McFilter: Liverpool

Unmaking Urban Mistakes

John Tolva has written an excellent essay (it's a bit long to be a blog post really) entitled Lessons from unmaking urban mistakes. In it he looks at how the inner-city highways have improved traffic throughput in the city, but at the expense of the human-scale interactions, and also looks at how the highways affect the surrounding architecture.

It's a difficult problem to solve. When I travel around the city by car then it feels like it's quicker on the trunk roads, although given the number of sets of traffic lights, maybe it isn't. Here in Liverpool the docks and the Pier Head feel cut off from the rest of the city centre by the six lanes of traffic on the Strand. The problem is even more pronounced when you get to the north edge of the city centre and the inner-city motorway that is Islington. I think the resurgence of city-centre living would have bled out to the north much more if there wasn't this huge gulf of inhospitable tarmac in the way.

Is the answer better public transport, maybe an underground system to provide capacity without taking up surface space? Or to separate the cars and pedestrians? If the latter then we'd need a better solution than the desolate pedestrian subways and underpasses that resulted when we tried that with the new towns in the 1960s and 1970s.

Maybe block-level one-way systems help - basically separating the carriageways of the highway to adjacent streets so that there are fewer lanes of traffic for pedestrians to navigate at any one time. That seems to work reasonably well with Dale Street and Chapel Street in Liverpool (although these days Chapel Street has reverted to two-way traffic).

As you can see, I don't have any answers to these questions yet. It's just something I ponder about in some of my thinking on how to improve Liverpool. And the question is made all the trickier because the solution needs to work with the existing fabric of the city - demolishing and rebuilding swathes of the city are only likely to generate a different set of unintended consequences.

Tags: Liverpool urbanism transport regeneration

Finding Books from Amazon in Liverpool Libraries

Toxteth Library, which has just been fully refurbished, is a lovely building and only a few minutes walk from my flat. Each time I pass it I think that I really should make more (or even some) use of it.

I've had a couple of ideas of how that might happen, and last night found some time to have a play around with the Amazon API and the library catalogue. More on that as and when I get it finished, but my experiments reminded me of the Library Lookup service that Jon Udell pulled together years ago.

What the service does is provide a one-click way to find out if any book that you're looking at on Amazon is available in your local library. Saving you the expense of buying it, whilst supporting your local amenities.

There seems to be a problem with one of the services that LibraryLookup depends on, so the initial lookup for Liverpool that I generated didn't work. However, it wasn't too tricky for me to work out how to fix things, and in case anyone else finds it useful, here's the bookmarklet:

Liverpool Library Lookup

Drag it to your links bar, and you'll be able to click on it whenever you're looking at a book on Amazon and want to find out if it's available locally. If you don't follow what I mean by "bookmarklet" or "drag it to your links bar" then have a look at the Bookmarklets 101 screencast that Jon Udell also put together to explain it all.

Tags: Liverpool library books amazon

Filming Activity on the Mersey

Now that I've found an interesting local route for some cycling I've been getting out for a ride every couple of days. One of the nice side-effects of this is that I'm getting to see more of the activity on the river, given that I cycle along the bank from the old Garden Festival site all the way to the Albert Dock.

As I've got my phone with me (tracking my progress via the GPS and MapMe.At) it means I can use @merseyshipping's twitter feed to find out the names of the ships I see; it's been good to start putting some "faces" to the names I've been seeing coming and going on the river over the past year.

To complete the "living in the future" scenario, I've been streaming live video of some of the more interesting happenings that I encounter on the river. The app from Qik makes it trivial to share video on the web, although it would be nice if you could download your videos too. You can see all the videos I take by visiting my page on Qik but I thought I'd share some of the recent river ones here...

First off is one I took when out with John. We had to wait until these yachts had left the lock before we could carry on our ride, as we needed to cross the bascule bridge over the lock...

A few days later I caught the dredger Norma clearing the entrance to the Canning Half-tide Basin next to the Albert Dock...

And on Saturday I happened to arrive at the Albert Dock just as the cruise liner Crystal Symphony was departing. By the time I'd made it round to the cruise liner terminal I'd missed the tug pulling her round, but did get to see them both leave and the Isle of Man catamaran Manannan coming in and the Liverpool pilot boat Pv Dunlin heading out.

Tags: Liverpool Mersey Norma dredging Crystal Symphony Manannan Pv Dunlin

LJMU Graphic Design degree work

As I mentioned in my write-up of the Degree Show, I didn't get round the graphic design section when I visited. However, when I was at the Art & Design Academy for the Re:Think lecture last night (no promises of a write-up for that - we'll see how things go) I picked up a nice cardboard envelope full of A5 cards - a catalogue for the graphic design section of the show with one card from each student.

I'm not going to provide any analysis of the work, but here's a list of the ones that stood out when I had a look through earlier. At a guess it's roughly a fifth of the catalogue, and unlike their product design and architecture compatriots they've all got a web presence (although some of them are yet to put anything much on it...).

In no particular order, categorized by how they list themselves on the card, they are...

Graphic Design

• Mike Harding
• Lewis Jones
• Danny Williamson
• Siobhan Ley
• Becky Jones
• Bill Corrigan
• Ben Rigney
• Rachel Shaw
• Peter Mason
• Michaela Cox
• Zoe Evans

Interactive

• Andrew Platt

Illustration

• Emma Symons
• Jess Woodhouse

LJMU Art and Design Degree Show 2010

Regeneration Soundtrack

Here are two songs that I'd been thinking of including in the previous blog post about regeneration here in Liverpool. In the end they didn't quite fit with what I wanted to say but I thought I'd still share them. Think of it as a kind of bonus track to the last blog post.

They're both examples of the North-Western folk music that I've known all my life, and are both written about the slum clearances of the 60s and 70s - telling through music what Who Cares communicates through film.

First off there's the Liverpool view, from Jackie and Bridie - Back Buchanan Street

mp3 link

And then the view from the other end of the East Lancs Road, the Houghton Weavers singing about the Manchester equivalent - Room Up in the Sky

Still Nobody Cares, And Nobody Learns

Since before I moved to Liverpool, huge areas have been boarded up or 'tinned' - part of the New Heartlands initiative to regenerate the areas. I'm not sure how long that's been the case but even so, that's almost two years and it's only in the past couple of months that the bulldozers have moved in and flattened the houses. I don't know how much longer it will take them to build the new estates, but there are houses nearing completion on another building site in Edge Hill and they must've been at least a year in the building.

So that's a minimum of three years that streets-worth of a number of communities in Liverpool have been empty. That's a long time for shops and businesses in already poor areas to survive whilst waiting for someone to sell things to or employ.

It's not like it's a small area either. One area I pass regularly is this one in Edge Hill - three or four entire streets of terraced housing have been demolished. I went up and took a few photos a couple of weeks back, you can some idea of the scale of destruction from this panorama...

And that isn't the end of it. Less than half a mile down the road there's the Edge Lane regeneration project which is going to clear another swathe of this part of Liverpool. At least with that one there's some reasoning behind it, as they'll be widening the main road route into the city centre. If you head half a mile in the opposite direction there's more of the same just off Smithdown Road. This time they've left the houses that are actually on Smithdown Road, and have just cleared the area behind, so once they're done if you don't look too closely you won't notice that the fabric of the area has been ripped out.

There have been people fighting against the schemes but the council seem to have pushed on regardless. Then once the damage is done, they have the gall to come up with a half-hearted sorry, I think we made a mistake.

What annoys me most is that we've been here before. In the 1960s and 1970s we did this wholesale replacement of streets, broke up communities and demolished huge numbers of now-desirable old houses. Could no-one in power spot that this wasn't likely to work or come up with something better?

