We have recently been doing some work in Wolverhampton with the Local Neighbourhood Partnership (LNP), talking to their neighbourhood wardens about how they can use Twitter to communicate on their patch, the sorts of conversations they could be having and showing them practically how to use it.

As I live in Wolverhampton, sit on the board for my local LNP and use twitter in my neighbourhood with @WV11, one of the examples I used when training them was live tweeting from our meetings.

Bi-monthly in each LNP area  there is a PACT meeting, Partners and Community Together where ASB officers from the council and housing associations, and other departments come to talk and answer enquiries, youth services deliver reports on the youth provision and the police attend and local policing priorities are set based on residents local needs. I, as @WV11, have been live tweeting/social reporting from my local meetings for months and last night as a result of our training an LNP in another area tried social reporting for the first time from their PACT meeting.

What was great following the #OXPACT tag (which you can see on Storify) wasn’t just that they were trying out a new way of a communication –  that we had taught them –  but also local councillors were picking up the information and spreading it to their networks too. On their very first attempt at sharing information in this way they were responded to positively and made their part of Wolverhampton a better networked, more informed place.

I hope many more of the LNP wardens in Wolverhampton will be picking up on this and trying it out in their areas and that sharing information in this way spreads further in other cities too!

Over the last 2 days the Podnosh team hosted 24 science communicators from across Europe. They were in Birmingham as part of the Open Places project which is looking at bringing together 69 science communication institutions and other stakeholders in European cities to partner with local policy makers to tackle socio-economic issues such as employment; education; climate change and poverty from a scientific perspective.We met with them to discuss social media and the ways in which it can be useful to them in their workplaces or on this and other specific projects.

We looked at different platforms such as blogs, Youtube, Twitter and Facebook. Gave presentations on networking, sharing and listening and had brilliant guest speakers Shane McCraken of Gallomanor talking about the Science is Vital campaign and Jon Bounds who talked about internet culture and memes –  or as one attendee put it – Why cats are hilarious….

It was a lot to digest in 2 days but everyone seemed really enthused by what they had learned so in the final session we asked them to take a few minutes and write about what they felt they would take away with them from the sessions – what had really stood out for them;

Andrea Carlini of  Associazione Festival della Scienza said she has stopped seeing social media as a broadcast tool and now sees it as a way to connect and Jacqueline Homan of Birmingham City Council says we have unleashed her inner blogger and has contributed to conversations and will be contributing to other blogs in ways she’s never considered before.

Abi Bryan of the Science Learning Centre West Midlands realised social media shouldn’t be a one way flow of information and conversations builds up networks and trust, while Lynsey Fairweather from Birmingham Thinktank realised she’d like to create more audio and video content, comment and share more.

Claire Hopkins from Aston University really took on board Nicks talk on social capital noting  ”Not everything we put out into the world of social media needs to be heavyweight stuff. Just engaging with people – on anything – is important as it opens a conversation and starts to build trust within networks.” , as did Karen Gemal a project manager from th Danish Sciene Communication she quoted Nick saying “The loop of generosity generates social capital” and that her first steps will be to “get in the habit of following bloggers and tweets, rss-feeds and get familiar with the universe.”

Alessia Dino, Project Officer with the Associenza Onlus is now much more interested in social media as whole – realising her perceptions of the platforms and their usefulness were wrong before these past 2 days.

Emma Wadland of Ecsite  said she really enjoyed Jon’s session and blogged  ”If you create something interesting enough, someone will take the time to spread it within their networks” while Nisa Vidan commented that this was one of the nest workshops she’s ever been to and wants to start experimenting with Soundcloud and Audioboo.

Rebecca Harding said we had reinvigorated her interest in social reporting and also she should “not to get bogged down with information, but instead save it and share it, this with the help of useful tools such as Delcious.com and Evernote.com.” and Patrick Willcocks of Birmingham City Council realised (among other things) that he needs to upgrade his smartphone!

And finally Pamela Waddell of Birmingham Science City has asked for comments on her post about some of her thoughts on the use of social media in her organisation.

You can find links to all the sites that were set up by attendees along with other posts and sites we discussed in our delicious stack  videos from the event on  both our channel and the Science Places channel on Youtube, photos over on Flickr and see what others were saying by looking up the #sciplaces tag on Twitter.

The video above shows how some people respond to adversity. Sound it Out lost core funding from the Arts Council last year and since then has been stretching it’s network and imagination to keep going. Tamperine is a stroke of genius.

How do scientists let us know what they’re up to?  More importantly, perhaps how do they help us understand what they’re doing?  The communication of science is crucial… and next week Podnosh will be working with science communicators from all over Europe to explore how social media can play a role in their work.

It’s not the first time we’ve done this. We thoroughly enjoyed social reporting for a Europe wide project on communicating science early in 2011.  We were supporting Kate Cooper at The New Optimists and our work helped flush out enough detail in one conference to create a final conference report (essentially) on the day (radically speeding up how these things often happen)

It’s all part of a European project, ‘PLACES’ and as well as finding out about projects from other parts of Europe we’ll be looking at two very successful projects that we know about – Shane McCracken from Gallomanor will be giving the background to ‘I’m a Scientist Get Me Out of Here…’  and the (again) Kate Cooper’s New Optimists  is a great example of how social media can help to grow a project.

Any science projects online that we should be looking at?  Tell us about the ones that have caught your eye.

Whilst they stew into something edible I just wanted to quickly share some very useful links plus a list of ideas generated as part of Make it Local - the work done by Nesta on opendata and local government.

First the links – all mentioned by Jon Kingsbury  (twitter) – who’s driving the Nesta Destination local programme.

• http://civiccommons.org/  is a us website which “is a marketplace for open innovation in government, tracking 585 apps in 199 cities. “  As Jon said – son’t re-invent the wheel, check ideas against this site.
• http://www.listpoint.co.uk/  Jon described as “an open platform for code lists standards”collates a lot of work on data standards, what they means and saves time and energy for opendata work.

Make it Local - opendata and local government programme from Nesta

Make it Local -  was a project that Jon helped run for Nesta which  supported local authorities to work with local developers on open and data tools.   One of  the projects – for example – was Birmingham’s Civic Dashboard.  Nesta created this make it local toolkit. – (download as a pdf ) which gives from very practical thoughts on how to make data work in government more successful.  I cite the whole thing below, simply because i think it’s worth sharing:

1 Generate the idea

Focus on the needs of the audience. Look at examples of existing best practice in web services and describe why your idea is better than what already exists.
• Social Innovation Camp sicamp.org/
• Seedcamp seedcamp.com
• Kickstarter kickstarter.com
• Stanford Research Institute’s NABC approach goo.gl/M9w8G

2 Find the relevant data

Finding relevant data for a service, in a format which is easy to use can be difficult. Data.gov.uk is the main repository for government data with over 5,400 datasets. Other useful sources of open data can be found at:
• Infochimp: infochimps.com
• Scraperwiki: scraperwiki.com
• Datamarket: datamarket.com
• Guardian Data Store: guardian.co.uk/data
• Or you can ask for data if it can’t be found elsewhere: whatdotheyknow.com

3 Understand the problem

Within the area you’re developing, gather together people with knowledge and expertise. For example, there will probably be council officers with deep knowledge of the data, community issues and supplier details as well as any technical knowledge and an understanding of any legal issues. Engaging with these stakeholders early on can help you to map out and solve potential problems.
• Human Centred Design Toolkit by IDEO: ideo.com/work/human-centered-design-toolkit

4 Understand open data

There’s a movement to open up government data, so that it can be easily found, is in a ‘machine readable’ format and has a license to be re-used. This is to be managed by the Government’s Public Data Corporation. The license of data is critical to re-use. An ‘Open Government License’ applies to most government data (though some agencies are exempt).
• Open Government License: nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/open- government-licence.htm
• Good practice and government data: opengovernmentdata.org

5 Access the data from council suppliers

Data is often managed by third party service providers who may have no vested interest in opening up the data. Ensure you allow appropriate time and resources within your project plan to account for this.
Get the data provider on board early and scope out the issues involved in getting the data you want. Make sure your deliverables take into account the dependency on the data provider.

6 Create advocates

A good idea still needs advocates to make it happen. This may include both internal advocates as well as external.
Showcase examples of service provision that tap into the interests of different stakeholders. Community activists will engage with ideas that give citizens a voice. Policy makers will want to showcase current thinking.
Find out what excites people and you’ll get a greater level of support from them.

7 Release early, release often

Launching with a ‘minimum viable product’ is likely to be more effective (and less risky) than a ‘bells and whistles’ product.Traditional approaches to development often try to specify a full set of features before launch.
A more effective approach could be to use an ‘agile philosophy’ and focus on a core set of user stories, iterating quickly as you go. Enlist the help of some early users (usually six is enough) who can test out the service, you can then launch a ‘beta’ product to a wider audience.
Minimum viable product: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product Agile development: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development

8 Understand public sector procurement

There are strict procurement processes within government that can make undertaking quick, agile projects difficult. Recent Government strategy aims to simplify procurement, making it easier for SMEs to tender.

Find opportunities to pitch a joint proposal with a local developer or agency. If you have an idea or want to pitch for a piece of work try and connect with other talented local developers and agencies to see how you could work together.

Government IT Strategy document: cabinetoffice.gov.uk/content/government-ict-strategy

9 Get the language right

We use different words and acronyms to describe the same things and this can be an issue in creating a service for citizens to use. Avoid jargon and adopt a friendly tone of voice.

When creating the architecture for a new service, gain an understanding of how your audience might describe the things described in your data. Card sorting exercises can be helpful in doing this.

Card Sorting Exercise: boxesandarrows.com/view/card_sorting_a_definitive_guide

10 Measure success

How do you know when you’ve made something brilliant? It helps if you know what you’re looking for. At the start, state what success would look like. Identify outcomes and measures for your success.

Tools like Google Analytics can be used to measure the performance of your web service (number of visits, users, referrers). Qualitative feedback is also invaluable in providing useful metrics. When designing your service build in an easy-to-use mechanism for people to provide feedback.

Utilise Twitter and Facebook as well as tools like Uservoice uservoice.com and Get Satisfaction getsatisfaction.com to help gain feedback.

Here’s an example of a woman telling Birmingham Settlement what she has learned about how to use the internet:

But what if a person wants to share their story about a negative or dangerous experience? What if that person wants to share their story but is still at risk?

Say, a woman who has left an abusive partner, and wants to share her story to help other women who may be trapped in a violent relationship. Say, a woman wants to talk about how she wants to join in local activities but cultural sensitivities mean she does not want to be recognised.

How can her story be shared online – to raise awareness or support other women in similar situations – anonymously?

Audio can be an effective way to capture a sensitive story and to share it anonymously.

Podnosh help train front line workers in third sector organisations, community groups and charities – such as Gateway Family Services and Birmingham Settlement – to use social media to raise awareness about their work and the people they help.

One way we do this is to encourage workers in these organisations to capture stories of the people they help every day.

To do this sensitively, we help people learn to use tools like Audioboo to capture audio stories using a mobile phone or a laptop with a built-in microphone.

By using tools like Audioboo, the organisations we help can embed the audio clips in their own websites, post safely in social networks and make the audio available for reuse by other organisations or individuals, spreading the story into their networks.

The above exchange took place recently between Wv11 a hyperlocal blog in Wednesfield (*disclaimer* I am the co-founder of Wv11 – but this wasn’t me tweeting this time), Wolverhampton Parks and Wolverhampton Homes, the ALMO  (Aram Length Management Organisation) that looks after housing for Wolverhampton Council. It was a simple and common complaint involving litter.  There wasn’t an immediate solution as someone had to physically get out to the park  to deal with it but because the message was not only acknowledged positively but there was also a response given about the planned action, any other residents following this exchange knew something was planned to get the litter cleaned up and later on when it was dealt with they could see that the promise was carried through.

This wasn’t the first conversation of this sort to take part online and it surely wont be the last but to  my mind at least this kind of engagement can only improve communities.

It may start as small as getting rubbish collected from the park put just imagine the possibilities. If lots of people can take part in a wider conversations with service providers and local partners, if they are responded to as individuals and if they can see that not only are things are getting done as a result, but also see the processes in place that get them there they are more likely to engage in the future and feel part of the bigger picture that makes their neighbourhood tick.

This post summarises emails I’ve sent in response to enquiries about the Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery I coordinate – and advice to other Surgery Managers.

It’s about my personal take on what – and specifically who – the surgeries are for. It also stems from feeling protective of the helpers who volunteer their time and skills for free at the surgery, the very social capital that makes the surgery work.

The surgery description on the website says:

“Volunteers are offering social media help to voluntary organisations, community groups, charities, clubs and societies in a relaxed, informal setting.”

When individuals book a place or send me an enquiry, I quickly look at their website or search to find out a little about them. Basically, I’m doing a quick check asking “does this person represent a voluntary or community group or a charity?”

If the individual looks like a private business or a politician, then I’ll write back to them to find out more information − I don’t immediately say “sorry, you can’t come.” Our jobs and community activities aren’t always so clear cut. Life is messy. Relationships, work and communities overlap.

If the individual can come along to the surgery – and ask for help there – in a capacity representing her voluntary or community group, then great, come along. If she wants social media advice to help campaign for political reasons, or to improve her business, then the surgery isn’t the right place for her.

My response goes something like this:

“Thanks for getting in touch about the Birmingham Social Media Surgery. I can see that you’ve booked a place at the next event.

Please note, as it says on the website, the surgery is for voluntary and community organisations, charities, local clubs and societies. The surgery doesn’t provide support to politicians or private businesses with their own resources for communications or training support.

This is because the surgery is staffed by volunteers – and I don’t want any volunteer helping someone who they wouldn’t want to help or any paid-for public servant advising someone for electoral reasons. It puts them in an awkward position.

Also, some of the volunteers provide paid-for social media consultancy and training as part of their day jobs. The surgery is a good way for them to provide free help back to the community they live in and care about.

However, from past experience, I know that individuals wear many hats in and out of work. A communications manager in local government might be a scout leader. A nurse might coordinate a bridge club in a community centre. A self-employed mortgage broker might chair the local residents forum and want help setting up a website.

Are you able to attend the surgery in an individual capacity – and ask questions – with your “community hat” on, rather than as a politician or business? If so, you’re very welcome to come along.

If you need help using the internet to campaign for political reasons, or to improve your business, then the Surgery isn’t the place for you.

Another, increasingly common, enquiry I receive is “I’m unemployed and trying to get my freelance business running. I need some help with social media.” I usually reply with links to other meetups that may be more suitable, such as the Birmingham Social Media Cafe.

I hope this text is useful for other surgery managers who may wonder how to handle enquiries and keep the surgery focused on the voluntary and community groups the surgery is there to help – those very organisations doing great work that inspires the helpers to keep coming back. I also hope this gives you more of an insight into coordinating a surgery and my personal view on who the surgeries are for.

I’d be interested to hear from others on how they handle this.

Dudley Social Media Surgery (image from Gavin Wray)

This was the question Beatrice asked me. She wasn’t sure if she could help as a surgeon at one of these events designed to support local community and voluntary organisations in a relaxed one to one format:

I would like to make myself useful helping other people and I would like to know what skills I would need to be a good social media surgeon.

 I am not a technical person by background. I have, however, spent a fair amount of time on the internet and it would be good to know what skills would be in demand at such an event.

It seems I have a bit of time to mug up on skills before the event but I’d be grateful for any advice on where to focus. Twitter is my platform of choice. I have just splashed out on a camcorder and digital recorder but I doubt I will feel confident with these tools before the event. Can I still be a useful person if I stick to Twitter/Facebook/general internet skills?

I have been helping at a couple of surgeries now including the well established Central Birmingham Surgery and the Wolverhampton Surgery which I helped to get started and each one is different.

Lozells and Birchfield surgery is small and whilst the Central Birmingham surgery is run through podnosh on a voluntary basis this one forms part of our paid work.

Today I returned to Lozells Methodist Church to help the surgery manager Jo Burrill from our client  Midland Heart – a social housing organisation who work hard in communities, and 4 patients who’d registered for today. Selwyn looking for support with his email, Chris and Kevin both with WordPress enquires and Verona who wanted some help posting to a website. It was a nice number and while I helped Chris with his stuff and Jo helped Verona with hers the others got chatting and Kevin turned into an impromptu surgeon to help support Selwyn with his email problems – every one left  happy having received  the help they needed.

Everyone who has attended each of these surgeries either surgeon or patient has left satisfied with their input and that is is the measure of their success, it’s not the number of people that come through the door but being able to help the people that are there. So while in comparison to the to the city centre surgeries of Birmingham and Wolverhampton, Lozells and Birchfield’s Neighbourhood Surgery is small but it’s definitely perfectly formed.

Photo by Mero Report: Social Media Surgery at COCAP, Nepal

Social media surgeries in the UK received lots of attention last Thursday when the Prime Minister recognised the social media surgery movement with a Big Society Award for 2012.

Nick posted about the award and mentioned the wonderful people who have organised surgeries over the last three years in the UK. They’re enthusiastic, generous people who make stuff happen.

While the Big Society Awards acknowledge individuals and organisations across the UK that demonstrate the Big Society in their work or activities, I thought I should mention the surgeries outside the UK. It’s great to see an idea that originated in Birmingham spread to other shores – and I’m keen to hear how the surgeries are working in other countries.

Here are the wonderful people who have taken the social media surgery model abroad and run their own events:

• Pauline Sargent – Drimnagh, Ireland
• Binaya Parajuli – Kathmandu, Nepal
• Maurice Specht – Den Haag, Netherlands
• Marlon Parker – Cape Town, South Africa
• Chris Pinchen – Barcelona, Spain
• Jigar Patel – Fredericksburg, Pennsylvania, USA

Carolyn Deuchar, a Senior Research Officer at New Zealand Tourism and Research Institute, also likes the idea:

Do you know other surgeries I haven’t mentioned here?

Updated 12th March 2012: Kultwerk West are holding a social media surgery in Hamburg on 14th May 2012, the first to take place in Germany.

I’m very excited to be able to say that the Prime Minister has recognised social media surgeries with a Big Society Award for 2012.

The Big Society Awards were set up by the Prime Minister in November 2010 to acknowledge individuals and organisations across the UK that demonstrate the Big Society in their work or activities. The aim is also to galvanise others to follow.  David Cameron said this about the surgeries:

“This is an excellent initiative – such a simple idea and yet so effective. The popularity of these surgeries and the fact that they have inspired so many others across the country to follow in their footsteps, is testament to its brilliance.

“Congratulations to Nick and all the volunteers who have shared their time and expertise to help so many local groups make the most of the internet to support their community. A great example of the Big Society in action.”

Thank you for such kind words – to which we responded formally with:

“It’s wonderful to have recognition for everyone who has organised a social media surgery or turned up to volunteer their help.  I think the surgeries work because they are simple.  They are very easy to organise, fun to do and not in the least bit intimidating for people who want some help. They give active citizens and community groups the confidence and skills to use social media to campaign, organise and hold power to account.  They’ve grown because of the passion and energy of bloggers and voluntary groups up and down the country.”

Background

The idea of a social media surgery originated with Pete Ashton – who used them with people who were looking for free help from his consultancy supporting arts organisations. We then applied the relaxed approach in a new way, scaling it up and putting together two sets of people – lovely helpers from the Birmingham Bloggers group (started in 2007) with the fab active citizens I’d had met through the Grassroots Channel podcast.  The first was in October 2008. It was only supposed to be a one off, but it turned out people enjoyed themselves so much we kept them going – and they started to spring up in other places.

Since then this simple approach has grown into something of a movement, with surgeries so far happening in 60 places in the UK and at least four other countries. They have also become part of our business, using them to help organisations internally and encouraging and supporting our clients to run them for their own communities.  We’ve also built the social media surgery website to make it easier for people to organise them and find them.  In 2010, the Central Birmingham social media surgery won an award from Creative Birmingham’s Invisible City’s Media Circus.

This Big Society Award is great recognition for anyone who has organised a social media surgery or turned up to volunteer their help.  I’m going to be mention a few specific people (which is dangerous):

• John Popham for taking the idea and spreading it throughout the shires of northern England, to showgrounds and trains
• Josh Hart for investing huge amounts of his love and his brain in www.socialmediasurgery.com, which makes it possible for the surgeries to grow without killing us all
• Hannah Waldram who, when working here at podnosh, refined how we organise them then, through her next job at The Guardian, helped them flourish in Cardiff
• Our own Gavin Wray for patiently keeping the Central Birmingham surgery working whilst teaching loads of others how to run them well
• Tessy Britton for telling me that social media surgeons are militant optimists and for nominating the surgeries.
• Tom Watson for nagging us to do something on blog action day 2008 – hence the first surgery.

Also a thank you for Lawrence at The Studio – who lets us use his Birmingham venue for free (and all the other people who share their venues without charge).

You might like to follow the surgeries us on facebook.

