Gavin Wray // Carefully crafting content since 2001

The Birmingham social media surgery for voluntary and community groups is now one year old. Huzzah! The first surgery took place in October 2008 at the BVSC and since then has developed into something quite special.

Here’s a video capturing the essence of what the surgery is and how those taking part feel about it (video by John Popham and questions from organiser Nick Booth).

Photo by benjibrum

It’s almost a year now since I first went along to a social media surgery for voluntary and community groups in Birmingham. The surgeries are thriving and it’s great to see new surgeries sprouting in Lozells, Acocks Green and now Solihull.

One of the things I love about going along to these surgeries is that I never know who I’m going to meet or what topics will come up. The randomness is refreshing, it keeps me on my toes while meeting motivated folk who really want to improve their communities is good for the soul.

This social media lark is wide. Those coming along to the surgeries for advice may want to talk about anything from how to start a blog, attracting more readers to their website or making new contacts using the social web – and that’s just the start.

So, what really happens? What do we talk about?

Here’s a summary of a chat from a surgery in Fazeley Studios on 19th August between Esther Boyd, Paul Hadley and I.

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The super bunch at Rhubarb Radio have posted the audio of my impromptu talk on geotagging life experiences and the ensuing discussion at the WxWM2 unconference.

Download the audio (MP3, 9.2mb)

Here are the other talks from the event

Yesterday I went along to the West by West Midlands 2 event at the Spotted Dog pub in Digbeth, Birmingham.

Expertly hosted by Shona McQuillan, there were some planned talks plus, following the unconference format, off-the-cuff talks by attendees. If the number chosen by Shona’s random number generator thingy (there’s probably an app for that) matched the number on your sticky lapel label, you stood up and gave an impromptu talk.

My number 31 popped up and here is my attempt to describe what (I think) I talked about…

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Yesterday I spent a wonderful hour meeting Attiye Faraji at the sixth social media surgery in Birmingham.

Attiye is a health and wellbeing lead for young people at Health Exchange, which aims to “make health services available and accessible to all members of our community”. It’s a partnership development between the Heart of Birmingham Teaching Primary Care Trust and Birmingham City Libraries.

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Video by Nick Booth

Just a quick writeup following the third Social Media Surgery for voluntary and community groups based in Birmingham, organised by Nick Booth, and held at the Birmingham Voluntary Services Centre in Digbeth.

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The second free Social Media Surgery for voluntary and community groups in Birmingham was held at the BVSC in Digbeth on 26 November 2008.

The idea behind the surgeries is to help individuals working in voluntary and community projects in Birmingham who want to know how to make better use of the web and social tools to benefit their work.

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