fisharepeopletoo

All Architects, Planners, Designers, Developers and Planning Committees should be made to cross this bridge.

 

Look into your souls, you wretches.

Really quite nice on one side.

 

 

Awful on the other.

Shocking but brilliantly designed infographics showing investment in high speed network infrastructure in UK city regions

 

Historically high levels of investment in high speed network infrastructure.

 

 

Historically low levels of investment in high speed network infrastructure.

 

 International Comparison

Investment in high speed network infrastructure in a medium sized post industrial city in Germany.

 

Why I Still Heart Text Messages :-)

This piece is part of my contribution to What Makes Us Tick, organised by Diane Sims and Alan Williams. Any self indulgence is all my own fault.

 

Why I Still <3 Text Messages :-)

I fell in love with text messages through poetry.

I got my first mobile phone in that strange period between 1999 and 2001 when mobile phones went from being something that only loud mouthed rich people had, to something that nobody could live without [1]. I didn't buy it for the texts though, I bought it because I'd read about something called WAP, which connected mobile phones to the internet, and the idea of having all that information in the palm of your hand felt like something to do with reading and writing. It felt like books. Within a couple of days of buying the phone I knew my guess had been right, but it wasn't the mobile internet that did it, it was texting. As soon as I sent a text I was head over heels. It was like writing poetry. Does that sound odd? It's just texting after all. But how about if I gave you this definition and asked you what I was describing: “It's an intimate kind of writing, with a set of formal limits, that tries to get an emotional response.” Am I talking about poetry, or texting? Because it's not a bad definition of either.

So standing at a bus stop on Kirkstall Road in Leeds, on the first warm day of early summer, I wrote a poem in a text message and sent it to a couple of mates. And they texted back:

“Wot R U on about?!”

But that didn't matter. I'd proved the point to myself, and over the next 18 months I wrote 80 poems that are small enough to fit into text messages, and collected them together in a book called, well, what else, Text Messages. When that was published I ended up on the Today programme being laughed at by John Humphries and shouted at by a famous poet for trying to destroy the English language. I didn't succeed in destroying English, but the book is still available on Amazon, right here, and I highly recommend it, especially for the bargain price of 35 pence, which is what it once sold for!

Of course I wasn't the only person who thought there might be a connection between creative reading, writing and mobile phones, and a few months after the poem on Kirkstall Road I sent an email about poetry to Vic Keegan, the editor of the Technology section of the Guardian, he replied, and in a few more emails we had worked out a way to run a poetry competition by text message.

In May 2001, the Guardian asked people to send them poems by text message. They got 7000 in two weeks, which were whittled down to a short list of seven by two proper poets, Peter Sansom and UA Fanthorpe, and those seven were sent back to everyone who entered, one poem per day, for seven days. Each day at about lunch time the participants got a poem by text, read it, decided if they liked it, gave it a score of between one and ten and sent that score back to the Guardian as a text. At the end of the week the scores were added up and the poem with the highest score was the winner, which was this one by Hetty Hughes, a student in Bradford at the time:

txtin iz messin,
mi headn'me englis,
try2rite essays,
they all come out txtis.
gran not plsed w/letters shes getn,
swears i wrote better
b4 comin2uni.
&she's african

What was so fantastic about the competition was that the texts came from everyone, everywhere, all the time. Of the seven people on the short list, none thought of themselves as poets, and the 7000 messages were about everything from big news stories of the day (mad cow disease) to personal relationships, to a poem about texting on the toilet. It's this quality of everyone, everywhere, all the time, that is at the heart of why I heart text messages. Because texts have become such a big part of people's everyday lives, they are by far the most welcoming medium - nobody is scared of writing a text, and people will take part by text who wouldn't take part in any other way.

Mobile phones are an intimate technology - we keep our phones within an arms length most of the time, often right next to our bodies, and the texts we get regularly are from our closest friends and family - so people will use text messages to say the things that they need to say, even if they would never say those things out loud. And because we always have our mobile phones with us everywhere, text messages can be used to reach people in the spaces where they live, and where they feel comfortable, rather than in official spaces, for example by using signs at bus stops or beer mats in pubs. If you give people something they are interested in, they always have the means to take part by text if they want to.

