bit.ly blog – Announcing bit.ly Pro – "…. a new service: bit.ly Pro. The Pro service provides custom short URLs powered by bit.ly. Publishers and bloggers will be able to use their own short domain names to point to pages on their sites"
FutureGov Network – "OK most of government isn't as sexy as (m)any of these brands, but we thought it might give you some inspiration when looking at how to build your Facebook page."
The Birmingham Social Media Surgeries have taken place within the walls of a number of venues since their conception in September 2008. We’ve previously set up camp at BVSC Birmingham Centre for Voluntary Action, and have run the central surgeries from our offices at Fazeley Studios in Digbeth.
But we’ve noticed during the winter months some people have been reluctant to make the dark evening walk to Fazeley street. So we’ve decided to move to a venue a little bit closer to the city centre.
The December Social Media Surgery Social was at our new venue – the studio. The lovely people at the studio are letting us take over their bar area free of charge allowing us to carry on our voluntary service (so long as people buy a beverage from the bar). It’s a bright space with excellent WiFi and a friendly atmosphere, and located right in the centre of Birmingham – it couldn’t be easier to get too (see directions below).
Wendy and Kati from Fazley Studios
While we are excited about holding our Central Birmingham Social Media Surgeries in the city centre, we also want to say a HUGE thank you to all the lovely people at Fazeley who stayed behind after work to make sure we could run a surgery in the reception area, providing us with tea and coffee and always there to help.
Here are some of the things I’ve been reading December 15th from 02:21 to 03:00:
David Barrie: Love diagrams – “What followed was a sequence of graphics that map the course of human relations in the film – cutely assuming that love relationships are “dynamic” (don’t stop reading) and ignore scuzzy soap and socks left on the floor.” Original here.
Theatre Pledge 2010 « Stan’s Cafe Theatre Company – Stan’s Cafe theatre pledge encourages people to make a commitment to support local theatre, bring new people to new experiences. What might you choose to create a pledge for?
Official Google Enterprise Blog: Why the City of Los Angeles chose Google – “Google Apps will save the city of Los Angeles millions of dollars by allowing us to shift resources currently dedicated to email to other purposes. For example, moving to Google will free up nearly 100 servers that were used for our existing email system, which will lower our electricity bills by almost $750,000 over five years. In short, this decision helps us to get the most out of the city’s IT budget.” via @davebriggs.
Christmas Fun at Stanhope Hall Highgate « Highgate,Digbeth and St Andrews – Andy Sheppard, neighbourhod manager, shows that praise is a key quality to deploy in blogging a community: “Father Christmas made a special visit to Stanhope Hall and presented all the children with an early Christmas Present. Special thanks for both events are due to Monica Lee Community Worker and the ladies of Stanhope Hall Womens Group who worked incredibly hard to ensure the success of both events. Special thanks are also due to Eddie Howard and Highgate Housing Liaison Board for their support for both events.”
Hyperlocal news: profits a long way off | Media | guardian.co.uk – “2010 will not be the year of hyperlocal—these are the foothills, the beginnings of localised online publishing. But the signs are auspicious: increasing levels of online literacy and broadband connections mixed with more inevitable local newspaper closures mean it’s natural that readers—and advertisers—will shift to new outlets. Whether anyone will be making a real living from it—as a mainstream publisher or a start-up—seems unlikely in the near future… ” via @daveharte.
These are my links for December 6th through December 13th:
When 1000s of Spaniards Rallied in Defence of Online Rights (I): A Chronicle | Personal Democracy Forum – Well worth a read: “An online fire is burning in Europe. It was set by what appears to be a designed campaign to transform the European intellectual property regime, towards a more restrictive set of rules directly affecting the fundamental rights of freedom of expression and information. We’re seeing its implementation in Sweden, France, Italy, UK or at the EU level in Brussels.”
The Ernest Marples Blog › The blog for Ernest Marples’ Postcodes – There have been some pretty exciting announcements during the last few weeks. Alongside those, we’ve also met with the Royal Mail to have a talk about finding a way forward.A couple of weeks ago, we had a great meeting with the Royal Mail. They explained in some detail the background to these datasets: how they’re maintained, where the data comes from and where money changes hands. It’s all a bit complicated!
Lee Bryant on leadership – I keep returning to this post by Headshift’s Lee Bryant, on leadership in the networked society. It’s big, meaty and good.My starting point was the myth that leadership is somehow less important in new, networked organisations. Not so. If anything, it is more important than ever, but the focus and practice of leadership is changing; and if we are to engage leaders and involve them in the development of social business structures, then we need to be able to understand and address their challenges and issues using language that resonates with them.He provides some slides from a talk he recently gave on the topic, which give a nice overview – though I really do recommend you read – and re-read – the whole thing:
http://blogs.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/digitalengagement/post/2009/12/07/Local-Government-Data.aspx – “The Government will encourage local government to release local public data and make it free for reuse, and establish an open-platform local data exchange. Professor Nigel Shadbolt from the University of Southampton has been asked to head up a panel of experts to oversee the release of local public data and ensure that data are linked effectively across local authorities, the Local Government Association, government departments and agencies.”
