Helping you use social and digital media to create civic good.

Podnosh was started in Autumn 2005 to use new digital media to tell the stories of active citizens. We quickly shifted to not just doing things for people but helping them do things for themselves.

Since then we have been commissioned to work with active citizens, community groups, charities large and small plus local government, central government, housing association the NHS and police forces.

Primarily we aim to grow the civic conversation, get people and the public sector talking more fruitfully to each other and help them measure and demonstrate the impact they are having.

Podnosh is run and owned by Nick Booth, a former BBC political reporter and television and radio documentary maker.

He was one of a couple of dozen bloggers invited to cover the G20 Summit in April 2009. He was among a small group who established the Birmingham Bloggers group in 2007. With this and his experience of telling the stories of active citizens through the Grassroots Channel Nick has been instrumental in establishing a thriving hyperlocal community in the Midlands.

In 2012 he accepted a Prime Minster’s Big Society award on behalf of the Social Media Surgery movement he founded and was listed in The Independent on Sunday’s Happy List 2012 of 100 “outstanding people whose volunteering, caring, fund-raising, mentoring, charity founding, or selflessness makes Britain a more contented, better-adjusted, supportive, and happier place.”

Nick was also part owner and Community Director of Help Me Investigate, set up to allow citizens to ask civic questions and collaborate with each others to find the answers.

In recent years Nick has been a trustee of the Birmingham Conservation Trust, on the board of Stan’s Cafe, on the advisory board of the NCVO on the Birmingham Smart City Commission and on the independent DCLG Local Public Data Panel – chaired by Professor Nigel Shadbolt of the HMG Public Sector Transparency Board. Nick was a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce

You can find him on Twitter @podnosh.