TH!NK ABOUT IT – european blogging competition – Homepage – TH!NK2 Climate Change is a 3 month blogging competition with a focus on UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) in December 2009. 81 bloggers from Europe with featured guests from India, China Brazil and the USA, representing the world’s biggest players in climate policy, will come together on the European Journalism Centre’s thinkaboutit.eu platform, to exchange ideas and debate the issues of climate change.
A return to the “old skool” – Social Media challenges in the Public Sector « Carl’s Notepad – Thoughtful piece from Carl Haggerty: “Are we seeing social media facilitating a return to traditional and “old skool” values around community and neighbourhood support. I see the main difference being the “community” and the “neighbourhood” that people relate to is more complex and far reaching (offline and online) than ever before. If this is the case, then the Pubic Sector truly has a huge task ahead, not only support itself to transform the way we engage with people and our own staff, but to acknowledge those communities who are already engaged but also nurture communities (offline and online) to become part of the wider public service delivery model.”
Mapping Digital Inclusion Actors « CDI Europe – A really useful map of the different roles different organisations and people play in digital media, digital inclusion, democracy and civic activism from iris at CDI
The Stirrer – Social Media Surgeries – “The Birmingham social media group have attracted visitors from across the UK to see how it works. The model is so simple and cost free. Just bring those who have something to teach together with those who want to learn and bang a life changing concept is off.” Audrey Miller, a beneficiary of the social media surgeries sums it up quite nicely, although it’s a touch embarrassing.
These are my links for June 15th through June 16th:
Digital Britain – final report – The Digital Britain Final Report is one of the central policy commitments in the Government's Building Britain's Future plan and draft legislative programme.
Building Britain's Future sets out the practical action we will take to build a stronger, fairer and more prosperous country. It focuses the energy and mission of the government in the year ahead on three clear priorities:
* Cleaning up politics and reforming our democracy
* Moving from recession to recovery and planning for a strong economy in the future; and
* Reforming Britain's public services.
Social Innovation Camp | The Young Foundation – Great ideas: Social Chain Gangs Flash-mobbing with a purpose. This tools aims to get a bunch of people together to get something done, whether it's cleaning up a local park, helping your neighbours move in, a quick spot of gardening – fast.
CHANGEit IdeasFund for Young Creatives | VCS Matters – CHANGEit, which is an organisation that recognises, supports and rewards young people who want to, or have already spoken up and taken constructive action about something they want to be improved, changed or created in their community has announced that it is seeking applications to its new £50,000 IdeasFund.
The aim of the Ideas Fund is to support creative enterprise and seeks to promote new and exciting ways of working between young people and organisations that are driven by and for young people
Imagine: School Design for the Future. – Imagine’ is a database which captures school design best practice from around the world. Architects and researchers from the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield [BDR] have conducted a critical analysis of over 150 schools, highlighting excellence in design according to different themes. It considers integrated ICT, environmental design and flexibility for space and learning.
The growth of social lending – Third Sector Foresight – Anyone heard of Twollars? Well they're a new online 'currency of appreciation' that you can use on Twitter to reward positive actions. Each Twitter user automatically has 50 Twollars in their account. So they're great news for VCOs as people can give Twollars to the charity of your choice and once the charity has created an account, they can sell their Twollars to businesses and people who support their cause and want more Twollars. So, Twollars are designed to go back into circulation.
ASH-10 » A Local Blogs Blog for Birmingham – Over the weekend it became apparent to me that I couldn’t keep all the local blogs that have sprung up in Birmingham straight in my head. I was also aware that what defines a “local blog” is somewhat, well, ill defined. so I started Local Blogging Birmingham, a quick and dirty Tumblr blog to record them as I find them and add a bit of commentary.
ASH-10 » Towards a Theory of Yurtification – I superimposed a photo of a yurt on a volcano but fits current thinking about the digital divide and needs to be considered when thinking about these things.
So that’s my Yurtification theory. In short, the pyramid will be softened, Mongolian style.
Videopress | DavePress – Well, VideoPress looks like it might be worth looking into. It’s been created by Automattic, the guys behind WordPress and various other cool things. It’s a video upload and hosting service that uses WordPress.com as its back end, as far as I can tell. But you can embed your videos wherever you like.
