Tag: Citizen Journalism

Social Media Help – support for local groups blogging.

If you look at the top of this page you’ll see a new set of pages called Social Media Help.  They are an extension of some work we have been doing for Groundwork UK on the Big Lottery Community Spaces fund..

With tight resources we wanted to provide some simple guidance for any community groups who use social media as they  apply for or perhaps spend the Community Spaces fund dosh.  My favourite of all is this wonderful blog post from the Friends of Abbey Gardens, but other groups are at it, including Macclesfields Skate Park group, Fairland Park, and  some consistent blogging from Roy at Meols Park.

The help section is available on their site and here.  It will also be useful for the facilitators who help groups with contracts etc.  there are 50 of them and we neither had the time or the desire to try and show all 50 how to blog etc.  For those do want to encourage local groups to use social media it’s a starting point.

The help section is available on this site and here and the end result is:

We’ve compiled some practical articles and videos to help you get the most out of using social media to tell your story. You can go through them one at a time, or dip in and out. Each section has a search facility to help you get to useful nuggets of information from trusted help and support sites.

  1. Tips for blogging with WordPress
  2. Tips for sharing pictures with Flickr
  3. Tips for sharing videos with YouTube
  4. Tips for using Twitter
  • What makes the web social?

    • It deliberatley only covers a few services because we dont want to clutter things up for beginers.  Thanks very much to Paul Henderson for pulling this together.  Feel free to use it for social media surgeries and the like.

    About Brum podcast features social media surgeries

    Some of you may know that podnosh began as a podcasting business in 2005, with the Grassroots Channel – audio stories of active citizens in Birmingham.

    At the last social media surgery Christopher Woods interviewed me for what has become the first episode in his freshly minted About Brum podcast.  You can listen below, and it’s worth it, because Christopher has a very appealing and relaxed style.

    thestraightchoice.org – The Election Leaflet Monitoring Project

    Screenshot from The Straight Choice website
    Screenshot from The Straight Choice website

    The Straight Choice website is a place where anyone can upload any election leaflet delivered to them, so we can all keep track of what the parties are saying and whether it is true:

    Election leaflets are one of the main weapons in the fight for votes in the UK. They are targeted, effective and sometimes very bitter. We need your help to photograph and map them so we can keep an eye on what the parties are up to, and try to keep them honest.

    It has been put together by 3 very fine people:  Julian Todd who wrote Public Whip with Francis Irving, which became the input for mySociety’s TheyWorkForYou.com. In 2007 he made undemocracy.com which applied the same idea to the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council. Richard Pope was also behind the Planning Alerts project, Groups Near You and StreetWire. He has a track record on this sort of site from the 2005  Election Memory project to record and publicise manifestos of the different parties in the Lambeth local elections. Francis Irving has also done substantial work on mySociety’s WhatDoTheyKnow.com. Great Job.

    Very Local Media blossoming in Lozells – but who should keep watering it?

    I was really pleased to find the first bulletins from Lozells News – a new child led digital service, appear in my feed stream last week:

    Lozells News Highlights from can uk on Vimeo.

    This is a project from CAN-UK, who’ve been working from Ladywood for more than a decade. Lozells already has the very fine www.lozells.info and the South Lozells Housing Regeneration area is beginning to use the web to tell the story of how it is progressing, see vision-lozells.org.

    A couple of things.

    The first is the question of how to integrate these a little better and so seed more local story telling? Perhaps a local social media surgery might help? It is a certainly somehting I’d be interested in.

    The other is that our own experience of creating local news with young people  in Frankley or Castle Vale (and others) tells us there remains a problem of how we keep things going once the project ends. There’s no lack of enthusiasm from the young people:  Comments like

    this was the best week ive had at Frankley, and making this podcast was a great experiance!

    and

    can’t wait to see if we do anything else

    show there is an appetite for more.  It’s rarely an issue of equipment or websites etc, these are now cheap enough and simple enought to leave behind.  I think the problem is often who will take the lead/ownership in your absence.

    So thoughts?  How could we ensure that when the project dosh dries up the storytelling keeps flowing?