One step (or stone) at a time

Part of the Operation Noah day activities on the 5th July included a taize service (what’s that, I hear you ask) which was very moving and turned out to be very symbolic of the challenge that we will face in trying to address our carbon foot-print as a community.

As one element of the service, we worked together to move a pile of pebbles from the larger x10 footprint (which Ruth and Josh had used at the school assemblies with the children) to the smaller x1 footprint; but there weren’t really any “rules” and all of this whilst singing the taize as well.

- The first hurdle was “who to start ?”. Well, at least that wasn’t too hard with having Ruth within our community.

- The biggest hurdle was “who to go second ?”; where we all metaphorically looked at each other (and wondered if we were going round in the circle or not). I have forgotten who “broke the mould” but then we fairly easily got into a pattern of moving one stone each from the big footprint to the little one.

- The next hurdle was “well actually, an individual can move more than one stone at a time” and we fairly easily got into a pattern of people moving two or three stones at a time.

- However, the collective realisation dawned, now that we had started the task, that the pile of stones really wasn’t getting moved very quickly (and that we would be singing the taize forever!) and that actually we needed some rather big actions if we were going to finish at a reasonable time. So, the second biggest hurdle was for someone to take a really big handful of stones from one pile to the other.

- Finally, there was one stone left and then one of the younger members of the congregation taking part stepped forward and moved the final stone.

The symbolism here was strong at each stage in the process to the task that we face in Hartley Wintney about thinking about and doing something about our carbon footprint, as we have so clearly been asked to by the children of the village.

- The first steps are always hard. It will be hard to get our community moving and taking action. Breaking the barrier of “why should I go first” is actually pretty strong. There is always something else to be doing in our busy lives. However, a momentum builds up, once you can get things started.

- We are bound to find that the first steps were good to get us going and build up our confidence, but not sufficient to achieve our ends. Again, we will need to work together and it will seem strange “breaking the mould” again and doing things that will really make a difference. At this stage people will need lots of support and encouragement, but these really big actions will also be required for the enormity of the challenge that we face.

- I felt it was significant that the youngest member of the congregation moved the final stone, because our actions today will effect the world that we leave behind for our children and their children.

All in all, it was very thought-provoking … … …

Meeting my MP for the first time

Children of Hartley Wintney present their fabric petition on climate change to their MP

Friday was the first time that I’ve met my own MP ! The occasion was that the primary school children of the Hampshire village, Hartley Wintney, were unfurling a giant petition for their local MP James Arbuthnot, calling on the Government to protect their future. The petition calls on the Government to cut the UK’s carbon footprints by 90%. This was the start of a community climate change weekend event called Operation Noah Day and I’ll try and post more about how it went soon ….

The petition – made of recycled bed sheets – was taken by Ruth Jarman, chair of the Hartley Wintney Operation Noah Group, to all four primary schools in the area and collected hundreds of brightly coloured signatures. Children also received an Operation Noah Day leaflet with five suggestions for all village parents to “Change the way you live because of who you love”. Supporting her was St. John’s Church Careforce volunteer, Josh Parmar.

The wording of the children’s giant petition is “To the UK Government from the community of Hartley Wintney and Dogmersfield. We want to cut our carbon footprint from this (large footprint) to this (10x smaller footprint). We will do our part. We need you to do yours”.

Charity begins at home

Within the transport community, when it comes to “behavioural change” (oh don’t we use some strange terms), we all know that nothing beats “feet on the street”. Gillian Merron heralded the early results from the three Sustainable Transport Towns (Worcester, Peterborough and Darlington) as “astounding”. Surveys all point to the fact that people want better transport. However there is a huge gap between what we say we want and what we do. In the lingo, the approach taken in the three towns was called “Individualised Travel Marketing” – where information is sent to every household, followed by a visit to establish a personalised travel plan to suit them. All the evidence seems to suggest it works. People can’t change their behaviour if they don’t know the options available to them. It is too easy to stay stuck in a rut and stick to your old habits. However, the “personal touch” seems to make all of the difference and I’m not really at all surprised.

Well I thought I’d have a go too and they say that “charity begins at home”, so I have been working with a national charity and a local church to pull together some travel options for my local community of Hartley Wintney, all as part of an event called Operation Noah Day, which is on Saturday 5th July. I hope to keep you posted on the blog on how it goes.

Style of communication really does matter and I’ve just had one of the sweetest messages from one of my fellow volunteers to say that “I love the really local and practical approach and gentle, non nagging style, it will really make people think. Yes please and more – if you have time to produce it!”.

