At Chain Reaction today doing a bit of social media surgery and sitting behind me are the guys from Noonan Media who are streaming the video for today’s event and the NFPTweetup tonight. You should be able to see the results of their work below

**UPDATE** now the event is over, the archived footage will be posted soon, I’ll link to it when it’s available.

Next week I’m going to be doing double duty at two great events – Chain Reaction and the 5th NFPTweetup. I didn’t go to Chain Reaction last year, but it immediately erupted across my Twitterstream as lots of attendees were eagerly tweeting about it, so Iwas really interested in going along this year. Chain Reaction is all about getting people together to change things – as they say:

We provide spaces – at ‘real life events’ and on line – in which people can collaborate with others across the boundaries that divide us and commit their energy to new ideas and new ways of working that will change the world.

Big stuff but the line-up of people going is looking great. I’ll be doing a bit of social media surgery alongside the illustrious Rachel Beer, Jonathan Waddingham and Steve Bridger.

In the evening is the 5th NFPTweetup, and fingers crossed we’ll be streaming it live over the interwebs, and I’ll be floating about with a mic and the cameras from Noonan Media, so even if you can’t make it, you can watch and join in on Twitter

Yesterday I was doing some social reporting with David Wilcox and Steve Lawson for a really interesting symposium looking at how technology can help in (and get us out of) the current cold economic climate, organised by Jamie Young at the RSA.There is plenty more on the blog and the event wasn’t the end of the process as you’ll see in a second.

As well as the keynote speeches and panel discussion the main meat of the day was discussion of four papers that had been commissioned on Supporting Innovation, Sustainable Technology, the Interconnected Society and finally Public Services.  I was live-blogging the last two sessions using CovertItLive and you can ‘replay’ the session to find out what went on.  Jamie is busy gathering together all the feedback the results of this process will be published shortly

• My pictures
• David’s videos and my videos
• The Twitter backchannel (everything tagged #techcold)
• Kathryn Corrick’s write up of the Interconnected Society session

Sorry it’s been a bit quiet around here, one thing I have been up to is helping to organise the first (of many hopefully) Coventry & Warwickshire Social Media Cafes.

As with many things, it started with a tweet with another Paul (Squires) who I met at the Birmingham Social Media Cafe. We both found ourselves on the train going to the BSMC and thought, why can’t we have one closer to home and the CWSMC was born.

With just over a week to go, we’ve got:

• A venue, the Court Street Creative Arches in Leamington Spa

• A sponsor for the all important coffees, Screen WM

• Wifi courtesy of a WiMax connection put in be Konnex networks (did you know Warwick and Leamington are one of the first places in the UK to get WiMax ? I didn’t think you did)

All we need are some people…actually we’ve got a healthy bunch of early adopters signed-up already, but if you’re around near the station in Leamington next Friday 18th Sept from 10am-12pm – pop down and have a coffee and chat about anything digital and social media, with other interested locals – you might be surprised who you meet.

You can sign-up beforehand which would help us with numbers and see if there is anyone you especially want to meet up with.

Thanks also to Ray Smith at Warwick District Council and Sarah Allen for all their hard work in making it happen so far!

There is a video of Ray talking about the Creative Arches on the CWSMC website.

I’ve been a bit quiet for a while here but (as I mildly trailed on Twitter) big things have been happening. Today I excavated my desk from 3 and 3/4 years of paper-based sedimentary layering and packed up for the last time at ruralnet|uk.

From 1st May I’m joining the massed ranks of the freerange and unjobbed.

It’s been a while in coming to fruitition but I think the slighty queasy feeling in my stomach isn’t a bout of swine flu, but a mixture of excitement and trepidation tempered by the huge support from everyone that has helped me get here. To Dunk, Brian and Rob and everyone else who I’m leaving behind, I’ll miss you all – it has been a tremendous time but I’m not going far (see below)

What will I actually be doing?

In short – more. More of this social media stuff, more blogging, more social reporting, more connecting up, prodding, poking and trying things out.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow?

Well, literally tomorrow I’ll be rambling (stop it at the back saying I’ve been doing that for ages) to rejoin Mohini and Sameena for a walk around Selly Oak Library as part of the Ramblers’ Get Walking, Keep Walking programme. I’m going to be helping them tell the story of their project and hopefully doing as little as possible, as they’ll be able do it all following our session last week

Why solo doesn’t mean solo at all

Of course the brilliant thing about social media is that no-one is really on their own at all.

So I’m really excited to be working with Nick Booth on more Podnosh projects and looking forward to collaborating with the likes of Dave Briggs and David Wilcox (but I’m willing to consider work even if you’re not called David). And I’ll be back at ruralnet|uk to do some training and get involved in some other upcoming projects.

I might even get round to do some blogging…

I’m doing a bit of social reporting today with David Wilcox at the 2009 World Entrepreneur Summit being held at the (more than) Goodenough College in London.

There is some blogging taking place at the Crowdvine social network that has been set up to support the event and the various videos, pictures, tweets and audios (if that is a word) are being collated over at Pageflakes.

