Podnosh

Here are some of the things I’ve been reading February 18th from 09:08 to 21:55:

• 10 Keys to Effective Non-Profit Organization Websites | Vandelay Design Blog – volunteers who are offering their time and services are also critical to most non profits. The website should provide information that tells people how they can get involved, how it will make an impact, and provide them with an opportunity to express their interest in volunteering.
• 5 Ways to Express Yourself More Clearly Online – WebWorkerDaily – The fact that you have a voice doesn’t mean you have to use it at every opportunity. Talk about what’s important to both yourself and your audience — don’t just follow the crowd.
• Connecting 2.0 Communities? « – Tracey helps organisers organise: "I couldn’t help feeling that with a few “tweaks” a good event could have been great and so, I’d like to offer a few suggestions – and – an offer to help put some of them into practice at the next event."
• The Monkey Cage: What Will Make People Trust Goverment Again? – What drives the trend in political trust? By and large, it is the economy. People trust government when times are good. They don’t trust it when times are bad.
• Cardiff bloggers meet-up, March 2010 « How to microblog in high heels – Nurturing the hyperlocal: "Cardiff will host its first bloggers meet-up next month – a chance for newbie, budding and veteran bloggers to be introduced, share ideas and link up."

givv.org. allows you to make one monthly donation

The site www.givv.org is simply brilliant. It allows us subtle control what we give and to whom.  When you offer someone control it tends to make them feel better about doing something.

As a charity donor it allows you/me to make one single monthly payment into an account then choose how to apportion that.

If this month I want to support disaster relief I can, next month I split it between that and a home based children’s charity. In fact I can split it as many ways I like – picking up local charities for a while, changing my interests from young people to building sonervation.

I can then decide whether I let those charities know I’m supporting them or not, either joining their netowork or avoiding it.  That means I can also have some control over how many times they send me daft envelopes with silly pens in.

As a charity trustee or administrator I get one lump sum payment a month from givv.org rather than lot of different payments.  Especially for the smaller charities (such as my favourite,  Birmingham Conservation Trust) it may improve the chances to get small yet manageable donations from a much wider group of people.  When someone opts to share information with you the chances are that will also be a more fruitful relations – better rewarding the effort put into nurturing it.

It’s very clever and I hope something similar comes to Britain soon. Of course don’t let the wait put you off making a donation here  ;-)

www.justgiving.com/birminghamct/donate

Tip top hat tip for Chris Unitt.

These are my links for January 12th through January 14th:

• John Popham’s Random Musings – "I have been quite annoyed by some of the accounts of “heroic” struggles to get to work through the snow, because, it seemed to me, that some of them just weren’t necessary." John on why the web doesn't seem to make it easier for people to work without traveling through snow.
• Building the “reusable video” player « Carl’s Notepad – "What i’d like is a player which has the ability to pull content from any source, youtube or vimeo or a traditional video storage platform – I’d also like to add value by providing a feature that allowed me to layer content, questions etc over the top to gain additional benefit from the original content. I’d like to be in a position to reuse our existing video archives and repurpose them, or use other public material from either central government or other local authorities providing the content was reusable”"
• Official Google Blog: A new approach to China – "we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties."
• Google to end censorship in China | Technology | guardian.co.uk – "Google acknowledged that the decision might well mean Google.cn, and potentially the company's offices in China, would have to close."
• Management | Zoetica: Connecting Organizations with Their Networks – Beth Kanter becomes a Chief exec.

Beth Speaking from elstudio on Flickr (click on the picture to go to the original)

Beth Kanter is the social media expert for non profit organisations. Last year I made this promise to pay more attention to her prolific blog output.

Today is her 53rd birthday, and in keeping with a small tradition built up over the last 3 years, she is again using her birthday as an excuse to show how social media and trusted networks can combine to help charities. She is raising funds for her favourite charity, the Sharing Foundation.