Unrealistic and radical?

Environmental (or come to think of it, any) “campaigners” are often tarred with being “unrealistic” or “radical” in their ideas. When people say “unrealistic”, they often mean “I don’t want to xxxx – I don’t want the hassle of doing xxx.”. People trying to discredit the ideas from campaigners as “radical” are even more interesting. Consider the alternative and think about who is being radical now:

- It is deeply radical to say “we have 5 billion people on the planet and things are already running out. I know let’s try having 10 billion people on the planet and see what happens?”.
- It is extremely radical to say “let’s keep driving until we change the chemistry of our atmosphere and then see what happens”.
- It is tragically radical to comtemplate that “when you were born you shared the planet with perhaps 30 million other species and yet when you die there might be one tenth of the number”.

I am just reading “The Comforting Whirlwind” by Bill McKibben (apologies for the precis above) and I was so reminded of Bob Geldof’s words on the power of unreasonable people. I discussed the balancing act between the two Government Stern and Eddington reports in my previous postings – something has to give and if that means us getting tarred as being unrealistic, radical and unreasonable then I don’t think I mind that much!

Manchester re-enforces its bid to become England’s second city

As a (near-)Brummie, I can vouch there there has always been a rivalry with Manchester and Birmingham, vying for the position of England’s second city. Well, I think Manchester may well have clinched it yesterday by bagging £1.5bn of central Government funding from the Transport Innovation Fund, which unlocks a £3bn improvement programme for Manchester’s transport system. This enables a pretty comprehensive programme of modernisation funding to develop a world-class transport system. The list of planned improvements is impressive, covering tram, bus (including a fleet of dedicated yellow school buses), trains, park & ride, cycling, smart card technology, eight new transport interchanges etc. etc.

But, at what cost? As the press widely reports, this funding is only enabled because Manchester is considering a dual-ring congestion charging zone, in part to fund the transport investments but also to limit demand and encourage behavioural change.

This is a big step for national policy and a huge step for Manchester itself. Formally, the situation is that Ruth Kelly was annoucing on the 9th June that Manchester had achieved a stage-gate called “programme entry”. This means that the Government support the package in principle, have provisionally made the money available and commit themselves to working closely with Greater Manchester as it develops its proposals in the coming months.

You can find out what Ruth Kelly actually said in her annoucement to parliament at the wonderful theyworkforyou.com, or watch it as a video. You can also see the actual responses from the various local MPs.

Sir Richard Leese, as leader of Manchester City Council, was of course at the centre of the annoucements.

Have social networks replaced the need for cities ?

One of the parallel “seminar” sessions that I attended at the Innovation Edge conference was billed as “Are online social networks the new cities?”. The session was chaired by NESTA visiting fellow Charles Leadbetter of “We think” fame and was set up as a classic debate between the physical and the virtual world. In the “red corner”, representing physical cities as the financial, social and creative engines of our culture, was Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester City Council. In the “blue corner” was Michael Birch, former CEO of Bebo, a social networking site, recently sold out to AOL. In the middle ground was Jon Gisby from Channel 4 and Tom “inkie” Bingle, kept his private image by not bothering to show up.

The debate followed fairly predictable lines, with it starting as an either/or discussion between the physical and the virtual. Sir Richard Leese maintained that cities were the crucible for innovation – it is only innovative people that make Manchester innovative, so Manchester’s policy is to do what they can to attract them and them pretty much get out of their way. Just as Manchester had made the journey from being at risk from becoming a declining industrial city, Sir Richard didn’t want Manchester to become a declining post-industrial city either and he saw that innovation was key. Michael Birch was quirky and enigmatic, but pretty much trotted out the Bebo story. He did manage to drop in a good plug for Bebo because, which is on the intersection of where social networking is helping to world to become a better place. The conversation finally meandered its way around to the question not being one of either/or between the physical and the virtual, but more a question of how they could complement each other in a possible future world.

I was dying to ask a question about transport systems, as they seemed to me to be exactly at that interface between the physical world and the virtual, but it was one of the least intimate “seminars” I have been to and very hard to get your hand seen amongst the crowd! Intelligent transport systems have lots of great examples of where the modern ICT technology can help improve the travel experience (travel alerts when to leave the house based on current conditions or Variable Message Signs when travelling as to whether to divert route or mode of transport) all the way through to virtual conferencing and online networks as a means to give people a credible alternative to travelling in the first place. In the middle ground on that spectrum is the opportunity for social networks to help enable behavioural change to encourage people when they do travel by car to actually share the space with people who they’d like to spend time with. If only you knew that your friends, or a business contact, were making nearly the same journey as you; wouldn’t it be good to have the opportunity to have a chat as well as travelling?

