Category: Leadership

1st November 2011

Emerging Leaders in London, Ontario Canada and the social media surgery model.

Last week I talked to the Ma Social Media Students at Birmingham City University about social media surgeries for community and voluntary organisations. I was explaining how they emerged from a wide range of activity that was building social capital here in Birmingham.

It’s a story I’ve told before but never really in such a concentrated way – in fact I told it twice in one day. The students were a guinea pig for the talk I was planning to give at Michael Overduin’s Science Capital event on “Networks, Nodes and Knowledge: from local enterprise to global engagement”.

The slides are here but what I’d like to share if what one of Dave Harte’s students made from the talk. Dave shared the whole thing with his overseas students who study the degree remotely. He asked them to:

This week I would like the distance learning students to reflect on the talk by Nick Booth and consider how you might go about setting up a social media surgery in your own town. What would your strategy be? Have a read of Nick Booth’s ‘recipe’ listas a starting point.

Your response should be a short (5-10 mins) video that tells us the following:

What’s your town like? – rich? poor? digitally deprived??

Is there a way to connect to voluntary groups and community organisations (an umbrella organisation of some sort)?

How would you go about connecting to other digitally minded folk to persuade them to help set up a surgery?

What’s stopping you doing this?”

This is a question about social capital and innovation, where is it, how does it happen. Can you nurture or grow both. Dave highlighted one response from Jeff Sage.

http://youtu.be/lvJESMqHRBg

Jeff talked about how a group in London Ontario developed “Emerging Leaders” a network for connecting people. As yu can see they also work with different agencies in the city to help improve their community. Principles that struck a chord with the social media surgery ethos include:

never duplicate efforst of others or create silos and making mistakes should be a goal, rather than something you’re tryng to avoid.

Also very much inline with the work Tessy Britton is doing at social spaces and David Barrie’s Militant Optimists,

One coincidence – Michael Overduin, who asked me to compile the initial story on the surgeries – hails from Ontario.

23rd August 2011

Local Government please don’t sack the connectors.

I’m just reading the very promising report on the future of public services written as part of the University of Birmingham Policy Commissions. “When Tomorrow Comes” began life with this discussion on Big Society at the Conservative Party Conference last year.

Now published the work describes a world very close to my heart, active engaged citizens using their networks and communications skills to help shape or lead public policy and public services. It also, though, identifies qualities we will need from public servants:

Key new roles include: storyteller, communicating stories of how new worlds of local public support might be envisioned in the absence of existing blueprints; weaver, making creative use of exisiting resources to generate something new and useful for service users and citizens; architect, constructing coherent local systems of public support from the myriad of public, private, third sector and other resources; and navigator, guiding citizens and service users around the range of possibilities that migth be available in a system of Local Public Support.

First of all these are not new roles – they already exist to a certain degree. We spent the best part of a year working with neighbourhood managers in Birmingham helping them with the tools and the skills to be storytellers, weaver’s and navigators. We do the same with the citizens they work alongside, not least through social media surgeries. Likewise we’re working with the Wolverhampton Strategic Partnership to help them advance their wonderful community empowerment learning programme, which helps public servants and citizens work together to be better weaver’s architects and navigators. We do similar work with housing associations – who value the connecting and empowering skills in their staff

Appreciating these qualities can sometimes feel like a tricky message to get across. I remember a fascinating afternoon on The Hague with Tessy Britton and Maurice Specht. Both of us were talking to senior officials in central government in Holland about the impact of potent networks, self organising citizens and militant optimism on how will will govern ourselves. “What should we do?”- they asked. Learn to get out of the way, perhaps offer very lightweight support I urged them. Invest in the connectors was Tessy’s advice. People like the initiative brokers we met later that week.

To late?

My fear is that these skills are not being truly valued now. The neighbourhood manager role has gone in Birmingham and in the process the council has lost some remarkable people who’s passion for connecting ideas and people made government much more accessible and I’m certain more efficient.

Other’s who are connected nationally regionally and locally are being pushed back into more definable jobs, turned back into box tickers in pre-ordained processes. These latter jobs are the ones we can eventually automate and prescribe. So as funding dries up for the jobs best done by connectors – please local government management, make sure you find ways of keeping them in fruitful work and onside – because you will be needing them.

16th June 2011

Community Lover’s Guide To The Universe and Birmingham

Tessy Britton is an inspiration and so is Maurice Specht. Tessy got to me to write a chapter on social media surgeries for Hand Made – her book on new community culture and militant optimists. Maurice ‘dragged’ me over to Holland to talk about the work we do to government, housing associations and community groups.

From that has emerged the “Community Lover’s Guide To The Universe” and we’re editing the Birmingham edition. Sort of like the Grassroots Channel but with better pictures (and a book). Let Tessy explain:

A few weeks ago Maurice Specht turned to me on the way to Schiphol airport and said ‘So when are we going to bring out a Hand Made for Rotterdam?’.

What a brilliant suggestion!

Since then the idea has really taken off with 12 community enthusiasts already volunteering to edit special local editions – collectively now called the Community Lover’s Guide To The Universe. Since we brought out Hand Made last August the number of people-led projects has continued to grow and we wanted to explore both the common themes, but also the unique cultural ideas and interpretations from all parts of the world.

We also wanted to start to show how places that are buzzing with community activity and projects are amazing places to live, increasingly more amazing than places with cool architecture or luxury shops. Community brings places alive, gives us new and interesting ways to contribute and connect … and there are signs already that people are finding places that have this creativity and excitement going on highly desirable.

Community can’t be mass produced and it can’t be ‘delivered’. But in rising numbers there are a lot of very excitable people just getting on and making and shaping their local communities for themselves. This series of books will create the opportunity for them to tell their stories, which in turn we hope will encourage other people to put aside any hesitations they might have and get more involved in their neighbourhoods.

So I’ll be doing one of my favourite things – chuntering my way through the wonders of Birmingham, asking for 800 words or so and loveley pics. No one’s getting paid for this, but I hope you’ll join in.

Who should I talk to – where is the new community culture in this city and who are the militants optimists?