonder how long it'll be before Lite steals them as well.

I'm quite happy for newspaper groups I don't like to regale me with free reading material, even if it is very boring. I can't criticise all their interactivity and links to YOUR website, because I've been pushing exactly the same strategy at The Friend for the last 18 months, even if we resist the urge to SHOUT. I feel rather sorry for whoever it is who is having to rehash articles for at least 3 different puiblications in snappy, scaremongering or straight style as demanded, but that's just a perk of working for Associated Newspapers, along with the guilt and fear and, i gather, quite good pay for your 24-hour workday.

If the Express and Sun groups take the same path, printing like fiends until they can no longer afford to exist, you won't find me trying to stop them. This desperate grasping for the last dregs of our attention (and more importantly that of the advertisers) will only last so long before we finally say farewell to the twitching remains of the paid-for British newspaper industry and its utterly outdated treatment of the people formerly known as the audience. That's not my phrase by the way, I stole it off some other website and will do so again, given half the chance.

Interestingly, if indeed you are, I suspect the Metro will probably live on because unlike the Lite (which is really quite unreadable, I found while writing this post), it has actually cracked the secrets of creating community and presenting news neutrally (it essentially lifts stories from the Press Association). It has years on these new freebies and, most importantly, it has animal stories.

Thwart mayors - it's good for them

2006-08-04T18:45:00.000+01:00

I guess the formidable brains of Mark Meredith's team didn't pick up on the last post by Stoke's second best blogger then (7 RSS subscribers can't be wrong). Better have another go...

He really does get me going though. And not just because of his charming smile. In a bad way. Today Our mayor had his proposal to pay his friends on the council £71,500 turned down. What a shame!

According to the Sent'null:
Mr Meredith said at the meeting: "I set this panel up to give some clear political direction - the Labour direction.

"The Labour Party is by far the biggest party here and I was elected as a Labour Party candidate.

"Quite clearly people wanted a Labour mayor and quite clearly they want a Labour agenda."

Well...

I'm not trying to imply that the good, decent people of Stoke don't deserve the vote or that they're voting voting with completely random, self-centred crosses, but just consider the traffic for a moment. Everyone in Stoke needs a vehicle, fine. It's an unwieldy place with 6 towns and an infinite number of oddly named places packed between them. But I've written before about the size of many of these cars. Bigger than their houses, I've written. Do they need to be quite so big? And do the people in them need to be quite so blind? Stoke at rush hour is an obstacle course, a bumper car rally in which people would be able to be a little more tranquil if there weren't quite so many of them trying to squeeze their huge cars through roads in a manner that suggests they don't just grit their teeth and aim for that child, they relish the chase. They don't care about anybody but themselves. If all these people apply the same mentality in the voting booth as in their cars, then, I tentatively suggest, perhaps they shouldn't be allowed to vote. And that's a lot of people.

But maybe that's a bit harsh. Perhaps a more reasonable aspect is the utter lack of choice in the city. Last local election we got two leaflets through our door. One from the Asian Labour man with his nice red glossy leaflets. Now, I wouldn't join the Labour party because of what the government has done to Muslims and I'm not even a Muslim. But then the other leaflet was printed on suspicious looking paper from a man who didn't quite say 'repatriate the darkies' but there was that definite message leaking out of his badly punctuated missive. So, luckily, the Labour man won. But that's not exactly Clare of Burslem 'clearly' embracing the 'Labour direction'. The very phrase makes her shudder.

So, OK, the city has 'chosen' to be dominated by a Labour mafia. But did it choose to have some of them paid £71,500? Obviously not, because whatever councillors are paid is quite clearly stated in some bit of paper hidden away in some backroom of the council and we figure it's just about a fair recompense for whatever the hell it is they do (unsurprisingly, our democratically elected councillors haven't written to us since the election). For starters, if we assume that these pals of the Ghost will be putting in fair time for the money they are paid, which I have a certain scepticism about, but let's say for a laugh that they do, that means they have more hour-time than their less favoured friends on the council, which means that come next election they'll be able to list many more achievement than those who have had to spend their time earning a wage or filling in benefit forms, which are, as you know, lengthy and difficult. That's hardly fair is it?