It's not like you need to go far to find the evidence. About a mile from this site in Edge Hill is Falkner Street. At one end it's still cobbled and lined with lovely Georgian terraced houses - the houses fetch around £0.5m and the street featured in a recent Hovis commercial showing the Tommies going off to the first World War. It's one of the most desirable parts of the city. Yet when Nick Broomfield filmed his Who Cares documentary in 1971 they were busy demolishing some of the houses further down the street.

The houses in Edge Hill are a bit newer and not quite as grand as those on Falkner Street, but that just means they're more suitable as single-family homes. Lots of the Georgian terraces have been broken up into flats as there's not the same demand for eight bedroom houses now we don't have servants.

Conveniently the Google street view car passed through Edge Hill before the demolition, so I can do a few "now and then" shots. I've taken a copy of the street view images to save you having to click through and also because they'll presumably change at some point in the future, but if you follow the links you can explore what the area used to be like. There are some more photos of the area (and the location of the old Edge Hill college) over in my Edge Hill photos page.

Traffic lights by the Durning Arms: Google street view

End of Uxbridge Street: Google street view

Is this really the best we could do? Turning streets into a ghost town for a few years, then flattening them and handing them over to a developer to throw up something cheap and cheerful? It might be the easiest and cheapest option in the short term, but I don't see how it's going to achieve anything approaching regeneration of the area in the longer term.

UPDATE: There's a follow-up musical bonus track for this post.

Tags: Liverpool regeneration

Sugar Hill Gang at The Masque

Sefton Park and Riverside Circular

Out for another bike ride today and I've found a much better route that runs to just over six and a half miles without lots of to-ing and fro-ing in Sefton Park. It still takes in both Princes Park and Sefton Park, and adds in a lengthy ride along the bank of the river. It's the first time I've been along that stretch of the river - the marina and housing is all very nice but it's just one huge soulless housing estate isn't it? Are there any shops or things that aren't houses or offices down there?

Click here to see the map in the full window

Tags: Liverpool cycle route

Exercise and Sefton Park

A couple of things lately have reminded me how little exercise I've been getting, and how much I enjoy it.

A few weekends ago John McKerrell and I threw our bikes onto the train and headed up to Southport. From there we set off down the Trans Pennine Trail to see how far we could get in the day. Having not done any training, and having only just gotten my bike back on the road (the gear cable had stuck, giving me only one gear - resulting in hardly any cycling over the winter) I wasn't expecting to get too far. In the end we made it all the way down to Widnes, and then cycled over the bridge to Runcorn station to catch the train back. When I checked my bike computer at the end of the day I was rather amazed to find we'd done 38 miles.

And then over the weekend I spent an enjoyable couple of hours throwing a frisbee round with some mates in a park in London. I haven't played frisbee since I used to head down to Parkers Piece in Cambridge to play ultimate frisbee in around 2005.

This afternoon I decided to get out of the flat and get a bit of exercise. So I headed through Princes Park and into Sefton Park. You can see where I went on the map below (although the orange trail isn't that easy to see against the map)

Click here to see the map in the full window

Both parks had plenty of people out enjoying the weather and jogging, walking and cycling, and there were the odd games of football or rounders. I even found the boating lake on Sefton Park but didn't spot any boats out on it - maybe it hasn't reopened yet after the refurbishment of the park.

So this summer I want to get back into being a bit more active. The only problem is finding some people to play sport with. There are plenty of five-a-side leagues and such, but I'm not looking for anything so serious. What I want is the sort of groups I knew in Cambridge - people who are up for a regular, friendly, anyone-can-play game of football (anything from 3-a-side through to 10-a-side), or game of ultimate frisbee. Rounders or softball would even be a possibility. A social trip to the pub afterwards wouldn't go amiss either, but isn't an essential.

Does anyone know of anything like that in the centre of Liverpool? Or is anyone up for joining me to start getting out to enjoy the summer and get some exercise?

Interplay 2010

Gil Scott-Heron at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall

On the evening of Thursday 29th April I went along to the Philharmonic Hall with a couple of friends to see a rather rare occasion - a Gil Scott-Heron gig. I haven't had chance to write-up the event so far on my blog, but I don't want to leave the occasion unrecorded.

It was an amazing gig. One of the best gigs I've attended. I can't imagine how good he'd have been to see in his prime - the banter with the audience was superb, and the songs fantastic. The guy is, understandably, a legend.

And if you don't know who I'm talking about, have a listen to this (which was the probably the stand-out track of the evening) and go check out his back catalogue ("I Think I'll Call it Morning", "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and "Lady Day and John Coltrane" are personal favourites)

Ignite Liverpool Videos

The video of my Ignite Liverpool talk is now up online, so if you'd like to watch it, here it is...

The rest of the videos from the first event can be found on Defnetmedia's YouTube channel.

Following the success of the first event, we held the second the Thursday before last. Our turnaround time of getting the videos online has been quicker this time. You can see them all over on this Defnetmedia page, and read the write-up on the LDP Creative blog.

Tags: igniteliv ignite liverpool

Leaders Debate Party in Liverpool on Thursday

Inspired by Britain's adaptation of American-style debates, my friend Deena DeNaro is organizing American-style debate watching parties at local pubs in Liverpool and challenging people in other cities to do the same. The first one will be this Thursday (22nd April) at Hannah's Bar on Leece Street.

Doors are 6:30pm. The debate itself starts at 8pm, but turn up earlier to get yourself some food and catch the build-up...

• Bubblino will be there, watching for the leaders debate hashtag, and I'll briefly introduce him (in case anyone hasn't met him yet... ;-)
• The guys from My Vote will be launching their new topical iPhone app
• And maybe some more (I think there's still room if anyone has anything appropriate to talk about)

Debate will be on Sky from 8-9.30 pm followed by moderated responses from the audience.

Join us in Liverpool’s original New York bar for burgers, beer and democratic dialoging. We are still looking for a venue for the 29 April debate. To RSVP - use Plancast. The Plan is here: http://plancast.com/a/2qmu

Tags: liverpool politics leadersdebate

Ignite Liverpool

Ignite Liverpool

O'Reilly, the tech book publisher, organises a series of events under the banner of Ignite and a group of us are bringing the format to Liverpool as part of O'Reilly's Global Ignite Week.

It'll be a series of talks on a variety of topics, loosely based round the themes of technology, social or politics. Each talk consists of exactly 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds, so even if one of the talks isn't up your street, it'll be over in five minutes and there'll be something different to look forward to.

We're holding it at the new Art and Design Academy, next to the Metropolitan Cathedral, from 6pm-8pm on Thursday 4th March.

It's a free event, but we'd like you to book so we get an idea of numbers - confirm via Facebook or our our Ning site (you'll have to register with Ning, but it's pretty painless).

Would you like to present?

We've still got a couple of slots available for presenters. If you fancy giving it a crack (and you don't have to be a seasoned presenter, we're more than happy for presenting newbies to give a talk too) then just email a brief (50-100 words) outline to ignite.liverpool@gmail.com by 24th February and we will inform you if you have been chosen by Friday 26th February.

And feel free to share details of the event with anyone you think might be interested. See http://ignite.oreilly.com/2010/02/global-ignite-week-liverpool-uk.html for the full links and info.

Tags: Liverpool Ignite GlobalIgniteWeek IgniteLiv

Improving or Sanitizing?

Reading Julian Dobson's recent article Warning: Dementors at large reminded me of a bit of neighbourhood tidying that's happened here in Liverpool. It was probably just done by the owner of the building, rather than the council or as part of the Baltic Triangle regeneration going on in the area, but it provides some anecdotal evidence of how an intended improvement could affect the delicate threads of activity that it seeks to encourage.

The building in question is next-door to the Novas centre, which was the location of the first Liverpool Barcamp back in December 2008. At the time, I'd decided to give a talk to try to encourage more entrepreneurial and creative activity but had only started putting the slides together on the morning of the second day of the event.