As you’d expect for the topic, the seminar is well covered within the blogosphere, although unfortunately it looks like it wasn’t videoed. Well done to James Stewart, for an amazing attempt at live blogging at the event and there is plenty of coverage on technorati.

Finally, Sir Richard Leese also commented on the importance of schools in creating a culture of learning and the continuation into work via 21st Century apprenticeships.

The power of unreasonable people

The definate highlight of the Innovation Edge conference, hosted by NESTA at the Royal Festival Hall yesterday, was Sir Bob Geldof. The whole theme of the morning was about hearing from people who have actually changed the world. Sir Bob was preceeded by Tim Berners-Lee – who else could casually say “I invented the worldwide web because ….”.

I can’t resist a few sound-bites from Sir Bob (or George Bernard-Shaw):
- “Never under-estimate the power of unreasonable people … they have a restlessness to change the world”
- “Every idea has its time, a perfect syncronicity with their need at a moment in time”
- “Everything is running out: water, oil, time, …”; and of course:
- “Poverty is shit” .

Bob Geldof has enough on his plate with solving poverty and I was left thinking who is our champion for actually doing something about climate change and facing upto the fact that, not only is the transport sector the largest end-use category of emissions in the UK, but also it contibutes the most significant increase in our carbon foot-print year-on-year. Eddington predicts twice as many cars on our roads by 2050, Stern says that we need to reduce our carbon foot-print by 60-80%. “Do the math” as the Americans would say … How are we going to sort out this fine mess?

P.S.> I should have mentioned that the Prime Minister was there as well, so atleast there is is some top-cover for the innovation agenda in Government circles.

Why should I get involved in a sandpit ?

At the end of the sandpit, I closed proceeding by what at the time was an aspiration of the three things that I hoped that attendees might have got out of the event: 

- an improved network,

- increased insight, and possibly

- involvement in an exciting project.

One-to-one feedback sessions with attendees confirmed to me that the attendees had actually got these things out of the event and that it wasn’t just self-publicity; but they genuinely gained and learnt from the experience.

Firstly, no-one knew everybody going into the sandpit and most people were lucky to know up to half of the attendees. Hence, as a minimum attendees got an improved network out of the event. I am absolutely certain that one of the three resultant projects from the sandpit itself was from a consortium who wouldn’t have met without the sandpit. The composition from the second team was also certainly added to, as a result of the mixing up at the sandpit. However, improved networking is not enough of a reason to hold a sandpit ……

The second tangible benefit is all about improved insight. Each attendee is looking into the world “from their own drinking straw” and doesn’t see the whole picture. A large proportion of attendees fed back to me that they came away with a broader and sometimes substantially different viewpoint on the future of their market-place. For instance, one attendee from my sandpit took tangible steps the week of returning from the sandpit to find out more about one of the main themes emerging from the sandpit – the impact that the whole Web 2.0 (and user-generated content) phenomenon will have on the transport industry and in particular on the provision of traveler information.

Some lucky people will walk away from the sandpit involved in exciting collaborative projects. Let me tell you more about those exciting projects which the TSB chose to fund later in this blog. However, perhaps even more interesting are the collaborations and projects which spin-off from the sandpit, where the attendees don’t bother to come and get funding off Government but just want to press on anyway.  We had those as well ….

An interactive hand-over document to my successor

The stimulus for writing the blog is to provide a more interactive form of hand-over document to my successors within the Intelligent Transport Systems and Services (ITSS) Innovation Platform. It used to be part of the old DTI, but is now within a Non-Departmental Public Body, called the Technology Strategy Board. By gradually updating elements, it will help to keep the hand-over process live and hopefully will allow a few more people to get involved in the process. Also, hopefully it will provide a more interactive on-line resource for other people as well about the ITSS Innovation Platform.

Starting is always the hardest part …

It’s always tricky to start , so I’ll jump in on “why this blog ?”. I’ve been on secondment from industry into the Civil Service, heading up a thing called the Intelligent Transport Systems and Services (ITSS) Innovation Platform. The purpose of this blog is to share some of my insights on transport, innovation, what it is like to step back into working in Government … It is simplest, but a little inaccurate, to say that I was seconded from QinetiQ into the Department of Trade and Industry, but I’ll tell you more about that later.