Leadership

Community Lover’s Guide to Birmingham – The Launch

Posted on 15th January 2013 by Steph Jennings

Tonight we’re at ChangeKitchen for the launch (as opposed to the non launch) a of the Community Lovers Guide to Birmingham – It’s an opportunity for us to get some of the contributors together and thank them for volunteering their time and their words towards the book., have a few nibbles and some drinks.

You can buy a copy of the book here - for those who don’t want an object chapters will soon be online.

Nick started the proceedings thanking everyone and introducing Tessy Britton , as really she is the inspiration for the Community Lovers Guide series after she put together Hand Made.

Also here tonight receiving their copies of the book are Tom Baker from Loaf in Stirchley, Karen Strunks of the 4amProject which started in Birmingham, and Birgit Kehler of ChangeKitchen.

Other contributors who unfortunately couldn’t be here with us are:

Emma Woolf, Friends of Cotteridge Park
Eleanor Hoad & Nigel Baker, Urban Harvest
Jon Bounds, Big City Plan Talk
Chris Unitt, Created in Birmingham
Naseem Akhtar, Saheli Women’s Group

: Birgit Kehler and her copy of the book

Books are available to order now from Blurb, and every chapter will soon be available to read online.

Posted on 15th January 2013 by Steph Jennings
Tags: Birmingham, Book, Community Engagament, Community Lovers, Community Lovers Guide to Birmingham, launch, Maurice Specht, Tessy Britton
Posted in Big Society, Leadership, Local Government, Third Sector | 3 Comments »

Video: what does it mean to be a Brummie?

Posted on 2nd October 2012 by Gavin Wray

Birmingham Leadership Foundation hosted a debate asking “what does it mean to be a Brummie?” at their third Monday Masterclass at the end of August in Handsworth. I shared my notes from the debate last month. This video by Punk Zebra gives you a great flavour of the debate and the passion that young people have for the city.

The masterclasses are a mix of inspiring talks from young leaders and entrepreneurs, together with a social media surgery run by Podnosh.

The debate was part of the MyBrum consultation, led by Councillor Waseem Zaffar for Birmingham City Council’s new social cohesion and community safety scrutiny committee.

Posted on 2nd October 2012 by Gavin Wray
Tags: Birmingham, Birmingham Leadership Foundation, consultation, Leadership, mybrum, Video, young people
Posted in Leadership, Social Media Surgery, Third Sector | No Comments »

Helping Birmingham Leadership Foundation use social media

Posted on 11th July 2012 by Gavin Wray

Video by Punk Zebra for BLFLeaders

Birmingham Leadership Foundation helps new and aspiring leaders to emerge. They connect emerging leaders with established leaders to help them learn from each other’s experience.

They organise networking events, training and connect existing leadership development projects to encourage the next generation of leaders in Birmingham to develop – leaders who reflect the city’s demography. These could be:

A young person aged 16–30 with the ideas, ambition and spark to make an improvement to the lives of others in their local community.
A person who is proactive in their community.
A chief executive or senior manager of a private company or public sector organisation who wants to work with, and support, the local community but lacks the know how and contacts.

Nick and I ran a social media surgery at the Foundation’s first Monday Masterclass last month. We’ll be working with the young leaders at the upcoming Masterclasses, sharing social media skills to help them get out there, network, collaborate and make things happen.

We’re also helping the Foundation team with their social media strategy and to further develop their own social media skills.

Posted on 11th July 2012 by Gavin Wray
Tags: Birmingham, Birmingham Leadership Foundation, Leadership, Social Media, social media strategy, social media training, young people
Posted in Leadership, Social Media, Social Media Surgery | 1 Comment »

“Charities should be the gold standard for open data” – and so should local gov.

Posted on 4th July 2012 by Nick Booth

Karl Wilding and I have worked together on social media and the implications of the web for civic activity since 2007. He’s head of Policy and Research and NCVO (I’m on the advisory board of NCVO) and a very clever/prescient man.

Here he talks for Guardian Voluntary Sector Network about what open data means for charities – much of it is also useful/true for local government.

Posted on 4th July 2012 by Nick Booth
Tags: Karl Wilding, ncvo
Posted in Government, Leadership, Local Government, Open Data | 2 Comments »

Skills in Birmingham – our people, what they’re like and what we need

Posted on 23rd January 2012 by Nick Booth

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?

Values

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:

believe in what we do
care about it
are accountable
transparent
honest
have integrity
are networked

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.

Posted on 23rd January 2012 by Nick Booth
Tags: Birmingham LEP, creative industries, recruitment, skills
Posted in Government, Leadership, Miscellaneous | 21 Comments »

Emerging Leaders in London, Ontario Canada and the social media surgery model.

Posted on 1st November 2011 by Nick Booth

Last week I talked to the Ma Social Media Students at Birmingham City University about social media surgeries for community and voluntary organisations. I was explaining how they emerged from a wide range of activity that was building social capital here in Birmingham.

It’s a story I’ve told before but never really in such a concentrated way – in fact I told it twice in one day. The students were a guinea pig for the talk I was planning to give at Michael Overduin’s Science Capital event on “Networks, Nodes and Knowledge: from local enterprise to global engagement”.

The slides are here but what I’d like to share if what one of Dave Harte’s students made from the talk. Dave shared the whole thing with his overseas students who study the degree remotely. He asked them to:

This week I would like the distance learning students to reflect on the talk by Nick Booth and consider how you might go about setting up a social media surgery in your own town. What would your strategy be? Have a read of Nick Booth’s ‘recipe’ listas a starting point.

Your response should be a short (5-10 mins) video that tells us the following:

What’s your town like? – rich? poor? digitally deprived??

Is there a way to connect to voluntary groups and community organisations (an umbrella organisation of some sort)?

