This is Rinkoo Barpaga, Rinkoo attended the Erdington Social Media Surgery this afternoon for some help telling the story of a project he’s involved with.
In 2 weeks time he’ll be flying to the states to take part in a series of workshops and training sessions with deaf community groups, theatre groups and comedians to learn how they approach putting on events for the deaf community over there hoping to bring the knowledge back to the UK to make things happen over here.
Not photographed is Rinkoo’s interpreter (who politely declined to be in front of the camera) a volunteer who had come along to act as a sign interpreter so that Rinkoo could sit and learn with me as Rinkoo himself is deaf.
It was a productive session which as always was adapted to best suit the person learning but in this instance involved a 3 way conversation and a lot of pointing but there was something really lovely about how it came together, a volunteer helping a volunteer come and learn from, had it been someone else other than me teaching him, another volunteer.
The surgery was in full swing by the time they arrived so Nick took them out onto the terrace to tell them about how the Social Media Surgery Movement started while I got on with managing the surgery…
You can read Nick’s chapter in the Community Lovers Guide about it here:
In January we launched the Birmingham edition of The Community Lovers Guide, 12 stories of of the ways volunteers, community and social enterprise are changing relationships in the city. - a simple book of stories of the ways volunteers, community and social enterprise are changing relationships in the city.
The idea for the series was born at a railway station in Rotterdam and bought back to Birmingham, and now tomorrow 12 Dutch visitors will be following in its foot steps and visiting places and groups the feature in our edition of the book.
The visitors are a mixture of professionals, researchers and civil servants from Holland and they’ll be joining us as we head to Stirchley to visit Tom Baker at Loaf, to Cotteridge for a walk around Cotteridge Park with Emma Woolf of the Friends of Cotteridge Park and finally a visit into the city centre to join us for the Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery.
We’ll be posting about their visit throughout the day tomorrow but if you’re interested in finding out more about the places they’re visiting before then you can read the relevant chapters of the Communnity Lovers Guide to Birmingham below.
Loaf – Bringing Back Real Food
Friends of Cotteridge Park
Loops of Generosity – The Social Media Surgery Movement
At the same time as running the project we’ve been working on in South Birmingham with the Community safety team we’ve been engaging with communities in east Birmingham in the same way. In fact we’ve just wrapped up the first lot of surgeries in Shard End and it looks like we’ve had some great results with people coming to learn about twitter, facebook and blogging.
One of the patients who attended was Lol Thurstan.
Lol came along to a Social Media awareness session we held at The Pump on Kitts Green Road and subsequently attended our Social Media Surgeries at Shard End Library. Chair of his residents association and lead coordinator with his neighbourhood watch, He wanted to learn how to use social media to support his Neighbourhood Watch group
In just 4 sessions (including the initial awareness session) Lol has established B26 Community, A neighbourhood website for the Sheldon community that allows him to not only share Neighbourhood Watch news but can also involve other groups in the community to improve communication in the area -
By his own admission Lol was a late comer to starting to use technology but he came with a willingness to learn and as I think you’ll see from this video, age isn’t a barrier to learning something new and getting stuck in !
Keith came along to a few of the Social Media Surgery sessions at Blakenhall Healthy Living Centre in Wolverhampton to receive some help with communications for 2 charities he supports. After receiving help from our surgeons he returned a 3rd time to offer support himself.
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.
I first met Lorna Wills at the Low Hill Social Media Surgery in January. Recently I caught up with her again to see what had prompted her to come to a surgery in the first place and what she’s done with her new skills since then.
Lorna moved into the area 2 years ago and didn’t know that many people near where she lived, so she came along to the surgery wanting to learn how to use the internet to find out what things were going in her area. Things that she could get involved with. She had been attending her local neighbourhood watch meetings, but when the group tailed off she realised she wasn’t sure what she could get involved with next.
” I first found out about the surgeries only just in time to attend the last session in Low Hill but the people there were lovely and welcoming. I sat with someone and they showed me how to use twitter. They knew there were lots of people and groups using it locally and that I could use it to find out what was on going on in my area ….
…I’ve since joined the local Crimestoppers group as a voluntary member. I talked to Mac the organiser on twitter and went along to a meeting to find out more.
I’ve since traveled to Rugby for my induction and to the Crimestoppers conference in Warwickshire, which is where I met Chief Constable Andy Parker. Talking to Andy we discovered we had a mutual acquaintance, we got back in touch I’m now arranging to meet him too!
Those conversations on twitter have been a catalyst for all this. I have met some lovely people and improved my social life.
I was feeling dissatisfied in the area, it didn’t seem that friendly, I found it was hard to make new friends in a new place. I think I’d come to realise you have to stay somewhere couple of years to find your community but I just couldn’t meet people I could relate to before but now I have both at the surgery and people I’ve met by going online.
I used Twitter to find out about events locally, which I’ve attended and now I’m even helping to arrange our own event on Low Hill for local groups to a showcase their organisations. The surgeries played a big part in my taking part in all this, it has boasted my confidence, I’ve always been active but in my own and now I’ve met some lovely people to be active with.”
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…..
After the session we spoke to Pav from the LINk to ask her why she’d come along – She said she’d attended to find out more about Social Media, how to use facebook and twitter and connect it to their website.
She left having set up her own twitter account and as you can see in the video she is REALLY excited to get back to work and tell her colleagues about it!
Looking at the stats in socialmediasurgery.com – which we started in 2010 to help people administer their own surgeries as the movement spread across England and abroad – there have been more than 500 events.
500 events is a great milestone and testament to the hard work volunteers have put into the social media surgery movement over the last four years. That’s why I’m posting this now.
While I’m here, some more numbers from the website:
122 social media surgeries started
502 events held (or booked in for the coming months)
3,122 people have booked 4,152 appointments between them
