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Beginnings and endings – visualised…

‘Each of us narrates our lives as it suits us…’ says Elena Ferrante in her novel Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. it is possible to recognise the great truth in this reflection. We strive to become what it is we want to be, even sometimes presenting a face to the world that we do not, in truth, cleave to inside us.

Now technology can map our journey from beginning to end. The humble laptop or mobile device can show this life track to the casual visitor. The wonder of the novel is it’s ability to draw us into the individual life, to be able to join the sole reflection of the journey.

The visual displayed below shows the power of aggregation. Making moving pictures of the lives of many. From their birth to the place of their death. In the aggregation comes another story.

It is an informative, broad brush canvas about the creation of communities, cities and centres of culture. It is also, to our mind, both art and science.

See the movie on YouTube You can see the original film on YouTube here…

Researchers at The University of Texas, Dallas have tracked the beginning and end of life of notable figures in history from 600BC to the present day.

The database of notables was drawn from Freebase, a Google owned data service, and the skills and enterprise of the individuals is seen as a proxy for the spread of culture across the globe.

It is a ‘western’ view of cultural dissemination. It omits much influence drawn from the movement of Asian and African peoples through time. One of the most stunning sequences in the film is the movement of people from the east coast of the USA to the west.

It does visualise the rising importance of the West Coast, particularly in the Twentieth Century. Showing how inevitable the collapse of Native American culture had become.

On balance, a great presentation that shows the cultural spread of European ideas, over space and time.

Useful links:

interneticon You can find a thoughtful reflection on the novel by Elena Ferranti here. It is written by Rohan Maitzen.

interneticon The original research was featured in the journal Nature: see Schich, M. et al. Science 345, 558–562 (2014).

interneticon  Freebase data is available for use under open license. Explore the contents here, you can see how to use the data more explicitly here.

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Never retiring?

We are living longer, even despite social and economic disparities in society. We are retiring later and some individuals are not seeking to retire at all. A trend to longer, healthier lives means that there is more experience and energy that older people can offer than ever before. (You can see an Office of National Statistics report on retirement age from 2012 here…Ed.)

As a society do we value the mature contributor? Do we capitalise on the learning and earning capacity of this age cohort? Jonathan Collie thinks not. He is looking to raise enough funds to hold a conference on ‘The Age of No Retirement‘ on the 1st to the 6th October, 2014.

‘…‘The Age of No Retirement?’ is Britain’s first ever national conference to debate & revalue our opportunities in retirement. Gathering experts, policy makers, key stakeholders and the public we will explore retirement and the opportunities we can provide in an ageing, technological and engaged society’.

It is planned that the first two days of the proposed conference will look at, debate and construct visual outputs and nascent policy proposals around some key themes…

  • Work & employment
  • Ageism & prejudice
  • Health & well-being
  • Technology & communication
  • The plus-50 consumer
  • Self, family & society
  • Knowledge & education

After a closed day of consolidation and publication there will be a public, three day open event for the review of, and a wider consultative approach to, the work and its outcomes.

 Give to this project on KickStarter Help fund this important event on ageing here…

The Collie manifesto on ageing has it’s own practical outcome too. Jonathan founded, and has gained wide support for, a new social business called Trading Times.

The project connects local employers with mature workers who are often retired, single parents or carers. They may not need a full-time job, but can offer a wide range of skills to interested employers.

interneticon  You can discover how Trading Times works here

We think this is an important debate. Not only because the conversationsEAST office is a ‘no-retirement’ zone, but because the potential contribution of this section of society is untapped. Trading Times is not the only player in town, but could provide an economic model that works well for the mature employed.

Why not a Trading Times hub in every RSA region? (It’s not immediately obvious from the web site, but we suspect that TT is a London centric initiative at present…Ed.)

In conclusion, the Age of No Retirement constitutes a move to an important new social shift. Support it, whatever your age, as the outcomes may condition the whole life contribution you can make. Wherever you are on your journey now.

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Is yours a socially productive place?

Today sees the launch of a new RSA report, generously sponsored and in collaboration with British Land – Socially productive places – Learning from what works: lessons from British Land – born out of an earlier RSA conference.

