This morning we started our work with Birmingham Settlement – one of the city’s oldest charites with a track record that spans two century. They do tricky and incredibly supportive work working with the most disadvantaged people in their neighbourhood, the wider city and increasingly the wider world! As one of them put it – they make life better for Brummies.
We worked them through our social media awareness session – the one designed to help people get their heads in the right place, to understand the link between what they do and what we know.
Margaret Farrell is in charge of the business of outreach for Birmingham Settlement’s money advice services. She confessed that all this digital stuff is outside her experience – then at the end of a mornings worked told me this
Following a collaborative project to map stories of voluntary groups told their funding will be reduced – and analysing the government’s projected spending plans for the Spending Review period 2011–2015) – NCVO estimate “the voluntary and community sector is facing nearly £3billion in cuts over the next five years.”
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?
It’s odd how when you look away your friends seem to go and do some really interesting stuff. I first met Willem Guizeman in 2005 when he was in Birmingham planning some work on the Residents university for the Residents for Regeneration. Then he was fronting a Europe wide organisation which was working with the EU.
Last month we saw each other again in The Hague, his home town. Now Willem is doing something much more (more…)
I think I just got paid with a hug. Full of the joys of social media surgeoning Lorna Prescott from Dosti put her arms around me and said thank you. (sorry Lorna for being embarrasing and thank you!)
It is really one of the reasons I love social media surgeries – they make me happy and they seem to make others happy too.
30 people turned up and the proportion of surgeons to patients was just right. This rather dark video shows just how busy and absorbed people were:
I shared the evening with two wonderful people. Michael Dennis turned up thinking he was there to get some help for the St Thomas Community Network - but because he does web development he got wordpress ganged into being a surgeon. It turned out Michael also run a successful ning network for foster carers.
Michael worked with Jackie McGuirk from Dudley Lions.
He helped her understand why social media might help their work. She said up a blog and wrote here first post (and this jackie is your first trackback). The worst part for Michael seemed to me interviewing them both:
Great evening and a great start to surgeries in Dudley.
This time our work is funded through the support Birmingham City Council gives to Neighbourhood Forums in the city . The details are below and you can download them here. If you want to come contact: (more…)
Here are some key points from the session on Health and Social Care (check som of this – facts not all checked)
Data from the Care Quality Commission, conversations about scarping data from the site, told that individuals can query the site and find individual care homes, but it’s not set up so you can systematically compare. Will shortly be available as raw data on scraperwiki. Individual reports are only available as pdfs – which causes a huge amount of work for data users.
Reports have lots of words in them – you cant compare all 28 outcomes.
Issues between health and social care – mainly to do with battles over budgets in local authorities plus changes in the structure of the health service. Inspection regime is changing.
Huge problems with health service and different council services being able to share information. Systems are not compatible – and proprietary formats. One local authority talked of 100 systems – no indicators any more so no more performance staff. Who would port this information out.
Illustration of how local government officers suddenly have access to information when their councils publish information as open data – they can find with google in a way that they couldn’t with internal systems.
For social care people want to know how nice the staff are.
Car parking is a particular problem with hospitals
Private contractors provided by the four big companies that can’t be FOI’d and even joint ventures – some people said that you can FOI if they’re delivering a public service.
From January local authorities are expected to publish new contracts.
Re health…discussion on the potential value of combining data re health outcomes with some information on taxi firms – quality fo service from transport etc etc.
How do you collate all this information together – individual contracts, care homes quality.
Supporting people ( eg ) outcomes data (now stopped ) captured information for 200,000 people who risked being homelessness and the national insurance numbers – shows the revolving door problems re social services, drug action team etc etc.
Worrying theme of data sets being less available because of cost cutting.
Do we need contracts which require transparency.
Is there consistency in licensing from some of the government open data sites?
NHS in general
Should GP practices release performance data etc
Problems of protecting the most vulnerable people from con artists etc.
Data protection act still stands.
Problem of the benefits or otherwise of revealing detailed health data.
The aim was to introduce social reporting – quick and simple ways of sharing what’s going on around you with other people, using social media tools. Sharing information; getting a message across.
A social reporter might shoot a simple video about their neighbourhood. She might make notes at a meeting or conference and share notes with other people online while the event is taking place.
This post rounds up discussion and links created on the day.
It isn’t often that you get key thinkers in one place at just the right time, but that’s what’s happening in a couple of weeks (20 – 21st October) here in Birmingham.
That we are hosting such people is one measure that Birmingham – and much of the rest of the West Midlands – really is ahead of other places when it comes to digital media and civic good. I’ll be talking about just that, sharing a platform with Will Perrin, Karen Cheney and Robert Hardy to talk about the connection between digital technology and Big Society.
It is not the time to wait and see what happens -we need to be more proactive and make sure that we are leading the debate about how to realise the efficiencies and make the reforms to manage the cuts most effectively.
It may sound like I’m on commission. I’m not, although you get a discount if you use this link.
I had some time at the Conservative Party Conference last week and learnt a great deal from the people I met. Whatever bit of the public sector you are from, new ideas are where your future lies. Digital Birmingham has been planning this for a year: it just happens to be the right thing at the right time.
