Birmingham Social Media Surgeries
29th January 2009
For the past few months a team of volunteers have been running Social Media Surgeries at the Birmingham Voluntary Services Centre in Digbeth. The evening sessions are designed for local voluntary groups to come along and get advice on a range of social media technologies; blogging, Twitter, podcasting.…….etc.
Pete Ashton’s video below shows how popular these events have become
Social Media Surgery for Voluntary Organisations from Pete Ashton on Vimeo.
The events have been a big success and, ever ones to jump on a bandwagon, Annette and myself from Digital Birmingham went along last night. Both of us came away impressed by the enthusiasm that the bloggers had for explaining social media and helping local community groups get started.
As well as Pete, it was good to see Jon Bounds, Nick Booth, Gavin Wray, Benjamin Brum and Paul Webster some of whom I met for the first time. Nick has posted a list of people who were at the event and the observant will notice that I’m down as a surgeon. **gulps** My professional life of faking it continues.
We have a really strong belief in Digital Birmingham in the power of digital technologies to increase civic engagement and Birmingham is really ahead of the game when it comes to having an online community which has come together to do just this.
We’ll be back. Hey, I might even do some homework before the next one.
It was good to see you both and thanks for leaping in to help. (It was only at the end that It occurred to us that you’d also come to get help!). If people are interested in whether community groups enjoy the surgeries and what they get out of them please also have a look here:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=bEPbtfdIkVY
[...] Bounds, Pete Ashton, Jon Hickman, Joanna Geary, Gavin Wray, Benjamin Brum, Simon Whitehouse (see here), Abby Corfan, Phil Oakley, Watfordgap, Danny Smith, Katie Spragg, Mark [...]
[...] and Pete Ashton and Nick has helped create the “haven” with its social media cafes, surgeries for voluntary organisations … and a paper that really sees the value of encouraging local [...]