Making Space for people and technology

Making Space for people and technology

Benedict Dellot of The RSA has recently authored a new report on the growing phenomenom of Maker Spaces. There’s one near you…did you know?

The report defines MakerSpaces as ‘…open access workshops, hosting a variety of tools, from 3D printers and laser cutters through to sewing machines and soldering irons’.

These unique spaces attract hackers, roboticists, traditional engineering and technical enthusiasts, along with a variety of arts and craft specialists. There is something of a William Morris, Arts and Crafts revolutionary aspect to their public face. Offering as they do, spaces for making and experimentation in a collaborative and supportive atmosphere.

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See more here…pdf

Morris would have it that you should ‘…have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful’. Perhaps in the 21st Century, in a MakerSpace context, their motto should be ‘…beautiful, useful and technically collaborative’. (…great sign over every MakerSpace door?…Ed.)

As part of the RSA report (Ours to Master…)a survey finds that people, when asked, express an interest in Maker philosophy and practice, and would be interested in accessing such facilities. The survey found…

  • 26 percent of people regularly make things for their own use, 49 percent fix things that are broken and 21 percent modify products to better suit their own needs
  • 57 percent would like to learn how to make more things they and their families could use
  • 61 percent would like to have a better understanding of how the things they use work
  • 78 percent think our society is too materialistic and our economy too dependent on consumption
  • 43 percent often feel confused by the pace of technological change and struggle to keep up
  • 24 percent would be interested in using a makerspace in the future

You can read more about MakerSpaces on the pages of The RSA. here. (The report is freely accessible to all).

Maker Spaces in the East of England?

Ipswich Makerspace:

‘Ipswich Makerspace is a Suffolk based group of like minded makers who get together to learn, build and experiment with a huge variety of hardware, software, and technology in general’.      (Source: Ipswich Makerspace, December 2015)   See more here.

Chelmsford Makerspace:

‘Chelmsford Makerspace is a non-profit, community of makers in Chelmsford. We are a group of makers and hackers that get together to share tools and knowledge’. (Source: Chelmsford Makerspace, December 2015). See more here…

Colchester Makerspace:

‘We are developing a maker workshop offering affordable access to basic equipment such as workbenches, pillar drills, soldering irons, sewing machines and saws etc’. (Source: Colchester Makerspace, December 2015). See more here…

Cambridge Makespace:

‘Makespace is a community workshop in Cambridge for making and fixing things, meeting people, working on projects and sharing skills’. (Source: Cambridge Makespace, Decembre 2015). See more here…

Hitchin Hackspace:

‘Hitchin Hackspace is a community organisation devoted to providing everyone with a place to explore all kinds of creative technologies and crafts’. (Source: Hitchin Hacspace, December 2015). See more here…

Thank you to Benedict Dellot for another interesting and cutting edge report. It is interesting to see old concepts of craft and sharing being developed in contemporary communities, to deliver accessible, technology related products and learning. ‘Social engineering’ in its purest form perhaps?

We are surprised, in our brief survey of MakerSpaces in the East, to find no representative group for Norwich. If you know of one, use our contact form and let us know. We’ll run a supplementary piece to spread the word about them, if we missed an opportunity to do so here. Happy making! Ed.

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Where do you really work?

We were putting together some training material for social enterprise development at the office, doing the day job, and rediscovered this Ted Talk by Jason Fried, founder of  37 Signals and the author of Rework.

It’s been a useful tool in the past to get groups to think about the nature of work, their place in it and how to react to the pressure of meetings and interruptions.

Fried makes some telling points about the quality of the interrupted process when we gather in the office. It is, of course, a gentle trumpet for the remote worker and the internet connected working life.

None the less, the argument about how offices are ‘factories for interruption’ and only real work takes place when individuals are ‘remote’ is telling. He also looks at the need for creatives – authors, designers, engineers etc., to access quiet space. As well as debunking the old management myth ‘…if I can’t see you, you can’t be working‘. More often sounded in the 21st Century than you might think.

We like his summary points at the end. Go on, cancel that meeting today!

(Check out our Productive Paradigms page for more articles on the world of work…Ed).

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British Science Week Funding
Events in March 2016

 

There is still funding available for British Science Week during 11th March 2016 to the 20th March, 2016. Both the Kick Start Grants programme for schools with challenges and the Community Grants programme are still available. (If you’re quick…Ed)

Kick Start Grants for schools in challenging circumstances to organise their own events as part of BSW with:

  • Grants of up to £300 for schools to run an activity.
  • Grants of up to £700 for schools to host a science event or activity which involves their students and the local community.

