Tom de Grunwald » London

Digital Britain Unconferences

Tom de Grunwald — Wed, 27 May 2009 10:54:16 +0000

Over the last couple of months I’ve had the pleasure of helping to create a dialogue around the UK government’s Digital Britain report. The story has been better told elsewhere, but essentially, during a meeting of some of the bigger and more established players in the UK media, Bill Thompson tweeted with the idea of having an unconference and quickly, Kathryn Corrick, Dan Hon and I (amongst others) concurred.

I suggested a simple tag to keep the discussion unified, set up a Twitter account and blog to co-ordinate information, and Kathryn, who has really driven the whole process, set up a Yahoo! Group to start getting events off the ground.

A few weeks later and we’ve seen twelve events in towns and cities around the country, including a virtual discussion of rural issues, a family unconference, hundreds of tweets tagged with #dbuc09 – a real public consultation about the future of Britain in a digital world. At one point during the Birmingham event, we were victims of our own success, when #dbuc09 started trending on Twitter and thus garnered unwanted attention.

It’s been great working with Kathryn, Bill and Alastair Duncan (who’s made an invaluable contribution to the editing stage of the process) amongst many, many others. It feels like a fascinating example of how collaboration around a common purpose can work using free web tools – something future government consultations could take from. I’ve been enormously impressed and heartened by the ideas and spirit shown by all who have participated, and encouraged that the good folk behind the report are listening. I look forward to reading the final report!

I took on the task of collating the reports from the London event, which have been published in this PDF. The idea was to embed a slideshow and audio on the blog, but as it wasn’t possible (for technical reasons), I thought I would post them here.

Digital Britain Unconference London 6 May 2009 (dbuc09) by microclimate

Arcadia I

Tom de Grunwald — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:27:04 +0000

The other day I went to Kew Gardens, courtesy of my sister Natasha. It was a cold, wet, rainy day and unusually there were few colourful flowers around – but we had a lovely walk, and came into the Palm House, a beautiful example of pavilion architecture from 1848.

Whilst really no expert on them, I have a soft spot for Arcadian interventions. Whilst I revere truly wild, unromanticised wildernesses, I love the way that the Victorians turned their creativity to framing nature, such that nature and culture work together to create poetry. In wilderness no civilisation; in Arcadia civility and nature collide.

The Palm House represents this beautifully: the plants, which in the 18th century were curios, have become the foundation of one of the most important conservation collections in the world

I’m seriously considering joining Kew soon.. Maybe we’ll meet there!

The obligatory iPhone post

Tom de Grunwald — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 14:08:22 +0000

I’m sitting in Spitalfields drinking coffee and getting used to writing on the iPhone’s touch interface. I’m keeping it short as there’s no copy and paste, and there’s little that’s not been written already about this particular toy, sorry, piece of high consumer technology.

Suffice to say I’m loving the cocktail of connectivity and syncronisation, ease of use and rich media experience. I like the way it has got software developers excited and brought a unity to the mobile platform which has been sadly lacking in all my previous smart phones.

It is not without its flaws – again, well documented elsewhere, but perhaps most significantly the charge that it is a closed and tethered device that could threaten creativity and/ or go towards creating a new Market monopoly. But I sincerely hope that it acts as a catalyst to other makers of mobile devices creating truly usable interface. The iPhone has moved the goalposts, now it just needs worthy opponents on the field.

On a more personal note, this is actually my first iPod and I haven’t enjoyed listening to music so much since I stopped buying vinyl. I think this is because it brings a sense of intimacy with the record back into the experience, where other players have made a music collection feel like a set of data files – still possible to enjoy as music, but despite the interface rather than because of it.

Mayday?

Tom de Grunwald — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:41:16 +0000

Zoe Williams wrote a piece in The Guardian on the day of the London Mayoral election, about Boris Johnson – presumably in order to mobilise the vote against him. She says we make two mistakes about Boris:

That he is a nice guy (“he is not a nice guy”), and
He despises (all) people who are not of his class because
he is a snob.

Williams contends that Boris is racist, homophobic, and out of touch with Londoners:

“A snob’s London is a Monday-to-Thursday kind of affair, behind fusty
doors, in clubs that only just let women in, let alone plebs, in
restaurants that don’t have prices on the menus, in the Regency offices
of magazines whose only distinction is that all the staff are shagging
each other. They disappear to the country at weekends, then come back
muttering on Monday about how the poor generate litter. That is not
London. I’m not going to do some New Labour drum-roll about creativity
and youth and multiculturalism, since we don’t need it.
We know what
London is. Boris is not London.”

I had been concerned to discover that the candidate had given up drinking alcohol for the duration of the campaign; but as as soon as the votes were cast, he had returned to his old ways. It struck me that perhaps this, and not the unseen hand of his Conservative minders, was the reason for the marked change in the tone of his behaviour during that time.

Other than venting her personal feelings about him, Williams backs up only a couple of points empirically, and therefore comes across somewhat partisan. These are augmented by a selection of anti-Boris viewpoints from a rollcall of Londoners in and out of the public eye. In fact, if you weren’t to scroll to the bottom of the page, you would miss the most compelling argument, which is both empirical and non partisan: Boris’ words themselves. Perhaps these are what worked on those people I know who were successfully mobilised by the article. I’ll leave you with the words of our new mayor:

On his arts role

“Look, the point is … er, what is the point? It is a tough job but somebody has got to do it.”
· On being appointed Tory Arts spokesman, 2004

On stag hunting

“I
remember the guts streaming, and the stag turds spilling out on to the
grass from within the ventral cavity … This hunting is best for the
deer.”
· From his book Lend Me Your Ears

On Africa

“No doubt the AK47s will fall
silent, the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the
tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big
white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.”
· In 2002, on Tony Blair’s visit to the Democratic of Republic of Congo, Daily Telegraph

Link to article

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Tags: London, mayoral election, Boris