Social productivity is the additional social value that can be created through better relationships between citizens, society, business and public services…

The report is a long letter to developers, communities and planners, essentially pleading the case that ‘…long term property value is driven by the long term economic relevance of an asset’.

sociallyproductiveplacescoverpic-mA socially productive place would build community capacity to benefit from and drive growth, and increase resilience to shocks and give an ability to adapt to new circumstances. This is not a new idea. The evidence in the report tracks community development progressive initiatives from early EU regional funding to the New Deal for Communities.

What is new, perhaps, is the tight focus on new skill acquisition by all partners and a fresh focus on method and delivery for impact. The same refocus is taking place in the community finance sector, where the ‘impact investor’ and how outcomes are mapped and delivered is a priority for funders, project planners and community partnerships. The report exercises this viewpoint well.

pdfIcon4   Download a complete copy of this report here…

(As an example of this new social finance mode of delivery see how Social Enterprise East Midlands worked in collaboration with Big Society Capital to deliver an informative and effective mapping session for politicians, social bankers and financial intermediaries in this new sector. See more here…Ed.).

The RSA Report also shows how private capital is developing both it’s land bank and its ideas with impact in mind. The report references brands such as Asda ‘... adopting a ‘community venturing’ approach, forming partnerships with charities and public services‘.

Discover more about shopping for shared value and community venturing in a recent edition of Matthew Taylor’s blog – read more here.

Planning should be thought of as a front-line service.

The success of a development should be judged by its impact on those who use it and its ability to contribute to a broader set of social and economic outcomes, the report declares. Building high quality public realm is expensive, but, says the report, privatising public space is not the answer.

Accessible public realm is an important feature of social productivity places – places designed to support social and economic connectivity. When built, the people must come.

To achieve the above, then there are a number of often new issues to wrangle with for key players in the development process. Investing in community relationships, by any mature, established corporate entitity requires agility and commitment. The report focuses on three key elements…

  • Successful community investment takes time and effort by developers, including long term consistent representation, engagement by senior executives and dedicated staff.
  • Local political support is essential, site specific planning frameworks are not.
  • The results for developers can be profitable as quality of public realm drives rents, and local consent for density allows greater floorspace yield from a site.

The Cambridge sub-region:

One of our own sub-regional cities features in the report too. Cambridge, which quietly broke out of green-belt constraints in the 1990’s, created new communities and growth areas. These well designed and built communites, although having offered an increase in take up of local services were less successful, the report indicates, in increasing employment in those new communities. They have, however, increased pressure on transport links.

As universities become ever increasing drivers of economic development, then local areas should increasingly consider graduate retention as an important part of their
social and economic development thinking, the report highlights.  Working with both universities and developers to pursue this goal should be a strategic priority for the future. Certainly a key development driver for Cambridge, being the world class research nexus that it is.

Finally, the report gives readers examples of non-linear, non -traditional development models which utilise public spaces for community benefit in innovative ways.

One such featured is Incredible Edible – whose growth has been achieved by by-passing bureaucratic processes, ‘…which rely on a narrow account of how value is created and maintained’.

interneticon  Discover the Incredible Edible Network here – just one of the great things to come out of Yorkshire…

In summary, this is an important paper, which whilst containing no ravishing new insights or philosophy, should score very, very highly with the community development sector in the way that it brings together, in a new meld, a variety of distinct skill sets to map a new way forward  for developers, planners, politicians and community groups.

You can still find the content of the original conference, and the papers presented by a list of distinguished speakers here, on The RSA web site.

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Being a creative person…

In his recent RSA Annual Lecture, Matthew Taylor espoused creativity. How the RSA should exist to ‘…empower people to be capable, active participants in creating the world we want to live in…’

See the movie on YouTube See the original film on YouTube here…

phoneIcon You can listen to a full audio broadcast of the event here too…

In his lecture Matthew argues that we stand on the edge of a vast plain of opportunity. Social, technological and philosophical changes in the last century have the potential to enable every person to be creative, in the widest sense.

His core argument cites Amartya Sen, amongst others, who have argued that with the creativity that education and open-ness deliver, runs alongside a reliance on resources. These must be garnered, deployed and accounted for too.

He does stress that in this century those resources are, or can be for most, free. This journal, for example, is a product of imagination and the utilisation of Open Source software to create and deliver information and opinion to a social network.

Although we would bind ourselves to the argument it does not fully extend itself, yet, into the sphere of hardware. The technology we need to deploy free assets still comes at a cost, a la Amartya Sen.