The fund does not put limitations on the type of event/activities that schools can provide. This is entirely up to them.

School activity ideas can include:

    • Carousels of activities from BSA activity packs during lesson time/assembly/lunch time/after school.
    • Quizzes between pupils, classes or even teachers.
    • Presentations from invited speakers on science and/or engineering topics.

Community Grants – of up to £500 for community-based groups and organisations that work directly with audiences who are traditionally under-represented and currently not engaged in science activity.

To be eligible, events and activities must:

  • Target and include hard-to-reach audiences, which include
    • People who are Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic (BAME).
    • People with low socio economic status.
    • Young people with anti-social behaviour, including those not in education employment or training (NEET).
    • People living with a disability.
    • Girls and women.
    • People living in a remote and rural location.
  • Be STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) related.
  • Require funding in order to take place. (The funding is for events and activities that would not otherwise take place due to lack of funding.)
  • Raise the profile of BSW in the community or have local and/or broad media appeal.

Explore the web pages of British Science Week 2016 – get your community, whatever their age, interested in science.

You might also be intertested in Science: not just for the scientists, a new BSA initiative.

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Inequality in Education:
a new web presence for change

iettSnapshotpage

Here at conversationsEAST we are delighted to be able to donate web hosting, design and content creation services and new media support to this new, nascent movement.

Inequality in Education – turning the tide (IETT) is about change in the educational landscape and improving equality of opportunity and outcome for children and young people across England.

interneticon  You can see the new IETT web presence here…

You can follow IETT news on Twitter too:   @Tide_Turning

The web site features not only regular news and featured ideas on the pages of The Tide, the IETT web journal, but also regular newsfeeds from a variety of sources across the education landscape.

Monographia is a growing web resource of research papers and conference contributions that mark key themes for IETT groups. The Debate – filmed is a growing archive of videos that go to the nascent movement’s campaigning and research aims.

If you have an interest in educational reform, or the social inequality agenda, we commend this site to you…Ed.

 

Developing your project web presence?

The conversationsEAST team are keen to offer web support to socially focused web projects in the East of England.

We are particularly happy to support projects led by RSA Fellows, as our donating Partners at SmithMartin LLP, are keen supporters of the Society. We would also like to support the planned development of IETT groups in Nottingham and Oxford.

See our project web offer at conversationsEAST here and contact us for more help, if we can.

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Ideas Festival 2015
Chelmsford, Essex

The Chelmsford Ideas Festival is almost upon us again this year.

chelmsfordideasFestivalimageThe programme of events continues to engage and stimulate Festival-goers across a wide range of cultural, artistic, heritage and innovation themes.

When:  19th October to 1st November 2015

Where: Chelmsford, Essex, UK.

Web: See more details here…

The Chair of Changing Chelmsford Malcolm Noble and Ideas Festival Director Leonie Ramondt , and their teams, have put together a well designed and informative Festival programme – with the creative input of the Anglia Ruskin University Design Collective. (Thanks go to Jeff Bray, Becky Lockwood and Daniel Tubl).

pdfIcon4  You can downoad a pdf copy of the programme here.

 

A couple of key highlights in the programme are offered below…

Engineering Fair at Anglia Ruskin University

Friday 23rd October, 2015 – 10.00am to 4.00pm

Host: Department of Engineering and the Built Environment, Anglia Ruskin
University

Robotics…. Be part of world level engineering breakthroughs, achievements, and products being designed and developed in Chelmsford and Essex. You will have the opportunity to take control and get involved in various activities such as engineering design, 3D printing, using advanced computer models, robotics, aerodynamics, medical engineering, Raspberry Pi and many more. Learn about the change and impact that engineering in Chelmsford and Essex makes nationally and internationally.

Extra Information: Booking required: www.anglia.ac.uk/ community or call 01245684723

Essex Police Future

Thursday 22nd October 2015 – 7.30pm to 9.00pm

Venue: Anglia Ruskin University    Host:  Nick Alston, Essex Police and Crime Commissioner

Essex Police is 175 years old this year. Nick Alston CBE was elected as the first Police and Crime Commissioner for Essex in 2012. He is currently Chair of the Board of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners and Chair of the Police ICT Company Board. He will give us an overview of his experience as Commissioner, reflect on policing in Essex and provide some pointers on the police service of the future.