Countdown to oneplace « Audit Commission blogs | Michael Newbury – If knowledge really is power then we’re truly putting an awful lot of power into the hands of the ordinary citizen. The person who uses and pays for public services. In times of extraordinary pressure on public finances this seems absolutely the right thing to be doing.
These are my links for December 4th through December 6th:
Measuring digital engagement – Digigov – "Recently, I’ve been working with colleagues in COI on this problem and we’ve come up with three common measures that appear to work across all digital engagement or social media tools:
1. Number of relationships
2. Number of user-generated content items
3. Number of referrals/recommendations"
Listening to you – "Residents in Longton and Meir are invited to meet their local police commander next week, and a new billboard will leave them in no doubt of where and when to find him. A 20ft by 10ft billboard has been sited on Weston Road in Meir (near The Broadway) inviting people to come and speak to the local commander. " via @Mike_rawlins
“We may have, if we are lucky, one stringer in a particular country. You may well have a dozen people there who know it well. It makes sense for us to use your resources to cover a story or issue.”
All media organisations are now opening themselves up to gathering material from the public – including NGOs. And NGOs are now expecting their humanitarian staff to act more like journalists. "
Freedom to Lead | John’s Idea – "In Leicestershire 92 council staff spend their time keeping government up to date on 3,000 performance indicators at a cost of £7 million a year. The need to reduce these costs, and shift the emphasis of performance reporting from central government to local people, sit at the heart of the LGA campaign Freedom to Lead."
What struck me last night, and not for the first time, was that people still have this ingrained view of what a blog is. When I showed the cake site to one lady she blurted out, “That’s not a blog! A blog is boring with lots of text.” Wordpress.com still promotes itself to bloggers and offers:
“Express yourself. Start a blog.”
It’s a website that is easy to update and optimised for search engines. End of. Let’s not label it with something that puts people off.
"# Attend 12 theatre shows in the next 12 months, 4 by West Midlands writers/artists/companies you haven’t seen before, 1 in a West Midlands Venue you’ve never been to before.
# Take 12 people who have never been, rarely go, or don’t ‘do’ Independent Theatre to a show. Share transport.
# Host a meal/party for 8 people 4 of which you barely know.
# Write 12 comments/reviews/blog entries about theatre on other people’s sites.
# Attend 1 mid*point or return to the next Open Space event."
Another day, another report « Chief Inspector Mark Payne’s Blog – How did it stop being like this? "In West Midlands Police we have been one of the pilot forces for ‘community resolutions’. This effectively allows officers to use their judgement to make decisions at the scene of some lower level crimes, and together with the victim agree on a suitable remedy. So if a gang of kids break your window, you can ask them to apologise and pay for it, rather than enter into the criminal justice system. So far we have carried out 8000 of these types of resolutions, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Police officers are allowed to use their professional judgement (or common sense as it is more commonly known,) based on the full circumstances of the case, not on narrow performance objectives."
Idiot English: Vorsprung durch Biscuit – This is blogging to warm the cockles of my heart: "My wife likes Bahlsen's Choco Leibniz biscuits, so we often have some in the pantry. But their presence weighs heavy on my pedantic mind. There it is, in my home, the yellow box with its (in)famous slogan:
More chocolate than a biscuit
Eh? It should be "More chocolate than biscuit"! (They're about two-thirds choc.) I can only imagine that this slogan was the victim of hypercorrection in the seminar room"
A quick start guide to Twitter – "The guide takes absolute beginners to Twitter right from the start – explaining what Twitter is, and how to sign up – right through to replying, retweeting, hashtagging and using tools to measure success." Dave Briggs knows his stuff – and he can be funny.
You are the editor of a newspaper. You are allowed to employ one more person. You can choose either a writer that has won a Pulitzer prize or a writer that has built an online community of 40,000 highly committed readers and contributors. Which do you choose?
I know nothing is ever that clear cut, of course. This is a real “daddy or chips” question. Yet, I guess how you answer it gives a good indication of how you think we should train our journalists of the future."
I'd choose both.
