Come to the Digital Circle LaunchBlackstaff Studio, Belfast The Digital Circle is about you! About how we can, together, make the right decisions now to help us build and sustain our companies and jobs for the future.
Come to the launch. Find out what we’ve done for the industry’s benefit and how you can get involved to make a difference. Click Here to Register |
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories are bringing their annual mediascapes bash to Belfast this year. This annual celebration of uses of their toolkit for building mobile media will bring together users from across the world (Taiwan to Denmark) who are building games, guides and educational tools using the toolkit. It’s a chance to see what people are doing in this experimental area and its free!
A small community of users in education, heritage tourism and broadcasting is emerging here in Northern Ireland, there will be a chance to try out a mediascape meet the people who are making them. Registration and programme here
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Whether it is Internet Protocol, Intellectual Property, Innovation for the Public, it’s the 4 in 4IP which is important.
Ewan McIntosh of Channel 4’s 4IP Fund was in Belfast on Thursday (11 November 2008). Ewan is Digital Commissioner for Northern Ireland Scotland and north east England and is planning to make regular visits here for open meetings.
Davy Sims met him in one of Belfast’s posher venues, hence the opera in the background.
For more information and to contact Ewan go to http://www.4ip.org.uk/ and http://www.38minutes.co.uk/
And a note about Digital Circle. The official launch will be soon. You can sign up for free membership now through the blog – http://www.digitalcircle.org
Members will be voting for the steering group.
There’ll be a podcast about all that soon and you can follow it all on the Blog.
This site has been created to help a group of collaborators to work on the development of the role of Digital Mentors, which was raised by the UK government department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) in their white paper in 2008, Communities in Control.
The white paper stated of the digital mentors:
“Government will pilot a ‘Digital Mentor’ scheme in deprived areas. These mentors will support groups to develop websites and podcasts, to use digital photography and online publishing tools, to develop short films and to improve general media literacy. The Digital Mentors will also create links with community and local broadcasters as part of their capacity building, to enable those who want to develop careers in the media to do so. Depending on the success of these pilots, this scheme could be rolled out to deprived areas across England.“
This has echoes of some other projects which are planned for the next year in Northern Ireland. I’ve signed up to the mailing list and would encourage you too.
On this subject,
Claire White (whitellama) writes:
All people need is access and time. This is a big ‘all’. Unpicking this, use of social media is a luxury. Access to basic equipment is enough for basic interaction, but the technology you have dictates whether you can access features like broadband. When internet access has a price, time becomes limited. Your ability to have an ambient awareness of the passing world depends if you are near a screen much of the time, for example in a job that is both computer-based and where access to social sites has not been blocked.
Joining in the many-to-many conversations online takes longer than face to face, but it is at least more possible than actually moving to the same gathering points. Twitter’s strength is that it is virtually as quick to post as it is to read updates, so many-to-many conversations have become quicker and more open than email. Unless you protect your updates, you open up your interactions for anybody to follow. When Twitter becomes widely accessible by mobile phone again it will become easier for this to happen away from computer screens.
There is an opportunity for Digital Circle to perform as a community creator, not just enabling those who are ‘in the business’ to collaborate, but also to introduce those who are excluded who may bring new prespectives, new ideas and new “wealth”.
We’ve now created a LinkedIn group for Digital Circle.
It’s just, along with 38minutes.co.uk, another way for Digital Content creators and managers to connect and collaborate. Just earlier today I used the LinkedIn network to talk to senior folk at Electronic Arts and Marvel - it’s that good!
The first of the Belfast OpenCoffeeClub morning meetings. No pressure - just come along for half an hour of chat and coffee in the morning. We’ll test out a few other times and dates as well with the intent of making it a weekly meeting of OpenCoffeeClub minds.
Title: Good Morning Belfast - OpenCoffee
Location: Charlies, Bradbury Place, Belfast
Link out: Click here
Description: Morning meeting for the Belfast OpenCoffeeClub.
Start Time: 08:00
Date: 2008-11-25
38minutes is a NING network for Channel 4’s 4IP initiative.
Delivering effective, high quality public service media in an increasingly digital age is still pioneer territory and a real challenge.
Channel 4 has decided to take up that challenge in a radical way by forming the 4 Innovation for the Public (4iP) fund.
The 4iP Fund aims to deliver publicly valuable content and services on digital media platforms with significant impact and in sustainable ways. It represents one of the biggest and most exciting calls-to-action for new and emergent digital media companies in the UK.
Join the Digital Circle group on 38 minutes and stay connected to the rest of us.
Quietly put as a “Dragons Den” rip-off, Chasing the Dollar (on BBC iPlayer) may hold some interest for Northern Ireland entrepreneurs.
(Link provided by Studio NI Yahoo Group - the group for NI Media Freelancers)
Co-Working Belfast is well on the way to being set up as a Non-Profit.
We also viewed an excellent property today in the Cathedral Quarter which would be a serious candidate for Co-Working Belfast. The site is circa 1200 sq ft, has a modern kitchenette, toilets and disabled access.
We’ve also applied, with the help of Belfast City Council, to the Creative Industries Innovation Fund for some funding to create fully equipped hot-desks as well as buy desking, chairs and office amenities for the co-working space. The funding also covers some software and backup facilities for co-working road warriors. We just have to wait and see if we get it.
What the funding does not cover is the rent. The rent + rates would be approximately £20000 per year which means we’d need to bring that in through ‘client’ rents and/or sponsorship. The space itself is amenable to holding events in the evening as well as co-working spaces during the day. We would anticipate that we can probably fit 20 people in there in working spaces - and with hot-desk subscriptions, it works out even better.
If you want to comment, please do so below. Please also add any constructive comments or opinions regarding the creation of co-working spaces.
Last week, Microsoft launched their BizSpark program designed to help early stage startups get resources which would otherwise pose a barrier to entry:
Eligibility:
You need to be a privately held company building a software-based product or service (even using Open Source code), in business for less than 3 years and have annual revenues less than $1 million.
To enroll, Contact Momentum and we’ll provide some information.