Links for August 5th through August 19th
Some links for you:
- David Byrne's Journal: 08.09.10: The End of News, Part II - "I’m not sure I’m ready to believe that millions of people with very little insight and almost no information can somehow magically turn into one smart collective entity"
- Summer Fête Vegetable Competition | dirty bristow - I'm so tempted. I have a massive marrow and lots of slighted deformed radishes. This event includes launch of interesting looking new mag.
- Birmingham Post - Dave Harte: Creative has been ‘done’ in Birmingham - My column in the Birmingham Post from the other week. I was trying to make a pointed retort to another columnist's work the week before, but I think I was a tad too subtle about it for anyone to notice.
Birmingham’s Creative Industries - the ‘business case’
Whilst admiring the yellow courgettes growing on my allotment yesterday I thought to myself: “someone should really write a blog post about Birmingham’s Creative Industries and the whole Local Economic Partnerships thing. Hey, that’s something I could write about”. Fortunately, Chris Unitt on the Created in Birmingham blog got there before me and has got some good discussion going. This therefore is the ‘further reading’ to that blog post: some stats to help set the context and a modicum of opinion.
‘Punch Above Their Weight’
We could do with a restatement of the national picture of the size and scope of Creative Industries (CI) and their contribution to the economy. That’s the ‘Creative Industries’ sub-sectors as measured by government since the late 90s. The last economic estimates for CI in the UK puts them growing at 2% above the rest of the economy, accounting for 6.2% of Gross Value Added (GVA) in the economy and responsible for 4.5% of exports. That GVA figure is worth pausing on. In general CIs are a bunch of sectors that are ‘high value’, the goods and services they create are bought at a high price compared to the cost of producing them. So although in scale CI aren’t vast, they tend, in jargon heavy policy documents at least, to be described as ‘punching above their weight’.
Birmingham’s CIs
So what about locally? Back in 2007 there was a report called ‘Making The Business Case’ (not available online), funded by the City Council, commissioned by the Creative Birmingham board, which articulated Birmingham’s case for continuing to recognise the importance of the CIs: “Birmingham’s creative industries are important to its economy. They generate real jobs and income and respectable amounts of GVA.” They reckoned the sector was worth £1bn or 8.7% of the city’s GVA (Manchester has a figure of 10.9%).
An updated report was commissioned in 2009 which used a slightly different methodology so the two reports aren’t comparable. For example, its GVA figure for 2007 is £663m (see below) but is calculated in a different way and, if I recall correctly, the researchers were very sceptical about the accuracy of calculating GVA at city level. Much of this updated report is summarised in a report in the Birmingham Post from October 2009 but the report itself remains unpublished. It’s a good read though, if only you were able to read it.
Here are some tables from it. Stats only go up to 2007 and even if revised again now would only go to 2008:
So in summary, Birmingham’s Creative Industries do just about ‘punch above their weight’ and remain an important part of our economy. But other smaller cities seem to do a bit better than us - we’ve got less creatives than Leeds and less as a proportion of overall employment than Bristol. We have a growing number of employees in micro firms but a decline in overall creative employment since 2003/4. That’s evidence perhaps that policy that focuses purely on start-ups needs to be supplemented with support for growth of larger firms along with a focus on inward investment.
Not a Charity Case
It’s inevitable that whatever LEPs form in and around Birmingham, the ‘Creative’ sector will be articulated within them. But how they articulate them is really quite important. There is established methodology about what the CI are and despite its flaws at least it’s there and established. I worry whenever I see those definitions rejected. Jerry Blackett, current chair of the Creative Birmingham board is arguing for just such a rejection of established definitions and even for a shift in focus towards philanthropy. That feels wrong. Birmingham’s Creative Industries need a business case, not handouts.
I think this position comes from the confusion of thinking that the subsidised Arts sector has much to do with the Creative Industries sector. There’s overlap of course but in Birmingham the two most significant contributors to Creative Industries value have been Architecture (32% of GVA in 2004) and Software (35% of GVA in 2004). Music and Performing Arts are low-value sectors in economic terms (1.1% of GVA in 2004).
Writing in 2006, Calvin Taylor noted that it was:
“significant that the arts lobby mostly uses the creative industry tag. Very few other sector bodies, representing other components of what are taken to be the creative industries, use the tag in their sectors promotion work.”
He went on to warn that in the regions, advocacy for the creative industries must rise to
“the challenge of developing a credible evidence base, without allowing judgements of the attempts made so far to be circumscribed by the pressure to deliver yet more advocacy.”