I had the words done, but was looking for suitable images to accompany them when John McKerrell pointed me to a photo he'd taken earlier that day of some graffiti on the building opposite.

The slogan on the mural summed up my call to action perfectly - "First rule of the cosmos: get off your arse and make it happen" - and ended up as the final slide in my talk Don't Just Change the World... Improve It!.

I don't know how much action my talk inspired, but it did have some effect. Just the other day in an email, a friend explained what an upcoming meeting was about:

"I am meeting [him] to give him the obligatory 'Get off your arse and make it happen' (c) McEwen 2008 talk"

So, just a nice fluffy "man gives talk partly inspired by graffiti, at least one person was listening" story, but one that shows the potential unintended consequences of such "tidying and improving" as the clean-up of the graffitied building that's happened since then...

This is what the graffiti looks like now:

Good job Barcamp Liverpool happened when it did.

Tags: Liverpool regeneration graffiti Baltic_Triangle

Regeneration Attitude

On New Year's Day I wanted to get out of the house for a bit and went for a walk. As is often the case in such time, I found myself drawn down to the river. As I neared the Pier Head, I passed this poster, stuck up by the North-West Development Agency (the regional regeneration quango) to help hide an ugly old concrete building awaiting demolition and remind us of the good work they're doing. (Just as an aside, the much more attractive stripey building to the left of the picture is the old offices of White Star Lines, owners of The Titanic).

I've seen it before, but this time it struck me that the choice of language sums up what irks me about the whole regeneration question.

We make big things happen.

People of Liverpool rejoice. The NWDA is sorting everything out for us. At best, this sends the message that the inhabitants themselves don't need to do anything because the NWDA is taking care of it all. That's lovely, but what happens if the government decide to scrap the RDAs?

At worst, it steals the credit for any improvements from the people responsible and presents it all as the work of the NWDA.

This is one of the classic signs of a bad manager or a bad leader, and it's particularly disappointing for a regeneration agency to fall into the trap. Surely the ultimate sign of success for a regeneration quango is to make itself obsolete? And to do that it needs to empower and lead the people to where they realise they can do it themselves - not to hoard any scraps of success under its own flag.

Tags: Liverpool NWDA quango regeneration

Joyous Machines at Tate Liverpool

A few weeks ago, Michael Dales recommended the Joyous Machines exhibition at Tate Liverpool to me. I've had a busy few weeks, but having got some work completed and invoiced yesterday, I rewarded myself with a trip down to see what it was like.

Michael's right, it was the sort of thing that's right up my street. It was great to see that someone (Jean Tinguely) was experimenting with making art from motors and bits of metal and wood in the 1960s, and there are some really nice intricate workings to the pieces. Lots of bent steel wire, cogs and pulleys - I was as interested in the mechanisms as the art part of it. Naturally, I came away with a head full of ideas about how you could reinterpret the themes for a modern day and incorporate some form of external data source as a driver for the mechanism.

I did also think that some Arduinos could've been usefully employed to improve the display of some of the artworks. As they're getting a bit old and fragile, some only worked for one minute in every fifteen, but there was no way to know when the time period would be up; they weren't on a regular schedule, there were nice chunky red-domed buttons mounted on the floor to start the machines, so something triggered off that to run a simple countdown display would've let you know if it was worth waiting around to see it in action.

It's a shame that none of the sonorous pieces were set up to work - from looking at the mechanism (and from watching the video of the Homage to New York piece) there seemed some interesting mechanisms for making sounds, and I'd have loved to have seen and heard them in action.

It was also disappointing that the meta-machines weren't operating yesterday. The machine-drawn artworks they produced reminded me of the vibrobots and brushbots from Howduino events, although produced with more elaborate mechanicals.

But, minor gripes aside, a lovely exhibition for anyone into tinkering, brushbot art and the like. You've got a couple more weeks to catch it - it finishes on 10th January.

Tags: Tate Liverpool Michael_Landy

What's With the Obsession About Big?

Pete Ashton has posted a great entry recently to his blog, wondering whether Birmingham City Council has an obsession with big, grand, look-at-how-great-we-are events that seem more about showing off to the rest of the country (and world, if the world happens to care) and engaging in woolly activities like "improving the brand" than it is about putting on enjoyable and great events for the population. He asks why it has to be about the big, major initiatives and why it can't celebrate more smaller events - something that might, paradoxically, differentiate the city more than another me-too big lighting switch on.

Reading Pete's article, it seemed to me that you could switch some of the names and some of the projects (although thankfully I don't think we've had a similar failure with people getting injured) and it could easily be about Liverpool. There's a similar desire for big projects that swallow up millions of pounds of funding and promise grand regeneration, prosperity and job targets in the middle distance. It all makes for great headlines in the Echo, but does it really achieve much more than that?

I suppose it depends on whether you think that the way to improve the city is through a top-down or bottom-up approach.

From my (admittedly somewhere near the bottom) perspective, the top-down style seems to provide good media soundbites and short-term bragging rights, but at the expense of much of the money trickling down the lowest level and a high risk of failure. Liverpool One isn't perfect but is about as well executed as a big shopping mall project could be, but the Innovation Park seems to be a grand project casting around for a purpose still.

Maybe the problem is with a focus on trying to attract prosperity from outside the city, rather than nurturing the potential of the people within it? Do we have to create these grand schemes in order to successfully bid for regeneration funding? Are we building big science parks and office complexes with a view to attracting big companies to relocate to Liverpool and bring their jobs with them? I don't know; it would explain things better if that's true.

Is that how successful cities operate? "Move here and we'll give you loads of handouts". I'm not sure I'd want to live in a city populated by people who are only around because they were paid to be here. I think it's better to take a longer-term approach and help the people already in the city, who want to be in the city, to create interesting and new businesses. Some of them will fail, but some of them won't, and I don't think it's immediately obvious beforehand which are which. We should be encouraging all of them, and helping people dust themselves down if things do go wrong. That way we'll end up with a much more resilient mix of businesses and who knows, maybe the next Meccano or White Star Lines or Littlewoods...

Tags: Liverpool regeneration

Building a Bike-powered Generator at the Liverpool Social Centre

Yesterday afternoon I spent an enjoyable afternoon doing some hacking and making, but of a slightly more old-school type than my usual hacking.

Through the Transition Towns South Liverpool mailing list I heard about a "DIY and fixing" workshop that was being held at the Liverpool Social Centre on Bold Street. As the announcement email stated:

"The idea being that if you have anything which needs fixing, be it clothes, a bike, a computer whatever, bring it along and try to fix it yourself. All going well there will be other people there who have either experience in something similar, or keen to help out and together we will work it out.

For those of you who have nothing to fix (surely you have something thats been broken for ages and you just haven't had the energy or time to fix it), there will be a project of making something."

I didn't have a project to take along, and part of my motivation was just to meet some other people doing making/tinkering/hacking sorts of activities in Liverpool, but I was also drawn in by the idea of the collaborative project: Luke wanted to build a bike-powered generator.

Luke is on the right in the photo above, discussing the next step in tbe build process with Mark. The three of us spent a few hours pulling rusty nails out of bits of wood, sawing, drilling holes and screwing things together.

The first step in the bike generator was to build a frame to lift the back wheel off the floor to let it rotate without the rest of the bike moving. Once that's done then there needs to be some mechanism to drive a motor in reverse to generate the power, but yesterday we were just focused on building the frame.

Luke had brought half an old wooden pallet and a length of steel pipe, which you can see scattered around the floor in the photo above. By the end of the session we'd transformed it into something that looks like it might do the trick, as you can see in this photo. It still needs some diagonal bracing added, and the piece for the other side still needs the "feet" pieces screwing on, but we were pretty pleased with the progress we'd made.

I think Luke is planning on finishing off the stand on his own (as it doesn't need much more work) and then the next session will look at how to connect the bike wheel to the motor, which should be an interesting session.

