Abdullah from the Forum and Andrew Brightwell. Picture by Nisha Virdi

We’ve been holding some social media surgeries in Balsall Heath. So far they’ve been supported by the  Birmingham Social Investment Trust and our hope is that, after our third event on July 7, we’ll be able to carry them on as completely voluntary events. If you’re interested you can sign up here.

One of the projects that has benefited from our this is the Balsall Heath Forum, which is also gives us a venue for the surgeries. The Forum has a website, but we’ve helped it to set up its own WordPress blog. The main force behind this is Nowrah Abdul, who works at the Forum. Nowrah has thrown her energy into creating new pages and blog posts for all the many projects that the forum is involved in. Before the blog came along Nowrah and others were struggling to access and update their original site with ease. Within a few minutes of sitting down we’d started the blog (for free) and shown her the basics of setting up pages and working with posts.

Google Maps

One of the main focuses for the Forum is the resident associations that look after specific neighbourhoods in Balsall Heath. At the last surgery, Nowrah was keen to find out how she could create maps to show the areas the specific associations cover. We spent a bit of time finding out about Google Maps – first creating a Google account and email address for the Forum – so that she could start to map out the boundaries of the various groups.
View Kinver Croft Resident Group in a larger map

You can hear a short interview with Nowrah, below, about how this can help the Forum to tell its own very interesting story.

Other examples

Of course, this is just another example of how a social media surgery is able to offer some very practical help to an organisation. It’s not the only one, either. At our Yardley Social Media Surgery we’ve been able to help the church, St Michael and All Angels, to start its own blog and, more recently, the Friends of Yardley Park. There is enormous pleasure in helping people to tell their own story – and something quite humbling (as a ‘recovering’ journalist) about seeing how it can help to transform their ability to communicate their organisations’ ideals and mission.

Blogging and the Big Society

The Balsall Heath Forum is, of course, an organisation that has had a great deal of attention since the general election back in May – and featured prominently as a model for the Conservative Party’s ideas in the Big Society. The Balsall Heath Forum’s chief executive Dick Atkinson, for example, has been talking to the government about it – as this post from Will Perrin of Talk About Local shows (Dick is sat next to the Deputy Prime Minister on the seating plan).

And then there’s this video by Demos, which features Dick and, firstly, Nowrah.

Balsall Heath is thought to be a prime example of what happens when citizens take control of an area and try to improve it for themselves, so helping the Forum to tell its story and help to communicate with others about how they too can help their neighbourhoods does seem like a rather good idea. Community blogging is a cheap, effective and remarkably simple way of helping that process, which is one of the many reasons we get just a little bit excited about the power of social media surgeries.

Irrespective of your opinion about the Big Society, the idea of community organisations sharing information for the benefit of their work and their communities makes profound sense, because often the questions that organisations face have been faced and solved by others before. Traditionally, the problem is getting to the answers. Blogs – cheap, simple to run and phenomenally easy to communicate and have a relationship with – can do an awful lot of that work and social media surgeries are a way of spreading those skills that’s informal, sensitive to individual’s very different demands and, most importantly, remarkably fun.

It featured academic and activist Simon Baddeley talking about his campaign to prevent homes being built on the Victoria Jubilee allotments, which border Handsworth Park.

Grab your plot

Simon and his neighbours couldn’t stop the housing development, but they did manage to get planning to require the developers to re-instate 80 of the allotments plots.   Simon has fought long and hard to ensure that this commitment is honoured.  Yesterday he claimed his plot:

Simon Baddeley: "Got the plot"

and filmed this:

A few weeks ago Simon also digitised the original documentary, which you can see here:

A healthier approach to Urban Land?

For me the re-opening of the allotments  represents a small symbol of a shifting attitude to land in our cities. At the time the doucmentary was made it felt like land was there for developers and individual profit.  Since then demand for allotments has grown, people are showing off their pride in these places, the Birmingham Open Spaces Forum is nurturing a better relationship between citizens and council.  Parks like Cannon Hill and Handsworth have improved immeasurably and the famous CoCoMad in Cotteridge Park has shown how far open space cements community relations.

As Emma Woolf, of the Friends of Cotteridge Park,  explained in one one of our first Grassroots Channel Podcasts in 2005, conflict over public space can be a catalyst for a community coming together:

Is it time for a more flexible understand of public land?

Martin Field has been making the case for an easy to use map of publicly owned land plots in the city.  He’s made a tiny bit of progress:

We  emailed  a simple google map reference to the relevant officer and within 24 hours we had a response as to the specific ownership. Very good service and free, although you can only determine if the land is owned by the City or not, but still a good start. If the City does not own the land you are directed to the UK Land Registry, which is not a good experience and not free!

Last week I was at the Handsworth Residents Network meeting, which included a detailed discussion about how hard and frustrating it is for community groups to clean up or use eyesore plots.