The Guardian's competition was very timely, and generated publicity for them round the world. For a few weeks the people who took part had come together and made a community, but once the competition ended, the community vanished. People took part from everywhere, but that meant that the community wasn't from anywhere. It wasn't rooted in a place. At the same time, mobile phones were changing the way that public spaces felt. Private worlds and public places were starting to get mixed up, and a new set of rules for how people behaved in the company of strangers were being worked out. Suddenly, the most intimate private relationships would find people in public places, either by text or by phone call. Public places became a mixed reality, haunted by the presence of people who were somewhere else but could ring you at any time. If you are old enough to remember it, everyone noticed this happening, whether they liked it or not. This was the strange period when comedians could make whole TV programmes out of carrying around a giant mobile phone and shouting “I'm on the train.” And the strange period when academics wrote whole papers about why people say “I'm on the train.” (the reason is very illuminating, but you can work it out yourself, if you think about it.)

So I wondered if we could use the intimacy, inclusiveness and commitment that text messages offered to somehow “build” public places. After all, public space is one of the things we all share, or choose not to share. Lots of different kinds of people can cross paths in a public space without ever needing to know anything about each other apart from that they all care about the quality of that place, and live some of their lives there. In late 2001 I started work on City Poems, and it opened to public participation on Valentine's Day 2003.

City Poems was a text message biography of the city of Leeds, written by the people who live and work there and delivered from a network of Poem Points at key locations around the city.

The Poem Point locations were chosen to tell the story of the city through its places, and City Poems was a book that people read on their mobile phones, finding new chapters as they walked around the city, and reading them in the place they were written about.

Each of the numbered squares on the map is a Poem Point, including a bar (3), Leeds General infirmary (6), a bus stop (17), an internet cafe in Chapeltown (8), Armley Prison (12) and an old people's day centre (13).

A Poem Point sounds quite technical, but actually it is just a sign on the wall with some instructions on and a key number.

  

Send a text with just the key number in and you'll get a poem back about the place you are in.

For example, Poem Point 3 is a bar, so if you sent '3' as a text you'd get back a poem about being drunk, or hoping to meet someone, or hoping to avoid someone or regretting the night before. 6 is Leeds General Infirmary so there you'd get back a poem about care or grief or something that fits in with the location. If you send the key number again you get another poem.

To get the first poems for City Poems we set up some creative writing workshops at some of the Poem Point locations, run by Peter and Ann Sansom, but after that anyone who wanted to could send in a poem just by texting it to the same mobile phone number and I would guess where it was about and add it to the system.

In 2004 Antwerp in Belgium was the World Book Capital, and Stefan Kolgen and Ann Laenen set up a sister project to City Poems called STADSchromosomen (City Chromosomes), so we twinned Leeds and Antwerp by choosing the same sort of places in Leeds and Antwerp, for example the civic theatre, and in Leeds you could read poems from Antwerp about plays and performance and at the theatre in Antwerp you could read poems from Leeds on the same subject.

 

City Poems was about people making their own sense of shared public spaces by reading and writing while in those spaces - readers might never find out who wrote the poem they read at the bus stop, but they knew that there was some common ground because they shared at least one of the same places.

I was the “editor” of City Poems, I choose the places to be Poem Points, and these Poem Points made a biography that was chosen, at least in part, by me. But that is just one biography of a city, mine, and there are as many biographies of Leeds or any other city as there are people who live there. It's really not for me to say what the important, meaningful places are that people care about. It's for whoever wants to, to make their own choices.

One of the things I've been doing since is trying to make a web site that lets anyone who wants to set up their own version of City Poems, or set up anything else that they want to try out by sending and receiving texts.

My friends from the Ordsall Writers group in Salford have using the latest version of this web site to run what started out as creative writing but quickly became a lot more than that, in a way that could only have happened through using text messages.

 

 

The first step in the process was a creative writing workshop, again run by Peter and Ann Sansom. Peter and Ann are great at engaging with people who aren't confident as writers, and they use creative writing games and exercises that help people to say the thing they need to say. Their approach is perfect for texting, because they give people confidence to talk in their own voice, and Jane Wood, one of the organisers of the Ordsall group, described the workshop as “absolutely brilliant”.

At the workshop, members of the group signed up to a text message mailing list. After that, one of the members of the group, Amber, started logging into the web site each week and using it to send out a question by text message everyone taking part, designed to draw out a fragment of interesting autobiographical writing from each participant, for example “What piece of music always brings back memories?”. The members of the group each text their answers back, and all the responses are collected and published, anonymously, on a web page for the Ordsall Writers, for example:

“Telstar does it for me, the record was made to celebrate the launch of the first telecommunications satellite in 1962 I was on my way to australia as a boy on my first trip to sea I can remember watching the night sky out on the ocean every night for it”

 

 
(one of Amber's jobs is pretending to be a ghost, and she often comes straight from work.)