Beside those there are almost 400 volunteer surgeons, particular the people who came to the first one in 2008,  and the people who have stepped up to create their own:

Social media surgery managers

In no particular order, here are some wonderful people who have organised social media surgeries over the last three years, all of them remarkably generous people who give their time and love to help make the places they live in a bit better:

• John Popham – Leeds (also Monica Tailor) and oodles of other surgeries across West Yorkshire
• Paul Webster – Surgery Manager at Hulme and Mansfield, and surgeoning across the Midlands, Yorkshire and the North West
• Andy Mabbett – Oscott Surgery Manager and surgeoning across Birmingham and the Black Country
• Mike Leigh Cooper and Abhay Adhikari – York
• Mike Rawlins, Jamie Summerfield and Clare White – Stoke, Stone and Stafford
• Nicky Getgood – Digbeth
• Lorna Prescott – Dudley Surgery Manager and regular surgeon in central Birmingham
• Jag Gill – Sheffield
• Hannah Waldram – Cardiff
• Jo Burrill – Lozells & Birchfield
• Joni Ayn Alexander – Llandaff
• Renee Wallace – Shropshire
• Ben McKenna – Bradford
• Michael Waugaman – Yatton
• Nottingham CVS – Nottingham
• Graham Richards – Harrogate and Richmond, North Yorkshire
• Jaki Booth – Southampton
• Kate Sahota – Warwickshire
• Jon Foster – King’s Cross
• Ian Mellett – Cannock
• Esko Reinikainen – Monmouthshire
• Kath Fackrell – Telford & Wrekin
• Dan Slee – Walsall and surgeoning across the Black Country
• Gavin Wray – Central Birmingham and all over the Black Country and brum
• Polly Aplin – Adamsdown
• Mohammed Midhal – Cumbria
• Steph Jennings – Wolverhampton
• Mike McTimoney – Darlington
• Melvin Green – Forest of Dean
• Paul Evans – North Finchley
• Geraldine Nichols and Ed Walker – Roath
• Juliette Llewellyn – Canton
• Kate Sullivan – Llanishen
• Alan Seatwo – Liverpool
• Ross McCulloch – Glasgow
• Matthew Deaves – Rugby
• Steven Flower – Salford
• Sarah Lasker – Maldon District
• Cat Yaffe – Wakefield
• Aidan Kelly – Derby
• Matthew Colleran – Moseley

Thank you all.

Recently I was having a conversation with Nick about the value of social media, the community links you can build using Twitter and blogs and the value this has in the real world, when I remembered the story of PC Richard Stanley’s blog.

PC Stanley is a blogging police officer and Twitter user from Walsall. He uses these platforms to talk to the “locals” about his job and help give plain English examples of how the police work and why things are done in a certain way sometimes. I read his blog, follow him on Twitter and have personally never found him to be anything less than factual and informative with some nice humorous banter, creme eggs, #foxwatch and competitions thrown into the mix.

A couple of months ago he wrote a piece in response to a news article in the national press where a suspected burglar was shot during an incident and the property owner who had shot him was arrested.

It was a factual piece that explained, from a policing point of view, why sometimes the “victim” of the burglary can also end up being arrested along with the burglar in cases like this. It was written so that it would be easy for the public to digest – and I felt it was. It was informative without being patronising and a good insight into how a decision to arrest someone could be made.

However, what wasn’t easy for regular readers to digest was what happened next. His blog’s comment section exploded with anonymous commentators condescending and, in some cases, outright insulting PC Stanley. It wasn’t an argument about the accuracy of any details in the blog but an inference he was doing something wrong by engaging in this way and “toeing the party line.”

One of the local “tweeters” spotted this and put out a “call to arms” and they responded (myself included – although I don’t live in Walsall, but drink there often enough) to defend PC Stanley and his right to blog in any way he pleased.

Through a series of blog post and 140 character updates on Twitter PC Stanley had built a community that were willing to stand up and show support when people with an axe to grind targeted him. As it stands there are 90 comments on this one post. About a third of the way into the comments, you can see how the tide changed from criticism to support as more and more local bloggers stepped in to defend PC Stanley. The anonymous commentators really underestimated the strength of feeling their attack would provoke, with one person even inferring our comments weren’t genuine:

“A large number of comments have been critical of PC Stanley’s blog, and there’s been a moderate number of comments in support of him, but then the pattern changes and a number of comments suddenly have become somewhat biased in his ‘favour’. A modern day Glavit alive and well.” [sic]

We were, and are, real. Although few of us have actually met PC Stanley in person we all felt strongly that he was being targeted and more so because he was being criticised on how he had chosen to engage with us. PC Stanley didn’t ask for our support. He did tweet that the post was provoking conversation but at no point did he say “Hey guys come defend me.” He didn’t have to – he had a ready made community willing to stand up for him that had been built over time through engagement.

Whatever your view is on the original article and subsequent comments is irrelevant here. What I’m trying to highlight – and in my opinion what is fantastic about this story – is PC Stanley hadn’t done anything unique or ground breaking. He simply went out and talked to people using the tools that were available to him to bring the conversation to us; the community relationships built from this meant that we were more than willing to step up to the plate when we thought it mattered.

Social media matters and the relationships and community you can build through these different networks are valuable and very real.

Last Friday, Steph and I spent a great morning in Bexley at Orbit South housing association, with Orbit residents from Kent and Sussex.

We worked with Heather, Paula, Peter, Sue and Jackie to set up their own Posterous blogs to talk about what’s going on in their neighbourhoods and to help them in their roles representing Orbit residents where they live.

It was great to receive such a nice warm welcome (as stories of forthcoming epic snow started to flurry) and see the enthusiastic way the residents got stuck into setting up their own blogs, asking lots of questions and understanding how social media is relevant to what they do.

The blogs vary in purpose – some are hyperlocal blogs about a street, block or sheltered housing area, one is for a Residents Forum connecting Orbit South residents across south east England, and another is a focus group monitoring Orbit services on planned works.

Here are the five hyperlocal and scrutiny blogs started:

• Chapel Lodge Block, St Leonards-on-Sea
• Boleyn Court, Gillingham
• South East Residents Forum
• Quex Court, Thanet
• Planned Works Focus Group

We’ll be continuing to support and encourage to update their own blogs to become a useful resource for Orbit residents.

Peter said of his blog:

“It’s like a village notice board. I’ll be able to add events, resident meeting dates, news, posters and the like.”

Photo of Sue, Heather and Jackie by Steph Jennings

Knowledge and experience dwells in neighbourhoods, because we do. On recent visit to Knowle West Media Centre in Bristol, I was struck by how firmly the centre is rooted in the local community. Andrew remarked that projects like their University of Local Knowledge value and celebrate local experiences, and also treat the neighbourhood as a kind of pool of local data and local stories. The challenge for local authorities is how to mix our data into that same pool – how to put the data that communities can make use of into the places where they can really use it – their own places.

If you know where the radishes are, you know whether it’s feasible to get a supply of radishes – and if you know where the shops are, or what people buy, or what people’s attitude to local food is, then you also know where you might be able to sell those radishes. If you know who is growing the radishes, you can start a conversation with that person, and who knows where it might lead.

I know a few people who are partial to a good radish. There’s a story in that somewhere.

This week I’ve been playing with stacks on Delicious, the social bookmarking site. Stacks are a way to organise your links into a common theme and the new social features make collaborating much easier.

To learn how the new features work – rather than curate links around an arbitrary theme (such as “most awesome kitten stunt videos”, which someone has probably done already) – I started this stack to share resources and links aimed at social media surgery managers.

Here’s my blurb on Delicious describing what, I hope, the stack can be:

I’ve started this stack to share resources and links related to running social media surgeries for voluntary and community organisations. See socialmediasurgery.com for more details on what a surgery is, the ethos we share and how to start your own surgery. Please feel free to add your own links but – please note – keep this focused on resources you, as a Surgery Manager, think your “patients” will find useful. If you’ve run a surgery, you’ll have a good idea of what people need to get started and what they need to develop further. This stack of links should be a useful resource. Any SEO / self-styled guru types / spammy marketers / self-promoters, please stay away. Thanks in advance for collaborating.

Are you involved in running, or volunteering, at a social media surgery? Are there resources or links you often find yourself demonstrating that others could benefit from knowing about?

Please feel free to contribute your links to the stack and make it a useful resource.

View Social Media Surgery stack on delicious.

Great Value(s) P(l)eas(e) - photo by Tony Crider (click to view on flickr)

Later this month the Birmingham and Solihull LEP will start making some decisions about skills and work – asking themselves what skills do employers need and how to make them available.

I know this because of a set of “skills” that are hard to measure or teach.

One is being networked.

Peter Latchford (who’s doing some initial work for the LEP on skills) approached me to see what I thought businesses like Podnosh will need. On 30th January he’ll report back and tell the LEP what small business is asking for. So this is what I’d like them to hear:

Podnosh recruits for?

Values

We are driven by making things better: improving public services, helping active citizens have a greater impact, allowing individual civil servants more freedom to improve lives, supporting good third sector organisations to help more people. We don’t work with anyone – if potential clients don’t share a good chunk of our passions or values we’d rather they found someone else to help them.

So for this we employ or work with people who:

• believe in what we do
• care about it
• are accountable
• transparent
• honest
• have integrity
• are networked

In turn they often know what they want and believe in and are leaders in their own worlds.

They are usually enterprising: Steph Jennings runs her own hyperlocal blog, Josh Hart makes LIVEBrum happen, Gavin Wray has nurtured the Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery for years. They make things happen, adapt to change, accept and learn from failure.

On top of that they are flexible and committed. All seem to have an unstoppable ability to make things work, see things through and to learn everything and anything they need to make that happen.

So we also want to find people who start things themselves (not the same as self starters), can’t help but learn on their own, aware of their strengths and happy to be open about what they want to strengthen.

It may sound like a halcyon world of small enterprise. But these are the people who work at, or with, Podnosh and they all have remarkable qualities (and if it sounds like I’m expecting them to be superhuman I’m not, I could never keep up).

One thing I haven’t mentioned? A certificate in anything.

Certainly there are technical skills and we are looking for more folk who are good at Ruby on Rails, but in our world many technical skills get outdated very quickly. So at it’s simplest we recruit the person, get that right and the knowledge later.

What do you recruit for – what does the LEP need to understand are the skills or qualities we need to help Birmingham’s small businesses thrive?

Update:

Karl Binder at Adhere added these thoughts to the discussion in his post “Total Business”:

So I look for:

• Aptitude, a readiness and quickness in learning
• Love what they do, have a passion for their job
• Flexibility
• Desire to continually try something new
• Recognition that their job role can and will change
• Existing skill set

If I had to sum up my employment strategy in a catchy little sound bite I would say I always looked to ‘employ people, rather than skills’. This effectively means if the person’s attitude is right, they have a willingness to learn and an ability to do so, don’t get disheartened and give up quickly and realise that their role is one that is constantly evolving, I would employ them over someone who was the finished product in one particular area of expertise.

Thanks Karl.

Yesterday at the Lozells and Birchfield Social Media Surgery I was paired with a young man who was looking for help setting up a blog for an organisation he was involved with. I started as always by chatting with him a little bit about what the work he was doing and what they wanted to use the blog for when he said something that really pulled what he was trying to achieve into focus for me;

“The girls have babies and the boys shoot and stab each other. I’ve lost count of the amount of christenings and funerals I’ve been to but I’ve never been to a wedding that’s just not what we do”

- He was talking about life in Handsworth and Lozells as he knew it.

The patients name was Mosies, he is a 19 year old ex gang member from Handsworth, He’s not long been found not guilty on a very serious criminal charge, and by his own admittance has been in trouble with the law before, and now he’s taking that experience to not only try and turn his life around but also to try and change the gang culture that plagues youths in some parts of North Birmingham.

He along with other ex gang members from opposing groups in the area, some with criminal records for gang related activities have come together to form the New Day Foundation, They are aiming to try and combat gang culture targeting younger children to educate them on the realities of gang life and try to show them that there are other options to what they think is “normal”,  to change their futures so they can go to more wedding than funerals in their lives!

I sat for an hour and listened to Mosies as he told us about the path he’d taken to be sitting in the room with us that day. Where he’d come from, why he wanted to change the lives of people stuck with the perception that joining a gang was the only option and how he and the other members of his group hoped to do that.

He had the whole room enthralled and as he was telling us how at the age of 14 he stopped going out to the cinema with his friends so he could save his money to buy a gun and all I was thinking was look at you now! 5 years later a changed individual talking about the pride taken in earning money the “proper way”, looking forward to getting a mortgage and hoping the story of your experiences would in some way stop others having to go through it.

-  and that right there is what I like so much about the Social Media Surgery format; Only in a room where people are encouraged to talk to each other and help each other one on one would I have heard Mosies story. At a prescribed training session we’d have all sat in rows listening to one person talking and hoping to pick up the most relevant bits for our needs and no one would have realised the momentous journey this one young man had taken to be there with us.

Paul Bradshaw is hosting this review by Ofcom’s Manager of Nation’s and Region Damian Radcliffe.  Damian has been a patient observer and (I think) advocate for bottom up hyperlocal website’s such as the one’s we help through social media surgeries.

They often provide an information anchor which can be very useful to local government, the police, housing associations – anyone serving a neighbourhood. On the whole I tend to think of local as much more local that is often meant when maintsream media or ministers bandy around the term hyperlocal. They seem to be talking about town size patches – we’re keen to encourage something much more local still.

Since it’s launch in 2001 Wikipedia has been growing at a rapid pace. Its army of volunteer collaborators have now edited more than 20 million articles in just under 300 languages worldwide and it is still growing.

So what’s next?

This year Wikipedia are launching Monmouthpedia, it’s first venture based on location,  a community collaboration for town centric Wikipedia pages. The hope being that residents and visitors will contribute articles and photographs on interesting and notable places, people, artefacts and other aspects of Monmouth life. QRpedia codes could then be placed near points of interest around the town for smartphone users to scan and view the relevant Wikipedia/Monmouthpedia page right on their phone.

The Wikipedia page for the Monmouthpedia project adds:

Articles will have coordinates (geotags) to allow a virtual tour of the town using the Wikipedia layer on Google Streetview, Google Maps and will be available in augmented reality software including Layar.

Could you see this model being useful for where you live?

The collaborative part of Wikipedia has always intrigued me and I’d be really interested in seeing it put to work on such a local level.

Image used under Creative Commons: James Stringer

It’s been a little over 5 months since we first mentioned The Community Lovers Guide To The Universe : Birmingham and we’ve finally found some time to get around to to approaching people to write chapters for us.

Jo Burrill and Birgit Kehler are going to be covering Change Kitchen, Emma Woolfe will be writing about The Friends Of Cotteridge Park, Christ Unitt will be telling us about Created in Birmingham and James Yarker will be writing about Stan’s Cafe “Of All The People In The World” and there are still some email responses pending from other interesting projects we’ve contacted.

We’re hoping that the The Community Lovers Guide: Birmingham will be ready to be published by early next year, but that of course all depends on us getting all the content we need in time. So while we’re making a start approaching the groups from the suggestions in the comments of the last post Can you think of any other people/projects that would like to contribute? A lot can happen in 5 months and we’re just wondering if there is anything happening that may have slipped under our radar.

In our social reporter training we repeat mantra like:  if some one says something interesting or useful then grab your camera and ask them to say it again – then stick it on the web.

Yesterday I spent a really enjoyable morning with a group of Orbit East residents.  I was showing them the many ways in which social media is compatible with their  role to try and constantly improve social housing.   We also had time to help set up a couple of simple posterous blogs:

http://orbiteastresidents.posterous.com/ – for the region wide residents panel

and

http://blenheimresidents.posterous.com/  for an estate in Carbrooke in Norfolk.

Anyway Sue and Nigel left saying really lovely things about the morning and what they had learnt – so remembering our mantra to our clients and grabbed the camera and recorded the feedback above.

One of the charities we work with, The Birmingham Conservation Trust, wanted to make better use of their Facebook page to drive donations for their cause. So, with 27% of all donations via the Just Giving website coming from Facebook in the last 12 months, an increase of 130% on the previous year we decided that one way to look at doing this would be to help integrate the new look Just Giving app into their Facebook page.

The Just Giving app allows charities to invite people to donate without having to leave their Facebook comfort zone. Fundraisers can share a complete copy of their Just Giving profile and donors can chose to make a one off  payment or set up a regular donation within the familiarity of the page.

New Optimists listening to the conversation about food at last night forum

Below are some questions but first the context:

Last night I was working on the first of a series of conversations about how Birmingham will feed itself way into the future.  The New Optimists Forum is organised by Kate Cooper who has the very powerful idea of getting groups of scientists from different disciplines and policy makers to think about this thorny problem.  She argues, I think rightly, that getting practical about problems and places helps us understand best what we need to change now.

One of the scientists was Ian Nabney who talked about the opportunities that will come to make better decisions about complex problems when we have more data and more power to crunch and use that data.  Here’s what he said.

It made me ask the question what if we created a new form of planning gain: supermarkets share their data with us rather than build a new badminton court. 

Could knowing what they know about our eating habits help us lead healthier and better lives?

Mark Braggins Tweeted this this morning:

@markbraggins on twitter

And it also tickled a local MP’s curisosity.  Richard Burden (who’s Northfield constituency may have a few urban “food deserts”, another idea kicked around at last night’s forum)  tweeted this question about half an hour ago:

@richardburdenmp

So here are some questions:

1. Is asking supermarkets to share their data a good form of planning gain?
2. If so in what form would we want it – opendata, depersonalised or maybe full data to be share just with civil servants
3. What would be the arguments against (so we can anticipate) or just how naive is this! ?
4. How would Kate Cooper of the New Optimists go about talking to sainsbury’s about this?
5. Would you rather have a new pavilion at the local park?

Odd what comes out of combining real world conversations with online stuff!

Update

Looks like Adrian Short was thinking about supermarket card data as a public good back in April – scroll to the bottom of this post.

It’s a story I’ve told before but never really in such a concentrated way – in fact I told it twice in one day. The students were a guinea pig for the talk I was planning to give at Michael Overduin’s Science Capital event on “Networks, Nodes and Knowledge: from local enterprise to global engagement”.

The slides are here but what I’d like to share if what one of Dave Harte’s students made from the talk. Dave shared the whole thing with his overseas students who study the degree remotely. He asked them to:

This week I would like the distance learning students to reflect on the talk by Nick Booth and consider how you might go about setting up a social media surgery in your own town. What would your strategy be? Have a read of Nick Booth’s ‘recipe’ listas a starting point.

Your response should be a short (5-10 mins) video that tells us the following:

• What’s your town like? – rich? poor? digitally deprived??
• Is there a way to connect to voluntary groups and community organisations (an umbrella organisation of some sort)?
• How would you go about connecting to other digitally minded folk to persuade them to help set up a surgery?
• What’s stopping you doing this?”

This is a question about social capital and innovation, where is it, how does it happen. Can you nurture or grow both.  Dave highlighted one response from Jeff Sage.

Jeff  talked about how a group in London Ontario developed “Emerging Leaders” a network for connecting people.  As yu can see they also work with different agencies in the city to help improve their community.  Principles that struck a chord with the social media surgery ethos include:

never duplicate efforst of others or create silos and making mistakes should be a goal, rather than something you’re tryng to avoid.

Also very much inline with the work Tessy Britton is doing at social spaces and David Barrie’s Militant Optimists,

One coincidence – Michael Overduin, who asked me to compile the initial story on the surgeries – hails from Ontario.

These are the faces of the latest bunch of New Optimists and if you’re interested in the future of Birmingham and the future of how we feed ourselves you may just want to follow their conversation as part of job we’re doing tomorrow  (Wednesday 2nd November 6 – 9 pm) .

We will be live blogging the first  New Optimists Forum – a conversation between these fine folk…ten scientists, an architect (last year’s RIBA President no less) and the city’s development strategist take part …. They are Eugenio, Hanifa, Peter and Gareth  (l-r, top row); Rosemary, Jim, Peter and Ruth (l-r, middle row); David, Helen, Ian and Liz (l-r, bottom row).

It’s the first of a number of events which will concentrate on the fascinating issues of how we feed ourselves, and happens to fall in the week we welcomed the babies that pushed our population over 7 billion.

The simplest way to follow and join the conversation is through the twitter hashtag  #tnofood (The New Optimists on Food).  We’re not live streaming this first one but will be sharing material as it happens.

If you’re curious about the New Optimists it’s a Birmingham based not for profit organisation set up by Kate Cooper.  She started by asking scientists what makes them optimistic and ended up publishing a fab book called The New Optimists – still available on Amazon.

This is a short video with Joe Holyoak, a resident of Balsall Heath, an inner city area to the south of Birmingham.

Balsall Heath is one of the first 20 neighbourhood planning front runners chosen by government to write their own neighbourhood plan. The idea, part of the Localism Bill, is that instead of neighbourhood plans being written by professional planners in local government, the plan should be written by the local community itself.

Joe is working for Balsall Heath Forum. They are at the start of a six month process to write the plan (from September 2011 to March 2012). They are consulting local people, finding out what they want to see in the plan, what their priorities are, asking residents what they want Balsall Heath to become. The aim is to create a set of proposals, which will form part of Birmingham City Council’s official plan for the city.

This video was recorded at the first meeting of the Neighbourhood Planning Network, 29th September 2011, hosted by MADE in Birmingham.

We worked them through our social media awareness session – the one designed to help people get their heads in the right place, to understand the link between what they do and what we know.

Margaret Farrell is in charge of the business of outreach for Birmingham Settlement’s money advice services. She confessed that all this digital stuff is outside her experience – then at the end of a mornings worked told me this

Makes me smile!

I’m just reading the very promising report on the future of public services written as part of the University of Birmingham Policy Commissions.  “When Tomorrow Comes” began life with this discussion on Big Society at the Conservative Party Conference last year.

Now published the work describes a world very close to my heart, active engaged citizens using their networks and communications skills to help shape or lead public policy and public services.  It also, though, identifies qualities we will need from public servants:

Key new roles include:  storyteller, communicating stories of how new worlds of local public support might be envisioned in the absence of existing blueprints; weaver, making creative use of exisiting resources to generate something new and useful for service users and citizens; architect, constructing coherent local systems of public support from the myriad of public, private, third sector and other resources; and navigator, guiding citizens and service users around the range of possibilities that migth be available in a system of Local Public Support.

