Take a good look at this picture. It is full of what I would call ordinary folk. None of them appear to be super heroes, to fit the heroic mould we have created for our social entrepreneurs and active citizens.

They are David Barrie’s fellow “bloody minded obsessives” who have collaborated on this urban project. He tells us

there are about ten people missing from the shot but this picture includes community leaders, an architect, a property developer, a former school cook and a janitor who won an Order of the British Empire – in part for her commitment to the cause. Every town or city in the world has such a group.

Dejan calls them urban obsessives.

Doug Henton of Collaborative Economics has a positive, more romantic catch-all description of the cadre.

He calls them civic revolutionaries.

I mention it simply because it is people such as these that populate the stories of the Grassroots Channel Podcast. You can see some of the pictures of these folk on our flickr account. More than 50 stories almost all from Birmingham. That’s a lot of bloody-minded urban obsessive civic revolutionaries for one city – but I know we’ve only just scratched the surface.