Developing Birmingham’s Digital District

Birm­ing­ham is well known as the sec­ond biggest city in UK and it is recently get­ting the fame of Social Media cen­ter of interests.

Devel­op­ing Birmingham’s Dig­i­tal Dis­trict is exactly that kind of project, head­ing towards evolv­ing dig­i­tal net­works by pro­vid­ing fast inter­net con­nec­tiv­ity known as Next Gen­er­a­tion Access.

Dig­i­tal Britain together with Dig­i­tal West Mid­lands and The Regional ICT Strat­egy is the project above Dig­i­tal Birm­ing­ham, which is the con­text of pol­icy and reg­u­la­tion to develop. It has been said that there is great sup­port from corporations.

Key speak­ers at the event came from var­i­ous Euro­pean cities such as Birm­ing­ham, Barcelona and Berlin to swap their opin­ions and report their own expe­ri­ence about devel­op­ing dig­i­tal dis­tricts:
Steve Hard­ing, Dave Harte — Birm­ing­ham City Uni­ver­sity, Lisa De Pro­pris – Birm­ing­ham Busi­ness School – Uni­ver­sity of Birm­ing­ham, Paul Tins­ley MBE – Deputy Leader Birm­ing­ham City Coun­cil, Chris Price – Dig­i­tal Birm­ing­ham, Hardy Rudolf Shmitz – Wista Man­age­ment GMBH Berlin, and finally the enthu­si­as­tic Chris Pinchen – Citilab-Cornellá Barcelona.

Hardy Rudolf Shmitz – Wista Man­age­ment GMBH Berlin

There are a great deal of poten­tial evo­lu­tions com­ing about by real­is­ing these projects that actu­ally are impos­si­ble to deter­mine in their entirety right now.
How­ever, let me briefly out­line some of the input given dur­ing the  Dig­i­tal Birm­ing­ham event on the 14^th of Octo­ber 2009 at Faze­ley Studios.

Faze­ley Studios

Devel­op­ing a dig­i­tal area in the city would allow dig­i­tal peo­ple to aggre­gate eas­ily and quickly. This inno­va­tion brings along new busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties or sim­ply the devel­op­ment of exist­ing businesses.

In addi­tion to that a dig­i­tal dis­trict would make many more peo­ple come onto the inter­net to share and to build knowledge.

Beyond shar­ing knowl­edge there is a fast and always on hand net­work­ing pos­si­bil­ity, organ­ised out of the stan­dard hier­ar­chy and through the many social media and web­sites which are the foun­da­tion of a newly organ­ised crowd of voices.

Any­way crowd­ing the city cen­ter is not in the on the scope of the project. On the con­trary the aim is to con­nect fast and vir­tu­ally from that area to anywhere.

Let’s think offline to have a bet­ter under­stand­ing: imag­ine offer­ing a group of peo­ple the pos­si­bil­ity to have a place to meet with whom they want and to find what they want. Put this cen­tre of inter­ests an inch away from each per­son. Would you not see the whole group go there in a crowd, meet, chat and cre­ate new valu­able things?

This hap­pens today on the inter­net, which is infi­nitely expand­ing the capa­bil­ity of peo­ple to net­work. The key fac­tor is to allow peo­ple to use tools to inter­act in always easier&quicker-to-use ways.

Imag­ine a vir­tual place, the inter­net itself, with an infi­nite pos­si­bil­ity of con­nec­tions with the world and put it in the cen­ter of an active group. What would happen?

Some of the most bril­liant stu­dents at BCU, Hai Nguyen, Nkem Nwchkw, Shilpa Alakkal attended Devel­op­ing Birmingham‘s Dis­trict Event

These are exactly the busi­ness dri­vers of Devel­op­ing Birmingham´s Dig­i­tal Dis­trict: to explore what hap­pens when it is pro­vided with much more speed and access to con­nec­tiv­ity. Actu­ally, cur­rent lev­els of con­nec­tiv­ity are inhibit­ing inno­v­a­tive prod­ucts and services.

On the other hand there is a strong need to demon­strate the value of build­ing a Cre­ative Metrop­o­lis in order to solve the main issues which are briefly: engag­ing stake­hold­ers and exist­ing devel­op­ments, get­ting secure fund­ing and deliv­ery timescales, resolv­ing state aid con­cerns, build­ing mar­ket engage­ment and busi­ness care.

The audi­ence

On top of that, do not for­get how many places in the world are becom­ing sort of open offices for cre­ative peo­ple. Cof­fee bars such as the Coffee-lounge in Birm­ing­ham or co-working places such as the Mose­ley Exchange in Birm­ing­ham the set up of which Steve Hard­ing was involved in, Citilab-Cornellá of Chris Pinchen in Barcelona, the Beta­haus in Kreuzberg Ger­many. The list of places like these is get­ting longer and longer, that is a strong sig­nal of a new dig­i­tal way to work.
Well, these places pro­vide their own wire­less net­work to the cre­ative peo­ple. Actu­ally the con­nec­tiv­ity is not always the one you can expect to work efficiently.

So let’s see what Devel­op­ing Dig­i­tal Birm­ing­ham is going to bring to the cit­i­zens media in terms of qual­ity and cov­er­age. Accord­ing to a Wikipedia def­i­n­i­tion cit­i­zens media  refers to forms of con­tent pro­duced by pri­vate cit­i­zens who are oth­er­wise not pro­fes­sional journalists.

Tags: active group, Barcelona, BCU, Berlin, Birmingham, Birmingham England, Birmingham Business School, birmingham_city_university, Britain, Chris Pinchen, Chris Price, City University, citylab, citylab_cornella, cornella, Dave Harte, developing_birmingham_digital_district, digital_district, digital_event, Fazeley_Studios, hand networking possibility, internet, Leader Birmingham City Council, Lisa De Propris, media, media citizens, Moseley_exchange, Paul Tinsley, Rudolf Shmitz, Social Media, social_media, Steve Harding, Technology/Internet, United Kingdom, University of Birmingham, wireless network, Wista Management GMBH