David is collecting little audio interviews using his iPhone and something called AudioBoo -importantly you can capture a picture too, so you can put a name to a face.  We’re liking it here as sometimes a video camera shoved in your face can be a bit intimidating, but most people seem comfortable just chatting – and the sound quality is pretty good, especially in a buzzy but noisy venue.  Check them all out here.

Not so much breaking news, but spraining it – here is my blurb on last week’s excellent NFPtwteetup.

Organiser Rachel Beer, and Justgiving’s (lovely sponsors of the evening) Jonathan Waddingham, brought together about 60 non-profit types to Christian Aid’s HQ in London for a couple of hours of chat about Twitter and all manner of social media tools. We were also lucky enough to be able to boadcast live on Christian Aid’s internet radio station which I found myself presenting for a couple of hours(!). And very enjoyable it was too, once the inital shock had worn off. The collaborative slideshow that was created for the day is below.

One of the reasons for this blog is to pull together some nuggets of the more useful stuff that I’ve done, add a bit of context and offer them up to whole new audience – UK Freeview watchers will know this as the Dave channel approach. So a few presentations, pictures and highlights of events will pop up here occasionally (don’t worry, no Last of the Summer Wine)

This time last year we ran a workshop with the help of David Wilcox, to help us understand what the next generation of ruralnet|online might look like – (we were also doing that process online). As part of that I did a presentation boldly (possibly foolishly) titled ‘Working 2.0′ where I talked my way through a typical ‘day’ (actually it was pretty close to the mark) of mostly working online, blending scanning comments and feeds, responding to conversations, adding pictures and even using an RSS feed search from eBay to find a replacement bowl I had dropped while while washing up. It’s all still pretty relevant I think, and it’s not just slides, there is audio too (not brilliant quality I’m afraid), but if you’ve got a spare half hour and Red Dwarf isn’t on Dave, have a cup of tea and a watch.

There were a few questions in that session – including “When did you do any work?” but I think I got across the point that with an RSS reader and few other (free) tools, I could do things online that I couldn’t do trapped on my desktop. Oh I didn’t touch my email to do any of it.

Other real outcomes from the day?

Giving Tracey Todhunter the tiniest bit of confidence she needed to take over the Low Carbon blogging world, and meeting a bloke called Dave Briggs – still, you can’t have everything.

PS Well done if you spotted the missing element of ‘Working 2.0′ – the absence of Twitter. The presentation wasn’t about the tools but more what they could do and I’m sure that if I’d been on Twitter then, it would have formed part of the day.

PPS another Social Media/Social Reporting Tip – posting the presentation online and the pictures have meant I could refer to them again now just by pasting in a link or two.  Also there were about 15 people in the room that day, but the presentation (at the time of writing) has been viewed over 400 times, pretty good use of a resource that we had prepared and produced already.

• More pictures from the workshop
• More thoughts on the day

Burslem’s finest, the eloquent and erudite Clare White, has beaten me to a post about social reporting with her guide to social reporting events. All I can add is some of the things I’ve learnt from doing a bit of what has come to be termed social reporting (coined as far as I can tell by the godfather of social reporting, David Wilcox who himself has some excellent reflections on 2gether08).

You need to remember there are several different audiences for any event and this should guide you as to the way you need to report it, and unless you’re Channel 4 and also have the help of Richard Jolly for an something like 2gether, you are not broadcasting the event. Social reporting is about (horrible phrase alert) ‘adding value’ or giving a flavour for those audiences.

So, before, during and after the event, it is for:

1. The people who aren’t there -  Those who inevitably cannot for one reason or another be in the select group that are able to be in that rooms or rooms. Like any radio show, if you don’t say it on air, it hasn’t happened. Similarly, imagine you are viewing your event from afar, and can only see the website associated with it – if all you can see is the out of date booking page, the event effectively hasn’t happened.

2. People who are at the event – bit of a novel one this – and it helps if you have some big screens displaying what is going on, (or small ones, set the homepage of the browsers in the cybercafe to the webiste where you are posting stuff if the event has one) You can use things like Twitter to crowdsource questions, and you can solicit questions from the website or blog by asking for comments, so keep an eye on comments.

3. The great unwashed: (or potential sponsors, attendees of your next conference or event – yes they might pay to come next time instead of watching it unfold online, Time Team). Whatever you produce is a historical record of what happened – it won’t be everything, that would be impossible (and you’re not broadcasting remember) but a flavour, interviews with speakers after their keynote – not the keynote itself. And that should inspire people a year or more down the line to get involved.  The event was probably expensive to put on, so make the most of that investment, and record some of it, and make it work for you during the weeks and months afterwards.

Do

• Have a plan about what you’re going to cover. You can’t be everywhere at once

• Agree a unique tag and stick to it -wherever you are posting content (Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, Slideshare etc) You’ll find that Google is your friend when it comes to a search for the event, gathering all these resources together.  On a smaller scale if you’re set up on Twitter and create a #hashtag, then a page will automatically be created that grabs all of the above in one convenient place, even if you haven’t got a specific social reporting site set up.

