Paradise Circus

Shall we say Thurs 28th at a suitable location?

I’ve written in the past about how I’m not entirely convinced about the proposed new location for the Academy (or Hummingbird, for those of us who’ve been here long enough to remember…), but at the same time pointing out the uncharitable attitudes of some of the people they will be neighbours to once they’ve moved.

Another perhaps-soon-to-be neighbour has managed to secure a court appearance in order to appeal against the licensing application:

But that licence is now under threat after Patrick McCrossan, who lives at nearby Clydesdale Tower, claimed having the venue on his doorstep would infringe his human right to a decent night’s sleep. He said the additional noise from the crowds, cars and cabs leaving after a night of live and loud rock music would make sleep impossible.

The ‘plight’ of people who move in to a house next to an airport, church, farm, or pub and then start complaining about the noise coming from them is, of course, well known.

But this is taking that situation to new extremes; an entertainment license is tied to the person running the venue rather than the venue itself, but the venue still has the use which can be made of it laid down in planning consent – the Dome has planning consent to be a nightclub, so whoever owns it, unless they are successfully granted change of use consent, the building will only ever be used as a nightclub.

Presumably when it was being run as the Dome itself Patrick McCrossan never had any trouble getting a good night’s sleep. If he did, he could have applied for a noise abatement order against the place.
So how will the site continuing to be used for the purposes it has been consistently used for for at least 30 years infringe his human rights?

After the heady excitement of WordCampUK, people have been forming localised WordPress groups. For us it would be WordPress Midlands.

The Flapper is to be demolished as part of a redevelopment and while I’m not surprised, I am bloody furious

Me and the Flapper have a chequered history; in my early teens a lot of my friends had there first gigs there, the cheap booze and out of the way nature of the place soon led it to be the perfect pre-XL’s stomping ground, and then a little later because of the rowdy circles I moved in the bar staff would phone the police if they so much as smelt our leather jackets as we swaggered past. Currently the Flapper is my secret bolt hole a quiet afternoon escape where I can take half an hour to watch the sun set over the canal.

But its not nostalgia or personal convenience driving the affront, it’s the creeping homogenisation of our city centre, a bleeding of every scrap of individuality and independent spirit, until Birmingham becomes just another yuppie temple of Mammon a bland glass pit stop on the road from London to Manchester.

We are doomed to live in a city of ubiquitous name brands. Fated to have to drink in identikit Wetherspoons or those hatful Ember Inns that are decorated in neutral coffee house banality designed not to appeal to anyone just as long as the don’t offend anyone either. Every music venue will be corporate sponsored and controlled by vacuous PR machines.

I’m not saying creativity will not survive in this atmosphere, it will. But that’s all it will be; surviving, not flourishing or growing, just a loose knit collection of people fleeing to the suburbs playing at local pubs to a handful of friends and a confused man with a dog.

The soul of any city is its culture; unfortunately this city’s soul is being sold to the redevelopment devil one “regeneration” at a time.

*written in a pub and posted with the help of the lovely bounder*

After a few twitter soundings I’ve stuck a pin in the 23rd of July for a meet-up this here month. As last months “turn up when the hell you like” worked well I vote we stick to it (there was a good spread of people, some from around 6, the majority there at 8 or thereabouts).

Sorry to those that can’t make it, we’ll see you soon (btw, is this a good argument for moving things round, so people who “can’t do Thursdays” etc.  can come every so often, or would a more rigid time suit?).

The Malt House (beloved of William Jefferson Clinton) gets a stormingly bad review here:  which means it’ll be nice and empty and easy to take over.

A good few of the bloggers will have been to WordCampUK over the weekend before, so if you’d like WordPressy questions answered this meet-up might be a good time.

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As you may know I’ve been doing some work with Digital Birmingham over the last month which has been pretty interesting on a number of levels. They come from the rigid, hierarchical City Council environment necessary to run a large city while I come from the fluid, distributed playground of social media exploration. But we have a lot in common, principally the desire to widen the use of online tools and resources across the population, so finding ways to work together has been, and I never thought I’d say this about working with a council department, a lot of fun.

While I’ve got some personal projects in the pipeline through (plug alert!) ASH-10 there’s one idea which I think is worth talking about here since I hope it’ll involve all of us.

DB are interested in putting together some kind of online handbook for social media tools – links to resources such as WordPress.com and Twitter but, more importantly, guides on how to use them and why in the context of Birmingham. Since this wouldn’t be a small undertaking there would be funding available either through DB or from sponsorship, but DB would look after all of that.

I’d be interested in writing something like this – if nothing else it’d help me to drill down my ideas and theories into something practical – but I don’t think I could cover everything in depth. Which got me thinking about bringing in others who have expertise in areas I don’t. So we get a team of, say, 5 writers to develop an online resource.

Since we’ll also overlap in expertise it makes sense to do this on a Wiki or similar allowing collaborative writing and editing of pages. And once you’ve got a wiki that opens up a whole new world.

But if you’re doing it as a wiki why not just bypass Digital Birmingham and do it ourselves? Not gonna work. It’s pretty well established that most collaborative online endeavours work when a lot of people contribute a very small amount of time and effort and a relatively small number doing the heavy lifting – the ripple effect, if you like. Wikipedia works because the contributor base is huge. This wiki would have a contributor base of, at most, 100 people. And, to be honest, even though it’s my idea I don’t have the time to dedicate to writing the bulk.

So here’s the proposal.

• Digital Birmingham (or, if they don’t go for it, some other body) commission a team of people to produce an online resource based on their requirements and specifications.
• This is produced using wiki software (MediaWiki or the new-to-me XWiki).
• On delivery the wiki is opened up for others to edit. I’d suggest an approved registration system which would allow anyone to join but would have a delay to prevent vandalism.
• The wiki can then be expanded and, more critically, kept up to date by the community who can use it as a resource for their own work (training, consultancy, etc)

What do you people think?