Blog Action Day was today. You can read about its aims on the site but in short bloggers are encouraged to post about a single topic, in this case poverty, and carry on a conversation across the networks to raise awareness. In Birmingham a bunch of us went about this arse-backwards and decided not to blog but to show others who were working with voluntary groups, many of which were connected with poverty, how to blog to the benefit of their aims.
The notion was raised (on Twitter, naturally) about a week ago and in that time we, marshaled by the mighty Nick Booth, had gathered about 10 experts and spread the word through the voluntary sector networks. We had a room, food and drinks, a bunch of laptops and awaited the crowds.
Two hours later we were exhausted and buzzing. The event was a tremendous success with all of us kept busy throughout. Most inspiring for me was explaining the social internet to the lady tasked with running The Carers Network (site currently under review, hence her coming) which she completely got. Carers are by definition a distributed community of people often working alone with shared aims and needs yet marshaling the information they need and orchestrating the communication networks is a mammoth task. We talked about setting up web tools that become part of the process and enable stuff to get done rather than hinder it but more interestingly about how giving the carers the ability to create the web resource themselves could be achieved through giving them a sense of ownership and leading by examples. I talked through how Wikipedia worked and how that theory could be applied to a carers resource and also how mentoring on how to use the site could be devolved through the community. Most pleasing to me was how everything I talked about could be compared to how things work in the “real world” for her, reinforcing my belief that all this crazy online stuff is really just about people interacting as people do.
But I’m knackered now. It was a great evening and we really must do it again, which of course we will. Thanks to Nick, my fellow surgeons and everyone behind the scenes who brought our patients to us. Onwards!
Nice action plan. And a great way to participate.
good for you. best thing i’ve read today concerning blog action day.
Great post, Thank you for sharing, I myself wrote about it here: http://www.guruofsales.com/general/427/fight-poverty-its-blog-action-day-today and got a huge respond from readers and other bloggers. Would you please honor us and share your thoughts by leaving a comment on our post? I am trying to come up with something new tomorrow and I will include and encourage readers to visit your blog back so we can all unite to fight poverty.
As this is an issue that has unexpectedly become important to me over the last couple of years, thanks for providing your time and advice for this particular project.
You’re so right about carers being a distributed community and online resources such as these are incredibly valuable – and rare. It is getting better, slowly, but the input of people like yourself and initiatives like BAD will make a positive and lasting difference.
I’m lucky in still being able to juggle a career with caring and not have either role impact too negatively on the other most of the time. But I need to turn to others sometimes for a bit of advice, encouragement or just to know I’m not the only one and networks like the one you helped plug a very big and important gap.
Thanks (again).