interactivecultures

I will be spending much of the coming year or so working with companies across Birmingham on social media and web-based projects. The project, which I am delivering on behalf of Digital Birmingham, is a small part of a much larger programme utilising Working Neighbourhood funds managed by Birmingham City Council. The project will work with sixteen organisations between now and March 2011, and will also lead to a number of events; I will of course also be looking for opportunities to develop some academic outputs from the project.

What I will be doing

The project builds on our experiences in our recent project, the AHRC Knowledge Transfer Fellowship in New Strategies for Radio and Music Organisations. I will be demonstrating simple uses of technologies that could make a difference to companies. We will prototype new ideas for our partners, using simple and accessible technologies that could help to make life easier, open up new opportunities, or speak to different audiences. The prototypes will be informed by our research and teaching activities within Birmingham School of Media.

Why I’m doing it

My project’s aims are to demonstrate the usefulness of Internet technologies, especially social media technologies, to a wide range of business sectors; the wider project aims include innovation and business growth. My job-title, and the name used at Digital Birmingham, for this project is “Digital Champion”. I won’t be using that title an awful lot, firstly because modesty won’t allow and secondly because the real champions will be the companies I partner with. My project aims to stimulate and create something new in a wide cross-section of companies, and then to communicate this process to a wider business community; my partners in the project will be the true Digital Champions, inspiring their friends, their staff, and their business rivals to try something new.

Creating Demand

When I worked in industry, people would often come to me with a good idea that was a little vague and needed to be shaped. I had no way of helping them to form that idea without charging for my time, and their budget would mean that they only had one chance to get it right. Often good ideas would never get started because I couldn’t afford to invest time and companies couldn’t afford to risk money. I hope that the time I spend with my partners will provide a space for some innovation or change to happen that would not otherwise occur. My project will take the early risk, and leave the partner with something more formed and considered which they can then use as the basis of a new, commercial, partnership with a local firm. Successful projects will stimulate demand whether that be finding an agency to write code that’s above and beyond my skills and remit; hiring a social media consultant to take a role in developing more content; or working with audio and video producers on podcast content.

What I’m looking for

I’m looking for partnerships across the city, in all sectors of our business community, who might benefit from this project. They might wish to be a prototype partner, or might just wish to attend one of our forthcoming events for some inspiration. Do please leave a comment below, or email me (jon.hickman [at] bcu.ac.uk).

I have a number of companies I am specifically looking for, these include:

• a T-shirt screen printing company
• a professional services company with a well developed CSR programme
• a company with a branch office overseas

Our digest of links for February 2nd:

• British politicians engage in modern warfare – Interesting artcile re the old media effects debates as it relates to computer game violence. Tom Watson's position as presented here is an increasingly common one. I've heard a number of commentators come up with the same points in news articles (though I have never heard an MP come out against the moral backlash before). What is particularly interesting is that it is now possible to take a moral position that supports the development of any computer game, including violent ones, but which is always located with in a discussion about the creative industries and the value of the computer games market: the text itself is seen as subordinate to the industry.
• Hashtags and the desire to own and organise – jon bounds – When two tribes (both self professed "social media experts") went to war over a hashtag, we saw a breakdown in folksonomy, a drive to own in the intangible, and a final denouement of ridicule heaped on all parties.

Nick Webber’s MeCCSA 2010 conference presentation at the London School of Economics, regarding the effect and veracity of existing research on the public debate around digital music consumption.

Tim and Simon’s presentation at the 2010 MeCCSA Conference.

To what extent is social media a useful tool for meeting the government’s local empowerment agenda? That was the question being asked in a panel session at an event last week organised by the National Empowerment Partnership which is managed by the Community Development Foundation.

‘Local Engagement: Sharing Practical Approaches’ was aimed at local authority officers and those working in the various organisations that make up the National Empowerment Partnership. The panel I was presenting at included Hannah Peaker from the London Civic Forum (who interestingly had spent time on the Obama campaign in 2008) and Stephen Frost from izwe.com. I was there courtesy of the work the role I’ve had with Digital Birmingham over the past year.
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I was recently invited by the United Nations and World Health Organisation to attend their annual international conference to discuss the use of radio in prisons as a way to engage with hard to reach prisoners. I, Morag McDonald (from CRQ at BCU), Phil Maguire (from the Prison Radio Association-one of our KTF partners) and Andrew Wilkie (from the National Prison Radio Authority) presented a one hour workshop on the benefits of using prison radio as a tool for health promotion and education within prisons. Read the rest of this entry »

At the end of January 2010, our current AHRC-funded knowledge transfer fellowship (KTF) project draws to a close. That’s only a marker date, but it is the point at which the funding stops. Three months later, we need to have submitted forms, letters and financial summaries which, among other things, evaluate our project’s effectiveness and general, overall, wholesome family goodness.

