Category: Third Sector

Hand Made – “new community culture”, the social media surgery and Militant Optimists.

I’m proud.  The picture above is of a lovely thing Tessy Britton has sent me – the gift of a book.  She asked 28 people (including me) to write about their experiments in community.  My chapter is on Social Media Surgeries. The combined result is a wonderful book:

Tessy writes:

Largely (but not exclusively) these projects by-pass existing ‘systems’.  They start with little or no money and ask for no permissions….Small they may be, but they represent the seeds of an emergent culture which I believe is going to spread, so potent is the glow created from the human interactions these projects generate.

The surgeries are spreading. As I write this I’m on the train to London, to speak at Open Tech (another great example of community culture stuffed full or people working on “stuff” that matters) about them.  Rootling around in the back end of www.socialmediasurgery.com I find (and this site doesn’t record it all) that:

  • 30 people have become “surgery managers”  (the people who set them up – run them – keep them friendly and happy)
  • 168 people have registered as surgeons (helpers)
  • 506 people have attended a surgery somewhere

They are running in

  • 34 places – 28 in the UK plus South Africa, Spain, USA, Eire and India.

We launched the site in July.

These people belong to something that David Barrie describes in his chapter in the book as the Thirteenth Tribe of community life – “Militant Optimists”:

One thing that makes life worth living is … people who are committed to improving society, prepared to organize and give it a go.

Hand Made: portraits of emergent new community can be bought from blurb.

The authors are:

David Gauntlett
Megan Deal and Friends
David Barrie
Rob Hopkins
Jerry Stein
Nick Booth
Jack Ricchiuto
June Holley
Ryan LeCluyse
Tracey Todhunter
Jack Forinash and Friends
Julian Dobson
Tom Andrews
Hannah Bullock and Tim Smit
Sarah Drummond and Friends
Andy Gibson
David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young
Peter Sergeant
Caroline Woolard and Friends
Louise Macdonald and David Key
Anab Jain and Chris Hand
Lloyd Davis
Dougald Hine
Edmund Colville and Friends
Matthias Regan and Friends
Chris Kennedy and Kate Cahill
Cassie Robinson
Tessy Britton

The New Optimists – "the most exhilarating of books"

Nigh on a year ago Kate Cooper walked into a social media surgery here in Birmingham and started talking about a book she was going to publish.

She had, she told me, persuaded 80 or so scientists from the West Midlands to write a few hundred words in response to the question “what makes you optimistic?” Jenny Uglow (the historian who wrote the brilliant story of the Lunar Society:  The Lunar Men) had agreed to write the foreword.

At the time I thought oh yeh… Read more

Government Reservists 2 – an idea for the Big Society?

I’m on a train to London for the launch of the Big Society Network  and pondering.  This week Nat Wei described the Network  as having a

…mission to be – in partnership with government, business, and the voluntary sector – an action-orientated remover of barriers to mass civic engagement where people live – enabling the change we want to be.

He also wants what The Guardian described as

an army of community organisers that will become the “catalyst” for communities to band together and challenge the apparently arbitrary decisions made about public services in their name. “I want them to be the glue bringing community together. They will be financially independent of government. They will be able to have different views from government. There can be healthy debate and this can build social capital. [Organisers] I hope will end up as trusted as the local GP,”

Perhaps…..

In 2008 I wrote a post musing about the idea of a sort of Territorial Army for government. I was thinking about the implications of a growing band of self organising citizens Read more