This week I’ve been playing with stacks on Delicious, the social bookmarking site. Stacks are a way to organise your links into a common theme and the new social features make collaborating much easier.
To learn how the new features work – rather than curate links around an arbitrary theme (such as “most awesome kitten stunt videos”, which someone has probably done already) – I started this stack to share resources and links aimed at social media surgery managers.
Yesterday at the Lozells and Birchfield Social Media Surgery I was paired with a young man who was looking for help setting up a blog for an organisation he was involved with. I started as always by chatting with him a little bit about what the work he was doing and what they wanted to use the blog for when he said something that really pulled what he was trying to achieve into focus for me;
“The girls have babies and the boys shoot and stab each other. I’ve lost count of the amount of christenings and funerals I’ve been to but I’ve never been to a wedding that’s just not what we do”
– He was talking about life in Handsworth and Lozells as he knew it.
The patients name was Mosies, he is a 19 year old ex gang member from Handsworth, He’s not long been found not guilty on a very serious criminal charge, and by his own admittance has been in trouble with the law before, and now he’s taking that experience to not only try and turn his life around but also to try and change the gang culture that plagues youths in some parts of North Birmingham.
He along with other ex gang members from opposing groups in the area, some with criminal records for gang related activities have come together to form the New Day Foundation, They are aiming to try and combat gang culture targeting younger children to educate them on the realities of gang life and try to show them that there are other options to what they think is “normal”, to change their futures so they can go to more wedding than funerals in their lives!
I sat for an hour and listened to Mosies as he told us about the path he’d taken to be sitting in the room with us that day. Where he’d come from, why he wanted to change the lives of people stuck with the perception that joining a gang was the only option and how he and the other members of his group hoped to do that.
He had the whole room enthralled and as he was telling us how at the age of 14 he stopped going out to the cinema with his friends so he could save his money to buy a gun and all I was thinking was look at you now! 5 years later a changed individual talking about the pride taken in earning money the “proper way”, looking forward to getting a mortgage and hoping the story of your experiences would in some way stop others having to go through it.
– and that right there is what I like so much about the Social Media Surgery format; Only in a room where people are encouraged to talk to each other and help each other one on one would I have heard Mosies story. At a prescribed training session we’d have all sat in rows listening to one person talking and hoping to pick up the most relevant bits for our needs and no one would have realised the momentous journey this one young man had taken to be there with us.
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.
This morning we started our work with Birmingham Settlement – one of the city’s oldest charites with a track record that spans two century. They do tricky and incredibly supportive work working with the most disadvantaged people in their neighbourhood, the wider city and increasingly the wider world! As one of them put it – they make life better for Brummies.
We worked them through our social media awareness session – the one designed to help people get their heads in the right place, to understand the link between what they do and what we know.
Margaret Farrell is in charge of the business of outreach for Birmingham Settlement’s money advice services. She confessed that all this digital stuff is outside her experience – then at the end of a mornings worked told me this
Makes me smile!