We’re back for 2012 and the first date for your diaries is the evening of 24 February.

We’ll be finalising the details of this meeting (like times and venue!) over the next week or so, so keep your eye on here, the twitter account or the hashtag (we actually have two but tend to use #smcderby rather than #derbysmc!)

Never been to a social media cafe before? Here’s what you can expect…

• An informal network and conversation event for anyone who works with or has an interest in all things digital in Derbyshire
• Coffee and probably cake – although sometimes you do have to pay for this yourself
• To learn something or to share something with other people passionate about this stuff
• To find out how social media and digital are being used outside of your sector or work or area of experience – this can be quite eye-opening!
• What you won’t get – the hard sell from any companies as we ask people not to push their products, companies or services although talking about what you do and discovering opportunities is A-ok!

We’ve also had word that the very first Derby Social Media Surgery will be taking place at the start of March. This is an opportunity for not-for-profit organisations, community organisations and charities to get free advice and practical help from people with experience of the tools and tips needed to get on online.

More details on this soon too but you can follow the hashtag #derbysms if you’re interested in being either a patient (needing help or advice) or a surgeon (available to help out).

In the meantime spread the word that the cafe and surgery are on their way as we head toward spring and we’ll see you there!

Sarah and Nigel

A small group but big conversations about digital in Derby – and plans for getting SMCDerby back on the rails fully in 2012.

Thanks to Nigel for organising and Quad for letting us perch in the cafe.

Here’s a list of Twitter handles for the people who came:

• @Mannaz
• @sarahlay
• @laurennotes
• @crocstar
• @aidenmkelly
• @kaygeeuk
• @datchux

And here’s a flavour of where the converastion went:

• QR Codes – especially about how Derby Museum and others are using them. Could have done with Nick Moyes or Andy Mabbett to explain more really!
• BitCoin
• Digital activism
• Building and managing networks and flows of information
• Freedom of Information requests via social media
• social media surgeries
• the future of the Derby and Derbyshire Social Media Cafe!

On this last topic the decision was made that the next meet will be in January (date, time and venue to be confirmed) and then every other month from there. I’ll be digging out the results of the survey we ran to see if we can get a handle on format etc but any ideas / requests / offers of sponsorship do leave a comment, tweet me or Nigel or email us!

We’re also hopeful a social media surgery will run in Derby soon – if you’re interested in being a surgeon or a patient leave us a comment and we’ll make sure you get the details.

Until next time – see you online

So, if you do digital in or around Derby and fancy a coffee and chat with other people that do it too come along to the cafe bar at Quad from 6.30pm.

It’s all very informal so there is no agenda – all we ask is that you don’t directly pitch your services to people attending but rather come along and talk about industry issues or opportunities to collaborate. If you’re a non-profit or community group then there will be people at the cafe who can offer you advice on how to use social media and digital too – although again, this is very informal and not an organised social media surgery!

I’m looking forward to seeing lots of you tonight (and hopefully the cafe will become a more regular event again too)!

And if you do do digital in Derbyshire here are a couple of things I spotted which I thought you might be interested in:

Derbyshire Broadband Survey

Derbyshire County Council have two surveys open for residents and businesses to share their experience of internet and broadband in the county.

You can take the survey/s on their website and the information will be used to gauge demand for broadband as well as the current level of provision.

Might be five minutes well spent if you think broadband could be better for your home or business in Derbyshire.

Take the survey on the Derbyshire County Council website.

Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times (15)

This film, documenting a year behind the scenes at the newspaper, will be showing at Quad 21 – 23 October 2011 and shows their media desk correspondent covering the advances which may make print obsolete.

Looks interesting if you’re interested in the past, present or future of journalism and the media.

More info on the Quad website about Page One.

We had the second meeting of the Derby and Derbyshire Social Media Cafe last night. It was a great turn out and a really interesting talk about hyperlocal by Will Perrin, Mike Rawlins and Nicky Getgood of Talk About Local and Philip John of the Lichfield Blog.

