Thanks to everyone who took a few minutes to complete the survey and give me ideas and feedback on what would make the Derby/shire Social Media Cafe really useful to the community.

I think a couple of interesting things to come out of it was a strong desire for social media surgeries as well as cafe meets. Surgeries have been established in other areas of the country where people with experience online in some way ‘surgeons’ can offer free guidance and practical help to ‘n00bs’ in getting started. I think this would be an interesting area for the group to look at going in alongside developing the meets we have now.

So – here are the results anyway:

1. How often do you think the cafe should meet? 46% said monthly, 39% said every other month, 14 % said quarterly.
2. When should it be held? 78% said evenings, 18% said during a weekday, 3% said on the weekend
3. Where should it be held? 85% said central Derby (where all the meetings have been so far) but favourites after that were Matlock, Chesterfield, Alfreton and Belper.
4. What format should it be? 96% said they liked a mix of themed discussion and informal networking
5. Suggested topics. There was lots of interest in all of the topics listed with Digital inclusion and hard-to-reach groups online and the future of news coming out top. Other suggestions put in by recipients included; social web for social change, social media for business and commercial use, usability, writing good web content, citizen journalism and the future of social networking.
6. Would you be willing to lead a session? Nice to see that so many would and had an are they felt they could share something with the group about.
7. Sponsorship opportunities. There were a few replies saying they’d be interested in sponsoring the cafe – if this was you please get in touch with me (sarah l lay (at) googlemail (dot)com)
8. Offers of help to organise. Again, there were a few people saying yes so if this was you please (please) get in touch!
9. Anything else? Lots of good comments here and encouragement too – thanks.
10. Overwhelmingly the group voted for cake rather than death.

What now?

Well, with a full time job, final year of part-time Masters, freelancing work, a husband and three-year-old child I’m going to need A LOT of help to make the cafe / surgeries happen more often than they do at the moment.

It’s been pretty tough going to make the first three happen although very rewarding when they do.

I guess the first thing for me is finding out who is interested in happening and how then we can take it from there. It would be nice to get some dates and locations down in the diary with a rough idea of the themes or surgery opportunities and then run from there I guess.

So – over to you guys again!