The Big Society Awards were set up by the Prime Minister in November 2010 to acknowledge individuals and organisations across the UK that demonstrate the Big Society in their work or activities. The aim is also to galvanise others to follow. David Cameron said this about the surgeries:
“This is an excellent initiative – such a simple idea and yet so effective. The popularity of these surgeries and the fact that they have inspired so many others across the country to follow in their footsteps, is testament to its brilliance.
“Congratulations to Nick and all the volunteers who have shared their time and expertise to help so many local groups make the most of the internet to support their community. A great example of the Big Society in action.”
Thank you for such kind words – to which we responded formally with:
“It’s wonderful to have recognition for everyone who has organised a social media surgery or turned up to volunteer their help. I think the surgeries work because they are simple. They are very easy to organise, fun to do and not in the least bit intimidating for people who want some help. They give active citizens and community groups the confidence and skills to use social media to campaign, organise and hold power to account. They’ve grown because of the passion and energy of bloggers and voluntary groups up and down the country.”
Background
The idea of a social media surgery originated with Pete Ashton – who used them with people who were looking for free help from his consultancy supporting arts organisations. We then applied the relaxed approach in a new way, scaling it up and putting together two sets of people – lovely helpers from the Birmingham Bloggers group (started in 2007) with the fab active citizens I’d had met through (more…)
Recently I was having a conversation with Nick about the value of social media, the community links you can build using Twitter and blogs and the value this has in the real world, when I remembered the story of PC Richard Stanley’s blog.
PC Stanley is a blogging police officer and Twitter user from Walsall. He uses these platforms to talk to the “locals” about his job and help give plain English examples of how the police work and why things are done in a certain way sometimes. I read his blog, follow him on Twitter and have personally never found him to be anything less than factual and informative with some nice humorous banter, creme eggs, #foxwatch and competitions thrown into the mix.
A couple of months ago he wrote a piece in response to a news article in the national press where a suspected burglar was shot during an incident and the property owner who had shot him was arrested.
It was a factual piece that explained, from a policing point of view, why sometimes the “victim” of the burglary can also end up being arrested along with the burglar in cases like this. It was written so that it would be easy for the public to digest – and I felt it was. It was informative without being patronising and a good insight into how a decision to arrest someone could be made.
However, what wasn’t easy for regular readers to digest was what happened next. His blog’s comment section exploded with anonymous commentators condescending and, in some cases, outright insulting PC Stanley. It wasn’t an argument about the accuracy of any details in the blog but an inference he was doing something wrong by engaging in this way and “toeing the party line.”
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.
Paul Bradshaw is hosting this review by Ofcom’s Manager of Nation’s and Region Damian Radcliffe. Damian has been a patient observer and (I think) advocate for bottom up hyperlocal website’s such as the one’s we help through social media surgeries.
They often provide an information anchor which can be very useful to local government, the police, housing associations – anyone serving a neighbourhood. On the whole I tend to think of local as much more local that is often meant when maintsream media or ministers bandy around the term hyperlocal. They seem to be talking about town size patches – we’re keen to encourage something much more local still.
In our social reporter training we repeat mantra like: if some one says something interesting or useful then grab your camera and ask them to say it again – then stick it on the web.
Yesterday I spent a really enjoyable morning with a group of Orbit East residents. I was showing them (more…)
One of the charities we work with, The Birmingham Conservation Trust, wanted to make better use of their Facebook page to drive donations for their cause. So, with 27% of all donations via the Just Giving website coming from Facebook in the last 12 months, an increase of 130% on the previous year we decided that one way to look at doing this would be to help integrate the new look Just Giving app into their Facebook page.
The Just Giving app allows charities to invite people to donate (more…)
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?
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:
Is asking supermarkets to share their data a good form of planning gain?
If so in what form would we want it – opendata, depersonalised or maybe full data to be share just with civil servants
What would be the arguments against (so we can anticipate) or just how naive is this! ?
How would Kate Cooper of the New Optimists go about talking to sainsbury’s about this?
Would you rather have a new pavilion at the local park?
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.
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’sScience 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.
I had no idea...