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:

We arrived to find Emma Woolf of Friends of Cotteridge Park elbow deep in wood chippings in the Forest School with a group of girls from a nearby school.

The Forest school is just one feature the group have introduced since they became involved with the park – You can read about that in their chapter here:

But essentially, Emma tells us, It’s all about forging partnerships with volunteers, local schools and the local community. Today the forest school, year 9 field volunteers have helped create a path around the area using wood chippings from the railway that runs alog side the site, Contractors we’re there over the weekend cutting back the trees fro over the tracks, “Can you chuck that over here” Emma asked them, so they did and now i’s been put to good use.

They’ve also been cutting back the willow to make archways along the paths. The girls, Emma notes, like the craftier stuff and the boys, who usually come along to help Sunday mornings, like the heavier work like turning compost. Wendy, one of the other volunteers at the park, remarked of the paths the group were creating, the girls do curved lines the boys would have done straight ones.

Working Together

We run the park in partnership with the local authority. They own it and they deal with the day to day upkeep so we can innovate. For instance one project is our outdoor excersize. Adults and children working out together in the park … this works on all levels but most of all because there is no funding for pretty green spaces but there is for health. Parks are outdoor gyms, we can keep people healthy and make our groups sustainable by applying for grants for things like walking groups, Running groups etc…

We have 20 volunteers who help out regularly, but in addition to that we have 700 on our email list and different people get involved at different times. They are more likely to come along if it’s something they’re interested in and that’s ok. We’d rather they come an do a bit of something they like, be that weeding or building, than feel obliged to something the don’t like and not want to come back again. 5000 come annually to COCOMAD and we make the whole event free as far as possible.

Involved community

Not everyone likes what we do, Some people think us working here brings people in and in turn causes anti social behaviour, but we think the opposite is true, having people here using the park deters ASB and on the whole the community are proud of the park as they’ve done it themselves.

Even the kids get involved with things like litter picking and we hold regular spray paint workshops that they attend, decorating the park for themselves so we have very little problems with graffiti.

The pride the community have in their park really showed when we had our Green flag judging – the place had never looked so tidy, everyone was out in force picking up rubbish and making sure we looked our best.

Q&A

(Paraphrased from the questions and answers with the visitors)

How does the partnership work out?

A It’s been nothing but positive, we have a really good relationship with our park manager. We have a good understanding of their position, they’re restricted by funding so can’t do it all, but we can get them to support us. We can fundraise and apply for funding to make things happen where they can’t and that works for all of us.

For instance the land for the Forest school we bought for £7000, £4000 raised by collections. £3000 donated. We bought it and then handed over the ownership to the local authority for the people of Cotteridge.

What do you fundraise for?

A. Everything needs funds, be it the tennis courts need relaying, or for new the benches. Then there’s the festival we apply for grants, ask local business and have buckets in the park.

Is this your full time job?

A. No I’m a volunteer, it takes up time but it’s a break away from my day job and I enjoy it. I get to play outside all day, in my wellies. I probably spend up to 2 days time working on the park, but I’ve now become involved in a city wide network “Birmingham Open Spaces Forum” which involves and supports other groups and that takes up some more of my time too.

They are in the UK to explore the emergence of civic economy, what it means to individuals and communities. It is a diverse mix of , writers, civil servants and researchers – It is also some of the groups first visit to Birmingham and we greeted them in typical British style….with a cup of builders tea.

Tom started today introducing the story of loaf, talking about its birth from his house – that you can read about in his chapter:

But in short Tom used a model for starting Loaf called Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) – Loaf is the second bakery in the country to use this approach.

The new home of Loaf – 1421 Pershore Road, was formally a butchers shop, and the changing face of the High Street can be seen by walking down the road now, a third of the shops are closed, or only open on short term leases which only open for 6 months. Tom was determined to try and change this so opened his shop in the community that had supported him to start the regeneration of the High Street. The shop was renovated with the help of . A small brewery that was looking to invest in small food and drinks shops and the purchase of the equipment was funded by the sale of bonds in the community, the 6% interest on the bond is paid out in bread!

From the shop Tom runs his cookery school. As well as the original bread courses, there are also classes on pasta making, butchery, knife skills, foraging etc and the classes on offer keeps on diversifying.