Will told us all about how he got into hyperlocal blogging, showcased some of the sites they are supporting through Talk About Local and explained their model. We then had a look at The Lichfield Blog with Philip John and there were some interesting points about bloggers being accepted by or even working in collaboration with traditional media.

There were some good questions from the group about the potential legal issues of running a hyperlocal blog, the amount of time it takes, community-generated vs organisation trying to embed in a community (BBC Local or Local People were examples) and some general chat about what hyperlocals exist in Derbyshire.

It’s set me thinking about hyplerlocal again from a personal perspective, but that’s another blog for another day.

Attendee list:

I’m trying to do this from memory so if I’ve missed you off, firstly sorry and secondly just let me know so I can add you!

Sarah Lay
Richard Mackney
Colin Mitchell
Will Perrin
Nicky Getgood
Mike Rawlins
Philip John
Emily Robe
Antoinette Burchill
Darren Holden
Karen Thomas
Nick Moyes
Christine Cawthorne
Hadrian Cawthorne
Bel Harvey
Lee Flanaghan
Lauren Noakes
Sarah Barker
Colin MacKenzie
Emma Bryn-Jones
SubVee
warrenfree
cybrum

Useful links:

There were a few sites and posts mentioned in the presentations and chat which people asked me to link to from here.

You can of course find out about Talk About Local and The Lichfield Blog at their respective sites. Philip John also highlighted a couple of posts on his blog – one about some legal information and one about sharing ideas for hyperlocal sites.

I think we should all check out the sponsor’s site as well – Fish Media - kindly paid for the venue and the drinks so I’m sure we’d all like to thank them for that.

If you liked CUBE at Deda then check out the website for opening times – they’d welcome anyone who wanted to pop in for a coffee, bite to eat and use their wifi!

Tag anything from last night – tweets, blogs, photos – with #smcderby and I’ll aggregate when I get a chance!

Tell me what you want!

Planning is already underway for the next meeting – this will hopefully be earlyFebruary.

Let me know if there is a day / time which is best for you so we can try to set a date suitable for greatest number of people.

And is there a subject you want to talk about as a group like we did with hyperlocal? If no-one has anything in particular we can just have a networking session. Get in touch and let us know your thoughts on last night and what should happen next time!

Until then…

Ok, maybe not fully mapping Derby and maybe it’s a bit rough round the edges, but this should give you a good idea of the impact of Social Media in Derby and possibly inspire you to do something similar or even better?

A fair few Saturdays ago, I was bored and thought I’d see how much of Derby was on Facebook. I began to search for key areas (political wards or neighbourhood names), issues, people, places etc and plotted them as nodes on a Mind Map using MindMeister.

I tweeted to Tim that I was doing this and invited him to collaborate. It grew exponentially as we both edited it live and quickly moved beyond Facebook into something more indicative of the many sites in use by or known to both of us.

You can view the map for yourself below and draw your own conclusions about what it tells us. Everything on the map is freely available to public searches. All we have done is carry out those searches for you and put them all in one place.

A Mind Map illustrating the extent of usage of Social Media in Derby, UK.

City of Derby Social Media Map by Paul Cole and Tim Cooper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

The map was briefly made available at LocalGovCamp in a session I ran entitled, “Are we listening?”. This session and the discussions it raised have been covered very well already by Sarah Lay, Jack Pickard and Pete Ashton. All posts are definitely worth a read.

I had hoped to have a hyperlink (the small arrow) from each node taking you straight to each web page. Unfortunately, these have only (mostly) been added to Facebook so far.

You should be aware that there is an issue with the links to most of the Facebook Groups as I incorrectly pasted the link to the search results for the group and not the actual group address. This will take me a while to rectify, if I do it at all. To get to a Facebook group with a faulty link, simply copy and paste the exact title as it appears on the node into the search bar on Facebook. Links I have added for Facebook Pages and other sites should be OK.

The map is presented as is, that is, as it was created on that day. It may not be organised perfectly or logically, but it does its job as far as I’m concerned.

The simple experience of searching for and finding what is out there was a good learning experience in itself. You can take what you want from it or try it for yourself in your city or area.

Please share your thoughts with us.