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
We do various forms of bespoke paid for training for all sorts of people in the third sector, government, housing associations and others, but every month we also give free help for local active citizens.
I often say this about social media surgeries: please keep it simple.
Why? Because the most important single thing about a surgery is that it should be there.
Being there is a core part of supporting communities. Month after month they know you’ll be there, they get used to it, they get used to the relaxed format and they come for help, come for ideas, come for connections, come back to offer help.
It is just a truth that something is more likely to happen if it’s simple. A cup of tea with a friend is much more likely to happen than (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.
Table Three discussing hyperlocal blogs and the BBC - source podnosh on flickr
Access and archives
Bloggers mentioned copyright as the main barrier to exposing content in the BBC archives to a wider, and local, audience.
Frustrated when historical archives are copyrighted, preventing you sharing it with your audience. One volunteer wants to share old photos of areas around Birmingham city centre for others to reminisce, share stories or simply for curiousity. Copyrighted BBC content, in the iPlayer for example, prevents content being put in the public space for comment, discussion and consumption.
There is also a wealth of great archive content by the BBC, spanning decades of local media, that isn’t yet online. There’s lots of interest in this.
Video of Nicky Getgood talking with Robin Morley asking (more…)
All are based in the former North East Coventry NDC area – which is now served by a social eneterpride thre Moathouse Community Trust. The passion of the people we worked with is what always draws me to working directly in neighbourhoods with active citizens.
For example, we have been working Tracey Thorne, the neighbourhood manager in Handsworth, to help her blog about her neighbourhood. We built this site for her and gave her training and support. In less than a year she’s posted more than 100 posts and there have been nearly 70 comments. Tracey’s site has been visited by nearly 5000 different people this year, with them looking at around 32,000 pages. Two thirds of those visits are from the Uk – and of those more than half are people in Birmingham.
This is testament net to Tracey’s determination make her site work ann to the benefits of thinking long term – Sites like hers are a journery – sometimes you can do that on your onw – sometiems you need the support and encouragement of others.
plus a couple more that are coming on soon. As Tracey puts it:
I really wish them luck with these blogs and encourage them to blog as much as they can about Handsworth…the more we all blog about it the more we raise the profile and allow the rest of the world to see the wonderful spirit of people in Handsworth
Keep these sites going will take commitment and I suspect some extra support. But I love helping people head down this path. If you think we can help get your community groups online then contact us.
Last Wednesday I spent a great afternoon at Hyperlocal Govcamp West Midlands, an event in Walsall bringing together a mix of local government officials, hyperlocal bloggers and people interested in open data.
I ran a session introducing social media surgeries for voluntary and community groups, looking at how surgeries can help active citizens tell stories and collaborate online.
The session was slanted towards encouraging people to run their own surgeries and to make use of socialmediasurgery.com to promote, manage and evaluate events.
She is Anne Elliot, who’s planning to go along to the Leeds Social Media Surgery on October 7th because she’s hoping to start work with a social enterprise in October.
That’s 500 people since the site was first sort of functioning in private beta in April of this year, although most of you have joined in since we went more public in July.
Of those 500, 178 of you have registered as surgeons – the people who are there to help. And of those, 33 people are surgery managers, the people who take responsibility for finding venues, choosing dates and keeping people happy at these informal but potent events.
Between you, you have set up social media surgeries in 38 different towns cities or neighbourhoods in 5 different countries (plus some others coming). You’ve run or set up 76 different events.
The site also allows people to capture who has helped who learn what and add links for sites created during the surgeries. I’d love to encourage more people to make use of that, because then it will be easier to record the effectiveness of the surgeries.
Great work from all of you and some fine work from Josh Hart on the coding. We have a bunch of improvements heading your way.