Matthew also presses us to the concept that creativity is not the sole remit of high culture alone. For a creative individual, it is perhaps starting a new socially focused enterprise, writing and publishing new works or working with others to deliver societal change.

This notion of ‘the social’ is a strong theme in the lecture. Matthew argues for the collapse of ‘Fordism’ and traditional passive consumption of services in the local authority arena. The social transaction in the workplace and wider civic society itself undergoing dramatic change at the social/technological interface. This change, the lecture makes clear, is still under way. Destination unknown.

In the final part of the lecture we hear of two key restraints on creativity.

One is the ever increasing ‘gap’ to reach those who enjoy privilege and wealth. Matthew cites Thomas Piketty’s recent argument that the traditionalist, narrow pyramidal social and economic structures of the past continue to eat into the resources, and undertake exploitation of, the majority in the present. The spectre of Marx is at the feast, even for Piketty.

Secondly, the Weberian notion of ‘splitting’ is a key restraint argued for by our lecturer. ‘Social pyramidism’ is reflected in the largest corporations, whether in the civic domain or in private hands. Where individuals are completely constrained by function and hierarchy…to the detriment of their own creativity.

We would probably extend this argument slightly further, in that the traditionalist, elitist and pyramidal organisation creates a culture of fear, not of creativity. All creative people recognise the tone of those emails, the sense of ‘beyond my pay grade’, that any attempt at initiative and new thinking can create.

This personal creativity is fostered, we would argue, in the private, domestic domain to the disregard of the corporate structures that the individual labours under….perversely perhaps, in order to acquire the technology to be properly free.

In conclusion, the lecture pitches us into the argument of ‘civic effects’, where success for a creative society will be an ad-mixture of engagement in civil society, the activation and support of creative ‘doers of things’ and the press to change entrenched behaviours, in order to disrupt the traditional pyramidal approach.

It’s a powerful argument from and for the RSA and should be heard widely.

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Something for the summer?

Fun and intellectual stimulation in the sun...

Now with added RSA

Lulworth Castle – July 31st to August 3rd 2014

Bestival booking pages here…

Heading away from the Eastern Region over the summer period? Spending some time on the South Coast? A great event with some inspiring and refreshing RSA talks will be taking place at Camp Bestival 2014.

‘The sister festival of the Isle of Wight’s Bestival, in its first year Camp Bestival was awarded ‘Best New Festival’ at the UK Festival Awards and has since won Best Family Festival three times at the awards in 2009, 2010 & 2013.

Set in the majestic grounds of Lulworth Castle, on Dorset’s dramatic Jurassic coastline, Camp Bestival is jam-packed with entertainment, from stellar musical morsels and cultural delights to stunning sideshow attractions and lashings of family fun.  Featuring a truly enormous kids’ area your little’uns will be utterly spoilt for choice. 

With a host of thrilling activities from soft play and circus skills to go-carts and glitter, there’s plenty of excitement for kids of all ages. Plus, there are kids’ shows and performances on the Castle Stage and in the Big Top, daring antics to be had at the Freesports Park, and fairytale escapism in the Dingly Dell’.

Narrative source: Camp Bestival web pages – see more here…

The RSA Hour

vintagetravellersPic
Vintage travellers…ready for Dorset?

The RSA Team will be boarding their summer holiday charabanc and leaving the metropolis for the Dorset countryside. With tents, wellies and a relaxed mind, ready to be entertained themselves and to have the children beguiled too.

 

Fellows, and the assembled audience, will be able to enjoy The RSA Hour events on Saturday and Sunday of the weekend…

Saturday 2 August at 10am.
Psychologist Dr Ben Ambridge’s innovative interactive investigation of intelligence.
‘What is intelligence? Where does it come from, and why does it even matter? How much do you know and understand about what makes you tick? And how good are you at predicting other people’s behavior…or even your own?

What’s the link between intelligence and curly fries? Are atheists cleverer than religious people? What about men vs women, or right- vs left handers? Does listening to heavy metal or Mozart make you smarter? What do different shapes taste like? Are you stupider than a monkey?’

