Getting to the Unconference

The venue is BVSC in Birmingham City Centre, 5 minutes walk from New Street and Moor Street stations, as well as the new Digbeth Coach Station. Being a Saturday there is some free on-street parking nearby, although there are plenty of paid car parks nearby. BVSC has a small number of free spaces for disabled people visiting by car, these need to be booked in advance. Maps and more details are on the BVSC site.

View Digbeth & Environs in a larger map

What’s an Unconference?

If you’ve not been to an unconference before then this site has some good advice on how they go — in essence we will create the agenda for the day as we go along, with people volunteering to lead sessions and groups splitting up and forming as necessary.

Schedule

9am – Registration and breakfast
9:25am – Welcome
9:30am – 10:45 am Residents University Discussion
10:45am – 11am Session planning
11am – 12pm Morning session 1
12pm – 1pm Morning session 2
1pm – 2pm Lunch break — see this map for the many options nearby
2pm – 3pm Afternoon session 1
3pm – 3:30pm Coffee Break & networking
3:30pm – 4:30pm Afternoon session 2
4:30pm – 5pm Wrap-up

What do I need to bring?

Yourself, a laptop if you want to use one (there will be free wifi) and anything that you may want to use in a session. We’ll have a projector if anyone needs one, but we expect the day to be a bit more informal than that.

If you’d like to make sure there’s an audience for a session you’d like to run, or would like to collaborate — or even organise to share transport on the day why not use the comments here. Look forward to seeing you on the 23rd.

Sponsored by

We’ve happy to announce the details of the Digital Inclusion Unconference. It’ll be held at the BVSC in Birmingham city centre on Saturday 23rd January 2010, (9am – 5pm).

The event is free, thanks to our sponsors — head over to Eventbrite to sign up.

Join We Share Stuff and other people working with those that don’t or can’t take advantage of the opportunities offered by the Internet for a free unconference. A day of discussion and talks with those developing new practices in Digital Inclusion that will leave you with new ideas to try — and a bulging contact book of like-minded professionals and volunteers.

The Digital Inclusion landscape is changing fast, policy and practise are altering as never before. As we are often working in isolation, despite digital connectivity, it will be valuable to join other practitioners and share more of your ideas and experiences.

It’s a chance to talk not so much about policy — and money which distracts from the work itself at many turns — but about the methods and techniques of how to best help people gain opportunities and abilities — in social, community and employment.

The unconference is a chance to work on the issues from the point of view of the practitioners. In an unconference the venue is the only thing fixed, attendees can create as many sessions as they wish on any topics of their choosing — it’s ideal for an event where sharing of practise and open discussion is the aim.

Taking place in central Birmingham, we expect civic-minded social tech experts, those involved on the ground in communities and Digital Inclusion workers to come together and push the debate forward.

Sponsored by

We’re really pleased to announce what we think is the first officially accredited course in understanding and using social media for those with no previous experience. We Share Stuff has developed the course and it’s now part of the OCN framework (WSS are an OCN Centre), as three units of 10 learning hours each.

As it’s platform agnostic (it doesn’t prescribe certain sites or tools) and also driven by the learners as to use, it’s applicable to anyone that wants to get to grips with the social web and gain the confidence to get involved.

We envisage it being useful to businesses, young people — almost anyone — with the bonus of a real qualification at the end of it. We’re now looking for opportunities to deliver it… the fun starts here.

Check out the full details and the course itself here.

Stuart was invited to talk at the West Midlands Regional Observatory’s ‘Sharing Information Digitally’ event.

You can listen to it onine here: Stuart Parker on Digital Inclusion

We Share Stuff is looking for people from all manner of industries to help us with a young people’s project in Sandwell, West Midlands. As part of the project, the young people identify industries they might be interested to work in and are set a task to come up with some questions and interview somebody from that particular industry. The interview will only a be a quick fire Q&A style thing and could take the form of video, audio or any other method that the interviewer decides.

So, if you’re based in the West Midlands (or further afield if interviewed online) we’re asking you if you wouldn’t mind joining our interviewee pool. All you need to do is be available for a quick visit / or online chat etc, from the project team at relatively short notice. Just state your name and job / industry that you’re involved with either on this post, email, twitter etc.

Thanks!

As an organisation that does nothing apart from sharing its skills (and some basic admin of course, and chatting and coffee) it’s lovely to have someone share skills that we need with us. And so we’re extremely happy to have had Lyndsey Michaels working with us for the last month or so.

Lyndsey has tons of experience in marketing and communications as well as being someone who understands the tricky business of bid-writing, she’s already become a hugely valuable member of the We Share Stuff team. She’s managed to smooth our bid-writing process out, slapped us into shape about focusing on the right bits at the right time — and been a refreshing presence in our meetings.

Like all of us, We Share Stuff isn’t a full-full-time job, so if you’d like Lyndsey to work with you I’m sure she’d be happy for you to get in touch.

We have a 30 minute slot at this West Midlands Regional Observatory event, Tuesday 7th October. As their site says, “…exploring the whys and hows of making public data more accessible. We’ll also look at using social media to improve sharing data and information.”

I’ll be using the time to explore what digital inclusion actually means and to raise some stuff about how we might look at ensuring everyone benefits from the techno rush, not just those who are interested.

Digital Mentors are people we work with to help to train, advise and inspire our clients in the use of social technology. Our clients are usually defined as “digitally excluded”, but may also be socially excluded too — we focus a lot of our work on NEETs – young people not in employment, education or training.

Digital Mentors need to either be working with social media, or using it personally on a regular basis — doing it as part of the rest of their activities, not something separate. We Share Stuff feels that the use of social technology shouldn’t be seen as different, difficult, or “something else to learn”, but simply another way to connect and create.

Digital Mentors need to be confident in trying new tools and networks, passing that confidence on to others — our aim is to use informal learning, letting clients chose their own reasons for interacting. That means that we don’t prescribe types of content, sites or tools to use, but instead help instil the knowledge to choose the appropriate way for each task and the basic skills and confidence to learn the rules and techniques of the tools.

We are an accredited OCN (Open College Network) provider and are working on our own social media course that will fit into QCF framework. No previous teaching or assessment experience or qualifications are necessary, but there may be opportunities to gain them.

As our work is project based, we need to be able to engage freelancers to help deliver training — work may not be regular, and we will have a team for each project. Some availability in normal working hours is much preferred. We’re based in Birmingham (UK) so most of our work is based in and around the West Midlands.

Our Digital Mentors need to be comfortable with working with young people, and in some instances may require a CRB certificate and/or public liabilities insurance (we will both advise and help on these issues).

Drop us a line in the first instance, and we’ll talk.

Not a huge amount of progress so far on the idea for a Digital Inclusion Unconference, but a great deal of support has been expressed.

So as support meets inaction, I’ve set up a wiki for people to help organise and it should also become useful nearer the time.

We’ve stuck a pin in the calendar and it landed on Saturday 14th November — we’ve also been doing some work securing a venue, but any thoughts you can contribute (which might even change the date etc) are welcome.