The big flyby
May 18, 2006 Posted by Clare in : Bristol, Engineering , add a comment
The biggest and most advanced passenger aircraft, the A380, did a Bristol flyby today in recognition of the engineers at Airbus who had worked on it. Welcomed with cheers by staff at Filton, the aircraft is being hailed as a cleaner, quieter and more environmentally friendly aircraft, in a time when the environmental price of air travel is increasingly questioned.
Airbus A380, originally uploaded by sancho_panza.
Start-up city
Posted by Clare in : Computer science, Bristol , add a commentBristol got a good plug in Tom Coates' Blog plasticbag.org. Writing from XTech conference and asking the question how American are start-ups? he cites Bristol as being in the top ten Computer Science departments in the UK and concludes Bristol as a location with great potential as a startup hub.
Issues forums for community engagement
May 17, 2006 Posted by carolhayward in : e-democracy , 1 comment so farAs part of Bristol’s work with the Local eDemocracy National Project, we have been working closely with an American organisation called eDemocracy.org who have been piloting and promoting Issues Forums in the UK.
Tim Erickson from eDemocracy.org was recently visiting the UK and came to Bristol last week to talk about the concept with the Knowle West Media Centre and Bristol Wireless.
The idea behind it is that it is similar to discussion forums and email lists that are commonly used, but that there are some simple guidelines and rules that help ensure that the discussions remain varied, friendly and welcoming to all rather than being dominated by a minority.
Generally managed by citizens at a grassroots level, one of the other differences is that elected representatives, officers and the media are all encouraged to join in to discuss issues of importance to that community and to take action as need be.
We’ve been looking at setting up some neighbourhood Issues Forums, particularly in the pilot areas of our digital challenge proposals, that could run alongside recently established neighbourhood management pilots and enable open debates to take place with anyone in the community who has internet access. Ideally the neighbourhood forums would link up so that there would also be some Bristol-wide discussions.
Using open source software called groupserver, both email and online contributions are possible. UK examples of similar forums in action are at Brighton & Hove and Newham which have been running for just over a year. I hope that Bristol neighbourhoods will soon join them.
The Wireless World
Posted by Stephen Hilton in : Wireless , add a commentWi Fi has been a hot topic in Connecting Bristol sparking debate about the pros and cons of top-down / corporate versus ground-up / community approaches to connectivity. The bid includes some of both.
I was therefore really interested to see Rudi Van Drunen's presentation on Wireless Leiden - "the Wireless capital of the Netherlands"
This voluntary foundation provides a community wireless network spanning 300 km square. They have more than 2000 registered users and even provide connectivity to the city's schools and museums etc. Most impressively, as Rudi stated in his presentation, "there are no paid jobs in wireless Leiden" - volunteers support everything!
It is a great example of a successful digital community with people meeting and acting together both on and off line and a shining example of how much organisations like Bristol Wireless can achieve. .
I caught Rudi's presentation at a european conference in Greece - so it really is a wireless world!
