The workshop was essentially an overview and took the form of introduce, question and answer. The platforms explored included Twitter, Yammer, WordPress, Facebook, Doodle, Dropbox, SkyDrive, LinkedIn Google Analytics and Google+. Most importantly delegates began to tentatively question how these platforms could be made to meet their individual needs.

The core message of this workshop was that one needs to establish and maintain social networks where their target user group engage rather than try to maintain lots of different social networks poorly.

Much of the feedback from delegates was that they left the workshop with a better idea of what to explore later in greater detail. Both Michael and I look forward to returning to Regent College to work with the delegates in greater depth.

For more information about Co-operatives East Midlands please visit http://www.cooperatives-em.coop/

As is often the way with charitable trusts, the energetic and fantastic work that is done is seldom reflected online. This can make it difficult to share the message, demonstrate benefit, promote works wider than a tight circle or recruit new trustees.

Peter approached me about an overhaul following a terrific number of visitors since we last tinkered. He was concerned that people were looking and the site wasn’t quite there yet.

http://www.muzika.org.uk is now live and looking pretty much as it did before. What has changed is mostly behind the scenes. We sourced a theme that better suited what Peter wanted to achieve. Following quite a long discussion there is now fewer pages on the site, but those that survived the kull are worth the visit.

With a conference looming in Bucharest the site is ready and robust to act as a focus across Europe. I will watch with interest how Muzika Charitable Trust take their content forward to meet the challenges now that they have full control over their website.

Some feedback from the course –

“The course has helped me focus my mind on establishing a business. It’s increased my positive mental attitude.”

“I understand that most of what I want to use the blog for requires me to pay for it. Rubbish. Good to find out now”

“Got me out meeting people, out in a work environment and improved my techie skills.”

“I like the fact that the last session was quite open. What do the learners want to know now?”

” Useful, got to grips with the basics.”

The course was written and delivered by Lindsey Tasker and Alan Carter-Davies

Lindsey says,”The big realisation is that the easy part is setting it up, the hard part is keeping it going.”

Alan says, “Even if the site created during this course is not right for the business, the creator will gain a better understanding of what a website is and should be, leading to stronger and more controlled commissioning. “

Paul’s new book is an academic perspective on the internet revolution, paying particular reference (at least the section I read) to the democratisation of the web. The shift from brochureware to user-generated content.

It did feel odd to be reading what will become a textbook about things that I have been engaged with over the past decade. In no way do I claim to have made history but it appears that I, and all my contemporaries have become part of history.

I am currently not at liberty to go into the content of the book too much. One of the caveats of course. However, from what I’ve seem so far it will be worth a search on Amazon for “Beyond Web 2.0″ by Paul Anderson in about a year’s time.

Scanning the report http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/cmr/753567/UK-internet.pdf  (for the Internet and web based content section) makes for futuristic reading. The new age has officially arrived. Less time passivly consuming and more time creating seems to be the new way. Web 2.0 has arrived. Many of you reading this will thik to yourselves “So?” yet one must remember that if you are reading this then you are in the minority. 74% of people aged 65+ feel that they are not confident users of the internet. This age group constitutes only 6% of the active internet universe yet according to the National Statistics Online by 2034, 23% of the population is projected to be aged 65 and over compared to 18% aged under 16. Of course by 2034 some of us reading this will be in that 65+ age bracket.

I still can’t help wondering what the 29% of the population who haven’t yet made the leap online are thinking.

Of course, being online is hald the question. What are people doing online once they have achieved connectivity?

Social networking now accounts for a quarter of all time spent online.

Some 37 per cent of over 55s use email each day and 47 per cent use it weekly.

Usage of instant messaging declined from 14 per cent to 5 per cent.

Back when I was in art college all the photographers used to make collage views. In these digital times this doesn’t seem to be so popular. However, being somewhat old school in my thinking I took the series of pictures above on my phone and pieced them together.

As you may have worked out by now, I have a new home. When I’m not organising for the Workers’ Educational Association you can find me up in Room 2 at the Broadway in Nottingham’s sunny city centre.

