This week I’ve been playing with stacks on Delicious, the social bookmarking site. Stacks are a way to organise your links into a common theme and the new social features make collaborating much easier.
To learn how the new features work – rather than curate links around an arbitrary theme (such as “most awesome kitten stunt videos”, which someone has probably done already) – I started this stack to share resources and links aimed at social media surgery managers.
Great Value(s) P(l)eas(e) - photo by Tony Crider (click to view on flickr)
Later this month the Birmingham and Solihull LEP will start making some decisions about skills and work – asking themselves what skills do employers need and how to make them available.
I know this because of a set of “skills” that are hard to measure or teach.
One is being networked.
Peter Latchford (who’s doing some initial work for the LEP on skills) approached me to see what I thought businesses like Podnosh will need. On 30th January he’ll report back and tell the LEP what small business is asking for. So this is what I’d like them to hear:
Podnosh recruits for?
We are driven by making things better: improving public services, helping active citizens have a greater impact, allowing individual civil servants more freedom to improve lives, supporting good third sector organisations to help more people. We don’t work with anyone – if potential clients don’t share a good chunk of our passions or values we’d rather they found someone else to help them.
So for this we employ or work with people who:
In turn they often know what they want and believe in and are leaders in their own worlds.
They are usually enterprising: Steph Jennings runs her own hyperlocal blog, Josh Hart makes LIVEBrum happen, Gavin Wray has nurtured the Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery for years. They make things happen, adapt to change, accept and learn from failure.
On top of that they are flexible and committed. All seem to have an unstoppable ability to make things work, see things through and to learn everything and anything they need to make that happen.
So we also want to find people who start things themselves (not the same as self starters), can’t help but learn on their own, aware of their strengths and happy to be open about what they want to strengthen.
It may sound like a halcyon world of small enterprise. But these are the people who work at, or with, Podnosh and they all have remarkable qualities (and if it sounds like I’m expecting them to be superhuman I’m not, I could never keep up).
One thing I haven’t mentioned? A certificate in anything.
Certainly there are technical skills and we are looking for more folk who are good at Ruby on Rails, but in our world many technical skills get outdated very quickly. So at it’s simplest we recruit the person, get that right and the knowledge later.
What do you recruit for – what does the LEP need to understand are the skills or qualities we need to help Birmingham’s small businesses thrive?
Update:
Karl Binder at Adhere added these thoughts to the discussion in his post “Total Business”:
So I look for:
- Aptitude, a readiness and quickness in learning
- Love what they do, have a passion for their job
- Flexibility
- Desire to continually try something new
- Recognition that their job role can and will change
- Existing skill set
If I had to sum up my employment strategy in a catchy little sound bite I would say I always looked to ‘employ people, rather than skills’. This effectively means if the person’s attitude is right, they have a willingness to learn and an ability to do so, don’t get disheartened and give up quickly and realise that their role is one that is constantly evolving, I would employ them over someone who was the finished product in one particular area of expertise.
Thanks Karl.
Yesterday at the Lozells and Birchfield Social Media Surgery I was paired with a young man who was looking for help setting up a blog for an organisation he was involved with. I started as always by chatting with him a little bit about what the work he was doing and what they wanted to use the blog for when he said something that really pulled what he was trying to achieve into focus for me;
“The girls have babies and the boys shoot and stab each other. I’ve lost count of the amount of christenings and funerals I’ve been to but I’ve never been to a wedding that’s just not what we do”
- He was talking about life in Handsworth and Lozells as he knew it.
The patients name was Mosies, he is a 19 year old ex gang member from Handsworth, He’s not long been found not guilty on a very serious criminal charge, and by his own admittance has been in trouble with the law before, and now he’s taking that experience to not only try and turn his life around but also to try and change the gang culture that plagues youths in some parts of North Birmingham.
He along with other ex gang members from opposing groups in the area, some with criminal records for gang related activities have come together to form the New Day Foundation, They are aiming to try and combat gang culture targeting younger children to educate them on the realities of gang life and try to show them that there are other options to what they think is “normal”, to change their futures so they can go to more wedding than funerals in their lives!