This page has become a very engaging archive, written collaboratively by the people taking part, and browsing through it is a great introduction to the area and the people who live there, in their own words.  This is very helpful for Ordsall, because the area has a reputation that isn't always positive. One of the questions the group asked themselves by text was "What is the best thing about living here and why?". And after a few weeks, Jane and the other organiser, Mike, incorporated the creative texting into the radio show they present on the local community radio station Salford City Radio.

As well as developing creative writing skills the group noticed how it had increased their sense of wellbeing. The questions give them reason to think and write about meaningful personal memories, and they enjoy the sense that they are doing this at the same time as other members of the group. As one of the group said “I had had a rough day and the message cheered me up”. Jane feels that this is both therapeutic and good community development.

Everyone taking part thinks that there is something unique and valuable about using text messages. Sylvie, one of the members of the group, said that “a question out of the blue makes you be creative on the spur of the moment” and that being able to reply straight away by text made the answers more personal and honest: “it wouldn't be a true thing if you didn't do it straight away, it would be calculated”. Mike felt that being able to text anonymously meant that “in a group, people are mindful of what they are going to say in public, but when it's just you and a phone you can be a bit more open.” This anonymity is different from “social media” web sites like Facebook and Twitter, in which contributions are linked to a personal profile.

Sending the text “is like a message in a bottle”, a rich, intimate experience for the person writing: “it digs things out of your head that you didn't think about”. Being able to go to the web page and find other people's answers makes it a shared event, even though the members of the group didn't know who has submitted each answer: “you would be on your own without the web site”. Jane says she goes to the website straight after every question, and Sylvie discusses the messages with her partner: “I told him the questions and read the answers out, and said 'can you tell which is mine'?” This combination of anonymity and openness contributed to building trust within the group.

When the Ordsall Writers group began using text messages five months ago, there were seven people signed up to take part, but that has risen to 18 through the members of the group introducing the activity to other people. There seem to me to be two reasons why the Ordsall activity has been a success so far. The first is the talent, good humour and initiative of the Ordsall Writers. The second is text messages, and the qualities that are, if anything, even more true than they were for the Guardian’s poetry competition in 2001 - that text messages are welcoming, intimate and that all of us have our mobile phones with us all the time.

The web site that the Ordsall Writers are using works anywhere in the country, and is open to anyone to use, so if you'd like to try it out please do just email me: wilsonandyb @ gmail . com

 

[1] I sometimes get caught out saying “everyone” has got a mobile phone, when there is someone listening who doesn't, and I've thought about whether I should say “most people” instead of everyone.

But in the end I've decided to stick with “everyone”, not because I don't care about who it excludes, but because of everybody it does include. For example, my friend Ann Sansom ran a creative writing workshop in a prison as part of City Poems, and she said that men who would be described as illiterate were able to take part when she told them that they would be writing text messages. If we want to listen to the voices of all the people we share our towns and cities with, text messages are the best way. Those people who don't have a mobile phone (which is a perfectly reasonable choice) are the exception that proves the rule: more than 90% of people in the UK have a mobile, including more than 50% of over 75s.

A Greenfield Site Just North of Walsall

"Countries who move their capitals to smaller cities tend to have more balanced urban systems, and, as a corollary, more even economic development."

"The interaction between the large capital's business and policy communities and the national leaders cause the latter to mistake the good of the city with that of the nation."

"But we may also ask, does a country even need a capital city anymore? With the long term shift away from central authorities like monarchs to pluralistic democratic institutions, multiple branches of government, and decentralisation to provinces and municipalities, there is little reason to retain the conceit of a single, enduring seat of power."

Quotes from here

 

What Are We Trying to Do in Huddersfield?

I've been wondering what we've been trying to do in Huddersfield with events like this, and publications like this.

I think the answer is that we are trying to get rid of any distinction between our government and the place that it's in.

The government - Kirklees council - has to be pulled back into the place that it's in, and the place has to take over its own government again.

What's so interesting about Newsome (an area of Huddersfield) is that it's really hard to see the joins between local activists, council staff and local councillors. They all seem to be doing the same things at the same time.

(If you missed Diane Sims's talk about Newsome Grapevine last night - I was very happy to hear that there is a real grapevine! - then Councillor Andrew Cooper's piece in Any Plan Will Do is a good reference point)

But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have local government. Just the opposite.

Our government needs all the powers necessary to do what we want to do.

Making that happen is a big job, and I'm not sure Hudds has got the muscle, the idealism or the creativity for it any more, but we'll see.

