Category

I just wanted to post a quick thought or two prior to the Guardian online Q&A regarding social media and social enterprise. No idea how interesting it’s going to be and it’s the first time I’ve done one of these so while I tweeted about my approach earlier in the week, I can see me being more of a lurker. We’ll see how it goes. I guess from the ‘pulling no punches’ line I think

If you’ll forgive the indulgence we are rather proud to tell people that We Share Stuff Birmingham Ltd this week became We Share Stuff Birmingham C.I.C. We’ve been working on this for a while, and are pleased to have cemented our social enterprise aims into the organisation. It won’t make any difference to the way that we operate.: put simply, we knew that we were working to make our community a bet

Just a quick post to mention that our bid for a startup grant from UNLTD (as a social entrepreneur) was successful and we now have funding in place to deliver the taster sessions leading up to 2009. Many thanks to Tony Clabby, our development manager and the rest of the UNLTD staff for recognising the potential of our project and giving us this opportunity to get things moving swiftly.

In order to deliver any N/OCN unit or combination of units a provider has to become a “Recognised Centre”. Now, as yet, the project is not currently looking at becoming a “centre” as such, as we plan to deliver our training using existing providers. Just wanted to make the point that the organisation is looking to become recognised with OCR and there is not currently a physical “centre&#

A new Government white paper, Communities in Control, came out last week and in their own words… “Communities in control: real people, real power aims to pass power into the hands of local communities. We want to generate vibrant local democracy in every part of the country, and to give real control over local decisions and services to a wider pool of active citizens.” A few interesting things relat

As we approach more organisations and have more meetings, there’s a reoccurring question that comes up. ” What’s the project called?” So far, each time I explain about NBSE, but now I have made a decision on a project name, for convenience in the first instance. So after a weekend of word juggling, the NBSE project will now be known as “We Share Stuff“. Alas, wesharestuff.com has b

Not much time this morning so i’ll make it quick and we can elaborate later. The meeting with UNLTD took place on Friday 27th and was very positive and gave us some kind of timeframe in the short term. (more later!) I’ve set up a Google Apps space for the project which will allow us to manage the project a little better from now on. Anybody who comes into the project will get access to this. It’s cu

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 d

Another extremely relevant debate sparked by Nick Booth (Podnosh) this time addressing the issues of the digital divide. This is a subject which is at the very heart of what I believe the NBSE project will look to address. I agree with most of what is being said in that the focus should be on the communities not the technology but I do have some fears that the wrong people will be rushing to throw their weight behind

The Dept. for Innovation, Universities & Skills (DIUS) are currently running a consultation regarding the way forward for informal adult learning. It’s been running from January so we’re a tad late on this but the consultation is open until June 12th so at least there’s time to have a look at the proposals and responses etc from the likes of NIACE. Just a quick aside, no more posts from me now u