I first met Beth almost exactly 3 years ago when she visited Birmingham from her home in Boston, New England. She was  working with David Wilcox to deliver a presentation at a conference for people who provide IT support for charities and the like.  It was a time when social media had not become the generic term it is now. I was mostly thought of as a podcaster, one of the one’s who’s job it was to help with telling the story. So naturally enough I interviewed her for the Grassroots Channel podcast.

Click below to listen to the podcast

Click here to download the podcast

Here are 5 things things that I know a number of people have helped me understand, but I can confidently say that Beth Kanter repeatedly showed me these ways:

1. Lead by example. Beth experiments all the time.  Just (F) Do It is ingrained in her personality.  The more I’ve done the same the more confidence it’s given me to keep on going.
2. Don’t hog your content. Share it and move on. You should always build your expertise on the next new thing you’re going to learn, rather than worry about others getting good at one you already know. The faster you share the faster you learn that new thing.
3. Respond. Beth has 305,000 followers on Twitter. She still gets back to you!  How does she manage it?  Discipline.
4. Blogging isn’t a vain thing to do. It can be but, the way Beth does it, it isn’t.  She writes a great deal about the people she meets, she is very generous in describing what she is learning from them. She also puts huge amounts of effort in doing thinking for us and sharing it when it’s incomplete.  These are things Beth (and others) taught me about content.
5. It’s about bringing people together. As David Wilcox said it 3 years ago:    “The other delight at the event was a chance to meet up with fellow UK enthusiasts for social media including Steve Bridger, Miles Maier, Paul Henderson and Nick Booth. We can’t rival Beth’s US fellow social media bloggers yet, but I think a little blog community is emerging here around social media and social network where the focus is nonprofits and civil society. Drop a comment in here if you are interested in linking up – we hope to have a get together fairly soon. Beth suggested we start tagging social media posts with nptechuk … the standard US tag is nptech.”

There is so much more I learn from Beth but these are the basics. That’s why at least once a year I donate something to the Sharing Foundation.  Not because I’m especially connected to the work of the foundation, simply because I’m am especially connected to Beth.

Thanks to Amy and Stacey for encouraging me to write this post.

These are my links for December 4th through December 6th:

• Measuring digital engagement – Digigov – "Recently, I’ve been working with colleagues in COI on this problem and we’ve come up with three common measures that appear to work across all digital engagement or social media tools:

  1. Number of relationships
  2. Number of user-generated content items
  3. Number of referrals/recommendations"

• Listening to you – "Residents in Longton and Meir are invited to meet their local police commander next week, and a new billboard will leave them in no doubt of where and when to find him. A 20ft by 10ft billboard has been sited on Weston Road in Meir (near The Broadway) inviting people to come and speak to the local commander. " via @Mike_rawlins
• Charlie Beckett, POLIS Director » Blog Archive » Networked Journalism: Challenges To NGOs and Mainstream Media – What a relief: "In a recent Polis private seminar with a major international NGO and a global news organisation, the head of the news media’s international division said that he now accepted that they had to work together to report the world:

  “We may have, if we are lucky, one stringer in a particular country. You may well have a dozen people there who know it well. It makes sense for us to use your resources to cover a story or issue.”

  All media organisations are now opening themselves up to gathering material from the public – including NGOs. And NGOs are now expecting their humanitarian staff to act more like journalists. "

• Freedom to Lead | John’s Idea – "In Leicestershire 92 council staff spend their time keeping government up to date on 3,000 performance indicators at a cost of £7 million a year. The need to reduce these costs, and shift the emphasis of performance reporting from central government to local people, sit at the heart of the LGA campaign Freedom to Lead."
• CivicSurf » “That’s not a blog. Blogs are boring with lots of text” – Hear, hear: "

  What struck me last night, and not for the first time, was that people still have this ingrained view of what a blog is. When I showed the cake site to one lady she blurted out, “That’s not a blog! A blog is boring with lots of text.” Wordpress.com still promotes itself to bloggers and offers:

  “Express yourself. Start a blog.”

