David Barrie

Memories of doing time, courtesy of President Charles Taylor

Over at Channel 4 News' website, foreign editor Tim Lambon writes about the time the two of us, reporter Sorious Samura and sound recordist Gugu Radebe were imprisoned in Liberia in August 2000 by former President Charles Taylor. 

Taylor is now standing trial on 11 counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other serious violations of international humanitarian law at The Special Court for Sierra Leone at The Hague - and you can follow proceedings at the outstanding Open Society Justice Initiative website.

This time of year is always slightly weird for me, as I remember the unbelievable goodness of my family, friends, fellow inmates, Channel 4, British Government ministers, Nelson Mandela and Jesse Jackson for personally interceding to free us from prison.

For sure, there are shocking memories of wailing prisoners in Monrovia Central Prison and fear of rape but then there are the inspirational, slightly surreal ones, like the Parliament of prisoners who would gather in the night to appoint imaginary Foreign Ministers and Cabinet Ministers in this corridor:

For someone who used to walk back home for hours from Adam and the Ants and Buzzcocks gigs late at night and write endless, awful poetry set to the music of Cabaret Voltaire, I am more than capable of writing maudlin meaningful (and dull) sonnets on this experience. 

But fact is that there are too many fantastic, wonderful things going on to look back: from the innovation by companies who seek to spread and share prosperity, to the work of social and civic entrepreneurs who want to change the world, from the 1.5 trillion people who use the internet to discover and share knowledge, to the creatives who investigate, entertain and make something new - be it artists like Liam Gillick, farmer Wendell Berry or photographer Thomas Demand to the music of Goldmund and Ben Lukas Boysen, writers like Fiona Sampson, Murakami or Alexander McCall Smith to the design of  Steven Holl, Kate and Laura Mulleavy, even YSL Tributes!

Images courtesy of Kathryn Cramer and the others unknown.

E-serendipity: Digital inclusion, social media and super-communicators

In super jargon, doomsday for the internet comes as cyberbalkanization - or fragmentation of people in to like-minded groups.

Hellfire then rages in the idea that the net discourages serendipitous encounters - accidental, involuntary, on-the-fly, human interplays that allow for take-your-breath-away, progressive, life-changing moments.

In the words of Harvard Professor Cass R.Sunstein in Going to Extremes:

In countless domains, the Internet produces a process of spontaneous creation of groups of like-minded types, fueling group polarization. People who would otherwise be loners, or isolated in their objections and concerns, congregate into social networks.

In other words, welcome to cyberspace, a place full of spaces to populate but with lines tricky to cross, much like the Kosovo/Serbian border. 

A passport to migration across digital territories is said to be collaboration between those online that tips in to large-scale community building: an activity flagged in a recent McKinsey paper as use of the internet that is neither mass content creation nor 'decision support'.

But a key barrier, as ever, is the fact that less than a quarter of the world's population are online. In the U.K., according to a presentation by Helen Milner, 23% of adults do not use the internet, 35% of households don't have access to the internet and 70% of people who live in supported housing aren't online.

But I'm confused.

Take Tiger Bay, or Butetown, an area in Wales that hosts the second poorest housing estate in the country.

36% of the area's 4500 residents live in council or assisted housing, 36% have no qualifications, a fifth of the population in 2001 were born outside of Europe and 62% of the children attending a local primary school receive extra support learning English. 

 
We have just carried out a survey for a project called Digital Butetown in to internet use by 11-19 yr old students who attend the most prominent secondary school in the area: Fitzalan High School.

Over 1300 people completed a simple survey and results were analyzed by Dr Kelly Page at Cardiff Business School.

Here are the headlines:

• 92% of students said that they can access the Internet/Net at home
• 46% use the web on average for up to one hour a day from home
• 46% use community access points, e.g. internet cafes and libraries
• 88% of respondents said they owned a mobile telephone
• 49% said that they sent over 50 SMS messages a month
• 55% said that they had taken a photo with their phone
• Favourite websites: YouTube, Friv and Google
• Favourite social network sites: MSN, Bebo, Facebook and MySpace

The results suggest some obvious things.

There's a generation of users at the most local level who are web-literate super-communicators.

Access to the internet is a limited measure of the digital divide.

And if sowing the seeds of experimentation is important to increasing the uptake of participation technology and polarization of opinion is a risk in the new online economy, it may reap dividends to hyper-target the young.

But then the challenges pull sharply in to focus.

Opportunities need to be easy to find, forward and act upon.

And how to channel online enthusiasm into specific, targeted activities that further an overall goal?

This stands to reason as one effective way forward for collectivized, non-polarized engagement - and was an important element in the success of the Obama campaign, according to a recent report by Edelman.

Some great first ideas on a forward process were raised at a workshop in Butetown last month. RSS-me to catch that update and join our Google Group for more. 

 

Images courtesy of ornithes, cabiria8, photojennic and Paul Corcoran.

Crowdsourcing action against climate change

On 26th September, the town of Middlesbrough, North East England, will host its annual town meal.

At the event, people will feast on food that they've grown at home, in kitchen gardens and on formal or informal plots of ground across the town.

The Middlesbrough Meal initiative started in early 2007, supported by Middlesbrough Council, the U.K. Design Council, real estate developer BioRegional Quintain, Groundwork North East and local public agencies. 

Towards the end of 2006, service designer and former NESTA Creative Pioneer Nina Belk, artist and educator Debra Solomon of Culiblog and me put a call out to local people, asking them if they wanted to grow food and to choose their preferred location. 

Over the next year, over a thousand people in the town, clustered in local groups or connected by social networks, grew food in public places. 

They brought their early harvest to cookery classes called 'kitchen playgrounds', inspired by meal-assembly centers in the United States.

The final harvest delivered the base ingredients for a town meal, curated by artist Bob and Roberta Smith, attended by an estimated 8000 people - and reported by the Observer newspaper to be part of a wider move for harvesting food as art. 

 

You'll find more on the project throughout this blog (and I should give it a rest, I know):

- on its relevance to freeing-up of inter-human communications

- on the value of master-planning productive urban landscapes in cities

- or the clue it offers to making additional money from the development of urban land

Now this is all terribly fascinating - or not (please keep reading) - but the real legacy is now starting to come through from a process that was consciously designed to trigger mass participation, sow the seeds of a more localised food supply chain and strengthen social ties - in retrospect very connected to Michel Bauwens and his ideas on Peer-2-Peer Collaboration.

A forthcoming report on Green Infrastructure by CABE, the U.K. Government's advisor on architecture, urban design and public space, will outline some of the project's key legacies:

• 14 new allotments have been created in local schools
•  a training allotment has been set up in a deprived part of town
• three new food co-operatives have been set up in three districts of the town
• a social enterprise restaurant for 13-19 year olds is being set up to help careers in catering
• urban farming was at the core of a successful bid to the U.K. Government for what is now an £8m ($13.5m)  fund aimed at helping the town become a healthier place

This is not to brag. But to make some simple points about public participation in the transformation of the physical fabric and the quality of life of our towns and cities. 

Mass participation at the most local level can generate real, additional value.

Sometimes what matters is orchestration of human activity, not just its production. 

And sometimes it helps people to have a script - in order to write their own.

Images courtesy of Tubbyphunk.