Podnosh

This video was a quick one shot at the Social Media Surgery for voluntary groups in Birmingham this evening (should say 2009 – my bad). Despite the leading questions, I hope it gives you a sense of how people from community groups feel about the help they get from volunteer bloggers and social media folk. About 25 “recipients” (real people) plus  the social media surgeons who were in no particular order:

Jon Bounds, Pete Ashton, Jon Hickman, Joanna Geary, Gavin Wray, Benjamin Brum, Simon Whitehouse (see here), Abby Corfan, Phil Oakley, Watfordgap, Danny Smith, Katie Spragg, Mark Steadman.

For a more general view please have a look here. Pete shot this and uploaded it there and then to demonstrate embedding. Bless him!

In the new year blog post I’ve written in my head (but not here – it needs to follow a review of the year and that too is still in my head) one of the things that occurred to me was that I need to pay more attention to Beth Kanter.

I treat Beth’s brilliance as the background to my online life, knowing that I needn’t do a million and one things ‘cos Beth will have already done them and reported on them, just for me.  Here’s one for example – how to list the bits of your blog that you lot have found most engaging using something called Postrank (which counts much more than most clicks).  Here are mine for the last 12 months, interesting year!

Why doesn’t government have reservists?

Bridging the digital divide is about strengthening human networks not internet access.

BAD08 Birmingham Social Media Surgery: provisional results

Blog Action Day in Birmingham – a social media surgery for voluntary orgs.

What is a Birmingham Blogger doing at the Tory Party Conference?

Birmingham Bloggers met.

Marc Reeves, The Birmingham Post and Five fine questions on blogging.

Quality newspaper video from the Birmingham Mail:

Was the Big Picture about the artist or the community?

The fab moment Lucy Moore realised her Grandfather’s picture was The Big Picture Winner 2008

Downing Tweet: is this about the personal, celebrity or patronage?

The Charity Commission Responds to Education and Blogging

Hands up whose blog helps them learn? The Charity Commission thinks you’re wrong

Is Tom Watson MP stealing or reading? The Tories think the former

Why should leaders blog?

The flow chart of faff

Has Birmingham’s Artsfest gone anti-social on Twitter?

Twitter and the Birmingham (ish) Earthquake.

and then here’s some more, but from Beth:

How Much Time Does It Take To Do Social Media? 

Social Change Behind the Firewall

Transparency and Social Media: Dealing with Criticism

Blogging Behind the Nonprofit Firewall: ROI Approach

How To Share the Social Media Workload in Your Organization

I would put Beth high on Business Week’s new wanted list of online guru’s.  If you’re not subscribed to Beth’s blog give yourself a new year treat, and do so.

That’s one of the questions asked on the site of a new programme being launched in Birmingham on November 7th.  The full question on Heard and not Seen is

I want to ask, “Do Muslims have a sense of humour?”.
I ask as the media portrays them in a negative way; extremism, fundamentalism etc etc. Where do Muslims go to relax and have fun as I understand they don’t drink either. I’m just curious…

One answer can be found on the site below the question, whilst I think an even better one comes from here in the form of the islamic lolcats you see on the left.

Heard and not Seen is run by Friction Arts (who’ve just shifted their own website over to wordpress) and is best described as askthedriver for Muslims.

If you also want to go to the launch and ask some questions details are here.

Simon Berry’s patient yet relentless campaign to persuade Coca Cola to use its distribution network to trasnsporrt re-hydration salts is explained in this elegant short video.

Here it is, the 30 sec video to support the ColaLife submission to Googgle’s Project 10^100 (10 to the 100th). Please go and look at it on YouTube. It’s a thing of beauty! Please can I also ask you to comment on it on YouTube and rate it (highly?). It’s worth clicking the ‘watch in high quality’ link to appreciate the detail.

After watching, commenting and rating – that should only take 2 minutes – can I ask you to do one more thing? Please send a link to this page to 10 of your friends and ask them to do the same? Very many thanks.

