Been a bit busy on all fronts with those concerned with We Share Stuff. Apart from the holidays and new born babies, things are getting back on track. The project visited the UNLTD awards event in Manchester to officially recieve their award and certificate. A decent event where other award winners spoke about their projects and plenty of networking ensued.

We are currently finalising the identity and web presence for this stage of the project. Nothing too fancy, just something to give the project a face. We are hoping to have the site up and active at the beginning of October. We have also nearly completed our taster session module ready to roll out and we are currently looking at places in the North Birmingham area to deliver. The taster sessions are free (to both providers and clients) so if your establishment would like to participate, please get in touch.

We have also completed our policies and procedures to enable us to become OCN accredited and we are close to gaining centre status which means we can then look at delivering qualifications from the OCN portfolio.

Finally, there is plenty of “behind the scenes work” more info of which, will get blogged in due course. Including project sustainability, aims and objectives, technical stuff and loads more.

The majority of training / learning programmes these days tend to require some form of qualification (to show knowledge) and /or progression path towards further development (further learning, employment etc). Our project too will need to show that it has been of use to the participants and if we are to secure any contacts or funding, we need to be looking towards some form of formal accrediation.
To begin this process, we initially talked to Tony Clabby of UNLTD, a startup organisation for ’social entrepeneurs ‘. He suggested, the Open College Network (OCN) as their diverse mandate would probably suit our project idea. I have worked with OCN before in the past and I also had these in mind.
So after a brief telephone enquiry we have set up a meeting with OCN to look at the possibility of getting our project idea / course accredited and to discuss how it could work alongside other OCN courses, particularly for our potential participants. The meeting is scheduled for Friday 11th July and I will post any updates after then.

As well as tagging our blog posts with relevant words according to what we are writing about, we are also using specific tags that will be propagated in places that are either relative to Birmingham or social enterprises.  At the moment, as far as I am aware, we are just using these special tagging phrases so that we will be displayed on UpyerBrum.  UpyerBrum propagates tags that either use birminghamuk or upyerbrum.  The birminghamuk tag gets placed in the Items tagged from around the web: category.  Users of upyerBrum may then decide to vote for it to be a top story.  Whereas upyerbrum gets placed in the Popular stories voted for by you: category automatically, bypassing the voting stage.  Relevant, and we hope, enciteful posts that we feel are news worthy will be added to the latter.  We will reserve birminghamuk tags for posts which, like this post, are just mentioning a method of social media application or that is less news worthy.

If you know of any other tagging conventions that we should be using to target particular websites please leave your comments below.