Later this month a group of enthusiasts will get together to run another one of Birmingham’s Social Media Surgeries. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The original idea was just one as a practical contribution to Blog Action Day, set up by volunteers and run by volunteers.
So far we’ve done five, (I counted wrong before!) three at BVSC and Two at Fazeley Studios. The results:
At least 60 people from probably 50 organisations – helped. That’s based on numbers for 3 surgeries, because for two of them we were so busy we all forgot to record who was there and where they were from.
At least 33 volunteer surgeons involved, many of them repeat offenders. They probably average about 5 hours of effort each, plus the organisers, means a minimum of 175 hours of high quality, highly skilled voluntary effort.
Since that first evening – a number of sites have been set up or emerged. For example:
Birmingham’s Jubilee Debt Campaign came out of that first night and Audrey and Duncan Miller have kept on using it, because they prefer it to their old site.
The Digbeth Trust is switching it’s web platforms to use more social media after being helped to appreciate the benefits as a surgery patient on a couple of occasions.
The Ramblers locally is now using this blog to explain how they’re getting people walking in the city and Mohini, who works for them, has already started a blog about Mangoes!
Other place based sites pop up.
Acocks Green Neighbourhood Forum has started with this site and already begun connecting with other verylocal sites.
Tony at www.cannonhillpeoplespark.net has been along looking for advice on how else they can use the web whilst John Heaven, from well established Lozells.info, also got some great advice on what they can do next.
These are just some examples, I’m pretty sure there is stuff I’ve forgotten or don’t know about.
Some people didn’t want to plunge straight into using social media for a charity, their neighbourhood or work and so we have helped create at least half a dozen personal blogs. Some have fallen silent, others are used with great passion.
This video helps show how much people enjoy the surgeries, and that they are not always the folk you most expect:
We don’t expect it to stick first time and we encourage people to come back. When they book for the second time, it is their comments that encourage us.
They include the very practical: “So useful last time, need a little more help with developing the blog lay out,” and “just a matter of fine tuning my site to send it public” or “thanks to the brilliant advice and support we got last time it inspired us to put our website up (just), and we’ll be along to discuss building on our social support!”.
Notice the language. These people feel like they own these bits of the web. In the past efforts like this have been more likely to lead to moribund pages on communal portals.
Sometimes people come back already comfortable with the basics and hungry to understand more technical aspects of how the social web encourages conversation: We want to “extend our blog skills to improve how we use trackback and linking” or: “placing of images within text. What are pingbacks?”.
Over time they are encouraged to use video, host images in more social places, perhaps even experiment with twitter.
Aspirations vary. Some want to “promote our government funded service to the local community.” Others “as a fundraiser for this organisation , I really need to know how to use social networking sites, develop a blog for former members and to learn about keeping a website up to date. Not all at once!”
“Not all at once” is important. The one to one (or almost) surgeries mean that people learn what they need as and when they need it. It is also less intimidating for anyone to go from learner to teacher, so the number of potential volunteer surgeons grows all the time.
It ain’t broken really.
I’ve been thinking of ways to change or improve what we do, but mostly people don’t want us to meddle:
To the best of my counting, so far 33 different people have been volunteer surgeons. Some have been at every event, others have come to one and helped hand out tea. They are not all from Birmingham, Paul Henderson has come from Warwickshire, Paul Webster Yorkshire (yes, Yorkshire on 2 evenings) Philip Oakley, Kate Spragg, Kasper Sorensen and Simon Howes wend their way from different spots in the Black Country.
Diane at Fazeley Studios has worked as a volunteer receptionist for us and Candy Passmore at BVSC gave us immediate and generous help with a venue and support for the first three surgeries. Digital Birmingham and Be Birmingham have also given us great support by passing the dates around to their networks and encouraging active citizens to come.
What do the surgeons have in common?
As far as I can tell nothing more than a desire to help and a belief that social media can advance community groups and community activity.
We are also all connected to each other through various online and real world networks formed or nurtured in Birmingham over the last couple of years, some further back than that. Without those networks being both online and real world we may not have got to know each other well enough to be happy to collaborate like this.
What keeps people coming back to give their time? My guess is that most found that being a surgeon helped them learn faster and learn more. They also care about Birmingham as a place. It can be exhilarating. In fact, it makes me feel great.
Why else would we do it?
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