Sunday 3 August at 1pm.
Dr. Kevin Fong – our fascination with the final frontier.
‘Of the men who once walked on the Moon, only a handful now remain.  The space shuttle, the most remarkable space craft ever built, is gone.  Our ambitions appear to be failing almost as fast as the Government funds available for space exploration.

Variously described as ‘TV’s face of science’ and the ‘Brian Cox of medicine’, self-confessed space junkie Dr. Kevin Fong asks – have we come to the end of our fascination with the frontier of space? What social and scientific value did our curiosity about space really add, back here on Earth? Perhaps in the future we will look back upon the endeavour of human space flight as we do the building of the pyramids…’

Narrative source: RSA events web pages.

interneticon  You can find the Bestival booking pages here…

interneticon  See more about the RSA Hour on the pages of the RSA web site here.

You can find RSA East regional events here, and check out what’s on at The House too on the pages of conversationsEAST.

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Iconic metaphor for enterprise?

As part of an occasional conversationsEAST series on major architectural developments across the globe, we take a look, in this article,  at the The Jockey Club Innovation Tower (JCIT) in Hong Kong.

The JCIT is home to the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) School of Design, and the Jockey Club Design Institute for Social Innovation.

vimeoVideoButtonpic-m  Discover the original video on Vimeo here…

The Tower, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects of London, appears from one angle to be reminiscent of the prow of a great ship, cutting through the Honk Kong island landscape.

A formidable block, which at first appears to teeter or lean from its base, yet which is  an elegant building, seeming to move forward, conveying a sense of motion.

The tower contains 15,000 square meters of space, and can accommodate some 1,800 students and staff. It crests at a height of 78 metres.

We think the tower is a great metaphor for an enterprising community. Hong Kong, enjoying unique relationships with Britain and China because of its history, none the less has in the Jockey Club Charitable Institute and the islands’s seats of learning, a powerful admixture to reap social and economic change in the region.

Indeed, the building’s occupants define its mission as being ‘…initiated by PolyU and the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, Jockey Club Design Institute for Social Innovation (J.C.DISI) convenes university expertise, curates trans-disciplinary projects, and constructs partnerships for social well-being and positive systemic change’. 

tower drawings - Hadid ArchectsExploring the Hadid Architects web pages, the drawings of the tower, confined by the landscape the building is set in for sure, none the less look like drawings for rotational cam devices – using an engineering metaphor to illustrate the movement of  all the enterprise contained within.

Supporting the circular energy idea, despite the many contradictions of Hong Kong, are PolyU  projects like SOCIA. Striving to co-ordinate and facilitate research and social change with the English speaking world,  SOCIA looks to ‘…articulate partnership, with government, business, community and academia, for design-embedded social innovation projects – to incubate a new generation of graduates and young designers as novel thinkers, activists and change-makers from Hong Kong‘.

interneticon  See SOCIA and its projects on their web pages here…

A building is simply a shelter. In the case of Hadid’s tower it is also a shelter for ideas, community engagement, innovation and education. If the concrete construct is a metaphor for innovation, it’s enduring legacy could be substantial and durable change in the communities that lie within its hinterland?

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The Great War – the wrong turn to end all?

The weekend of June 28th 2014 marked the centenary of the death of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, at the hands of Gavrilo Princip. Arguably sparking the events that put in train the First World War.

This reflection revealed a surprising and diverse range of resources about the Great Conflict. Many, perhaps, at odds with the perceived understanding of the war and its consequences. Remarkable in as much that so much is yet to be discovered, even after a century has passed…

Image: A single German war grave near Ypres, commemorating over 40,000 of their lost combatants…

The weekend in East Anglia in 2014 was fresh, warm and sunny, as it was across England on that weekend in 1914. (You can see a detailed weather forecast from The Meteorological Office for June 1914 here  pdfIcon4…Ed.) It is unlikely that Princip, in his passion to undermine Austrian dominance of his culture, was thinking of the words of Thomas Hoccleve, see below.

His ambitions were arguably localised, national, but the outcome of his act  was trans-continental. With the destruction to come, the terrible devastation of war, linked to and having an unfortunate long echo back to the previous tumultuous tragedies in France during the 15th Century. The anguish is contemporary still.