And there’s our problem. We’ll have spent two years working with our KTF partners – and there are lots of them – and we have to judge how effective our involvement has been. Read the rest of this entry »

Sam and I recently submitted some of our audio pieces to the Radio Futura 2009 which is the radio station that operated during the Future Places event in Oporto, Portugal in October. We were really pleased to be asked to supply content for the station. We sent over seven pieces of work that were a mixture of Knowledge Transfer Fellowship work between BCU and the Birmingham Music Archive and other partners Sam has worked with as part of the AHRC project.

Future Places is explores Digital Media and Local Culture and is six days of exhibitions and events addressing the potential and the impact of digital media on local cultures and took place October 13-17, 2009 and is a project of the UT Austin|Portugal Program

http://colab.ic2.utexas.edu/futureplaces/

Radio Futura

Radiofutura broadcast 24/7 via RadioZero and from 91.5 FM Frequency during futureplaces 2009. A full webstream of the programme is now in the works.

FuturePlaces 2009 presents RADIO FUTURA

The official FuturePlaces radio station

Broadcasting live during FuturePlaces 2009 digital media festival.

October 14-17, 2009 – Porto, Portugal

A joint venture between Future Places and Rádio Zero.

LIVE EVENTS. SONGS. RANTS. FIELD RECORDINGS. SOUND POETRY. MUSIC. EXPERIMENTAL. HOT TOPICS. PURE WEIRDNESS.

Check the broadcasting schedule here. Contact: radiofutura2009 @ gmail.com

Portuguese radio jingle here. English radio jingle here.

The two pieces that Radio Futura ran were the Birmingham Popular Music Archive Phil Lynott documentary which also aired on BBC WM, Absolute and Spin FM and Music in Moseley.

This was another example of the Fellowship work in practice and the wide ranging ways of disseminating that work to audiences, in this case internationally.

To listen to the above pieces and other work by Sam follow the link: Sam Coley Vimeo

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ell-r-brown/ / CC BY 2.0

We’ve been increasingly interested in the idea of ‘Music As Culture’ in the past few months. I’ve presented under that banner at a couple of conferences and events in London and Berlin recently, and Jez has been hard at work developing some projects on that topic.

The central idea is very simple: that most of the discussions and many of the important decisions being made today around popular music, copyright and online participation are from the perspective of music as a primarily commercial enterprise.

In fact, to read the newspapers and blogs, and to attend the music industry conferences, you would be forgiven for thinking that music itself has failed, because it is no longer as profitable as it once was.

But music is not just commerce. It is an important part of our culture, and we’re interested in the ways in which that is manifest – and in particular, the consequences of overlooking that very important point.

So we’ve launched MusicAsCulture.org. It’s a place to bring together projects that highlight this very important point. It’s not an organisation as such, and nor is it a body with a specific political agenda. It’s an umbrella under which we can explore and discuss ideas and issues around popular music, archives, cities, scenes and creativity.

Live, Loud and Local
We’re launching MusicAsCulture.org with a very special project. Here in Birmingham, as with many places elsewhere, heritage music venues are in danger of closure or losing their live music licence because of issues of noise. Areas that were once not residential now have tenants, and the clash between apartment dwellers and local music venues has demanded a response at a policy level.

From the Birmingham Post:
Digbeth Pub The Rainbow Facing Closure After Noise Complaints

And Pete Ashton predicts a riot.

UB40 step in
Brian Travers from the band UB40 approached us to discuss ways in which we might collaborate around this issue – and on November 3rd, the band will play a one-off gig at the Rainbow pub in Digbeth to raise money for a new roof on the building, in an attempt to reduce outside noise.

Brian and the band believe that live, local music is vital to the city and its cultural life. Their performance at the Rainbow serves to draw attention to this issue.

Under the Music As Culture banner, we’re bringing together a group of interested people to help document and communicate this effort, using all of the tools of the digital age, and some old-school ones as well. We believe these conversations and debates are important ones, and it’s gratifying that such an incredibly successful international act such as UB40 are so involved and interested in their local community and the ongoing creative lifeblood of their hometown.

Follow the UB40 Campaign Live, Loud and Local at Music As Culture here – and look for more projects coming soon.

Left to right: Prof Tim Wall, Andrew Dubber, Dr Simon Barber and Jez Collins.

What is it?

‘Just Like Jazz‘ is a collaborative project between the Interactive Cultures research unit at Birmingham City University, and the Scarborough Jazz Festival. The team comprises Professor Tim Wall, Andrew Dubber, Dr Simon Barber and Jez Collins. Part of our academic interests include jazz and so we’re working with the Scarborough Jazz Festival to explore the ways in which jazz festivals can be portrayed online.

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