26th October 2010 by Dave Harte

Slides from Hello Business discussion

I thought it worth putting up the few slides I created for the session I was part of at the recent Hello Business event.

The discussion involved myself, Steve Harding from Birmingham City University (chairing), entrepreneur Michel Mol from Amsterdam and Jane Holmes from Advantage West Midlands (she does the inward investment stuff)

I’m not going to summarise the discussion which was wide-ranging and very useful other than to give some context to the diagrams in the later part of this presentation. They show the results of a workshop that I attended in Berlin earlier this year where representatives from a range of European cities mapped out the relationship between industry/trade bodies and creative and cultural policy-makers.

The last slide (from Berlin) seemed to have much clearer routes to enable industry to influence policy than any of the other cities. In Birmingham I’m not sure we have that and points were made about how some sectors (music for example) seem to lack a lobbying route to key City influencers.

One question from the audience asked about the role of culture in these structures and I related how in Birmingham, the fact Hello Digital is about the business end of digital rather than the culture end is testament to the fact that one lobby was more successful in making its case to policy-makers than another.

Hellobiz ci diagrams

View more presentations from Dave Harte.

21st October 2010 by Dave Harte

Paper on Advantage West Midlands’ Digital Media Cluster

awm During the summer the Business Cluster Opportunity Group that represents the Digital Media industry in the West Midlands asked me to produce a kind of positioning paper whilst the discussions were ongoing about the formation of Local Economic Partnerships (LEP).

The group was formed in 2003 so the paper is kind of saying: ‘don’t dump that knowledge, it might be useful’. It’s probably not a group that too many people have a wider awareness of but it actually did a lot of the strategic positioning work around placing ‘digital’ as a key focus in the region’s economic strategy.

It’s had a wide distribution via email to the various business/public sector bods who were doing the LEP lobbying but I suspect it’ll never get formally published anywhere so I thought I’d dump it on here.

An excerpt from the executive summary:
“In the current climate where business support policy is being reshaped and support mechanisms rethought, this paper strongly makes the case for those groups forming new partnerships to draw on the existing expertise of the West Midlands Digital Media Cluster Opportunity Group”

Digital Media Sector Cluster Paper 2010 Final

Paper in full (PDF).

15th October 2010 by Dave Harte

Links for October 10th through October 15th

Some links for you:

My paper to ECREA conference – further reading – theplan – Noted, useful list of Social Media or related academic papers
National Police Web Managers Group: Communication Teams and the Public – "Having taken part in a session entitled 'Press Office vs Bloggers' at the recent #HyperWM event at Walsall College, and the 'Tweets' since the event, I have decided to write this blog to capture the issues and what can be learnt."
Channel 4 axes 4iP | Media | guardian.co.uk – In the comments are some from people I know generally supporting 4iP. The article is interesting though, suggests that like many ideas, this one was suffered because it was too closely associated with a previous management regime, plus Channel 4's online remit now seems to be purely about increasing TV viewers.

9th October 2010 by Dave Harte

Links for October 8th

Some links for you:

The iterative development of 4ip | Screen WM – A look back on 4iP by Screen West Midlands as it gets subsumed into C4's general online commissioning structures.
A Postmortem Look at Citywide WiFi by Eric Fraser – Why city wi-fi failed. Interesting glimpse also into how US telecommunications law helped kill it off in certain US cities.
Digital partnerships – culture and business – Google Maps – Useful map of partnerships between business and cultural organisations. From Arts and Business

1st October 2010 by Dave Harte - 1 Comment

Links for August 27th through September 30th

Some links for you:

Creating a cost benefit equation for social media – Kathryn Ashcroft – Paper written by marketeer/PhD student on the back of the event we held at Birmingham City University in July 2010 (tho paper say July 2009)
Data mash-ups and the future of mapping – JISC (PDF) – "Data mash-ups in education and research are part of an emerging, richer information environment with greater integration of mobile applications, sensor platforms, e-science, mixed reality, and semantic, machine-computable data. This report starts to speculate on forms that these might take, in the context of map-based data."
The March Of Twitter: Analysis of How And Where Twitter Spread – "Nine months after the creation of the service in March 2006, Twitter only had a few thousand users. A year later there were an estimated 150,000 people using the service. How did Twitter get those vital initial users?"