Stef Lewandowski
Create something every day

Too many ideas, not enough time to write them all down before I’m on to the next thing. That’s my problem.

So the Masterplan event last week has really tweaked a few things in my head, and I’ve suddenly begun thinking about a large number of issues and ideas almost constantly since then.

To be honest I’ve become something of a bore since then - talking (or is it ranting?) to anyone who’ll listen on the subject of the ‘future of Birmingham’.

I guess what’s really interesting is that with what is going on, it’s not just the Council making decisions by themselves about the city - they’re opening up the debate wider than that.

In my last post I’d promise I’d try to divulge and explain some of the big things that came out of the event, so I’ll start with the one of the biggest - the process itself.

The consultants have asked me to come up with some ideas (a proposal perhaps) for how to use the Web throughout the process. Quite a dangerous thing to do really - inviting me to put some ideas in writing - because you know that I’ll just come back with something overly ambitious and then find out that their budget (yes there is a Web budget) won’t stretch to those ambitions.

But whatever, you only get one shot at something like this, so I’ve just spent the last few hours putting it all down into a sketch.

My process as it always is, is to open up a blank document in Adobe Illustrator - this is a _drawing_ package. So I guess that’s interesting. I start with a sketch and moving things around on the page. Words, lines, boxes (usually rounded boxes) until something appears from the mess.

I though it might be fun to include that rough sketch, so here you go:

I guess I’m doing the hyper-modern bit. Blogging about drawing a sketch of a web strategy proposal that I’m suggesting will use blogging, and in so doing will be being part of that web strategy before it’s even been agreed. Ah well!

But there’s one word in that sketch that does jump out, and that’s not because I don’t know how to use point size properly. I always start my text at about 10pt and then seem to scale up and up and up, so these sketches always seem to have a ‘zoomable’ quality to them. So the ideas that come at the end - the ones that are crystallisations of what has gone before tend to be much bigger than other things on the page. I guess you could say that they are ‘visual conclusions’.

Anyway.

The word is WIKI.

This is something that came up in Friday’s discussions at the Masterplan event. We were discussing how it is possible for people to get involved in such a large project and for there to be a feeling of ownership by the general populace of the city over the plans for where they live.

A WIKI Masterplan could be the solution.

For those not familiar with what a WIKI is, it is a very simple website consisting of a number of pages in a loose structure. The great thing is that all of these pages are editable and can be created by anyone who visits the website. A great example of a WIKI in action is WIKIPedia, now the world’s largest encyclopedia, which has no central editing team, and all of the knowledge on there is created by the site’s users.

Great things can happen when you take an ‘anyone can edit this page’ approach, so how about, rather than having a masterplan that is a boring, flat document that gets uploaded as a Word document onto the Council website next year, we do things differently?

How about a Masterplan that is a WIKI?

Just a website (that looks just like WIKIPedia) that has sections for each of the grand ideas that are being proposed, where anyone, no matter their background, can go and make their opinions known and can influence the final (and the notion of final starts to sound old-school in this situation) document for publication.

In New Zealand this approach was taken in developing a new law. How futuristic is that? And how democratic can you get?

This could have far-reaching impact if we apply it in Birmingham.

One of the issues that I think this Masterplan process is facing is that there are plenty of people in the city who are passionate about the place, yet could feel they are being marginalised just through the fact that getting the consultants and the people working on this to have any contact with all of them is a human impossibility - there are too many people in the city and this process lasts just one year.

You can see the problem - “I think X about the city but there is no way for me to get my voice heard. This masterplan process is elitist and selective and I won’t have anything to do with it.”

But with a WIKI approach, you can just say in response - “Well, have you been to the masterplan site? You can just go and edit the page on X and the council will listen to your opinion when it comes to the final decisions”.

And even better than that, through this process, people who are passionate who we don’t already know about could emerge from the woodwork and become vocal and powerful advocates.

This could also have ‘diversity’ bonus points. I couldn’t help noticing that _again_ and I know that this isn’t the fault of anyone involved on a conscious level, the room was dominated by White, Male, Middle/Upper-class people (‘male, pale, stale’ if you’re not feeling generous). I thought we’d gone past that years ago, but the more I get invited into this ‘scene’ the more I realise that what I’m used to in the ‘creative’ scene just doesn’t apply elsewhere. Could a WIKI help make the process better in terms of involving a wide range of people? Worth a try, I reckon.

Back before the Masterplan “visioning study” was released, many people I spoke to were pretty muted about the whole concept of top-down city design. It sounded like a bad idea - that we’d end up with some authoritarian approach to rebuilding the city.

But when it came out, most of the people I know in the creative/cultural sector thought it was great - it was saying exactly the right things about the city.

Up until then, there was a movement to set up our own ‘underground’ alternative to the plan. Kind of a “You think that the city is going to be that, but you know what? We think it’s going to be more like this.”

And Sandra from Friction Arts coined a fantastic term to define it:

The Mistressplan.

Every good master needs a mistress, so how about it?

A WIKI Mistressplan?