Catherine Howe

We had a very productive Third Thursday meeting and have got straight what we want to do for things like venue, speakers and the overall plan for awarding prizes etc which we will get up on the blog just as soon as we have got these confirmed.

We also all pledged to get out and about and attended meetings with groups that haven’t taken part in CityCamp before so that we can explain what it is and hopefully get people interested / excited about coming.  If you are running a meeting and want us to come along or if you know of someone we should contact then please let us know.  This is instead of the pre-CityCamp event we did last year for Community and Voluntary organizations as we thought it would give us better reach.

We also sorted out marketing plans and we will have more details online and also with print flyers next month – we will be looking for volunteers to help spread the word!

We are still hoping to have at least a limited crèche on at least the Saturday but it is proving rather expensive so if anyone has any ideas on this we would be really glad to hear them as we know it can be difficult for people with kids to take part.

So – all very logistical last night but plans are really moving along – getting excited now!

Please either comment here or contact us if you think we have missed something – the more ideas/ help we get the better the event will be – and HUGE thanks to everyone who turned up last night to help with the planning.

We had our third thursday CityCamp Brighton meeting up this week and apart from updates from projects (including the brilliant GigBuddies) we spent most of the discussing the implications of the impending benefit system changes  and the impacts we expect to have them to have in the City.  One of the strengths of CityCamp is the fact that it brings together the people who are trying to address issues like this different sectors and also people who are going to feel the impact – this makes for an informed, impassioned and at the end of it practical debate.  Many thanks to Paul Brewer for organising some speakers and for Val Pearce for giving us the facts in an accessible and open way.  Also huge appreciation to Nathan from Fairshare who was inspirational about how practical approaches can solve problems.

This is a huge topic and I hope someone else will summarise the debate but suffice to say we expect there to be more people in poverty in the City as a result of these changes and these financially excluded people are also currently digitally excluded.  This is not a unique problem – the question is whether we can come up with a Brighton and Hove solution.

We tried to focus on what kind of help the CityCamp network could bring to this problem and this is where Nick Hibberd had a very focused suggestion.  He pointed out the lack of links between the kind of formal support that he and his team can offer and the informal and practical help which organisations like Fairshare can offer.  We talked about the need to network these informal and formal networks together and also talked about the need to raise the level of information sharing about these issues.

One of the projects which won funding at CityCamp Brighton was the brilliant House of Games proposal from Richard Vahrman which you can read about here (note this is not the finished article).  Richard sat down with Carl Haggerty a few weeks ago to see if we could see a way of piloting this idea in one of the We Live Here projects – Carl’s thoughts on this are here.  Gamification is something which is a big buzz in tech circles at the moment (really balanced Pew Report on it here) but the basic thrust is the idea that we bring competitive and playful experiences into serious tasks.

The combination of these two conversations is the idea of a knowledge badge, a peer rewarded and public accolade which signals that you are a valuable part of this informal/formal knowledge network and that you are available to answer questions and help.

We now need to speak to Richard (which is partly the point of this post – hello Richard!) and see what he thinks about this idea and then we need to sit a few people down (Richard, Me, Carl, Nick, Paul and anyone else who is interested) and see where we can take this.  Will be nagging people to this end.

The other major issue that we think CityCamp Brighton can help address on this topic is digital exclusion which was one of the other projects that got funded this year.  We have a meeting about this next week and I will blog an update then.

Any comments / corrections then please shout!

The next Third Thursday is 21st June and we will be focusing on digital exclusion – put it in your diary!

A quick reflection on why we at Public-i wanted to get involved in CityCamp…

CityCamp brings together a number of things that we feel very strongly about. We believe that you need to build co-productive relationships throughout communities – and you need to include business as well as the public sector with the community. We also believe that things are achieved by the people that turn up – and that you need to provide space for this to happen. And that if you can’t make a contribution to the community you are based in then you can’t tell other people how to do it.

We wanted to help organise CityCamp for all these reasons and also because we think we can offer a practical set of skills to make sure it works (this has been referred to as a ruthless pragmatism, but who can say…).

I have attended some fantastic events, but at the end of it that’s what its been – an event. What we want to build with citycamp brighton is a network – a group of people who not only come together at the March event but continue to meet and work together after that. The Aldridge Foundation funding gives us chance to make this happen – as does the fantastic support from the Council and other groups in the City.

Real stuff, real people

One of the biggest challenges of an event like CityCamp is to make sure that it’s not purely digital – that it reaches out to the community as well and is not hijacked by the digerati who, with very good will, will take things off in a shiny new technological direction. We want to make the community the focus of the event and to build connections between some of the incredibly talented technologists and creatives we have in the City and the people who need their help.

We believe that technology will almost always help bring people together and reduce barriers – but that doesn’t mean it has to be complicated or even cutting edge – it just needs to be useful. So, the focus for us at CityCamp will be on making connections and building things that the real-world community finds useful. Put like that it doesn’t sound all that exciting does it? But it’s getting this simple stuff right that we hope makes all the difference to how you get different groups and communities working together with and, over time, build a common vision of where they live.