First of all these are not new roles – they already exist to a certain degree.  We spent the best part of a year working with neighbourhood managers in Birmingham helping them with the tools and the skills to be storytellers, weaver’s and navigators. We do the same with the citizens they work alongside, not least through social media surgeries.  Likewise we’re working with the Wolverhampton Strategic Partnership to help them advance their wonderful community empowerment learning programme, which helps public servants and citizens work together to be better weaver’s architects and navigators.  We do similar work with housing associations – who value the connecting and empowering skills in their staff

Appreciating these qualities can sometimes feel like a tricky message to get across.  I remember a fascinating afternoon on The Hague with Tessy Britton and Maurice Specht. Both of us were talking to senior officials in central government in Holland about the impact of potent networks, self organising citizens and militant optimism on how will will govern ourselves.  “What should we do?”- they asked.  Learn to get out of the way, perhaps offer very lightweight support I urged them.  Invest in the connectors was Tessy’s advice.  People like the initiative brokers we met later that week.

To late?

My fear is that these skills are not being truly valued now.  The neighbourhood manager role has gone in Birmingham and in the process the council has lost some remarkable people who’s passion for connecting ideas and people made government much more accessible and I’m certain more efficient.

Other’s who are connected nationally regionally and locally are being pushed back into more definable jobs, turned back into box tickers in pre-ordained processes.  These latter jobs are the ones we can eventually automate and prescribe.  So as funding dries up for the jobs best done by connectors – please local government management, make sure you find ways of keeping them in fruitful work and onside – because you will be needing them.

Following a collaborative project to map stories of voluntary groups told their funding will be reduced – and analysing the government’s projected spending plans for the Spending Review period 2011–2015) – NCVO estimate “the voluntary and community sector is facing nearly £3billion in cuts over the next five years.”

Their key findings include:

• The UK voluntary and community sector will lose around £911 million a year in public funding by 2015-16.
• This means voluntary and community sector stands to lose £2.8 billion from Government over the current spending review period running from 2011- 2016.
• These are likely to be conservative estimates based on analysis of the Government’s own figures published by the Office of Budgetary Responsibility. The figures assume that cuts with be made proportionately, they provide us with a solid baseline figure to measure any further cuts against.

NCVO published the Counting the Cuts report because they believe:

“Estimates of the extent of cuts to voluntary and community sector funding from government vary widely. Some published estimates are not we believe reliable and do not give the full picture.”

Shining more light on how charities operate, what they do and correcting statements about charities that are simply wrong, NCVO’s Karl Wilding has written about seven deadly charity myths. Here are Karl’s slides:

This busts some myths about charities. Are there other myths that could use busting?

Tom Watson (and Ahmed Al-Omran) blogging at the G20 conference

Thank you Kate Hughes for being so kind on your blog post for the seven links blogging idea – one which encourages bloggers to talk about some of their older blog posts and share who they follow and read. I’ve also read Dan Slee’s post on the same, full of more inspiration.,

Not normally my thing but it’s good to do things differently.

So what seven links from back in my blog  do I want to share with you under the chosen categories

1 My Most Beautiful Post: Perhaps curious is a better word for Why doesn’t government have reservists. It was written  just after Christmas 2008 at the time the Labour government was pouring cash into the economy to try and see us through a recession.  The question provoked wonderful, intelligent responses in the comments section, 2 years later the post prompted an invitation to meet Nat Wei  (hello Nat) and was re-vamped for the world of big society.  It’s beauty?  Simple half finished ideas shared is one of the joys of blogging.

2 My most popular post: Which flip should I buy,  I thought it would date quickly – but I still stand by the suggestions to help social reporters be efficient and effective. Why so popular?  Probably because it answers a question lots of people are asking.

3 My Most Controversial Post: Not sure I’m really trying to be so much of that,  so possibly this dig at what I consider to be the daft idea of Local TV – encouraged by William Perrin.

4 My Most Helpful Post: The thing I seem to say most often is please keep it simple.  I hope that helps.

5 A Post Whose Success Surprised Me: This was the post when I set out plans for the first social media surgery aimed at supporting community and voluntary organisations in Birmingham.  Interestingly we were being egged on by fellow Birmingham Bloggers Group member Tom Watson who asked us what we were planning.  From this has grown this website and surgeries in more than 70 places in the uk and at least 5 other countries.  We have 400 people registered as volunteer helpers and 12oo who are receiving help. As a reminder though it was Pete Ashton who coined the phrase and the approach as a way of describing the one to one sessions he offered to potential customers.

6 A Post I Feel didn’t get the Attention it Deserved. This is a tricky category because I reckon most posts get the attention they deserve.  This one on using how conversational cities are as a measure of urban health I thought could be worth a bit more something or other.

7 The Post that I am Most Proud of: Simon Berry, Bob Geldoff, Colalife the pope and condoms was a post I wrote whilst at the  G20 conference in London – Why proud?  It was great to be invited there as a blogger (the first time bloggers had been invited to such a global summit), it was great to be in a room a few feet from Obama – but better still the most useful thing I could think of doing with that all that lovely access was to help Simon further his Colalife plans

Who I’m tagging next:

There are so many people I could add here but let me try:

John Popham for his tireless pursuit of the cause of social media surgeries.

Chris Unitt because he really does read the whole internet so we need not.

Hadley Beeman because she seems to be able to invent things and make them happen.

Dave Briggs because he’s written so much stuff this will be an impossible task and probably get on his nerves.

Steph Jennings for the joy of her finding her voice

Why so?  Well Podnosh is one of the partner organisations in the Brighton bid along with Demsoc and Public-i.

Creative councils:

ambition over the next two years is to work with a small group of pioneering local authorities across England and Wales and their partners to develop, implement and spread transformational new approaches to meeting some of the biggest medium and long-term challenges facing communities and local services.

Put simply our proposal will work on taking online and offline civic conversation and digitally connecting that into local public service decision making in a concrete way.

Thanks very much to Anthony Zacharzewski, Catherine Howe and Paul Brewer for getting things to this stage.

What next?  More work will be done on the final 17, with the hope of much more significant investment in 5 of the ideas.

The other 16 on the long list are:

• Bristol
• Cambridgeshire
• Cornwall
• Derbyshire
• Essex
• London Borough of Havering
• London Borough of Islington
• Leicester
• Monmouthshire
• Reading
• Rossendale
• Rotherham
• Stoke on Trent
• Westminster
• Wigan
• York

You can find and engage will all 137 ideas on simpl.

Chris Taggart is one of the main energy bundles behind real practical progress in open data in the UK.  besides starting to scrape local government websites to create the the remarkable openlylocal, and  then casually setting up open charities (open data for information about charities) he has also been working on making information about business more freely available,

Open Corporates – he tells me – has reached quite a milestone:

A few hours ago, OpenCorporates tipped over the 20 million companies mark (with information on 40 million statutory filings too). Traffic is doubling roughly every 3 months, and all without VC backing.

We’re pretty pleased with all this, and couldn’t have done this without the open data community, who’ve helped with writing scrapers, giving advice and generally being there for us.

central birmingham social media surgery

We do various forms of bespoke paid for training for all sorts of people in the third sector, government, housing associations and others,  but every month we also give free help for local active citizens.

We organise a free social media surgery in Central Birmingham.

The aim is to help local community and voluntary organisations get free help to understand how social media can advance their cause. The help is provided free of charge by volunteer “surgeons”,  many of whom have considerable experience of blogging and using tools like facebook, twitter and flickr.

We liase with the fine people at The Studio (who lend us the space for free) and organise things, plus turn up an help.

The surgeries are not for businesses, people who work in funded statutory bodies or politicians (bless them all anyway) .  Instead they are volunteers helping volunteers, or voluntary groups.

The spread of surgeries

We started these in October 2008 alongside a whole group of friends from the Birmingham bloggers group.  Now the idea has spread to more than 60 other places in the UK plus 5 other countries and they are organised through a site we’ve built to simplify running surgeries.  They have also now formed part of our business, a way in which we help organisations develop their own skills, the skills of the people they work with and then keep track of the benefits of using social media in a civic way.

This month the 1,500th person signed up to for one of 71 social media surgeries established since  2008,  nearly 400 of those are volunteering to share their skills, the rest from community groups and charities across the country.

If you’re a vol org from brum and want some help sign up here (there’s also a new one in Oscott organised by Andy Mabbett ).  If you’re from else where browse for your nearest surgery.

Last week, we worked with a group of people from museums, archives and arts organisations from across the West Midlands to help them develop their existing social media activity and to think how they can increase the level and impact of their social media work. We met at the Wolverhampton Archives, in the fantastically restored Molineux Hotel Building.

Emma Cook, Museum Development Officer for Birmingham, the Black Country and Telford & Wrekin has posted the discussions:

• Social media – what inspires us – culture, museum and other work
• Social media projects the group have worked on and are most proud of
• What shall we do next using social media?

A proper cup of tea by James Shade on flickr

I often say this about social media surgeries: please keep it simple.

Why?  Because the most important single thing about a surgery is that it should be there.

Being there is a core part of supporting communities.  Month after month they know you’ll be there, they get used to it, they get used to the relaxed format and they come for help, come for ideas, come for connections, come back to offer help.

It is just a truth that something is more likely to happen if it’s simple.  A cup of tea with a friend is much more likely to happen than a dinner party.  A social media surgery is that cup of tea, easy informal, friendly.

Sometimes I see people wanting to run surgeries but getting into dinner party mode: trying to get all the partners on board first, guarantee that a certain number of people will turn up, thinking about handout sheets, trying to decide if someone is expert enough to be a surgeon, paying to book a room, worrying about feeding people, thinking it has to be in a library or a public building etc etc etc.

All the while they are doing this, the surgery isn’t there; it doesn’t exist.

The local community and voluntary organisations could have been turning up month after month in their ones and twos (or maybe dozens) getting help.  But that didn’t happen because it had become complicated in the minds of the people who wanted to start the surgery.

A couple of years ago I wrote a recipe for a basic surgery but now I’d like to simplify it.

I think you need:

1. a free room where there is wifi and you can buy or blag a drink  (cafe is perfect)
2. a surgery manager – the person who’s happy to choose a time and date and check with the people at the venue that it’s ok with them.  On the day they welcome people, introduce them and  just make sure people are ok.
3. at least one surgeon (can overlap with manager in the weeny ones)  and hopefully at least one person from a local community and voluntary group who wants some help
4. zero expectations – high hopes can kill enthusiasm. Expect nothing and be delighted by what does happen.

That’s it – anyone can organise that – you can get one up and running tomorrow if you want.

So please keep it simple.  Simplicity is usually the difference between a surgery being there or not.

——

Update.

This response to this post made me smile:

for original tweets see here and here

Photo by Glenn Wood

Toby Blume, of Urban Forum and Paul Evans ran a session on data visualisation and visualising policy (more on that in this previous post).

Partway through the discussion, one particular issue really grabbed my attention. There was some frustration from some local authority officers about how difficult it is to actually make a visualisation or to communicate issues visually. It went something like this:

“This stuff is really hard. I want a tool that will let me put my data in and will give me a nice visualisation back.”

After a few responses – useful suggestions such as starting with Google Spreadsheets or Fusion Tables – the frustration with the steep learning curve came out, and Michael Grimes refocused the room with this nugget of sense:

“The process of creation [for a data visualisation] is important. It’s about how we communicate accurately with the information we have.”

And Michael got me thinking… do local authority officers expect making a data visualisation to be a straightforward process? Should it be easier? Are the available tools not serving those new to visualisation?

Or, and this is my thinking, there’s a false expectation that visualising data is easy. The JFDI attitude prevalent in other areas of digital tools for local government may have created false expectations on ease of access to visualisation.

Other digital tools in the social web made for publishing content – such as free blog platforms, Twitter, Facebook Pages or sharing video on YouTube – are relatively straightforward to get started with and local authorities are using these tools to great effect already.

But ease of access to tools, having the ability to publish or the skills to find your way around a blog platform doesn’t necessarily mean you can communicate effectively. Also, you can’t learn to write well or communicate with other people by spending an afternoon reading blog posts on the subject. These are skills that take time to build up and are achieved through practice, experimentation and, frankly, well… work or experience.

Making an effective data visualisation of a civic issue or communicating policy ideas visually to help other people understand the issues is an involved process:

• How should it be done?
• Who decides what the message is?
• Who ensures the data is accurate?
• Who makes the visualisation?
• Where is the visualisation shared for maximum effect?

The process of creating a visualisation requires a variety of skills:

• Handling tabular data
• Some understanding of statistics
• Research and analysis
• Understanding people, communicating ideas and storytelling with data
• Visual design understanding and software knowledge

Let’s look at a few examples and try and dissect them a little.

How many households are like yours?

The New York Times published this interactive data visualisation which enables you to explore the different types of American households and see how these households have changed over time.

View full size image (png, 29kb) | Published by New York Times, 17 June 2011

This visualisation is a nice mix of charts, illustration and a simple user interface for users to select the household makeup to retrieve data on. Nice work – easy to understand – and an approach I could see being useful for UK local authority officers and elected members, particularly if similar UK demographic data at a more local level could be used.

Also note that four people were involved in creating this visualisation (Jeremy White, Ford Fessenden, Sergio Pecanha and Matthew Ericson).

Local apprenticeship data

Closer to home, the West Midlands Regional Observatory (disclaimer, my former employer) produced a set of visualisations on supply of and demand for apprenticeships in West Midlands local authority districts. The idea was to present the data in a single-page dashboard style for use by local authority chief executives and business leaders.

Birmingham apprenticeships dashboard by West Midlands Regional Observatory, January 2011

I’ve shown this project as I think it’s a nice example of what you can achieve with good communication and technical skills in Excel – skills readily available in local authorities. This visualisation was created using the tools the organisation to hand – MS Excel and Publisher – with no extra graphics software.

Roundup and identifying skills

My response to the room at LocalGovCamp was:

Don’t beat yourself up with false expectations that you should be able to handle all of these areas on your own. It’s a rare person who combines all these skills. Graphic design, illustration, communication and statistical analysis are established long-standing disciplines. It’s unrealistic to expect yourself to quickly develop these skills together without a period of learning and practice.

Instead, find these skills distributed across a local authority in different people – and bring them together in an agile way when you want to create a visualisation.

Some more suggestions from the room are in Paul Evans’ slides, quoted here:

• Review required skills for LocalGov employment
• Co-ordinate visualisation skills within local government better
• Lower expectations on corporate style – go for authenticity rather than branding
• Encourage people other than formal employees to present information – it’s more authentic – enable and curate rather than ‘just create’
• Make a clearer link between participation and decision making
• Make organisations more permissive in comms terns – making everything go through the corporate filter doesn’t work
• When we inform – say WHY we’re informing
• Curate walk-throughs of how people do good data visualisation – dotgovlabls/skunkworks
• Visual media surgeries!

A wizard-driven approach to visualisation

There was also talk in the room about a desire for a wizard-based tool to walk the user through creating a visualisation, with tips and recommendations suggested at relevant points in the creation process.

Have you used anything like this? Do you think such a tool would be useful?

Related links

• Improving data visualisation for the public sector
• My bookmarked resources, tools and examples of visualisation
• Google Spreadsheet – an early attempt to compare featuresets of visualisation tools – feel free to edit this with any useful tools you find
• debategraph.org – visualising debate and conversation rather than data
• 22 free tools for data visualisation and analysis
• Visual tools and applications (via visualisationmagazine)
• Visual Camp group on Our Society

Toby Blume runs Urban Forum, a charity helping community groups and local people influence what happens in their area. Toby is interested in understanding how we can make policy and data understandable to help people engage with decisions that affect them and to help them make informed choices.

Toby facilitated a session, alongside Paul Evans (here are Paul’s slides) on visualising data and policy at LocalGovCamp last Saturday in Birmingham.

In this video, Toby talks about the Visual Camp event he organised in May 2011, which brought together policy makers, developers and designers with citizens, community groups and people working on service frontlines  to find creative ways to stimulate debate, understand different needs of different audiences, and how we can better present ideas in more visual or accessible ways.

In the LocalGovCamp session, Toby emphasised how much of the visualisation debate experienced so far has been focused on data, how we make it accessible to people and the tools to enable citizens to make use of data more easily – and less focus on how we visualise policy. We can articulate the essence of policies through visualisation using stories or pictures – such as Big Society or community rights or electoral reform.

Without this, Toby feels it’s difficult to expect citizens to engage in policy making in a meaningful way. Visualisation can be a way to entice people to engage in debating on decisions that affect them.

Tessy Britton is an inspiration and so is Maurice Specht. Tessy got to me to write a chapter on social media surgeries for Hand Made – her book on new community culture and  militant optimists. Maurice ‘dragged’ me over to Holland to talk about the work we do to government, housing associations and community groups.

From that has emerged the “Community Lover’s Guide To The Universe”  and we’re editing the Birmingham edition.  Sort of like the Grassroots Channel but with better pictures (and a book).  Let Tessy explain:

A few weeks ago Maurice Specht turned to me on the way to Schiphol airport and said ‘So when are we going to bring out a Hand Made for Rotterdam?’.

What a brilliant suggestion!

Since then the idea has really taken off with 12 community enthusiasts already volunteering to edit special local editions – collectively now called the Community Lover’s Guide To The Universe. Since we brought out Hand Made last August the number of people-led projects has continued to grow and we wanted to explore both the common themes, but also the unique cultural ideas and interpretations from all parts of the world.

We also wanted to start to show how places that are buzzing with community activity and projects are amazing places to live, increasingly more amazing than places with cool architecture or luxury shops. Community brings places alive, gives us new and interesting ways to contribute and connect … and there are signs already that people are finding places that have this creativity and excitement going on highly desirable.

Community can’t be mass produced and it can’t be ‘delivered’. But in rising numbers there are a lot of very excitable people just getting on and making and shaping their local communities for themselves. This series of books will create the opportunity for them to tell their stories, which in turn we hope will encourage other people to put aside any hesitations they might have and get more involved in their neighbourhoods.

So I’ll be doing one of my favourite things -  chuntering my way through the wonders of Birmingham, asking for 800 words or so and loveley pics. No one’s getting paid for this, but I hope you’ll join in.

Who should I talk to – where is the new community culture in this city and who are the militants optimists?

We brought them together as part of the work we have being doing with the BBC to encourage stronger links and better understanding between mainstream news and hyperlocal blogging.  The BBC team n Coventry was keen to reach out to a broad range of people in their patch with an interest in social media.

It was run as a very simple unconference – with those present setting the agenda for what turned into 3 separate 45 minute conversations on:

• Tools and techniques and policies around social media
• News and emergencies
• Community and getting local

I didn’t manage to capture all that was said – but here are some bits that floated across my attention.  Please add any more you remember in the comments.

Tools techniques and policies around social media

This had a couple of senior officers from West mids Police, West Mids Fire Service and head of comms at Warwickshire Police plus Ally Hook from Coventry City Council and BBC journalists – here are my bullet points

• Police using their own iphones -  policy perspective – how to buy the right equipment?
• Gordon Scobbie when at West Midlands police-  why do we need a specific policy when we allow out policy to engage on a daily basis.   We have enough trust in them to do that.
• Over arching social media guidelines that really refer to other policies – also how Coventry City Council  does it.
• If you go out on the street you learn about body language – people need to learn the mores of social media.  Etiquette should be taught, not the specific tools.
• Warwickshire police very much to be convinced of the value.
• Colleagues automatically think social media savvy public servants are techy and saddo – they don’t understand we are trying to engage with the community – and telling people what we do on a daily basis.

News and emergencies

This was the smallest group – journalists and the head of comms at Coventry city Council mostly (no uniformed folk to talk about coordinating emergencies and coverage!)  One key point really:

• In emergencies agree a twitter hashtag quickly between newsrooms, police, fire council etc
• Resilience team  it would help for them to agree to use social media.\

Community and getting local

This was the group I spent least time with.  Things that I remember are:

• Skilling up active citizens to use social media will help create local pools of activity which public services can join
• These things are not very hard to do – sometimes it is just about showing people how easy it is.
• Police finding they can connect with lots of people, but not always in the righ places, is there critical mass at neighbourhood level.  If not is it worth doing?
• Skill up your own staff to allow them to skill up others
• Only 6 Warwickshire councillors were on twitter.  Sometimes you can’t even e-mail a town councillor.

There was much more said in this group – please feel free to add in the comments.