It gave me plenty of food for thought on how best to run these sorts of activities though. A permanent space, where we could collect a set of useful tools, and where there were some decent workbenches would make things lots easier; and I wonder if weekend sessions would help the Liverpool Hackspace be more productive. The Tuesday evening meets are good, but it's often hard to get much beyond catching up with each other and chatting about stuff - having a whole afternoon means you can really get stuck into something, but maybe makes it harder for people to attend?

Tags: diy bike power hackspace Liverpool

The Active Learning Lab

For a while now I've kept catching glimpses of a strangely coloured building lit up near the university when travelling to or from home when it's dark. It's not really on any of my usual routes around the city, so I'd never quite worked out where it was or what the building was. Tonight I went for a wander to track it down and capture some pictures of it to share.

It turns out it's the Active Learning Laboratory, part of the Engineering Department at the University of Liverpool. It's on Brownlow Hill, just behind the Metropolitan Cathedral and next-door to the very different but similarly splendid Victoria Building.

It wasn't the best night to try filming things, it's very windy - particularly up on the top of the crypt at the cathedral - and bit chilly. Of course, once I'd found a decent vantage point, it had finished the more impressive part of the colour cycling sequence, which is why this video is so long. Skip to about eight minutes in to get to some of the prettier colour changes.

It's hard to convey with the video, especially as it's just recorded on my N95, but the colours are really vibrant in the flesh and it must be three or four storeys of lighting - almost floating a couple of storeys off the ground. You can get a better idea of the scale from this video, taken from a little way down the hill. The cathedral is just off camera to the right, and the clock tower illuminated in the background is on Victoria Building.

This video also captures the most interesting colour changes that I saw, with the colours in vertical bands flowing round the building and merging into each other.

There's surprisingly little information about it on the university's own website, but I did find this article about the opening from the Liverpool Daily Post and here's another article with technical details about the LED lighting and a video showing off its capabilities.

Tags: Liverpool LED ActiveLearningLaboratory

Interface Amnesty at Static

Yesterday a few of us from the Liverpool Hackspace group went down to Static for a day of playing around with electronics to make music noises. It was an event called Interface Amnesty, organised by Sound Network as a fringe event for the Abandon Normal Devices Festival. Is that enough links?

The day was split into two parts. First off was a Maker Faire-style show-and-tell where people were demonstrating what they'd made, and then in the evening the space was cleared of trestle tables and a few of the artists present gave performances of their work.

The Hackday

Most of the rest of the people with stalls at the event were just showing off what they'd already made. We were embracing the hackspace mentality, and were building stuff as well as showing things that were finished.

It took us about three-quarters of an hour to get an Auduino up and running, which was pretty good given that it was my mate Andrew doing the building, and he hadn't even touched an Arduino before yesterday morning. So that build time includes him downloading the Arduino IDE and getting it installed on his laptop.

I hadn't heard the Audino before, but was impressed with how good it sounds, and it's just five potentiometers and an Arduino. You could build one for much less than £30. Plenty of the other musicians there were really impressed with what a lovely noise it makes.

Our "already made" contribution came from Ross. At the past couple of hackspace meetings he's been playing around with infra-red distance sensors, an Arduino and some python MIDI code and had got his IR Guitar ready just in time for the event.

I think the next step is getting the distance from the sensor to control something, such as different notes or different volume, but waving your hands about in mid-air is a fun way to play an instrument.

I had hoped to build some of the Chiptune Orchestra instruments too, but although I'd made sure I'd bought all the parts I needed from their partslist, I didn't spot that there isn't a circuit diagram available yet. We did start playing around building an oscillator circuit with the chips I'd bought, but there was too much going on to really get stuck into it. Maybe at the next hackspace meeting...

The Gigs

The music in the evening was a great way to round off a fun day. If I remember correctly, the line up was...

PixelH8, playing songs on his Nintendo DS synth.

Then Mike Blow played a couple of pieces, including this atmospheric one built up from a field recording in a tunnel under the river Elbe. I'm still not quite sure how he managed to get the cathedral bells outside to start up at such a perfect time in the dying moments of the work.

Stretta was up next. I can't find anything that shows what his stuff was like to experience live, but this video and about 3 minutes into this video give you an idea of the sorts of thing he was playing with and using to create his music. The Monone interfaces he was using are beautifully designed and made.

And the night finished with The Amazing Rolo playing stuff through his Wiimote software and his musical jam jars. You can get an idea of what it was like by watching this, but there's more music on his website.

The Wii BeatLooper in action! from The Amazing Rolo on Vimeo.

Tags: InterfaceAmnesty Static Liverpool ANDFestival Arduino Hacking

TEDx Liverpool

If you've been reading McFilter for a while then you might remember me talking about the superb talks from the TED conference. I even collected some of them together into the TED Taster DVD.

So I was really excited to hear that Liverpool will be hosting the first of the TEDxNorth mini-conferences, on the 7th August. The conferences are a series being put on across the North by Herb Kim (of Thinking Digital fame) along with local partners (ICDC and Kisky Netmedia here in Liverpool), and feature a mix of TED videos with live talks.

It seems there's a bit of theme to each of the events, and the Liverpool one seems to be taking a bit of a "post digital" direction, with Alison Gow from the Daily Post, Steve Clayton from Microsoft showing off the multi-touch Surface table, and Alex from Tinker.it (my nomination for Ada Lovelace day 2009) no doubt talking all things Arduino and hardware prototyping.

Full details on the TEDx Liverpool website.

Tags: TED TEDx Liverpool conference

Integrated City Project Launch Event

Following up from my recent post about Liverpool Architecture Society's Integrated City Project: there's now some information up on the LAS website.

They're having a launch event for the project on Wednesday 22nd July at Static. Full details including how to RSVP are on the LAS event page.

And please say hello if you spot me there.

Tags: Liverpool Architecture Society Integrated City civic

Liverpool Architecture Society's Integrated City Project

A few days ago I found out about a project that the Liverpool Architecture Society is in the process of launching. The Integrated City Project is a challenge to look at ways of reconnecting the various districts and areas of Liverpool and working out a cohesive set of suggestions and plans for how best to develop the city.

There isn't anything as yet on the LAS website, but the LAS President elect, Robert MacDonald, has kindly agreed to let me publish the details in a web-friendly format here.

I'm not exactly sure how I can help with the project, but it seems that it could be a great opportunity (and possibly that final push that I need) to try out some of the really interesting "civic software" initiatives that are springing up.

Could the findings feed into a set of requirements for some DIYCity.org projects?

Would something like the Sutton Green Map help inform people about amenities, planning and infrastructure issues?

Can we experiment with the recently released source code for EveryBlock?

It also feeds nicely into the sorts of technology and ways of working explored by the Be2Camp group, and that initiatives like Talk About Local are starting to address.

Of course, it's quite possible that this is the sort of technology-focused response that fails miserably because it's targeted at the iPhone-wielding web native. But I think there are ways round that, and that's maybe where the geeks of Liverpool can help - rather than just installing all these whizzy Web2.0 services, we can extend them and look for ways to integrate them into peoples lives. Maybe text-messaging can provide enough interaction and richness to bootstrap the service; or we could integrate with The Newspaper Club to provide hyper-local, customised paper versions of the content; or work with local shopkeepers to install simple information kiosks... We'll need to work out what the problems really are first, but if services like this are useful then the technical challenges can be overcome.

I don't want to publish Robert's email address online, so if you want to find out more or get involved with the project then let me know and I'll happily pass your details on. My email address is over on the left.

Liverpool Architecture Society's Integrated City Project

Just imagine a ‘do it yourself’ city. Crises in government organisation and financial development are leading towards the self organisation of people in urban situations. Liverpool Citizens need encouragement to take creative and cultural urban control of architecture and inner city developments.

