This post is by Simon Bannister, who was at CityCamp 1 in 2011 and is coming again this year.

One of the aims of CityCamp this year is to widen participation from the community generally and the B&H voluntary sector in particular and 9 February saw a kind of launch for City Camp 2 at an information evening for community groups.

Around 60 residents/reps from various groups turned out to find out more about City Camp, and also more about the substantially increased prize pot of £20k provided by Brighton & Hove City Council and NHS Sussex.

The aim of the funding and the projects judges will be looking to support are quite broad and loosely defined- aside from some administative particulars, funded projects will need to: “Advance the goals of City Camp – increasing participation or wellbeing in the city using new technologies or innovative practice in public or voluntary service and openly sharing the results”

The event and the funding criteria is slewed toward social media (though not exclusively) and the evening discussion raised many  of questions about this aspect, from attempting to define  ‘social media’ , looking at issues of participation and digital exclusion and talking about the various platforms available and how they might best be used to accomplish certain tasks. It was clear that not everyone was starting from the same point, with some individuals and organisations far more at home in the digital environment and understanding its potential than others, and recognising this, it is really useful that a first Social Media Surgery has been planned for Feb 20th which could help groups work out how they can make best use of online places in advance of the main City Camp event. (HERE for info and to reserve a place)

Although I spend a lot of time online and offline with people who see internet technologies as a part of their daily terrain, much of my work puts me in contact with the many people who don’t. Finding ways to describe the benefits of internet based technology to people and groups who are inexperienced at using it and may be sceptical is an ongoing challenge, but being aware of the issues of digital exclusion isn’t a reason not to engage; it intensifies the need for the approach taken by City Camp2 and underlines the value of the particular funding emphasis on grassroots community organisations developing their work online.

Public services are increasingly aware of the ‘digital by default’ challenges and benefits and our council in Brighton & Hove is investing in its digital presence – it is becoming an easier and better way of getting things done, whether that is finding out about council activity and taking part in consultation, or commenting real time on service delivery.  As one mundane example, my local Local Action Team has found that using Twitter to send a picture of flytipping to the council, is a far more efficient way of reporting and getting action – and also it puts the complaint and response into the public realm and gives it a transparency which other approaches could not easily match.

That City Camp this year is looking for greater involvement from Brighton & Hove voluntary sector, and has been able to focus energy, resources and real cash toward making this happen, gives so much extra value. Not only work given to help develop projects, and money to develop them with, but a really serious attempt to involve those groups working with the most marginalised and excluded communities across the city, helping them to find new ways of translating the benefits of ‘online’ to improve the opportunities and quality of life for those they work with.

The Head of IT at Brighton & Hove Council recently weighed-in with a big offer to the Open Data Brighton & Hove group – “tell us what data you need, and we’ll open it up”. Having worked with government data one way or another for about 20 years, that sounds like opening up the sweet shop and inviting us to help ourselves. In other words, count me in.

In the first of a multi-parter on the Open Data Sweet Shop, I looked at data for school admissions to help parents make choices – http://www.ocsi.co.uk/news/2011/09/01/three-picks-from-the-open-data-sweet-shop-%E2%80%93-part-1/. In this second post, I cover ‘how good are services’.

Open Data Pick 2. How good are services?

From a non-random and non-scientific sample of friends who don’t work in public services, most people take government talk about transparency and open data to mean spending data. The Guardian’s lovely data visualisation of public spending in the UK has ended up on people’s walls, and it’s difficult to avoid the constant media snippets on how councils or other public sector organisations are allegedly pouring money down the drain on things like days out at the races (somehow the actual facts of using Newmarket’s reasonable conference facilities on non-race days didn’t seem to get as much press).

But I don’t just want to feel the quantity, I want to feel the quality too. Simply knowing how much something costs doesn’t help us decide how good that thing is.  And simply publishing how much something costs is just fuel for media articles about how much is being wasted – articles that don’t want to go into all that boring detail about whether it was money well spent or not.

If the public sector is real about using open data to improve quality of services, then it needs to be publishing how good services are. A “scores on the doors” rating for services.  Useful to local voters, users of services, media and indeed councillors/ MPs and officers in local and national organisations. Next time I’m voting, or talking to my councillor, or hearing someone moan about the bleedin’ council and how much money they are wasting, this is the sort of information I’d want at my fingertips.

Surely there’s something out there already, I hear you cry. Well, kind of. The Audit Commission, set up by Michael Heseltine in the 80s “to protect the public purse“, carried out evaluations of local authorities and services including a “Use of Resources” element (how effectively was money spent). The previous government also set out a series of National Indicators (and earlier Best Value Performance Indicators – love the jargon) by which local services and agencies were assessed. (And of course, there is already information on quality for some services such as schools, where pupil exam results and value-added measures are routinely published. But this isn’t the case for most local services.)

But both the Audit Commission and National Indicators are on their way out. Although many won’t mourn their passing, it does leave a gap in knowing how good local services are – and how they compare with services in other areas. And that makes it harder for us (and councillors and senior managers and local media and …) to understand where our council is doing really well, and where it could do better. And that’s a bad thing.

So here’s the suggestion. Local councils and other agencies to open-up the information which they use to decide how good services are. Whether services are run internally or commissioned externally, there should be measures of performance.  These measures tell us both the yardstick by which local services are judged by the council, and how well they are doing against that yardstick.

Publishing this information would be a powerful way of moving the debate on from simply “how much”, to “how good”. And understanding the yardstick by which services are currently evaluated is an important step in widening the debate on how to improve services – and even perhaps involving us all in agreeing the yardstick to judge services.

These sound like topics for next month’s Brighton CityForum. Come along and get involved.

