Community Stuff

Social Media Surgeries

Anniversary of Birmingham’s first Social Media Surgery;

Help people discover how the web is going to let an active citizen achieve something;

“Every City, Town, Village and Neighbourhood should have a social media surgery,”  says John Popham. More here.

Community Blogging

Really interested in community blogging at the moment and the value it could have in;

• delivering on our neighbourhoods aspirations, helping to build stronger communities
• enabling improved local communications and countering a largely negative local press
• improving skills and enabling communities to benefit from wider digital opportunities

There are some well known people active in this space including Will Perrin of Talk About Local fame and Nick Booth, a former journalist doing interesting work around Birmingham and further afield.    

Here’s a few examples of community blogs; 

• Formby First (by a Parish Councillor)
• Kings Cross Local Environment (started by Will Perrin)
• Pits ‘n Pots
• Sheffield Forums
• Ventnor Blog
• Wath Upon Dearne (community news)

We recently submitted proposals for a ‘Local 2.0’ project to the Young Foundation but weren’t successful. The Kirklees Community Technology Project has been supported and will work with community organisations, individuals, service providers, ward councillors and others within one neighbourhood to look at how new web technologies can help people share information more effectively and bring more opportunities to neighbourhoods.

We intend to follow this work closely but to also find a way of nurturing and supporting community blogging in Barnsley. We already have a few bloggers, including Royston Folk, who have asked what the Council can do to support and encourage local blogging across the borough.

We’re currently exploring how we can work with volunteers and Barnsley’s ‘digerati’ to take this forward. Other areas have run successful social media surgeries for businesses, communities and councillors e.g’s Paradise Circus, Birmingham Social Media Cafe and WMCSMS Solihull

Some places have active, self directed communities of interest doing some of this stuff themselves, sharing their understanding and helping others e.g. GeekUp. There’s a good round up of the social media scene in Birmingham at BeVocal, “a site about social media for social good and using the internet to turn public data into something useful.”

If you’re in Barnsley please let me know if you have an interest in community blogging or if you want to understand more about social media and what it can do for you, your community group or your business.

Interestingly, how local government comms. teams engage with local bloggers is also the subject of some debate at the moment. There’s an excellent blog on the subject by Dan Slee here.