The best the Barbican's blurb for the Open East Festival comes up with is "Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park will be London’s newest urban park." It isn't even remotely funny in comparison to some classic previous performances:-
The 'largest new park in Europe for 150 years'
Dee Doocey - Scrutinising or Propagandising?
Oh no - it's not even the biggest new park in London in 20 years...
'After' (OED) the Games, the Park

Carpenters timeline: updated 8 May 2013

Campaigners Carpenters Against Regeneration (CARP) have fiercely opposed the council’s decision to demolish and re-house residents rather than pay for refurbishments and the UCL partnership struck in October last year prompted protests outside the Town Hall.

Chairman Osita Madu said: “It’s good in the sense that we don’t want UCL to have the land and get rid of residents.

“But this means people now face further uncertainty about what will happen to their homes.

“I think CARP now need time to digest this information and decide how we move forward.

“But it’s a lesson for Newham Council and UCL about how they engage with the community.”

UCL and Newham Council axe £1bn campus deal for Carpenters Estate, Stratford

Alexandra Wrage is the president of TRACE, "an organization that provides sane, cost-effective compliance solutions to the problem of international commercial bribery". She served, for a time, on the Independent Governance Committee of FIFA, football’s governing body. She recently resigned due to a perceived lack of progress from the organisation in improving internal transparency.

She has written the following account of her experiences within FIFA which has been published by Forbes.

"When FIFA’s leaders could no longer ignore the spate of scandals ranging from World Cup hosting decisions to irregularities in its internal elections, they announced a new “reform initiative.” The initiative was declared an effort to restore public confidence in the organization, but has done little more than polish the veneer on an outdated men’s club. The inaptly named Independent Governance Committee, of which I was a member until my resignation last week, was originally comprised of a cross-section of stakeholders, including two people who have since been elevated to FIFA’s Executive Committee, as well as governance professionals. The process has been expensive and time-consuming, but little has really changed back at FIFA’s headquarters in Zurich.

One area of influence the IGC was assured was the role of nominating experts for key positions. But after the IGC’s nominations were sought to fill two newly designed and critically important positions — the two positions right at the heart of reform efforts — FIFA rejected all of the IGC’s recommendations in favor of its own candidates. (In so doing, FIFA also asked the IGC to stop putting female candidates forward, stating that no female candidate would be acceptable.)

The IGC had another opportunity to effect change when it proposed independent members on the ExCo in order to encourage more transparency and accountability. More than any other recommendation, this would have signaled a willingness to pry open the shutters on the organization. Even carefully controlled and even with an understanding that some items of business would have to remain confidential, this would have brought FIFA in line with well-governed corporations and non-profits worldwide. The ExCo rejected this proposal, lending weight to FIFA’s reputation as a secret society, answerable to no one.

As a matter of common sense, the IGC proposed a neutral, independent background review process for new candidates for senior office to reduce the chance that the organization would be embarrassed by inadvertent association with felons and miscreants and to explore possible conflicts of interest. The ExCo agreed instead to ask candidates to complete a “self-declaration” which, presumably, felons and miscreants would not hesitate to falsify. Days later, the CONCACAF Integrity Committee report described how Jack Warner misspent many millions of dollars of FIFA’s money to improve a property owned by companies he owns.

In line with well-established international practices, the IGC recommended that the FIFA leaders disclose their total compensation, including salary, bonus and perquisites. The ExCo declined, declaring the issue more one of public curiosity than good governance. FIFA benefits from public subsidy through its tax-free status, but FIFA argues that the public has no right to insight into these matters. The public, it seems, also has no right to know the performance criteria upon which these compensation decisions are based.

The IGC recommended age or term limits for key FIFA figures to reduce the stranglehold that permanent presidencies can have on any organization. Blatter has stated that this will be put to a vote at Congress, but has not made clear what terms will be recommended by the ExCo. Anything put to a vote without sufficient detail and ExCo support will, in the commotion that is Congress, likely die on the floor. Meanwhile, the 77 year old Blatter who took office in 1998 has begun to float the idea of standing for election a fifth time in 2015.

Blatter has all but declared “Mission Accomplished”, and in a sense it has been. Opportunities for change have been evaded, finessed or re-directed; he deftly avoids discussion of the recommendations that simply fell off the table over time. He did not debate them and did not explain himself; this is no surprise from a man who describes FIFA as if it were a sovereign state over which he presides.