Pop in for a coffee and a chat. I am usually about on Mondays and some Tuesdays.

For information on the Broadway please visit: www.broadway.org.uk

Set up

Of the 34 people on this bus 12 are non-white. Of the 26 cars that overtook this bus on my 14-minute journey 23 were single occupancy, only 2 were non-white drivers. 30.8 % of my neighbourhood is non-white. Yet 35.2% of the bus passengers are non-white and 8.6% of car commuters who overtook the bus are non-white.

Conclusion

Either: Non-white commuters are more environmentally aware and are acting to save the planet

Or: Non-white commuters are predominately working in jobs that do not come with the perk of a city centre parking space

Either way I thought that this was interesting.

Related Links:

http://www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/

(Find your own statistics)

http://www.hostsrv.com/webmab/app1/MSP/quickmath/02/pageGenerate?site=quickmath&s1=numbers&s2=percentages&s3=basic

(Percentage Calculator)

I’ve had a Twitter account for about a week now. Obviously I looked for friends and acquaintances to follow and just left it at that. At the time of writing I have 5 followers and am following 11 people. Hardly world beating. However, as the saying goes, with a long enough leaver one can move the world.

Here is how my leaver moving moment came about.

Late Sunday evening: Popped 50 Good for Geeks mugs we had kicking about onto eBay.

Monday morning: Shipped the first 2 sales.

Monday lunchtime: Installed Tweet Deck and resolved to get tot the bottom of this Twitter thing. (www.tweetdeck.com)

Monday late lunch: Posted the following on Twitter: “By popular demand (+ lots of nagging) Web Safe mugs for old skool geeks http://bit.ly/afj3su spread the news!” This went out to my 5 followers. (http://bit.ly is a neat way to make a long web address short, important when you only have 140 characters to play with)

Monday (still) late lunch: One of my followers re-Tweeted (RT) my advert to her 767 followers.

Monday (still) late lunch: One of my followers’ followers did likewise to their 515 followers 

Monday (still) late lunch: Creative Nottingham (creativenotts) did the same to their 1080 followers. In the space of   15 minutes my small eBay advert has reached 2362 people. Admittedly some of these people will be in the same lists but non-the less, I am a Twitter convert.

Monday afternoon: I notice that another mug has just sold.

Good on all levels takes experience, craft and time particularly when it comes to projects.

These are some basic points to think about to ensure that the project delivery meets expectations.

What is it?

What is the project goal? This is not as easy as it sounds. In trying to define the “what” one encounters all the related questions.

What is it? We want to build a website for our organisation.

This is a good start, however in the example above there should be further steps before commissioning a design team. The next two questions should be about “who”.

Who are we?

For many organisations this can be a stumbling block. A neat description for the “who are we” may have been written for the business plan and repeated in pitches and bids but not seriously considered and revised. This is frequently the cause of a disparagement between the published organisation offer and the customer experience.

Who are they?

Who are the people that the organisation needs to reach for its very reason of existence? The service users, clients, customers, members and associates. They all have needs. They all want a good deal. They all need to feel that they have benefited from an encounter with an organisation. They, What and We form the trinity of project expectation management.

In project terms we are discussing the relationships between the senior user, the senior stakeholder and the project its self. 

As a good friend of mine says when a brief hit the mat, “They’re looking for the moon on a stick.” A little attention to They, What and We will save a project plenty of time and money leaving the project delivery team open to get on with making everything gorgeous safe in the knowledge that the project is owned and has definite purpose.

As an aside, I made the burgers pictured on July 4^th 2009. They were as good as they look.

Our latest collaboration is the delivery of a two and a half hour workshop about social media, web 2.0 and social networking to a select group of social entrepreneurs. The challenge for me is that the host venue has managed to block a whole host of social networking sites in a bid to protect learners from the big bad world. 

There is plenty to talk about when it comes to the use of social media by social groups, with or without access to demonstration sites. We shall be covering communication strategies, cost verses effort, evaluation of performance. A tall order for the timescale but if I can leave the participants with a solid grounding and pointers to some ready next steps then the workshop will not have been in vain.