Author: Nick Booth

Stuff I've missed during my quick holiday

These are my links for August 7th through August 8th:

  • BrandNew – “BrandNew is a friendly, informal gathering in London, UK, for those employed to represent a brand online to get acquainted, chat and share.” Jo Geary, yes she who set up the Birmingham Social Media Cafe, starts something new in London. You can still come home though Jo.
  • Mappa Mercia: Is this the shortest bus journey in Birmingham? – I linked to this simply because it shows the potential benefits of having attentive eyes on the street. I might not want time/money spent putting this right, but volunteer mappers are bound to find things worth changing.
  • ‘Total Place’ in Birmingham « – Total Place is an important idea, one which I first came across many years ago when Dr Dick Atkinson was trying to work out the total public spend for Balsall Heath. I know he shared that passion with both government an opposition. It helps at city level, but I think key decision making will change when there is also some way of making ti work at neighborhood level. To quote from one of the local MP’s: “The BeBirmingham partnership recently estimated that in total around £7.5 billion of public money was invested in the city in 2008-09. That’s a huge amount. Over a billion is spent on education.”
  • Government names successful projects to help young people unlock their talent – Corporate – Communities and Local Government – Have we on just got round to doing this? “The Inspiring Communities initiative is about getting people in communities working together to boost the aspirations and achievements of their young people.”
  • Social Media Provide Untapped Opportunity to Engage High Dollar Non-profit Donors, According to Community Philanthropy 2.0 Research Study : New Communications Review – The social web offers a welcome place for individual philanthropic activity. New research funded by the Columbus Foundation, The San Francisco Foundation and The Saint Paul Foundation demonstrates that High dollar donors — especially 30-49 year-olds — use the social web, but have yet to be engaged by strong, trustworthy philanthropic organizations. This was among the key findings of the new research study, “Community Philanthropy 2.0,” conducted by Beth Kanter, Society for New Communications Research Fellow Geoff Livingston, and Qui Diaz of CRT/tanaka.

Stuff I've seen July 28th and July 29th

These are my links for July 28th through to July 29th:

  • David Cameron’s missing a Twitter trick | John Prescott | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk – Interesting and true: “More and more politicians are blogging, vlogging and tweeting. Interestingly, according to the Hansard Society, MPs like me born before 1940 are more likely to blog than their younger colleagues.”
  • Rewired State Projects – Young Rewired State is a weekend event emulating the success of ReWired State’s National Hack the Government Day, but this time with hackers aged 15-18.
  • Data & Stuff – Neil Houston so enjoyed doing some spare time data journalism he’s started blogging about it.
  • localcommunities – Who’s who – David Wilcox has pulled together a very fine summary of lots of community digital media activity.
  • Autocar – New tech to cut congestion – Dominic Gill, Microsoft regional manager, said: “This is the first application to use available data intuitively to put real power in the hands of individuals to make and refine travel plans.“The strategy of linking with information sources so they can react to an individual’s changing circumstances will transform people’s travelling experiences.”

Be2Camp in Birmingham, story telling and designing places.

This is not so much a blog post as an assemblage.

I’m very fortunate to have people tag things in delicious for:podnosh, which means I get to see stuff that I would otherwise have missed, or many never knew that I was interested in (what Stef calls accelerating serendipity).  One such lovely person is Dominic Campbell who tagged this for me:

Story and Emergent Design

View more documents from Hugh Graham.

I would love to have heard what Hugh Graham was saying, espcially during the final few slides.  Fortunately though you can read a lot of his idea on his blog.

This leads me to assemble some stuff:

Be2Camp is coming to Birmingham on August 12th 2009. “It’s for people interested in how the latest web applications and web design techniques could help build a better, more sustainable built environment – from planning and design through construction to occupation and management of buildings, infrastructure, landscape, etc.”  Organised by Rob Annable and Lorna Parsons, you can register here: http://be2campbrum.eventbrite.com/.

Paul Slatter at the Chamberlain Forum has been experimenting with the Structured Dialogue method which is “an approach to storytelling circles designed to produce robust evidence (as opposed to anecdotes) which can be used in influencing policy.”  There’s a more detailed outline at the Evaluation Trust.

In Sheffield in May I met Tony Quinlan from Narrate.  He reminded me of some mass story collecting techniques, like these on Cognitive Edge.

Somehow I also connected this with Jon Bounds wandering Moseley drunk.

Moseley BarCamp – Blogging & Psychogeography from bounder on Vimeo.

Finally may I just add Karl Binders My Dad’s on Twitter experiment combined with Drawnalism.

There you go, it’s like assembling an Airfix kit without a picture or a plan. Have you any idea what that lot looks like?

Need a Fairy Blogmother? Fancy being one? Read on…

Since the beginning of the Birmingham Social Media Surgeries lots of people have taken their first steps in blogging and have done fantastically well (here is a list of the ones we know about)

But blogging can be tricky to begin with and after the surge of excitement of getting your first post up, sometimes it’s hard to know what to do next. The good news is that among the Birmingham Bloggers Group there are some kind folks who can help.

So if you’ve been to a surgery and started a blog (which means you’re a Birmingham based community oor voluntary group)  and would like a volunteer ‘Fairy Blogmother’ to give some extra tips and keep an eye on your blog while you get going – all you have to do is:

Write a post on your blog saying you’d like some help and link back to this post

link button(To make a link, copy the address (URL) of this post and write some text that you want to make into the link. If you’re using WordPress, highlight the text and click on the link button) then paste in the address.

You can just ask for help or if you’ve got a question, write about it and someone will try and head over to you blog.

How does it work?

Just by linking to this post (as if by magic) a little trackback will be created and that will let the Fairy blogmothers (and fathers) know that you need some help.  It won’t necessarily appear like magic, but hopefully some Fairy Blog Father or mother  will then leave a comment on your blog post saying they’re willing to help.  With that comment you will get their private e-mail address, which you can use to keep in touch with them.

What is a Fairy Blogmother?

From time to time we get people who would like to help at the social media surgeries saying they can’t make it.  We hope that some might be willing to offer you advice etc by e-mail.   They’ll be doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, so take care not to overburden them.

For more Social Media Help have a look at these guides and if you want help – link here!

For face-to-face help check out details of the next surgeries at Paradise Circus or  BeVocal or the wonderful Digital Brum.