Social media surgeries prove a hit in Acocks Green
Digital Birmingham is creating net-savvy communities – Jo Ind meets some of the people who are taking part.
Rebecca Docherty is sitting in the Inn on the Green in Acocks Green, Birmingham laughing, chatting and sharing a laptop with the others at her table.
The 36-year-old, who is about to train as a teacher, does not know her ATMs from her LDAPs but has come up with the idea of creating a blog for her street.
“We want to organise a street BBQ at the end of August or the beginning of September,” says Rebecca who lives in Francis Road, Acocks Green and has recently taken over the Neighbourhood Watch.
“We want people to know who’s doing what. We’ve got a strong sense of community but not everybody knows everybody. We want to be able to recommend tradespeople, carpenters and so on, that other people in the street have used.”
So where do you go when you have got a great idea for a blog but no idea how to set it up? You go to your local pub for a social media surgery – that’s where.
Social media surgeries are organised by Be Vocal, which is part of the Birmingham – Open City initiative run by Digital Birmingham which aims to develop a net-savvy community empowering citizens. At the pioneering end of Be Vocal’s remit is the exploration of datamashing, which aims to make public information available to ordinary people through imaginative uses of the net.
For that to work, ordinary people have to be happy and comfortable web users, which is where the social media surgeries come in. At a surgery people with skills in social media freely offer their time to help voluntary organisations and community groups with any questions they might have.
The idea for social media surgeries was hatched in October 2008 as part of Bog Action Day, where bloggers all over the world join forces to write about a particular subject. That year it was poverty. “We wondered if there was something else we could do,” says Nick Booth, owner of Podnosh which is running Be Vocal. “We came up with the idea of surgeries.”
So far there have been eight in the Fazeley Studios in Digbeth, one in the Methodist Church in Lozells Street, Lozells and three at the Inn on the Green in Acocks Green. The idea is that they should be expanded throughout the city and run by local people.
