We mentioned, a short time ago, about our plans to hold a regular surgery for voluntary and community groups, assisting and supporting them with all the gubbins that the Internet has to offer. Well, we now have a launch date, so put Sunday 23rd November in your diaries as the ‘We Share Stuff’ team will be at The Red Couch cafe, Erdington each Sunday morning from 11:00am to around 1:00pm. The surgery will be free to attend and the cafe itself serves a wide selection of drinks and snacks. So if you’re curious about the Internet, want to know how to get a voice online, or merely want to drop by for a chat, please do. The atmosphere is real friendly and we promise not to bombard anyone with jargon. It’s all about showing you how easy the Internet is becoming. If you want to let us know in advance of any particular things you may be interested in, or just to let us know you’re coming along, please add a comment to this blog post or give us a quick call. We look forward to seeing you there!

We Share Stuff is chuffed to announce that we will be running a free Internet surgery every Sunday morning at the Red Couch Cafe, Erdington. We have taken the blueprint established in the Custard Factory run by Birmingham blogger extraordinaire, Pete Ashton. We will be available to answer questions and support community groups, businesses and individuals on the wonderful world of the Internet. Blogging, websites, micro-sites, youtube, facebook et al.. they’re all up for discussion and how they can be used to increase activity, awareness and what not. The sessions will start off as a first come first served basis. The cafe serves a wide range of food and drink and is located on the High Street in Erdington.

Many thanks to Cafe manager, Taf, for letting us use the premesis. In fact, The Red Couch will probably be the first business to use the service after briefly experiencing what we have to offer, they’re keen to get a blog going and get involved…which is what it’s all about… The surgery plans to start early November, we will announce more details on here as and when we have them.

A meeting was held to discuss any possible direction for the project and we came out of it with a few things to look into. For me, these early sessions are all about gauging interest in the idea and I now think we have a core of people ready to start moving things forward. Last night Kev, Jon and myself discussed a few ideas and straight away, I wanted to highlight the issue of participants in the project. For many different reasons, a lot of people who have expressed an interest in NBSE, simply don’t have the time to commit to what looks like a pretty big project. All three of us last night commented that we too have time and commitment issues and therefore, are looking long term for the project. As we are blogging our progress, it will be open for people to come onboard and contribute as and when. There’s a lot of experience and skill out there that this kind of project would benefit from and we’ll keep the facebook group open for those to be involved as we progress.

Location & transport
One of the first subjects raised was that of premises and location. My initial thoughts were to have any activity centralised at a possible N brum training centre. Both Kev and Jon saw the delivery as being more mobile and definitely saw the project as more of an outreach service. Both, of course, sounds ideal and this gave us something definite to start visualising and forming ideas. Jon then raised the issue of the lack of transport within the area, especially where buses are concerned. This led us to discuss Nbrum boundaries and how far and where we should provide our service to. Task born: geographical area of N Birmingham, council borders, transport links,  etc. Also, places with internet access / courses / training ongoing (libraries, schools, community centres, churches etc)

Content & Delivery
We touched upon how social media taster sessions could work for different audiences / areas such as unemployed, probation, health etc and how we’d use a selection of different applications to approach any engagement / learning / informing objectives. We thought it might be useful to try setting some taster sessions up during the summer at various locations to experience how it could work in practise, so another project task was born: To source local training providers to see if we could possibly run some social media taster sessions or even “piggy back” current courses (hijack the lesson)

Meetings
We have a few meetings lined up to help us with the business side of things. A meeting with Unltd takes place Friday 27th and we’re looking to set up a meeting with some of the NIACE folk in the near future. No set date for a progress meeting as yet for members to get together again, but we will probably be looking at something monthly. Of course we have the internet to keep track of everything!

One initial thought is whether we are reinventing the wheel here. Is this kind of thing already happening?

E-Skills UK is currently working on a 5 year strategic plan and the latest revision has some interesting stuff, only after a quick five minute scan, already there are loads of thoughts popping into my mind on how our proposed venture can tackle some of the issues raised. I’ve also found myself going “but what about this?” and “why don’t they talk about that?”. Anyway, i’ll post some more on the plan when I’ve had chance to have a good read.

There are many different avenues our project can take but from my own point of view, the E-Skills things seems pretty relevant and to answer my original question. ” What took us so long to get started?”