A website and blog by Peter Lewis
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Coworking in Birmingham: Part two
All in all, I think today's coworking crawl was a big success. After the last post, which I wrote in Jibbering Records in Moseley (nice coffee), we took the number 50 bus up into Digbeth and set up camp in Rooty Frooty (£1 pastries and lightening fast internet) at the Custard Factory. Despite the initial confusion about which electric sockets worked and which didn't, it was actually a pretty good place to work, with plenty of space and comfortable seating. We all settled down to some decent work at Rooty's, and stayed there for the rest of the day. Despite allegations of "coslacking" in the comments on my previous post, work did in fact take place; I managed to get a decent chunk of coding done.
Five of us took part over the day; Simon Hammond and Pete Ashton had already met up by the time I arrived in the morning, and stuck around all day. Mike Voong joined us for an hour or so at Jibbering Records, then we later met up with Stef Lewandowski, who was already at Rooty's when we arrived.
There's already talk of more events such as today, and some discussions took place about more semi-permanent homes for future coworking sessions. Keep tracking the #brumcoworking tag on Twitter and keep your eye on the Birmingham coworking wiki for future occasions. All welcome!
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Coworking in Birmingham: Part one
Following the idea being mooted at the recent Birmingham bloggers meet-ups, today is the first decent attempt at coworking in Birmingham. I haven't blogged about the bloggers meet-ups myself, mainly since everyone else seems to have done a pretty good job themselves. I've only been to two out of the four meets so far, but they've been a nice informal gatherings of bloggers, social media people, journalists, techies and artists.
The basic idea of co-working is that people who often work alone from their laptops, from home or an office, get out, go somewhere else together and work in proximity to each other. Instigated with Simon Hammond, today we're having a co-working crawl of various cafes and other places offering free wireless internet around the city. We began over a hearty breakfast at the Kitchen Garden Cafe in King's Heath, and are currently enjoying tea, coffee, chilled Afro music and free wifi at Jibbering Records in Moseley (who incidentially have computers running Ubuntu). Rooty Frooty at the Custard Factory is next...
If you want to track us, or come and join in, then follow the #brumcoworking tag on Twitter and take a look at the Birmingham coworking wiki. I'll also be streaming the occasional live video on my newly created Bambuser channel.
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Photographers' rights
Fellow Birmingham blogger Andy Pryke has recently written about the right to photograph in the UK. He points out that this BBC News article, including its quite interesting comments I might add, describes a worrying increase in the number of mis-informed police officers attempting to illegally stop photographers from taking pictures in public places. In some cases, officers even demanded that the photographer delete their images.
As pointed out by Linda MacPherson, a lecturer in law at Heriot Watt University, taking photographs in public is, except for a few specific exceptions, a right guaranteed by law in the UK. She has produced this rather useful factsheet for photographers, which can be carried around and checked up on if and when the police start making demands.
Austin Mitchell MP has tabled an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons calling on the government to clarify to police the law on the right to photograph, according to the BBC article. Andy Pryke also points out that there is an online petition in support of such a clarification, which can be signed here.
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Friends of the Stars
I bought a CD this week. Exciting stuff, eh? It's not worth a mention, of course, except that I thought I'd give a bit more interweb presence to whom I've discovered are quite a good local band. Friends of the Stars are based in Moseley, in Birmingham.
Somehow - I'm not exactly sure of the sequence of events leading up to it - I ended up on their email list, and they started sending me links to tracks and previews and things available online. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't spam, just that I probably signed up and forgot about it. Anyway, after having listened to their melodious folky kind of sound for a while, I decided to buy their CD, Lighting & Electrical. Click, click, click and I'm done, as is how we're used to these days. It should be here within a couple of days, I thought.
Just a couple of hours later, and Craig, from the band, emails me to say thanks for the purchase, and that since I'm only down the road, he'd just pop the CD through my letterbox. Great stuff. This has to be the antithesis of Amazon and CD WOW, the latter of which ships its CDs to the UK from Hong Kong in order to shave a little off the cost.
