fizzPOP is for people who like to tinker, whether that’s with electronics, code (maybe there’s some crossover with HydraHack there), motors, gaffer tape or whatever. It’s about trying things out and making things and is the nearest Birmingham has to a Hackerspace.
It’s been on a bit of a hiatus recently but there’s a get-together on Wednesday from 7pm in The Boardroom at Bennetts Wine Bar.
Thank soddery for that. It’d be one hell of a shame if Birmingham couldn’t support something like this, especially with all the talk of how well we do ‘digital’ here. Now can someone please offer them some permanent space?
I wanted to do a round-up of this year’s degree shows but I’ve been a bit busy and the job of pulling everything together is looking a bit daunting (sorry if you’ve emailed me stuff).
It’s a bit late in the day now but I reckon it should still be done. If you could help out that would be great.
If you know of or are involved in any shows that are happening, please leave a comment with as much of the following as possible:
a talent pool of graduates from the BA (Hons) Visual Communication course at BIAD, BCU. Our Visual Communication graduates span Graphic Communication, Illustration, Photography and Moving Image
Today, every so often, I’m going to grab a smattering of tweets and pull them into the timeline below. If you refresh this page every so often you’ll see what’s been added. Or you can see it on the Storify site.
There’s a bigger point to be made behind this. It’s kinda obvious but I might write it up sooner or later.
And it’s not just that I couldn’t think what to write about today (although that too).
Our creative and cultural industries – media, arts, online, music – are collectively bigger than construction in this city (that’s a great fact we used in the bid team and final pitch).
Incredibly, there is no-one to speak for us on the Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) – almost as incredible as the lack of female members but we warned you about this male, pale and stale phase creeping up on ya me old hearties.
A lucrative and dynamic sector that is developing in markets across the world will remain uncharted waters as far as local strategic development is concerned.
The Guardian have been doing a series of summer city guides and they asked us to write about some of the stuff happening in Birmingham over the next few months. Ian and I duly obliged.
cease trading as a retail operation and are now investigating ways to move the organisation towards a new model, offering valuable exhibition space and meeting rooms at it’s city centre location, whilst still working to support the local creative community
So it’s not closing yet, it’s just not going to be a shop anymore. No doubt there’ll be more to come on what the new model will look like but in the meantime I’d like to congratulate everyone involved for what they’ve managed to pull off over the past eight months and wish them all the best for the next phase.
I’ve been meaning to write something up about all those guest posts that we had on CiB throughout March.
I thought it went very well. Alex was organising all of that so I had no real idea of what was going to go up on the site each day. By and large I was pretty darn impressed with what we got.
If you missed the series, here’s what we had in date order:
The thing that interested me most about going back through these is the format most people adopted. Most people went for the long-form, text-centric article, with only William Fallows doing something a little different. Also, most posts were illustrated with photos but nobody embedded any video or music – even the folks talking exclusively about music.
I’m not going to pick favourites, but I was particularly interested by the posts from William Fallows, Laura Katriina Pollard and Miriam Rowe – in the case of the latter two it was because they introduced me to some things I wasn’t aware of, which is what I’d like to think CiB is all about. I thought it was interesting how Rich Batsford canvassed a wider spread of opinion for his too.
The reason I’ve always shied away from encouraging guest posts is that I think it’s healthier if people write on their own sites and build up their own archives and audiences. I’d like to think that, if I was aware of people writing the kind of thing they submitted on their own blogs, I’d have linked to them from here anyway, sending them readers who might explore their websites etc and so on.
Incidentally, of the people who answered our initial call out, we accepted pretty much everyone who had a reasonably definite idea of something to write about.
So, thanks to all our guest posters. We might do this again sometime.
Following on from Alex’s post about Ikon Eastside closing, let me pile on the joy by presenting a few other things that aren’t going to be around so much.
I intend to discover the new in the city, but at a more leisurely pace and in more depth
Which doesn’t sound all that bad really.
The Yam Yam
However, The Yam Yam, a Walsall-based aggregator of local news, is shutting up shop completely. Here’s a fuller explanation of what that’s all about. I was aware of the site but, not living in Walsall, had no particular reason for following it very closely – the number and content of the comments tell you how much the site was appreciated though.
Next?
In a few weeks time we’re going to hear about which of the established arts organisations and council services aren’t going to be supported any more. That’s not going to be pleasant. There’ll still be plenty of good stuff for us to write about on CiB, and plenty of individuals doing good things, but we won’t know what we’re missing.