The council itself has been seeking to streamline the process of transferring assets into the hands of community groups through it’s Community Asset Transfer Development Programme.  (I’ve been involved in recording that programme). Their work includes thinking of broader ways to measure the value of using land, called Valuing Worth.  This is supported by a wide range of other activity – including Growspace, which is taking hold in Ladywood.

These are small things.

I think we are still confused about ways of using urban land and why shouldn’t we be. Cities are confusing places.  But people outside and inside local authorities are finding it easier to collaborate to make better use of land for community benefit.

What else do we need to do during a time of lower public spending, tighter financial restrictions for developers and an ideological/economic battle over where food should be produced?  Update – perhaps all questions you can explore at the Cultures of Birmingham: Open Spaces event from the Chamberlain forum on 24th June at 6.30 at the the Mac in Cannon Hill park

Andy and Lenka talk WordPress

On our way to the June Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery, I worked out that it’s been six months since our first event in the Studio – the first that I was sort-of involved in. In all that time I don’t think we’ve had a better turnout – for the type of people that have come down and the variety of things that they are interested in.

Scanning down the list of names and organisations that turned up, we had – in no particular order – representatives from two hospices, a city centre residents’ group, a campaign for sustainability in Solihull, a basketball club, a neighbourhood forum and people from two social enterprises.

The help

While the Civic Centre Residents Group continued to get help on their posterous blog (it’s their third time down to a surgery), it was great to see people from two hospices come along. Tony Coulson and Daphne Welch of St Mary’s Hospice in Birmingham received help from Michael Grimes with their website. Mark Binnersley, who is also at the St Mary’s Hospice was helped with Twitter by Catherine Howe – who had come from Brighton to learn more about what the Social Media Surgeries are like here in Birmingham and very kindly stepped in when it looked like we were running out of surgeons.

Given that was only five minutes into the evening – and we already had a pretty full set of tables – it was something of a relief. But she wasn’t the only person more than happy to help out with some of the great variety of different issues that we dealt with that night.

Goodbye to Heidi

Heidi Blanton, who has only recently become a social media surgeon, was charged with helping Paula Mitchell and Jane Hartnell of Acorns Hospice. Sadly this is likely to be the last surgery that Heidi can attend, because she’ll be heading back to the USA for a while, but we hope to see her – at least for a visit – in  the not-too-distant future.

Jane and Paula from Acorns

As the audio interview below hopefully explains, Paula and Jane were looking for help with using social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook to better communicate with the many people who have an association with the hospice. But they also had an inquiry about how they might be able to get news feeds onto their websites with RSS – after Paula (who is the first person I speak to on the interview) was approached by someone trying to sell them the service for a very large amount of money!

Transitions Sutton Coldfield

Another particularly interesting arrival was Lenka Moore, from Transition Sutton Coldfield. I’d not heard of Transition before tonight, but you can learn more about it by visiting the Transition Network site. Andy Mabbett helped Lenka to set up a WordPress.com blog (which I’m trying to find the url for) for the organisation – which looks to make local communities more sustainable in a time of environmental and economic challenges. I asked Lenka a few questions about her organisation and what it hoped to get from setting up a blog.

Mark at the first Yardley Social Media Surgery

We’ve just ticked off another historic landmark in the development of social media surgeries, with our first Be Birmingham-funded Yardley social media surgery, which I’m pretty sure is the first to be held in a church – St Michael and All Angels.

After a few tricky moments with Wifi (something I’m reluctantly becoming something of an expert in) we were able to impart some help to the church itself, which through Anne Maddox and Mark Hayward is now running its own blog. As you can see from from the post that was put up on the day of the surgery, there are already a lot of interesting things going on with the blog!

Mark, as he explains in his audio interview below, has been in charge of the existing church website and is now, thanks to some help from Nick Booth, equipped to use the blog, add pictures and start to explore the benefits this new approach can bring to the community work the church is involved in.

Louse Darwood

Mark wasn’t the only person getting help, though. Dan Davies also helped Louise Darwood, who lives in Yardley, with help in setting up a blog and using Twitter.

In the video Louise – who is involved with the Riverside Church in Moseley – explains that she is very interested in becoming more involved in campaigns in her local area and hopes the blogging and using Twitter may allow her to develop her interests further.

This is just the first of our Be Birmingham-funded surgeries in Yardley. There’ll be two more – on June 23 and on July 28 – to look forward to, if you’re interested. And, if you want to find out more about what happened at the surgery, you can read my Surgery Manager’s report on the Social Media Surgery Plus website, here.

Anabel Palmer and Dylan Martlew at NDI10

I’ve just got back from  the National Digital Inclusion conference – very, enjoyable.  I was particularly interested in the strand on social housing and digital inclusion which has spun off the work chaired by Helen Milner on just that problem.

At the forefront of  the case that Social Landlords are key to tackling digital inclusion is that 70% of their tenants do not have internet access at home.   It is a figure that appears in the first sentence of the introduction to the  Social Housing Providers Digital Inclusion Action Plan 2010 (pdf):

Research shows 70% of people who live in social housing do not use the internet. That means they’re missing out on all the benefits, opportunities and conveniences computers and the internet can provide – essential public services, instant communication, commercial comparisons and online bargains, job searches and applications.