Stirchley Stores

In the space next door to Loaf is a retail space that he’s given over as an incubation space for another local business – the local food cooperative. Stirchley Stores. They are totally reliant on volunteers to run the shop so Tom doesn’t charge them rent, in exchange for for the space they sell Loaf’s bread.

The original members of the bread club (read the chapter to find out about this) and the investors collecting the interest on their bonds drop by the store the store and it’s also open with the bread available for anyone to buy.

The shops opening hours are different to other conventional stores, adapting so that the bakers don’t need to work through the night and to the needs of the community. Stirchley is quiet during the day but often busy with commuters in the evening, the community soon got used to this change and the store is busy during the week. The only exception to this is Fridays and Saturdays, The bakers work through the night on Fridays so that the store can open on Saturday morning.

Loaf’s mission is to promote good food and healthy living in communities and build community through foods and they’re already reaching these goals, and have lots of other ideas for the future.

In the 3 years Tom has been running Loaf the small bakery movement has exploded through the , he loves being part of this and keeps in touch with other bakers across the country using social media.

Q&A

(Paraphrased from the questions and answers with the visitors)

Did you have any problems with the government helping you start?

A. Yes, it was a slow process getting through planning, and they could do a lot more to help support local businesses anyway. We’ve created jobs and inward investment. If they were a little more forward thinking about working with grassroots business we could make a larger impact to the High Street than the big supermarkets can.

Did the council change their opinion when they saw the business?

A. Yes, individual officers have recognized the success and I’ve been invited to talk to their planning department.

Can you tell me something about the influence this has on the wider community?

A. A lot of people now say that when they are in the street of in the park they will recongnise people because they see them here. People are making friends with their neighbours who has volunteered in the shop with them. Although there is still a split between the younger and older sides of the community. It’s hard to know how we are perceived but we try and be as inclusive as possible and we’ve just made links with a local school to invite students and their parents into the shop once a year to see what we’re all about.

What are your plans to grow across Birmingham?
I’m not interested in the rest of Birmingham – this is very much a local project for me, My business, my home and my community are all tied into one and getting more important by the day.

We are looking to expand locally and are looking a business planning for a coffee shop on the High Street and my dream is to own a small holding, a farm to reconnect to the land and supply the shop.

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

All chapters of the book are available to view online, or is for sale via Blurb.

We’re currently working with BRAG, Bullying Reduction Action Group, supported by the POD and Link2ICT to pilot a project in the Nechells area of Birmingham, working with schools to develop a social media surgery that focuses on skills as well as conversations around internet safety and cyber bullying.

We’ve been working with students from Heartlands Academy from years 7, 9 and 12 to turn them into surgeons and inviting groups of parents in as patients so that they can be taught how to use the sites and tools that their children maybe using, and to discuss any concerns they may have with them using “the internet” with their children’s peers.

We’d held a session at the beginning of the project to identify what the students thought of the  internet, what sites they used and how aware they were of their own and others safety online. We then held the same session with parents and teachers and the differences were vast. The students had identified way more sites they were using than the parents and teachers even knew of , and even if the adults knew of a site or platform they were in most occasions not using it themselves so were maybe unable to properly advise on security and privacy settings to help the students keep themselves safe.

Surgeries

Last night was the second open surgery, where we had a group of year 9 students on hand to answer parents questions and we had 5 patients come for support.  Their questions were varied from “How do I stop my child from using Facebook?”; “How do I set myself up on Facebook”  to “How do YOU keep yourself safe online?”. Answers in short ranged from you “You can’t – but have you thought about coming to an agreement with him like this that I have with my Mom”; “Here let me show you how…” and “Like this…”

Every parent that came in I spoke to before and after the surgery and all of them were impressed by the advice they were given, one even commented that she felt better able to go and talk about Facebook to her own daughter, now she “knew what she was talking about”.   The students had really enjoyed becoming the teacher, and some great conversations had taken place.

We’re just about to move into the second phase of the project – introducing parents from a local junior school to the surgeries, focusing on years 5 and 6, the parents of the students who will soon be looking for their places at senior school,  finding much larger circles of friends and potentially becoming  more active users of social networks themselves as a result.

