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.