Who came:

• Rupinder Singh, NA
  Website: http://rupindersinghwrite.blogspot.com/2011_01_01_archive.html
  Blog: http://rupindersinghwrite.blogspot.com/2011_01_01_archive.html 

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• Marian McNamee, BBC Coventry + Warwickshire
  

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• Rebecca Clarke, SWC Print
  Website: http://Www.swcprint.co.uk
  Blog: http://Www.swcprint.co.uk 

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• Ali Bushnell, Coventry University
  Website: http://www.coventry.ac.uk
  Blog: http://www.abfabali.blogspot.com 

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• Paul Coxon, Warwickshire County Council
  Blog: http://audioboo.fm/Paul_coxon_81 

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• Fran Collingham, coventry city council
  Website: http://www.coventry.gov.uk 

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• Robin Morley, BBC English Regions New Media
  Website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/england/ 

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• Nicki Bradley, Coventry City Council
  Website: http://www.coventry.gov.uk 

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• Moira Rawlings, BBC Coventry and Warwickshire
  

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• Tracie Kilbey, Earlsdon WI/Ministry of Justice
  Website: http://www.earlsdonwi.com
  Blog: http://www.earlsdon.info 

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• Johanne Thomas, Homes and Communities Agency
  

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• Afzal Hussain, Purple Patch Communications
  Website: http://purplepatchcommunications.com 

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• Angela Tellyn, C&W Chamber of Commerce
  Website: http://cw-chamber.co.uk 

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• Carl Baldacchino, Warwickshire Police
  Website: http://warwickshire.police.uk 

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• Dan Essex, Shilton Parish Council
  Blog: http://www.shiltonparishcouncil.blogspot.com 

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• Karen Ramsay-smith
  Website: http://flavors.me/kaz_ram 

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• Keith Portman, West Midlands Police
  Blog: http://inspwestmidspol.blogspot.com/ 

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• Alastair Orencas, Coventry Police aka WMP
  Website: http://www.twitter.com/Coventry_Police 

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• Kate Sahota
  Blog: http://808kate808.wordpress.com 

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• Simon Shilton, West midlands fire service
  Website: http://WMFS.net 

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• Kerry Blakeman, West Midlands Police
  Website: www.coventrypolice.org.uk 

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• Mike Downes, whatsinKenilworth
  Website: http://whatsinKenilworth.com
  Blog: http://www.themikedownespage.com/ 

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• Alison Hook
  

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• Vanessa Pearce, BBC
  

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• Jeremy Pollock, BBC Coventry and Warwickshire
  

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• Susie Rack, BBC
  Website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/coventry 

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• Nick Booth, Podnosh
  Blog: http://www.podnosh.com

Stans Cafe

A theatre company in Birmngham is exploring the small things it can do to make the city better,

On a microcosmic level, how can an individual improve life for the collective whole? What small change can one person effect that touches the lives of many? What if, in this City of a million people, everyone took just one minute each day to tidy, dust, mop or polish a square of communal space. How would our citadel shine then?

Stan’s Cafe has been looking around its home City and spotting small things that could make it a better place. Realizing how easy it would be to step in and take on a few of these little tasks the company is under taking a series of performances to improve things.

On 24th May the company will position itself at the Arrivals Gate at Terminal 1 of Birmingham International Airport to provide a warm welcome for visitors and valued citizens returning home.

On 25th May the company will be providing a friendly concierge service for the taxi rank at Snow Hill Station during peak periods.

These are the first two in a planed sequence of actions. If you would like to help either by volunteering your time to this project or by submitting your suggestions for future acts of improvement we would be delighted to hear from you.

Together With Love We Will Make This Citadel Glorious.

N.B. As of the end of September Stan’s Cafe will cease to be funded by Birmingham City Council.

Interesting.

Corian Huhenholtz-Sasse and Rinske van Noortwijk

Meet Rinske van Noortwijk and Corian Hugenholtz-Sasse  – they make wishes come true.

I met them both in Rotterdam, invited through the wonderful Maurice Specht to speak to the Association of Initiative Brokers ( @inimakelaar )  in Holland, organised by Rinske.

Two days before, Tessy Britton and I had been in The Hague speaking to senior civil servants from Dutch central government.  They kept asking us what they could do to help citizens do the simpler things that made sense  in their communities. Scale-ability was constantly on their lips.

I was urging them to be careful.  Stepping back, getting out of the way is one way government can help citizens just get things done.  Find simple ways to give people small amounts of no string attached help was the other – what I call “learn how to slip someone a quiet tenner”.

Militant Optimists and New Radicals

Tessy wanted something more practical.  She wanted government to support the people who have the skills to nurture community, to connect people, to amplify what is possible in communities.  The people David Barrie calls Militant Optimists, the sort of people who appear on the Grassroots Channel and Tessy brings together through Hand Made.

She wants government to recognise and support the people who follow here 12 rules for new radicals. here are the first three compared with older form of community organising:

RULE 1

Alinsky (Old/Conflict): “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood.

Britton (New/Collaborate): “Power involves creating spaces where ideas, energy and people are connected together from within all sections of the community and local government to create positive communities” This involves careful facilitation and creating safe spaces where everyone can share their opinions and contribute positively.  There is no enemy in a community.

RULE 2

Alinsky (Old/Conflict): “Never go outside the expertise of your people.” It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone.

Britton (New/Collaborative): “Always reject ignorance in favour of building skills and knowledge.” There are many new ideas and methods that result in creative solutions that make people and communities stronger.

RULE 3

Alinsky (Old/Conflict): “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.

Britton (New/Collaborative): “Whenever possible, instigate dialogue, so that everyone shares the same knowledge base to design solutions.” Look for ways to increase security, trust and responsibility.

Rinske and Corian are just those sort of people: militant optimist, new radicals:

For nearly a decade they have been running Greenwish:

Greenwish means more space for sustainable initiative. We encourage people to implement their sustainable ideas. If people do what they really care about, people are very passionate. It is this force that will really accelerate sustainable development.
Greenwish promotes the interest of government, civil society and business in social initiatives. We want to see more cooperation and more is learned from social initiative.
Greenwish support promoters with advice and contacts. We represent the interests of promoters to policymakers and politicians. Greenwish advises government, civil society and business in what they can do for initiatives and vice versa

Originally they were funded to connect community ideas to the people who can help make those ideas happen.  Sometimes they might connect a citizen to a government programme, sometimes to a private supporter, sometimes to another citizen – often to all three.   Each year these brokers make around 200 things happen that would otherwise have gone by the wayside.  They know people, have ideas, are networked and like finding the easiest ways to get things going.

The First First Followers

They call themselves the first followers – the first people to stand beside someone and say “that’s I good idea, I’m on your side”

“Society is buzzing with ideas”

Listen to them talk about it here:

Key points form the interview are:

• We met many people with good ideas to contribute to the community who need a little bit of help. We ask them waht do you need to make your next step and can we help you.
• We’re interested in what gets people enthusiastic and why they are doing it.
• Government funded for some time, now in transition.
• Value is being known and trusted by people government wants to work with, it is still difficult to find government that works that way.
• It can take patience to make an idea real. Over time enthusiasm builds
• 200 initiatives supported, health, food, energy, participation
• Common currency is passion, it is always a struggle.
• People in places always have ideas – we get ideas easily. “Society is buzzing with ideas.”
• We are the first believers for anyone with a crazy idea to help society
• Looking for new concepts for making our added value clear to the government, Tessy Britton gave me new ideas of how we should make that more clear.  Big Society is a new way for government to stop thinking for citizens, instead allow citizens to think for themselves.
• There are so many ways to make what is happening visible through social media without having to push the information. Ask them to make themselves visible.

See also

http://bigsocietyinrotterdam.wordpress.com/

http://podnosh.com/blog/2011/05/03/grassroots-channel-podcast-willem-guizeman-on-being-there-slow-steady-community-building-in-rotterdam/

http://thrivingtoo.typepad.com/thriving_too/2011/05/for-the-love-of-public-space-guerrila-gardening-and-public-responsibilities.html

http://thrivingtoo.typepad.com/thriving_too/2011/04/big-society-artists-transformation-and-collaboration.html

Nol and Willem - Gray Man Bald Man

It’s odd how when you look away your friends seem to go and do some really interesting stuff. I first met Willem Guizeman in 2005 when he was in Birmingham planning some work on the Residents university for the Residents for Regeneration.  Then he was fronting a Europe wide organisation which was working with the EU.

Last month we saw each other again in The Hague,  his home town.  Now Willem is doing something much more modest.

Because he is close to retirement and doesn’t need to earn big money he and his friend Nol are simply spending time in what they call the Stagehuis Schilderswijk – an apartment they rent on a street corner in a poorer and multi racial area of the city.

“It’s a great way to become an old man..”

Listen to what he has to say:

Tessy has written about Willem’s thinking here and hopefully he will write a chapter for a new version of the Hand Made book.  Tessy says:

As well as doing activities, their presence is clearly having other effects.  I am currently very focused on side-effects – ones that we measure, but also ones that we don’t think to pay much attention to.  It is one of the reasons I am so intent on developing new creative and collaborative methods (see some further discussion on this on Matthew Taylor’s blog), rather than conflict driven ones.  Conflict has a negative wake, often fracturing communities regardless of the results.

I suggest that Willem’s and Nol’s benign presence is creating bridging social capital and a contagious and soothing balm in this neighbourhood.  The position of their building is literally forming a bridge between 2 faiths.  Nick Booth described their presence as ‘taking the tensions away’.  They are certainly changing how the neighbourhood ‘feels’ – their gentle approach to leadership is having an impact – one that emerges slowly from the connections and relationships that their social space has created.

Grey Man Bald Man.

The locals call Nol Grey Man and Willem Bald Man – a sign of the affection they have garnered by simply Being There.  I want to share some of things I picked up from talking to Willem:

1. Willem and Nol just plan to be in the neighbourhood.  they just want to be there – nothing more.  They are not concerned about funding (they are both ok money-wise) so that means they don’t need to be concerned too much about what funders might want.   For Willem this is the calm culmination of a career spent working in regeneration and community.
2. They build trust through conversation and being helpful.  Their apartment has big windows and a table where people can sit and drink tea together.  They take their time and help when people ask for it.
3. The outcomes are very personal. For Willem seeing two young women from different backgrounds laughing together is an outcome – a success.  Certainly bigger things ahppen – but he doesn’t bank on them happening.

His approach chimes with the one we have learnt to adopt for social media surgeries – encourage people to be patient and have low expectations – high expectations lead to disappointment and a sense of failure.  Being patient and taking your time allows people ina  community to get used to your work being there.

Thanks to Maurice Specht for organising our trip over  (we have been many times before) – more stories from Holland to come.

It is really one of the reasons I love social media surgeries – they make me happy and they seem to make others happy too.

This was the first Dudley Social Media Surgery, organised by the remorseless energy of Melissa Guest from Dudley CVS and Lorna.  We had been involved with some work helping them pland and organise the surgery and some social reporter training as part of the Black Country Take Part Pathfinder programme.

30 people turned up and the proportion of surgeons to patients was just right.  This rather dark video shows just how busy and absorbed people were:

I shared the evening with two wonderful people.  Michael Dennis  turned up thinking he was there to get some help for the St Thomas Community Network - but because he does web development  he got wordpress ganged into being a surgeon.  It turned out Michael also run a successful ning network for foster carers.

Michael worked with Jackie McGuirk from Dudley Lions.

He helped her understand why social media might help their work.  She said up a blog and wrote here first post (and this jackie is your first trackback).  The worst part for Michael seemed to me interviewing them both:

Great evening and a great start to surgeries in Dudley.

Yesterday, Podnosh and Substrakt collaborated under the SpeedData banner to run the evening ideas session at Making (and Saving) Money With Open Data in Birmingham.

Small groups and individuals worked together to develop their ideas for useful, commercial and social open data projects. At the end, each group pitched their idea to a judging panel: Dave Harte, Award Leader, MA Social Media at Birmingham City University and Simon Jenner of Adventures in Business and founder of Urban Coffee Company.

To help the groups consider all aspects of an open data project, we provided five checkpoints staffed with experts:

1. The idea – helping people refine their ideas or come up with an initial idea.
2. The data – where to find data, how to get data and who to speak to get the data.
3. The technology – refining the data into suitable forms, using tools and understanding how to build the project.
4. The visual – design, visualisation and media to present the project to users.
5. The pitch – preparing and delivering your open data project pitch.

So… come up with your idea. Get help refining it. Discover data sources. Understand the technological approach and tools available. See how the idea can be visually represented effectively. Practice a pitch in readiness for the panel of judges.

Ideas

James Cattell from Birmingham City Council housing presented his anonymised heat map showing variance in rent arrears across social housing owned by the council. This looked promising as an internal tool to understand payment patterns in different areas of the city and to target efforts or different approaches appropriately to those areas.

Kevin Yuan Bin pitched his idea to combine data around construction product specifications, such as windows, doors and central heating, for building contractors to access online. His idea (this is my interpretation – the language barrier was a little difficult to cross) is that building constructors could use such a service to make smarter purchasing decisions and increase efficiency in new builds. Manufacturers’ specification data is currently available in weighty printed catalogues or as a PDF on the manufacturer’s website. Kevin envisaged a service pulling such data together from across manufacturers.

Stuart Parker – co-founder of Connect for Good and We Share Stuff – discussed his experimental work on mapping third places. Stuart has been using Foursquare to ‘check in’ to venues that he considers to be third places (places in community settings that are separate from the usual social environments of home and work). Stuart discussed his aim of building up a map of third places that isolated people can use to find comfortable, conversational and neutral places where they can interact with others in a local community.

Stuart already has a Google Map up and running. Mark Steadman of Substrakt, along with Rob Styles and Richard Wallis from Talis, talked about possible syntaxes for check-ins that could feed useful information into a spreadsheet or database. Venue title, address, postcode, some kind of category, satisfaction ratings and tips, if structured, could then be output to an application for people to use and make informed choices on what third places are near them and what to expect if they visited. Thinking of a structure now could also aid crowd-sourcing the third place venue data, by giving the hyperlocal community a means of using existing Foursquare check-ins to contribute to the third place database.

We were fortunate to be visited by a group of French students and their tutors. They came up with two interesting ideas and pitched each to the judges. The first was a portal to aid investment choices related to land and buildings in the EU. The portal would pull in demographic, economic and political data feeds, combining them to form an indicator of investment potential. One visualisation idea was a map of the 20 cities in the EU with the highest potential for industrial investment.

The second group of French students pitched a networking application to connect graduate entrepreneurs with startup incubators and industry-specific clusters.

The winning pitch came from Chris Waring, creative lead for Kasabi at Talis. He pitched an idea to help patients find their best hospital for treatment using an application based on open government data.

The helpers

The session generated some great discussion and ideas for practical, useful applications. Thanks to all of the checkpoint experts and judges who helped to develop the ideas:

• Vicky Sargent and Joe Tibbetts from Boilerhouse Media
• Matthew Green from Policy Works
• Rob Styles and Richard Wallis from Talis
• Mark Steadman and Ryan Dean-Corke of Substrakt
• Martin Sullivan – formerly Research Assistant at the West Midlands Regional Observatory
• Becky Cadwallader, Creative Director at In Cahoots
• Simon Jenner of Adventures in Business and founder of Urban Coffee Company

We were also supported by Andrew Mackenzie and Andy Mabbett (Andy collected bookmarks from the day too).

Lastly, thanks Dave Harte, organiser of the day and session facilitator extraordinaire for asking us to run the evening session.

This time our work is funded through the support Birmingham City Council gives to Neighbourhood Forums in the city . The details are below and you can download them here.  If you want to come contact:

Karen Cheney,

Community Empowerment Lead – Birmingham City Council

Telephone – 0121 675 8519

Email – Karen_Cheney@birmingham.gov.uk

Karen will give places to neighbourhood forums first – then other active citizens from Birmingham.  If there’s room we may also have places for Council officers – it’s good to learn together!

If you want to know whether it’s worth it some feedback from our last session:

“Downright Inspiring. The training was just fantastic (and this is from someone with very high expectations)” Lorna Prescott Dosti.

“I thoroughly enjoyed it and it gave me the confidence to do more” Nicki Burrows  Dudley CVS Dosti.  Lorna Precott came to the same course in the Black Country and told us:

“[I'm] thinking about how best to use social media the next time I organise an event. When I get my smart phone I’ll try making some short pieces and work with my colleagues to upload on my blog and/or our own changes website.”  Sue Gorbing – Changes UK

Sue and Lorna both did some top social reporting at the Take Part Final Celebration Event Last Month – following on from their training.

—-

April 12^th and 19^th (you need to be able to do both dates)

Time 4.30pm – 7.30pm

Venue- Fazeley Studios,191 Fazeley Street,Digbeth,B5 5SE

What is social reporting?

Social reporting is about quick and simple ways of sharing what’s going on around you with other people, using social media tools. Sharing information, getting a message across.

A social reporter might shoot a simple video about their neighbourhood, make notes at a meeting or conference and share those with other people via the web as it happens. The point of social reporting is that it’s easy to do, and it’s fun.

What to expect

• We will give you a warm welcome and a cuppa on arrival, and another cuppa during the session
• There will be Max 12 participants and 2 trainers.
• The training format is relaxed and informal.
• This is hands-on training – expect to start having a go!
• There will be laptops and other equipment such as Flips available for you to use.

If you have a laptop, camera or any other equipment of your own you may want to use, please bring it along.

Outline of training sessions

This training is run over two half days. Trainees must attend both sessions.

Day One: Tuesday, 12th April   4.30pm – 7.30pm

• Theory and principles of being a social reporter: blogging,
  Twitter, easy and fast use of video, audio and photographs.
• Start blogging

Day two Tuesday, 19^th April    4.30pm – 7.30pm

• Learn how to use audio or video in your social reporting
• Hands on recording and reviewing

Who is it for?

Neighbourhood Forums and Community Groups plus Active Citizens are prioritised for this training

If there are any spare places then these can be taken up by BCC members of staff

Training resources

There will be laptops and other equipment available for you to use. If you have a laptop, camera or any other equipment of your own you may want to use, please bring it along.

Finding the venue

There is car parking on the roadside although it is quite busy. Nearest Car Park is the one opposite The Custard Factory. Approx 20 mins if walking from the city centre

Contact

For more information and to book a place on the training please contact:

Karen Cheney

Community Empowerment Lead – Birmingham City Council

Telephone – 0121 675 8519

Email – Karen_Cheney@birmingham.gov.uk

APPLICATIONS NEED TO BE RETURNED TO KAREN BY 7^TH APRIL 2011

Diane Smith of Stafford Direct

Diane Smith has used the social network Stafford Direct to starts to challenge the way the mainstream media was telling the Story of the enquiry into deaths at the local hospital. Below she explains what she ste out to do – why she felt the mainstream media was getting things so wrong and what keeps here going:

Ian Little of the Tenbury Wells blog said the reason he got into blogging was the town council was not very transparent with closed meetings – local paper would cover the council from one point of view, my stories tended to be from the opposite point of view.

Should stuff be edited or not?

Mike Rawlins of Pits and Pots in Stoke-on-Trent talked about how they can go through stages where they break loads of stories.  He talked about how they will run interviews unedited, rather than choosing a soundbite or even a particular line.  This prompted quite a discussion.

Oliver Evans of the  Silhilian wants things tight – journlaistic standards applied. Most people think the same think is interesting he said, although other argued that the web is niche and people dpo find the longer interview interesting.  It is also a matter of creating a record.

Interesting observation from Ciara Redman who works on Inside OUt and for some of their longer form programmes at the BBC. She noted that when they run longer interviews – near rushes online or on their sport programme the audience love them.  Thoughts of archive.

Pits and Pots gets 6000 unique visits and long interviews are popular.

Motives and is it journalism:

Ian Little – said his news values are now different.  The way I used write the story would have been with a headline and now I tend to give the information and let the reader decide.  Rcent story about town council up for election – some town councillors have missed 60% of meetings.   A form of data journalism. Councillors don’t say anything.

There are many big issues in communites that never get dealt with – because the story moves on,

Diane Smith mentions slow journalism -  which is really something akin to what she does on the hospital story – assembling facts, disentangling distortion  But with some much information being offered how do you help the reader ow do help them navigate .  Diane says she is very sympathetic to journalists. The hospital story is an enormously complicated story about a scientific issue that no one understood.

Diane isn’t after audience particularly or hits. She wants to put the record straight and help a community conenct.

Ian:  What I went in to sort out was financial transparency – we’re almost there. They are now publishing ina  meaninglful way – understood by human being.

We don’t care about audience, we care about changing things.

Throughout Matthew Eltringham of the BBC was one person asking questions along with Vanessa Pearce from BBC Coventry and Warwickshire.   They were particularly interested in motivations beyond audience.   Below Matthew Explains his reaction to the conversation:

Table Three discussing hyperlocal blogs and the BBC - source podnosh on flickr

Access and archives

Bloggers mentioned copyright as the main barrier to exposing content in the BBC archives to a wider, and local, audience.

Frustrated when historical archives are copyrighted, preventing you sharing it with your audience. One volunteer wants to share old photos of areas around Birmingham city centre for others to reminisce, share stories or simply for curiousity. Copyrighted BBC content, in the iPlayer for example, prevents content being put in the public space for comment, discussion and consumption.

There is also a wealth of great archive content by the BBC, spanning decades of local media, that isn’t yet online. There’s lots of interest in this.

Video of Nicky Getgood talking with Robin Morley asking the BBC archives to be made available online for reuse by community websites:

Potential Support from the BBC

Useful support from the BBC at local level could be in attending councillors meetings. One blogger mentioned issue related to libraries closing in Warwickshire yet councillors were not being held to account at public meetings or the meetings were poorly attended. Exposure through BBC coverage could help raise these issues and show people that there is a place where they can make their voice heard.

Robin mentioned the BBC’s journalism training resources, previously only available internally to staff, are shared online at the BBC College of Journalism.

And how can local bloggers support the BBC? (After all, this event was about supporting each other!)

One journalism student mentioned offering to cover events for the local BBC team. Go and cover it for them. This can kickstart a relationship that will benefit both the blogger and BBC over time.

Engagement – how to

After running a neighbourhood watch scheme for 3 years, Mark started a hyperlocal site for Lightmoor Village, Shropshire. He wanted to know how to engage people, how to find out where these groups meet and what they think. How do others promote their blog – especially to communities who may not be active online?

Some ideas from the table:

Physically go where the audience will be – community halls, council run facilities, church halls, libraries. Put posters with your site’s URL  on notice boards.