Allas! what peple hathe your werre slayne!
What cornes wastede, and doune trode and shent!
How many a wyfe and maide hathe be forlayne,
Castrels doune bete, and tymbered houses brent
And drawen doune, and alle tortore and rent!
The harme ne may not rekened be ne tolde;
This werre wexethe all to hore and olde…

Thomas Hoccleve, Poet & Clerk, London
‘An appeal for Peace in France’ (1412)

Princip, part of a team of six Bosnian-Serb radicals dedicated to their plan,  was standing outside a cafe in Franz Josef Street, reflecting on an earlier failed assassination attempt upon the Austrian Archduke by a co-conspirator that day. When, seeing the royal vehicle, engine stalled  after taking a wrong turn, he leapt forward with his revolver, and from a distance of five feet, changed history.

This story of ‘cataclysm by happenstance’ continues to provoke debate and divide about how the next few months saw progress into war, but also about the wider legacy of Princip’s actions, even after a hundred years has passed. The narratives still differ, both historic and contemporary, often in surprising ways.

Modern Sarajevo remains a divided city, politically and culturally, to this day. With Princip seen as hero or devil depending upon the view of historical events taken from the city centre. To mark the Sarajevan centenary Andrew MacDowall, in The Guardian newspaper, has written an interesting and insightful article on how stands the political front-line concerning Princip.

You can discover MacDowell’s article on-line here…

In Eastern Sarajevo, from the view point of the Serb Republic, Princip is a national hero,. His actions freeing the city from Austrian dominance. However, for the Bosnian Muslim population Princip’s actions bought about an end to a golden era of Austrian administration. The Muslim population look to the grand edifices of civil society, schools and railways of the Austrian Empire as evidence of their argument.

Even after a hundred years, residents of a strife torn city cannot agree on a single, conciliatory view of their history. This set us thinking about that sunny day in 1914. What were, or what did, contemporaries to Princip think about the coming events and their out turn?

We turned to the Project Gutenberg on-line library. Looking through the project’s World War 1 bookshelf we discovered, amongst the usual, deeply moving and contemporary military narratives, a surprising and very different view of events and understanding of the ‘culture’ of war, particularly of conflict in other places.

This writer did not know of a Mills and Boon, Kiplingesque  literary  oeuvre developed around events of the war. Deeply at odds with the first person narrative of other, military writers, but perhaps born of a then contemporary optimism for Empire, incomplete knowledge and the heady ‘home by Christmas’ approach.

The Gutenberg archive also makes available to the general reader a selection of European political writing on the Great War. We found the account of pre-war diplomacy and events from Viscount Haldane both disturbing and revealing about political attitudes and actions towards European conflict. See more here…

interneticon  You can discover the Gutenberg Project library World War bookshelf here…

Red Cross Girls cover picMargaret Vandercook in her The Red Cross Girls with the Russian Army, (John Winston Co., Philadelphia, 1916)  writes about war and combat as a sort of Mills & Boon romance adventure. Dashing young men in foreign places, capturing the swooning hearts of kindly young women. Published in 1916, it arguably represents a canon of juvenile fiction, that was blind to, or unknowing of the true horror of warfare at any front-line.

There is a sort of breathless, adventure story pace to the book, at odds with the newsreel and written narratives we have come to know about the Great War and other conflicts in the 20th and 21st centuries.

There is in this bookshelf collection a fascinating insight into the power of Empire and the loyalty created in military service.

In Talbot Munday’s Hira Singh – When India Came to Fight in Flanders  lies the fictionalised story of a group of Sikh soldiers captured by the German army in Flanders and transported back to ‘Constantinople’, who then escaped and marched overland to Kabul in Afghanistan to rejoin the British Army in their fight in Europe again.

One hundred Indian troops of the British Army have arrived at Kabul, Afghanistan, after a four months’ march from Constantinople. The men were captured in Flanders by the Germans and were sent to Turkey in the hope that…they might join the Turks. But they remained loyal to Great Britain and finally escaped, heading for Afghanistan. They now intend to join their regimental depot in India, so it is reported.
New York Times, July, 1915 (Talbot Munday)

Although fiction, with some of the language jarring by modern cultural norms, and being written by a European,  the story none the less provides insights into the nature of leadership, how men who were accomplished warriors from another culture, might have seen the conflict in Europe with empathetic eyes.

The archive does not contain any reflection from Indian sources, but when looking at the contribution of the Indian Army and Marine service to the conflict, there is little doubt that support there was.