Nice one Craig, I'm enjoying your tunes very much.
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John Tighe wins Brummie of the Year 2007!
I'm a couple of days late with this post, but voting has now closed for Brummie of the Year 2007, and the winner is John Tighe, of the Spotted Dog in Digbeth! Congratulations John!
For those not familiar with John, his pub was served with a noise abatement order after over 20 years of being a lively and popular venue in Digbeth, prompted by complaints from residents of newly constructed city-living apartments. The campaign to keep Digbeth vibrant is ongoing. Keep up the good work folks!
Just beaten into second place, was serial blogger and key figure in Birmingham's creative scene, Pete Ashton. Well done mate! Somehow though, I don't think he'll mind coming second to John...
Full details of the poll is on the organiser's website: Birmingham, It's Not Shit.
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Brummie of the Year 2007 - Voting Now Open
Voting is now open for Brummie of the Year 2007.
Vote here!
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University removes right to freedom of speech on campus
I was just about to blog about this, when I realised that my friend Zeth has already done a fantastic job of summing up the recent changes to university policy in this post. Thanks to the joys of the Creative Commons Licence, I can make his comments available here...
I often receive emails from various online services saying there has been a change in their privacy policy, which almost always means you have less privacy than before, and they are now going to share your personal information with another third party. So the real purpose of privacy policies is often to take away your privacy rather than to give you privacy.
This time I received a controversial email from my University that had been forwarded from the centre down eventually to my little corner of geekdom. The email explained that there had been a change in the 'Freedom of Speech' policy (I didn't know we had one), so now anyone from outside the University must be given written permission to speak on campus. So the 'Freedom of Speech' policy now restricts freedom of speech.
Without a lot of careful steering, Universities always tend to drift into ivory tower mode, now we are pulling up the drawbridge too. Here is the email:
Colleagues,
I have attached for your information and subsequent action the revised policy on the Code of the Practice on Freedom of Speech on Campus which was approved by Council on 19 September 2007 to be implemented from 30 September 2007. The Authorising Officer for Freedom of Speech is [Senator McCarthy], Director of [Big Brother] who has nominated me to act on his behalf.
I have also attached a PDF speaker request form which includes a section from the policy regarding conduct of meetings on university premises to be given to people making an application for an outside speaker. I would be grateful if all requests were made on this form with immediate effect.
The Code of Practice defines Outside Speakers as persons who are not students, employees or other members of the University, who are invited to speak on University premises on occasions other than as a normal part of an existing academic programme of study authorised by the relevant budget centre, or as a normal part of a regular careers exhibition or similar event.
I would be grateful if you would cascade this policy and new speaker request form within your School to staff and students who are involved in booking outside speakers.
If you require any further information please let me know.
Thank you
[Corporate Drone X]
So it is a classic bit of Orwellian doublethink where 'Freedom' of speech requires an application form to be submitted three weeks before to obtain permission from a central bureaucrat, thus not actually being free any more but a privilege handed down by a neo-monarchy.
I'm sure the changes to the (un)freedom of speech policy comes from people with seemingly good motives, i.e. to protect us all from those dirty and scary common real people outside the campus gates. Like the British Empire was created with seemingly good motives or those who set up Guantanamo Bay had seemingly good motives. The problem with the British Empire, like a 'Freedom of Speech' policy, is that it is paternalistic.
The British did not trust the 'natives' to run their own affairs; even though the native cultures were thousands of years old, they did not have the signs and symbols of the Western world, so therefore they must be inferior and Western control and Western signs and symbols must be introduced. Likewise, even though dozens of events involving the public have been held on our campus, on almost every week for over 100 years, the Council does not trust academics and students to run their own events involving 'outsiders'. Common sense and good manners must be replaced with the signs and symbols of bureaucracy.
I find it very unlikely that all our academics and students are secretly harbouring subversive ideologies; I find it very unlikely that our academics are secretly communist revolutionaries, Islamic fundamentalists or members of the national front (though I hear the Masons do quite well here). Perhaps even if a minority are, then engagement is surely the correct policy. If the universities stop believing in the power of free thought and open discussion, then why is society funding the universities at all?. If there were radical elements on campus who refuse to discuss with rational academia, then we would need to do a lot more than email a couple of PDFs to combat them.
