To MadLab, yesterday, for the Together Works AGM. Together Works is the social enterprise network for Greater Manchester, and the AGM was a chance to network, then take part in a debate on the future of Social Enterprise in the current climate of cuts.
The panel included Social Entrepreneur Dave Dawes, who started with a strong denouncement of grant-dependency in the sector: “Grants are evil, corrosive - they will destroy you. They are precisely the same as heroin”
“What amazing sculptures would Michaelangelo have done if hadn’t been dependent for 4 years on an income stream from the Pope for the Sistine Chapel,” he continued.
All of us in the room had been involved at one time with voluntary organisations that had, if not sold their soul, at least severely switched direction for the sake of grant funding. However not all social entrepreneurs have completed a change of mindset to meeting a market’s needs - Dawe’s provocative phrasing drew a stark picture of the effective choice.
Embracing failure
Fear of failure was another key topic as one speaker seemed to say that if you got your market right you wouldn’t fail - forcing me to point out that all sorts of things could make an enterprise fail, but that was a fact of life. You recover and move on.
What’s important is not letting fear of failure stop you trying again (and again).
In that vein I mention here that following the disappearance of the two best people I had to launch a new Social Enterprise for voluntary sector Cloud Software, I’m working on new plans for two projects that had been on the back-burner.
Anybody looking for a new project, feel free to get in touch. I’ll post more here later as things develop.
It’s been a while since we’ve done any work with schools - something I hope to change in the next year, but it meant that when I was asked to write up case studies and apps for FOSS in education, to contribute to International Software Freedom Day leaflets, I had to go back a bit.
I’ll add more to the page as events dictate (but bear in mind that things I meant to post here a year ago are still unposted - if you think there are too many blog posts on the Internet, just think how dwarfed they are by the number of unposted items, particularly since we all started diverting our efforts to micro-blogging).
A memory game from GCompris, by Bruno Coudoin (screenshot under GNU/FDL)
ScraperWiki is a code wiki that provides you with a maintained scraper to extract data from any public source on teh InterWebs, for any purpose. A great example is the map showing oil drilling around UK shores at the same depth as the Gulf of Mexico Disaster. Thanks to Aidan and Francis for lots of info about what ScraperWiki is up to, and where it’s going - if I can’t find a publisher for the interview (my usual outlet can’t fit it in), I might post more here.
Social Media Café at Static Liverpool, 25 August 2010, pic by Mike Nolan
There was also a talk given by myself, on Open Social Networks - or what to do about FaceBook being Evil. I’ll be writing here soon about GNU social, Diaspora*, and other ways of taking back control of your social media use, but for now please see the article at LinuxUser magazine - and the extracted interview with Evan Prodromou.
As I prepare for the third Ignite Liverpool event, I found my first talk online, on urban food - from foraging to guerilla gardening. As a pecha kucha style talk it’s a bit of a gallop, but manages to cover a few points.
(It also doesn’t jump after a minute like the Manchester recording did.)
I’m at WordCampUK - a conference for WordPress developers and users. There have been great presentations, from Accessibility & HTML5 to WordPress Themes. However the real value of any conference is the corridor time, face-to-face chat with peers, and people doing all sorts of unexpected and fun things with Free Software.
WordCampUK has been a bit short on corridor time, but has made up for it with socials, and lunch-time meetings: today in particular when most of the 3rd sector people got together for a not-for-profits meetup. As promised, below are the details of everyone at that lunch, so that WordPress people working in the voluntary sector can find each other:
If you’re doing something with WordPress in the not-for-profit sector, please feel free to put your name and link into the comments. I’ve no idea if anything useful will come out of this, along the lines of Plone’s NGO group, or Drupal’s various specialist groups - I just offer this set of links up with a vague hope ;-)
Update
There’s now a mailing list for anyone helping the sector using WordPress - sign up and say hello, everyone welcome.
I’ll be giving a potted 45min version of the Social Media & the Accessible Web introductory course at the next Green Drinks meeting. 6pm, Thurs 8 July at The Loggerheads pub, Shrewsbury. Also featuring Judy Coleridge, Editor of Shrewsbury Green Guide.
Feel free to come along - Green Drinks is also a great networking event. Meet people from environmental businesses, campaigns and social enterprises from across the region.
Those of us volunteering to staff the MFS Stall had a great time - not just enjoying the vegan food and drink of the Fair, and catching up with old friends from Manchester’s numerous environmental groups in attendance, but from several hours of talking to the general public about software freedom.
While MFS membership is heavy in Unix admins and programmers, the group is about the philosophy of software freedom, not playing with technology - thus we all enjoyed engaging with the public on why freedom matters in software. Passers by ranged from committed Ubuntu users to those without a computer at home, yet nearly all were responsive to the principle of software built on values of community, education, and sharing knowledge.