As an upbeat creative response to the economic recession, The Liverpool Architectural Society (established 1848) and others are planning a positive city wide project as part of the forthcoming cultural years of the Environment and Innovation. The society aims to address architectural, cultural, planning and social issues in the Inner and Outer City of Liverpool. The LAS aims to be inspired by local communities and situations. Multi-professional teams of architects, landscape architects, artists, students and communities will set out to create a series of practical and theoretical urban propositions for the inner city. A locally designed and constructed integrated light rail tram system is also being considered as a way of re-connecting different parts of the fragmented Inner City.

Currently, the Inner City is very much a hollow vessel without people. It needs new urban activity and density. In 1931 the overall population was 857, 247 and in 2002 the population was 441,500. In Merseyside, 83,000 jobs were lost between 1981 and 1986, representing 1 in 3 jobs. The average annual income in Liverpool was £7,363 in 2001, which was £4,127 under the national average. Unemployment is well above the national average. The biggest single knowledge gap is that we do not know whether the vacant land and empty building problem is getting worst, or better, or staying the same. The population increase in the 12,000 of new build apartments, in recent years, has been in the City Centre. Why has the inner city and outer areas been excluded and disconnected from these new developments ? The LAS ambition is to include the Inner City in future speculative visions for the city.

The best way to appreciate the shrinking Inner City and polarisation of Outer City of Liverpool is to just take a short walk out from the City Centre or take a bus ride to The Dingle, Toxteth, Kensington, Edge Hill or Walton or Seaforth. Any number of empty buildings, houses and vacant sites immediately become apparent. These neighbourhoods, districts and locations will be the focus of The Integrated City Project (see adjacent map, copyright James Mellor) This map highlights 33 urban districts including Speke and Garston. There are also numerous zones of vacancy ‘inbetween’ the perceived urban neighbourhoods.

URBAN DESIGN & CITIZEN PARTICIPATION

The urban design methodology will be to invite 33 independent and autonomous teams of designers to adopt one the Urban Districts or neighbourhoods. Each group will then be invited, over a twelve month period, to develop local contacts and participate with their communities to create new Urban Models for the neighbourhoods. The community connections might include Liverpool City Council, Merseyside Network for Change, Tenants Spin, City Planners, industrialists,developers, schools, businesses, creative industries, social groups, libraries, hospitals, health centres, GP’s, public houses, cultural, sports and entertainment. This process of design participation will be recorded by public progress presentations.

PUBLIC EXHIBITION 2010

The objective will be to hold an exhibition in a Major Public Venue in 2010 attracting National profile and publicity. The 33 individual projects will be presented as 1.500 models, photographs of the inner city communities, illustrations of the new projects, interactive multi-media, film and moving image. The Liverpool City Council will be invited to take a lead and participate by displaying the updated Shankland City Centre Model. There will be opportunities for public participation, sponsorship, either financial or in kind with the involvement of various city wide agencies.

Tags: Liverpool Architecture Society civic

New Ways of Working

As part of their Climate for Change season, FACT held the unSustainable unConference, an unconference about sustainability.

It was on Saturday 9th May and I'd just returned from a chaotic week in Germany. It was full of passionate people trying to work out what could be done to help sustainability, but by the end of the day I was getting rather frustrated with how we were defining the Manifesto for Change by what we were against, rather than looking for aspirational and more positive directions to channel our energies. Sadly I was wiped out after my week away (where I'd also acquired a cold) and so wasn't up to engaging with my fellow attendees, so I just retracted into my digital shell and heckled them electronically.

Before reaching that point, however, I did present some thoughts about the growing co-working and hackspace scenes. The flexible working and community-building that seems to come with such spaces could fall easily into a more sustainable way of working. And to meet my aforementioned aspirational and positive approach I even ended with a rather grand vision for how such a movement might evolve here in Liverpool.

I'll leave anyone interested to find more details by reading through my slides, but by all means get in touch if you'd like to know more...

There are notes with the slides, but they don't seem to have come out in the Slideshare presentation. If you download the Powerpoint deck for the slides you'll be able to get an idea of what I was talking about when giving the presentation.

Tags: Sustainable coworking hackspace Liverpool

Howduino, How Did It Go?

On Saturday 23rd May, a collection of about thirty geeks, coders, artists and complete novices took over the Gallery 1 space at FACT for a day of learning about hardware hacking and working on interesting projects to fuse computing power with the real world.

Howduino was an event hatched up by Thom Shannon and me, and the space at FACT was a perfect location for it. There was a big screen where I ran my "Getting started with Arduino" talk, and plenty of big work tables where people could spread out their tools, soldering irons, laptops and projects as they worked on them.

We weren't quite sure what to expect, given the wide range of abilities from the attendees (from the architecture students who had no knowledge but lots of enthusiasm, to the similarly enthusiastic but much more experienced Aaron from .:oomlout:.) but after a quick run round the room for everyone to introduce themselves, people seemed to find groups to work in and share knowledge.

I think our use of the wiki before the event was vital, as it meant that people had an idea about what projects were available to be tackled, which helped us organise people into groups - we had a quick "hands up if you're interested in X" for each project on the wiki, and then people could find each other afterwards to get started. It also meant that people could work out what components they'd need beforehand, and so come prepared.

By mid-afternoon there was a real buzz in the air, as people helped each other out, traded parts and some real progress was being made by on the projects. It seemed a shame to break up such a productive community, which meant that we left it a bit too late to start wrapping up the day. That was my biggest regret - we didn't get chance to share what everyone had achieved during the event, but it's been great to see the blog posts filtering out over the following weeks as things get finished.

That also meant it was hard to work out what to do about the prizes we had. The guys from O'Reilly who I met at Maker Faire had very generously sent us some book vouchers, t-shirts and an i-Sobot robot, and initially we'd planned to have a number of categories for "Best project", "Most ambitious project", "Most components killed in the pursuit of hardware hacking", etc. However, as most projects were group efforts, and the groups were formed by people who'd only met on the day, it seemed a bit hard to work out who would get the prize; so in the end we held a raffle amongst all the attendees. It seemed to fit the collaborative, helping-each-other-to-achieve-cool-things vibe to the day.

It also means I don't have an easy way to run through what was built on the day, so I'll just list them as I remember them (and include links where I can). We had...

• Bristlebot art
• Twitter racing cars
• A drawbot
• Stockmarket watching Panda
• Dancing robots
• The Location Clock
• A line-following Mini

...and there are photos from Nikki, Tim D, and Thom, and blog posts from Nikki and .:oomlout:..

What could we have done better?

The biggest problem with any hackday is the amount of time you have. Ideally we'd make Howduino a weekend event, as that would give people time to get something significant finished. I'd also see if there's a more hands-on way to get people started wth Arduinos. Maybe I could give a shortened version of my talk, so people could get the basics and then get started on a project; but also have a longer, more practical session for people who wanted a bit more hand-holding through getting things working. And maybe run a "driving motors with H-bridges" session, as lots of people were trying to do that, and possibly combine that, or run it just after, a session to harvest stepper motors from old printers or floppy drives.

Thanks again to Thom for helping me organize it all, Sophie for the excellent logo, O'Reilly for the prizes, FACT for a great venue, and attendee Stewart Dunn for the robot kits.

So, will there be another Howduino day? Definitely. We don't know where, or when, but keep an eye on the wiki or follow @howduino on twitter to find out when there's more news.

Tags: howduino fact liverpool hardware hacking arduino

Heading to the Unsustainable Unconference at FACT

Back from a whirlwind trip to Essen in Germany for the Kiosk and Digital Signage Expo, I've barely time to catch up on my emails before the next event I'm attending...

Tomorrow I'll be heading down to FACT in the centre of Liverpool for an interesting-looking unconference. The Unsustainable Unconference is part of their "Climate for Change" programme (which is also hosting both Be2Camp North and Howduino).