I want to thank the following people who have dedicated a significant part of their lives over the last 3 days to pull this together: Luke Berry (artist); Sam Berry (Animator); Julian Moore (Sound); Simon Cohen and Howard Lake for creative suggestions.

There’s still time to comment on the text of the application if you can.

Onwards and upwards!

There are a lot of talented Berrys. Watch it, comment ,share please.

I thought is was time to take stock, not least to ensure sufficient tea and coffee for the social media surgery which us Birmingham bloggy folk are organising (with BVSC) to support voluntary and community groups in the city on Blog Action Day.

If you want to know how social media can help you campaign, garner support, raise funds, change the world then please sign up through this link (Wednesday, October 15th 2008, BVSC (map) 5.30pm to 7.30 pm). Come when you can for some free, friendly, one to one support.

Sign up here:

http://birminghamblogactionday2008.eventbrite.com/

The Social Media Surgeons:

Coming from Somerset we have Steve Bridger, once of The Guardian website and Oxfam now a specialist in online fund raising and community management. I first met Steve through shared involvement with the NCVO ICT Foresight project.  Also getting here by train, this time from Sheffield, is Paul Webster. I think I first met Paul at the UKGOVBarcamp.   Paul travels endlessly, bringing vol orgs and their suport organisations up to speed with how IT and the web can help them.

Stef Lewandowksi will be there, sharing his enormous experience of producing blog based websites which achieve things, from webby award winning sites to those that build networks around curious human ideas, Stef builds some of the most elegant pages you can find on the web. He’s also offering:

half a day of my time to produce from scratch a blog-based website for one charitable organisation that works with disadvantaged or at risk kids, at no charge.

This is a brilliant offer. Stef can achieve a great deal in half a day if he’s working with an organisation that’s keen to get on with things.

Pete Ashton – who’s the first person I know to come up with the idea of a social media surgery – will also be there to help. One of the countries first professional bloggers, Pete has won national awards and helped the cities creative community burst into online collaboration and conversation through establishing Created in Birmingham. That leads me on  to another local. Chris Unitt has run Created in Birmingham for the last 6 months or so and is a very talented blogger who’s also applied his professional energies to initiatives such as cQuestrate, an ambitious project to develop an open source solution to climate change.

Others possibly/hopefully coming who can help with everything from how to set up a blog to how to run a festival (should that help reduce poverty) are Anthony Herron, Dave Briggs, Nicky Getgood and Antonio Roberts. (Update:  Joanna Geary – a Birmingham Post journalist who’s helping introduce social media to newspapers, is also hoping to come).
I (Nick Booth) will also be there with my background in BBC journalism then community podcasting and various work with local government, schools and community groups on using social media as a tool for empowerment.

Jon Bounds and Julia Gilbert, both of whom have energetically inspired and worked on this idea, can’t make Wednesday, but just thought I’d day hello and thank you.

Social Media Patients(!?):

So far I’ve had about 15 people say they’re hoping to come from various groups, some with url, some without names!  Among them are Gerry Moynihan of the Bordesley Green Neighbourhood Forum. I’ve worked with Gerry before to make this film and podcast for a European wide group of active citizens called R4R.  I spoke to Claire Rigby of Fairbridge earlier this week and if she can’t make it she means to encourage someone else to com along.  Her charity supports young people to pull themselves out of destructive patterns, often involving drugs.
Stuart Parker is establishing a social enterprise to use the power of the social web to help people who foundered in education. I’m sure he’ll be teaching and learning.
Ally Sultana works with women in Balsall Heath and has been developing a podcast project – she’s already explored some social media.  Audrey Miller helped create the Jubilee Debt campaign which put so much pressure on the 1998 Birmingham G8 to cancel debt to Africa. Serena Malone works with Rural net, and again is someone who may be able to teach as much as she learns.