The IGC has never had any means to compel FIFA to change. The only entity capable of insisting on transparency at FIFA is the Swiss government, to which FIFA’s unapologetic opacity should be as embarrassing as its $1.4 billion in tax-free reserves are interesting. I hope they will act."

From: Forbes

See also Transparency International

See also: FIFA's New Ethics Committee Fails First Test

Peers are apparently keen to prevent appointment of fellow peer the Baroness Grey Thompson (of the £7500 appearance fees, lest we forget) to the role as chair of Sport England because they fear she would be "too political".

Eight months after the so-called first digital Olympics Weymouth, the home of sailing during London 2012, has just got the high-speed broadband BT promised would be available for the Olympics. Bizarrely, BT blamed the Olympics for delaying the Olympic broadband!

Sailing by...

It was something of a joy last night to attend the launch at the Institute of Education of Phil Cohen's East London and the Post Olympics. Part of that joy for me was meeting up with commonKnowledge tovarich John Wallett who spoke briefly and featured in the film shown, Lights on for the Territory.
We came away (and made our way on the number 30 to the premiere of The Wick) with lots of swag.

A review will duly appear in our Books section.

Usain Bolt is to get £500,000 for appearing at this summer's Olympics Anniversary event. Up till now Bolt has been the victim of 'punitive' tax laws which have prevented him earning these absurd sums in the past, but now the law has been changed to rectify this injustice! His British rivals, the likes of Ennis and Farah, will have to make do with a miserable £100,000 or so.

I weep for them!

One family seems to be doing nicely out of the Olympics. Mrs Windsor's nephew made a profit out of selling Jubilee and Olympics commemorative items at £3,900 a throw. Mrs Windsor herself was awarded an Honorary BAFTA and was ludicrously described as the 'most memorable Bond girl yet'. The Olympic Park is, of course, named after a famous ship, the QEII. A further example of this interminable sycophancy is the renaming of another local park, Marsh Lane Fields, where the Manor Gardens Allotments were forcibly relocated, the instantly forgettable Leyton Jubilee Park.

Anyway it seems the people at BAFTA aren't entirely sure that Ms Windsor is the last thing in Bond Girls, given the slightly ambivalent 'yet' tagged on to their award. Perhaps they are hedging their bets in case another Alexandra Kollontai turns up to take centre stage...

The Law of Unintended Consequences kicks in in the post-Olympics discontent with a campaign in South London against paying any more money to the Lea Valley Regional Park Authority in North-East London. Local politicians are annoyed that South London boroughs each pay hundreds of thousands of pounds to maintain the Lea Valley Park, which South Londoners seldom use, when it has just gained tax-payer funded facilities worth £170 million from the Olympics. They've got their own Regional Park in the Wandle Valley and think the money should go there.

Who would have thought one legacy of the Olympics would be an argument over Regional Park Authorities?

Silicon Hackney: The (r)evolution of Hackney Wick: Screenshot from www.spacestudios.org.uk/whats-on/events/silicon-hackney-the-r-evolution-of-hackney-wick- Wed 03 Apr 2013 22:52:53 BST

Silicon Hackney in a joint enterprise with Space Studios planned a free gig in the White Building, originally for a date in February, booking on Eventbrite, then subsequently postponed until Thursday 4th April, billed as:

Presenters include: Richard Gibbs, from iCity; Will Teasdale, Hackney Council and others.

Until today that billing remained unchanged, but now it transpires that it will be a little less formal. According to announcements from both Silicon Hackney and [ space ]:

We've decided on a slight change of plan for this Thursday's event. We've decided to keep it an informal get together in the Crate Brewery, for like minded indvividuals, start ups, and techies to get together to talk about recent changes in the area. There will be some free beer for those who arrive early. Starting at 7 PM tomorrow.
There is no need to print tickets!!! Just show up.

Of course, we were always only going for that free beer.

Update, 5/4/2013
In the end it turned out there was a table full of free (Crate) beer - Golden, Best and IPA - but no-shows from LBH's Will Teasdale and iCity's Richard Gibbs. According to organiser Christian Ahlert, Gibbs had emailed apologies in the morning on the day. Regrettably, much lower turnout compared to past Silicon Hackney events too, whatever that might mean.