Here's a professor from the LSE saying that reducing the powers of local government in the name of the Big Society isn't localism, it's just more centralisation - though there can't be much left to centralise by now.

Speakers for All Sorts 2 on Wednesday 24th

I'm looking forward to these three talks and they should cross over with each other in quite a productive way as well I think.

 

Dave Naylor
Principles and Practise of Open Source Software

Diane Sims
Newsome Grapevine

Alison Mealey
Art in Collaboration with a Computer

+ Discussion of future events

 

mere details here

All Sorts of Technology and Local Democracy part two
A tea-time discussion (with sandwiches)
5.30pm to 7pm, 24th November
Cafe Ollo, The Media Centre

Was @mattedgar 's #Tedxleeds talk the most wide ranging, coherent, productive thing anybody is saying about northern cities

I'm still finding reflections from it, I know that much.

Matt has very kindly contributed a short piece on Matthew Murray and James Watt Jnr for Any Plan Will Do issue 1, and I'm hoping to arm twist him into something based on any one of a number of ideas from his Leeds talk for a future issue.

 

A Community Activist with Backup

The Neighbourhood Police Inspector I've been working with in Manchester, Damian O’Reilly, won community policeofficer of the year (details here).

If anyone ever deserved an award it's Damian, and the amazing thing about how and why he does his job the way he does it is that he was born, brought up and still lives in the area he is the Inspector of.

How does that change the relationship between the police and the community they serve, in any neighbourhood you can think of?

[Guardian article about what we've been working on here]

Ivy4Evr

I read and took part in Channel 4's story-by-SMS Ivy4Evr the week before last, and had some really nice moments with it.

It was the story of a week in the life of a teenage girl (about 16 and a half I'd guess) told to you by her sending you texts, and asking you to reply to questions both about yourself and to help her out.

I thought the tone of voice for a teenager was spot on and very authentic feeling, the events of the story were very well suited to being told in such an intimate space (though I don't think all stories for a mobile small screen need to be so TV small screen), and the writer(s?) did well at getting across enough information to keep the story moving without breaking the conversational to-and-fro feel of texts.

The first nice moment I had was when Ivy asked me a question to help her out, which was how could she get advice about being pregnant without anyone finding out.

This caught me at a good time, because the dialogue between me and her happened in the evening when it wasn't distracting me from anything else more pressing. And the question is so perfectly in tune with the kind of conversation that would actually happen in the intimate space of texts that it was very easy to accept the suspension of disbelief and start feeling like you are worried about the poor girl at the other end. That was added to for me because I wasn't completely sure I was giving the right advice - there used to be Family Planning Clinics (I think they were called), but do they still exist? And if I suggested her GP, am I sure that GPs don't have a duty to tell the parents of girls under 16?

That sense that I was being asked for advice from someone who needed it, but I might not be giving good advice, really increased the engagement for me - the story was happening inside my head (which is where the real mixed reality is). I also thought it was a fantastic learning device - I was very strongly aware of what I did and didn't know, because someone else was depending on me.

The second telling moment was when the spell broke.

Ivy asked me whether my parents were together and I said no because my dad was dead. I was in a bit of a rush so I said it in so many words.

Ivy's response was "Hi, Mines been divorced for ages. Can I tell you something."

From a storytelling point of view, that response didn't work. I didn't mention my dad to get sympathy, just as a matter of fact, but that reply didn't quite sound like even a 16 year old would respond to that information. If nothing else, why say "Hi", we'd been talking to each other for 3 days. "Oh. sorry." or "Oh :-(" would have been much better.

Up till that point I'd thought that Ivy was probably being orchestrated by humans, maybe through some sort of menu of customisable standard replies at each stage, but then i wondered if she was a chat bot and the writers/programmers just hadn't anticipated my answer.

One or two things I picked up on twitter though suggested that Ivy wasn't a bot, so then I wondered if the orchestration was being done by work experience people, straight out of art or media school, and they hadn't had the artistic maturity to script anything better on the fly. That's not meant as a criticism, I'm not sure I would have done at 22.

Both of those two reasons are just formal or technical questions which didn't bother me, but something else came to mind later which is a bit trickier. I wondered if the AI or the orchestrators had been told to change the subject straight away if any of the readers started to try and talk about their own problems.

I can see why that would be the policy, because there would be a danger of getting into long conversations that the AI or the work experience people just weren't qualified to deal with and couldn't really help with. But it does feel like a different kind of expectation has been raised than a TV programme about an issue with a helpline number at the end. If you are going to use the intimacy of a channel of conversation like SMS, and kid on to perhaps vulnerable teenagers that they are talking to a real person who asks them to help solve her problems, what is the right thing to do if those perhaps vulnerable teenagers then ask that real person to listen to their problems in return?