Then there’s Gary Smith from firstlightmedia and also working with young people, Colin Kerrigan of the charity Stage 2.  Stephen Brook is coming along from another educational charity excell3.

Linda Hines from the Witton Lodge Community Association in Perry Common is coming. She’s also a community champion for Be Birmingham (I recently worked with Be Birmingham on simple podcasts and material for their youtube channel and flickr.)  Other community champions might join us, as might community groups who’ve worked with Groundwork in Birmingham and members of the Third Sector Assembly.

If you’re coming and I haven’t mentioned you please use the comments section to say hello. For some that will be familiar – for others commenting on this blog post might be your first step in social media!—

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Update. Beside the bloggers some key organisations have also offerred their support with links and publicity, including Digital Birmingham,  BVSC who’s providing us with space and drinks and NAVCA.

Over here Jon Bounds has reminded us of our collective Birmingham blogger wish to mark Blog Action day next week in some shared way.  When Tom Watson asked us about this a while back there was plenty of enthusiastic muttering.

The theme for blog action day 2008 is poverty, considered in it’s widest sense. So rather than simply blog, we’re arranging to do something more practical:  run a social media surgery for voluntary and community groups in Birmingham.  Many of these deal directly with poverty in the city, I think all of them contribute in some way to creating life opportunities or alleviating suffering or disadvantage.

The aim is simply to get a group of volunteer social media savvy people together who can give one to one advice on which bits of the social media palette might be able to help these groups accomplish more.

Perhaps we might set up some blogs, get people using video or images in a new way, help them map problems?  Who knows? I’m quite certain everyone who takes part will learn something. (I’m wondering if this will help me imagine what a digital mentor might do.
Half an hour ago Candy Passmore at BVSC  agreed to provide a room at their place (138 Digbeth, B5 6DR, map).  The proposal fits very closely with their attempts to encourage the voluntary sector to find new ways to communicate, lobby and network. The offer also comes with wifi and some food between 5.30 and 9  on the evening of Wednesday 15th October 2008.  Once we’ve got something written she will also pass the invitation onto their networks within the city.

So who fancies helping and who knows any community or voluntary groups who might like to come?

Update: Its on.
Birmingham Voluntary Services Council love the idea and are happy to help us with space at their place, tea coffee and perhaps a morsel for those who want to stave off their tea time pangs. time is 5.30 pm to 7.30 pm Wednesday 15th October 2008.

Sign up here: http://birminghamblogactionday2008.eventbrite.com/  any problems with that don’t give up – leave a comment below or call me on 0777 909 5692.  If you want to find out about this stuff we want you there!

I’m late with this but want to mention it anyway. The really imaginative US programme Global Giving is now operating in the UK through GlobalGiving.co.uk. It subverts the big agency model of “give us your aid/charity and we’ll decide who gets it”.

To quote from their press release:

GlobalGiving.co.uk is a website enabling individuals to give directly to hundreds of well-vetted grassroots charity projects in over 70 countries, mostly in the developing world. Donors can also tangibly see the impact of their donations on the communities concerned through regular progress updates from project leaders. Projects range from providing clean water to villages in Morocco, enabling Guatemalan women to set up small-scale businesses, or helping Nepalis produce pedal-generated light as an alternative to dirty kerosene lamps.

The GlobalGiving concept was established in 2001 in the US by two former World Bank executives, Dennis Whittle and Mari Kuraishi. Since then, GlobalGiving.com has generated over $12 million to fund over 1,000 grassroots development projects. GlobalGiving.co.uk now offers the same exciting types of project opportunities to UK based donors.

Charities have long grappled with the issue of giving supporters a sense of the impact of their donations, and avoiding the uncertain feeling that donors often experience after sending a cheque. Meanwhile, outstanding projects struggle to obtain financing throughout the developing world. With GlobalGiving.co.uk individual donors can choose how much they wish to give – as little as £5 – and to which causes. In fact, many project leaders insist that the steady amounts of small donations are the ones responsible for projects reaching their goals.

