Category: Third Sector

Grassroots Channel Podcast Willem Guizeman on "being there" – slow, steady community building

Willem Guizeman and Nol
Nol and Willem – Gray Man Bald Man

It’s odd how when you look away your friends seem to go and do some really interesting stuff. I first met Willem Guizeman in 2005 when he was in Birmingham planning some work on the Residents university for the Residents for Regeneration.  Then he was fronting a Europe wide organisation which was working with the EU.

Last month we saw each other again in The Hague,  his home town.  Now Willem is doing something much more Read more

The First Dudley Social Media Surgery

I think I just got paid with a hug.  Full of the joys of social media surgeoning  Lorna Prescott from Dosti put her arms around me and said thank you.  (sorry Lorna for being embarrasing and thank you!)

It is really one of the reasons I love social media surgeries – they make me happy and they seem to make others happy too.

This was the first Dudley Social Media Surgery, organised by the remorseless energy of Melissa Guest from Dudley CVS and Lorna.  We had been involved with some work helping them pland and organise the surgery and some social reporter training as part of the Black Country Take Part Pathfinder programme.

30 people turned up and the proportion of surgeons to patients was just right.  This rather dark video shows just how busy and absorbed people were:

I shared the evening with two wonderful people.  Michael Dennis  turned up thinking he was there to get some help for the St Thomas Community Network – but because he does web development  he got wordpress ganged into being a surgeon.  It turned out Michael also run a successful ning network for foster carers.

Michael worked with Jackie McGuirk from Dudley Lions.

He helped her understand why social media might help their work.  She said up a blog and wrote here first post (and this jackie is your first trackback).  The worst part for Michael seemed to me interviewing them both:

Great evening and a great start to surgeries in Dudley.

Free social reporter training for Birmingham based Neighbourhood Forums and Active Citizens

Later this month we are running another social reporter training programme, building on the work we have done for Birmingham Local Democracy Week and the Black Country Take Part Pathfinder.

This time our work is funded through the support Birmingham City Council gives to Neighbourhood Forums in the city . The details are below and you can download them here.  If you want to come contact: Read more

#madwd Health and Social Care session, some notes from making a Difference with data

Here are some key points from the session on Health and Social Care (check som of this – facts not all checked)

  • Data from the Care Quality Commission,  conversations about scarping data from the site, told that individuals can query the site and find individual care homes, but it’s not set up so you can systematically compare.  Will shortly be available as raw data on scraperwiki. Individual reports are only available as pdfs – which causes a huge amount of work for data users.
  • Reports have lots of words in them – you cant compare all 28 outcomes.
  • Issues between health and social care – mainly to do with battles over budgets in local authorities plus changes in the structure of the health service.  Inspection regime is changing.
  • Huge problems with health service and different council services being able to share information. Systems are not compatible – and proprietary formats.  One local authority talked of 100 systems – no indicators any more so no more performance staff.  Who would port this information out.
  • Illustration of how local government officers suddenly have access to information when their councils publish information as open data –  they can find with google in a way that they couldn’t with internal systems.

  • Have we read the information revolution strategy from the department of health?  Big themes on choice – hospital you go to, you gp, treatments.
  • For social care people want to know how nice the staff are.
  • Car parking is a particular problem with hospitals
  • Private contractors provided by the four big companies that can’t be FOI’d and even joint ventures –  some people said that you can FOI if they’re delivering a public service.
  • From January local authorities are expected to publish new contracts.
  • Re health…discussion on the potential value of combining data re health outcomes with some information on taxi firms – quality fo service from transport etc etc.
  • How do you collate all this information together – individual contracts, care homes quality.
  • Supporting people ( eg ) outcomes data (now stopped )  captured information for 200,000 people who risked being homelessness and the national insurance numbers –  shows the revolving door problems re social services, drug action team etc etc.
  • Worrying theme of data sets being less available because of cost cutting.
  • Do we need contracts which require transparency.
  • Is there consistency in licensing from some of the government open data sites?
  • NHS in general
  • Should GP practices release performance data etc
  • Problems of protecting the most vulnerable people from con artists etc.
  • Data protection act still stands.
  • Problem of the benefits or otherwise of revealing detailed health data.