This is particularly true of Ivy4Evr because Ivy was NEET (Not in Education, Emplyment or Training). I wondered if Ivy4Evr had been designed specifically to try and to reach NEET teenagers through the only two-way media channel they would have consistent access to, their mobile phone. I thought that was admirable (at least for The Broadcast Media) and inventive, but it would mean the readership would be more likely than the usual to be going through a tough time, and I think there would be some responsibility to put a mechanism in place for engaging with them genuinely if they wanted to.

The last nice moment was the very final message.

Ivy had been hiding from a "squaddie type" who was trying to find her (my advice had been to lie on the floor until he stopped knocking on the door, which may not have been the most grown up) and then the messages stopped for the day.

The next message was from a friend she'd mentioned a lot, a lad called Adz, saying that he didn't know where she was. The change of voice was very immediate and effective in a text, and I interpreted it as him texting her friends from her phone.

We all feel in our bones that not-got-their-mobile can't be a good thing, so it made a great cliffhanger.

I wouldn't want to be too gushing about Ivy4Evr, because we did a story told by a character sending you texts, and asking you to reply to questions both about yourself and to help them out, in Huddersfield two years ago, and I don't think that was the first either.

But I did think Ivy4Evr was expertly handled and had some things to learn from.

My only other word of caution would be that I had a real interest in staying engaged and I just wouldn't know how much it worked for someone starting with no more, or less, commitment than they would bring to any other channel for storytelling.

Barnet 'easyCouncil' spending to save?

Barnet council are on the front page of the Guardian today because so far their efforts to find new ways to provide public services have cost more than they've saved.

Regardless of what you think of Barnet's methods or motives, trying to do new things in new ways is bound to cost something at the start. It might not be money, but it will be time, effort, imagination, care, committment and courage.

If it doesn't, it would be easy and everyone would be doing it, wouldn't they? And then it wouldn't  be innovation, would it?

The Gaurdian story - in that spot across the bottom of the front page that is reserved for stuff that isn't news - is a good example of self-serving "ooh look we made a headline" reporting that makes it harder for other organisations, whose methods and motives that Guardian might be more in sympathy with, to try and do new things in new ways. But then that's The Broadcast Media for you.

But, in the kind ofhappy coincidence that seems to follow my meetings with him around, I happened to hear Sam Markey (@sammarkey), who works for Barnet council, give a very insightful and entertaining talk yesterday about the process they are trying to go through in Barnet and why, and I was going to post my brief notes from it any way, so here they are:

 

Barnet has 300 000 people, which was a bit of an eye opener for me, it's bigger than Manchester.

A slide about the huge amount of money - it looked like it was into billions, but I may have got that wrong - when all public spending in Barnet is pooled. Surely there must be some space to do things in new ways with all that money that are both better and cheaper.

A slide and some figures about the amount of landfill waste that Barnet produces and how it is growing. How can that be changed?

Asking themselves"how do we change behaviour, save money and increase satisfaction?"

Making clear through web visualisations and so on what the needs in the borough are is the first step to establishing partnerships between the council and citizens to provide solutions.

[I have a nice piece from Alan Williams of United Response about needs and assets in the first issue of Any Plan Will Do, but you'll have to buy a copy for  that, 50p, no online edition.]

What savings can be made by pooling all public sector spending and what is the democratic oversight of that?

A very telling observation I thought about  "democractic distance" - the distance between council services and the public is one step - you vote for a councillor, they decide. The distance to the local  health authority is umpteen steps - you vote for an mp who may then sit on a committee to oversee the authority. This struck me as similar to the Localopolis arguement for one unified structure for local decision making - you vote for  a council that is in charge of everything.

Barnet are “prototyping new examples of how to provide services”.

The use of the word prototyping rather than pilots makes a difference because:
*it's better branding - "public sector pilots" have a negative connotations
*they are qualitatively different – prototyping is an iterative process in which the end point isn't known

Local authorities need courage to try new things.

And in the discussion afterwards including the audience and other speakers, it came out that the government's localism drive is being directed from the centre by the Cabinet Office and that a set of shadow targets and are being drawn up which local authorities will be expected to meet. So so much for localism.

 

This post is one in an ongoing series in which people who used to read this blog for short fun posts about Monsters and invisible sprites who lived in mobile phones wonder what the f**k has happened. But Monsters will be back, probably in March 2011.