Carry business cards with URL.

If you were arranging a party, where would you put up posters?

Go to events, take photos and videos to show them, return to their events, be friendly. Print out blog posts and stick them on the wall!

Produce content your site audience are interested in – be relevant.

Print your site’s URL on beermats and put them out in your local pub.

Make it easy for people to subscribe to new posts by email. For people newly online, email is one of the first things they learn. For example, those running sites on WordPress.com can use the subscribe widget. Google Feedburner can turn your RSS feed into email notifications.

Connect with people at Silver Surfers‘ events taking place 16-20 May 2011.

Let your community see it as “their news outlet”. Encourage contributions. Draw in others’ content. Get them to think: “This is our site.”

Tracey Thorne’s work with Hands on Handsworth (set up and supported by us her at Podnosh) is a great example of tying together blogging, print and engaging a wide audience. As well as running the blog, she ran the Big Handsworth Conversation and with us the social media surgeries to skill up citizen journalists (aged 10-80) to write about their area, and produced a printed community magazine to engage people offline. The best posts on the blog are used in the quarterly magazine. and citizen journalists feel they can help to change the perception of their area.

Having a magazine and being online has really helped people know what we do. These places – we might not know about them – but they all have interesting people and stories to tell. Blogs and magazines help us change perceptions of places.

Story on disused building – people go and comment [find link] – and they tell the story. It’s an empowering platform for them to tell their story of what it’s really like in Handsworth.

Technology

MD: eg police officer using twitcam – people can ask qus via twitter, get responses fr officer, cam recorded, then archived.

Twitcam – find example of police officer taking questions on Twitter and responding live via Twitcam. (Vanessa Pearce BBC mentioned this too.)

Video

Bloggers want to reuse video stories by BBC and be supported by BBC.

Doesn’t feel govt’s local tv will work on its own; might work as part of a website.

BBC’s experiments with video and analytics – short bursts work well 2mins max.

Don’t forget text

Increasingly seen bloggers dropping text, replacing it with video and audio. These work great in the web browser, but are not so easy to watch on mobile devices, especially with limited data. Text works well on mobile. Video and audio should complement text.

Make electronic text pleasurable to read. Ebooks like the Kindle synchronise across readers and phones. They are also accessible – good text resizing, easy to use, less intimidating to those new to tech.

Untapped potential with Kindle? Just for books at the moment. Could creatively be used for news, hyperlocal blogs.

Links to blogs

• shropshirelive.com
• http://www.wv11.co.uk – Wednesfield, Wolverhampton
• digbeth.org – Digbeth, Birmingham
• http://hollymoor.wordpress.com/ – B31, Hollymoor, Northfield, Longbridge and surrounding areas, Birmingham
• http://pitsnpots.co.uk/ – Stoke-on-Trent
• http://6towns.co.uk/ – Stoke-on-Trent
• http://alittlebitofstone.com/ – Stone, Staffordshire
• http://thelichfieldblog.co.uk/ – Lichfield
• http://www.whatsinkenilworth.com/ – Kenilworth, Warwickshire
• http://tenburywells.blogspot.com/ – Tenbury Wells, Worcestershire
• http://lightmoorlife.wordpress.com/ – Lightmoor Village, Shropshire
• http://www.karmadillo.co.uk/b31/ – Northfield, Longbridge, Frankley, Rubery and Rednal in Birmingham
• http://lovekingsheath.co.uk/- Kings Heath, Birmingham
• http://welovemoseley.co.uk/ – Moseley, Birmingham
• http://northbrum.tumblr.com/ – It’s Grim Up North Brum
• http://kingsheathen.co.uk/ – Kings Heath, Birmingham
• http://www.birminghamitsnotshit.co.uk/ – Birmingham
• http://thesilhillian.blogspot.com/ – Solihull, Knowle, Dorridge and Bentley Heath
• http://etredebirmingham.wordpress.com/ – Birmingham
• http://hednesfordnews.journallocal.co.uk/ – Hednesford, Staffordshire
• http://b72suttoncoldfield.co.uk/ – Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham
• http://handsonhandsworth.info/

• Dearth of stuff on housing.  is it because the information is inaccessible to difficult to collect or is it that it isn’t very interesting.
• What is the next big thing like a crime map – could it be from housing?  Unique Property Reference Number – if these were freed up that would make a huge difference.
• Land registry business model is at issue for how we can know stuff about the homes we live in.  You have to pay to put information and then people also pay to take information out!  We need a sensible charge when information is put in – and non to take it out.
• that sort of change comes from “very dull pressures” around –  lumping them into one data corporation is the hope that this sort itself out.
• Public land is difficult to get hold of.  CLG currently trying to pull together a database of public owned land.  PROD Public request to order Disposal being potentially revamped.
• Work being done to empower residents to use online tools to hold power to account. cc’ing the world.   Birmingham civic dashboard mentioned – where are they spending the most money on housing repairs.
• Supported housing has different issues – needs to have very good engagement re learning disabilities and other tenants – maybe not so good in older people’s housing?
• We need to skill up active citizens to understand digital tech better – that will help them appreciate the value of data.
• If you release more information you create demand for information – which is both a problem and an opportunity.
• general needs you tend not to engage with residents unless they are being a nuisance – rent areas, anti social behaviour.
• Dont argue that people are no online – this is 2011 and we need a glass half full view of just how many people are online.
• Potential advantages to wi-fi ing neighbourhoods to improve organisational efficiency and allow local community web activity to flourish.
• No standard required for web access to be included in home.
• Choice based letting where you could put data about properties.
• Report available on voids – re- let times rents etc. But that’s neighbourhood wide information.
• Affordability maps – combine with private information?
• Re let times to let people know how long they will have to wait on that waiting list.
• Mapumental
• People want to spend time with their clients rather than throw data into a computer.

• Data from the Care Quality Commission,  conversations about scarping data from the site, told that individuals can query the site and find individual care homes, but it’s not set up so you can systematically compare.  Will shortly be available as raw data on scraperwiki. Individual reports are only available as pdfs – which causes a huge amount of work for data users.
• Reports have lots of words in them – you cant compare all 28 outcomes.
• Issues between health and social care – mainly to do with battles over budgets in local authorities plus changes in the structure of the health service.  Inspection regime is changing.
• Huge problems with health service and different council services being able to share information. Systems are not compatible – and proprietary formats.  One local authority talked of 100 systems – no indicators any more so no more performance staff.  Who would port this information out.
• Illustration of how local government officers suddenly have access to information when their councils publish information as open data –  they can find with google in a way that they couldn’t with internal systems.

• Have we read the information revolution strategy from the department of health?  Big themes on choice – hospital you go to, you gp, treatments.
• For social care people want to know how nice the staff are.
• Car parking is a particular problem with hospitals
• Private contractors provided by the four big companies that can’t be FOI’d and even joint ventures –  some people said that you can FOI if they’re delivering a public service.
• From January local authorities are expected to publish new contracts.
• Re health…discussion on the potential value of combining data re health outcomes with some information on taxi firms – quality fo service from transport etc etc.
• How do you collate all this information together – individual contracts, care homes quality.
• Supporting people ( eg ) outcomes data (now stopped )  captured information for 200,000 people who risked being homelessness and the national insurance numbers –  shows the revolving door problems re social services, drug action team etc etc.
• Worrying theme of data sets being less available because of cost cutting.
• Do we need contracts which require transparency.
• Is there consistency in licensing from some of the government open data sites?
• NHS in general
• Should GP practices release performance data etc
• Problems of protecting the most vulnerable people from con artists etc.
• Data protection act still stands.
• Problem of the benefits or otherwise of revealing detailed health data.

Notes on his comments at Making a Difference with Data.

• data is essential as part of our scrutiny role.
• we find getting hold of data takes up a good chunk of our time – and our support staff.
• generally we have problems – officials often reluctant to release raw data to members and meners of the public
• I’ve started to request that all data I ask for goes on the London datastore so it’s shared [great thing to do]
• changing the way we make policy – all data we use to make policy is getting shared, which speeds up the analysis of the policy by scrutiny easier.
• Sharing tree information across London changed tree planting approach – but three years ago it is still like pulling teeth to release the data again.
• need open and complete information on publicly owned land.
• on average it costs £300 to answer and Assembly members question.  With open data fewer questions will be asked and so less admin needs to happen – he hopes.

We spent a great morning working with a group of active citizens from the Black Country Take Part Pathfinder programme, coordinated by Dosti.

The aim was to introduce social reporting – quick and simple ways of sharing what’s going on around you with other people, using social media tools. Sharing information; getting a message across.

A social reporter might shoot a simple video about their neighbourhood. She might make notes at a meeting or conference and share notes with other people online while the event is taking place.

This post rounds up discussion and links created on the day.

Everyone in the room started their own blog. They used their blogs to practice social reporting by posting about what they were learning in the training. Here are the blogs (and respective Twitter accounts):

• nickiburrows.blogspot.com / @nickidosti
• lornaprescott.posterous.com / @dosticen
• sueg24.tumblr.com / @SuzieG24
• nikkishhh.tumblr.com / @nichole_harris
• stl-wv.tumblr.com / @stlfromwv
• jillbed.tumblr.com / @jillbed
• shireoak.wordpress.com
• saiqa123.posterous.com / @saiqaaslam

Social reporting with audio

Lorna Prescott recorded two interviews, publishing them online immediately using the Audioboo app on her phone. Have a listen to Nichole and Jasmene talk about the Women Take Part programme:

And here are Jill Bedford’s thoughts on the social reporter training:

Discussion

It was great to see participants exploring the tools, making choices about what suited them and discussing along the way. On having something to say:

“Is what I have to say interesting enough to add to the sum total [of knowledge online]?”

“Taking an interest in other people is the surest way of people being interested you.”

“Get stuff on to the web. Shovel stuff. [Social reporting]  is about them and what’s happening around you – what they’re saying – not about your tone or style.”

Getting started

“Very straightforward. I have posted text, a photo and a video [this morning].”

Social reporting doesn’t have to take the traditional, formal approach (listen, make notes, rewrite at length, edit, publish).

“Relax, capture and share it.”

“So there are different ways of reporting. Not just one way.”

Difficulties and barriers

“It’s difficult to write down what’s taking place in the room while listening at the same time.”

“Too complicated for older people. I’m concerned how older people will access social media. Will they be up to speed with this kind of interaction?”

“Need for one-to-one coaching. Space to learn, ask questions and work at their own pace.”

“Editing is a barrier. Capture and publish. Next week we’ll learn how to summarise content without needing to edit.”

Tools

One person “found it really easy to write what you were saying” using Posterous on iPhone. We looked at how to insert hyperlinks in text because it is not obvious how to do this in the Posterous for iPhone app. Lorna and Gavin used Twitter to collaborate – and did a quick post on their respective blogs to test different methods.

Another person gave up using Google’s Blogger mentioning “too much faff; too much like creating a website.” She decided to use Tumblr instead.

Saiqa started using Google Reader to monitor RSS feeds. She also used the MobileRSS app to read RSS feeds on her phone.

Links roundup

• Twitter list – Black Country Take Part Pathfinder group
• Storify – create stories using social media
• Audioboo – record and upload audio using your phone
• Posterous – blog platform; you can add posts by email
• Tumblr – simple blog platform
• WordPress – blog platform

Final thoughts

“Excited by it now.”

“Excited and frustrated when things don’t work. Comforting to know there is no right or wrong way.”

“Remember this is a conversation. You need to listen. Two qualities on the web that work best are generosity and usefulness. Think – how can you help someone else?”

“Don’t drop into the mindset of being a journalist. They’re writing from an angle and want you to notice their story. Social reporters are just getting the story out there objectively. Remember generosity and usefulness.”

Public money can and does get wasted in the unruly rush to the end of March.  You could improve that.

In September we trained a group of citizens to use Flip cameras, so that they would be able to record events as part of Birmingham Local Democracy Week website. We documented this over at the Local Democracy Week website, and last week we sat down with some of them for a chat about how it all went and what they were able to capture.

One of the most striking things which came out of the conversation was how many of the active citizens interviewed think that what they do is unremarkable. But some of the stories which came out of this, like Claire Spencer’s interview with Local Hearts Award winner Luke McClean, show how dedicated so many people are to improving their communities.

Claire also noted that for people unfamiliar being with filmed, they would need to first be put at ease – this is where the conversations off camera can feed into what’s eventually recorded. There were other interview experiences too, including Glyn Selwyn’s chat with MP for Selly Oak Steve McCabe. There are active citizens who want to have conversations with MPs and councillors, and the group thought that carrying a Flip camera was likely to get them more intimate access.

For Glyn, with a training background in professional media, this meant unlearning the rules he’d previously learned – being lo-fi and “shot on sight” instead of edited, the immediacy of the medium and the flexibility of social media allows everyone to be a media outlet. Anarchic and uncontrived, this is how the process was described by Glyn, who was delighted that there’s a clear story running through his videos about litter problems in the Bournbrook area of Selly Oak. Ben McPhillips went further by saying that the videos don’t have to be perfect because they aren’t supposed to be polished film-making, which really takes the pressure off.

Dario Silvestro, above, talked about his own experience of using the Flips for Voice is Power, Birmingham’s Children and Young People’s Parliament. He commented on the instant messages that are able to be captured, getting to the heart of what people have to say, and says that the cameras have been used to record thoughts at training events and a conference on domestic abuse, calling the stories “raw and powerful”.

It’s so simple to add video content to sites such as Posterous, and this is what Dario has done with ViP’s video footage, making short clips for instant engagement and giving young people cameras so that they can make videos for their peers. Without much need for extensive training, the simplicity of the process is what makes it so easy and effective a tool to use, says Dario.

As well as the immediacy, Yvonne Wager said that videos give a sense of context missing from still photos, which helps to reflect what’s going on in the local area. One of the key messages which came out of the session was that active citizens and hyperlocal blogs are filling a gap by doing this and writing about the issues which matter to local people. Social media sites such as Posterous are cleaner, faster, elegant and allow total control, and can be updated via email, while council workers struggle to get flashy but big websites updated.

As Karen Caine pointed out, one really important use of videos is that they can be used as evidence, with real people acting as witnesses by talking about issues which concern them; these can then be showed to decision-makers and in doing so they become powerful tools – they don’t necessarily even have to be used online but can be used in other ways and for other opportunities.

There were some issues raised too – especially the large file sizes of videos recorded on the HD Flip (we always recommend that you buy the standard definition Flip), which made uploading difficult, while the people who work for councils found that they were unable to install the FlipShare software on their work computers. Many of the group found it a learning process, figuring out what might be the best approach (whether to describe what’s happening or simply ask questions), how to balance sound, and how much to talk when interviewing.

The group also wondered if there is scope for training public sector workers how to use this technology to get messages out to the public and communities quickly, especially when updating official websites can be difficult and time-consuming.

Ben and Claire also noted that people they’d interviewed were apprehensive about the recordings being made public, which points to the need for a debate about what is ‘public’. There were some suggestions that there needs to be a cultural shift or breaking down of ‘traditional’ mindsets if people are to understand the process and be willing to become part of it, but also recognition that there’s sometimes a tension when these moments in time are then published online.

Everyone agreed that the Flip looks friendlier than a phone, and is simple to teach people how to use, even technophobes. People can see the value of it – organisations and neighbourhood forums are purchasing cameras to document meetings, and Dario has bought cameras for use with ViP while Karen has used them to show people doing their jobs and capturing the value of what they do.

The kind of training and social media surgeries run by Podnosh equip the network of people and organisations with the skills so that they in turn can share the message wider. And that’s what all this should be about.

John Samuels had a good day on Saturday. Not only did he become a grandfather (again) he became a blogger for the first time. We ran a social media surgery as part of the first Local by Social event – the Midlands one. (Local by Social is a Futuregov and IDeA programme to get local government using the web in neighbourhoods)

John set up  http://unityactionforum.wordpress.com/ to help give his group a voice.

We seek to represent black and ethic interests in the WEHM – the Wood End, Hanley Green and Manor Farm neighbourhood in North East Coventry.

Whilst another group produced  http://deedmore.blogspot.com/

“..a small residents group wanting share information about what’s happening. up to date news and gossip”

Sadly I have a favourite.  

For example, we have been working Tracey Thorne,  the neighbourhood manager in Handsworth, to help her blog about her neighbourhood.  We built this site for her and gave her training and support. In less than a year she’s posted more than 100 posts and there have been nearly 70 comments.  Tracey’s site has been visited by nearly 5000 different people this year, with them looking at around 32,000 pages.  Two thirds of those visits are from the Uk – and of those more than half are people in Birmingham.

This is testament net to Tracey’s determination make her site work ann to the benefits of thinking long term – Sites like hers are a journery – sometimes you can do that on your onw – sometiems you need the support and encouragement of others.

We have also run a short series of 4 social media surgeries with Tracey.  The outcome of that has been

• Wilkes Green Residents Association
• Women’s Help Centre
• Ghetto2glama

plus a couple more that are coming on soon.  As Tracey puts it:

I really wish them luck with these blogs and encourage them to blog as much as they can about Handsworth…the more we all blog about it the more we raise the profile and allow the rest of the world to see the wonderful spirit of people in Handsworth

Keep these sites going will take commitment and I suspect some extra support.  But I love helping people head down this path. If you think we can help get your community groups online then contact us.

Birmingham Creative City's Media Circus Award

Thank you to everyone who voted for Social Media Surgeries to win in the Creative Birmingham Invisible City’s Media Circus awards.  The public voted in a  number of categories and you lot voted the surgeries top in most helpful.  Thank you.  Here’s a bit more on the awards

Media Circus 2010 from Karl Binder on Vimeo.

1. Write a meaningful headline

Headlines are one of the most important parts of your blog – not just for readers but for sites like Google which use it to decide what your blog post is about.

When you write a blog post, the headline should be as meaningful and factual as possible. ‘An event this weekend’ for example, tells us very little. ‘Council meeting at Sparkhill Community Centre’ is much better. If someone is searching for ‘Sparkhill’ or ‘council meeting’ or ‘community centre’ they are much more likely to find it.

A good technique is to put yourself in the place of someone looking for the information you’re publishing. Will they use the same jargon as you, or a more common term? Try to include in your headline the terms that people will use for their search.

2. Write meaningful content

Google will not just look at your headline when categorising a blog post. It will pay particular attention to your first paragraph, any subheadings, bold and italic text, and links.

Try to include important names, places and terms in those places. It not only makes it easier for Google, but also for readers, who will often look to the first par, subheadings, bold and italic text and links for the key information they’re seeking.

3. Categorise and tag your content

Once you’ve finished your post, make sure you categorise and tag it. The boxes to do that are to the right of your post as you write it (instructions for how to do this can be found here).

Categories and tags help Google to more accurately classify your content – but they also make it easier to find for people browsing your site. If something is categorised ‘Herefordshire’, for example, when someone has finished reading it they can click on the ‘Herefordshire’ category link to see all the other posts in that category.

4. Add an image – and an alternative description

An increasing number of people are using image searches to find content. When writing a post think if you have an image that suits it. If so, add it in (instructions can be found here) and make sure that the ‘alternative description’ box is filled with something meaningful and factual – this is the text that Google uses to categorise it.

5. Add text summaries to audio, images or video

Search engines like Google cannot hear audio or see photos or video, so they look around it to try to figure out what the content is about. If you are publishing audio or video include an introductory paragraph that explains who is speaking, where it was filmed, and what it is about. Make sure you include key places, names and phrases that people might use to find this content.

As an aside, if your video is hosted on YouTube or your images on Flickr, make sure you have a description on that site as well – and a link to the blog. More people use YouTube to search than use Yahoo! so it’s another way that people can find your information.

Mentions cholera and data – John Sow discovering it was water born through mashing up info and maps.

Open data changes behaviour and mentions Govspark – which Podnosh worked on!

Mentions Lichfield, Windsor, Redditch – local authorities opening up data.

We have to do fundamental and dull work.  Open source and open licenses.

Find the open government license here.

Nigel slagging of train operators for wanting to control the timtable.  This is the kind of culture shit we need – people knwoing when the trains run is more important that making a few quid out of and app.

Mentions Asborometer.

Public data collected in pulbics name will be published

It will be timeley and quite fine grained

The data you hold may be dull and dready to you but of great interest of a few

It will be public and businesses driving new rights to data and extensions of Freedom of Information.

Worked hard on getting location data = boundaries etc.

Turns out bus stops are not where the database says they  are [open street map helps fix this ]

COINS means you begin to get a clamour for better information on whrre money is spent – some of that will come from Local Authorities. – mentions Windsor and Maidenhead.

Mentions Local Data Panel and Openlylocal. Data Guidance here.

It is not about:

An intelligent community is not about size or wealth or the super speed of your internet connection. Not about hi tech companies or research institutes, twitterati.

It is about what they do, how they do it and why.:

1 Starts with broadband. – You have to have it, it’s like oxygen. Without it you can’t drive your own future.

2 Focus on building a skilled and knowledgeable workforce.

3 Requires innovation, especially in small business – “everyone can play in the innovation game so long as we are connected”

4 Digital inclusion is important.  An intelligent community makes sure that the people who’s lives are difficult don’t have harder loves.  They do it because it is the morally right thing to do and because leaving people out costs money.  It’s moral and practical.

5 They tell the story of themselves and what is going on.

Needs

• Focussed work on making things happen
• Stopping doing things that dont work
• Brave intelligent politicians who are good at collaborating
• Doing for a reason:  Why?  Do it for you children

The angels hide in the details:

Story of Dundee in Scotland.

The formed the Dundee Partnership and started with frontline staff together who worked together, meetings projects, discucssions.  They built trust.

They discovered something unusual, that they were creating jobs in new areas in new sectors – software, animation, computer games.  They fanned that flame.  New degree programmes, research centres, IP policies etc… Promoted.

Dare to be Digital Competition to encourage games innovation.

First: who are your users?

Before you can do this you need a clear idea of who your users are. Are they other people in your organisation? Potential partners in other organisations? Existing users of a particular service? People who might be interested in using it in future?

It’s likely that it’s more than one of the above, and you might write different posts for different people.

1. Link to something interesting or useful to your users

If there’s a website, article or report that you think your users might find useful or interesting, blog about it.

This needn’t take you more than a couple of minutes: the blog post doesn’t need to be long – just a one-paragraph explanation and a link will do. But simply providing regular links to useful material saves your users time and establishes you as a knowledgeable source. It also helps you remember useful material yourself – and makes it easy to find again if you need to.

2. Compile a list of useful resources

You may already have lists of useful resources elsewhere that you could publish online. Or there may be one that you need to compile. Or there may be a question that you’re regularly asked and these resources answer it neatly.

This again needn’t take long to write. A simple ’5 useful websites for help with setting up a business’ or ’3 webpages that explain Big Society’ is just an extension of blogging a link to one useful resource. You might just provide the list, or include brief summaries.

A good tip is to invite the user to add any more they might know of – this can introduce you to new useful resources.

3. Write a how-to

If you ever have to explain to someone how to do something, or have to find out how to do something, why not publish that guidance on the blog? One of the largest categories of searches online are ‘How to…’ questions, so it’s likely that others will be asking the same question.

If you’re already doing the work this will be no more than a copy-and-paste job – and will save you time having to repeat the advice in future.

Alternatively, if you’ve asked someone else how to do something it may be worth asking if you can publish their advice on the blog as a ‘guest post’.

And of course you should invite users to add their own tips or advice in the comments.

4. Interview someone interesting

Having a blog gives you a perfect excuse to make contact with interesting people and ask them questions about what they do or what they think. Whose stories do you think deserve a wider audience? Or that illustrate a point you want to make? Whose advice do you want to seek?

A simple set of questions in an email can provide the basis for a post – try to keep them open (not yes/no questions) and interesting, but useful.

Alternatively, if you’re technically confident you can meet the person and conduct the interview with a small digital camcorder, mobile phone, or digital dictaphone.

5. Preview an event (or events)

What events are coming up in your field? What’s in your inbox or calendar? A quick description and link can take less than a minute if there’s already a webpage for the event. If not then just copy and paste the details from an email or Word document.

One tip is to find the venue on Google Maps and link to that map (guidance on how to do that here)

6. Summarise an event

If you’ve attended an event it’s likely that there will be other attendees who want to see what people thought about it – or people who wanted to attend but couldn’t. Blogging about the event serves both – and also helps you keep a record of what happened.

If people have made a presentation you might also ask for a copy of it and upload it to a site such as Slideshare (asking permission first).

7. Invite contributions to something you’re working on

You may be about to put together a report – publish a simple blog post explaining what you’re doing and saying any ideas or contacts would be welcome. This approach can suggest new ways of seeing issues, introduce you to new contacts and new sources of information.

If you have time to provide updates on your progress that can also nudge people to provide further leads and help.

8. Publish a report – in parts

Once the report is finished it’s always worth publishing on your blog – but don’t just publish the whole thing in its entirety.

Instead, publish it in thematic parts. Do one post publishing the section on education, for example, and another on commerce. Different people with different interests will then more easily find – and read – the parts that interest them, and comment accordingly.

For example, someone who is interested in “Fitness facilities in Selly Oak” might find that part of the report without realising that one was even being prepared. It’s much less likely they would stumble upon it by searching for the full “Report on health and wellbeing in Birmingham”.

Make sure you publish as text rather than linking to a PDF or Word document. Text will be easier for people to search and find, while PDFs and Word documents present extra barriers both for users and for search engines.

• G-Cloud will save us £1.2 billion a year, says government CIO – ComputerworldUK.com – Also on procurement… “SMEs can’t afford to bid. In my opinion, that stifles innovation.
• Ordnance Survey Blog » GeoVation gets £150,000 funding boost – The funding will be used to support geography based ventures that have the greatest potential to transform how we travel – so get your thinking caps on!
• Council’s red tape cut as 4700 whitehall targets slashed – Local government – Communities and Local Government – instead of the National Indicator Set, and instead of every single department's endless demands that you measure this, that or the other, there's just going to be one list of every bit of data that Government needs."
• Pickles scraps more national targets » Communities » 24dash.com – National Indicators used to monitor council performance will be replaced with an agreed single list of Whitehall data requirements for local government. New transparency arrangements, CLG says, will make sure councils remain accountable to local people.
• DCMS Transparency Data – This transparency site is a data repository for the Department and its Arms Length Bodies.

I’ve just started a blog for the BBC on hyperlocal websites.  It emerged from a meeting which Will Perrin organised between local Birmingham bloggers, the BBC’s Head of English Regions David Holdsworth and Laura Ellis – both of whom had been my bosses when I was at the Beeb.

We were discussing the best way for the BBC to connect with an understand the growing movement of very local, or hyperlocal, blogs.   I suggested at the time the BBC started blogging about these sites.  The why is pretty straightforward.

Something  I had learnt back in 2005 when I started the Grassroots Channel Podcast (which told the stories of active citizens in Birmingham) is how making media about people is a great way to establish relationships. Through interviewing people for a podcast two things happened, I established stronger relationships with them, but they also started connecting with each other.  The simple idea of understanding each other better and, to a degree, sharing a platform.

It was the case I was making last week at the new currency event.  Storytelling is about connecting people and we hope to help do that through this blog.  We will concentrate on the wider West Midlands region and the sort of blogs that interest me are outlined in the first post here. Besides taking an interest in the bloggers, what they write and why they do it, I’ll also be talking to a number of BBC newsrooms and production teams and introducing people.

I’m really looking forward to this.  I have a passion for both the BBC and for people who use various forms of social media for civic good.  I think they’re natural bedfellows.  We shall see.

Speed Data website

On Thursday we’re running the second Speed Data event as part of the Hello Digital Conference.

The first was held in April which brought together a wonderful range of people.  That was a structured half day with a nice lunch – this time we have 90 minutes to run what I can best describe as gardeners question time, but for data.

If you’re from the public sector and want to ask questions about what you should do to open up data, or look for ideas about who to collaborate with or what esle you can do with all those spreadsheets and management information then please come along.  Find out who’ll be there from here. Sign up to say you’re coming here.

Or just pitch up …

Thursday 21st October
16:30 – 18:00

Room 5, Zellig  (the swanky newly refurbished bit at the front of the Custard Factory)
The Custard Factory
Gibb Street
Birmingham
B9 4AA

Speed Data is a informal coalition of data folk which Podnosh organises with Substrakt,

Zellg

No great surprises in here, but a rough transcript of what Eric Pickles is saying:

• We don’t need to waste time defining localism, it will strangle it.
• Don’t salami slice, the old patterns of spencing wont return
• Put everything under the spotlight and ask we do we really need the money to do.
• Do we really need separate, planning, comms or chief executives?
• Waste has shown a lack f respect towards the public and public money.
• Greater transparency will revolutionise the way government works.
• It will say to suppliers that the government is no longer there to be fleeced.
• The public can judge public spending for themselves and perhaps public servants will take greater care when they know there will be an army of armchair auditors checking their working.
• Much more radical:
• Re-examine how every council works. There’s no point in wasting time on restructuring layers of authorities.
• Birmingham is saving £430,000 a year sorting its own post
• Worcestershire has counted 24 agencies working with young people and is looking to cut this down.
• Tests – does it need to be done, does it provide value for money, are we the best people to be doing it.

• It’s not my job to sit behind a desk like a puppet master pulling strings, instead I want to cut away those strings,
• Hammersmith and Fulham came up with 100 bureaucratic burdens they are working against.
• If councils working with residents want to set themselves goals that’s up to them, but National Targets mean councils are working ion this that matter to Whitehall. I’d rather councils tackle local issues.
• A conservative estimate of the total for one local authority area is £7 million across 1500 indicators (including health policing etc)
• Today I am scrapping Local Area Agreements.  It’s up to local councils to keep or dump the indicators as they see fit.
• We will just have one list of every bit of data the government needs from you.
• We will give council’s freedom, power and responsibility.  Stronger say on planning and a central role in the health service.
• The localism bill will go further, through a general power of competence they will be able to do whatever they want to do.  I want to make sure councils can take charge of their own money, borrow against future income, pool budgets across the public sector to tackle social problems. We have freed up £1 billion of ring fenced money.
• I don’t want council’s checking with me on everything, some councils feel they cant do anything without my permission. We need a new culture of action and decisiveness.
• There is going to be a lot less money. I will make sure that you have what you need to tackle problems with new powers.  Local Governments natural instinct is to use innovation to adapt very quickly, most of the smart way to deal with deprivation or housing comes through local government.

See also www.communities.gov.uk/newsstories/localgovernment/1740490

• Machine written sports reports Projects – Stats Monkey – By analyzing changes in Win Probability and Game Scores, the system can pick out the key plays and players from any baseball game. Second, the system includes a library of narrative arcs that describe the main dynamics of baseball games (as well as many other competitions): Was it a come-from-behind win? Back-and-forth the whole way? Did one team jump out in front at the beginning and then sit on its lead? The system uses a decision tree to select the appropriate narrative arc.
• Too much money plays against government 2.0 – government 2.0 is more interesting – and useful – where the are scarce rather than abundant resources.
• The Great Transition: what it means for Local Authorities « Nat Wei’s Blog – make cuts intelligently rather than in a knee jerk fashion, safeguarding effective and connective local community projects and other external suppliers rather than avoiding to make savings closer to home or spinning out functions as mutuals or social enterprises – at least until many of them have been able themselves to transition to a more diversified financial position.
• Community Media Activist: The Spectre of Community and the Big Society – The Big Society, if there is such a thing, or spirit, or programme, will most likely emerge from the evolution of community, and community development, rather than the ideological urgency of a cutback-driven Little State.
• Thriving too: Big Society: Exploring Sustainable Collaborative Service Models – "Collaboration between equals is difficult, between disciplines more so… but between paid professionals and unpaid volunteers very hard indeed. On paper it sounds like ‘just the sort of thing we should be doing’…. But in real life situations, such as the one described, it presents challenges that we don’t know how to overcome…. Yet.

  The challenge is not organisational or even financial… but about how we create frameworks that sustain the *relationships* that are required for collaborative services to flourish."

• ‘Big society’? Let me explain | Ian Birrell | From the Guardian | The Guardian – "At its core, the big society is an attempt to connect the civic institutions that lie between the individual and the state – and these range from the family and neighbourhood to churches, charities, libraries, local schools and hospitals. It is born out of recognition that our centralised state has become too big, too bureaucratic and just too distant to support many of those most in need of help, and that it deters people from playing a more active role in public life."
• Why Facebook’s New Groups Will Change the Way You Use Facebook – the new feature offers an improved signal-to-noise ratio, increased context for communication and a big improvement in user privacy, thanks to respect for the contextual integrity of conversations.
• HyperLocalGovCampWM 1 – How organisations can use social media for internal communication | the albert memorial is still there – "…if you think about it, a workplace blog is effectively a hyperlocal blog – or depending on the nature and size of the organisation, a series of workplace blogs."
• Snowblog – Reflections on Birmingham – "By the way, now that the British Waterways quango is to go, who will sustain the magnificent canal system here?"
• YouTube – Harvey Milk Speech – Harvey Milk Speech

Last Wednesday I spent a great afternoon at Hyperlocal Govcamp West Midlands, an event in Walsall bringing together a mix of local government officials, hyperlocal bloggers and people interested in open data.

I ran a session introducing social media surgeries for voluntary and community groups, looking at how surgeries can help active citizens tell stories and collaborate online.

The session was slanted towards encouraging people to run their own surgeries and to make use of socialmediasurgery.com to promote, manage and evaluate events.

With IT hiccups at the venue, I wasn’t able to show slides or demonstrate the webite so, with Nick’s help, I busked through on the hoof. As it happened, this worked out quite nicely with plenty of discussion.

Here are the slides I had up my sleeve.

One of the ideas we talked about was community groups telling their stories through their own websites specific to a local area or subject, such as health, unemployment or local news.

This continued into a chat with Jason Antoniewicz, a social media student at Birmingham City University. In relation to the surgeries, Jason asked Nick Booth how to avoid the same old story of neglected people not being heard, for example the unemployed or mentally ill:

Jason also asked me what advantages community-based websites have over websites managed by bureaucracies.

You can read more about the Hyperlocal Govcamp day in Paul Bradshaw’s post: ‘Making it findable’ – the creed of the hyperlocal blogger.

Photo credit: Hyperlocal Govcamp West Midlands by Jason Antoniewicz

It isn’t often that you get key thinkers in one place at just the right time, but that’s what’s happening in a couple of weeks (20 – 21st October) here in Birmingham.

Charles Leadbeater, the author of We Think, Richard Allan of Facebook, Professor Nigel Shadbolt of Data.gov.uk are just some of the remarkable people who are going to speak at Beyond 2010, an ambitious 2 days that will “show you how to deliver more for less with digital technologies”.

That we are hosting such people is one measure that Birmingham – and much of the rest of the West Midlands – really is ahead of other places when it comes to digital media and civic good. I’ll be talking about just that, sharing a platform  with Will Perrin, Karen Cheney and Robert Hardy to talk about the connection between digital technology and Big Society.

As Glyn Evans from Birmingham City Council puts it…

It is not the time to wait and see what happens -we need to be more proactive and make sure that we are leading the debate about how to realise the efficiencies and make the reforms to manage the cuts most effectively.

It may sound like I’m on commission.  I’m not, although you get a discount if you use this link.

I had some time at the Conservative Party Conference last week and learnt a great deal from the people I met. Whatever bit of the public sector you are from,  new ideas are where your future lies. Digital Birmingham has been planning this for a year: it just happens to be the right thing at the right time.

The final session of the afternoon focused on what bloggers wanted from council officials. The subject itself says a lot about just how the power relationship between communications professionals and hyperlocal bloggers has changed.

As one attendee from a police authority commented: “We have to treat questions from members of the public in the same way as from the press.” The ability to publish is no longer unique. Forget about citizen journalists – we are all citizens now.

A distributed, engaged audience

Indeed, Dan Slee from Walsall Council – a former print journalist with the local paper – noted the difference between the numbers of readers of the local paper (22,000) and those on Facebook (197,000), and that one of the attractions of local bloggers from a communications perspective was their strong presence on social networks. He also bemoaned the inability to get an accurate figure on the numbers reading a particular newspaper – “There are no Google Analytics for newspapers”.

Another attendee noted that many people buy a newspaper to read the crossword, but that “People read blogs because they want information.”

And a third explained why she released information about a story to a hyperlocal blog in preference to the local paper. The paper, she said, wouldn’t publish the story until the following day. And the hyperlocal blog had demonstrated that it “cared about the issue”, while the paper would only be interested in a ‘story’.

The blogger’s creed: make information findable

Meanwhile I noticed a recurring theme from the bloggers’ perspective on their role – something unique to online journalism, and which I’ve commented on before: the duty to make things findable.

Bloggers repeatedly referred to information about the local democratic process that was hidden away on council websites – and which they worked hard to make available and interesting to their community. Council meeting times; minutes; planning meetings.

They did not see their role as ‘telling a story’ so much as communicating important details about what was happening in their area.

At one point someone said that the bloggers were there to “hold power to account”. Not always in the active sense of posing difficult questions – but also in making the invisible visible; the obscure findable.

By doing so they are not only shedding a light on the workings of local government, but transferring power. “This is your responsibility”, it says – not “This is my story”.

Chris Taggart and Paul Bradshaw talking about somehting very clever - click on the image to go to the original

Open data: not just findable, but linkable

Later I spoke to Chris Taggart, the creator of OpenlyLocal, a platform for making data about local councils accessible and linkable. He told me about councilllors’ webpages that could only be seen when accessed from another page on their council website. This made them invisible to Google, and impossible for anyone else to link to.

Then there were the pages on suppliers that could only be accessed by filling out a form – again, making it invisible if you were searching for details on that supplier using Google.

Chris saw a large part of his role in making that information visible, so that it could be linked to other information. What companies is that councillor a director of? Who won that contract, and what other contracts do they hold? How much investment is being made in my area? And in what fields?

In a networked age, making information findable – and linkable – is a public service. It is not about ‘easy win’ stories on who finishes at the bottom of a given table, aimed to sell papers. It is about giving readers the information – and the tools – to ask the questions that matter to them (some might call that Big Society). It’s an acknowledgement of the shift in power from publisher to user, serving a community rather than shouting at them. The open data movement – covered throughout the day at the event – will give that shift a whole new dimension. And it’s bloggers, once again, who are at the forefront of that.

• An open letter to David Cameron, part one of three « Francesca Elston – I have worked in a large Government department, and I believe the following: firstly, that it would have been possible to take 25% of the costs out without harming the service delivery in the long term (that caveat’s important); secondly, that it might have been possible to improve the service in doing so, and thirdly that there were people within that organisation who knew exactly where the 25% lay.
• Government data will be machine readable, Maude pledges | Politics | guardian.co.uk – Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude told the Conservative party conference in Birmingham that the Freedom of Information Act will be amended so that all data released through FoI must be in a reusable and machine readable format.
• BBC News – The ‘night riders’ who help the NHS – The volunteer service, which is available in the south-east of England, offers a free out-of-hours service to a number of NHS hospitals and can be asked to carry anything urgently needed from baby milk to blood products and X-ray results.
• MaPit – MaPit is our database and web service that maps postcodes and points to current or past administrative area information and polygons for all the United Kingdom.
  Another notable benefit is that this new version has been filled with only totally open data, so you can be secure that you can reuse the data from this site under the minimal terms of the licences given below.
• BBC – dot.Rory – A 16-year-old who turned up at a hacking event a couple of months ago may just have achieved two great things. If Isabell Long’s idea works, it could make a major contribution to getting Whitehall to cut its energy use.

Rory Stewart MP, Professor David Eastwood, Ben Lucas and Professor Helen Sullivan

I’ve just come away from a very thought provoking Big Society discussion hosted by the University of Birmingham and Demos at the Conservative Party Fringe.   I think Rory Stewart MP gave one of the most lucid explanations I’ve yet come across.  Here are my notes

Rory Stewart is the new MP for Penrith and the Borders in Cumbria. His constituency has been one of the pilot areas for “Big Society” – he writes about that here:

Big Society isn’t a Sphinx without a riddle or an excuse for no funding or a mystical construct.

It is clearly not about the government per se, the individual or business, probably not primarily about the voluntary sector. It is about community, particularly about local democracy.  To use a Bhuddist analogy the noble truths might be….

• We have a World dominated by government that is to rigid
• Solution to this is de-centralisation
• The path is through something called the big society

Big Society is not an object so much as an activity, not a funding stream or a pot of money.

Concrete example in Cumbria re rural broadband… attempting to install super fast broadband faster and cheaper than government would do it.  14 to 15 billion would be the government cost. In Cumbria we are breaking into the fibre that runs into schools, creating cabinets and encouraging communities to tap into thoise  Farmers can dig their own trenches bringing prices down to 15% and get it done in 2 years instead of much longer.  Here government provides soft loans – access to infrastructure. The government was never going to be able to do this – communities organised through parishes to give them democratic legitimacy can do this.

Ben Lucas of the 2020 Public Services Trust

My concern is that it could undermine the value of the Big Society idea in it by trying to be two things at one time

• A rhetorical distanceing from the idea that there is no thing as society.
• Also a way of emphasising relative importance of civic society against the role of the state.

Very strongly support much of what lies behind it.  Some people have interpreted it as just about volunteering – it clearly isn’t.   It is partly about re-thinking the role of the state. Social value lies in the quality of the interaction between the state and the citizen, for example if citizens don’t play their part in improving their health it doesn’t matter how good the local hospital is, public services are essentially co-produced.

One of the area of interest for him is how do you link effective social institutions with effective social networks.  Jospeh Rowntree did a piece of work on communities in recession with high levels of unemployment.  The ones that are more resilient are the ones with more community ownership in the neighbourhood.  Questions…

1. How do you finance up front social investment in a recession?
2. Quality of the public realm – how can local authorities not do the obvious things, cutting their non core services – which might
3. What is the role for the voluntary sector – the real future is the creation of new institutions, local mutual, citizen run.

We need to keep a layer of govt that can coordinate at a city region level.  It’s about a balance between localism and the wider neighbourhoods.

Professor Helen Sullivan, Professor of Government and Society at University of Birmingham going to run

a independant Commission by the University of Birmingham in partnership with Demos.  The Commission will draw together the University’s expertise in local government reform and Demos’ work on capabilities and citizenship in order to contribute to the development of a policy agenda that might effectively and fairly empower non-state actors in society.

There’s no doubt the state has become unfashionable again.  Now regarded as at best outmoded and at worst a block to citizen action and enterprise.  Big Society underplays the vital contribution a well resourced state makes to inequality and key issues, such as climate change.

Fails to acknowledge the inter connection between state and civil society.  Investment has become largely from the state, not private philanthropy.  If the state withdraws then the voluntary sector will not automatically fill the gap.

Re thinking the role of the state

1 Working out more precisely what is meant by the big society, a conversation to be had with the public.  What are reasonable expectations citizens have of the state. People have different motivations for engaging in civil action, often citizens are resisting the state, not doing its will.