The most bizarre thing is that the people tasked with implementing this policy are not academics, but the department that deals with accommodation, gardening, postal services, cleaning and so on. I have no idea who [Senator McCarthy] is, but we could (in theory) have someone who started as a gardener or porter telling professors and lecturers who can and cannot speak at their events. University cleaners are the latest recruits in George W. Bush's war on terror.
Even if we put the censorship issues aside for a moment, the required three weeks notice is just not practical for many of the events, including the most dynamic and interesting ones, so it either means the policy will just be ignored or outsiders will be invited onto campus less often. There is a grandfather clause for some existing events, but in general this extra layer of red-tape means the University becomes even more cut off from the public who fund the whole University. British Universities are almost exclusively financed by the tax-paying public. There is an elaborate dance of quangos and bureaucrats between to help burn a bit more cash, but it is the tax-payer who foots all the bills. Research Councils == tax-payers. HEFCE == tax-payers. The grants and subsidised loans that students use to pay their fees == tax-payers.
So in return for all their support, the public, who are paying for the whole thing, need written permission and at least three weeks notice to open their mouths on campus. Charming. Even though I benefit a little from all this tax-payers money, I find this lack of respect for the public somewhat tasteless.
Recently someone was found to have gambled away 4 million pounds of the University's money, i.e. tax-payers' money, no one in the senior administration resigned or lost their job over it; even though the senior administration was responsible for overseeing and reforming the structure that allowed this to happen. If the university's senior administration and council would spend a bit more attention on their core role as custodians of other people's money and therefore know where this money is, then maybe they would have less time to waste on censoring invited guests who speak at University events.
Thanks, Zeth. Though I'm really not surprised. I'm not quite sure what exactly the problem is, which they are attempting to solve with this new policy, but presumably it has something to do with the odd person who came to campus and made them feel a little uncomfortable. However, Albert Einstein quite famously said that for every problem there is a solution which is simple, obvious, and wrong, and I'm convinced that is what's going on here.
Similarly, I've also recently become involved in the Young Greens, an environmental group on campus, affiliated to the Green Party. One of our planned activities for the early part of this semester was to have a stall on campus, handing out some free food as a bit of a gimmick, along with fliers about some upcoming events. However, even to carry out this innocuous activity and even though we are all students, required three week's notice. We were also handed regulations requiring the brand names of all food on the stall to be submitted to the university authorities, along with written recipes. We were also prohibited from using any nuts or eggs. Now, I have a bit of experience of the relationship between university administrations and students, and rather than based on anything useful, this appears to me to be nothing more than an attempt at disincentivising students from carrying out such activities.
But, as a previous senior university colleague of mine frequently used to remind those with whom he came in contact, universities in the 21st century are businesses. I'm extrapolating now, but as such, mustn't any activity which might potentially have a negative impact on the efficiency of the multinational-company's-graduate-training-programme-participant-production-machine be discouraged, shut down or banned? Operating within its current market environment (the inevitable outcome of the sadly unstoppable move towards ever increasing tuition fees in higher education - the issue which first motivated me to get involved in politics by the way), can anything else be expected of universities? University administrations are, I would argue, caught between the rock of failure (and therefore replacement of the management) and the hardplace of their current approach.
The answer? More to come later I guess from me on that, but a refocus on the role of education in today's society at the very least...
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UCE -> Birmingham City University
I wasn't quite sure that I'd read this properly at first, but the University of Central England (UCE) has now become Birmingham City University. Shocking. I know that they've been looking at a name change for a while now, but it's now official, and this is what they chose. They've even got a blue logo and everything.
Right, the only thing left for us decent Brummies to do is to petition to get the University of Birmingham (my university) renamed to the Aston Villa University, with all associated claret and blue livery. Who's with me? (Okay, I suppose that Aston University has a headstart on that one, but that would be less fun for me...)
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