Hello Digital are accepting applications by Wednesday for £500 towards organising a 'fringe' event.

 

Quite simply, I've had a few people ask "when's the next hack day?", so why don't we do one in October and use the money from Hello Digital to pay for the first year's hosting charges, which is currently $80 / month (I know it's high, but I'm covering it at the moment).

 

Please amend/edit as you see fit:

 

Hello Digital Fringe Events Submission

 

Hello Digital is looking for digital-related events, particularly this October, and you can get up to £500 in support of your event to become part of Hello Digital Fringe. Hello Digital - the Midlands’ largest digital media festival combines an annual industry conference with a showcase that encourages and enables the widest possible audience to engage with digital content and technologies.

 

Hello Digital's 2009 conference on 21st October will be strongly aligned to the Digital Britain agenda focusing on the opportunities and challenges this brings around digital adoption, skills and use. The conference will also help springboard a year round public participatory programme through workshops and events along with fringe activities throughout October.

This is a great chance to raise your event’s profile by being part of the Hello Digital brand and be associated with the cream of the digital world. The deadlines for submissions are on Wednesday, September 30 and Tuesday, October 13. But before you apply, please check the Submission Guidelines first.

 

Submission Guidelines

 

Is your event Hello Digital Fringe 2009 material? Successful applications will be assessed by the panel against the criteria questions defined below: 

 

- Do you have an event taking place in Birmingham particularly during October 2009?

- How will it reflect Hello Digital’s aims and core themes?

- Does it involve new digital technologies or new ways of thinking?

- Is it digitally inclusive i.e. will it reach out to Hello Digital’s public participatory programme’s target audience?

Young People aged 8-19

Senior Citizens 55+

Creative Producers and Artists

Bringing Communities together

- Have you organised an event before?

- How do you plan to publicise your event to make it accessible to the widest range of people? 

About Hello Digital

 

Hello Digital aims to:

Ensure that Birmingham and the West Midlands are widely recognised as being at the heart of digital media

Ensure that all the people of Birmingham and the West Midlands have the opportunity to engage practically with digital media in all its variety

Provide opportunities for innovation and creativity through digital media

Develop skills and encourage people to prosper through the innovative use of the opportunities made possible with digital media

Provide opportunities to learn through digital media

 

Hello Digital’s three core themes are:

Access – for all through and with digital media, to empower the widest and most diverse range of audiences, users and content providers

Creativity – to stimulate, support and showcase original digital content, especially though networking, sharing and mutual learning

Enterprise – to develop skills and confidence, empowering people to be media literate to make the most of the opportunities presented by digital media

 

Questions? Contact Mars Elkins, Project Manager, via e-mail - mars.elkins@birmingham.gov.uk.

Hello Digital Fringe Events Application

 

Event Title: BCC DIY Hack Day 2

 

Event Time and Date: We will work around your timetable for the month to ensure it does not clash with other events so we can guarantee attendance of key people. Preferably a Friday in October from 9am until 8pm.

 

Event Venue: Moseley Exchange

 

Details of event:

BCC DIY Hack Day 2 is the sequel to the BCC DIY Hack Day held Friday 25th September.

It is a collaborative project to rethink, redesign and rebuild the Birmingham City Council website following its highly publicised and debated relaunch this month. It is a positive project aimed at thinking about how local government services should best be accessed via the web, asking simple questions about what we want from our council when we use its website, and coming up with innovative and surprising solutions to those problems through crowd-sourcing, mashups, APIs, and open source, collaborative ‘open innovation’ (and any other Web 2.0 jargon you might care to use). However - this is simplified down into simple offerings for a target audience of every citizen of Birmingham, so the end result are simple tools that are easy to understand: Get a text message telling you when it’s recycling day for the bins; type in your postcode and get a list of local services, contacts, your MPs phone number, local planning applications near your house and so on.

In just 1 week from start to finish, BCC DIY produced a fully-functioning website that implemented many of the missing features from the new, high budget website and is a testament to the power of online communities to self-organise in a positive constructive way.

On the final day we held a “hack day” where 50 people worked collaboratively, alongside a further 100 online to produce the website we have today.

The ideas that we came up with that have not yet been implemented are nothing short of revolutionary for the way that council websites could and should work.

BCC DIY Hack Day 2 will take the baton on and explore and implement some of those ideas, as well as bringing in a wider group of citizens to test both sites in a “mass user-testing session”, the results of which we would make freely available online for Birmingham and other councils to view.