Tom Smith, OCSI.

The first of our post-event meetups was amazing, massive thanks to everyone who came along. I think most of the groups that pitched an idea at the main event were there and gave us a progress update, as well as lots of new people from Brighton and Hove City Council, the local digital community and beyond.

One of the most exciting aspect of the evening was the amount of progress people have made following #ccbtn back in March.

Jo Ivens (one of the CityCamp Brighton team) updated everyone on the project, joining up data available across sectors and communities, aiming to assist intelligent commissioning.

The Vital Reality team had some exciting news on their plans to feature at the Brighton Digital Festival in September, hoping to run a seven-day ongoing game to map the city, with players as agents of change.

Winning team My Urban Angel, the smartphone app project to keep people safe when they’re out and about, have been making progress. They gave everyone some useful insight into the nitty gritty of really getting things off the ground and setting up as an official entity.

Paul Brewer talked about I Can Help – his idea to reconnect local communities through digital – based around micro-volunteering and micro-lending (some affinity with CityCamp Brighton speaker, Benita Matofska’s People Who Share, I think). Paul was interested in ways to break down barriers within communities to connect through social media – if you’re interested, get in touch with him.

Rob Shepherd’s been hard at work on the CityHive project, wireframing, getting the basics in place and looking for funding (someone give him a shout if you can help).

Last but not least, Greg Hadfield of Cog App and Open Data Brighton and Hove announced the Open Data Manifesto for Brighton and Hove, aiming to transform Brighton and Hove into a world-class open-data city.

I think everyone who was there felt really excited about the fact that there’s already momentum about what we’ve all already started through CityCamp Brighton, and we’re looking forward to keeping that up.

Talking of which… the next meetup is going to be on 16th June, venue TBC. Apologies for the gap in announcing it, but we’ve been working on developing a format and trying to find a suitable venue.

We’re up for suggestions for a possible place to meet – somewhere with a decent sized space we can take over (given the great turnout for the last one – round-up below), that’s preferably downstairs (and therefore accessible to all). Oh, and that serves drinks. Of course.

If you’ve got any suggestions or anything you want to share, leave a comment or drop us a tweet via @citycampbtn.

After a weekend of furious thinking, talking and building (with a bit of eating and drinking thrown in), teams downed tools on Sunday afternoon, pitched their ideas and left the judges with the impossible task of picking one overall winner.

Of the eleven pitches (a couple of the thirteen projects chose to join others), My Urban Angel was chosen as the winner of the £10,000 prize.

The team describe it as:

“…an application which will run on a smartphone and supported by a website and social media channels.

The app will be used by anyone who is going out and wants flexible options for keeping in touch with friends and staying safe.

It is principally for young people going out at night but could equally be used by children or older adults. Users have complete control over a range of features and they can personalise setting to suit different occasions.

Different features only come into play when they are neeeded and the overriding aim is to make it easy for anyone to keep themselves safe.”

To find out more on how it works, check out the My Urban Angel site

The other ideas, which all deserve a mention, were:

• iNoticeboard
• Bite-Sized Brighton
• Brighton Open Kitchen
• Zocalo
• Pier-to-Peer
• CityHive
• Touchy Peely
• I Can Help
• Vital reality

Thanks to the kind help given to our teams by Jonathon Markwell, some of the pages linked to will allow you to add your email address if you want to find out if they progress.

As an organising team, we were blown away by the energy and buzz around the whole weekend, and in awe of the passion of everyone who took part. Seeing eleven really solid ideas being pitched was the ultimate proof.

Cities are full of people who care deeply about the place they live. Trouble is, most of them don’t get a chance to talk to each other, let alone share their knowledge or pool their skills.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get them all together in one place for a few days and see what happened? And chucked a healthy dose of technology into the mix, for good measure.

Well, that’s pretty much what CityCamp Brighton is.

Running from 4-6 March, it will bring together people from all aspects of the city – Brighton’s public, private and community and voluntary sectors – to turn their problems and ideas into real projects.

Oh, and it’s free.

The format’s pretty exciting too – a three-pronged innovation assault:

• day one: inspiring speakers from Brighton and beyond to get everyone thinking.
• day two: barcamp-style workshops to generate ideas and spark collaboration.
• day three: a full-on build/hack day to see what teams can produce.

To make sure it’s not just another fun and interesting event, there’s a £10,000 prize for the best idea and ongoing mentoring available, so that what happens over the weekend is just the start.

Among the speakers we’ve got confirmed so far there’s John Barradell, Chief Executive of Brighton and Hove City Council, Dan McQuillan, one of the founders of Social Innovation Camp, Antony Mayfield, author and founder of Brilliant Noise and Emer Coleman, who heads up the London Data Store.

We’re helping organise the event with The Democratic Society, Public-i and Wired Sussex, but it’s been inspired by the CityCamp ‘movement’. which started in Chicago over a year ago.

Since then, it’s been replicated all over the world. Brighton is the second UK event, following in the footsteps of CityCamp London, but there are at least two more lined up for later in the year.

Registration is open, but places are going fast, so if this sounds like your kind of thing, please do get involved.

Did I mention it’s free?

Friday 4th March – Sunday 6th March 2011

CityCampBTN is about rethinking the way the web, technology and participation will shape the future of our city.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re someone with a great idea or a problem to solve, or if you’re a developer with specific skills – if you’re passionate about our city and want to be inspired to create new solutions, then this is for you.

We’ve lined up three days of inspiring speakers, discussions powered by you and hands-on building of solutions. And it’s free.

Part of the CityCamp movement, started in Chicago last year, CityCamp BTN brings together local government, business, community sector and academic communities, to work together.

Register your place now!

CityCamp Brighton is supported by: