Tag: Voluntary Sector

Looking back at the first Balsall Heath Social Media Surgery

It’s been manic recently, so I’ve not had the time I really need to talk about our first social media surgery at Balsall Heath. But, now I’ve confirmed that the next surgery – again at the Balsall Heath Forum – will be on June 2 , I thought it was a good time to look at what was a fascinating and quite exciting first outing for the newest Podnosh-run event.

Quite a few Balsall Heathers (or should that be Balsall Heathans?) have been down in one capacity or another to the Central Birmingham Social Media Surgeries in the past, so it was good to see a few familiar faces coming to the Balsall Heath surgery.

Simon Whitehouse was in attendance, helping Nisha Virdi. And John Newson was also down, getting some assistance with his blog for Balsall Heath Is Our Planet from Dan Davies (who, as it happens, also lives very nearby – even if he thinks he’s in Moseley!)

But there were also many new faces who managed to make it down, including – of course – those working at the forum themselves. I spent some time helping Abdullah Rehman and Nowrah Abdul to set up a blog for the forum, which it’s nice to see they’ve been using in the week or so since the event.

Nick Booth was able to help Zainab and Dalal from the Yemeni Women and Children’s Society – and even set up this quick blog post with them on the day. And it was particularly exciting to see Zulfiqar Ali, of the Pakistani Youth Council. Zulfiqar is really good at using online tools already, but he got some help with using RSS feeds and Yahoo Pipes, which hopefully will be very helpful with some of the interesting things he’s doing.

So, all in all, lots of interesting things happened and I’m really looking forward to the next event. Hope you can make it!

To sign up to the next event, on June 2, please visit the Social Media Surgery Plus site.

Digital scrutiny: the web’s the tool

While I’ve watched the election drama unfold over the last few days I’ve been busy trying to finish off the first stage of my digital scrutiny project – which is looking into how it might be possible to use the web to help the public scrutinise local government.

My idea has turned into a blog – Where Can We Swim – that I’m busy trying to develop as a sort of laboratory for the scrutiny of swimming pool provision. At the heart of my idea is a basic belief that we – the public – in all our great unwashed glory, might be able to help to run public facilities – not just as volunteers, but because we’re clever and can actually come up with new ways of doing things.

A reappraisal
When I started the project I hoped to develop a kind of tool kit for scrutiny. I even imagined I’d be scraping data in order to provide really good quality information. But my assumptions were totally off. By posting about my swimming pools idea on Podnosh I’ve learned of the work that Plings has done to find out all the local authorities providing free swimming to under 16s.

The Where can I swim for free site

This has made me think about how this provision will continue in the future. I’ve also realised the mines of local information that exist from websites locally, like the Moseley Road Bath’s excellent updates on swimming pool news in Birmingham and are helping to keep an eye on how the city council runs its pools.

Swimming around the web
And, when I first encountered the daftness of the Active Places data set run by Sport England (the store for all the country’s public sporting facilities), I imagined I’d spend my time trying to unlock the data, but it turns out that the folk at Rewired State have already had a crack at it.

What all this is beginning to prove is that my idea of a tool kit makes no sense whatsoever. Instead it’s pretty simple really: the web’s the tool. The real trick – something I’m only beginning to understand – is learning to use it to make connections between you and other people who have the same idea. And, if you do that, then suddenly all sorts of clever things begin to happen.

What happened at the May Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery

May Social Media Surgery

After some very busy surgeries recently, May’s was small, but perfectly formed. Emma Neil and Hannah Severn from The Birmingham Conservation Trust got help from Gavin Wray and Nick Booth with their blogging work for the trust. Both Emma and Hannah are volunteering for the Trust and have been doing some really interesting stuff since coming to the Central Birmingham surgery a couple of months ago.

They’ve both been blogging assiduously for a while now, on a variety of different subjects for the Trust, as you can see here and here. They also write reviews of local history books, which allows the trust to raise small aounts of money through the Amazon affiliate system.

This time they learned, in particular, about Google Analytics because they’d been worried that too few people were commenting on their posts on the site, as this video interview with Hannah (left) and Emma (right) explains.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32uCoQvtxDs]

Emma and Hannha weren’t the only people to come down – even if we happened to pick the moment the UK got its first coalition government in 70 years. Anna Watson, from Localise West Midlands, was down for her first surgery – and seemed to really enjoy it. Heidi Blanton, who was down to help as a surgeon for the second time,  helped Anna to learn about Twitter, WordPress and other forms of social media.

We also had a visit from Dr Monika Metykova – who is a media and communications research associate at Goldsmith’s. Monika is conducting some really interesting research into changes in media consumption and production – and was down to learn about what we’re doing at the Social Media Surgery. She also got a little bit of help from Simon Gray on setting up a Twitter account. Monika said she was particularly surprised how quickly it is possible to make some really significant, useful steps towards understanding social media at a surgery.

In the video she explains a little bit about the context of her research and how her visit to the Social Media Surgery fits into that.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC8RxuVrkv8]

May’s Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery

February Social Media Surgery

We’re heading towards our next Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery, which will be on Tuesday May 11, 2010 at the studio, 7 Cannon Street, which is just off New Street in central Birmingham.

If you belong to a Birmingham-based community or neighbourhood group or charity please come and join us. You can drop in any time between 5.30pm and 7pm. All local charities and voluntary organisations are invited.

At the last SMS in April we launched the beta version of the new Social Media Surgery website, which is where you can sign up for this event and learn more about other social media surgeries that we’re organising, here.

The surgeries are organised by volunteer members of the Birmingham Bloggers group. Surgeons work as friendly advisors giving informal one-to-one help to show you how to make the best of social media. If you’ve never been to a surgery before then it might be a good idea to look here. And, if you’re interested in finding out a little bit more about what the surgeries are and their history have a look here.