Created in Birmingham

Downsizing the new Birmingham library. Interesting report by Paul Dale in the Post fron the city council scrutiny group on the central library’s new site next to the Rep. Starts thus:

Birmingham’s £193 million new library will have half the space for exhibitions first envisaged, may have fewer books on offer than at present and will almost certainly be run at reduced staffing levels, it emerged last night.

Members of a city council scrutiny group set up to examine the business case for the merged library and Rep theatre in Centenary Square remained unconvinced that what was being proposed would be an improvement on the Central Library in Paradise Forum.

and continues…

One for the built environment buffs – Revealing the Town Hall is a talk given by Anthony Peers at, yes, the Town Hall this Saturday Sunday afternoon. “Anthony has been researching the history of the building for close to a decade and was involved in the planning of the recently completed scheme of repairs and improvements.” News comes via Chris at About Brum who also provides the lovely panoramic photo I nabbed for this post. Click on it for the massive version.

Joanna Geary had a follow-up chat with Michael Woolf after he expressed interest in helping Birmingham improve it’s image after the Plus+ festival. He suggests we ask this question:

If Birmingham was a person, or a family, what would it be like? If it was a verb, what would happen if you Birmingham-ed?

Personally that sounds a little corny to my cynical brain but what the hell, she’s soliciting suggestions in the comments of her blog. Do your worst!

A brief update to the Margaret Street closure blogged about here in April. A comment left on that post from BIAD Fine Art course director John Wigley implies it won’t go ahead quite as planned. If I may quote:

To reassure everybody and to end speculation, at present, as far as we are concerned working in the building, they are not going to sell the Margaret Street site. Certainly it has been a marketing and publicity blunder of spectacular proportions, seemingly unaware of how strong the voice would be in protest, and how much the building is valued as a purpose built centre of creative practice. It would seem, however, that sense has prevailed.

Yay!

Birmingham studios face uncertain future. Grimley of The Post gives a great overview of the Artists Studios issue spotlighting some success stories and comparing the Birmingham situation with other cities. Well worth a read and if I wasn’t on holiday (did I mention that?) I’d go through and find links for all the people. If you fancy a bit of Google-time feel free to do so on your own blog or send them to me.

Actually, Nikki Pugh has run with some of the themes raised by Grimley and quotes somebody who apparently commented here. First I’d heard of it but I like the sentiment: “Birmingham will get a reputation as a vibrant, creative, international city when it becomes a vibrant, creative, international city.”

The big drama school thing in Eastside has been officially announced. Here’s some coverage:

Government News Network
BBC News
Education Guardian
The Stirrer
The Post will presumably have something later next week, as is their way.

Well, no sooner had I said goodbye to all that than I get a phone call from Marketing Birmingham at the airport. Suffice to say the phone is now off but this one’s worth posting immediately.

(That and I’m stuck in Osaka airport with free wifi for the next five hours…)

The Visit Birmingham website, which should be the first port of call for anyone planning to come here, is having a massive overhaul in the new year and local web companies are invited to bid for the tender. Or something.

Agencies are asked to register their interest and complete a pre-qualification questionnaire by 5pm Monday 17 December by post to Lisa Smith, On-line Campaign Manager. Invitation information is obtainable from lisa.smith@marketingbirmingham.com or telephone 0121 202 5115.

I’ve had a look through the material and there’s a reasonable emphasis on Web 2.0 stuff which boils down the following:

In the proposal please consider how Marketing Birmingham should apply Web 2.0 technologies, platforms and applications to their brand visitbirmingham.com on-line?
• Blogs
• Vlogs
• Social networks / communities
• User Generated Content (UGC)
• Wikis
• Podcasts
• Online video
• RSS
• Tagging
• Mash-ups and Open API’s
• AJAX (Asynchronous Java and XML)

While this is very welcome to see, how it’s implemented is going to be crucial. Do you “apply” blogs by having them or by providing adequate information for bloggers to use? Or both? By Social Networks do you mean developing on in house (NO!) or integrating effectively with Facebook, etc? With UGC (a horrible term but pretty defacto now) why should people submit their own work to your site? What kind of ownership are you giving them? Is RSS just going to be a token offering or will it be taylored? Open APIs are a fantastic thing to see but what exactly does Mashup mean?

Whatever, I’m just the messenger here but this could be something really excellent if only the right company gets the job. So if you’re the right company get in touch with them right away.

But please, let it be someone who understands the social aspects of such a site and not just the techincal bits. And, above all, not some Web 2.Oaf.

Some follow-up to the Creative Director notion blogged about on Sunday:

• Stef Lewandowski asks What Is Birmingham’s Creative Direction? putting the development of the city into the framework of a project.
• Paul Groves says Birmingham’s creativity can’t be stifled by politics.
• There are also some interesting comments after Joanna Geary’s post on the subject.

The Post follows up the story about Curzon Street Station being boarded up which I blogged about last Monday adding a bunch of research and quotes from persons involved.

The mighty D’log went to the Creativity and Creative Sectors, Clusters and Networks event at the Birmingham University Business School on Friday and wrote up his notes and impressions in three posts (one, two, three). A lot of it went over my poor head but a few things jumped out and raised an eyebrow.

When a senior consultant and researcher was looking for statistics at a regional level, he found it’s “unbelievably confusing when working at a regional level” … “it’s a mess”. On national statistics about the creative industries, the research is still very poorly done but “the DCMS is still spraying this information all over the place” while being fully aware that the data is misleading or plain wrong. The data is “incoherent … we are building a policy that is completely unreliable”. *

There will be a second follow-on event, “Creativity and the City: sector, cluster or network?” in Birmingham on 4th April 08.

