Introduction and the Festival of Ideas
May 6, 2008 Posted by Jeff in : Bristol, Innovation, e-society, Festival of Ideas, Guest Bloggers, Deaf Awareness , add a commentHi everyone and welcome to the first vlog in this series - Jeff McWhinney here - I am the MD of a social enterprise, Significan’t (Sign if I can’t), which assists all those of you out there who are manually challenged, unable to use sign language 
especially those providing a front line public service enabling them to engage with a qualified sign language interpreter through a video link within minutes and communicate with their deaf customers. Occasionally you may find my written English a bit ‘odd’ or strange - my first language is British Sign Language (BSL) and it has a different grammatical structure than that for English. It has been said that it is closer to the spoken languages native to India. That is why I am using a vlog (video blog) as well as this written transcript.
In this vlog I will be covering issues that deaf people face everyday in the hope that this group of people are better understood and therefore catered for as this week is the national Deaf Awareness Week. I will also cover innovation and all the latest with regard to the positive human impact that innovation has achieved.
Today, lets go to the Festival of Ideas event organised by Innovation Exchange (www.innovation-exchange.org) for social enterpreneurs (people like me!) facilitated by Innovation Exchange. A participant has uploaded a video clip which can be seen on YouTube and reproduced below:
Look at Me, Connecting Bristol welcomes Jeff McWhinney during Deaf Awareness Week 2008
May 3, 2008 Posted by Stephen Hilton in : Bristol, e-society, Technology, Guest Bloggers, Deaf Awareness , add a comment5th - 11th May 2008 is Deaf Awareness Week so we are delighted that Jeff McWhinney, a leading figure in the deaf community and a recognised digital innovator, has agreed to be Connecting Bristol’s Guest Blogger.
Jeff is the former Chief Executive of the British Deaf Association, Guardian Public Servant of the Year runner-up and now manages a video technology company called Significan’t, which he founded.
Significan’t uses real-time video conferencing to virtually link deaf staff and customers with British Sign language interpreters.
As Jeff explained in 2006, “There are about 275 registered BSL interpreters in the UK and around 70,000 BSL users. You just have to look at the numbers to realise that if a local authority or health trust sees a deaf person who is in urgent need and needs to communicate with them, they can’t do it straight away. There is usually a six-week wait to get a BSL interpreter to help sort out an urgent issue. What usually happens is that a deaf person will take their hearing child out of school to interpret for them if they have a crisis with their GP, for example. You can have the situation where a deaf person is being told they have a terminal illness and their child is interpreting for them.”
During Deaf Awareness Week, organisations working with deaf people across the country are inviting everyone to ‘Look At Me’. The theme aims to improve understanding of the different types of deafness by highlighting the many different methods of communication used by deaf, deafened, deafblind and hard of hearing people, such as sign language and lipreading.
Jeff will be adding a BSL version of his posts to the blog. We look forward to Jeff’s thoughts on how video streaming and other digital channels can help make the world a more inclusive, efficient and fun place for everyone.
The Big Green Bookshop
March 17, 2008 Posted by Andy in : e-democracy, Bristol, e-society, Technology, Guest Bloggers, Business , 1 comment so far
I came across this blog last week and thought it was another nice demonstration of how people are using “social media” in real life.
When Waterstone’s closed their branch in Wood Green (near me in London), there was a petition online and a local campaign.
When the store closed, the former managers decided to turn the energy of that campaign into a new independent bookstore. They used a blog to chart their progress and called on their “facebook army” for help and support.
Not only has this been great publicity, but they’ve got to know their customers, they’ve captured the spirit of the campaign and made their mark in their community.
Most importantly, Wood Green has got a good independent bookshop.
By one standard, the “Don’t close Waterstones” petition failed. The shop closed. By another, perhaps more interesting standard, it was wildly successful. Now this can’t happen in every case, but it seems that there’s often an opportunity to harness this momentum and create something better than before.
Online petitioning is something that Bristol is well known for.
So my question is, how could you help to create more positive results and situations like the big green bookshop?
Global Campaigning, Free Stuff and Cute Cats
Posted by Andy in : Bristol, e-society, Technology, collaboration, Guest Bloggers , 1 comment so farRecently, I worked with the Global Campaign for Education, who promote education as a human right around the world. They are a coalition of NGOs and trade unions and they run the Global Action Week, which sees activity in 120 countries around the world. Last year, over 5 millon children took part in the campaign.
Action Week this year starts on the 27th April.
The main reason to mention them is to highlight an organisation that could not have existed in its current form only a few years ago. You can run a huge, credible global campaign on infrastructure that is basically free, but arguably as good as the systems being used by multinational companies. So if you wanted to start your own global campaign, I’d suggest three applications that could save you tens of thousands in annual running costs:
Gmail: Free email accounts, but also huge (huge) online storage capability which gives you a place to store files and back things up. With google apps, you can create a private intranet and website. The basic service is free (and good enough for most people).
Google News Alerts: This provides a media monitoring service comparable to expensive clipping services, especially if you’re looking for global coverage. This is free, too.
Skype: You don’t even need a phone. Skype’s free international calling and instant messaging can bring together groups from around the world. It’s also got free video conferencing.
On top of this core infrastructure you’ve also got all the social media applications like myspace, facebook, wordpress and the rest.
There’s a lot been written recently about “free” as a business model recently (mostly triggered by this article in Wired), but one of the consequences of this is that you don’t need to spend much money to organise a huge global campaign.
As I was writing this entry, I came across this interesting presentation by Ethan Zuckerman on “The Cute Cat theory of digital activism” that makes a similar point, but for a slightly different audience. It’s aimed at people who build web services and it argues that if you build free online social web tools, one of the tests of their usefulness is whether or not they are used by activists.
The internet is about more than just pictures of cute cats, as shown by this graphic:
He concludes:
If there’s a single message to the talk, it is that activists are going to use your tools if your tools are any good - watch them, pay attention to them, protect them and learn from them. They’ll make your tools better, and they’re one of the reasons to make social software in the first place.
It’s got loads of good international case studies in it as well. Well worth a read over your lunch.
