Monthly news from @digibrum

FUTURE CITIES CATAPULT JOINS CITY LEADERS IN SMART CONVERSATIONS

Led by the Smart City Commission, we are working with a diverse range of city partners like Innovation Birmingham Ltd, Aston University, WM Police, Canals and River Trust and Social Breakfast to develop and support a programme of smart city integrated projects in East Birmingham.

The smart city demonstrator aims to build on existing investments and programmes of work such as Birmingham Cycle Revolution, Birmingham Connected and Active Parks and contribute to the ambition of the East Birmingham Prospectus for Growth by applying new and integrated ways of using technology, data, infrastructure and city assets to tackle city challenges.

In doing so it aims to accelerate how we can support people and businesses to be more economically active; create the conditions to support better health and wellbeing and build the evidence base that will shape more effective interventions and investments in services as part of the Birmingham ‘Future Council’ programme.

At a recent workshop with city leaders we started to identify the first round of project ideas to take forward, which will now be developed further by working with community groups, citizens and businesses on the ground and provide a starting point for the next edition of the Roadmap. For further information or to get involved click here to contact Nicola Bryant.

CONSORTIUM LEARNS REAL VALUE OF OPEN DATA

A six month project funded by the Cabinet Office, led by Digital Birmingham and with partners Aston University, Boilerhouse, Podnosh and RAWM has clearly highlighted that one of the greatest assets to the Open Data movement are the individuals and local organisations who can use data to achieve their aims.

The Birmingham Data and Skills Hub project has successfully streamlined a process for internal data extraction and publication to Birmingham Data Factory that will help to reduce overheads for future data requests. Focusing on extraction of data from the Northgate housing database (rent and stock data), Digital Birmingham has worked closely with the housing team to create a process to publish data sustainably by direct access to the database's underlying information systems.

Alongside this there was a strong community engagement programme aimed at building data skills through the already established and sustainable programme of social media surgeries and specific community development training in Castle Vale, Sparkbrook and Balsall Heath. The interactions with the community were vital for the success of the project and recognized that data skills are a journey, which needed to focus on citizen’s goals in order to drive their interest in data and data skills.

As part of this engagement work, Boilerhouse worked with members of the community groups in Castle Vale, Balsall Heath and Sparkbrook to develop a very easy to use visualisation tool enabling comparison of council rents with private sector rents. The full report is available here.

WINNER OF LEADERSHIP AWARD

Digital Birmingham’s Kofi Ackah has been recognised for his Leadership Skills at the recent “Celebrating Success Awards 2015 – Corporate Black Workers Support Group”.

He was cited for his considerable work and leadership around the council’s welfare reform activities and last year, it was nationally recognised for its work preparing for the Universal Credit pilot and the ‘My Work Journey’ Digital Logbook which is helping 5,000 unemployed Birmingham citizens seek, obtain and sustain employment in a digital way.