Here’s a link to the presentation for viewing in a web browser. You can also download a PDF of the presentation if you need (and I stress NEED) to print it.

Visiting Tower Hamlets today to talk about seeding a sustainable community enterprise while increasing participation and technology access using wireless technologies. More to post on this later.

early last week I met with two people from Brent Council Environment & Culture Department to discuss the Civic Reporter ideas and application framework that Comwifinet have been working on. A great opportunity to discuss how open accessible data could further develop participation in the up keep of the Borough. Brent Council considering working with a Made In Brent technology organisation and mobile technologies. Brent Council entertaining the public publishing daily status and performance information online. I was also keen to know more about the current use of mobile technologies by Brent and also about the techie stuff that pins their operations together.

Brent receive problem reports by several means and log them all into a central application. Incoming emails, texts and phone calls are entered into the application which dispatches messages to contractors for them to deal with the report. I understood from our meeting that some of what Civic Report does the Council is either about to deliver or is working towards delivering.

After a few mildly insulting comments about the status and stature of the comwifinet organsiation and a few about the council representatives own department and employer, I felt that the meeting was beginning to go somewhere. I talked about the positive opportunities that could be seized by publishing data and creating a interactive map thing for people to use. But before we looked at the application I knew that the meeting was a waste of time; mine and theirs. They talked about their perceived negative stumbling blocks that would prevent them for using something like Civic Reporter. In short it came down to status and money. The person meeting with me thought the comwifinet organisation was of low status and was therefore unwilling to recommend to his managers that Brent Council commit public money to us, this unknown quantity. Yet other very large public organisations spend with us - we just choose not to shout about it on our website.

A few days I got an email by a round-about way that let me know that Brent were not interested in pursuing Civic Reporter with Comwifinet. Shame that the people I met with were unable to get back to me directly. But I figure they are busy people.

The background to all this. Comwifinet had prototyped the Civic Reporter framework which is inspired by other innovative mobile technology projects, such as that implemented by Lewisham and the mySociety ‘Broken Civic Infrastructure’ idea. These similar initiatives all start from the question ‘Would putting pictures of abandoned cars on a map on the internet help people to think again about their role in maintaining a tidy Borough?
MySociety example
Love Lewisham

The difference between what we were doing and these other projects is the public daily status and performance reporting of the Councils’ responsiveness to reported problems in the Borough. This would have been a steep change from the current performance reporting for departments. Publishing the information online, on a map makes the scale and distribution of the tasks facing the council public. And just maybe this would help us Brent residents learn that the Council and its contractors are doing a through and quality job for us… but only for what has been reported.

hush! here’s a sneek on something I’ve been working on at comwifinet recently…

Spot it? Text it! - report things to Brent Council via SMS and MMS. What things? a faulty parking meter, fly-tipping, broken things in the environment that you see out and about. Here is the opportunity to report them as you see them… using your mobile phone.