Yesterday Dave Harte gave an excellent opening keybote speech at Urbanlabs09. Here you have it on SlideShare. He explained at length the different dimensions along which Birmingham has evolved as a Digital City.
It is difficult to summarize all the aspects he talked about. However, I think he very clearly showed that for him (and not only form him!) a Digital City is not just a city that uses digital technology for accessing and distributing information. A Digital City, as the different examples from Birmingham that Dave gave showed us, is a city where technology is also an opportunity for citizens to cooperate together and innovate in different spheres of civic activity. Possibly, the most spectacular example he gave was the hacking of the City Council website by a group of citizens that got together and set up a different website with all the services and information they really wanted ("BCC DIY").
He also showed how behind this type of initiatives there is a concept of innovation that is open. Not only it is open in terms of access to public data but also in the final goal and expected results and evolution of the innovation process itself. That is, it is an open-ended process that helps in learning new things, innovate and how this has social and economic impact.
He identified several key aspects to develop this type of initiatives:
This made me think on another conference by Ethan Zuckermann that I got to know (thru Ismael López Peña) about the key factors to trigger social innovation projects from and around technology. This connection made me think about where do we stand here as current state and possibilities for social innovation and what we can do here. And by "here" I think on the community that is physically close to Citilab but I think I could extend this consideration to Spain.1. The interest of citizens to get together and discuss
2. A culture of civic engagement and a culture of contributors
3. There should be public data available and a will from individual citizens to share their own data (he showed what he did with his own home energy data or his jogging data)
4. Some big trigger that sparks the reaction of citizens (in the case of Birmingham the cost of the City Council website was identified as such: 2,8 Milion Pounds were thought too expensive and started the whole hacking project)
I could elaborate on the relationship between both types of "key factors" about social innovation. I will try to go through all f them in the future.
For today I'll just mention that, in my view, one of the main differences between Birmingham and our closest environment is not just how different the proportion of citizens with technological knowledge is but specially the different attitudes in terms of "contributor culture".
I think that the former (extent of digital knowledge) is correlated with the latter (contributor culture). So, to be successful in spreading digital social innovation here, and if Zuckermann is right, one urgent task for Citilab is to understand very clearly which are them main traits of local culture here. Having this this in mind we have to devise better ways to contact with the leading citizen contributors and how to adapt our digital culture programmes to their context. We are putting a lot of effort to get to know better (through ethnographies, workshops and other means) and we are rethinking our current formats. As a next step I'd love to see citizens codesigning Citilab activities.