 

A strong theme of the Festival this year is the notion of Creating the City of the Future. Ideas for city change, walks through the concept of change in Chelmsford and harnessing the power to create – a three part, multi-location event.

Matthew Taylor of the RSA will be exploring the Power to Create the City, harnessing the thematic concepts enagaged in the Society’s Change Aims.

Enlightened City Making

Host:  The Royal Society of Arts   Venue: Chelmsford Cathedral   Date:  21st October, 2015 – 10.00am to 2.30pm

Session One – ENLIGHTENED CITY MAKING

Creativity is at the heart of innovation, enterprise and good places to live. But we are increasingly expected to be resourceful and self-reliant to shape our communities, with the help of amazing digital tools. The RSA says everyone has the power to create and to stival play a role in enlightened, active communities. Using the RSA ‘Change Aims’ we will look at the power to create the city with Matthew Taylor, head of the RSA.

Extra Information: Booking required. Please book online or ring 07421061054

The conversationsEAST team will be at this event, mapping and reporting on this key Festival conceptual driver. Watch our web pages for a full report…Ed.

See you in Chelmsford! See the full Festival programme on-line here.

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We support JDRF,
a great Type 1 Diabetes charity!

Cambridge Coffee Morning for JDRF

Date: Friday 2nd October

Time: 10am – 12.30pm

Venue: Girton College (The Old Kitchens)

Discvover JDRF on-line here...Come along and join us for this informal coffee morning, which will give you the chance to meet other families living with type 1 diabetes. You can find out more about the work of JDRF and the East of England Children and Young People’s Diabetes Network and to visit our our exhibitor stands.

 

At the event will hear about the new glycaemic targets from Matt Williams, and the role of the research nurse from Criona O’brien, diabetes research nurse at the University of Cambridge. So why not come along and join us.

 

emailIcon4  Email east@jdrf.org.uk to book your place to attend.
(You can see a recent review of a JDRF Eastern Region conference here…Ed)
The team at conversations EAST are proud to support the team at JRDF…
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The Programming Historian

Developing our on-line toolkit…

Here at conversationsEAST we are humanists, who work in web publishing with tools and techniques, more often than not devised by others, to create workflows that allow us to share a range of knowledge and experiences with others.

Imagine our delight when the economic historians and project writers in our office  discovered The Programming Historian.

‘The Programming Historian is an online, open-access, peer-reviewed suite of tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate their research’.

If you are interested in big data, the humanities, research and have but a passing acquaintance with ‘code’, then this is a great bookmark to preserve.

The Programming Historian contains principles and techniques across a range of disciplines and thematic approaches to digital data manipulation and publishing…

‘Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Data Management, Data Manipulation, Distant Reading, Mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Network Analysis, Digital Exhibit Building, Programming, and Web Scraping. Our tutorials include nearly a dozen lessons on popular DH tools such as MALLET, Omeka, and QGIS’.

The resources available are all Open Source and are published under a Creative Commons license. They are published to the Gold Open Access Standards and are fully compliant with HEFCE publishing requirements for scholars in the UK.

The portal is a volunteer project and is supported from the Rosenzweig Centre for New Media at the University of New Mexico.

‘This project is an attempt to demonstrate what open access academic publishing can and should be. Please tell your librarian to include the project in your library catalogue’.

We have added it to the conversationsEAST digital toolkit management list for future use.

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Open TED
– share your idea!

 Letting the imagination loose…

What a reservoir of intellectual curiosity and intelligent thought the TED Talks web site is. We would all aspire to be on that stage, in any city across the world, to deliver our magnum opus in those eighteen minutes or less.

Well, some of us would, we suspect?

Well now you can. TED have just called for video submissions for OpenTED, a new initiative that offers all, that is everyone, the chance to vent their idea to the world.

You have, in this case, just six minutes or less to give the world your idea. It might be a new social movement, political idea, artistic initiative or just a personal reflection on an aspect of your life.

Below is a contribution from the performer Tanya Davis, with the filming expertise and technology provided by film-maker Andrea Dorfman.

It is a poem and filmic art, about being alone. It is also a collaboration, to express the idea or commentary using a range of skills. Working together with others to express your idea.