2 Taking a localist approach -  this is about the quality of democratic politics.  There’s an assumption that consensus is the norm, but politics and conflict are always present. Local government will need to navigate the tension between communities. How will these relationships need re designing, what does it mean for future raining of government officers. Needs a review of local govt finance

3 Role of the central state.  There is a still a case to say we need national mechanism to address inequalities from local conditions.  For example inequalities over age locally.

Damian Hinds MP and Michelle Smith of Barclays talking about Big Society

I’m trying to cover as many Big Society sessions on the Conservative Party Fringe as I can get too -  not least looking for any clarity on what it might mean.

The first one was run by The Citizens Advice Bureau:  Big Society on a Small Budget – can more really be done for less. Notes from a Conservative Party Conference session.  The Panel Was Gillian Guy – Chief Executive of Citizens Advice Bureau,  Damian Hinds – MP for East Hampshire,  Therese Coffey – the MP for Suffolk Central and Michelle Smith, Head of UK Consumer and Community Affairs for Barclays UK Retail Bank and Barclays Corporate.

Sifting through my notes there were a number of things that struck me:

Gillian Guy from CAB explained the extent to which they use volunteers

12.5 million people helped on the web.   20,000 volunteers, already represent a good start to the big society. We want public services to be simpler and we want to the voluntary sector and communities to be trusted.

Damian Hinds outlined what he thought are the key elements which will underpin the Big Society…

Language and the mood is important – as a government we need to show that we are turning to the right people for advice.

Programme of devolution to local councils (when you devolve planning to individual councils you can take more interest)

Direct empowerment, right to bid taking over a community facility

Free schools programme, people now know that they could decide to make their own school

Information revolution, open data the web. – there will be enough people in anyone location to hold power to account

Big Society bank to provide extra finance

Encouraging volunteering – government needs to get its employees out doing volunteering.

Therese Coffey – MP for Suffolk Central key thoughts included:

We need to remove the mentality of the civil service culture.

We need to ensure that government does get out of the way.    Some aspects of the equalities act will hamper organisations trying to deliver the big society.

De-complexify government.  Need to provide some finance. Unemployed should be expected to go out and do some work in the voluntary sector.

The National citizens service is over cautious.

The other risk is there is a vacuum at the moment -  can the third sector flesh out some of the vision please – don’t wait for the pilot areas.

Michelle Smith seem to catch the mood of the room when she talked with real passion about how the volunteering done by Barclays staff benefits neighbourhoods and the business and the staff.  For example…

Half of our staff are actively involved in their communities on a regular basis.  We match charitable giving and fund raising and provide time off .  This improves staff retention and  performance, staff who volunteer are A third more likely to be rated A performers than those who don’t.

Worth listening to this interview….

Very late on Tuesday night I was asked a question on twitter – can you help get a government site up in short order?  The question was prompted by this.

GovSpark is a simply wonderful idea from 16 year old coder Isabell Long that emerged from Emma Mulqueeny’s Young Rewired State.  Isabell wrote last month…

I came up with the idea because the government had just released some live and historical energy consumption data, but it was all held on the respective department websites and not central anywhere. GovSpark aims to be the central website for people to go so that they can see what the energy consumption of a certain department is at that time. The government also have targets to reduce usage by 80% by 2050, so I thought it would be a good tool to show how well one department is doing compared to another department.

Because it was Emma asking we said yes.  Glyn Wintle had already sweated to build an API which ran off live data for energy use in government buildings in Whitehall.  We were given less than a day to help push it across the finishing line by deciding what it ought to look like and making it look that way. Josh Hart coded like a lunatic and the talented and calm Ryan Dean-Corke of Substrakt sorted out some visuals for us.

As the Downing Street website reported this morning…

The Prime Minister has today challenged Whitehall Ministries to compete to slash the energy used in their departmental headquarters over the month of October.

The league table application, called GovSpark, will show data from the 18 Government Real Time Displays. The original prototype for GovSpark was developed by Isabell Long, aged 16, during Young Rewired State 2010, an event run for young developers aged 15-18 working with open government data.

It’s always a pleasure to help something good happen, in fact that’s what we are here for really.  The best bit was a short e-mail from a clearly chuffed Isabell

It looks amazing – I really love it! Everything has finally come together!

In less than a month in total Isabell’s idea has turned into site which is running a blindingly simple competition to help civil servants use less energy.    It gives civil servants the information and incentive to switch things off, or find way to cut emissions.

We can only take a tiny bit of credit for helping.  The site was sponsored and funded by The Stationery Office and the real work, before our last scramble, came from Glyn and Emma Mulqueeny.  Thanks very much to Sarah Marshall for spotting Emma’s cry for help and asking us to get involved.

Birmingham city council is making great strides with the way it uses lightweight web tools (like wordpress) to communicate and create space for conversation.

The first round of the Big City Plan consultation led to a group of us (led by Jon Bounds) producing Big City Plan Talk – an independent volunteer built site designed to encourage online conversation about the council’s plans for the city centre.

Now the council is using a similar approach to make it easier for people to comment on the plan as it evolves. Great step forward.

• The Conservative Party | Get Involved | Social Action – This year's Social Action Project for the Conservative Party Conference will take place in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham.
• Can feed-in tariffs energise the Big Society?: New Start – Your blogs about what’s affecting you in regeneration, econoomic development & sustainable communities – The feed-in tariff presents a big opportunity for many community and voluntary groups and they would be wise to make the most of it.
• OPM Blog: a community for public interest discussions » Big Society and small business – "….where does the private sector sit in all this? For the most part, it gets a walk-on part as either heroic sponsor – the corporate philanthropist that steps in to fund community projects – or moustache-twirling fat cat."
• The Alternative Edinburgh Council Budget Poll – Greener Leith News - – Sadly, the consultation process has already run into problems.
• A simple demand: let us record council meetings « countculture – This is about councillors failing to understand democracy, about the ability to taking the same material and making up your own mind, and critically trying to persuade others of that view.

• Government Should Do its Own Data Homework | Jeni’s Musings – "….we need to work towards a virtuous cycle in which the public sector is rewarded for publishing useful data well. The reward may come from financial savings, from increasing data quality, from better delivery of its remit, or simply from kudos. It doesn’t matter how, but there needs to be some reward, or it just won’t happen."
• editorialgirl » Ah, Bridezilla… we’ve been expecting you – Government and e-mail: ! The assistant was apparently a bit flummoxed, saying, “well, you could email it, but there isn’t much point – I wouldn’t get it til tomorrow anyway”. Why was that, then? It wasn’t even mid afternoon. Had they got problems with their email? “No,” she explained, “all the emails are read at 9 o’clock in the morning, then they’re all printed out and we each get a copy on our desks. So if you email me now, I won’t get it until tomorrow.” He was baffled. Couldn’t she just access her email now? “No, it’s not my email,” she said. “It’s the office email. Only one person has access to it, and she only looks at it at 9 o’clock each morning.” Whu… why? “That’s just the way we do things.” Well, that’s silly, he told her. “Well, it works for us,” she replied. Bonkers."
• Rewired State – For the first quarter the challenges available are likely to be (but we don’t know for sure yet):

  * Building a framework to enable localised civil action (Big Society)
  * Using digital channels to get people online; building network of digital champions and apps to help get people online (Race Online)

• The arts make a contribution to the Big Society in Yorkshire | Arts Council – 'If public funding of the arts is cut too hard, the contribution the sector makes to the Big Society may be in real jeopardy.
• Local council spending over £500: full list of who has published what so far | News | guardian.co.uk – UPDATE, 5:05pm: Government has just published its guidance for local authorities. See the guidance here

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.

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

• Investing in Social Growth: Can the Big Society be more than a slogan? (September 2010) | The Young Foundation – The report warns of the gap between the ambition of the Big Society and the modest proposals currently associated with it, and of the risk that cuts will fall most heavily on innovative social enterprises and small grassroots organisations rather than big public or private ones
• What’s beautiful to you? | Community Spaces – A photography competition is being run by Dezeen, the online architectural and design magazine and The Photographers’ Gallery to find ‘Areas of Outstanding Urban Beauty’.

  The idea behind the competition is to find out what people love about the places where they live.

• Global Voices in English » Russia: Online Cooperation as an Alternative for Government? – The story of how bloggers organised to fight wildfires…. "Yesterday we went to Kulebaki to bring them everything they needed – firefighting equipment, food, protective devices that were purchased with the bloggers' money. Our mission to the “hot spot” was organized by i_cherski, who, as you know, is filling in voluntarily for our temporarily incompetent leadership of the Ministry of Emergency Situations."
• The organisers are coming : RSA Projects – "How much harder will the Big Society organisers find it to engage and motivate communities if, unlike Obama, they are seen as part of the establishment and therefore somehow associated with the very problems they are trying to solve?"
• KnightBlog » Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown Joins World Wide Web Foundation’s Board of Directors – "The World Wide Web Foundation (Web Foundation) today announced that it appointed former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to serve on its Board of Directors. Throughout the world, the Web Foundation leads programs that empower people to use the Web to nurture local economies and improve access to education and information. As a Board member, Brown will primarily advise Web Foundation on ways to involve African communities and leaders in the development of sustainable programs that connect humanity and affect positive change."

• Facing up to the financial facts | birminghamnewsroom.com – Birmingham City Council's Chief Exec Stephen Hughes: "The truth is, that if we are to protect the public from the consequences of these spending reductions, we need revolutionary change in the way we provide services."

  We are going to have to look at ideas that might have seemed inconceivable only a short time ago.

• Slices of soup – towards a new definition of local media | ASH-10 – "….the future of online media looks a lot like soup. There will be carrots and they will be important but on the whole it’ll be a murky and opaque and very hard to perceive as anything other than a whole."
• The 2010 Social Networking Map / Flowtown (@flowtown) – 2010 map of social media
• - ‘Do not sue’ Part II: stories and leads wanted! – an Easy-Waiver (loosely based on what you’d sign to hire a mountain bike, go paintballing etc).
• Your guide to organising a street party or fete – Communities and neighbourhoods – Communities and Local Government – "We want to make it easier for you to hold these sorts of local events, without having to plough through mountains of forms and red tape. So we have produced this simple step by step guide to how to hold a community event in your local area. It includes one simple form for you to use to let your local authority know about your plans."

She had, she told me, persuaded 80 or so scientists from the West Midlands to write a few hundred words in response to the question “what makes you optimistic?” Jenny Uglow (the historian who wrote the brilliant story of the Lunar Society:  The Lunar Men) had agreed to write the foreword.

At the time I thought oh yeh…I was very wrong to doubt Kate, even for a moment.  I’m now working a little with her and she’s one of the most focused and determined people I know.  She has set up a non profit publishing arm, is launching the book at the British Science Festival in Birmingham next month and the collection has become a brilliant reality.

So we now have 81 very clever people and their ideas for the future.  As Jenny Uglow describes it:

“The New Optimists is the most exhilarating of books. It looks to the future, not through rose-tinted glasses, but with a clear vision, aware of difficulties and challenges yet convinced that research and experiment can help the human race to overcome them. It seems entirely right that scientists should step forth and speak out in this way, on the 350th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Society. Right too that the 2010 meeting of the British Science Association should be held in Birmingham, a place that has always been a town of forges and anvils, of making and invention, a crucible of ideas.”

To get a copy go here or here.

• I couldn’t possibly comment: Westminster commercial noise map – experiment with Google Fusion Tables – Will Perrin… "It isn't perfect, but it's easy. If you can use a spreadsheet you can take some real public data and make a map to make a point."
• Reflections on the Birmingham Hacks & Hackers Hackday (#hhhbrum) | Online Journalism Blog – Paul Bradhshaw: "a different skill to that normally practised by journalists – we were looking not for stories but for ‘nodes’: links between information such as local authority or area codes, school identifiers, and so on. Finding a story in data is relatively easy when compared to a project like this, and it did remind me more of the investigative process than the way a traditional"newsroom works
• Response: The digital era has not made publishers defunct | Comment is free | The Guardian – "The idea that publishers "now appear frozen in the headlights of the onrushing digital revolution" is simply untrue." (Is it?)
• UK Sound Map – This is wonderful….. "Join the British Library in creating the first nationwide sound map. Take part by publishing recordings of your surroundings using the free AudioBoo app for iPhone or Android smartphones or a web browser. When uploading soundscape recordings via Audioboo, add the tag 'uksm' and they'll appear on the SoundMap"
• Socialreporter | There is no Big Society Big Plan – and that’s no bad thing – There is no Big Society Big Plan, and no-one is in charge.
  Unfortunately, in the journalistic sense, it’s not much of story.

He echoed a huge number of my thoughts on linear media, transmitters/printing presses and local-ness.  Will  challenged the government’s concentration on Local TV with a series of statements (for Will’s expansion on these visit his blog post here.):

• Why use television as a medium of transmission at all?
• TV is not local
• For small audience local TV there is no need to regulate news in the traditional way.
• The footprint for any of the 80-odd transmitters is orders of magnitude too large for a real big society impact.
• If you start with the internet, instead of TV low cost public service models are apparent.
• Of the hundreds of good local websites in the UK very few regularly use video to tell stories.
• Public service news done in the traditional British broadcast way is too expensive for local TV

There are a number of other thoughts I could add:

• The local web scene is more sustainable because it doesn’t rely on the financial viability of one or two organisations
• It has plurality (and I would suggest accountability) built in.
• Impartiality is now a difficult idea, the best way to develop trusted media is to expect/require it to be transparent.

But it was this one that got me thinking about what happens in my home city:

• Birmingham UK v Birmingham Alabama is often used as an example. Birmingham UK has a superb set of local, volunteer run grass roots internet media covering news, entertainment, events and culture.

The answer needn’t be Local TV

Here in Birmingham I think we take for granted the city’s very local web scene. Perhaps now is the time to shout about it. What is happening here (and in other parts of the country and the world) has in it the start of what the government should really nurture instead of Local TV.

The Secretary of State Jeremy Hunt’s department has a structural reform plan (links to a pdf) which states it’s second priority as supporting the Big Society – “a new era of people power”.  One way they wish to do this is

“foster the development of a new breed of strong local media groups, by removing local cross-media ownership rules to encourage local TV”

In this speech Jeremy Hunt says

I have long believed that the lack of high quality local TV is one of the biggest gaps in British broadcasting.  Why? Because, ironically, in an age of globalism people feel the need for stronger not weaker connections to the communities in which they live. And this government is committed to strengthening those ties by giving local communities far greater control over their own destinies. (my emphasis)

I think that is exactly what local online media is doing here in Birmingham.  Not only that but the burgeoning open data movement (encouraged by both the last and this government) is also making it easier for those same groups to hold power to account in new ways.   In the same speech Jeremy Hunt committed to broadband roll out.  The government understands the power of the web in so many ways.

Show and Tell

If he were to come to Birmingham who could Jeremy Hunt meet and what locally grown bottom up Big Society media goodness could we show him to help demonstrate an alternative beyond Local TV?

Here’s my starter:

Examples of local information and news:

• Live Brum, a crowd sourced listing site where the cities citizens keep each other up to date with events.
• Created in Birmingham an award winning site which reflects the breadth of creative activity in the city.
• Bournville Village is just one example of a very local news site, this one covers one neighbourhood and is run by volunteers – it has a sister site in the form of http://bournvillevillagecouncil.org.uk
• Digbeth is Good covers another and is again run by a volunteer.
• The Stirrer and Birmingham it’s Not Shit (Global City – Local Blog!) both cover the city in detail and from very different perspectives – again both run by individuals who are supported by a wider community.
• Hands on Handsworth is an example of a number of blogging neighbourhood managers (publicly funded) as is
• Birmingham News Room the city council’s tool for talking more directly to the public, rather than through the media.
• Birmingham Mail Your Communities is the beginnings of the local newspaper working with very local blogs

There are dozens of very local sites in Birmingham.  Openly Local records a few of them here:  and there are others listed on Be Vocal, but we still don’t have a full list.  Among my favourites are the allotments blogs like Court Lane Allotments with their own youtube channel and Neighbourhod Forum sites, such as the the one from Acocks Green – they provide a very local news service.

Examples of  online civic activism:

• BCCDIY :  the volunteer built alternative Birmingham City Council website.
• Big City Plan Talk another volunteer built site, this time an alternative to a rather shonky government consultation.

Support tools:

• Help Me Investigate A crowd sourced civic investigations website.
• Social Media Surgeries Birmingham born idea (now spreading world wide) where volunteers share their skills with community groups, encouraging the wider use of the web for civic good and community reporting.
• Talk About Local Will’s own organisation which is spreading the skills to run local community websites across the country – and indeed across the sea.

I know these sites are not telly. But people want local news and information, they don’t necessarily want to watch it.  All these sites use different media for different types of information.

What have I missed off?

Please add in the comments all the other sites I’ve missed off.  If you run a local website in Birmingham (even if it’s for your local neighbourhood watch) please also consider adding it to Chris Taggarts growing list of such sites here:

http://openlylocal.com/hyperlocal_sites

Thank you.

——–

Declaration:  We started the social media surgeries for voluntary groups in Brum in October 2008 and run the www.socialmediasurgery.com site.  I’m also a Director of Help Me Investigate Ltd.  Part of our work has been to help Neighbourhood Manager’s blog and run social media surgeries, Birmingham City Council started Birmingham Newsroom after some advice from us.

• Open data, democracy and public sector reform – This is an online report based on an MSc Dissertation by Tim Davies submitted to the University of Oxford, July 2010. It is shared using the Digress.it platform which allows for paragraph level commenting and hyperlinking to elements of the document.
• Alchemist dreams | El Pinchen – “how can a person who is doing things outside of the immediate understanding of many, survive and make a living. Make no mistake, this is not some bullshit from an artist in his ivory tower bemoaning the big bad world that doesn’t understand him. This is a new investigation from the person who has launched a thousand “social media” careers. Not only that, but he’s trying to find solutions – for himself, yes, but as in everything he does, public solutions which anybody could use.”
• MicroPatronage « Perfect Path – MicroPatronage
• Call phones from Gmail – Official Gmail Blog – “Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, “wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?”Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail. “
• Autism Radio UK, AutismRadioUK – Coming Very Soon! – AutismRadioUK was was established by Kevin Healey & is the first Autism Radio station in the United Kingdom, which will broadcast local, national & worldwide!

• Read+Comment | Hassle-free publishing and commenting on your documents – Good for consultation…. ‘Commentable’ online documents are a great way to establish two-way dialogue with the people who care about your organisation. But until now, you’ve had to build them yourself, often from scratch, either hosting your own or working around the limitations of your content management system or free tools.Read+Comment is purpose-built on modern, open source WordPress technology with all the configuration and plugins set up for you. Sign up, put your content in, and make the site your own.
• Brave New World | John Popham’s Random Musings – A very fine man is now freelance: “There is a big difference between the last time I was a freelance and now, That is the rise of Social Media.”
• Can hyperlinks be libellous, or are they just mere footnotes? | Law | guardian.co.uk – Interesting…. “The case of Hird v Wood, decided more than a century ago, is often cited by legal commentators as applicable by analogy – it featured a man who sat by the side of a road all day smoking a pipe and pointing to a placard on which a defamatory statement was written by an unknown author. The court of appeal decided that this conduct was tantamount to publishing the libel.”
• Social Media Surgeries – A Mutual Learning Experience | John Popham’s Random Musings – “It was a genuine mutual learning process. I learned a lot out of it, the tutors involved all agreed they had found the process both informative and enjoyable, they took copious notes so they could pick up from where we left off when they got back to their own computers.So, I now have very direct and personal experience of what I have been telling people who are nervous of becoming a “Social Media Surgeon”. I very much enjoyed it, we are all learning all the time, and I, for one, never want to fall into the trap of thinking I am “expert” at anything.”
• Big Society: foretelling the end of confrontational governing? – Neighbourhoods – “…what happened when the Big Society idea was concocted was that Conservative thinkers realised that overt ‘I/You’ thinking is running out of steam, historically. Something called the network society is coming over the hill which is gradually bringing an end to hierarchical systems. The emphasis is going to be on governance not government; on co-operation and openness not command and control. What should we do? Let’s occupy some ‘We’ thinkers’ terrain, and control that. Just bring some of this collective mentality into the foreground a little, not too much.”
• Councils spending millions on website redesigns as job cuts loom – Telegraph – One council refreshed the look of its website eight times in a decade, another paid more than a thousand pounds for a spellchecker that comes free with word processing software.
• The New Optimists – what she’s working on is trying to make old age a less unhealthy, uncomfortable place to be

• NHS spends millions on websites that fail patients, says government report | Society | The Guardian – Here, here… ” A layer of NHS bureaucracy, represented by websites built by primary care trusts, foundation trusts and strategic health authorities, received “almost no recognition” from the public. “The question is raised why these sites were developed in the first instance,” the report says.”
• O2 makes text donations free for charities – Civil Society – IT – News – providing news and in-depth coverage of charities, voluntary organisations and not-for-profits – O2 has become the second mobile operator to pledge to deliver 100 per cent of all text donation value to charities in a move which could signal an industry-wide shift.
• Birmingham Post – Business – Business Comment – Business Columnists – Jerry Blackett: Science festival brings hope – The New Optimists asks the simple question: what are you optimistic about? The essays in response – many from academics working in the region’s universities – are exciting and exhilarating
• rebootbritain – Obstacles and their solutions – “….there is insufficient clarity about the cost of failure of the other ways of doing things. Hence innovation feels disproportionately risky and expensive.”
• A Surge of Open Data « Warwickshire Open Data – In the run-up to the last week of the competition we have some great new datasets to play with.
• Open Knowledge Foundation Blog » Blog Archive » Dig the new breed, Part II – open archaeology and ethics – “…archaeologists, for right or wrong, consider the implications of placing fine grained data in the public domain and “Ethical considerations” have been identified as a “barrier” to deposition. However, there appears to be limited guidance as to how to resolve these issues. This means that many archaeologists are re-inventing the wheel. The challenge is to provide some supporting “thing” that makes it easy for individuals and organisations to get to a clear, and hopefully unambiguous, ethical position. Such a “thing” will reduce uncertainty thereby removing one of the barriers to data sharing. The current default position is the equivalent of doing nothing: surely this must change.”
• Armchair Auditor – “Sometimes you want a high-level view of how much money is being spent by each council service or paid to each supplier. Other times you want to examine the details right down to individual payments.”Armchair Auditor lets you do both.

