Paradise Circus

Ooops. I’ve just spotted that the March Central Birmingham Social Media Surgery is going to clash with the March Birmingham Bloggers’ meet. They are both on March 9. Apologies for the clash. As plenty of people will know the surgeries are the result of the Birmingham Bloggers – and a good number of the surgeons are involved in both events – so we try to make sure that they don’t clash.

However, it isn’t the end of the world. While the surgeries start at 5.30pm and the Birmingham Bloggers’ meet up is at 6pm, they’ll be pretty close to each other (see the map) so if people want to pop down to the surgery first – at thestudio, in Cannon Street, off New Street – then it shouldn’t be too difficult to get yourself down to the Birmingham Bloggers meet at The Solomon Cutler, Broad Street – Birmingham, UK, B1 2DS. And the social media surgeries are a kind of ‘drop in when you want’ affair, so there’s no pressure to turn up and leave on the dot.
View Birmingham Bloggers and Social Media Surgery in a larger map

You may have seen the new Birmingham City Council site, judging by comments I’d say most of you don’t think it lives up to its potential. But — could a group of volunteers do better?

What does a council site need, can it be scraped together and built in a better way for free?

I’m not volunteering to code, but thought it was worth discussing — so why not pop over to the BCCDIY wiki and see what occurs…

Nothing more than a repost from Interactive Cultures, but I’m sure they won’t mind:

This coming Tuesday will see an informal get together in Birmingham aimed at producing a response to the interim Digital Britain report. The Birmingham event is one of a number of events being held around the country under the umbrella of the Digital Britain Unconference. It will be held at BCU’s Margaret Street Building on Tuesday 12th May 2009 from 10am – 1:30pm.

The event will not keep to a strict unconference format (we prefer to see an unconference as being informal rather than unstructured). A call has been put out for people to chair a number of different strands of the day. Each strand will aim to explore one of the five key points of the report.

Digital Britain Unconference West Midlands has been convened by Interactive Cultures and Aquila TV. We would like to thank Margaret Street for the use of the room, and also our colleagues Clare Peters and Elizabeth Short who have put this event together in less than a week.

• To book a place at the table, please go to the EventBright sign up page.
• For general information on Digital Britain, refer to the main Digital Britain Unconference site.
• For spcific information on the Birmingham event refer to the Digital Britain Unconference West Midlands website.

Some things that may or may not intersect with the venn diagram of interests of Paradise Circus visitors:

BARG – Wide Open Space — This Saturday  —a day of gaming around Curzon Street Station

Digital Britain Unconference — Tuesday 12th May (daytime) —a chance for people to debate and produce a response to the Digital Britian Interim Report.

Eccentric City issue 3 launch & Eccentric Auction — Tuesday 12th May (evening)  at The Anchor — the World’s First Eccentric Newspaper launches issue three with drinks and larks.

Brum Bloggers Meet — Wednesday 13th May (evening) — still awaiting venue confirmation but it’ll be next Wednesday in a pub in town.

And in the longer term:

FlashCamp – Tuesday 16th June (afternoon- evening) at Central Library Theatre — for web people that dig that Flash stuff.

Moseley BarCamp — Sunday 28th June (day) at The Cross Moseley — a day of interwebs talks and fun, registration open now.

The next social media surgery for voluntary groups is this Wednesday March 25th 2009, as a drop in from 5.30 to 7pm.  We have a plush new venue, which is a few minutes walk from BVSC. For all the details and how to sign up visit the social media surgery page.

This is a public service announcement on behalf of a Birmingham Hackerspace:

There’s been a lot of discussion about a London Hacklab forming, and us in Birmingham are jumping on the bandwagon. We’d like to get as many people together to talk about what we could do, to bring a hacklab/openspace/hackerspace to Birmingham.

“A hackerspace or hackspace (from Hacker and Space) is a real (as opposed to virtual) place where people with common interests, usually in science, technology, or digital or electronic art can meet, socialise and collaborate.” – WIkipedia

This will hopefully be a place where people can explore technology, blog about their surroundings, meet and organise themselves. Even though it is usually geek based, more interesting, and innovative things will happen the more people use it.

We have the pre-requisite mailing list.

We are probably going to be meeing at The Bull in Birmingham City centre. (Geek friendly, with wifi)

Although this maybe subject to change, so sign up to the mailing list to keep up to date.

To arrange a time a meet-o-matic form has been set up. So please put in the times that are best for you. PM = 6pm-10pm.

Please tell your friends about this, blog about it, twitter it. At the moment we just need to build up interest and people that want to actually *do* something. The more people we tell, the more likely we
are to find those that we need to get his off the ground.

This was prompted by a tweet from Regengirl:

My first thought was something like Ask Metafilter could work where people could post questions for us to answer as and when we’re able to. Then it occurred to me we have a forum here already, so I created a Help section.

The problem with the forum is it tends to be pretty dead unless threads are announced on Twitter, so reverse engineering that problem led to me create @paraforum which simply pumps new topics from the Help forum to Twitter. If you follow it you’ll get questions in your Twitter stream within the hour.

The next step is to publicise it as an available service and the best way to start that is to have something to show so let’s get some questions in there. And next time you’re talking to someone who might need help in the future, give them the link.

Let’s see if it works!

The third social media surgery for voluntary and community groups in Birmingham is next Wednesday, January 28th 2009 at BSVC 138 Digbeth, B5 6DR, (map).  Please feel free to drop in anytime between 5.30pm and 7pm where volunteers from the Birmingham bloggers group will show you how you can make best use of social media. It doesn’t matter if you are the head of communications at a major charity or an active citizen in your neighbourhood, if you’re at all curious come along.

To helps us predict numbers please sign up using the form you will find here:   www.paradisecircus.com/social-media-surgeries/

Tools like blogs, podcasts, video and social networks can give a real boost to campaigning organisations, often for no or little cost. So these experts are offering you approachable one to one help and support because they believe it can help. You may just want to see what is possible and go away and think about it. You might be itching to set up a blog and start using it, either way you can get help appreciating the best use of the internet for your organisation. If you’ve been before please feel free to come back.

This surgery is organised as a collaboration between bloggers in Birmingham and the Third Sector Assembly.

The Big City Plan is a “masterplan” being worked up by Birmingham City Council in order to present a  vision for the development of the City Centre over the next 20 years. It has a lot of options, questions and information in it — and it’s currently going through a consultation process (no doubt you will have seen the taxis and posters).

When it came to blogging about it, a few of us felt that that was difficult because:

• It’s a huge dense document full of overlapping ideas, and it’s difficult to pull out one piece to discuss (you have to go over everything to make sense).
• There wasn’t a way to discuss in a central place.

So we had quite a long meeting at December’s Birmingham Social Media Cafe, and decided that we could treat the plan as a blog — each section commentable on, linkable to, and with as much information as possible (which meant researching and finding links about a lot of planning ideas and documents).

It took a long while to do — but it’s now up at bigcitytalk.org.uk.

Please feel free to link to it, copy chunks of the blogged version for your own use, but most of all go discuss and comment and feedback to the Council about the Big City Plan — so we can make Birmingham as good as it can be.

The date is set: Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 5.30pm to 7.00pm at the same venue as the one we ran on Blog Action day in October. To sign up for a free place and find a map to the location please visit this link. In this post we also have an explanation of what is going on, some information for people thinking of coming along to get some advice and a few words for the very fine folk who are offering their expertise for free.

I thought last month was a one off? Yes. So did I. But it worked really well. (more…)