How would you go about connecting to other digitally minded folk to persuade them to help set up a surgery?

What’s stopping you doing this?”

This is a question about social capital and innovation, where is it, how does it happen. Can you nurture or grow both. Dave highlighted one response from Jeff Sage.

Jeff talked about how a group in London Ontario developed “Emerging Leaders” a network for connecting people. As yu can see they also work with different agencies in the city to help improve their community. Principles that struck a chord with the social media surgery ethos include:

never duplicate efforst of others or create silos and making mistakes should be a goal, rather than something you’re tryng to avoid.

Also very much inline with the work Tessy Britton is doing at social spaces and David Barrie’s Militant Optimists,

One coincidence – Michael Overduin, who asked me to compile the initial story on the surgeries – hails from Ontario.

Posted on 1st November 2011 by Nick Booth
Tags: BCU, Birmingham, Canada, Dave Harte, Jeff Sage, London Ontario, science, Science Capital
Posted in Big Society, Leadership, Miscellaneous, Neighbourhoods, Social Media, Social Media Surgery | 2 Comments »

Local Government please don’t sack the connectors.

Posted on 23rd August 2011 by Nick Booth

I’m just reading the very promising report on the future of public services written as part of the University of Birmingham Policy Commissions. “When Tomorrow Comes” began life with this discussion on Big Society at the Conservative Party Conference last year.

Now published the work describes a world very close to my heart, active engaged citizens using their networks and communications skills to help shape or lead public policy and public services. It also, though, identifies qualities we will need from public servants:

Key new roles include: storyteller, communicating stories of how new worlds of local public support might be envisioned in the absence of existing blueprints; weaver, making creative use of exisiting resources to generate something new and useful for service users and citizens; architect, constructing coherent local systems of public support from the myriad of public, private, third sector and other resources; and navigator, guiding citizens and service users around the range of possibilities that migth be available in a system of Local Public Support.

First of all these are not new roles – they already exist to a certain degree. We spent the best part of a year working with neighbourhood managers in Birmingham helping them with the tools and the skills to be storytellers, weaver’s and navigators. We do the same with the citizens they work alongside, not least through social media surgeries. Likewise we’re working with the Wolverhampton Strategic Partnership to help them advance their wonderful community empowerment learning programme, which helps public servants and citizens work together to be better weaver’s architects and navigators. We do similar work with housing associations – who value the connecting and empowering skills in their staff

Appreciating these qualities can sometimes feel like a tricky message to get across. I remember a fascinating afternoon on The Hague with Tessy Britton and Maurice Specht. Both of us were talking to senior officials in central government in Holland about the impact of potent networks, self organising citizens and militant optimism on how will will govern ourselves. “What should we do?”- they asked. Learn to get out of the way, perhaps offer very lightweight support I urged them. Invest in the connectors was Tessy’s advice. People like the initiative brokers we met later that week.

To late?

My fear is that these skills are not being truly valued now. The neighbourhood manager role has gone in Birmingham and in the process the council has lost some remarkable people who’s passion for connecting ideas and people made government much more accessible and I’m certain more efficient.

Other’s who are connected nationally regionally and locally are being pushed back into more definable jobs, turned back into box tickers in pre-ordained processes. These latter jobs are the ones we can eventually automate and prescribe. So as funding dries up for the jobs best done by connectors – please local government management, make sure you find ways of keeping them in fruitful work and onside – because you will be needing them.

Posted on 23rd August 2011 by Nick Booth
Tags: Birmingham University
Posted in Government, Hyperlocal, Leadership, Local Government, Neighbourhoods, Social Housing | 4 Comments »

Community Lover’s Guide To The Universe and Birmingham

Posted on 16th June 2011 by Nick Booth

Tessy Britton is an inspiration and so is Maurice Specht. Tessy got to me to write a chapter on social media surgeries for Hand Made – her book on new community culture and militant optimists. Maurice ‘dragged’ me over to Holland to talk about the work we do to government, housing associations and community groups.

From that has emerged the “Community Lover’s Guide To The Universe” and we’re editing the Birmingham edition. Sort of like the Grassroots Channel but with better pictures (and a book). Let Tessy explain:

A few weeks ago Maurice Specht turned to me on the way to Schiphol airport and said ‘So when are we going to bring out a Hand Made for Rotterdam?’.

What a brilliant suggestion!

Since then the idea has really taken off with 12 community enthusiasts already volunteering to edit special local editions – collectively now called the Community Lover’s Guide To The Universe. Since we brought out Hand Made last August the number of people-led projects has continued to grow and we wanted to explore both the common themes, but also the unique cultural ideas and interpretations from all parts of the world.

We also wanted to start to show how places that are buzzing with community activity and projects are amazing places to live, increasingly more amazing than places with cool architecture or luxury shops. Community brings places alive, gives us new and interesting ways to contribute and connect … and there are signs already that people are finding places that have this creativity and excitement going on highly desirable.

Community can’t be mass produced and it can’t be ‘delivered’. But in rising numbers there are a lot of very excitable people just getting on and making and shaping their local communities for themselves. This series of books will create the opportunity for them to tell their stories, which in turn we hope will encourage other people to put aside any hesitations they might have and get more involved in their neighbourhoods.

So I’ll be doing one of my favourite things - chuntering my way through the wonders of Birmingham, asking for 800 words or so and loveley pics. No one’s getting paid for this, but I hope you’ll join in.

Who should I talk to – where is the new community culture in this city and who are the militants optimists?

Posted on 16th June 2011 by Nick Booth
Tags: Active Citizens, New Community Culture, Tessy Britton
Posted in Big Society, Leadership, Neighbourhoods, Third Sector | 12 Comments »