Learning

I’m really enjoying this project. The students have been amazing and the parents really open to being guided by “experts” much younger than themselves, and I’ve done my fair share of learning too. There were sites the students mentioned and conversations that have taken place that has prompted me to go home and have fairly frank conversations with my 13 year old son. Practically though I’ve also learned a thing or 2 about running a project like this. They are:

• Plan in advance. Schools are busy places with lots of sports clubs and other extra curricular activities. Trying to schedule sessions around these was hard so plan early and try and get a regular slot.
• Schools internet access SUCKS! – For someone who is used to open internet access pretty much everywhere I go working with in the restraints of a school building was hard! All the sites we were discussing Facebook, Twitter etc were blocked, so this goes back to point 1. Plan in advance and get the schools network admins to unblock the computers you’ll be working from. (Or do what I did take a  MiFi and my own laptop – although only works with decent 3G coverage)
• Parent involvement early on is a must. Communicating well to parents what the aims of the project are and how the surgeries would work was really important – That way when they attended the surgeries they weren’t surprised to be sat down learning from someone their children’s ages instead of being talked at my an “expert”.
• Working with students from different year groups has worked well,  pairing the year 7 students with year 9 & 12 students has helped them to deliver support, and opened up conversations across the year groups – as while the Yr 7 students may have the tech skills and experience, they don’t necessarily have the communication skills the older students have to enable them to get to the bottom of the things the parents really wanted to know.

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 !

Here he tells us why:

We’ve been working with Kate Cooper on the New Optimists and her New Optimists Forum for a few years now (find the fascinating book here) Here Kate gives a very fine speech to TEDx in Warwick on what urban food if for and how we can feed ourselves in the future.   She speaks a lot of sense and I learnt a long time ago to not doubt Kate.

This is a long post with lots of quite useful information on the structure of the NHS in the West midlands in April 2013

Lorna Shaw kicks off..

Lorna worked for the Local Government Association to lead on developing Health and Wellbeing Bards (the new board being established by local authorities).  Her points from the Health and Social Care Act …

• Government is trying to promote the idea that health is “everyone’s business”.  Change driven by money (getting tighter) plus ageing population and more intensive use of tech in health.
• £20 billion savings to be made by 2015 – equivalent to a 5% imporovment in productivity.  £30 billion a year goes on treting alcohol related illness
• In terms of reforms constant support for health and Wellbeing boards and transferring public health to local authorities.

Key principles include:

• measure outcome not processes
• empower clinicians and professionals
• commission wellbeing and improving lives locally
• tackling health inequalities and disadvantage locally.

Structure

Here is an infographic – to interact with it go here.

• NHS England – specialist commissioning,
• Public Health England has directors of public health sitting in local authorities.
• Healthwatch England to give a national voice for key issues affecting people using health and social care in England.  Go here to find you local healthwatch.
• Department of Health - no longer the headquarters of the NHS or manage any NHS organsiations.

Clinical Commissioning Groups:

211 created covering 60% of the NHS budget.  eg Birmingham has:

• Birmingham Cross City
• Sandwell and West Birmingham

 Next…

Dr Lola Abudu  from Public Health England on understanding and informing commissioning…

Commissioning flows like this

• Start with needs assessment
• Commissioning plan developed
• Doing – providing the services
• Review

Joint Strategic needs Assessment

• specific product that provides information on needs of population
• ongoing iterative process orchestrated by local health and Wellbeing board

An understanding of the needs of the local population is already embedded in the knowledge of the staff of the local voluntary organisations

Dr Lola Abudu  from Public Health England.

The JSNA is the golden thread that links the population to the commissioners.

Her thoughts on the role of Voluntary orgs in the health and social care syste

1 Advocacy

• How are you organised to engage with Healthwatch Do you have inks with patient participation groups? Does the local clinical commissioning group have engagement arrangements
• Can infrastructure orgs help share information and gather intelligence.

2 Engagement Cycle

• How can the voluntary sector link into identifying need – supporting prioritiesing and decision making, designing services and procuring services

3 Influencing Comissioning Decision

• You already have information, what can I do with what I already have
• Because we already reach communities and have expertise – if commissioners provide you with the resources what work can we do for them that plays to the strenghts of the vol org.
• Get involved in consultation son service design.
• Understand the commissioning cycle to see what you can best influence.

