Mersey Basin Campaign Blog

Image tour of the new Museum of Liverpool

I've been following the developments over at the new Museum of Liverpool with great interest over the past couple of years, and they're one of my favourite Twitter-friends too. Yesterday they were tweeting about a great new series of pictures showing the current state of the Museum from the inside - exciting indeed! The museum's going to be a fantastic new attraction on the watefront in Liverpool, especially with a whole gallery (Port City) dedicated to the River Mersey and the city's maritime heritage. Take a look at the tour and see what you think so far - I can't wait to be able to go and visit....

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE TOUR

And why not keep up to date with what's happening at the new museum by FOLLOWING THEM ON TWITTER?

Vote for Liverpool's International Slavery Museum

The pride of the Albert Dock, Liverpool's new International Slavery Museum has made it through to the finals of the National Lottery Awards. The museum, which opened in 2007, has been nominated in the Best Heritage Project category, where it's up against rival projects from Stourport and South London. The museum needs your help to win the award - please vote online or by phone on 0844 686 6957. Voting is open from 9am on Monday 3rd August until midday on Friday 14th August.

Make it snappy at Martin Mere

 

Picture by P Gibbs, entry in last year's competition.

Time is running out to enter the WWT Nikon Photography Competition, and WWT Martin Mere in Burscough is the perfect location to take your best shot. Entries have to be taken at a WWT Wetland Centre, but they can show anything, the landscape, wildlife, or even the visitors themselves.

The competition is to be judged by Chris Packham, and there's lots of swanky camera equipment up for grabs for the winners.

There are three categories to enter: Photo of the Year, Junior Photo of the Year and Digiscoping Photo of the Year. Regional winners in each catgeory will receive a prize of binoculars, and be put forward to the national shortlist.

CLICK HERE for more info about the competition and HERE for infomation about WWT Martin Mere Wetland Centre.

AFSL - Big Blog Challenge

An interesting new blogging project I've just heard about, being run by the Manchester-based charity ACTION FOR SUSTAINABLE LIVING. AFSL's role in life is to get people involved with and enthused about more sustainable ways of living, and to give their new blog a kick start, they've asked three brave volunteers to blog for them for two weeks about their own personal lifestyle change.

June's three bloggers are: Lucy Flintoff from south Manchester, who'll be reporting on her efforts to recycle as much of her home waste as possible for the fortnight; Michael Kelly from Failsworth, who's going to document his experiences of commuting on his newly purchased bike, and Sarah Ventress, a meat-eater who'll be turning vegetarian, and writing about how she manages to resist the lure of a bacon butty.

You can keep up with their adventures at: http://afsl.wordpress.com/

AFSL are looking for three more bloggers to take over in July, so if you're up for the challenge, contact ANNABEL BRADBURY

Blow climate bubbles in Manchester for Futuresonic 2009

 

Been out and about in Greater Manchester this morning? You didn't happen to spot anyone blowing bubbles, did you? No, United aren't at home to West Ham, it's all part of a project that's taking place during this week's Futuresonic festival in the city.

Climate Bubbles is part of the festival's Environment 2.0 strand, and aims to provide the Met Office with a picture of Greater Manchester's urban heat island (yes, there is one, despite how it feels this morning....).

Everyone can get involved with the project, and there are two simple tasks to complete - first, blow some bubbles and chase them, to record the wind direction, and second, blow a bubble and record how long it takes to travel ten metres. You can do the tasks at any time between midday today (15th May) and midday tomorrow (16th May), although apparently the best weather conditions will be after 3pm on Friday. It doesn't matter where in Greater Manchester you are - the project would like data from as many different places as possible.

Download your instructions and worksheet HERE - what're you waiting for?

Barrow's got the Art Gene

 

This fantastic light installation at Barrow-in-Furness is part of Art Gene's project "It's not as rough as it used to be", in conjunction with the Ultimate Holding Company. Each of the events / installations was located at one of Barrow's coastal 'hidden gems', and aimed to get people to discuss their potential for regeneration.

MORE INFO ON ART GENE'S WORK IN BARROW

Next up on Art Gene's agenda in Barrow are two events on Feb 26th - an afternoon symposium (2-5pm) looking at "Changing perception of what artists can do", and a private view of the new "Welcome to Paradise" exhibition.

If you're in the area check out Art Gene, Bath Street, Barrow-in-Furness, LA14 5TY.

Social Media Exchange 2009

A quick post to say what a great day the Mersey Basin Campaign had yesterday at the Social Media Exchange. I gave a workshop looking at the ways the Campaign has used new media in its communications - including such highlights as Sammy the Salmon's adventures on the Mersey and beyond, and the Mersey: River that changed the world project.