  It’s a website that is easy to update and optimised for search engines. End of. Let’s not label it with something that puts people off.

These are my links for November 1st through November 2nd:

• Poles, Politeness and Politics in the age of Twitter « The New Adventures of Stephen Fry – “the most fatuous and maddening aspect of the press’s (perfectly understandable) fear, fascination and dread of Twitter: the insulting notion that twitterers are wavy reeds that can be blown this way or that by the urgings of a few prominent ‘opinion formers’. It is hooey, it is insulting hooey and it is wicked hooey. The press dreads Twitter for all kinds of reasons.”
• Investment to The Media Bus | Futurebuilders – Futurebuilders invests ion a mobiel media training bus: “We have just offered an investment of £344,573 to The Media Bus. £297,527 of it will be a loan and £47,046 will be a grant. The Media Bus is a social enterprise in Poole that was set up by White Lantern Film as a solution to the growing demand for educational projects and digital media training in locations with poor technical resources.”
• Supporting Birmingham Conservation Trust if you’re in business – A whole load of ways businesses can support one of my favourite charities – Birmingham Conservation Trust. Non of them cost you any more than a little attention.
• Beware the instant online anger of the HobNob mob | Nick Cohen | Comment is free | The Observer – The heart of this piece on the power of online movements is the final very fine paragraph: ” A mob fighting a good cause is still a mob. To fight back, you need to remember that although the internet age is hugely expanding the number of complaints, the old rules still apply. Whether you are the owner of a tiny blog or the editor of a national newspaper, if someone points out an incorrect fact, you correct it; if someone challenges an argument, you argue back; and if someone says that you must think what they think, you ignore them.”

These are my links for September 3rd through September 4th:

• In Development » Draft Open Access and Licensing Framework released – as copyright works are concerned, NZGOAL proposes that agencies apply the most liberal of the New Zealand Creative Commons law licences to those of their copyright works that are appropriate for release, unless there is a restriction which would prevent this. The most liberal Creative Commons licence is the Attribution (BY) licence.
• Inaccuracies in newspaper coverage of Cabinet Office job advert – Blunt rebuttal: "This morning several newspapers ran a story about the Cabinet Office advertising for a Deputy Director of Digital Engagement who will be paid around £120,000 a year."

  Unfortunately, every single story contained inaccuracies, from basic facts about the vacancy to fundamental details of what the job is all about.

• How to stop being embarrassed by your website commissioning :: interactivecultures – "let’s call him Harold" Jon Hickman on form and inspired by the Help me Investigate investigation into the city council's website. (missed this when on holiday).
• Membership has its meaning « BuzzMachine – "the membership bar has moved up. It’s not enough to let people give you money and promote you. Now you have to invite them to have a real and meaningful role in what you do, even a sense – if not a stake – of ownership and, consequently, control."
• NTI Birmingham : Gamer Camp – Free: "Gamer Camp offers would-be game makers in the West Midlands the chance to learn how to develop and produce games for Apple's phenomenally popular iPhone/iPod Touch, as part of a four-week training course taking place at NTI Birmingham and Birmingham School of Visual Communication." via d:log

These are my links for August 19th through August 22nd:

• Ernest Marples: the first month – Harry Metcalfe – “Scores of people have sent us messages of support. I’ve even been hugged.”
• Open Plaques – “Open Plaques is a service that aims to find and provide data about all the ‘plaques’ (often blue and round) that can be found across the UK.”
• Open Knowledge Foundation Blog » Blog Archive » Open Plaques: open data about UK heritage sites -
• Together we are LOUDER – Louder.org.uk will be the new online home for campaigners across England. The site combines a cutting-edge social networking platform, established multimedia toolkits and a hub for online advocacy resources
• Power in People’s Hands: Learning from the World’s Best Public Services – Bit late but thanks to Dave Harte: “This report presents the findings of a Strategy Unit study of leading edge innovations in world-wide public services, which involved interviewing 50 academics, public servants and other experts from around the world. The report highlights more than 30 case studies from 15 countries. It emphasises that innovation and productivity come from forging stronger relationships with citizens and finds the most successful services have five distinguishing characteristics:”
• Communitybuilders fund will open in September – Third Sector – “The Communitybuilders fund will provide loans and grants to help community-based organisations in England that boost interest in local democracy and improve community cohesion.”
• FutureGov » Features » Using web 2.0 to safeguard children: an invitation to a round table discussion – “we are looking to bring together multi-disciplinary group of senior managers and practitioners from childrens social services, teachers, police and health workers with social web technologist, public service designer, funders – or even just people who have a personal passion for this area – to help us design and run a small Safeguarding 2.0 pilot.”

Here are some of the things I’ve been reading August 8th from 12:43 to 13:15:

• Citizen involvement in local governance | Joseph Rowntree Foundation – “This Round-up outlines the challenges and dilemmas that local partners, central government, councillors, staff and communities must resolve if citizens are to have more power and influence over local services and their neighbourhoods.”
• Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: Crowded Roads Ahead for Charity 2.0: How to address scaling and cause fatigue? – Beth challenging non profits to step uop a gear when it comes to now owning the message but being part of a network which achieves things. Excellent post
• What would you do with a journalist? « Talk About Local (alpha) – Good question asked by Will Perrin.
• Where British blogging is at | The Democratic Society – Demosc worries about whether blogging can replace msm: “a lot of sympathy with his scepticism about what blogging brings to political debate. It may be that it grows up, or that the cream floats to the top, if the traditional media do go under.” Medium and message mix up again?
• A Rebuttal & an Example of a High Performance Organization | Tactical Philanthropy – This is one of a series of interesting posts and conversations about social media and charities, high performance versus high impact. Some really intelligent stuff being chewed over on this blog.
• Hyperlocal, when you don’t want everything – jon bounds – Jon Bounds improves is Birmingham hyperlocal blog pipe, created as part of Talk About Local

These are my links for August 7th through August 8th:

• BrandNew – “BrandNew is a friendly, informal gathering in London, UK, for those employed to represent a brand online to get acquainted, chat and share.” Jo Geary, yes she who set up the Birmingham Social Media Cafe, starts something new in London. You can still come home though Jo.
• Mappa Mercia: Is this the shortest bus journey in Birmingham? – I linked to this simply because it shows the potential benefits of having attentive eyes on the street. I might not want time/money spent putting this right, but volunteer mappers are bound to find things worth changing.
• ‘Total Place’ in Birmingham « – Total Place is an important idea, one which I first came across many years ago when Dr Dick Atkinson was trying to work out the total public spend for Balsall Heath. I know he shared that passion with both government an opposition. It helps at city level, but I think key decision making will change when there is also some way of making ti work at neighborhood level. To quote from one of the local MP’s: “The BeBirmingham partnership recently estimated that in total around £7.5 billion of public money was invested in the city in 2008-09. That’s a huge amount. Over a billion is spent on education.”
• Government names successful projects to help young people unlock their talent – Corporate – Communities and Local Government – Have we on just got round to doing this? “The Inspiring Communities initiative is about getting people in communities working together to boost the aspirations and achievements of their young people.”
• Social Media Provide Untapped Opportunity to Engage High Dollar Non-profit Donors, According to Community Philanthropy 2.0 Research Study : New Communications Review – The social web offers a welcome place for individual philanthropic activity. New research funded by the Columbus Foundation, The San Francisco Foundation and The Saint Paul Foundation demonstrates that High dollar donors — especially 30-49 year-olds — use the social web, but have yet to be engaged by strong, trustworthy philanthropic organizations. This was among the key findings of the new research study, “Community Philanthropy 2.0,” conducted by Beth Kanter, Society for New Communications Research Fellow Geoff Livingston, and Qui Diaz of CRT/tanaka.