NHS England has funded a number of learning sites across England:

Dudley Shropshire and Staffordshire are about creating partnerships with local voluntary sector.  Tailored partnership development days and masterclasses.

Key issues identified about working with vol orgs for the NHS

• Commissioning process is complex
• How resilient are the different vol orgs
• Needing named contacts for voluntary orgs in the commissioning process
• Does  the third sector need to work together to build capacity and perhaps deliver outcomes through contracts?
• Outcome driven and social value approaches

VCS as service providers. opportunities..

• Personal budgets provide and opportunity for a qualified provider.
• Community development – community based responses to public health isues
• Make sure the intelligence you have can be packaged and put together in a way which can be offerred to commissioners.
• Making every contact count.-

“every contact can help imporove mental and physical wellbeing…

preventing poor health and promoting healthy living is essential”

Mental health and Wellbeing will be very important

Connect, Be Active, Take Notice, Keep learning, Give

END OF NOTES (these are notes from an event – trying to capture what the speakers were saying)

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:

• Kings Norton
• Billsley and Yardley Wood
• Erdington
• Edgbaston and Selly Oak
• Sutton Coldfield
• Shard End – East Birmingham

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.

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.”

Image thanks to vividbreeze on flickr

I’ve had a bonkers busy few weeks – meeting and talking to a wide range of people and it’s helped me start thinking through a problem with networks:  they tend not to be trusted to reliably deliver solutions at any sort of scale.

Let me share how and why I’ve started looking at this (and I’m sure I’m not the first).

Catherine Howe  (her govcamp piece here) and myself were both in a session at the fabulous ukgovcamp last Saturday.  It was the end of the day and  I think (I came in late)  it was on what makes cross sector collaboration work and  convened by  Jag Goraya with a big dose of help from Saul Cozens.

A problem of scale?

The bit of the discussion that helped me went along the lines of.   “The answer to a lot of public sector problems do sit in developing healthy networks and developing and encouraging the cultures which help networks thrive.  Do that and  people tend to do what makes sense, rather than what is prescribed.”  I was trying to understand why achieving this is so difficult and suggested that it was a problem with scale, something along the lines of…

1. Large budgets and large problems tend to lead to large things being created and commissioned.
2. These have a direction of their own and – on the whole – need to be seen to succeed.
3. Networked activity is different – it is often lots of small activity with little or modest innovation – that doesn’t appear to be capable of delivering at scale.
4. So large organsiation charged with sorting large problems are loathe to trust to a networked approach.

In truth I think networks can deliver at scale.  A city is such a thing, the families that make up a community likewise. The benefit for using networked approaches for sorting big problems is we don’t need to invest everything in one large solution then persuade ourselves it has worked.

Dollops and cock up

Instead we need to learn how to recognise the pattern of networked progress:  plenty  of success, a good dollop  of treading water and a decent slice of cock-up, indifference, waste and failure.

I think way forward collectivity this will improve on social problems more steadily and in a way that people can more easily get involved with than a large scale service offer tends to do.  It’s also relates to why I’ve had problems with unrealistic expectations – that setting expectation too high leads to harming social movement – zero expectations encourage success – high expectations make even achievements look like failures.

That was the gist of where ukgovcamp  had got me to.  It was built on other things recently:

• Listening to a conversation the week before at a conference I spoke at for the Hampshire Association of Local Council’s digital conference  (again with Catherine Howe) amongst a group of councillors from some of the larger
• At the LSIS Governance conference in Manchester late last week I started talking to a Clerk to a Further Ed college that had been asked to improve educational attainment in a particular neighbourhood.  They wanted a steady approach that built community links, strengthened social capital and relationships and built aspiration in the community. The funders wanted rapid change – so what they are likely to buy  is intense extra activity with the students about to take their GCSE’s – one is the big and brittle – v the modest but maybe meaningful.

Capturing the subtle incremental change that comes through networks is partly why we have been working with Gateway Family services and Birmingham Settlement and Nominet Trust to develop an impact assessment app which measures and organises the modest – as well as the sometimes downright remarkable -  shift that happens in people and places.  But turning this into something that politicians and policy makers will trust to deliver is an interesting problem.

Any solutions?