Follow the link above, or have a look at the flyer below for more information, and come and say hello if you spot me there tomorrow.

Tags: FACT c4c unsustainable unconference Liverpool

Where Are the Online Liverpool Calendars?

Jon Udell is in the middle of another project demonstrating what he does best on the Internet, and what he has been doing time and again since I first started following his work back in the BYTE magazine days.

He's working out simple but effective ways to weave together the tools available on the 'net to make it a more coherent and more useful place. This time his focus is on community calendars.

He's avoided the typical programmer trap of trying to automate everything, and instead is looking at ways to build tools that automate what can be automated, and ease the work required to be done by hand.

I've been following the project with interest, as I think a centralized grouping of all the event data for an area is an invaluable resource for the community. Jon is building such an item for his local area, but it only scales when other people take the lead of curating the event listings in their cities.

This blog post is in lieu of me actually getting the Liverpool listings up and running with Jon's system. When I've got a spare couple of hours sometime (so probably after Be2Camp North and Howduino) then I'll re-read Jon's blog posts and work out what I need to do.

Until then, I'm going to start collecting any Liverpool-related calendars I find online on my delicious account, and will tag them with "Liverpool" and "calendar". If anyone wants to help, then they can either tag any links in delicious themselves and I can pick them up, or leave a comment with the details in here.

Tags: Liverpool calendar events

Be2Camp North

Back in October I had a day down in London for an un-conference looking at what happens when the Web meets the built environment. It covered all sorts of topics, from ways to better manage email overload to using 3D sketching software to engage communities in regeneration work. Since the event there's been an ongoing community of attendees sustained on Twitter, and continued discussion about the next event.

I'm pleased to announce that I'm helping to organise the second Be2Camp event, and better still, we're hosting it here in Liverpool.

Be2Camp North is being held at FACT on Friday 15th May. It will be somewhere between an un-conference and a normal conference, with an idea of the day's sessions being fleshed out beforehand. Head over to the Be2Camp North topics page to see what's being planned, or suggest something yourself.

Or just sign up and come along to debate and learn more about the ways that computing can help construction, architecture and our built environment.

Tags: Be2Camp Be2CampNorth FACT Liverpool

The Songbook Sessions at Zanzibar

Howduino - a Day of Hardware Hacking in Liverpool

A Web Win For Liverpool City Council?

This article on the Liverpool Daily Post's Dale Street Blues blog earlier caught my eye - Guest blog: How to improve local government. It's about an interesting project called the Liverpool Commission to look into ways that local government could improve how it interacts with the electorate. Obviously, I think there could be interesting ways that social media and technology in general can help to improve the debate, and I'd like to see if there's any way that I or the rest of the Liverpool geek community could help out.

The Daily Post article is rather low on links to more information, and given my recent experiences with the Year of the Environment it was with some trepidation that I googled for "Liverpool Commission".

Thankfully my fears were unfounded. The first result returned was for a post on Councillor Paula Keaveney's blog about a recent Commission meeting. Not only that, but she seems to blog quite frequently, which is excellent news.

So, Cllr Keaveney - can we have a chat sometime about Liverpool Commission and how the web might help?

Tags: Liverpool Commission

Liverpool Environment Network Open Meeting

Is It Year of the Environment Here in Liverpool?

Back in November I posted a link to some details on the Year of the Environment. The details were pretty sketchy and it seemed quite late that things were being announced, particularly with all the talk of needing to maintain the momentum built up over the Capital of Culture year.

I'd have thought that now we're in February things would've been announced, and maybe even starting to happen, but I haven't seen any evidence of it. FACT are running a Climate for Change season to tie in with it, but the council have been pretty quiet on the matter.

I'm not the only person to notice. David Connor has just written about it over on his blog, and mentions that my earlier blog post about it currently ranks top of Google for the search "Liverpool Year of the Environment". And he's not the only person to end up here whilst looking for information about the Year of the Environment - 35 other people have landed at McFilter after searching for that on Google in the past month alone.

I completely agree with David when he says:

"I’m not expecting the Local Authority to drive this alone, or even expect any of their environmental partners to fly the flag. We all have a responsibility to play our part regardless of a themed year or where you live or work.

Can we please grasp this opportunity to maintain the momentum of Capital of Culture and direct that energy into a better place for our children and grandchildren?"

It does seem to be an opportunity being missed. Maybe I'll find out some more at the Liverpool Environment Network Open Meeting that's on tomorrow as Cllr Berni Turner will be speaking there after lunch. I'll report back if I find anything out.

Tags: Liverpool environment year sustainability

The River Mersey is now on Twitter

No self-respecting river can be without a Twitter account these days. If the River Thames has one then it's about time that the River Mersey was twittering too.

Rather than go on about the tides, I thought it would be more interesting to get a feel for the traffic using the river.

From his office in Tower Building, my granddad used to be able to look out over the river and see the ships coming and going. I'm a bit further away from the river, but I've knocked together a simple service to watch the ships for me and then twitter about them. I might not be able to see them (unless I walk round to the other side of the cathedral) but by following @merseyshipping on Twitter I still get to hear what's happening.

Barcamp Liverpool

The Award-winning Mazzini Project

Another piece of news that first featured in my twitter feed was the fact that I won the "Bitchin' Pitches" session at Barcamp Liverpool when I talked about the Mazzini project. It's been great to hear such positive things from people about it, and over on the company blog you can read more about the competition.

Tags: Mazzini Bitchin' Pitches Barcamp Liverpool bcliverpool

BarCamp Liverpool: Don't Just Change the World... Improve It!

In the run up to Barcamp Liverpool I set myself a challenge, and was even stupid enough to spell out the rather ambitious idea here on my blog. I decided to prepare two talks: the beginners guide to Arduino I've already posted; and a second which would be about inspiring people to start a business, or work out what's "wrong" with Liverpool and fix it, or use technology to counter climate change.

I didn't want to steal two slots in the schedule if that would stop someone else from presenting anything, so I held off adding the second talk until late morning on Sunday. There was a slot free for the end of the day, which fitted nicely with my ideas of rounding off the weekend with something of a call to arms.

I tried to pull the possible threads together under the umbrella term of improving the world, but I think my current business-focus skewed things a little. Still, I hope the dozen-or-so people present take the general idea and twist it to their own experiences and passions, and that me rambling about doing great things does have some small effect.

I've done what I can, whether this is "the spark that started things happening" will be up to others.

As ever, the slides are on Slideshare. After the talk, Alex asked about the assorted business networking events I'd mentioned, so I've thrown a list of places that I find out about business events and networking onto the GeekUp wiki. Feel free to add to that if you know of any similar links in the NW. The other way to find out about more of the events I attend is to keep an eye on my Upcoming page.

Tags: bcliverpool barcamp liverpool entrepreneurship

BarCamp Liverpool: Getting Started With Arduino - How to Build a Twitter-monitoring Alertuino

This is the first of a couple of posts I'll no doubt be making about Barcamp Liverpool - this one being the easiest to get out into the world.

I did a session about getting started with Arduino physical computing boards on Saturday afternoon. I talked a little bit about what the Arduino boards are first, and then stepped through the ubicomp equivalent to "Hello World" and from that moved on to hacking a toy ray gun so that it would alert me whenever someone twittered about Barcamp Liverpool. I'll expand upon the twitter side of things more when I write-up Bubblino...

Here are the slides. When I was writing them I tried to make them make sense if you weren't at the talk, but if anything isn't clear then ask questions in the comments.

Tags: arduino bubblino alertuino bcliverpool barcamp liverpool ubicomp hardware hacking tinkering

The Most Important Topics to Discuss or Disseminate?

In a couple of weeks it's the first Barcamp Liverpool. One of the "rules" of Barcamps is that everyone who turns up should have a talk ready that they offer to present. I've been pondering over what I should prepare for my talk.

