Tuesday was the first social media surgery held in Lozells. Below are some of the folk who turned up to learn and share. I spent the first 40 minutes with the Bangladeshi Youth Forum, warming them up to some ideas. Interestingly I don’t think I got very far. For the teenage lads I was talking to, the social web is a place to show off what’s cool.
Thanks very much to John Heaven and Raj Rattu for their energetic help with organising and the great welcome we had at the Lozells Methodist Church. We had a busy time with a huge range of ages and abilities, all dipping their toes into social media – creating blogs and trying out Twitter amongst other things.
Mark Bent, who runs the newly-opened Boathouse Café in Handsworth Park, set up a blog:boathousecafe.wordpress.com. Saeed, an educationalist and community activist in Lozells, was the first to bag lozells.wordpress.com. I was pleased to see Sharon Morgan, from Come:unity Arts, who is already a seasoned Twitterer! (Don’t forget about the Handsworth ArtWalk that they are organising.)
I spent the second part of the session Sharon. She had already set up a blog and so we covered some theory, principles of netwroking through the web etc. Then Sharon told me the absolutely brilliant story of how she used twitter to bag a milk float:
On Saturday I popped up to Handsworth for acommunity consultation event.
John Heaven, a council officer, was there live blogging with this wordpress site that he created literally as the event started. John and I also tweeted the event (using different tags – doh) and you can find the streams for the event here and for Handsworth in general here.
If you’re not sure what a hashtag is there is a complicated explication on wikipedia here or put simply its a label than any of us can use on twitter to mark that we are talking about the same subject. When used in a search of twitter the tag then brings together every thing everyone has said about that subject.
It also helps those not in the room watch and join the conversation. So as we twittered about Handsworth from a meeting room in the neighbourhood, observations were added from other parts of the city or country by David Nikkel, Leonardo Morgado, Andy Mabbett, Cyberdoyle and Carrie Bishop.
Carrie even pointed to a new service she has helped create to allow the public to reflect their opinions of police service called MyPolice.org.
So not only has social media been used to creatd a simple and immediate record of the meeting but it has also brought new attention to what is going on and the potential of fresh ideas, input and questioning.
Non of this was planned – John and I just got on with it because we could.
Why was I there? I want to meet some people who could help me set up a very local social media surgery for the area. More on that soon.
This is a project from CAN-UK, who’ve been working from Ladywood for more than a decade. Lozells already has the very fine www.lozells.info and the South Lozells Housing Regeneration area is beginning to use the web to tell the story of how it is progressing, see vision-lozells.org.
A couple of things.
The first is the question of how to integrate these a little better and so seed more local story telling? Perhaps a local social media surgery might help? It is a certainly somehting I’d be interested in.
The other is that our own experience of creating local news with young people in Frankley or Castle Vale (and others) tells us there remains a problem of how we keep things going once the project ends. There’s no lack of enthusiasm from the young people: Comments like
this was the best week ive had at Frankley, and making this podcast was a great experiance!
show there is an appetite for more. It’s rarely an issue of equipment or websites etc, these are now cheap enough and simple enought to leave behind. I think the problem is often who will take the lead/ownership in your absence.
So thoughts? How could we ensure that when the project dosh dries up the storytelling keeps flowing?