How profound, prompted a look at the detail of the contribution of the Indian Army in the Great War? Details of the 1 million Indian troops who served in France, Mesopotamia and other battle zones can be found on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission web pages. interneticon  See more here…

Closer to home are a range of projects and community activities to remember the Great War in detail.  One such is the work done by Fellows in Chelmsford, as part of a Heritage Lottery funded  project – Chelmsford Remembers,  and which will be launched as part of the Essex Remembers event, which involves both Essex County Council and Chelmsford City Council, to held at Hylands House on the weekend of 13th/14th September.

We look forward to supporting Fellows in the project by delivering a ‘web special feature’ about this exciting social history journey of discovery. (You can find the Chelmsford War Memorial web site here – this is a wonderful resource, with images and detailed biographies of the 359 men commemorated on the Great War Memorial in Chelmsford, Ed.)

Even after one hundred years, the local and social is as telling and moving as ever. Princip would probably still recognise the physical landscape old Sarajevo, if not the political one, whilst great new discoveries and insights lay waiting in the family archives of Chelmsford we suspect.

Newer on-line resources for The Great War

interneticon The Google Cultural Institute – The First World War

A new web resource, dedicated to the art, politics and history of the great conflict. Referencing major UK museum collections, but also providing insights into history from a surprising variety of sources.

 interneticon  Europeana Exhibitions – Untold Stories of the First World War

A  new resource offering insights into how ‘… it was the ordinary men and women who were affected the most. This exhibition gives those personal accounts from across Europe for the first time, based on stories and items contributed by the public’.

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Web? Writing? Whither?

The web has promoted a revolution in media delivery and consumption,  and has generated a similar paradigm shift in production processes and work flows. Whether for the corporate giants of this world, or the lonely writer crafting a masterpiece in his or her garret.

 

Evidence of the changes in news and visual media were well illustrated in a recent RSA lecture by John Ryley, Head of Sky News. His father, he tells us, was a vicar’s son, who was profoundly affected by his son’s elevation to the ranks of journalism.

You can hear the lecture, and an introduction by Matthew Taylor of The RSA, with an audience Q&A, by using the audio player below…

Rolling News – the Backbone of a Digital Future by Royal Society Of Arts on Mixcloud

 

In his lecture John Ryley describes his own early acquaintance with television. Describing it as a pseudo-religious experience, with the family sitting in rows, silent, facing an iconic piece of equipment, bathed in a particular blue light.

Web technologies and new software have also promoted a similar revolution in print journalism, which  that and the ubiquitous access that the web offers to any journalist, would be or otherwise, the chance to profoundly affect their ability as humans to tell simple stories.

Why do we write, and become journalists, historians, authors, self published or otherwise? Has technology really affected the way we look at the word on paper and on screen?

George Orwell, writing in 1946, mapped the landscape of why we write. That perceptive voice is still being heard from Manhattan offices to Cumbrian writerly retreats…

  • “Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed”.
  • “Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity”.
  • “Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude”.

Collected Essays, by George Orwell, Why I Write (1946)  http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au

Orwell’s philosophy of the narrative is being flexed for the internet age at the The New York Times.  Long an innovator in print journalism technology, they have recently published an article on the creation of their new back office production engine for the newspaper.

What is trans-figurative for New York Times journalists is the new focus on web and mobile as the default primary templates in this production process. The ability to blend digital content  for traditional press production is not an incidental or trivial outcome, it is imperative to keep ‘paper on the street’, but it is a secondary outcome of the creative writing and editorial process. This is new.

You can read the New York Times article about their new CMS, content management system, here.

It is also interesting that it is not only production processes and outputs that are being blended. The Mozilla Foundation, creator of the Firefox web browser and scion of the radical, open internet, has recently been the recipient of a grant “…of roughly $3.9 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which promotes innovation in journalism”.

With the money Mozilla will build a new ‘comments’ software for the New York Times and the Washington Post. It is remarkable that both newspapers are the properties of major league capitalists, but this non-profit initiative is geared to giving readers the chance to generate content, and to take part in the journalistic process by offering the writers direct feedback on their articles in new and  innovative ways.

A new blend of capital, charity and community engagement, which may well transform newspaper publishing?

