Tomorrow afternoon I’m speaking at the inaugural Black Country Social Media Cafe in Wolverhampton. It starts at 2.30pm at Alchemy Bar on North Street and I understand it’ll relocate each month to other cities and towns in the region.
I’ll be talking alongside Chris Unitt and we’ve been asked to recount our experiences at SXSW Interactive. As with most of these informal things I’m planing on winging it rather than give a formal presentation, taking the stuff I learned from people I met in Austin who are organising things in their cities and applying it to what the BCSMC is looking to achieve. No idea what Chris’ll be doing but since he’s running the Birmingham SMC I’m guessing he’ll cover how that works.
I’m looking forward to being at this for the beginning, seeing how it takes shape. These sort of communities are best defined by what the members want rather than by some pre-prepared model, so while there should be lessons they can learn from what Jo and Chris developed in Birmingham the exciting part will be seeing how they take these and others from elsewhere and add their own unique spin on them.