But this can’t be all about stats. People matter, and how we feel about creativity in the city matters also. There’s a really useful research paper (PDF) that looks at regional creative clusters in Birmingham Newcastle/Gateshead. In their conclusions the authors point out that:
“the city-region is a place for cooperation, not just competition [...] personal and emotive dimensions are key factors in the decision of creative practitioners to be located in both city-regions. This personal dimension is often underplayed in the development of creative industries…”
[A version of this, without the fancy tables, will probably make it to my column in next week's Birmingham Post]
Links for July 13th through July 15th
Some links for you:
- NESTA - Make It Local - Hey local authorities - get your bidding hat on and get that data opened up: "Make it Local aims to encourage collaboration between local authorities and digital media developers, to provide innovative, web-based services for their communities."
- Using Google Spreadsheets as a Database with the Google Visualisation API Query Language « OUseful.Info, the blog… - I'm now using the info from this post about fiddling around with google spreadsheet URLs as a way to make it easier to show running results for my running club's website. Therefore, I best bookmark this in case I forget how to do it…
- We still need libraries in the digital age | Ian Clark | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk - "Public libraries provide a key role in both facilitating access to information via the internet, as well as providing free internet access to bridge the digital divide, which does not only exist between industrialised and developing nations. Taking away this important role would disenfranchise people further, and mean they would have to refer to a commercial provider."
Links for July 1st through July 7th
Some links for you:
- Clay Shirky and the Cognitive Surplus - jon bounds - "What disappoints is that lack of discussion solutions to those problems, it might be that there aren’t any obvious ones but I’d love to see what Clay has to say on the matter — he says how early in his web career he made a mistake in assuming something about people’s behaviour (he didn’t see how people would want poor self-made Geocitites sites after seeing professionally designed sites), perhaps it’s a decision never to predict again."
- Self-help and civic culture … - Google Books - Looks like a book for current civic minded web types to read.
- Evernote shared notebook: jhsxswm - Jason Hall's (from Screen West Midlands) notes from a TSB (technology strategy board) event for their Metadata fuding competition.
Links for June 27th through July 1st
Some links for you:
- Steve McCurry - Exhibitions and Events - Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery - Must get to this at some point - or send students to it at least. "Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery is the sole UK venue for a retrospective of the work of American photo-journalist Steve McCurry, the man who is responsible for some of the worlds most famous photographs."
- Regional Economic Development | Policies | BIS - "Following the General Election, the Government is committed to building a new economic model. This includes the creation of Local Enterprise Partnerships - joint local authority-business bodies brought forward by local authorities themselves to promote local economic development - to replace Regional Development Agencies. in taking this work forward the Government wishes to ensure an orderly transition which maintains focus on delivery. Detailed proposals will follow in due course."
- Running, data and community | Talk About Local - Something I wrote for Talk About Local website. Re-reading it I'm almost tempted to start a data.bournvilleharriers.org.uk.
Links for June 17th through June 24th
Some links for you:
- Birmingham Post - Dave Harte: In love with committees - Piece by me in this week's Birmingham Post based on some observations of meeting reps from other European cities.
- Evidence base | Digital Participation - "We have published information about Race Online’s key target groups – older people, the unemployed and those in low income families – in the form of powerpoint chart packs. Each pack comprises latest internet take-up figures from Ofcom’s Q1 2010 Digital Participation Tech Tracker survey, as well as information about what these groups say about why they don’t have the internet, and their attitudes towards internet technology. It also provides background social and economic market data collated from national statistical sources."
- Citizensheep » Legal considerations for people responsible for websites - Most useful: "I’ve drawn up a legal primer for people commissioning or managing websites. This is by no means detailed or comprehensive: it is intended as a starting point and to raise awareness of the issues. I welcome feedback on anything that’s unclear or factually wrong."
Links for April 27th through June 8th
Some links for you:
- danielheaf.com: Technology & media predictions for 2010 - Bloke from Channel 4's 4iP makes some media/tech predictions - check back this time next year to see if he was right
- Starter kit: how to blog for your company « Subs' Standards - Useful series of posts about blogging for a company.
- Digital developments: special issue of Cultural Trends Journal — ADM-HEA - Call for papers: "For this special issue of Cultural Trends the editors are calling for papers which explore how different individuals and organisations, within and across different parts of the cultural sector, are making use of digital technologies; and which analyse the experiences of different groups of digital consumers. The world has changed, but the precise nature and dimensions of that change, and of further changes to come, remain to be understood."
Links for April 11th through April 16th
Some links for you:
- Birmingham Post - Business - Business Comment - Dave Harte: Bill is blow to digital sector - Me commenting about the Digital Economy Bill/Act over at the Birmingham Post. You should see the miserable picture of me they use to accompany the print edition of this.
- ebook: Convert Me, I'm Yours- Gas Street Works (Digital media agency based in Birmingham) - "Our first eBook is about social networks and how they can help your business."
- What next for the Digital Economy Bill? Implications for digital content producers - Susi O'Neil gives a detailed summary of the winners and losers in the fall out from the digital economy bill