As you might have noticed earlier in the week, this year we have a media partnership with the awesome This Big City.

This Big City is one of the most interesting publications online about sustainable cities and urban social innovation – with staff based in Taiwan, Canada, Germany and Hungary. We’re really happy that TBC has been so up for getting involved with CCBTN this year.

To kick things off, Joe Peach, writer and founder, published a great introduction to what we’re all about and a list of last year’s winners, for people who won’t know about us or the CityCamp movement (yet!)

Joe will be joining us on the Saturday in person, so keep an eye out and give him a warm CityCamp Brighton welcome

You can follow This Big City on Twitter here

In March 2012, a group of like-minded people started a discussion group at City Camp 2 around digital inclusion in the city. Everyone agreed on three things:

• It’s a form of poverty to not be connected
• Everyone should have the opportunity to be connected in the way that they want and to help themselves and
• It’s essential to grow digital communities alongside digital business.

We started to map out a programme of activities that could help set out a new level of digital ambition for the not for profit sector and embed a way of working across sectors to solve digital exclusion.  Loads of different things we could do were identified like mapping a digital champion’s network; pop up surgeries, a workshop at the Digital festival and establishing networking relationships.

There was a further conversation at City Camp 2.5 in September which was framed against the current context of welfare reform, reducing isolation, cuts to adult education and the digital by default agenda. Intermediary practitioners at the event asked for a tool to connect with each other, learn new skills and share knowledge around digital inclusion.

So that takes us so where we are now, I along with CVSF reps have been inputting to the financial inclusion, welfare reform consultation and digital inclusion research conducted by the City Council and are more certain than ever that there is a need to connect practitioners together across sectors, to learn from each other and help people get online.

I can’t make City Camp 3 but am hoping there will be some ‘tech’ people interested in looking into what platforms we could be using to connect a network of interested people online – I can do the writing bit. If you are interested in being involved just email laura@cvsectorforum.org.uk.

Wishing everyone at City Camp 3 a fantastic time full of ideas and fun!

I’m really happy that for this year’s CityCamp Brighton, we’re working with a few different people to see how we can create the greatest possible impact together.

As you might have noticed from the list of prizes this year, one of those partnerships is with the awesome people at TEDxBrighton.

TEDxBrighton are going to be awarding a spot in their Ideas Lab space at the 2013 event to one of the ideas pitched to the judging panel on the Sunday of CityCamp.

On that judging panel will be one of the TEDxBrighton team, who’ll help identify which idea is going to be the best fit, and benefit most from meeting all of the lovely and interesting people who attend their event.

As we’re both parts of the same extended ‘positive change and ideas’ networks in Brighton, it’s a perfect coupling: where CityCamp is all about encouraging people to make their ideas real, TEDx is in the business of ‘ideas worth spreading’. With their help, one of the great ideas about positiXe change in Brighton is going to get a bit more spreading.

Find out more about TEDxBrighton, and suggest speakers for their event this year at: tedxbrighton.com

We’ve just launched our ideas sharing platform and it’s a great chance to start sharing your ideas and networking.

Whether you can make it to the main event or not, it’s an opportunity to pitch an idea or problem to the crowd, get involved in discussions, and give your support in the form of votes or offers of help.

If you are coming to CityCamp Brighton and you want to contribute, once you’ve signed up for a profile we recommend clicking where your username says “Anonymous” and adding your real name. That way, not only can you get to know other people and build your network, we can all better match offers of help to ideas on the day.

In previous years, more than 20 ideas were shared, lots of comments and discussions helped take those further and hundreds of votes of support were cast.

Our friend Tom Nixon has started the ball rolling this year – why don’t you join him?

Get involved here

This year, CityCamp prizes are focusing on developing ideas into action.

Like previous years, CityCamp is about creating positive ideas that can make a real difference for our city. Over the three days of the event, teams will come together to discuss and work up practical proposals, and then to pitch them.

This year, five projects will win small grants of £500 each accompanied by a tailored package of support and introductions into the services, which will help the people turn their ideas into reality. Mentoring, connections, technical and business support, will all be delivered by CityCamp partners and the CityCamp team. Then at CityCamp 3.5 during September’s digital festival, we will bring back those five projects for an update and select the overall project of 2013.

There will be two extra prizes on the day. One of the five projects will be chosen as Weekend Winner. One project – perhaps the same one – will be chosen as TEDxBrighton Ideas Lab winner. The TEDxBrighton Ideas Lab prizewinner will get a free spot in TEDxBrighton’s Ideas Lab space at the Corn Exchange.

Judging

We will also be judging events a little differently. Unlike the last two years, where a team from the funding organisation plus the organisers has judged the winner, this year we’ll be adding a dose of randomness.