I talked, as I often do, about online civic activists, social media surgeries and the nurturing of neighbourhood level civic activity online.  The presentation is below but the 5 key points are:

• Permanent links to everything
• RSS feeds – lots of them by place and service
• Commentable pages
• Embeddable content
• Share your data openly – complete with its flaws

The film that appears on slide 3 is here (yes it does make me look like a git. The viseo was shot the morning after the power had coned our street in the small hours (because of a sports match) then started slapping tickets on cars – we went to bed legally parked and woke up illegaly parked, without warning).

Parking Attendant’s illegally parked whilst ticketing cars during the Ashes at Edgbaston from Podnosh on Vimeo.

Fascinating lesson from Cindy Gallop on how the internet changes our real world and the “pornification of culture”.  (have I just got this site blocked form every local government web service?)

“The single biggest impact technology is having on our most fundamental human activity, our sexuality”

Also includes a big challenge to understand social media around pornography.  Hat tip various on twitter.

See www.makelovenotporn.com

See also www.textsfromlastnight.com

Titus Dawo

I’m with Titus Dawo at the Balsall heath Social Media Surgery.  All I’m doing here is giving him and idea of how simple it can be to publish to the web.

Here I just want to share a few notes I made after joining John Houghton of Shared Intelligence and the National Association of Neighbourhood Management.

Breaking Down Practical Barriers

People in the main bit of the conflab:

• John Houghton
• Alice Fung  from 00:  www.research00.net
• Nick Booth
• Steve Bridger
• Rohit Grover

John was inviting us to consider the sort of barriers that government can create which frustrate engaged (or partly engaged) citizens when they try to do what they consider is the right or useful thing. We talked for a while before I started making notes – but my ears pricked up when Alice mentioned

Meanwhile licenses -  (we have been working on this site and material to capture  learning from Community Asset Transfer in Birmingham – and have also been talking to Birmingham Social Investment Trust about mapping local government owned resources). Alice explained a little about the idea as a form of “You can use a piece of temporarily redundant land based on good behaviour,” which is summarised as this from the Development Trusts Association:

The Meanwhile Project is making interim use of all kinds of buildings and land easier by working with government, landowners and local projects. This includes providing financial support and business planning advice for organisations involved in local meanwhile projects; the recently developed Meanwhile Lease for shops and other town centre buildings; and an awareness raising campaign to highlight the potential for meanwhile use.

There was also discussion about access to useful information which included the points:

• Big barrier – we can’t find out easily enough.
• The process of micro volunteering to create information or gather data can be quicker than expecting government to change.

The combined power of pro bono professional work

Rohit Grover was there from Professionals for Good – an organsiation which is seeking to coordinate the pro bono work done by various professionals to increase the impact it has – an intersting idea in an neighbourhood.

Government Reservists

I shared my idea of a TA for government as a means of helping engaged citizens understand government better and vice versa. Paid reservist work inside government.

Allow staff to be enthusiasts

Clearly this should always be the case, but Steve Bridger talekd about how organisations can stifle the enthusiasm and understanding for what ought and could be done – over emphasising what is required to be done. Ideas that emerged from this thought include:

• Government requires staff to do more than what the rules say – performance review
• The barrier of a blame culture.
• The system -  empowered to suggest.
• The role of government –   to provide service and to act as a catalyst and enervator in places -  they cant do that within a set of rules.
• Rewards -  Employees benefits trust.  Co Operatives.
• Time as a currency – community dividend.

Total Place

We all talked a little about Total Place with Alice, John and Nick outlining some of their experience. Area we highlighted include

• We need Mission not vague vision (put on the moon etc – I keep meaning to write more about this)
• Get practical not  issues but things.
• Whole systems thinking – (a contribution from @leashless was which balance sheets does it appear on?)
• Small success
• Neighbourhood Mutuals
• Your Square Mile – put the broken stuff in public.
• Government as a mediator
• Tricks  – cheap no legislative change.
• Barriers – are question agnostic.  No ways to ask questions – often around conflict.
• Who doesn’t government go to where the questions are, not where the process takes it

Other who’ve shared their thinking from the event (before or after):

Chain Reaction

the need for The Big Society Network to not ‘reinvent the wheel’ and to recognise existing projects and networks;

Tim Davies

It’s important to challenge architects of the Big Society Network to avoid institutionalised age discrimination. If a mutual is to be created – make sure anyone, however young, can be a full voting member: no arbitrary restrictions preventing under 18s or under 16s from being involved.

…mission to be – in partnership with government, business, and the voluntary sector – an action-orientated remover of barriers to mass civic engagement where people live – enabling the change we want to be.

He also wants what The Guardian described as

an army of community organisers that will become the “catalyst” for communities to band together and challenge the apparently arbitrary decisions made about public services in their name. “I want them to be the glue bringing community together. They will be financially independent of government. They will be able to have different views from government. There can be healthy debate and this can build social capital. [Organisers] I hope will end up as trusted as the local GP,”

Perhaps…..

In 2008 I wrote a post musing about the idea of a sort of Territorial Army for government. I was thinking about the implications of a growing band of self organising citizens being able to do more of the stuff government does.  I was thinking how this might mean we need government which is more flexible, better able to shrink or expand quickly. Here is just some of what I was chipping away at:

I first found myself thinking of the role of government as a “pilot light” at a Department for Communities and Local Government event on digital inclusion. Most government bodies are prone to consider themselves as somehow permanent but what would they be like if they got their collective heads around being only sometimes on? The pilot light on the boiler that hums quietly away, then sparks into life when things get a bit chilly.

That, of course, is very Keynsian and at the moment [in 2008] government is turning itself to full roar and bunging on all 4 rings on the gas cooker in an attempt to get some heat back into the economy.

What is interesting though is how we habitually structure most government on an assumption of permanence.  That means that when we need more government we struggle to find the capacity and when we need less we are clumsy at shrinking, often reluctant to scale it back and put the excess capacity to useful work elsewhere.

It wasn’t a complete set of thoughts and the comments on that post were both encouraging and cautioning.

Dave Briggs wrote:

There is no doubt that there are a number of civically minded people in the private and third sectors who have a sufficiently strong interest in government – and specifically *good* government – that they would be willing to make themselves available when required.

You hit it on the head when you mentioned culture, though. To bring in the reservists, those in charge have to be able to spot that they haven’t the ability or experience to get things done.

While Andy Sawford of the Local Government Information Unit wrote:

I love your idea of reservists. Will explore this with the LGiU team.

I still think the idea of government as (in some circumstances) a pilot light which can roar into action when needed is relevant.  Perhaps more today than we could predict in 2008?

Government reservists might also help change the way citizens and government relate to each other.

The Big Society – half in half out.

We do need government to change itself and fast.  Might government reservists now be a way for active citizens and government staff to understand each other better, work together more closely and wrought change?

If many of the people in these community organsiations can also have the opportunity to work as a government reservist, on a similar model and pay structure as the Territorial Army, how will that change relationships between government and citizen?

• What will government learn from reservists?
• What will reservist learn from government
• Would people do it?
• What does it mean for public workers losing their jobs?
• Could this be applied more intensively in neighbourhoods (as part of the next stage of Total Place )  – with super reservists being deployed for longer stretches to tackle particular problems
• What might this idea break?
• What new things could emerge from it?

Apologies for lumping all government in as one – some of the answers require a “it depends” – but just asking

I don’t get excited very often .  Today I am.

Last night we flicked a switch.  You might think it was a simple switch.  On the face of it all we  did was turn http://beta.socialmediasurgery.com/ over  to www.socialmediasurgery.com.

For me though that is one helluva switch.  It means that today you lot can start making the most of Social Media Surgery Plus – a site created to make it easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy to find, organise and report on social media surgeries.  You can start creating surgeries, joining surgeries, learning form them and sharing that with others.  And it’s not just for us Brits – oh no – it works anywhere!

It has taken a long time to get to this point and of course we still have a big beta badge – this needs a lot more work.

It all started with the first surgery we ran on October 2008.  Shortly after  that that Dave Briggs did his usual bit of forward thinking and registered the domain.  He’s like that. He knew at some point someone would need it, even if we didn’t know why or what for.  Last December I asked him if he minded me using it and essentially he responded with “about time too you numpty” and transferred the domain.

Then I started talking to Claire at Substrakt who came up with the design and That Josh Hart.  In fact for weeks Josh and I talked about it. Then, he disappeared into his shed – like our very own Caractacus Potts on crack code. He would emerge, covered in Ruby coloured soot, we would talk, he would disappear again.

Eventually we shared it with the the most brilliant people in the world:  social media surgery organisers.  They started tinkering and using so that  even before we are out of beta there are surgeries from 18 places using the site and 219 registered users.

Thank you also to…

Marlon Parker from Rlabs is using it to run them in South Africa, Paul Webster (a huge supporter of surgeries who came to our first) is registered as the surgery manager for York, along with the efforts of Yortime and Abhay Adhikara of Dyaan Design.  The folks in York even made it onto the ipadio blog.

Diane Sims has been using the site for the very succesful  Huddersfield Social Media Surgery while Mike Rawlins has been doing the same in Stoke and John Popham in both North East Lincolnshire and Leeds. Like Paul,  John has made huge efforts to set up and encourage wider use of the approach.

So what does Social Media Surgery Plus do?

Abdullah from the Forum and Andrew Brightwell. Picture by Nisha Virdi

We’ve been holding some social media surgeries in Balsall Heath. So far they’ve been supported by the  Birmingham Social Investment Trust and our hope is that, after our third event on July 7, we’ll be able to carry them on as completely voluntary events. If you’re interested you can sign up here.

One of the projects that has benefited from our this is the Balsall Heath Forum, which is also gives us a venue for the surgeries. The Forum has a website, but we’ve helped it to set up its own WordPress blog. The main force behind this is Nowrah Abdul, who works at the Forum. Nowrah has thrown her energy into creating new pages and blog posts for all the many projects that the forum is involved in. Before the blog came along Nowrah and others were struggling to access and update their original site with ease. Within a few minutes of sitting down we’d started the blog (for free) and shown her the basics of setting up pages and working with posts.

Google Maps

One of the main focuses for the Forum is the resident associations that look after specific neighbourhoods in Balsall Heath. At the last surgery, Nowrah was keen to find out how she could create maps to show the areas the specific associations cover. We spent a bit of time finding out about Google Maps – first creating a Google account and email address for the Forum – so that she could start to map out the boundaries of the various groups.
View Kinver Croft Resident Group in a larger map

You can hear a short interview with Nowrah, below, about how this can help the Forum to tell its own very interesting story.

Other examples

Of course, this is just another example of how a social media surgery is able to offer some very practical help to an organisation. It’s not the only one, either. At our Yardley Social Media Surgery we’ve been able to help the church, St Michael and All Angels, to start its own blog and, more recently, the Friends of Yardley Park. There is enormous pleasure in helping people to tell their own story – and something quite humbling (as a ‘recovering’ journalist) about seeing how it can help to transform their ability to communicate their organisations’ ideals and mission.

Blogging and the Big Society

The Balsall Heath Forum is, of course, an organisation that has had a great deal of attention since the general election back in May – and featured prominently as a model for the Conservative Party’s ideas in the Big Society. The Balsall Heath Forum’s chief executive Dick Atkinson, for example, has been talking to the government about it – as this post from Will Perrin of Talk About Local shows (Dick is sat next to the Deputy Prime Minister on the seating plan).

And then there’s this video by Demos, which features Dick and, firstly, Nowrah.

Balsall Heath is thought to be a prime example of what happens when citizens take control of an area and try to improve it for themselves, so helping the Forum to tell its story and help to communicate with others about how they too can help their neighbourhoods does seem like a rather good idea. Community blogging is a cheap, effective and remarkably simple way of helping that process, which is one of the many reasons we get just a little bit excited about the power of social media surgeries.

Irrespective of your opinion about the Big Society, the idea of community organisations sharing information for the benefit of their work and their communities makes profound sense, because often the questions that organisations face have been faced and solved by others before. Traditionally, the problem is getting to the answers. Blogs – cheap, simple to run and phenomenally easy to communicate and have a relationship with – can do an awful lot of that work and social media surgeries are a way of spreading those skills that’s informal, sensitive to individual’s very different demands and, most importantly, remarkably fun.

• Neighbourhoods Learning Together — BVSC – Course available for community activists in North Birmingham and Sandwell: “30 places are available and we want to the group to reflect the diversity of the area. If there are barriers or support needs which are making you hesitate, then let us know and we’ll see what we can do. The venues for the sessions will be wheel chair accessible.”
• Telford & Wrekin CVS-news from the Development Team » Blog Archive » Telford & Wrekin CVS BASIS Project – “The whole purpose of which is to recruit, support and train 50 local voluntary and community organisations, in the art of social media, so that they can implement it, to ultimately support group sustainability”
• Swimming pool data scraping: comparing opening times | Where can we swim? – “Birmingham City Council’s leisure centre website isn’t an easy place to look for information, harder still to try to take data, but that’s just what I’ve spent some considerable time trying to do….” Our own Andrew Brightwell continues his one man campaign to scrutinise availability of swimming pools.
• The power of conversations « Francesca Elston – “…conversations make people happier and more useful.”
• Pentagon hunts WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in bid to gag website | Media | The Guardian – The Daily Beast, a US news reporting and opinion website, reported that Pentagon investigators are trying to track down Julian Assange – an Australian citizen who moves frequently between countries – after the arrest of a US soldier last week who is alleged to have given the whistleblower website a classified video of American troops killing civilians in Baghdad.
• Cutswatch | Society | guardian.co.uk – Public services face the harshest cuts in decades. We want to know what’s happening in your area
• Futurebuilders — loan business scrapped, new direction will be grants for neighbourhood organisations « The BSSEC blog – “Civil Society Media website reports that Nick Hurd, the civil society minister, has confirmed that Futurebuilders — New Labour’s flagship loans-plus-support model for investing in third sector development, managed by the Social Investment Business — is “effectively closed for business”. In future the £200m fund will be dedicated to providing grants to stimulate the formation of neighbourhood-based organisations, a clear change of direction under the coalition’s new ‘big society’ policies.
  The Office for Civil Society (the replacement for the Office of the Third Sector) has also confirmed that Capacitybuilders and the youth volunteering organisation v — both major New Labour initiatives — are “under review”.”

• Jo Wood – thisiscornwall.co.uk ( a news site)
• Peter Raven – pinkun.com ( a sports news site)
• Stewart Kirkpatrick – Caledonian Mercury ( a news website)
• Paul Bradshaw – Help Me Investigate ( a place where people can collaborate on civic investigations)

The site has had an number of big investigations, from uncovering the £2.8 million price tag for Birmingham City Council’s website (which in turn led to the council’s own inquiry on the spending) to stripping away the layers of what lay behind a new free newspaper in London.

The site allows citizens to collaborate which each other to ask civic questions and find the answers.  HMI  was also recognised in Talk About Locals Un Awards earlier this year – (full result on the Guardian site) thank you!

We’ll find out on the 29th whose won this one.

It featured academic and activist Simon Baddeley talking about his campaign to prevent homes being built on the Victoria Jubilee allotments, which border Handsworth Park.

Grab your plot

Simon and his neighbours couldn’t stop the housing development, but they did manage to get planning to require the developers to re-instate 80 of the allotments plots.   Simon has fought long and hard to ensure that this commitment is honoured.  Yesterday he claimed his plot:

Simon Baddeley: "Got the plot"

A few weeks ago Simon also digitised the original documentary, which you can see here:

A healthier approach to Urban Land?

For me the re-opening of the allotments  represents a small symbol of a shifting attitude to land in our cities. At the time the doucmentary was made it felt like land was there for developers and individual profit.  Since then demand for allotments has grown, people are showing off their pride in these places, the Birmingham Open Spaces Forum is nurturing a better relationship between citizens and council.  Parks like Cannon Hill and Handsworth have improved immeasurably and the famous CoCoMad in Cotteridge Park has shown how far open space cements community relations.

As Emma Woolf, of the Friends of Cotteridge Park,  explained in one one of our first Grassroots Channel Podcasts in 2005, conflict over public space can be a catalyst for a community coming together:

Is it time for a more flexible understand of public land?

Martin Field has been making the case for an easy to use map of publicly owned land plots in the city.  He’s made a tiny bit of progress:

We  emailed  a simple google map reference to the relevant officer and within 24 hours we had a response as to the specific ownership. Very good service and free, although you can only determine if the land is owned by the City or not, but still a good start. If the City does not own the land you are directed to the UK Land Registry, which is not a good experience and not free!

Last week I was at the Handsworth Residents Network meeting, which included a detailed discussion about how hard and frustrating it is for community groups to clean up or use eyesore plots.

The council itself has been seeking to streamline the process of transferring assets into the hands of community groups through it’s Community Asset Transfer Development Programme.  (I’ve been involved in recording that programme). Their work includes thinking of broader ways to measure the value of using land, called Valuing Worth.  This is supported by a wide range of other activity – including Growspace, which is taking hold in Ladywood.

These are small things.

I think we are still confused about ways of using urban land and why shouldn’t we be. Cities are confusing places.  But people outside and inside local authorities are finding it easier to collaborate to make better use of land for community benefit.

What else do we need to do during a time of lower public spending, tighter financial restrictions for developers and an ideological/economic battle over where food should be produced?  Update – perhaps all questions you can explore at the Cultures of Birmingham: Open Spaces event from the Chamberlain forum on 24th June at 6.30 at the the Mac in Cannon Hill park

This video by Demos tells the story of how my neighbourhood and the people in it are doing work which fits with the governments Big Society idea.  David Cameron has visited Balsall Heath a number of times and Dick Atkinson who’s in the video, was at the Downing Street launch of the Big Society.  Nowrah the main woman in the film is one of the people helping us run the Balsall Heath Social Media Surgery.

That’s all I want to say at the moment – lots of thoughts bubbling at the moment on the Big Society – but enjoy the video.

Andy and Lenka talk WordPress

On our way to the June Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery, I worked out that it’s been six months since our first event in the Studio – the first that I was sort-of involved in. In all that time I don’t think we’ve had a better turnout – for the type of people that have come down and the variety of things that they are interested in.

Scanning down the list of names and organisations that turned up, we had – in no particular order – representatives from two hospices, a city centre residents’ group, a campaign for sustainability in Solihull, a basketball club, a neighbourhood forum and people from two social enterprises.

The help

While the Civic Centre Residents Group continued to get help on their posterous blog (it’s their third time down to a surgery), it was great to see people from two hospices come along. Tony Coulson and Daphne Welch of St Mary’s Hospice in Birmingham received help from Michael Grimes with their website. Mark Binnersley, who is also at the St Mary’s Hospice was helped with Twitter by Catherine Howe – who had come from Brighton to learn more about what the Social Media Surgeries are like here in Birmingham and very kindly stepped in when it looked like we were running out of surgeons.

Given that was only five minutes into the evening – and we already had a pretty full set of tables – it was something of a relief. But she wasn’t the only person more than happy to help out with some of the great variety of different issues that we dealt with that night.

Goodbye to Heidi

Heidi Blanton, who has only recently become a social media surgeon, was charged with helping Paula Mitchell and Jane Hartnell of Acorns Hospice. Sadly this is likely to be the last surgery that Heidi can attend, because she’ll be heading back to the USA for a while, but we hope to see her – at least for a visit – in  the not-too-distant future.

Jane and Paula from Acorns

As the audio interview below hopefully explains, Paula and Jane were looking for help with using social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook to better communicate with the many people who have an association with the hospice. But they also had an inquiry about how they might be able to get news feeds onto their websites with RSS – after Paula (who is the first person I speak to on the interview) was approached by someone trying to sell them the service for a very large amount of money!

Transitions Sutton Coldfield

Another particularly interesting arrival was Lenka Moore, from Transition Sutton Coldfield. I’d not heard of Transition before tonight, but you can learn more about it by visiting the Transition Network site. Andy Mabbett helped Lenka to set up a WordPress.com blog (which I’m trying to find the url for) for the organisation – which looks to make local communities more sustainable in a time of environmental and economic challenges. I asked Lenka a few questions about her organisation and what it hoped to get from setting up a blog.

Who should I cheer for helps you decide which World Cup team team to support on any given match based on their nations performance these key indicators:

• Life expectancy
• National Income per person
• Inequality
• Carbon Dioxide Emissions per person
• Women in government
• Spending on aid
• Spending on the military
• Number of people without enough to eat
• Maternal Mortality
• Happiness

It’s a brilliantly simple idea put together by Pontus Westerburg from the World Development Movement.
Knowledge is power.  It helps you make better decisions.  Without it how can you believe, how can you approve or disapprove?