So far, what we did on the hack day has reached as far north as Newcastle, where they’re taking some of our ideas and using them in their new council website build, to the UK parliament where there’s some excitement about this project, and overseas awareness of what we’re doing in Birmingham means comparisons are being made between us and Philadelphia, Texas, Barcelona in conversations with people in those cities.

As far as we can tell - no one has done this before, and we want to try it again. Timing it to co-incide with Hello Digital would be perfect and really tells the story about what digital innovation in this city really looks like.

 

How does your event comply with the criteria?

The City is attempting to simplify and make more efficient its services in a drive to cut costs over the coming years. However, with their new website, despite the budget, they are actively _not_ seeking users to test their services, because it would be a “waste of time”.

We flip their entire process on its head and want to seek opinions from a wide cross-section of Birmingham’s population.

We’d be doing interviews with the citizens of the city, which means we’d be interested in talking to those groups you are targeting.

What more basic point of Access will we have other than paying for our Council Tax online, or reporting a broken lamp-post via the web, especially with the drive to save costs. But what happens if they don’t test it? It won’t work for us - we want to solve that problem.

Creativity is built into this project, as is Enterprise. As a community we have seen a gap where something needs to be done and within a space of a week rapidly plugged it. That’s the spirit of Creative Enterprise and we’d like to showcase it.

What’s more - people who come along to the event will have the opportunity to learn new techniques and skills as a result. The feedback from the first event was that many people were going away having learnt a great deal, particularly those who weren’t as web-savvy as others.

 

Budget Breakdown: The event will be zero-sum in terms of costs, with all of the speakers, designers, programmers, testers, laptops, venue, internet, refreshments etc. being donated by the respective parties.

The £500 that is available as a budget towards the event’s costs would be put directly into hosting charges for the BCCDIY.com web hosting, which is currently $80/month.

This would enable the project time to reach self-sustainability through a number of revenue streams we are experimenting with (paid-for SMS updates is one example).

 

Anticipated Audiences and Numbers:

We expect to bring 80 people to the event, with the real-time audience being web-based, around the low hundreds mark.

Ongoing, and through Twitter/blogs/video hosting, we would hope to reach several thousand opinion formers.

The day will be entirely open to anyone who wishes to attend - members of the public will be particularly welcome.

 

About the organiser(s):

Stef Lewandowski, http://steflewandowski.com/biography is organising the event as a personal project, with support from many of Birmingham’s social media ‘usual suspects’.

Stef is a current Clore Fellow researching cultural leadership, and is an entrepreneur involved in a number of innovative digital media projects in the city: Help Me Investigate and Odadeo to name two. In 2008 he won a Webby, and in 2009 he was named as the number 2 ‘one to watch’ in the Observer’s Future 500.

Stef regularly speaks in public at digital media events, has run events for a number of years through his record label Type and successfully organised the first hack day with 3 days to plan it. The collaborators we’d expect to be part of the second hack day also have experience of running and organising several events of this kind.

We do this kind of thing all the time. It’s impromptu, a little rough round the edges, and the DIY ethos is about anyone being able to take control, contribute and organise, so who knows who’ll actually be involved on the day.

Facilities on the day will be provided by Moseley Exchange who cover health and safety, insurance, security, and will be providing an IT support person and a Host on the day.

Please tick your status

Sole trader / Freelance                x

Private / Limited Company            □

(If you ticked Private / Limited Company, we would like to know your current Equal Opportunities Policy)

Charity                        □

Other                        □

(If you ticked Other, please state your status here ________________________________ )

Are you VAT registered?            □ Yes        x No

 

References:

Dave Harte, Digital Birmingham

Suzie Norton, Screen West Midlands

Organiser / Event producer:

Stef Lewandowski, BCCDIY

 

Contact details:

 

Address:

149-153 Alcester Road

Moseley

Birmingham

B13 8JP

 

Email address: stef@stef.io

 

Contact number: 07887 646046

 

 

The next steps

 

Proposals are reviewed by the Hello Digital Fringe Events panel consisting of representatives from Digital Birmingham, 4iP, Screen West Midlands, Arts Council England and Birmingham City Council to ensure a mix of projects, which delivers well against the Hello Digital objectives. Whilst the panel will not exclude projects that are targeted at a particular audience, they will prioritise fringe events that will be open to the general public.

 

A response will be made in no more than five days of receipt of your proposal on Wednesday, September 30 and Tuesday, October 13.

 

The panel approves the application and successful applicants are contacted to inform them of branding guidelines and as this is a contracted process, a contract will be drawn up and signed by the event organiser and Birmingham City Council.