So far I've generally hinted at doing something Arduino-related, and have been assuming I'd either talk about monitoring your home (show the Mazzini prototype, talk about that and some of the similar projects from others, or some of the things I learn about at Homecamp); or running a more general "Getting started with Arduino" session where I plug some LEDs and a switch into a breadboard and write a bit of Arduino code. And I expect I'll still have something along those lines as one of my proposals.

However, I've just realised that I should be turning my thinking on its head. Rather than coming up with ideas based on the knowledge that I've got that others might find interesting, I should instead be answering the question:

You've got the attention of a couple-of-dozen motivated and intelligent geeks; how do you want to change their lives?

Now you could improve their knowledge, which is what my initial ideas cover; but maybe it would be better to inspire them to go out and improve the world, or challenge their thinking and affect their future behaviour.

I'm setting myself the challenge to go to Barcamp Liverpool with two proposals: one along the lines of the Arduino tutorial, and another that falls into the second category. I'm just not sure what it will be about. Maybe I'll talk about starting and building businesses that make a difference; or lead a brainstorming session to work out what's going wrong in Liverpool and how to fix it; or implore people to find ways to improve the reuse and recycling of technology to improve the environment; or...

I'd love to hear anyone's ideas, comments or thoughts on what this second proposal should aim to achieve. I'd love it even more if you came along to Barcamp Liverpool and presented something along these lines to inspire me. How cool would it be if we could point to Barcamp Liverpool as the spark that started things happening?

Tags: Barcamp Liverpool Homecamp Arduino

Liverpool Software City International 2008

Software City held its second annual event last week. It's a Liverpool software networking and pitch-to-investors event which sees a collection of companies present their ideas to a panel of advisors/investors (including ex-Dragon Richard Farleigh this year) who respond with some questions and suggestions. The rest of us watch and take the opportunity to chat to peers (i.e. others in the software business, not a collection of Lords), investors, development agency representatives and other hangers-on during the breaks and post-event drinks.

It was a good event and I made some useful contacts, including finding out about the NWDA's hi-growth business funding/assistance scheme and discovering that one-man offices are available on Liverpool Innovation Park for less than £150/month.

In lieu of a proper review, I'll just mention some of the more interesting companies who pitched during the event. Maybe they'll be some of the future stars I was looking for recently...

Momote

Momote have a cross-platform mobile phone development platform. I thought that's what J2ME was supposed to be, but looking at their website it seems more of an XML-based offering. That reminds me of the stuff I worked on back at Trigenix before they were bought by Qualcomm. I'd be interested to find out more about it, and see how their offering is different from the ones tried before.

New Concept Gaming

These guys are building some cool new devices to let you get more active with your games console. In a similar vein to the Wiimote for the Wii, but they have controllers for PS3 and XBox in addition to the Wii. They've got the jOG on sale already, which lets you jog on the spot to get your in-game character to move around, and have another product in development which also notices when you crouch down or jump.

Yuuguu

Yuuguu were the only company I'd heard of before, although I didn't really understand what they offer. I've got more of an idea now - they're trying to help people collaborate remotely by offering a product to let you IM, share your desktop and audio conference.

They want to make it easy to enable adhoc collaboration, without having to book phone conference sessions, etc. and now have integration with existing IM networks and the ability for users to collaborate with people who don't have the Yuuguu software installed by accessing the service through their web browser. I think they need to let people use it purely in the browser too, as that will help get over the initial "not sure I want to download and install yet another bit of software" reluctance.

Should I pitch at Software City 2009?

Tags: Liverpool Software City networking

2009 - Liverpool's Year of the Environment

Following on from a successful year as Capital of Culture, next year sees Liverpool focus on the environment. Up until recently though I didn't know much more than that. No-one seemed to have any idea of what the plans were, or who was involved in making it happen.

Information about it is starting to leak out. Last week I attended the first part of the Trade Waste Management & Computer Security event at the new BT Convention Centre where Councillor Berni Turner outlined what they're planning.

And before I'd had time to write-up my notes and publish them here, the details have been released on the Liverpool City Council website.

I think the most interesting ideas are the green ambassadors and the hosting of special events to encourage debate about environmental issues in each of Liverpool's five neighbourhoods.

Hopefully I'll be able to find out a bit more about getting involved before January. I wonder if anyone wants to help me build/fund a live energy usage display for the city...?

Tags: Liverpool Year_of_the_Environment 2009 environment green sustainability

Going Back to the Plans

Life seems to be a whirlwind of networking events at the minute, which is how I managed to have signed up for last Thursday's Life Is Too Short To Go Unnoticed without really knowing what it entailed. It's strange how the world sometimes throws you exactly what you need, and an opportunity to work on the business rather than in it was something I was looking forward to.

Quarter of an hour in and I was beginning to have reservations. It seemed to be shaping up to a formulaic "here's lots of snippets about successful companies, you should try to be more like them" - the kind of event where you sit there nodding and thinking "oh, how clever", but once you get back to your business you realise that you haven't discovered a new way of doing anything. I was even wondering how I could find a game card so I could play Buzzword Bingo.

However, that was just the presenters, John Leach and Simon Bailey from Winning Pitch, warming up. They started to win me over during the second presentation, when John pulled up a slide entitled "The UK Sales Mentality". Pictured below were Del Boy, Arthur Daley and Frank Butcher, and John set about explaining how he hates shows like The Apprentice and Natural Born Sellers with their ultra-competitive, win-at-all-costs sales mentality.

From there I enjoyed the rest of the day. They encouraged interaction with the attendees and had a few practical exercises which helped us to start applying their ideas to our own situation. At the start of the day they outlined their objective, which was for everyone to find the top three tasks to have completed (the first step of) before the end of Friday, and at the end we each took our turn to share some of them with the rest of the group.

Mine were:

1. Write a basic business plan for MCQN Ltd.
2. Finish the Mazzini prototype. This is well under-way, and I'd have worked on it anyway, but it's important to give me something to demonstrate.
3. Apply for some funding. This isn't vital, but will mean I can spend more time working on Mazzini. There are a few possibilities I've come across lately and, even if I don't get the money, just going through the process will sharpen up my thinking and talking about what I'm doing.

The business plan is the big task from that. It's also the one I've been putting off for the longest. I'm quite annoyed with myself, and a little amazed, that I've avoided it for so long. I'm a strong advocate for having a plan, regardless of whether or not you manage to follow it to completion. I'd almost suggest creating a plan and then immediately throwing it away, as the process of working out your route forces you to think about what you want and how you might get there. Your subconscious is then primed so that it can spot opportunities when they present themselves. I doubt that you'll end up where you thought you'd be when you wrote the plan, but I bet that it's a better place than you'd have ended up if you hadn't made one.

I didn't manage to get my three tasks started by the end of Friday, but that's because I already had the day earmarked to finish my VAT return. So I've given myself an extension till the end of the weekend, and am well on my way to achieving that. I haven't been able to work on the Mazzini prototype because I'm not at home, but the first draft of the plan was done yesterday, and I'm pulling together a list of the funding opportunities today.

Tags: Liverpool Science Park Winning Pitch planning

The North-West Will Be a Tech Hub When We Make It

Techcrunch UK has written again this week about the need for a technology centre (a la Silicon Valley) in the UK and how it might be happening in London. As usual, there's been a ripple of debate in these parts about the article, and whether there is, or should be, more of a scene here in the North West.

It hasn't stirred up as much debate as such items in the past, and I wasn't going to bother commenting on it until I read an article about it by Rob Knight.

He argues that there's a good case for having such a tech hub in the NW and cites the great developer community as one of his top reasons. He also says that "[if] there’s anything that the North does badly, it’s probably self-promotion."

I hope he's right, because I can't list any big or up-and-coming companies from the area who are doing interesting things. And I've been keeping an eye out for them.

