Category: Social Media Surgery

500 people involved in Social Media Surgery – plus…..

Today the 500th person signed up to www.socialmediasurgery.com.

She is Anne Elliot, who’s planning to go along to the Leeds Social Media Surgery on October 7th because she’s hoping to start work with a social enterprise in October.

That’s 500 people  since the site was first sort of functioning in private beta in April of this year,  although most of you have joined in since we went more public in July.

Of those 500, 178 of you have registered as surgeons – the people who are there to help.  And of those,  33 people are surgery managers, the people who take responsibility for finding venues, choosing dates and keeping people happy at these informal but potent events.

Between you, you have set up social media surgeries in 38 different towns cities or neighbourhoods in 5 different countries (plus some others coming).  You’ve run or set up 76 different events.

The site also allows people to capture who has helped who learn what and add links for sites created during the surgeries.  I’d love to encourage more people to make use of that, because then it will be easier to record the effectiveness of the surgeries.

Great work from all of you and some fine work from Josh Hart on the coding. We have a bunch of improvements heading your way.

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