Over the last few years the social media surgery movement has spread further than anyone could have imagined at that first (and supposedly one off) event back in 2008. There are now surgeries held in 70 different towns and cities all over the uk, and further beyond, in Australia, Canada, Switzerland and even Nepal to name but a few.
But, in the birth place of the Surgeries, Birmingham, there has been another spread happening -less global and more local, into our communities. In the last 6 months we have been working with partners such as the local strategic partnership and the police across the city and with their support there have been surgeries in:
as well as the continued support for the Central Birminham sessions.
These surgeries have been able to support people where they live and work, to enable them to get online to support the good work that they are doing in their neighbourhoods.
Like Lol Thurstan for instance, he came along asking for help distributing his monthly Neighbourhood Watch newsletter and we helped him set up a blog. Lol is now already exploring the possiblilities of sharing more than just hisNeighbourhood Watch news with his community – taking the idea of a neighbourhood magazine and reproducing it online, and there’s Sandra Turner. Sandra wanted some support promoting her community centre and finding out what was going on in her area. We sat with her while she set up a facebook page and later a twitter account so now she can do just that – it’s enabled her to share information online and make connections with others in her area.
And we’re not done yet. There are more dates already set and hopefully still more to come. We’d love to see you there whether it to recieve some support or to offer your help. You can visit www.socialmediasurgery.com to register to attend any of these sessions, or find one nearer to you.
At the moment we are in the middle of a project working with the South Birmingham Community Safety Partnership. This involves running social media surgeries across communities in South Birmingham to improve civic conversations in those areas, get the communities and local partners talking to each other and getting their news online and hopefully in doing so, positively changing their perceptions of safety.
In the video below we took 5 minutes to catch up with Austin Rodriguez the Safer Places Officer with Birmingham South Community Safety Partnership to tell us what they were hoping to achieve and what outcomes he’s seen from the project so far…..
Yesterday a sad thing happened; 2 children went missing. It was presumed at the time that they’d gone of their own volition and they were later found well and safe, but none the less it was an awful thing to happen.
This all happened in Darlaston, 5 miles from my house, in Wednesfield and as such when the press release went out appealing for witnesses we posted it to the WV11 site and Facebook page. We were aware that while the children weren’t strictly from the WV11 area our readership expands beyond our borders, and friends,and friends of friends, would most definitely cross over into Darlaston and the surrounding areas.
We posted the photo from the appeal along with the copied the police release verbatim, all we added to the post was two words at the end “please share”
And share people did.
Within an hour 565 people had re-posted the news direct from our facebook page and less than 2 hours later that number had jumped to 1984!
It seems to me 2 things had happened to make the numbers jump like that - every parent that uses our site could empathise with the situation these parents were in, no one can imagine, or would want to imagine, what it feels like to find your child missing like that, and going on the old adage that “it takes a village to raise a child” everyone wanted to help raise awareness to bring these children home safely.
The other thing that happened was we were there, we were local and we we part of the community and we appealed to them directly with the “please share”!
Darlaston falls under Walsall Council but it is fairly close to the border with Wolverhampton. Both Councils picked up the police release and shared to their facebook pages, Walsall’s post was shared 20 times, Wolverhampton’s 136.
The local radio station, Free Radio also picked up on it and shared to their page too, Their story was shared 550 times.
Looking at those figures it seems clear that being community based and very local really had an impact on the way the community interacted with the appeal.
The important thing here of course is that the children were found and returned home safe and well, l but as an observation it is interesting how much being part of a community can make a difference
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.”
Tuesday Monday evening was a thoroughly enjoyable couple of hours with a broad range of folk from the public sector, BBC and blogging communities in Coventry and Warwickshire.
We brought them together as part of the work we have being doing with the BBC to encourage stronger links and better understanding between mainstream news and hyperlocal blogging. The BBC team n Coventry was keen to reach out to a broad range of people in their patch with an interest in social media.
It was run as a very simple unconference – (more…)
These are my links for February 13th through February 14th:
Local council elections in 2010 « LGiU – the local democracy blog – At the BBC I loved organising and doing election coverage. (Genuinely did) This post shows that while the Local Government Information unit was thinking there are 166 local councils holding elections on May 6th the researchers I used to rely on, Rallings and Thrasher reckon there are 176. This can't be a tricky single data source problem to crack!
BBC – The Virtual Revolution Blog: BBC Digital Revolution rushes for you to download and edit – Argued for this in 1999 – great to see it happening. The most embarrassing bits of the rushes (un-edited video) are the ones when the producer reporter is making people do/say what they need them to do. That may well be the stuff left out! "Releasing rushes like this is an experiment, and there are some limitations. We're not releasing all our rushes, for two reasons. Firstly, we have a compliance procedure at the BBC which means that all online video has to be viewed by a senior manager – there's simply too much footage to do this properly. We do estimate that we will be releasing around 5 hours of interview material, featuring 20-30 interviewees, and up to an hour of other content."
Blogging and Facebook for councillors – Councillor Mary Reid offers you the benefit of her experience. She offers top tips on how councillors can make the most of blogs and social network media. (thanks to @pigsonthewing )
PC Ed Rogerson (hotelalpha9) on Twitter – This is one of my favourite bits of the web for the crossover between social media, very local stuff and public service: "Just had a meeting with my Sergeant. I've been instructed to conduct more speed checks in Starbeck and to seize tobacco off children."
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
“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."
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.
"# Attend 12 theatre shows in the next 12 months, 4 by West Midlands writers/artists/companies you haven’t seen before, 1 in a West Midlands Venue you’ve never been to before.
