But blogging can be tricky to begin with and after the surge of excitement of getting your first post up, sometimes it’s hard to know what to do next. The good news is that among the Birmingham Bloggers Group there are some kind folks who can help.
So if you’ve been to a surgery and started a blog (which means you’re a Birmingham based community oor voluntary group) and would like a volunteer ‘Fairy Blogmother’ to give some extra tips and keep an eye on your blog while you get going – all you have to do is:
Write a post on your blog saying you’d like some help and link back to this post
(To make a link, copy the address (URL) of this post and write some text that you want to make into the link. If you’re using WordPress, highlight the text and click on the link button) then paste in the address.
You can just ask for help or if you’ve got a question, write about it and someone will try and head over to you blog.
How does it work?
Just by linking to this post (as if by magic) a little trackback will be created and that will let the Fairy blogmothers (and fathers) know that you need some help. It won’t necessarily appear like magic, but hopefully some Fairy Blog Father or mother will then leave a comment on your blog post saying they’re willing to help. With that comment you will get their private e-mail address, which you can use to keep in touch with them.
What is a Fairy Blogmother?
From time to time we get people who would like to help at the social media surgeries saying they can’t make it. We hope that some might be willing to offer you advice etc by e-mail. They’ll be doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, so take care not to overburden them.
Help Me Investigate allows people to ask civic questions and work together to find answers. Since it emerged into life a couple of months ago people have sought answers to questions ranging from:
“Why wont’ Birmingham City Council hand over the running of Lightwoods Park to Sandwell Council”
“Help me investigate why my doctor has an 0845 number”
“What is the tracking process for petitions handed into Birmingham City Council.”
The site feels quite Birmingham centric at the moment simply because we are experimenting using questions about the place where many of us live. As the site evolves that will change.
Who pays for this?
It is funded by Channel 4’s 4ip fund, Screen West Midlands and Advanatage West Midlands and it’s launch attracted interested from the mainstream media. The Guardian summed it up like this:
Rather than a publishing platform, the site is a tool that could equally benefit news organisations and the public; it follows the MySociety mould of successful activism sites like TheyWorkForYou and FixMyStreet.
“Journalists think investigative journalism should be very secretive, but [HelpMeInvestigate] has to be seen to be owned by the community than by journalists because that puts off the public. People can contribute their expertise to answer specific questions, and journalists with no resources could use the site to call on the community for help.”
Today the site, still in a private experimental phase, saw it’s first spin off mainstream media news story.
The Birmingham Post runs an HMI story on Parking Tickets.
This morming the post ran this story about how HMI had found the worst street for parking fines in Birmingham. The story began here, with a question from Heather Brooke:
Help me investigate on which Birmingham Streets are the most parking tickets issued?
It’s an interesting HMI question because it is about something which bothers many of us, but it’s also specific and local. It’s also a classic local newspaper question, but what thye may not take the time to ask.
The next stage was a freedom of information request, which you can see here on MySociety’s brilliant WhatDoTheyKnow service, which makes FOI requests public and easy to make.
When the information finally arrive in three files another user of the site stepped into to help. Neil Houston likes messing around with spreadsheets (part of the point of Help me Investigate is to allow people to play to their strengths).
He quickly established the 10 worst places to park for ticketing were:
•Alum Rock Road, Washwood Heath (3,995)
•Stratford Road, Sparkhill (2,418)
•Corporation Street, city centre (1,748)
•Alcester Road, Moseley (1,545)
•Waterloo Street, city centre (1,455)
•High Street, Harborne (1,391)
•Gas Street, city centre (1,083)
•Whittall Street, city centre (1,022)
•St Paul’s square, Jewellery Quarter (1,008)
•Dean Street, city centre (978)
Neil normally blogs about food, so even though he wanted to right about this he didn’t want to contaminate his normal blog. He borrowed some space on Be Vocal to write this piece, including the observation that:
it’s surprising to see that the warden BM739, issued 5,080 tickets. The next ‘top’ ticketer issued 3,559. This shocked me, as that’s a LOT of extra tickets by BM739.