I also attended some excellent workshops, one examining the making of BBC Radio's fantastic Don't Hang Up, and one on storytelling with the brains behind the Pablo the Dr ug Mule Dog campaign. Nathalie from OnRoadMedia talked about her experience of developing a social networking site for young gypsies, especially extolling the virtues of ning.com - a site that lets you quickly and easily set up your own social networking site for any purpose - I thought this could be a great way to organise Friends groups, or keep track of a project. Mark from Podnosh led a great surgery looking at audio and video, and I really enjoyed the great examples of video from the RNID. The highlight of that for me though was when someone compared our Mersey People audio to the work of Radio 4!

The climax of the event came with a Q&A session with film-maker Ken Loach. Ken talked about his work, relating the storytelling he does in films like Cathy Come Home to the stories the delegates are trying to spread through social media. CLICK HERE FOR A VIDEO CLIP OF KEN'S SESSION.

What really stuck out for me during the day was people's 'have a go' attitude - everyone was keen to learn, and the emphasis was on what you can produce yourself, on any budget. The event was being followed and documented on Twitter, a micro-blogging site, and loads of people signed up to Twitter during the day and were posting entries from their phones / laptops during the sessions, which was fantastic. It's made me wonder what we could do in this vein at the forthcoming Environment 09 conference. (Here's Twitter's GETTING STARTED guide for the uninitiated).

That's enough from me. SMEX09 organisers Sound Delivery have made sure everything from the day has been gathered under one roof HERE, so get over there and find out what else went on......

BBC Bloom

The BBC have launched a new website aimed at encouraging people to make the right choices and lower their carbon emissions. 'Bloom' suggests actions you can take in every area of life to be more climate conscious. You just choose the action you're going to take, plant a 'seed' on your page, and watch the resulting flowers grow. Or bloom, I suppose.

You can search the actions based on easiness (the easiest is washing clothes at 30 degrees), cheapness (a cheap option, for example is to 'use your dress sense' to make your existing clothes last longer, while a more expensive action is to invest in an electric car), carbon rating (installing a biomass boiler wins on this front), and popularity on the site.

The site also aggregates BBC news on climate change-related issues, or you can search for audio or video content.

You can create a login for yourself in order to save your actions and watch your collection of flowers grow, and the fact that you can see what other users have been doing adds a nice sense of community. The site's in beta at the moment, so there aren't a lot of other 'bloomers' to compare yourself to, but it will be interesting to see how the site develops.

VISIT BLOOM AND SEE WHAT YOU THINK.....

Vote for Sustrans Connect2

Are you bored of Big Brother, and couldn't care less about the 'celebrities' in the jungle? Well here's a TV vote with a difference - one that can actually make a positive difference to YOUR local area. The People's 50 Million lottery giveaway is a unique TV show in which viewers' votes will decide which of four environmental projects will be the lucky recipient of Big Lottery funding.

One project, Sustrans Connect2, is a UK-wide initiative that aims to improve local travel in 79 communities around the country by creating new walking and cycling routes to encourage sustainable transport. The project really does have something for everyone, with 6 million people living within 1 mile of a Connect2 scheme.

If Connect2 is successful in the television vote, some 12 projects in the region will benefit from funding, including improvements along the Bridgewater Canal in Sale and Stretford, and a new bridge over the River Goyt linking Marple and Stockport. Check out the other Northwest schemes here.

You can vote online for Connect2 HERE from now until 12 noon on 10th December, and by phone from 9am on 7th December.

What are you waiting for? It'll do much more good than evicting Christopher Biggins................

Blog Action Day

Did you know that today is Blog Action Day? Yes, October 15th is the day when thousands of bloggers will be writing posts about environmental issues, with the aim of bringing them to the world's attention. It's interesting that the event should fall on the day before the Mersey Basin Campaign sets off for London to speak at an event called Web 2.0 - The What? The Why? The How? We'll be speaking to third sector communications folk about our recent experiences with blogging, podcasting, facebook and myspace etc - and hopefully meeting some other environmental organisations who are venturing into the same areas as we are. Over the year we've encountered lots of interesting blogs - for example Save the Ribble - a great example of how a blog can be used to focus attention on an environmental issue, but in our area, we still don't see a lot of environmental blogging at organisational level - we'd love a few new blogs to link up with, alongside our neighbours, Groundwork Northwest. In fact, I'm off to check out the Blog Action Day site to see if there's anyone we can link up with.....