Freedom in the 3rd Sector
Indeed, it continues to remain a puzzle why so many in the charity sector actively campaign against Free Software solutions, and promote the sector’s continued reliance on an unsustainable model of dependence on a few tax-subsidised, private companies.
These are issues I hope to tease out a little in my talk on Free Software in the UK Voluntary Sector, and why you should care, at MFS’s 20th April meeting. I’d welcome people with a wide range of views to come along and debate the issue afterwards.
To the UKUUG’s Large Scale System Administrators’ conference today where I was the rather strange choice of last minute speaker. Having spent 18 hours at the keyboard yesterday I wasn’t best prepared, but speaking on The Third Sector and Free Software shouldn’t have been too much of a challenge to me.
Indeed, despite the talk being more of a ramble at times, I think I managed to distill 4 key messages for the assembled Unix crowd:
There’s a real lack of IT knowledge in many VCS groups resulting in too many having no IT strategy. Please get involved with a local group at a governance level and help to make up this deficit.
Of all the resources lacking, training is holding back most groups. Please give a little time for effective training.
Many groups are tied into niche proprietary applications. Please help to code web-enabled, Free Software replacements.
I’m involved in lots of projects with great potential but not enough man power - please speak to me about collaborating on them.
I think I may also have mentioned what a great business model the Social Enterprise is rather too many times. :-)
If you were at the talk and want to get in touch about any of the projects, please e-mail me, or find me on Twitter.
What can I say? Speaking twice, on two different topics, in a week where I had major deadlines on three other projects is an unfounded faith in my time and project management skills bordering on wreckless! :^)
Somehow I survived, delivering a talk on the Monday session at Manchester’s Madlab, on the madness of Fractional Reserve Banking (though not having time to more than mention the alternatives), and on the Thursday, in Liverpool, on City of Abundance: Hacking the urban landscape for food.
Although not all of the talk videos seem to have uploaded correctly. As always with these events, there were a number of great talks - so I’m not singling out any!
It’s Good to Talk
Chief outcome? To be reminded what a great format the 20:20 or pecha kucha is. Distill a subject about which you’re passionate about to 20 slides, and talk for just 15 or 20 seconds on each. Not just a vehicle suited to the attention-deficient, but a challenge to the audience.
After all, it’s easy to switch off in a 40 minute talk and remember nothing afterwards, but five minutes done just right will push key points into your brain and leave you thinking about the subject days afterwards.
Could be a great marketing tool - sponsor a conference, and only demand five minutes’ attention in return. Just make sure that you follow up with a page of links and info somewhere memorable online, or take-away printed materials, for those hooked by your passion.
I’m travelling back from the Connecting 2.0 Communities event held this afternoon and evening at Madlab, in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. An MDDA-sponsored event to give technical and social media advice to community groups. I was arm-twisted into giving a short talk, so rapidly prepared an item on Social Media tactics and strategy culled from our 3hour course.
Firefighting IT problems? Get some IT strategy in your Org!
However the first speaker, Matt Haworth, did such a great job on exactly the same subject, with the wonderful local example of Manchester’s Lesbian & Gay Foundation’s viral response to US hate adverts, that I mentally ripped up my improvised speech, and settled on the least interesting topic under the sun: IT Strategy. IT Happens, I told the unfortunate audience, it drops from the sky as meteorites of randomly-funded PCs, and volunteer-coded websites, and leaves organisations busy fighting fires as IT fails to do what it should, instead of concentrating on delivering the front-line services for which they have so much enthusiasm.
So, what’s to be done? Organisations with chronic IT problems tend to be those which don’t just lack an IT strategy, but often don’t really realise how essential it is to any modern organisation. These groups usually lack IT expertise not just in staff and volunteers, which is understandable, but in their boards of governance, too. In an age when hardware and software is effectively free, IT funding should first go into bringing in outside help to assess an organisation, and help to draught its strategy; something that would pay for itself in a very short time.
Back in my M6-IT days (and before that at BVSC’s MOST project) we ran courses on IT strategy for decision makers in Voluntary Sector groups. In both cases we relied on carrot and stick from partner organisations to bring in attendees who most needed the courses. What can be done? I’d love to hear ideas for reaching groups (other than springing them on an unsuspecting audience like today ;), otherwise third sector groups will continue to fight fires, instead of using IT to grow and support their organisations.
Somewhere between Liverpool. Manchester, and Birmingham, pottering around in a convertible Morris Minor, is a man with a re-cycled laptop, and an endless supply of enthusiasm for Free Software, Sustainable IT, and the good things that can happen in the 3rd Sector when IT Strategy and social media hit an organisation.