Secondly and perhaps most importantly, advice, if you know what you're talking about, is *free*. You don't even need to be very clever to work out what makes a city good. Clean streets, nice shops, attractive floral displays, maybe a river but if not a canal will do. An engaged, healthy and ideally literate population that doesn't spend its every weekend and pound getting pissed, battering itself and smashing up aforementioned displays. Back gardens where belongings more vauable than rubbish can reside without inevitably being stolen. You won't find anyone who disagrees with the basic principles of a good city, you might just get some disagreement on what should be spent to achieve it. Skateparks, shiny paving, arty public gardens, theatres I'm all for, £71,500 advisers do nothing to brighten the place up.

Well luckily, good sense won and even with the beneficiaries of the cash quite bizarrely in on the decision, it was turned down. Hope's not lost then. But it certainly has gone missing without its collar.

Transpositions

2006-07-26T22:15:00.000+01:00

Oh my dears! Didn't I promise to tell you more about those images posted some weeks ago?

Well, they were from was Transpositions, a rather mysterious exhibition put on by one of the many mysterious groups that exist in Stoke to surprise you. We took my borrowed car on a magical tour through previously familiar roads led by Basia, whose only recollection of where she had been the previous night was that it was near some council blocks that reminded her of Poland. Londoners, stop your snorting *right now*.

Imagine my joy as I realised the location was a factory that I have been fretting over and restoring in my imagination for many years overlooking Hanley. A luxury development appears to be on the cards (you should never get your hopes up too high in Stoke) with art space retained. So far, so huzah. And Mike Wolfe is involved in some way, at least in the current exhibition space, which secures him the curious place in Stoke life as the ex-Mayor who is managing to achieve far more than Mark `the ghost' Meredith, the Labour-placemat whose given role appears to be to run down the position in time for an informed choice by the electorate in the next referendum in 2008 and whose only public output in the past month that I have read has been to tell citizens not to put their rubbish out too early. Come on, is that statesmanlike? Do you see Ken berating the people of Tower Hamlets about their rubbish? No.*

Incidentally, my inside contacts at the City Council tell me they're still running their proposed working past the electoral commission:

Would you like
A) An expensive Mayor who does nothing except have his picture taken every now and then for the Sent'null*
B) a faceless and unlected council leader 'supported' by the feckless mix of Labour and BNP that have been running down the City for the past fifty years (in the case of Labour, that is)
C) The same mixture of the two which you unwittingly chose in the last referendum, even though that wasn't supposed to be an option?

Supplementary question: what were you thinking, people, dumping the only man who had ever taken an interest in improving the lives of people in Stoke for someone who looks a bit like Jonathan Wilkes and drives a nice car?

* * *

Anyway... The art! Whem we got there in the afternoon, the young soldiers that Basia had commissioned (I'd say 'picked up' but she's a married lady) were placed in the baking sun, appropriately enough in desert uniform and facing outwards. They were unresponsive to the audience, which clearly had some effect on the people watching. In Britain the sight of soliders is still enough to make us feel unsettled. Opposite, the message on the wall -

Does anyone have any helpful suggestions
for non-violent forms of conflict resolution?
On personal, group, national or international level

- is broad and complex enough to attract a wide variety of interpretations, while the use of 'anybody' casts the net more widely than to those who would feel a 'you' was addressed to them. It was still early when we saw it but I am looking forward to going back and seeing what ideas people have suggested.

The most interesting thing about the factory was that it still retains most of its original features, having only been boarded up ad whitewashed to make a few areas inhabitable. Underneath the main interior space, a dark area had not even been this prepared and you could sit on trolleys and explore kiln areas. Upstairs, the art inhabited every corner and little rooms of what is still only a small part of the whole factory. A big yellow stain on the wall, which was you got closer turned out the be the little yellow chicks for cakes, each glued individually to the wall. Really close, their little beady eyes look out from the crowd. Pieces of string following the light flooding in from a window, with Hiroshima-style birds attached. Some of the exhibitions had been made on site from materials in the factory, hopefully they will be preserved.

I would have appreciated a bit more explanation of the art on display - I think you need a bit of an idea of what an artist is getting at before you can make your own interpretations, especially in images drawn from everyday life. However, it was still a very interesting exhibition and an exciting use of a prominent but previously crumbling building.

Transpositions runs until tomorrow. Google won't tell me the streetname and I don't know it (that's Stoke for you), just look for the big factory overlooking the ring road opposite Richer Sounds and some towerblocks reminiscent of Communist Poland...

* If I'm wrong about any of these assumptions about Our Mayor, I will be very happy to hear about his achievements over the last year if anybody from his office is reading. While they're at it, they might want to make his Wikipedia entry sound just a bit less, well, blank.