On the web side of things, it’s worth remembering that most of the genuinely interesting websites around are actually quite fragile things and, if they’re run for personal enjoyment, it’s probably best not to assume they’ll be around forever either. See also Jon Bounds’ comments last month when the harmless bit of fun that was Brummie of the Year turned nasty on BiNS:
I’ll continue to ruminate as to whether the site does its job or is best closed.
On the other hand, I’m all for a bit of a shake-up, some new voices and some new ways of doing things. We’ll see how things pan out over the next little while.
I’ve been invited to meet Jeremy Hunt MP (or The Secretary of State for Culture, the Olympics, Media and Sport, the Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP to give him his full name) later today. The email said:
The meeting will give the Secretary of State the opportunity to discuss his plans for local TV with you, as well as Government’s wider media priorities including the roll out of high speed Broadband, the Creative Industries and the forthcoming Communications Bill.
The Minister will be interested in your views on how Government’s programme will impact on Birmingham and the West Midlands specifically, as well as on the county as a whole.
From a quick search on Twitter it looks like Will Perrin, Julia Higginbottom and Jon Bounds have been invited too. I’ve no idea who else will be going.
This weekend I was at Culture Hack Day, where teams of developers came together to create things using data from cultural organisations (it had nothing to do with breaking into computers and nicking personal info – that’s different).
There were a fair few people from Birmingham who went along and they had access to a week’s worth of West Midlands listings data provided by Global Data Point, which Marketing Birmingham had a hand in arranging, so here’s a list of the kind of things they made.
And finally he was involved in Filmflexicon which cross-references on-demand films and rating from Rotten Tomatoes
The full list of hacks, which included a service that uses Foursquare check-ins to work out when galleries and museums are at their busiest and Subvertle – a framework for playing with iPlayer subtitles, should be on the Culture Hack Day website later.
On the Saturday there were some talks too. If you’re interested in what all that was about then I’ve written up quite a few notes on the Meshed Media website.
(* yes, so it should have been Culture Hack Weekend)
And when I say a minute, I mean a minute. It’s mainly checkboxes.
I’m interested in finding out which websites/online services people use to find out about what’s going on around Birmingham. Which listings websites people use and how they keep up to date with what’s going on – that sort of thing.
I had no idea what it meant or where it had come from, so I had a little look around. The Cultural Learning Alliance came up with the goods:
Since 2006, strategic partners in Birmingham have been working together to develop A Creative Future, a strategy for children and young people (0-19 years) and the arts. The aim of the strategy is to increase access to the arts, raise the quality of arts activities and recognise the achievements of children and young people in the arts.
‘Strategic partners’ isn’t expanded upon, but Birmingham City Council seem to be leading on things and the pic on the CLA’s website is attributed to Craftspace.
To explain the diagram above:
The Birmingham model for cultural entitlement illustrates how the Creative Future roles overlap (see Venn diagram). The vertical axis shows how we would like to see young people progress through from first-time experiences to independent engagement, and on the horizontal axis how they develop skills and understanding from basic to advanced
I also found an interview with Val Birchall, head of BCC Arts Team, about one of the projects that came as a result of the strategy.
I went to a meeting earlier that was broadly to do with how arts organisations can share resources and collaborate. One of the case studies looked at how sampad and mac work together in various ways.
One of the things from their presentation that set pens scribbling was the idea of shared office space, the benefits that have come as a result and the plans to develop it a bit more.
Sounds like a good idea to me. I share an office with Substrakt (actually, it’s their office) and Podnosh and there’s a steady turnover of various freelancers who have come and gone over the past couple of years including Kate Beatty, Chris Bates and Pete Ashton. Currently we have Caroline Beavon and Daniel Davies in here. It’s been really useful to share space with film makers, photographers, web developers, designers and others.
So yes, good idea.
A couple of options
If you’ve got a spare desk and you like the idea of making that available to someone (for free or not) then:
List it on DesksNear.Me, a lovely new service that’s been set up for just this sort of thing. There’s nowhere listed in the Birmingham area yet
Put it on Jobplot. Get a profile on the site (it’s free) then add your available desk space to the Opportunities board
DesksNear.Me is open to everyone, Jobplot is aimed at creative companies and individuals.
Other options
There are of course plenty of places where you can rent desk/office space around the city (cow-orking spaces, serviced offices, etc) and a few others where, for the price of a few coffees, you can get all the wifi you can eat.