It's strange, because there is such a coherent and active developer community, and there are many more networking opportunities and discussions going on in Liverpool, Manchester, and the surrounding area than I encountered in Cambridge, and yet...

There seem to be a lot more people working to build things for other companies rather than chasing ambitious projects to change the world. If we do want the NW to become a tech centre then we need to get on and build it, which is why I've moved here. At GeekUp Liverpool the other night, John mentioned that it would be great to get some big tech companies into Liverpool, and I'll extend what I said to him to the rest of the North-West - that's a great idea, what's your big company going to do?

Tags: Liverpool Manchester NW TechHub Technology

BarCamp Liverpool

It was announced a month or so back, but the tickets for the upcoming BarCamp Liverpool are now available.

It's a two-day un-conference taking place on the 6th and 7th December 2008. I've just booked my ticket, so I'll see you there...

Tags: barcamp liverpool

Making Liverpool Prosper Beyond '08

A Sign for the Times?

This sign is on Leece Street, and I pass it almost every time I head home from the centre of Liverpool. There are more dotted around the city, part of the Biennial I think, but this one seems particularly appropriate given the current world events.

Tags: biennial liverpool credit_crunch

A Busy Social Week

This week has seen me out almost every night at some sort of networking/social gathering. I even had to miss watching the Champions League game on Wednesday and so missed seeing Gerrard get his century.

GeekUp Liverpool

On Tuesday evening I was at 3345 Parr Street for this month's Liverpool GeekUp. Dave Verwer gave an interesting talk where he built a little iPhone app in less than 20 minutes. iPhone development doesn't look too tricky, and there seem to be a collection of "pattern" apps to help get you started. Dave's main recommendation is to get to grips with Cocoa development in general, and then the jump to iPhone dev is fairly easy.

There was a larger turnout than last month, but once again everyone was welcoming and I got to chat to lots of interesting people. I also seem to have agreed to give a talk about something, probably Arduinos. It might be a month or two before I've worked out exactly what though...

Liverpool LUG

Thursday night was another geeky get together, but this time the Liverpool Linux Users Group. The OpenStreetMap talk had to be cancelled as they couldn't get their usual room and so it was just a drink-and-chat session in the bar at FACT.

The membership seems a little geekier, and less business-y, than the GeekUp crowd, but isn't full of rabid free-software advocates arguing over which Linux distro is best. I even survived admitting that I used to work for the Evil Empire (aka Microsoft).

Liverpool Green Drinks

Last but by no means least, yesterday evening I headed to Doctor Duncan's for the Liverpool Green Drinks evening.

Doctor Duncan's is one of Cains Brewery's pubs with a great range of their ales on tap. I was on the IPA last night, and I'll have to work through the rest at future Green Drinks nights. It's also a lovely old building with the walls in the room we were in decorated with ornate tiles.

It made a refreshing change to be the only geek there and I had an enjoyable evening chatting with a variety of people from environmental consultants to architects.

I think I'll be attending all of the gatherings in future, although hopefully they won't all fall back-to-back every month.

Tags: GeekUp Liverpool LUG Linux Green

The BA Festival of Science 2008: Going Green With the Strawbridges

In Liverpool, Avoiding Being Eaten By a Spider

Well, we're finally here in Liverpool with Internet access and everything. It feels like an age since I left Torino, mainly because - err - it was over a month ago.

Things have been a bit hectic: first off finding somewhere to live (we've got a gorgeous apartment in the shadow of one of the cathedrals); then gathering all the possessions that we left scattered around the country when we headed off to Italy; sorting out utilities, phone, Internet; and finally buying a flat's-worth of furniture as the new place is unfurnished and all our existing furniture is being rented out to some nice people down in Cambridge still.

We managed most of the furniture buying in a day-long trawl of second-hand shops (the old church at the top of Upper Parliament Street is great) and charity shops around Liverpool and have some great buys. Lounge, dining room and bedroom fully furnished for £400. Result.

Most of the boxes have been unpacked now, and we've been venturing out exploring some of what the city has to offer. This weekend you couldn't miss the grand spectacle of La Princesse, a giant 50-ft steampunk spider.

We headed down on Saturday afternoon and fought our way through the crowds to Derby Square, where we were soaked to the skin with the water cannons fired over the crowd as part of the "water ballet". Luckily no-one seemed to mind, and many seemed to enjoy it. In between manufactured downpours, I took a few photos on my phone and have uploaded them to my flickr account. Start here if you'd like a look.

Tags: la_machine la_princesse liverpool

GeekUp Liverpool: mapme.at

Leave Cambridge? For Liverpool?!?

So, the Tory's favourite think tank has published a paper (pdf) which claims that we should close Liverpool and move its inhabitants down to Cambridge. With the predictable flood of outrage, the-North-is-nice-really, and it's-true,-they're-all-money-grabbing-spongers commentary following in its wake.

I've held off writing anything about it here because I don't think adding to either side of the argument will achieve anything other than help sell a few papers (or provide a few website readers, at least).

Instead, I thought I'd offer a personal perspective on why I'm in the middle of doing just the opposite to the recommendation and swapping punting on the Cam for a ferry 'cross the Mersey.

I didn't leave Cambridge because it's a terrible place - it's not. I lived in East Anglia for a decade, with the majority of that time in Cambridge, and thoroughly enjoyed it. There's plenty of greenery (cows graze in the centre of town for God's sake); it's easy to get around by bike (although often a right pain to navigate by car); and there are many technology firms providing jobs. And those companies aren't the big Blue-chip names you get in the M4 corridor, so there's more of a start-up/doing-interesting-things vibe to the place.

However, a few years ago I was doing some hard thinking about what I was trying to achieve, and what was important to me, and came to the realisation that Cambridge doesn't provide the answer.

Part of the answer is geographical, or is that geological? Cambridge is on the edge of the fens, and hence very flat. That makes it hard to go mountain-biking, or hill walking, unless you can make a weekend of it. Compare that with Liverpool, where in a day trip you can choose between the Lakes, Snowdonia or the Peak District.

But more so it's about what I can offer to the area in which I live. Cambridge is doing just fine for successful technology companies, and its problems are related to transport infrastructure and how to cope with the hundreds of thousands of homes that the government seems intent on dumping onto the surrounding countryside. That's not something that interests or excites me.

Having grown up on Merseyside in the 1980s, I'd seen the worst of Liverpool's decline first-hand. The idea of taking MCQN Ltd. to the city and helping both to grow really got me fired up, and a trip back for the Biennial in 2004 confirmed my decision.

I'd pictured my return along the lines of the prodigal son, returning to single-handedly drag the city back to prosperity, so I was somewhat surprised (and only a touch disappointed) to discover that they'd quite rudely started without me.

The building and reconstruction work that was already underway in 2004 has continued apace in the intervening years, adding a few new towers to the city's skyline and converting huge numbers of old office blocks and warehouses into new apartment-blocks and office complexes. Wandering round the city whilst looking for somewhere to live I've been amazed at how much things have changed in such a short time. And at how much work is still going on.

It's not just the buildings though. When I left the North-West in the mid-90s, there weren't many computing jobs, and those that did exist were mostly in defence work and over towards Manchester. Nowadays there's a thriving community of geeks in the North-West and along the M62 corridor, with regular get-togethers in Liverpool (and Manchester and Preston and Leeds and Sheffield...).

There's still plenty of regeneration work to do - the city centre has been the focus of the improvements and you don't have to travel too far out to find boarded up houses and deprivation - but there's a buzz to the place, which I'm sure isn't just because it's currently the Capital of Culture. I'm looking forward to getting into the thick of it, and to help push things forwards myself, when I pick up the keys to our flat in the shadow of the Anglican cathedral next week.

Tags: Liverpool regeneration Policy_Exchange