The big one, however, is this.

The city is considering appointing a “Creative Director” for Birmingham. A “Creative Village” area might be designated and signed by 2010; that may be either Moseley or the Jewellery Quarter, or possibly Digbeth. *

Geary of The Post has some questions and speculation about the Director thing and how this ties in with Michael Woolf’s calls for something similar.

Meanwhile this Villiage notion is intriguing. While the Jewellery Quarter and Digbeth have the Big Peg and Custard Factory complexes anchoring a creative industry Moseley does seem more “village-y”. Ironically, however, most of the Moseley creative scene seems to live in Kings Heath these days because it’s cheaper…

The next flash mob organised by Brumob is a “BANG” on December 5th at 2pm. Here are the instructions:

1) Gather at the location (to be revealed closer to the time) just before 2pm in a loose crowd.
2) At 2pm two members of the Brumob team will walk into the centre of the location and draw their fingers on each other.
3) In response pull you fingers on each other until a huge standoff is created. PLEASE NOTE: THERE WILL BE NO WHISTLE FOR THIS ONE!
4) As the tension builds one of the original two will “shoot” the other shouting “BANG!”
5) This is your cue, let the shootout commence!
6) When you’re shot fall to the ground, the more gruesome and exaggerated the death the better. We all know that pretending to die is half the fun, and if people get too competitive this could go on for a VERY long time.
7) Stay on the floor (or slumped up against the phone box you clawed a while taking your final few breaths in this world) until everyone else is dead/gone.
8) If you find your self the sole survivor either tern your fingers on yourself or leave jubilantly (Brumob team suggest that skipping a little would add to the over all effect).
9) At this point disperse quickly and calmly in different directions.

If all goes to plan it should look a little like this:

or this:

I just home the police armed response teams aren’t out in force that day. Keep tabs on the Brumob site for final location details.

via somebody, I forget who.

The events listings site What’s On In Brum has had an overhaul so I had a quick look. The listings are pretty normal, allowing you to search by day and type and to see what’s happening right now across a range of areas. The Venue Guide is pretty slick, giving you an aggregation based on information put in by promoters along with a Google Map. It’s nice to see some Facebook integration although it only adds links to the site on your profile rather than events to your calendar. A bit more work needed there but it’s a start. Hopefully adoption of the iCalendar data exchange standard (meaning you can add info to your own calendar with one click) is in the offing. THSH and Facebook themselves offer this and once you start using it it’s very useful.

No RSS. At all. C’mon, this is 2007 people. Gimme a custom feed based on search terms please!

A really nice feature is the Flyer Wall which runs down the side of each page. Hovering over the listings shows you a flyer and clicking through lets you effectively download it for your own use. I can see this being very useful for my own gig listings blog and anything that enables people to share the knowledge is a good thing.

There’s no indication who’s behind this other than the fact that promoters who have a TheTicketSellers.co.uk account can sign in with the same details implying there’s some cross-ownership here. This might not seem a big deal for a consumer-facing site but if they want to build up relationships with the wide range of promoters in the city then answering the “who the hell are you?” question would be a good idea. Needless to say I think some kind of blog would be good for this.

On the whole the site, while not that revolutionary, looks much better and appears to work well. What concerns me though isn’t particularly specific to What’s On In Brum but to the whole events listings industry where the onus is on the promoter to input the same information into numerous sites. Given the iCalendar standard is pretty well established it should be easy to have promoters put their information in one place and have the sites subscribe to it ala RSS? Or am I living in a tech utopia?

Audiences Central have announced a new membership scheme starting in April. I’m not sure exactly what that means or entails but I figure it’s worth pointing to for those that do.

I’s slightly torn on how to report the news that The BBC Big Screen in Victoria Square has been turned off “due to technicalities in the planning process” with a review to take place in the new year. On the one hand the screen does show a fair amount of local film and animation work and is available for festivals and the like in the city. But on the other hand I’m vehemently opposed to the whole concept of public televisions believing them to be pernicious contributors to the levels of mental polution in our built environments and nothing is going to change my stance on this. The Big Screen should go.

In my opinion.

via Upyerbrum

Interesting bit of news passed my way today. Bear in mind the usual disclaimers of hearsay and gossip but I have it on damn good authority that Curzon St Station is to be boarded up and not used for any events until it’s permanent future is decided, something that could take a number of years.

The Station, a glorious piece of monolithic railway architecture first opened in 1838 and a monument to Birmingham’s industrial history, has lain dormant for years. Recently it’s become something of a venue du jour for local arts organisations housing events run by Fierce, 7 Inch Cinema, Capsule, Rhubarb Rhubarb (who made a big noise about the venue for their international featival this year) and many more including a number of graduate shows. (A quick search on this blog will give you a snapshot of some of the things that took place there this year.)

But as of some time early next year all this will stop. It’s been decided by someone at Council level that it’s cheaper to essentially shut the building down than to let it be used by arts groups or anyone wanting to do something interesting with the space. From a purely balance sheet perspective this may well be right but it does rather stink of an ignorance of what’s been going on there these last 12 months. And not just from an arts venue perspective – having the building opened in its current state has been fascinating for any residents interested in Birmingham’s history not to mention all the train nerds.

Very disappointing.

Top panorama by Futurilla. Other photos taken by me during the Rhubarb-Rhubarb photography festival.