I sat for an hour and listened to Mosies as he told us about the path he’d taken to be sitting in the room with us that day. Where he’d come from, why he wanted to change the lives of people stuck with the perception that joining a gang was the only option and how he and the other members of his group hoped to do that.
He had the whole room enthralled and as he was telling us how at the age of 14 he stopped going out to the cinema with his friends so he could save his money to buy a gun and all I was thinking was look at you now! 5 years later a changed individual talking about the pride taken in earning money the “proper way”, looking forward to getting a mortgage and hoping the story of your experiences would in some way stop others having to go through it.
- and that right there is what I like so much about the Social Media Surgery format; Only in a room where people are encouraged to talk to each other and help each other one on one would I have heard Mosies story. At a prescribed training session we’d have all sat in rows listening to one person talking and hoping to pick up the most relevant bits for our needs and no one would have realised the momentous journey this one young man had taken to be there with us.
Since it’s launch in 2001 Wikipedia has been growing at a rapid pace. Its army of volunteer collaborators have now edited more than 20 million articles in just under 300 languages worldwide and it is still growing.
So what’s next?
This year Wikipedia are launching Monmouthpedia, it’s first venture based on location, a community collaboration for town centric Wikipedia pages. The hope being that residents and visitors will contribute articles and photographs on interesting and notable places, people, artefacts and other aspects of Monmouth life. QRpedia codes could then be placed near points of interest around the town for smartphone users to scan and view the relevant Wikipedia/Monmouthpedia page right on their phone.
The Wikipedia page for the Monmouthpedia project adds:
Articles will have coordinates (geotags) to allow a virtual tour of the town using the Wikipedia layer on Google Streetview, Google Maps and will be available in augmented reality software including Layar.
Could you see this model being useful for where you live?
The collaborative part of Wikipedia has always intrigued me and I’d be really interested in seeing it put to work on such a local level.
It’s been a little over 5 months since we first mentioned The Community Lovers Guide To The Universe : Birmingham and we’ve finally found some time to get around to to approaching people to write chapters for us.
Jo Burrill and Birgit Kehler are going to be covering Change Kitchen, Emma Woolfe will be writing about The Friends Of Cotteridge Park, Christ Unitt will be telling us about Created in Birmingham and James Yarker will be writing about Stan’s Cafe “Of All The People In The World” and there are still some email responses pending from other interesting projects we’ve contacted.
We’re hoping that the The Community Lovers Guide: Birmingham will be ready to be published by early next year, but that of course all depends on us getting all the content we need in time. So while we’re making a start approaching the groups from the suggestions in the comments of the last post Can you think of any other people/projects that would like to contribute? A lot can happen in 5 months and we’re just wondering if there is anything happening that may have slipped under our radar.
New Optimists listening to the conversation about food at last night forum
Below are some questions but first the context:
Last night I was working on the first of a series of conversations about how Birmingham will feed itself way into the future. The New Optimists Forum is organised by Kate Cooper who has the very powerful idea of getting groups of scientists from different disciplines and policy makers to think about this thorny problem. She argues, I think rightly, that getting practical about problems and places helps us understand best what we need to change now.
One of the scientists was Ian Nabney who talked about the opportunities that will come to make better decisions about complex problems when we have more data and more power to crunch and use that data. Here’s what he said.
It made me ask the question what if we created a new form of planning gain: supermarkets share their data with us rather than build a new badminton court.
Could knowing what they know about our eating habits help us lead healthier and better lives?
Mark Braggins Tweeted this this morning:
@markbraggins on twitter
And it also tickled a local MP’s curisosity. Richard Burden (who’s Northfield constituency may have a few urban “food deserts”, another idea kicked around at last night’s forum) tweeted this question about half an hour ago:
@richardburdenmp
So here are some questions:
Odd what comes out of combining real world conversations with online stuff!
Update
Looks like Adrian Short was thinking about supermarket card data as a public good back in April – scroll to the bottom of this post.
