My colleague at Citilab, Chris Pinchen, was beaming after his intense days in Birmingham. There he attended an event sponsored by Digital Birmingham "Developing Digital Birmingham District". He presented Citilab as a possible component of a wider urban innovation strategy.
He poured on me a lot of impressions. He was radiating good vibes. Got very positive appreciation from the people that attended the conference (follow their conversations and QA on Twitter here and here) and explained me about how to reinforce some initial cooperation we are starting as well as many others that he was able to initiate while there. Then we started to review his presentation on SlideShare. It has a lot of humour. Specially about current (mis?)conceptions abroad on the relationship between Barcelona and innovation. Then I saw this slide:
which, Chris told me, started a round of applause among the attendants.
Which is understandable. There is a strong Birmingham civic activism that is led by tech-savvy citizens I'll comment sometime in the future about several initiatives in Birmingham that illustrate perfectly well how and in which imaginative ways a critical mass of "geek citizens" can make a difference to the city's present and future.
In other words, I think some Birmingham examples will help me show some possible pathways to citizen-led innovation that couldn't happen at all without their knowledge of the digital culture. It might also be that they took these steps because they thought as digital design thinkers, not just as digital wizards (which some of them definitely are!). This is what Citilab is all about: letting people innovate in whatever sphere they want by using the strategies, practices and tools of the digital world.
In a way, it is a matter of turning citizens into geeks, too.
And this parallelism is what we will explore further during UrbanLabs09. Don't forget that the motto for Urbanlabs (a contribution of one of its founders, Enric Senabre) is:
"Technocitizenship" (geeks with civic conscience and citizens with digital abilities)
and
"Socioinnovation" (let technocitizens invent their collective future).
