Update on ranger Leyian who was shot: In total they gave him 6 pints of blood, and are keeping him under observation in case of infections.
That’s the latest tweet from the Mara Triangle on twitter and it illustrates some simple principles of good use of social media for charities and non for profit organisations.

The twitter [...]

Take a good look at this picture. It is full of what I would call ordinary folk. None of them appear to be super heroes, to fit the heroic mould we have created for our social entrepreneurs and active citizens.

They are David Barrie’s fellow “bloody minded obsessives” who have collaborated on [...]

Good community leaders need to be connected, competent and of good character. That is one of the blindingly obvious conclusions of a survey in the West Midlands for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The researcher explains what they set out to do
This study examined the realities of citizen governance from the perspective of participants living [...]

I just want to say hello to Andrew Hemmings who moved from lurker to blogger after last night’s mini Birmingham Bloggers meet in the Spotted Dog. (Don’t panic, it was an impromptu meeting for Joanna Geary who will miss the next one this Monday 7pm at Rooty Frooty in the Custard Factory) Andrew talked to [...]

That’s the question thrown my way by Simon Peters at Common Purpose as this international leadership charity sets out to start it’s own blogging experiment. So why?

Leaders need followers and followers need to know if they can trust you.

A blog helps establish how trustworthy you are. It is a patient process, but, over time, [...]

About the time I start writing this a bunch of people will be gathering in London to launch We-Think (Amazon link), the book written by Charles Leadbeater and 237 others. I was sent a review copy, partly because I left a single comment on the wiki, which was used to turn his solo first [...]

Has David Cameron been talking to Tom Steinberg at MySociety?  His announcement yesterday suggests he has because he wants to make ‘scraping’ easier.  Scraping is the process of harvesting information from government websites and reusing it – hopefully for public good.

The Conservative leader quoted a really good example with the mysociety website theyworkforyou which provides [...]

You may have heard me before railing at the term user generated content. It infuriates me because it embodies two ideas: “you mean we can get them to make films for us for free?” and “Well yes they can use our space but only when and how it suits us”.
It begins with the assumption [...]