—

Other govcamp posts:

http://perfectpath.co.uk/2013/03/13/some-things-about-govcamp-ukgc13/

http://sphereless.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/ukgc13.html

http://ashinyworld.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/uk-gov-camp-2013.html

http://tonyscott.org.uk/2013/03/14/i-went-to-ukgovcamp-2013/

Rowena Farr

Dave Buckster

David Bicknell

John Glover

Jonathan Flowers

Julia Chandler

Ben Procter

Ann Kempster

Dave God Briggs

Jason Cobb

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 we had our second session in the Kings Norton. Jo Burrows, senior youth worker at the Three Estates Youth Project came along. Jo, by her own admission was a complete novice when it came to social media – she didn’t trust it – and this came through her lack of understanding of the tools that were available. After just one Social Media Surgery with us we managed to change some of those misgivings and set her up with her own blog for the Project.  Here’s what she had to say :

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

This morning we were at Blakenhall Community and Haelthy Living Centre in Wolverhampton hosting another social media surgery. Attending were volunteers from Wolverhampton Voluntary Sector Council, workers from the cities Citizens Advice Bureau and Wolverhampton’s Local Involvement Network (LINk).

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!

Tonight we’re at ChangeKitchen  for the launch (as opposed to the non launch) a of the Community Lovers Guide to Birmingham –   It’s an opportunity for us to get some of the contributors together and thank them for volunteering their time and their words towards the book., have a few nibbles and some drinks.

You can buy a copy of the book here -  for those who don’t want an object chapters will soon be online.

Nick started the proceedings thanking everyone and introducing Tessy Britton , as really she is the inspiration for the Community Lovers Guide series after she put together Hand Made.

Also here tonight receiving  their copies of the book are Tom Baker from Loaf in Stirchley, Karen Strunks of the 4amProject which started in Birmingham, and Birgit Kehler of ChangeKitchen.

Other contributors who unfortunately couldn’t be here with us are:

• Emma Woolf, Friends of Cotteridge Park
• Eleanor Hoad & Nigel Baker, Urban Harvest
• Jon Bounds, Big City Plan Talk
• Chris Unitt, Created in Birmingham
• Naseem Akhtar, Saheli Women’s Group

Books are available to order now from Blurb, and every chapter will soon be available to read online. 

For the last six months we have been involved in a project in Wolverhampton bringing Social Media Surgeries to different neighbourhoods across the city.   At the surgeries all the help we and the other surgeons give has been recorded on our Social Media Surgery + website, but what is been really interesting having attended every surgery in the city so far is watching  the things that have happened, and the connections made that weren’t recorded on the website – The things that aren’t just to do with social media.

Today for instance at the Low Hill surgery, a semi regular attendee Jaswinder (or Handsome to his friends), came along to learn more about twitter, but  what was quite strange, even by our standards, was he hadn’t come for help from one of the volunteer surgeons already there . He’d bought his own surgeon with him, Ian!   –  Handsome had been to previous sessions and seen the value of the surgeries as a place to come, have a cup of tea, learn and to meet new people, so he’d bought Ian along so that they could work together in an environment he felt comfortable in, but also so that Ian could meet people from the area too.

Then there was Lorna who also came along today. Lorna is new to Low Hill, moving back to England from overseas a few months ago. She wanted to come and learn how to use social media as she’d heard that was a good way to find out what was going on and to meet new people. Which of course it is and we helped her look at her options to find things she could get involved with online, but also while there she was introduced to Tony and George (pictured above).

Tony is the chair and George the vice chair of the Low Hill Community Association and they are charged with running the community centre and as such know all of the activities and events that take place there. As I left this afternoon Lorna was in the process of becoming a fully paid up member so she could join some of the groups and take part in activities running there – but also during the session we’d introduced her to Keith. Keith is a board member of the Low Hill and Scotlands LNP, who alongside myself (as a member of the board for Wednesfield and Falling Park LNP) and some of the LNP Neighbourhood wardens who were in attendance, told her about the work of the Local Neighbourhood Partnerships, Keith took her details and now he’s going along to their next board meeting. – She’d come for some help just to find out what was going on locally, and left signed up to two very active groups!