You have until October 15th, 2015 to submit your video idea. It must be a video contribution, of course. It might be…

‘…an idea might offer a new, bold, big-picture way of looking at the world: a broad call for tolerance, a flipped view of human behavior, a breakthrough in the lab that will change our lives. Or it could offer a new way of thinking at micro scale — a new take on a small behavior we do every day, or a new way to get through the workday’. Source: OpenTEd

A small, personal idea, or big statement about an aspect of your life or community. The TED idea democratised. Now there’s an idea worth spreading.

interneticon  You can find the OpenTED small print here.

interneticon  Revisit the TED main web pages here for inspiration.

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Inequality in Education

The Future of Education in England

5 October 2015, 6pm – 9pm   –  The RSA, The Great Room, 8 John Adam Street, London, WC2N 6EZ

“Inequality in Education: The Future of Education in England – Organised by RSA London Inequality in Education Network hosted by Annette Smith, Education Consultant and member of Turning The Tide.

We are delighted to announce two great speakers: Diane Reay, Professor of Education at Cambridge University & Danny Dorling, Professor University of Oxford. Both speakers are passionate and informed critics of the current education system“.

The booking page on Eventbrite offers you full details of this interesting and informative event. On the booking page you can see the key questions that are to be addressed by Diane Reay and Danny Dorling, with an opportunity for you to tender your ideas and comments on the questions ahead of the event.

‘We are doing this because we think it unlikely that any significant changes will be made unless there is a strong social movement supporting progressive reform and we intend the meeting to be a contribution to the building of such a movement’.

eventbriteButton See more on this Eventbrite page here.

You can also review our last conversationsEAST article on Inequality in Education, about the previous group event. See more here.

Here both Pasi Sahlberg and Peter Mortimer gave relevant and commensurately challenging speeches about our emerging movement and ‘the state of the education nation’ in England.

See you on the evening of the 5th October?

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A Digital Toolkit,
for the Arts?

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See your copy here…

Making Digital Work – A digital toolkit for Arts and Culture is one of the latest publications available from The Digital R&D Fund for the Arts.

This is a stunning piece of work, encapsulating business modelling, ideas curation and potentiality for delivery , route mapping and success measurement – all through the meta-filter of the arts and culture agenda.

The toolkit is not a complex piece, nor is it exhaustive, but it does contain processes which any arts focused project can use to identify new opportunities, to plan the business case for the digital work, focus on audience and user value, collaborate, design, build and engage, then evaluate and share.

Simple and effective solutions to arts project planning and delivery in the digital domain.

interneticon You can view the full document or download sections here…

‘The arts sector is fizzing with ideas and creative ambition. Large and small organisations are using digital technologies to deliver dazzling online experiences linked to live events, useful services for learners, interactive displays in physical spaces and so much more’. Source: The Concept – Digital Toolkit

Whether developing the concept in mind with the Six Hats methodology or taking a more mainstream approach to idea development by using the Business Model Canvas, then the toolkit from The Digital R&D Fund for the Arts offers plenty of opportunity to use the techniques best suited to your management team, volunteers or funders.

We like the Business Model Canvas. Using it with our Third Sector clients is a good way to encapsulate the business argument and key considerations for the community enterprise. You can see an example on www.enterprisingcommunities.today here.

Using it here, in the arts and culture context, the main headings have been adjusted to include clarity of thought in the project overview, sales and marketing, operations and resources, staff and management…and finance too.

Contemplating a digital arts or cultural project then the web lends itself to testing, data collection, evaluation and storytelling derived from a completed project. The digital toolkit contains much that is useful in using and shaping output from new media and new technology, within the context of arts delivery.

We recently wrote, on our Communications EAST Toolkit page about The Growthverse, a very useful web service that can help you decide upon and plan deployment of your new media, user relationships and feedback methodologies. We commend it to arts professionals too. Although it is intended for tech start-ups, there is insight to be gained from exploring it, we would argue.

In summation, this is the toolkit for arts and culture in the digital age, bar none. The closing pages contain useful links, not only to the Digtal R&D Fund, but also to the Nesta Creative Enterprise toolkit, a variety of digital capacity resources from the Arts Council and the Design Council Guide to Design.

If you are a practitioner…connect to the internet and diary some laptop time, you will need it.

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Image credit:

News Desk image by Markus Winkler, Creative Commons, Unsplash...

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