At its worst, politics is like a wild pendulum swinging between extremes.  The high art of politics is more like the painstaking embroidery of a complex tapestry of many threads and textures.  Sitting today in the audience at the Beyond 2010 conference in Birmingham you could feel a new fabric being woven.

This is, of course, ‘On-line Week’ and Birmingham was saying ‘Hello to the digital world’.  The threads woven into this week included strong international dimensions.  Birmingham gained global recognition as ‘one of the world’s Intelligent Communities.’ The conference was linked by video to Australia, Korea and Canada.  Presentations featured many continental voices.

With delegates from central and local government, the event was focussed on how the public sector could deliver far better services at lower cost. The challenges of design and deployment of innovative on-line digital solutions was a persistent thread.

The event also coincided with announcements of funding for four Next Generation Access ‘pilot projects’ around the country and publication of the UK’s Comprehensive Spending Review.

And on top of that rich fabric the delegates enjoyed presentations from innovators from across many sectors such as health, education, tourism, property development, the media and manufacturing.

And woven into this tapestry of talents, ideas and actions, two key threads stood out:

• Away from Westminster, the UK’s big provincial cities and regions are, far more than central government, focussed on their place in Europe.
• The issues of investment in better digital access networks has really very little to do with the telecoms sector.

On the first point we heard speakers from UK cities fully engaged in sharing innovative ideas and experiences with leading continental municipalities.  The key lessons from these continental leaders were around the challenges of managing refreshingly open and collaborative networks of service providers.  They talked of their provision of common access networks (mobile and fixed) to allow many more people to generate innovative enterprises and deliver better public services.  In return they heard of the growing UK success in opening up publicly held data for recombination (‘mash-ups’) with different data sets to produce new service opportunities.

On the second point we heard that the real drivers for community-led utility digital investment came not from Telco’s but from the aggregated motivations of umpteen public and private sector demands for platforms to enable innovation – and their secret ingredient was bold local leadership.

Great examples from Barcelona and Venice showed the fundamental importance of having clear separation of access utilities from the multiple competitive services that run across them.  Their use of truly open (and low cost) access networks (with neutral and often not-for-profit utility ownership approach) has been key to unlocking the sorts of public/private services cooperation that could never have occurred in the conventional ‘vertically integrated’ world of Telco and CableTV territories.

With this week’s UK announcement of public funding to support alternative approaches to the provision of digital access, and with a new understanding of the illuminating power of ‘mash-up’ maps to inform community planning, the stage is now set for radical transformation of the way we do things.

Next month’s NextGen2010 conference (back to Birmingham again) will feature BDUK’s four Pilot Projects but will also, to observers of this new richly-woven tapestry, show that things really have changed, local communities can intervene to ensure their economic and societal development, and, in the best tradition of the Internet, they do not need permission to innovate.

For aspiring leaders of the UK’s local communities, NextGen2010 in November will be a great opportunity to weave their own local threads into the new economic fabric.

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This editorial was written for the UK’s Communications Management Association (CMA) whose members, in aggregate, spend more than £13bn per annum on networked products and services.

Readers of this editorial also read 'Exercising Choice' and 'Searching for economic growth hormones'

CMA Members qualify for a 20% reduction on delegate rates at the NextGen 2010 Conference in Birmingham's International Conference Centre, November 22nd and 23rd.   For more details click here.