Then there was a surgery early on in the project that the local police sergeant attended. Sgt Gary Passmore. Gary came along to learn how to use a twitter account for his role in the police, he already had an account, but just needed some guidance on some of the functions and terminology. Around the same period of time there were some quite serious rumours doing the rounds about an attempted abductions locally.  I’d heard them as Low Hill borders Wednesfield so they’d been posted onto the WV11 facebook page, and despite many people openly questioning the validity and the variations of the posts (different coloured car, different locations etc) they just weren’t going away. Obviously people were worried so when some attendees of the surgery saw a police office present they chose then to question him about it.  Gary was great, he allayed peoples fears and was able to speak to some key members of the Low Hill community who could help spread the accurate information for him through their networks, and also I took the opportunity to post an update to the  WV11 facebook page at the same time – Gary had come for some technically support but left having managed to connect to his community and help stop the spread of a pretty nasty rumour in the process.

There are many more examples I could give you just like there,  members of the WFTA meeting people from Tenants and residents groups and finding out about local issues, Tenants and Residents connecting with newly established local social enterprises, Neighbourhood wardens meeting their communities and on, and I’m sure this isn’t unique to this one surgery.

This for me is the unrecorded hidden value of surgeries, it may start with a simple “How can we help you online?” but they quickly develop into interactions that can help shape communities in the real world. All of these interactions have nothing to do with the internet, online tools, social media etc but have everything to do with the people. All the surgeries do is bring these people together in the same room, with a common purpose and give them the opportunity to talk.

Community Lovers Guide to Birmingham

Just over a year ago we announced we were approaching people and groups to contribute to The Community Lovers Guide to Birmingham - a simple  book of stories of the ways volunteers, community and social enterprise are changing relationships in the city.   We finally have the book ready for release.

It fits in with the work we did with the Grassroots Channel - capturing the stories of active citizens. In many ways (inspired by another book called Hand Made)  these are stories about militant optimism:  about people doing things because they care, sometimes against the odds and often with little formal support.

People like the Friends of Cotteridge park, a group who saved their local park from decommissioning and went on to make it bigger, better and who tell us that “having fun is what makes it work”.  “The feeling you get when you are part of a group who’ve achieved something you thought was impossible is a lovely feeling…the long term result is a better community and nicer place to live.”

People like, Birgit Kehler of Change Kitchen, Eleanor Hoad & Nigel Baker of Urban Harvest, Tom Baker of Loaf and more who all share their stories with us in this collaboration.

Most of the work pulling these stories together was done by our Steph Jennings and in the New Year we’ll be getting a few people together to launch it officially.  It will also be available online as a series of chapters soon. If you fancy a good honest book to hold  for yourself or your loved ones for Christmas it is already available to order from Blurb today.  If you order before 13th December using the “SANTA2012″ code you can get 20% off.

Also thank you to everyone who contributed towards the book. They were,  in no particular order;

• Emma Woolf, Friends of Cotteridge Park
• Birgit Kehrer, ChangeKitchen CIC
• Eleanor Hoad & Nigel Baker, Urban Harvest
• Tom Baker, Loaf
• Jon Bounds, Big City Plan Talk
• Chris Unitt, Created in Birmingham
• James Yarker, Stan’s Cafe
• Karen Strunks, 4am Project
• Naseem Akhtar, Saheli Women’s Group

This picture shows three hyperlocal bloggers all come together through yesterday’s first Three Estates Kings Norton social media surgery.

On the left is  Lynn Horsnett of the Friends of Kings Norton Park.  She came along for some tips – having started a blog.  We helped her make it more blog like – activating comments and looking at trackback (the way in which when one blog links to a post of another blog it appears in the comments section) and writing google friendly titles for posts. We also helped her change her twitter account and improved the prfile a little.   She is though in her own right a hyperlocal blogger – but he local is a park in south Birmingham.

Lynn’s feedback was that the surgery..

helped Friends of Kings Norton Park to open its blogspot up for conversation and helped set up a twitter account, hopefully meaning we can now hear from the important people, the wider community. Love the ideas of interlinking community groups and widening networks. Social media workshops are really positive experiences.

In the middle is our own Steph Jennings – a hugely experienced hyperlocal blogger around to offer tips about her work on www.wv11.co.uk.