Thriving too: Making Openness Work – The 'Open100' competition is a celebration of the power of openness and mass collaboration. You can be part of the competition by nominating the company you think is the best open innovator. The competition will be open until 12th February while the winners will be announced on 24thFebruary. The winners are those who will be included in the list of the world's top 100 open companies
Official Google Research Blog: Automatic Captioning in YouTube – Google experimenting wiht automatically captioning video: "The auto alignment features is available for all new video uploads, however the scope is limited to English material. The auto captioning feature is initially rolled out to a set of educational partners only. Although this is very limited in scope, the early launch makes the results of the system available to the viewers of this material instantly and it allows us to gauge early feedback which can aid in improving the features. We will release automatic captions more widely as quickly as possible." via @pigsonthewing
These are my links for December 1st through December 3rd:
Thinking Big – the cabinet office use Bebo to harness ideas. – “In total we received over 12,000 votes across all polls in reply to questions on how to improve schools, concepts of identity and whether Britain ought to have a death penalty.”The polls, in turn, drove young people to want to contribute more on a serious debatable topic. Rather than giving a simple yes or no answer they commented to explain their opinions and provide new ideas. In total the Bebo profile page had 6,798 comments while the Big Think teaser video that was added to the Bebo homepage was viewed 1,592,643 times.
Delib’s Local Authority Audit | Delib Blog – “Here is a general report on our findings with an overview of online consultation pages in local authorities and top tips we have formulated from our research . Individual authorities have been sent their own audits – which we hope will prove useful in finding opportunities to improve their online public consultation and engagement.”
Talk About Local » Government data on the ground, making a difference – The challenge for John Denham’s Department is to get local authority held data published and then stimulate creativity in truly local applications of national and local data sets. There are some simple and cheap ways – a competition with small prizes for good ideas, run a hack day with say the LGA or Dave Briggs.
www.north-wales.police.uk/balanceyourbobbies is a really simple way that people living in North Wales can help their police force set local priorities for neighbourhood policing. You are given a choice of priorities (set by the public) and then able to assign resources to them. The priority that averages the greatest amount of support where you live gets turned into a job for the local police.
It’s an extension of the idea of Neighbourhood Tasking, where police and public meet to set priorities.
Ian Davies – the Programme Director for Citizens Focus in the force – explains how it works and how he hopes it will help.
I have to say I am very proud of how open West Midland’s Police is embracing the possibilities of social media. They have been ahead of many forces with early use of podcasting in the form of Plodcast, getting officers using Facebook, widespread us of Youtube and Twitter. More importantly they are impatient to learn and, I think, willing to accept mistakes along the way.
Assistant Chief Constable Gordon Scobbie was keen to stress that different forces should learn from each other as quickly as possible. I think he was hinting at a competitive between forces which would be best set aside, instead collaborating to make good use of social media.
The web itself sets the example for this. Why sit in a darkened room invesnt a who new governance policy about social media (should you need such a thing) when others have already shared there’s: www.socialmediagovernance.com.
He also recognises the potential culture clash between an organisation structure around control and the problem that the web can’t be controlled in the same sense.
Chief Inspector Mark Payne and I first met properly when we both spoke at an Association of Police Press Officers event in June. Last week his first blog post threw a challenge out to all the forces in the country:
Nobody is going to be confident in an organisation who they don’t hear from, and who they can’t engage with.
Why then are many police forces so reticent to engage in social media? I have spoken to people involved in policing up and down the country, and I am genuinely amazed at the real fear that there seems to be around blogs, Twitter and Facebook. We are still in the position where the majority of Forces do not have a meaningful web presence.
I have a theory that people have become a little bit seduced and scared by the technology involved in social media. In my experience though, there are no dark secrets associated to the web, IT IS JUST ANOTHER FORM OF COMMUNICATION!
One of the other people there was PC Ed Rogerson of North Yorkshire Police. He tweets his job:
For him it’s a simple way of raising his visibility – people can see he’s working even though they can’t see him. It is all start on what might turn out to be a powerful new way of police relating to communities.
Our brains are fried, we’ve done a bunch of great social media stuff… it’s time to kick back and have a chat with friends we have met through the Birmingham Social Media Surgeries this year.
Our December Social Media Surgery is going to focus mainly on the ‘social‘ part of ’social media’. It’s a great chance to come a meet other people who have been to surgeries in Birmingham, discuss your ideas and work, and hopefully go away feeling supported and inspired for the new year.
The Social Media Social will take place on Tuesday 15th December from 5pm – 7.30pm atthe studioon 7 Cannon Street, Birmingham, B2 5EP (link to map).
Photo: Edward Moss
The lovely people at thestudio are letting us take over their bar area free of charge – all the more reason to buy another drink or two. They are located right in the centre of Birmingham and couldn’t be easier to get too (see directions below).
Feel free to drop-in anytime during the evening.There’ll be no agenda and it is up to you whether you come to share and show ideas, or just socialise. It is a space for voluntary groups, organisations to chat and get to know each other. Whether you’ve been to a surgery before or are interested in finding out more about what we do – all are welcome. We’d also love it if the surgeons (our voluntary social media experts) who have helped over the year come along too.
How do I get there?From New Street Station walk down the ramp out of the Pallasades, turn left onto New Street (past H&M) and Cannon Street is the first road on the right. Thestudios are further up on the right (opposite Jigsaw), and the restaurant is on the second floor.
