What is Digital Birmingham?

15/04/2009

Digital Birmingham is a city-wide partnership working to ensure that everyone in the city - people, business and communities - can benefit from digital technologies. Initially set up by Birmingham City Council and BT, the partnership now comprises over 30 organisations such as Birmingham Post & Mail, Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, Business Link West Midlands, Advantage West Midlands, Primary Care Trusts, BBC, Cisco, Microsoft, Vodafone and the three city universities. It is helping Birmingham make the transition from an industrial city to a digital city by driving forward the use of these technologies in order to increase prosperity, knowledge and quality of life of its citizens.

Digital Birmingham is encouraging SMEs to adopt technology and many of the events and initiatives geared towards businesses can be found on the Digital Business section of Digital Birmingham website.  

Digital Birmingham is working together to influence digital investment and uptake across the city with the aim to generate economic growth, close the digital divide and promote greater social inclusion. Its aim is to establish Birmingham as a leading digital city by 2010 and maximise its competitive advantage.

Going global looking local
Digital Birmingham aims to have a global outlook whilst focusing locally on the needs of the City’s people, communities and businesses. It is helping Birmingham to be a competitive city in a global market place whilst ensuring that the benefits are acknowledged and repeated on a local level.

Aims are:

·    To recognise Birmingham as a leading European digital city by 2010 as defined by its Digital Charter
·    To accelerate Birmingham citizens, communities and businesses up the digital curve to increase prosperity, knowledge and quality of life

Digital Birmingham wants to help citizens, communities and businesses in Birmingham to use digital technologies more widely and in new ways, whilst recognising differing interests and varying skill levels. The partnership is developing projects across the City that will help close the digital divide and encourage the use of technologies to promote social inclusion, actively working in partnership to encourage collaborative projects, exploit infrastructure investments and share good ideas about the use of technologies.

These are just a few examples of projects being supported:-

Birmingham Xchange plans to develop a joined up approach to delivering information and two-way communication to citizens on a device and channel of their choosing, enabling information to be personalised to meet their needs.

City Wide Connectivity is Birmingham's aim and it is working with leading communication partners to develop an integrated, future-proof infrastructure including next generation broadband that will maintain Birmingham’s profile as a leading global city.

Communities Building Capacity is the Birmingham vision. The aim is to create sustainable and cohesive digitally enabled communities by creating a framework to support exchange between Community and Voluntary organisations.

Connected Neighbourhood Forum - Digital Birmingham is part of The Connected Neighbourhood Forum which discuss and produce strategies, ideas and solutions all relating to digital connectivity technologies and related topic areas.

Connected Urban Development Project - Birmingham, together with the global cities of Lisbon, Hamburg, Madrid, Seoul, Amsterdam and San Francisco are an exclusive club of seven cities collaborating through Cisco's "Connected Urban Development (CUD) program".

Free supported public access - Digital Birmingham has set a key measure for 2010 that will provide every citizen with a free supported internet service within half a mile of their home.

Intelligent Cities is a programme led by Coventry University in partnership with key public and private sector organisations to address key urban issues relating to transport, tourism, security and climate change through the exploitation of information technology.

Local Digital TV - Digital Birmingham has created a local digital TV service for Birmingham. This means that Birmingham citizens can access around 50 information and service areas through their TV that covers jobs, bus and train travel information as well as a trial GP appointment booking facility.

Smart Card - Digital Birmingham is linked to partners such as Customer First (Birmingham City Council), Centro and Marketing Birmingham to explore opportunities for development of regional smart card infrastructure.

Virtual Birmingham aims to promote the use of virtual technologies such as 2D/3D mapping, web 2.0 and virtual worlds to discover their future potential and capabilities for enabling partners to deliver better services and citizens and residents to experience the city in many dimensions.

Welcome to Birmingham - This website is a guide to information and services that may be useful if you are new to the city or if you are working with people who are recently arrived.

More information on Digital Birmingham, its initiatives and successes can be found on the Digital Birmingham website.