That figure is sourced to the Office of National Statistics, 2008 and it seems that things are changing quickly. Anabel Palmer of Southern Housing Group and Dylan Martlew of Knowle West Media Centre have both recently done research on internet availability in the home of social housing tenants.  One found 56% of households are connected,  for the other the same figure was 67% with internet access. Listen to them sharing their thoughts on this:

Naturally we would need to check that they are measuring exactly the same but are these numbers an oddity?  There’s no reasons to suppose they are.  Southern Housing Groups 2008 survey found 30% using the net, which matched the national figure then.   Now they find 67% using the net.

It does not mean that there is not important work to be done by social landlords to help close the digital divide (for those who want it closed).   Many of their tenants might benefit from much wider use of digital tools – but have never really been exposed to them, or may have barriers to using them.

But it does show how quickly internet access is being taken up by those who see some sense in using it.

John does a wonderful job of explaining the simple way that a surgery works – in particular that it is really a conversation – where both people are engaged (the surgeon and the patient) in figuring out a solution to the patient’s enquiry.

As John explains, sometimes people are a little concerned about helping others, because they’re worried they don’t have enough skill to offer solutions.

But the surgeries are good way of breaking down this problem. Firstly, of course, there are others there who can help. And, secondly, the conversational nature of the surgery helps you to understand what might be useful and you can then work together to explore a solution. Even if you know only a little, your support can be invaluable to absolute beginners. You can reassure people that social media can be an enriching and empowering tool – and very much worth persevering with. And that, as it happens, is  what social media surgeries are all about – as John says.

John plans to keep these podcasts going, so keep an eye out for them in the future. And, since I’m on the subject of podcasts, if you’re interested in finding out about my own experiences with social media surgeries have a listen to my own, rather smaller and much less accomplished, effort.

A great turnout at February's Social Media Surgery in thestudio

Well, it seems sometimes you get what you wish for. February’s Central Birmingham social media surgery had a really good turnout. Nick decided to make me ‘organiser’ for the night and, perhaps, it would have been best if it had been a quiet night.

But, largely because everyone was so nice and actually knew a lot more about what was going on than I did, it ran very smoothly. A big thanks in particular has to go to the surgeons who did a really good job to juggle the large numbers of people, who often had very different interests.
We had folk in looking for help with everything from Twitter to Google Analytics on the evening – and from lots of different organisations.

Feryal Iqbal, of Friends of the Earth and Localise West Midlands, seemed very happy with the help that she received. Feryal will be working with both the organisations and wanted to learn how she could set up a blog, as she explains in this audio interview.
Feryal interview Social Media Surgery february

It was also great to see Neil Holland, from the Midlands Arts Centre, who wanted to find out a little bit about how to use social media.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Andy Mabbett helped the Friends of Brandwood End Cemetery set up their own WordPress site, which they are already using to publicise their petition to force Birmingham City Council to restore the listed chapels there.

Susi O’Neill, who is a Web 2.0 surgeon in Nottingham, also popped in – and helped Martin Miley, Rick Cokayne and Martin Field of the Birmingham Social Investment Trust. Martin (Miley) and Rick wanted to set up a site for the Civic Centre Residents Association. And, thanks to Susi, they now have their own Posterous site.

Chris Crean, of Friends of the Earth, was keen to see how social media could support the campaigning work he does within the organisation, as he explains here:-

Click here to view the embedded video.

Clearly I need to work on lighting for the next surgery. But I’m really hoping we get an equally good turnout again next month, when the surgery will be on March 9 – a Tuesday – from 5.30pm to 7pm. See you then!

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.

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.

Joshua Barwell and Carl Sheward

Carl Sheward and Joshua Barwell are two Junior Volunteer playworkers at Pype Hayes Community Focus. Both 16-years-old, when they are not studying for AS-levels they are spending their free time getting those younger than them involved, doing fun days and activities.

For their effort and heart for the community at such a young age, the Junior Playworker Co-ordinator has nominated them both for the Young Persons Birmingham Local Hearts award. They both agree the work is rewarding, and possibly see themselves forging a career in community work.  Here’s their story.

Dolores Pinkney and Kevin Duffy

This is the story of Dolores Pinkney who runs the Dojo project in Handworth. She has been working tirelessly for her community since she moved to Birmingham with her family in the 1960s, and now she has been nominated by Kevin Duffy for Birmingham City Council’s Local Hearts Awards in the active citizen category.

She says her parents were her inspiration – they opened up their home to everyone in the area and it became a focal point of the community. Now with her brother Hector, who works at Handsworth Library, Dolores has continued her parents’ legacy with the Dojo project.   It ranges from jogging sessions on Tuesdays & Sundays to securing the lease to build a community play centre on the derelict site of the Hockley flyover.

Dolores says her motivation is “encouraging everyone that we meet, enabling and empowering,” and if someone is there who needs help, she cannot turn them away. Here’s her story.