Jon Kingsbury champions localism at TEDx

Jon Kingsbury, Programme Director for Nesta's Creative Economy team, gave a rousing TEDx talk at the Houses of Parliament on the 22^nd of June, calling for the creation of more digital tools at the local level. Jon Kingsbury champions localism at TEDx.

Watch the video to find out more about where Jon believes the democratic opportunities of local media lie and what we can do to foster local media.



Jon is a digital media expert and open data campaigner, and he used his talk to highlight the potential future of local media and to explain why he believes that now is the perfect opportunity to start experimenting and innovating with democracy at a local level.

So why should we be thinking about local democracy at a time when national organisations, national governments and international organisations are working together so hard to tackle global issues?

Jon believes there are two main reasons:

Growing urbanisation

Now already half of the world's population live in and around cities. And moving forward that's going to two thirds of the world's population over the next decade or so. And the consequence of that is that city administrations, rather than national ones, will increasingly be responsible for the support, the welfare and for the well-being of their citizens. Now that's both a challenge but it's also an opportunity to reframe local democracy.

Connected world

We are going to see over the next 10 or 15 years a phenomenal increase in people being connected. At the moment there are about just over a billion of people around the world who are connected to the internet. Over the next decade or so we're going to see another 5 billion people come online. The majority of those people are going to be logging on via a mobile device, that device is going to know where their users are and help people find content that is not just relevant to their interests, but also relevant to their locality.