Changes to this Ning: Local Communities moving to Social by Social

Hi everyone - Wanted to quickly share some thinking and updates about this network:

We are expanding the network and goals here, and changing the name to reflect that. We hope you'll find that exciting, will stay with us, and invite others to join. This explanation is a bit lengthy, but we want to be transparent, so hope it is helpful.

The network was originally set up around the September 21 2009 workshop that was organised by the Social by Social team with Department for Communities and Local Government. There is a report back on that here.

(The Social by Social team is Amy Sample Ward, David Wilcox and Andy Gibson, who with Cass Business School co-authored the book Social by Social - a practical guide to using new technologies for social impact. )

The workshop succeeded in bringing together a wide range of people supporting social tech at local level - in particular national programmes like Talk About Local, Community Voices, Local 2.0, IDeA, Timely Information for Citizens.

Since then we've been talking to the programme leaders and others about developing this network as a neutral market place for ideas, support and services. Everyone is keen - but how to sustain it? There's no funding, and work to date has been voluntary.

We've now agreed informally that a way forward that works for the team, programmes - and we hope others - is for the Social by Social team to maintain the network on the following basis:

- while keeping an initial focus on local social tech, we'll open up to anyone interested in social tech for social benefit. That should help cross-overs between communities of locality and of interest - something that Dominic Campbell highlighted at the workshop.
- in practice that might mean the sort of areas we covered in Social by Social - as you can see here - managers, charities, membership organisations, public services, social entrepreneurs, campaigners
- in order to reflect the change, the URL of the site will change to socialbysocial.net, and we'll make some changes to the look and feel to reflect the difference. (See the updated logo and colors, as well as an updated About page.)

We don't want this network to be "branded" as Social by Social. We - Amy, Andy, David - are freelancers operating individually as well as together on some occasions. We aren't a company.

Like much else in the field, this is an experiment in how to work collaboratively with minimum formal organisation. Here's how we are starting:

- Anyone interested in the field can join the network. We'll put together some lightweight terms for acceptable use. Broadly: stick to the topic, be respectful, and while anyone can offer services, don't just tout for business. Be helpful to others.
- Anyone who wants to host a topic or programme area can ask to set up a group. You'll see Talk About Local and Community Voices have done that, and Will Perrin has created a group for a Hyperlocal Alliance. Thanks!
- What happens within groups is up to the admin/owners. We've set up a group for admins to collaborate on network development.
- In addition anyone can blog or post to forums. We'll do some light-touch facilitation to categories and cross link... and blog ourselves to bring in news, encourage discussion, make some linkages.

We want the space to be somewhere that the gift economy of open knowledge sharing meets paid-for, and where people explore how to sustain the creativity and innovation that social media can bring. The Social by Social team will do that themselves by committing some time voluntarily, while also seeing if those on the site and elsewhere will pay us for our social media, reporting and organising skills. We'll encourage others on the site to do the same thing. It's a market.

That's as far as we've got. What do you think? We don't want to build a large commmunity, and there will be lots of signposting and linking to blogs and communities. We do hope we can help make some connections between people who share an enthusiasm for the social benefits of social tech - and new ways to doing things.

If you want to explore more of that we hope you will read Social by Social, which was funded by NESTA. You can order it here, read it online and also download the whole 250 pages free as a pdf.

Please feel free to comment here with questions or ideas, or to report any bugs (especially as we aren't sure that all the links have been properly updated with the domain change, etc.).

Thanks,

Amy, David and Andy