Finally, amidst all this corporate activity and development at scale, technological innovation for the lone writer has not been lagging behind. From your own desk you can change the world one article at a time by using the services of Medium – a mixture of blogging platform, paid for content, social networking and collaboration tool.

With a beautifully designed interface, and tools that are intuitive and graceful, you can craft stories, news and research that are delivered in an elegant format to your readers.

We like Medium. Its content can be challenging and provocative, but it is also a place where the thoughtful, considered article can find a home. From new fiction to a story of how the cellular structure of the nematode worm has an impact on human brain function, sculpted with light…all writing is here. (You can find the worm article here…).

Of course, as an RSA Fellow in the East of England, you could publish your thoughtful piece in the pages of conversationsEAST. That’s new too!

Send copy at any time to editor (at) conversationseast.org  …your audience awaits.

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Students rising to the CIPD Challenge

University of Bedfordshire
Learning in Bedfordshire

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) is a professional association for human resource management professionals. It is headquartered in Wimbledon, London, England. The organisation was founded in 1913 and has over 130,000 members internationally working across private, public and voluntary sectors.

Bedfordshire Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development recently worked with the University of Bedfordshire (pictured) on the CIPD Challenge.

The University of Bedfordshire is based in Bedford and Luton, the two largest towns in Bedfordshire. A campus in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire is for students studying Nursing and Midwifery. A further campus in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, teaches business studies, electronic engineering, and telecommunications.

It has approximately 24,000 students. Nearly 3,000 international students study with the university. The university was created by the merger of the University of Luton and the Bedford campus of De Montfort University in August 2006 following approval by the Privy Council. In 2012 it achieved FairTrade status.

CIPD Bedfordshire Group Committee members, Paula Grayson, Sandra Brown and Letitia Winston worked with Sarah Jones from the University of Bedfordshire on the CIPD Challenge in the practice week for undergraduates on the BA Hons. in HRM.

On 3 March 2014, students were briefed on four “Consolidating Culture” challenges to provide good practice HR processes. The guiding principle was to design a process which should assist in consolidating and reinforcing the culture of the organisation.

(Over time the CIPD have developed a comprehensive, effective and wide range of resources for HR professionals. One aspect of the work is the creation of a CIPD Profession Map. Integral to this is the Courage to Challenge Model, which is part of a sequence of themes that look at behaviours around curiosity, decisive thinking, collaboration and being a winning influencer. All skills that the Bedfordshire students would have needed to deploy, in order to complete their assignment….ED).

They needed to use good practice guidance from the CIPD and other sources, remembering organisations are operating in difficult economic times. All additional costs needed to be justified in terms of improving productivity, increasing employee engagement or reducing an existing employee cost pressure. Each team was asked to choose one challenge from:

•  designing a new induction process for a large successful retail organisation to induct and socialise recruits, remembering to embed the strong values as soon as possible, while ensuring health and safety together with all legal requirements were fulfilled from day one

•  using social media in recruitment and selection for a small and relatively unknown web design company needing a web designer who could work within a performance driven culture with tight deadlines to meet client needs. They had to improve the poor job description and person specification written by the Managing Director, including taking out illegal elements, then outline their campaign and process, especially how social media could be used in the short-listing stage

•  improving motivation at a recruitment agency providing education professionals to the local authority and individual schools where the staff are partly paid on commission. They needed to address the low staff retention rate and high absence rate through appropriate non-financial rewards to recognise and provide incentives to staff

Students formed their teams, chose their challenges and got to work.

On 6 March, Sarah, Paula, Sandra and Letitia judged their proposals, selecting a runner-up team and a winning team. The presentations were all excellent, offering thoughtful, appropriate and legal advice to their organisations.

Their professionalism demonstrated how much they had learned during their course, not only about Human Resources but also how to write and present practical solutions to employment issues using good practice. The runners-up were given University of Bedfordshire conference folders.

The five students in the winning team will each have two days of work shadowing with CIPD Bedfordshire Group committee members.

Article contributed by Sarah Jones and Paula Grayson

(If the University has an image of the Challenge Teams, or the winners ceremony, email it to the editor and we will add it to this narrative…ED.)

University image by Kriscollins at en.wikipedia [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], from Wikimedia Commons

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The city. The future. The optimism.

Leaving the opera in the year 2000!