Tom Scotney at the Birmingham Post started to use his papers position to seek explanations for the figures from the council, and this morning he posted the article including explanations for these questions: 1/2) Why is Alum Rock Road the most ticketed area in Birmingham?
3) Why did the number of tickets given out rise significantly over the last full recorded year?
So what do I make of this?
Thanks to the Birmingham Post for running the story and more importantly sharing credit for the story. It’s important for news organisations to get used to being open and generous with sources.
It’s good to see citizens and journalists (who are also citizens, I know) collaborating with each other to get to the bottom of something
This one set of data has already triggered new questions about car clamping and could lead to a flurry of similar questions across the country.
The other thing to remember though is that this may not be typical of what happens on Help Me Investigate. This is a question which has general interest, hence useful for a mainstream news organisation. Many of the questions though may be, on the face of it, more mundane and more about how thre system works or perhas problems that are very very local.
For these the collaboration could involve public servants using the questions as a means to improve the work they do. At least let’s hope so.
Tuesday was the first social media surgery held in Lozells. Below are some of the folk who turned up to learn and share. I spent the first 40 minutes with the Bangladeshi Youth Forum, warming them up to some ideas. Interestingly I don’t think I got very far. For the teenage lads I was talking to, the social web is a place to show off what’s cool.
Thanks very much to John Heaven and Raj Rattu for their energetic help with organising and the great welcome we had at the Lozells Methodist Church. We had a busy time with a huge range of ages and abilities, all dipping their toes into social media – creating blogs and trying out Twitter amongst other things.
Mark Bent, who runs the newly-opened Boathouse Café in Handsworth Park, set up a blog:boathousecafe.wordpress.com. Saeed, an educationalist and community activist in Lozells, was the first to bag lozells.wordpress.com. I was pleased to see Sharon Morgan, from Come:unity Arts, who is already a seasoned Twitterer! (Don’t forget about the Handsworth ArtWalk that they are organising.)
I spent the second part of the session Sharon. She had already set up a blog and so we covered some theory, principles of netwroking through the web etc. Then Sharon told me the absolutely brilliant story of how she used twitter to bag a milk float:
It’s been quite an eye-opener meeting Marlon Parker. He’s visiting the UK from Cape town in South Africa and has come over here to share some of his work at the charity Impact Direct. He was here with Jon Hickman.
Below is a quick interview with him, where he explains how he began using social media to help gang members and drug addicts tell their stories, initially as a means of educating the wider community about what to expect.
On the face of it this is very similar to the social media surgeries we run here in brum, but just bolder. More like the work that wesharestuff does with young people who’ve recently been in prison.
But Reconstructed (Marlon’s original project name) blossomed from simply helping a few people to a network of people who are using mobile phones and instant messaging to mentor individual and families with a huge range of problems – from drugs addiction to HIV/Aids. Here’s a scrappy bit of video of Marlon showing Chris Unitt how the mobile phone stuff works, using an application put together by the original groups of social media trainees. It’s interesting:
The whole project is built on the some of the core principles that makes social media more than a means of connecting online, but as a means to gain or regain control:
Just get on with. Marlon doesn’t wait for funders to OK something, he gets on with it and hopes the world will catch up.
Concentrate on the useful. When encouraging people to use social media find something that’s useful for them
Get people teaching as much as they learn: the beauty of social media is it’s simplicity. It’s good to get those you are teaching to teach others, that strengthens the network and relationships.
Don’t wait for the kit, use available technology. Instant messaging and mobile phones work in South Africa because that’s what the people Marlon want to reach have.
In the end none of the work that Marlon does, we do or loads of the rest of you do with social media is to do with specific tools or bits of technology. It is essentially about helping people get to know each other well enough to be able to achive things together. To do that it pays to use whatever it takes to connect folk.
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Since the beginning of the Birmingham Social Media Surgeries lots of people have taken their first steps in blogging and have done fantastically well (here is a list of the ones we know about)
(To make a link, copy the address (URL) of this post and write some text that you want to make into the link. If you’re using WordPress, highlight the text and click on the link button) then paste in the address.
