Tag Archives: Birmingham City Council

Idea: A tool to make it easy to subscribe to web-based lists of Twitter accounts

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Here’s an idea: a tool (which could be web based, or a browser plug in, or a mobile app; or a feature added to existing Twitter clients such as TweetDeck), which would take the URL of a page with a list of links to people’s Twitter profiles, like the one at http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/twitter, which I set up and maintained in a previous career,

Part of Birmingham City Council's list of Twitter accounts, showing those of parks' rangers

and either subscribe the operator to them all, or do that and then create a Twitter list containing them all.

Optionally, it could first present a checklist, from which individual accounts could be selected, or removed.

Would someone like to make this happen?

Politician pin ups – open-licensed pictures, please

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Politicians, like visits to the dentist and taxes, are a necessary evil. We all moan about them, but someone has to take care of the machinery of state.

So it’s important that we hold them to account, and elsewhere document their activities in a neutral way. Hyperlocal bloggers do the former, and the latter takes place on Wikipedia, and on sites like the excellent OpenlyLocal (both of whose content is open-licensed).

To illustrate such articles, bloggers and Wikipedians need photographs of the politicians (and senior officers). While it’s possible for individuals to take such pictures (and even open-license them, as I described previously), it would be better if such pictures were available from official channels. Such organisations already take or commission professional quality shots and make them available to the press. If they don’t already, they should make sure that their contract with photographers pays for full rights, enabling open-licensing.

I recently asked Birmingham City Council’s press office to make their pictures of members of BCC’s cabinet available under an open licence, and, to their credit, they did so. I was then able to use one of them on :

Wikipedia article using a picture open-licensed by Birmingham City Council

Some might ask “but what if the pictures are misused, to misrepresent those people”. Well, if someone’s going to do that, then they won’t bother about copyright anyway, and other laws (libel, human rights) already enable redress.

So come on all you councils, civil service departments, police forces/ authorities and so on — let us have pictures of your elected members and senior officers, free (i.e. with no “non-commercial” or “no derivatives” restrictions) for reuse on our blogs, Wikipedia and other sites. Major companies, too, could do this for their most-public board members.

Then there’s all public bodies’ other photographs. After all, West Midlands Police kindly agreed to my request to open-license the fantastic aerial shots from their helicopter…

St. Martin in the Bullring Church, Birmingham
Birmingham’s Bull Ring, from the West Midlands Police helicopter. Although this picture is ©WM Police, I can use it, here and on Wikipedia, because they kindly make it available under a CC-BY-SA licence

The mysterious case of Birmingham’s missing Victorian cast iron urinal

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My recent post about a metadata standard for syndicating information about public toilets, reminded me of an incident that occurred over 20 years ago, and questions about it, which have vexed me for years since…

In late 1986 and early 1987, to make way for the construction of the International Convention Centre in Birmingham, a number of older buildings had to be demolished, and entire streets disappeared.

West to East: St Martin's Place, Edward Street and Alfred Place, running parallel, between Broad Street and Cambridge Street

1949 map showing St Martin's Place, Edward Street and Alfred Place

On one of those, Edward Street, was a cast-iron street urinal. This was a listed structure: despite its mundane function, it was an impressive and decorative piece of Victorian engineering. The (then) Department of the Environment only gave permission for its removal on the condition that it was re-erected elsewhere. At the time, I was a volunteer at Birmingham Railway Museum, and so in January 1987 I wrote, formally, on behalf of the museum, with the approval of its management, to the City Council, offering a home for the urinal at the museum.

This request was refused by a council officer.