Leaving the opera image
Image: Albert Robida, 1882 – The Public Domain Review, 2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A wonderful vision of city and cultural life, imagined in 1882. Even in the 21st century it is hard to contemplate leaving a cultural event in a city, stepping into your floating air carriage and drifting off home in ease and solitude.

Even after the most vigorous Tannhauser at the interneticon Royal Opera House, a trip on the Northern Line to return to the solace of High Barnet bears no comparison.

We have not given up on the city yet, though.

Our recent Fellows Annual dinner in the East of England was held in the surroundings of interneticon Emmanuel College in Cambridge.  Dating from 1584, the original Dominican Priory has been embraced by later buildings, yet Fellows were able to hear an entertaining and informative after dinner talk by Matt Lane, Head of the Royal Opera House site at Thurrock, the interneticon Bob and Tamar Manoukian Production Workshop, where ROH productions are built and delivered to cities.

The conversation also ranged across the occasion of the region’s forthcoming conference at the University of East Anglia. The programme for which includes Norwich Fellows session on Empowering Invisible Norwich and another on What is a Learning City? So although we will not arrive by hover car, the idea of the city will continue to echo.

Extending the city:

Writing just before the start of this century Peter Hall, in his book Cities in Civilisation – Culture, Innovation and Urban Order ( Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1998) was minded that…

At the turning point between the twentieth century and the twenty-first, a new kind of economy is coming into being, and a new kind of society, and a new kind of city: some would say no city at all, the end of the city as we know it, but they will doubtless prove wrong…

Hall goes on to develop his argument about societal change and stresses the enormous impact of technology on urban dwellers across the globe. This is true, but the forecasts of the end of the city have proved somewhat premature.

In fact, the building, or extending of cities, continues to be a hot political issue. For the forthcoming report by Sir Michael Lyons there is an indication that he will recommend that cities should be allowed to expand at their edges, a return to the New Town concept perhaps. With councils free to borrow and invest in house building and bringing reform of land release for house building to the table.

This latter point outlines how strong the the High Victorian concept of urban spread as an entirely bad thing remains. Surely the point is what sort of urban extension or city growth you achieve. We must not build urban ‘rookeries‘, or blanket ‘Bedford Brick‘ box extensions across acres of green fields either, we would argue.

Land release for social housing or city corporation development will be a thorny issue for private landowners, what ever the political persuasion of the originating idea, we suspect. You can see this debate outlined in more detail in a recent article from Patrick Wintour in The Guardian here.

Farming the city:

Using existing infrastructure in conurbations for innovative purposes is immensely appealing. Using it to farm, to develop new urban and social businesses based on food, new flowers and green space cultivation is a great way to deliver new skills, better diets and employment into communities, we would argue at conversationsEAST.

Robida in 1882, or Hall in 1998, could not have imagined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology  interneticon MITCityFARM project.

 “As part of the City Science Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, we explore the technological, environmental, social and economic design of scalable systems capable of producing affordable and high quality food in the heart of our future cities”.

If you have an interest in this green aspect of the debate an on-line visit to MIT is worth it. The MITCityFARM team are working in three key areas.

  • Re-thinking the ‘grow it there, eat it here’ agenda
  • reviewing the ‘urban infrastructure facade’
  • developing global open access course-ware, to make knowledge about agriculture available to all.

In the East of England, the agricultural heartland of the UK, arguably, there must be Fellow’s projects that can be blended into delivery of vertical gardens, rooftop farms or the reclaiming of industrial and derelict sites for community owned small holdings or gardens? (Write to the Editor, let us know, we’ll do a feature…Ed.)

The edge of the city, in the city garden:

A blending of  city growth concepts and urban farming/community greening agendas come together in the now, with the recent release of the short list for the interneticon Wolfson Economic Prize.

The Wolfson Prize team undertook research to see what sort of urban development was uppermost in people’s minds. The Garden City was by far the most popular ‘civic choice’ of growth mechanism. Simon Wolfson talks about the design choice in this short film below…

Consequently, the five prize shortlist contenders have been asked to submit designs for a new Garden City. You can see the individual practices in competition here.

In conclusion, maybe the time is now right. We have innovative thinking on edge development, an energised architectural sector with modern materials and community sensibility, coinciding with increased interest in city farms and Garden Cities from the civitas.

Who cannot have an optimistic view of our cities?

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Image credit:

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

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