• Take pictures, regularly get them off the camera, edit and tidy them up using something like Picasa (free and even Mac people can use it now) and upload them. Get some bankers – signage, people mingling, key speakers then more fun shots. You can use these as placeholders for posts that you don’t have a specific picture for  (I’ll do another post on workflow for getting pictures at an event soon)

• Grab other likely looking people with tiny laptops and fancy looking phones and give them a login – they might turn out to be great guest bloggers, who can help out while you gather other material (video and photos) to illustrate their posts. This happened to me with Darragh Doyle at Shine 2008.

• Bring a 4-way power adapter and extension lead (you will be able to rent out time at your sockets – there is never enough power)

• Have a Power Monkey handy to charge up your phone/camera/anything else portable

Don’t

• Try to social report an event you are actually taking part in- I’ve tried it, it doesn’t work.  If you can get more than one person helping out, then set someone up in the corner to field all the incoming multimedia, make sense of it and upload it.

I’ve not really touched on video as this is still something I’m getting to grips with, but I can recommend Qik, to get streaming and almost live, embeddable video straight from your phone. Be warned, you’ll need either wifi on your phone or a banging 3G (preferably 3.5G) signal and lots of battery power to push video up to the internet.

Someone like David Wilcox can even manage to extract some sense from a bunch of reprobates – maybe that isn’t the greatest advert for social reporting but if you weren’t there see what you missed…

Other useful links/events that have been socially reported

• Dave Briggs on Social Reporting
• Josien Karma on Social Reporting
• David Wilcox and others on Social Reporting
• ruralnet|2005 conference blog
• ruralnet|2006 conference blog
• ruralnet|2007 conference blog
• Collaborate|2008
• Shine 2008
• Futurechoices

Hello, is this thing on?

With 2009 dawning, the time has come to inflict upon the internet yet another blog – this time by me. If you already know who I am, thanks for dropping by, if you don’t – welcome and there is more about me here. I’m not entirely new to this blogging lark, it’s just that so far I’ve preferred to blog where it’s been more essential to do so.

Why blog here?

Partly it is just to back up some of the stuff that is stuck rather inconveniently in my brain, which, for at least 8 hours a day is offline while I’m asleep.  Frankly, when it is online, the stuff that is in there isn’t even tagged properly…

Partly it is to practice what I have come to be preaching over the last few years. That this social media stuff does actually work and is ‘a good thing’. So thanks to cajouling from Dave Briggs and others here I am. It’s their fault.

Stop. Aggregate and listen

It also acts as a bit of an aggregator for the other stuff I’m already doing – on the homepage you’ll see the fancifully titled ‘lifestream’ including my:

• Incessant twittering on … er … Twitter
• Photos on Flickr
• Videos on Qik, Vimeo and Youtube
• Bookmarks on Delicious

It’s also a way of engaging more with the good people that are also doing this sort of stuff and helping me manage lots of aspects of social media in one place – a sort of one-stop-shop if you may (I am just kidding on this description – I hate one-stop-shops. And portals. The future is distributed, get used to it. Read Ed Mitchell’s excellent blog if you want to know more)

Also some of the stuff that I’m interested in is outside of the scope of what I currently do at ruralnet|uk where I’m a project manager, and I need a little corner of the internet to park that stuff too.

So what’s it going to be about?

Good question. And not entirely dissimilar to the question my mum asks about what I do at work.  The answer is going to be fairly vague until I totally find my muse (once I’ve been going a while, the archives page will be a better map of what’s going on) but will cover a lot of the following:

• Social media and its practical application in charities, social enterprises and the public sector
• Distributed networks and disruptive technology
• Blending online and offline facilitation of these new networks
• Making the technology behind the above actually work
• Social reporting
• Skills and training in social media

The bits round the edge

I’m also interested in the fuzzy bits. The bits round the edge. The bits you can’t predict.  The serendipitous bits that only human beings can link up at the moment.

Inevitably this blog is personal to some extent and will reflect the other bits of me that overlap with worky stuff and  things that interest me. I’ll try and keep cricket blogging to Fridays Sundays in the manner of Schneier on Security’s Friday Squid Blogging, but no doubt some dodgy puns and metaphors from the worlds of gadgets, Forteana, chemistry, radio, sport and photography will creep in somehow.

The last word

Actually, despite the URL, title and these pictures it’s not actually about me. I’ve been very lucky to meet the likes of David Wilcox, Nick Booth, Steve Bridger, Dave Briggs, Ed Mitchell, Beth Kanter and Laura Whitehead and it’s more about giving back to that network (and beyond) some of what I’ve been fortunate to gather and absorb.

So thanks for wading to the end of this first post – I promise they won’t all be this long and I hope the journey is interesting for you too.  Any advice and help is gratefully received, I’m not the train driver on this one, only a passenger.