# Take 12 people who have never been, rarely go, or don’t ‘do’ Independent Theatre to a show. Share transport.
# Host a meal/party for 8 people 4 of which you barely know.
# Write 12 comments/reviews/blog entries about theatre on other people’s sites.
# Attend 1 mid*point or return to the next Open Space event."
Another day, another report « Chief Inspector Mark Payne’s Blog – How did it stop being like this? "In West Midlands Police we have been one of the pilot forces for ‘community resolutions’. This effectively allows officers to use their judgement to make decisions at the scene of some lower level crimes, and together with the victim agree on a suitable remedy. So if a gang of kids break your window, you can ask them to apologise and pay for it, rather than enter into the criminal justice system. So far we have carried out 8000 of these types of resolutions, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Police officers are allowed to use their professional judgement (or common sense as it is more commonly known,) based on the full circumstances of the case, not on narrow performance objectives."
Idiot English: Vorsprung durch Biscuit – This is blogging to warm the cockles of my heart: "My wife likes Bahlsen's Choco Leibniz biscuits, so we often have some in the pantry. But their presence weighs heavy on my pedantic mind. There it is, in my home, the yellow box with its (in)famous slogan:
More chocolate than a biscuit
Eh? It should be "More chocolate than biscuit"! (They're about two-thirds choc.) I can only imagine that this slogan was the victim of hypercorrection in the seminar room"
A quick start guide to Twitter – "The guide takes absolute beginners to Twitter right from the start – explaining what Twitter is, and how to sign up – right through to replying, retweeting, hashtagging and using tools to measure success." Dave Briggs knows his stuff – and he can be funny.
You are the editor of a newspaper. You are allowed to employ one more person. You can choose either a writer that has won a Pulitzer prize or a writer that has built an online community of 40,000 highly committed readers and contributors. Which do you choose?
I know nothing is ever that clear cut, of course. This is a real “daddy or chips” question. Yet, I guess how you answer it gives a good indication of how you think we should train our journalists of the future."
I'd choose both.
Thriving too: Making Openness Work – The 'Open100' competition is a celebration of the power of openness and mass collaboration. You can be part of the competition by nominating the company you think is the best open innovator. The competition will be open until 12th February while the winners will be announced on 24thFebruary. The winners are those who will be included in the list of the world's top 100 open companies
Official Google Research Blog: Automatic Captioning in YouTube – Google experimenting wiht automatically captioning video: "The auto alignment features is available for all new video uploads, however the scope is limited to English material. The auto captioning feature is initially rolled out to a set of educational partners only. Although this is very limited in scope, the early launch makes the results of the system available to the viewers of this material instantly and it allows us to gauge early feedback which can aid in improving the features. We will release automatic captions more widely as quickly as possible." via @pigsonthewing
These are my links for August 14th through August 15th:
Birmingham Local Food Directory :: Loaf Online – Loaf Online is a blog about local food in and around Birmingham. Great content, a directory of local food suppliers and looks proper tasty. More superlocal than hyperlocal but I like it a lot. Another example of people seeing an information vacuum and just getting on and filling it.
Social seniors and Social Media Surgery in Sydney« stuff and junk – This is a quick blog post from one of the people who took part int he first social media surgery in Sydney Austrlai. I love the quote: “Which brings me to my third thought – I can’t think of a generation better suited to social media than that of our senior citizens.” I agree, especially when you link it to a passion for real world community.
Birmingham Post – Life & Leisure – Post Features – Blog Street central – Good piece about our very local social media surgeries by Jo In in the Birmingham Post: “There are many lovely things about the surgeries, not least that the line between the surgeons and the patients becomes increasingly blurred.”
Welcome to the NPIA’s Citizen Focus and Neighbourhood Policing Programme Website – The NPIA’s Citizen Focus and Neighbourhood Policing programme is responsible for a number of key projects including; The Policing Pledge, Confidence, Citizen Focus Hallmarks and Crime Mapping. More information on these and our other core stands is included on the following pages:
These are my links for June 27th through June 30th:
Poynter Online – Youtube Launches Citizen reporter Support – The site has just unveiled a new effort to improve and promote videos that are newsworthy: the Reporters' Center. The Reporters' Center launched Monday with about 35 instructional videos from professional journalists on how to handle a range of reporting challenges, including: understanding privacy issues (and staying out of jail), shooting video with your cell phone, fact-checking assertions, conducting a good interview and covering a humanitarian crisis safely.
Building Britain’s Future: the next step to better policy discussion online at Helpful Technology – "a fair crack at how we might present big policy documents online. To me, this is one of the big challenges in digital engagement right now: we have a fair number of tool options for consultations, and are getting better at applying the ‘classic’ social media tools of Twitter, YouTube and Flickr – but the practicalities and small-p politics of presenting large documents in anything more than a downloadable PDF are still daunting. Like Digital Britain or New Opportunities, BBF is not (primarily) a consultation, so has to struggle with the thorny question of what to do with feedback and whether to solicit it at all."
http://mypolice.wordpress.com/ – MyPolice.org is a web-based service that fosters constructive, collaborative communication between communities and the police forces which serve them. MyPolice originated at (and won!) Social Innovation Camp, June 2009. Sicamp is a challenge to turn back of the envelope ideas which use the web to tackle 'stuff that matters' into a reality. In just 48 hours.
The Conservative Party | News | Speeches | David Cameron: Giving power back to the people – "Information is power – because information allows people to hold the powerful to account. This has never been more true than today, in the information age. The internet is an amazing pollinator, spreading ideas and information all over the globe in minutes. It turns lonely fights into mass campaigns; transforms moans into movements; excites the attention of hundreds, thousands, millions of people and stirs them to action. And constantly accelerating technology makes information infinitely more powerful.
