Year: 2009

Impact Direct and social media training for former drug addicts in South Africa

It’s been quite an eye-opener meeting Marlon Parker.  He’s visiting the UK from Cape town in South Africa and has come over here to share some of his work at the charity Impact Direct.  He was here with Jon Hickman.

Below is a quick interview with him, where he explains how he began using social media to help gang members and drug addicts tell their stories, initially as a means of educating the wider community about what to expect.

Marlon Parker talks to Nick Booth about Impact Direct in South Africa from Podnosh on Vimeo.

On the face of it this is very similar to the social media surgeries we run here in brum, but just bolder. More like the work that wesharestuff does with young people who’ve recently been in prison.

But Reconstructed (Marlon’s original project name) blossomed from simply helping a few people to a network of people who are using mobile phones and instant messaging to mentor individual and families with a huge range of problems – from drugs addiction to HIV/Aids.  Here’s a scrappy bit of video of Marlon showing Chris Unitt how the mobile phone stuff works, using an application put together by the original groups of social media trainees. It’s interesting:

Angel service for Drug Addicts in South Africa from Podnosh on Vimeo.

The whole project is built on the some of the core principles that makes social media more than a means of connecting online, but as a means to gain or regain control:

  • Just get on with.  Marlon doesn’t wait for funders to OK something, he gets on with it and hopes the world will catch up.
  • Concentrate on the useful.  When encouraging people to use social media find something that’s useful for them
  • Get people teaching as much as they learn: the beauty of social media is it’s simplicity. It’s good to get those you are teaching to teach others, that strengthens the network and relationships.
  • Don’t wait for the kit, use available technology.  Instant messaging and mobile phones work in South Africa because that’s what the people Marlon want to reach have.

In the end none of the work that Marlon does, we do or loads of the rest of you do with social media is to do with specific tools or bits of technology.  It is essentially about helping people get to know each other well enough to be able to achive things together.  To do that it pays to  use whatever it takes to connect folk.

Stuff I've seen July 10th through July 12th

These are my links for July 10th through July 12th:

  • Intel Social Media Guidelines – Genuinely excellent guidelines for intel staffers on getting involved with social media.
  • Not what ships are for at Helpful Technology – "one of the local authority participants contributed a quote which struck a deep chord: “Ships are ’safe’ in the harbour, but that’s not what ships are for” – great spot from Steph
    Amen to that. Here’s to seafaring!
  • Google – Local Government – This site is your guide to the tools and best practices your council can adopt to reach, communicate and engage with your community.
  • Conversation with communities – A councillor’s guide to social media – Councillors, as local leaders, will have a key role in these changes if they take that opportunity. Enhancing local democracy through greater transparency and providing both a greater voice and a greater responsibility for citizens in setting priorities and delivering public services means that the nature of a representative democracy may change. But the need for elected officials does not go away and there are tremendous opportunities local leaders to use social media to engage with a wider range of people in a powerful, focused way.
  • Kebablog » Blog Archive » Surgery anyone? – Steve's experience of the Social Media Surgery in Acocks Green: "2 ladies (bec and mandy? – I may have asked the names, but in the excitement forgot!) came in and asked about setting up a blog, Nick pointed them in my direction and I was happy to help out."
  • I couldn’t possibly comment: An open, digital Iraq inquiry – "The inquiry should assume that interesting things will be done with the information they publish off their website by independents." A really thorough explanation from Will Perrin about how the UK Government Iraq Enquiry could use the web and meta data in important ways.

About Brum podcast features social media surgeries

Some of you may know that podnosh began as a podcasting business in 2005, with the Grassroots Channel – audio stories of active citizens in Birmingham.

At the last social media surgery Christopher Woods interviewed me for what has become the first episode in his freshly minted About Brum podcast.  You can listen below, and it’s worth it, because Christopher has a very appealing and relaxed style.

Iraq, Clay Shirky, Court Reporting, Post Codes API. My links July 5th through July 10th

These are some of the things I’ve been reading recently:

  • Ernest Marples’ Postcode Latitude/Longitude Lookup API – Post codes are really useful, but the powers that be keep them closed unless you have loads of money to pay for them. Which makes it hard to build useful websites (and that makes Ernest sad). So we are setting them free and using them to run PlanningAlerts.com and Jobcentre Pro Plus. We’re doing the same as everyone’s being doing for years, but just being open about it.
  • PA ‘public service reporting’ pilot set for launch | Media | guardian.co.uk – “The Press Association is to launch a “public service reporting” pilot project later in the year aimed at replacing the dwindling news coverage given to meetings of public bodies in the local and regional press” hen I started in journalism this was core, not a peripheral part of the job.
  • Living with rats – Nobody has heard of Clay Shirky – “Out of around 40 council officers there, four had heard of the Digital Britain report. Three had heard of Charlie Leadbeater, one of the keynote speakers at Monday’s bash. As for Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and every aspiring social media guru’s guru, he drew a blank. (There’s a link to one of his talks here, if you’re interested).”
  • 100 hours this summer – “Here’s my challenge. Right now, put aside 100 hours over this summer. Do it right now, in your head. Put that time aside. 100 hours. 8 hours a week for the next 12 weeks. One hour a day, or one working day a week. It’s one summer out of your entire life, it’s nothing. Okay, you’ve got that 100 hours? Now for the next two days, go to talks and start conversations with people you don’t know, and choose what to spend your 100 hours on. I guarantee that everyone in this room can produce something or has some special skill, and maybe they’re not even aware of it.”
  • The Generation M Manifesto – Umair Haque – HarvardBusiness.org – “You sacrificed the meaningful for the material: you sold out the very things that made us great for trivial gewgaws, trinkets, and gadgets. We’re not for sale: we’re learning to once again do what is meaningful. There’s a tectonic shift rocking the social, political, and economic landscape. The last two points above are what express it most concisely. I hate labels, but I’m going to employ a flawed, imperfect one: Generation “M.” What do the “M”s in Generation M stand for? The first is for a movement. It’s a little bit about age — but mostly about a growing number of people who are acting very differently. They are doing meaningful stuff that matters the most. Those are the second, third, and fourth “M”s.”
  • Will Perrin : An open, digital Iraq inquiry: “The inquiry should assume that interesting things will be done with the information they publish off their website by independents.” A really thorough explanation from Will Perrin about how the UK Government Iraq Enquiry could use the web and meta data in important ways.