If you come to all three days of CityCamp 3, you can put your name forward on Sunday morning to be a judge. We will draw three judges from that pool, who will judge the prizes alongside one of the CityCamp team, Natalie from TEDxBrighton and last year’s winner Paul Richards of GigBuddies. As ever, the judges will be looking for ideas that can make a difference and sustain themselves without huge budgets.

On the Sunday afternoon, those judges will pick five winners to go forward to the development stage, the Weekend Winner and the TEDxBrighton Ideas Lab prizewinner.

On March 22nd-24th people from across our city will be coming together for CityCamp 3 to work on their ideas for how to create a better future for everyone. It’s a free event, and we get people from every area of life along, including community groups, digital professionals, council employees and education professionals. Everyone is welcome!

Here are the latest details for CityCamp 3:

Inform: Presentations about the issues that face the city. Friday 22nd March 2-5.30pm, Sallis Benney Theatre

Discuss: Come and discuss ideas to make the city better. Saturday 23rd 10am-5.30pm Brighthelm Centre

Do: Turn those ideas into actions. Sunday 24th 10am -5pm Hove Town Hall

More details and tickets will be available soon.

Keep coming back for updates or follow us on Twitter or Facebook

We had a very productive Third Thursday meeting and have got straight what we want to do for things like venue, speakers and the overall plan for awarding prizes etc which we will get up on the blog just as soon as we have got these confirmed.

We also all pledged to get out and about and attended meetings with groups that haven’t taken part in CityCamp before so that we can explain what it is and hopefully get people interested / excited about coming.  If you are running a meeting and want us to come along or if you know of someone we should contact then please let us know.  This is instead of the pre-CityCamp event we did last year for Community and Voluntary organizations as we thought it would give us better reach.

We also sorted out marketing plans and we will have more details online and also with print flyers next month – we will be looking for volunteers to help spread the word!

We are still hoping to have at least a limited crèche on at least the Saturday but it is proving rather expensive so if anyone has any ideas on this we would be really glad to hear them as we know it can be difficult for people with kids to take part.

So – all very logistical last night but plans are really moving along – getting excited now!

Please either comment here or contact us if you think we have missed something – the more ideas/ help we get the better the event will be – and HUGE thanks to everyone who turned up last night to help with the planning.

(UPDATE Feb 2013: Applications have now closed for this project and are being considered by Paul and his team.)

Gigbuddies, the winner or CityCamp 2, are looking for an innovative and talented freelance app and web developer to develop the online element of our Gig Buddies project.  Gig Buddies matches people with and without learning disabilities through their shared love of music so they can go to gigs together.

The key concept is that we want to create a stand alone app and/or web app which will be easy to use for people with learning disabilities but aimed at a universal audience.

We have won some funding for this work and have the support of the CityCamp Brighton so we are now in a position to actually commission our development work.  As our resources are limited we want to make the best use of open source and free software but we know that this will take some clever development work and creativity in its own right!

We have an idea of what we want but we want whoever we work with to help shape what we are doing. Our goal is an app (Android and/or iPhone), or perhaps a website built on responsive design principles that:

1)      Enables people to sign-up and register as a ‘buddy’ (a dating site without the ‘Love’)

2)      Enables people to choose what gigs go to – aggregating information from existing sources

3)      Enables gig goers to post up short 30 second video reviews of their night out

4)      Promotes our work to a wider audience

5)      Is easy and intuitive to use.

We also want to produce a strong identity for Gig Buddies so we will be looking for someone with a vision for an eye catching design for the project and app.

We would like to hear from someone who can work with us to design the spec for our project and deliver it.

We have a budget of £5,200 (inc of any VAT) for this project and closing date is 28th Jan 2013.

Email us to make initial enquiries, paul@stayuplate.org

Please also email examples of any previous work.

www.stayuplate.org

CityCamp is coming back to Brighton from 22-24 March 2013.

We’re working on venues and speakers, but the basics are the same:

• A weekend of learning, discussing and creating solutions that help our city
• Inspiring speakers from the city and beyond
• Prizes for the best ideas
• A chance to work with enthusiastic experts from completely different lines of work
• It’s still completely free and open

Watch this space for more information in the next few weeks, but put the date in your diary now.

City Camp funding has been helping Speak Out trainers with learning disabilities to promote the Thumbs Up scheme.

The trainers want local services to join and commit to good support for customers with learning disabilities. In joining the services will have access to training, advice and resources to help them meet the needs of people with learning disabilities.

City Camp has supported the trainers to get on facebook, use flipcam and a new zoom h2 sound recorder to help promote their message.

If your organisation hasn’t joined Thumbs Up yet there is more information about the scheme in this presentation.

For more infomation or to join contact the trainers email: traininggroup@bhspeakout.org.uk or visit our facebook page: www.facebook.com/bhspeakouttraining for more information .