Similar but on some level more individual than justgiving. For more than just this truncated hello, please see Beth, David Wilcox, Dennis Whittle, and their own blog here.

I think it was Antonio who once gave me the helpful feed reader analogy of it being like sending your dog to the front door to see if the paper has arrived yet rather than constantly trudging there yourself.  Commoncraft have a crack at their own explanation. Hattip Tony Molloy.

Yesterday Beth Kanter tweeted this blog post asking for contributions to help a Cambodia orphan pay her fees and stay at University. She asked us the same question last year and within 24 hours Leng had the $1000 she needed for Leng to do a year. Within a few days enough had been raised to help two people with student fees. This time it took just 90 minutes for Beth’s global online network and the trust we have in her to send Leng back for her final year.

Everything accelerates online!

Other blog posts about this:

Using Social Media for Social Good by Andru Edwards
Live Blog post by Bill’s Blog
An Uncomplicated Kindness at Gnomedex by Lipsticks and Laptops
Gnomedex Goes Bollywood by Dave Delaney
Gnomedex Day 1 by Dave Brezeal
Gnomedex by Jay Cross
Photography and Social Good Are Themes At Gnomedex by Jason Preston
Aftermath of Gnomedex by Stewtopia
RoundUp by CenterNetworks
What you missed at Gnomedex by Kevin Merritt
Using Social Media to Effect Social Change by Dan Risely
Seven Notes about Gnomedex by Kris Krug
Gnomedex, Sarah Lacy and More by Silicon Florist Podcast
From 0 to $2,500 in 90 minutes by Shiney Red Toy
Seven Notes About Gnomedex by Dave Delaney

The image above is some of the feedback from asking my friends on twitter how Groundwork might use the service.   The group I was working with were a little surprised (“wow”) by the speed and quality of the input from a network tool like this – so to Laura, Michael, Jon, Dave, Alice, Katie, Paul and Charlotte thank you – even amongst your number there was evident support and affection for the major national community and environmental charity.

The session was a general get-the-juices-flowing-see-whats-possible-start-to-get-your-head-around-whats-out-there 90 mins and to that end I think the one clear factor that emerged was that a bit of rss is needed in Groundwork towers.
The group I was working with manage grants for one of the projects and have to record and evaluate what’s being achieved, so the possibilities of digital media in terms of capturing what happens and starting a conversation about applications etc are self evident.

The conversation that really aroused my interest though hapened at the end once most people had floated away.

What if you use something like google maps to publicly share every single application you get?  You put all of them on the web and tie them to a map.  Green for approved red for rejected.  How will this change the dynamic betwen the grant givers and the apl;licants?  Will such transparency improve the system or weaken it?

It got me thinking about social media and market forces.  My A Level economics teacher frequently told me that a perfect market means everyone has perfect information.  Imagine a market for funding bids where everyone who is applying knows about every aplication that has happened, where they took place, whether they were approved and if not why not.   Could that improve efficiency in the distribution of grants?

The folk in East Anglia might understand that their area is already saturated with approved grants – so seek support from another fund or change their plans.  Groups in Northumberland might see there’s a real opportuntiy because their patch is under represented. Those who write the applications can see exactly what others have been saying so it will give them a realistic level of confidence in their ideas.  Those who hand out the grants can be more easily held to account – or better still the minds of the public can be put to helping them constantly refine and improve their decision making.

Sit around it a conversation about the rights and wrongs of particular grant applications and you can begin (with careful nurturing of the online community) to crowdsource a sense of where people want to see their money being spent.

Now don’t expect Groundwork to do this tomorrow – or even at all.  It is a big cultural leap for any organisation and it may not be that useful or warrant the effort.  This was simply one of those conversations that went deep down into the possibilities and cultural impact of social media.  But I share it as an idea. What do you think?