New Media Awards 2007 - Adam Sylvester

Adam Sylvester

Nominated in Contribution to civic society award category.

Greetings from www.yellowarch.co.uk in Sheffield: Home to Jarvis, The Arctic Monkey's and Richard Hawley. My nominee, Adam Sylvester, will be horrified to find out that he's been nominated. One of those rare people who really drives successful change, his work is increasingly beginning to contribute to positive growth within our social and material culture. He's worked for policy and delivery administrations, deprived communities, charities, businesses and individuals. No technocrat, Adam sees the potential that digital media communication technologies can deliver in terms of:- social engagement, empowerment and personal growth. I commend him to you.

1 nomination from readers

For the past seven years Adam Sylvester has successfully promoted digital media communication as a tool that can rapidly reduce the time that it will take us to become a significantly more Civic Society. He’ll tell you the whole thing began by chance, but the best thing that I can do to illustrate the importance of his impact is to list some evidence:-

In the year 2000, on behalf of the Sheffield First Partnership, he co-ordinated a developmental programme for city-wide “e-“ communication systems, networks and infrastructure: OTIS (Opening the Information Society – A Blueprint for an “e-“ city). The access that Adam enjoyed gave him a pretty special early perspective on the digital environment : Sheffield became an ‘early adopter’, a magnet for digital knowledge workers that now work under the primary branding: ‘Creative Sheffield’. He gained an early overview of the opportunities for multiply deprived communities to profit from the deployment of high-speed, wide-bandwidth connectivity. He’s made great use of this early good fortune!

In 2002, whilst writing an interim evaluation of a project offering ‘homework classes’ that the Asian Welfare Association (AWA) was running, Adam discovered participants benefiting from thousands of hours of learning in an ‘open source’ / free-software suite. Realising that this was then a rare thing, he took the AWA to BECTA who supplied it with it’s own server and another suite with a mobile, laptop-wifi environment for a further twenty learners.

In 2003, he delivered start-up funding for the e-learning outfit www.greenspaghetti.co.uk who worked extensively across the ‘Creative Partnerships’ network.

In 2004, on behalf of The Public (Charity) Ltd, Adam oversaw participation in the high-speed / wide-bandwidth and immersive Marcel Partnership www.mmmarcel.org

Currently a Director of Access Space www.access-space.org the UK’s longest running open-access media lab, he’s got to be in the running..!

Nominated by Robin Downe, 30 May 2007