It was with some surprise, therefore, that we read in the Birmingham Evening Mail on 14 February 1987, an appeal from “Birmingham council chiefs” for a new home for the urinal:

Yellowing press clipping from 14 Feb 1987, showing the urinal

Birmingham Evening Mail, 14 February 1987

There were suggestions from members of the public that the urinal could go to the Black County Museum, or Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings — neither of which, unlike the Railway Museum, were in Birmingham, or had indicated any interest in the structure:

Yellowing press clipping from 21 Feb 1987, showing the 'Philip Colmore' column logo

Birmingham Evening Mail, 21 February 1987

I wrote to the Evening Mail, and to the Council, pointing this out:

Yellowing press clipping from 128 Feb 1987

Birmingham Evening Mail, 28 February 1987

Eventually, after reconsideration, the council’s Technical Services Committee (made up of elected members) agreed that the Railway Museum could after all have the urinal.

It was about this time that my ten years of volunteering at the museum came to an end, but I was told that the urinal had been dismantled and delivered to the museum, where it was placed in store.

Remarkably, the museum now tell me:

It is believed that the urinal was disposed to another museum … but I regret that at this length of time there is no record of where

So, where is our listed urinal — part of the City’s cultural heritage — now? Did the museum obtain — or need — the council’s or English Heritage’s permission to give up this object? Why were the public not consulted about the change of location, as they were the first time around? And did the council fail its legal duty to see that it was re-erected?

Update, 25 May 2011: One of my moles has suggested to me that the urinal may never have been delivered to Birmingham Railway Museum, and that it may even be languishing in a Birmingham City Council store. Are either of these things true? Let’s hope we find out. Meanwhile, the mystery deepens!

Update, 3 June 2011: The Birmingham Mail have written about this post, and there’s a Birmingham Post article about this post, too.

Update, 22 September 2011: Birmingham City council have just informed me that the urinal they have in store (referred to in my 25 May update) is not the one from King Edward’s Place, which their records say was sent to Birmingham Railway Museum. They are trying to locate the relevant paperwork for me. So the issues remain: where is our urinal, and was the legal requirement to reinstate it complied with?

Alan Sugar, Digby Jones and me, in the Daily Express

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You’ll never see a nipple in the Daily Express according to .

But you can read about my new freelance career, thanks to reporter , whose article, “The Apprentice Proves that Britain Means Business“, is in both their on-line and paper editions, today. (You’ll notice that I’ve done the Daily Express the courtesy of linking to them, Like most mainstream newspaper sites, they don’t link to their subjects.)

Ros says of me:

This February it was revealed more than 4,000 Birmingham City Council jobs were being axed over the next three years to save £300million. Andy Mabbett was one of those who opted for voluntary redundancy after 21 years working for the local authority, the past 17 of them as a website manager.

At the age of 47 he’s setting up on his own as a consultant in online community building. “I had offers of work even before I left,” he said. “I’m lucky to have good contacts, good experience and saleable skills. Although there are cutbacks everywhere there are still things that need to be done and so there’s a market for people who can do them.”

I never thought I’d be mentioned in the same article as or . They must be chuffed.

Sharing images openly is better than uploading to single sites

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Simon Whitehouse, blogging as part of his day-job with Digital Birmingham, suggests that to the History Pin website.

That’s a neat idea; it would be a collaborative move on behalf of the City (disclosure: they employ me, but these are my own thoughts), and would be of interest to the general public.

However, the time and effort spent doing do so would only be of use to that one site and its visitors.

A better solution, perhaps, would be for the City Council (and anyone making archives of images available in an open manner) to invest the equivalent effort in adding metadata (about the subject, location, date and licence, which should of course be open) to suitable images, and for third-party sites to then parse that metadata, and import the images. Of course, such an import could also be done by individuals, on an “as needed” (or more likely “as desired”) basis, as a crowd-sourcing activity.

Carved and painted stone coat of arms

My picture of the City of Birmingham's pre-1974 coat of arms, hosted on Flickr, where it has lots of lovely, rich metadata and an open licence

The question is — what is the best way to include such metadata — internal to the image, in a format like ? As scrapeabe text, on a page displaying the image, like Flickr’s metadata, such as tags? Or on such a page, but using a parsable , or as a separate resource, such as ? Or a combination of these?

And are any third-party sites already indexing or aggregating images and their metadata in this way? If not, why not? Do we have a chicken-and-egg problem?