Beside Steph is the amazing Sas Taylor – listen here to why she and her husband Marty run the B31voices local blog.  Sas was sharing her expertise with a range of people at the surgery, including Kizzy Bent of Birminghsm City Council’s Environmental Health team.

Kizzy commented after the surgery:

Sas showed me how Environmental Health can promote the work we do in Northfield District on her blog and twitter sites to ENGAGE with the residents. I was amazed and will definitely be sending regular updates to the site. The Podnosh meetings have boosted my confidence using technology and highlighted social media is the way to go to connect with a wider section of the community. Thanks I will be encouraging my colleagues to do the same.

Austin Rodriguez – of the Birmingham South Community Safety Partnerships -  is working with us to run surgeries in south Bimringham, blogs in his own right on the site

http://bhamsouthcommunitysafety.com/

which brings together a lot of social media activity in South Birmingham plus news of their work.  Austin helped his colleague Lewis O’Rourk.

Lewis said after the surgery

I was initially a little bit wary of social media. The session has provided me with a decent insight into the simplicity of using this mode of communication. It is easy to use, a fantastic way of engaging with people and cost effective. I will certainly be using social media in future for various projects and media campaigns.

The best thing though by miles was bringing these people together in one place – one place where they could start to share not just skills but ideas and work together. Social media surgeries are about much more than technical skills – they are about confidence and relationships and building trust to make things better.

It was the fourth anniversary of the first social media surgery last month.

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
• 112 people have run a surgery

Photo: Low Hill Social Media Surgery courtesy of Wolverhampton Homes.

For the last few months we’ve supported Birmingham City Council with their Fair Brum social inclusion process. We worked with groups and individuals to show them how they could take conversations they were having with residents of Birmingham about social inclusion over to online places, to try and engage with even more people.

We supported council staff, academics and others interested in using social media to share their stories, experiences and findings of social inclusion in Birmingham. We provided them with the skills that meant they were able to contribute to, or comment on, the process via the FairBrum blog – or on their own sites – and tweet via their own accounts using the #fairbrum tag. We also helped create content and conversation by social reporting from some of their events.

As of 4th September 2012, we found the #fairbrum tag on Twitter has been used 1,600 times and appeared 1,591,590 times. That’s the gross number of times the #fairbrum tag has appeared in Twitter users’ timelines since the start of the process. (Yes, it’s an enormous number – we know not that many pairs of eyes have clocked it!)

Those numbers continued to rise. When we looked at the figures this morning the tag had been used a total of 2,479 times and appeared 2,170,039 times.

All this interaction, along with the findings of offline interactions, has been looked at to see what Birmingham’s needs are. As a result, a green paper was produced with recommendations on how we can work together across the city to address social inclusion.

Recommendations are split into seven groups:

• Support families and children out of poverty
• Embrace super-diversity
• Protect the most vulnerable
• Connect people and place
• Create a city that values young people
• Empower people to shape their neighbourhood
• Address safety isolation and loneliness

They are all available to view, discuss and comment on, online at fairbrum.podnosh.com.

The consultation has been running for a while now. This weekend is the last chance for you to have your say, as the consultation closes on Monday, 5th November.

Follow the links above to view the groups of recommendations and click through to individual posts to add your thoughts. You can also let them know if you work for an organisation already doing what’s being recommended and add yourself to the map.

Last week I worked with VCS Learning Solutions in Manchester to train a group of people who are, or will shortly be, running social media surgeries in different areas of north west England.

A slide I showed describes seven principles for digital mentors, originally created by Stuart Parker. The principles aren’t online now, so I’ve reposted them here with Stuart’s permission.

These principles closely match the skills and qualities required of a social media surgery manager, in my view, and I hope you find them useful.

Attentive: Listen up and listen well. Understand needs, fears and desires.

Impartial: While you may be a fervent believer in a service or platform, it doesn’t necessarily mean it will be right for others.

Social: Bow down to the network. Your fellow mentors are the key to achieving digital mentor nirvana.

Friendly: Confidence won’t improve with negative vibes.

Passionate: Believe in the positive changes technology can bring to everyone’s lives.

Lifelong: Understand that this is lifelong learning for everyone, Digital Mentors included.

Innovative: Recognise new and developing technologies and how they can be of benefit to everyone.

Photo: Low Hill Social Media Surgery courtesy of Wolverhampton Homes.