Reaching critical mass? Social media at #NCASC

Last month I attended my fourth National Children and Adult Services Conference #NCASC in Eastbourne. The first time I attended in 2009 was to launch the resources from Safety Matters, an action research Change Project I’d been running at RiPfA focusing on adult safeguarding. We had a session in Harrogate presented by myself and a couple people from the project who worked in one of the local authority members in our network. The session, and resources, were really well received; the feedback was amazing and I left clutching a handful of business cards and a big fat grin of satisfaction! We followed up afterwards by email or phonecall with the contacts we had made. At that time I’d been using Facebook for two years, Twitter for just over one and LinkedIn for a mere six months but I wasn’t confident of the value of any of them for my working life.

Fast forward to NCASC 2010 in Manchester and l can share with you that there were three people tweeting from conference about adult social care, three of us, Vic @cpeanose, Mark @MarkWatsonKM and myself. I suppose there may have been one or two other exhibitors or journalists tweeting, and I think Jasmine @Jasmine_Ali was tweeting about children’s services but I couldn’t confidently name any more. There was no organised hashtag and very little online action, but I left convinced that social media had more to offer our sector. Last year we started to get a momentum building at NCASC 2011 in London; there was a veritable feast of tweeters, policy makers, journalists, exhibitors and at last an (unofficial) hashtag and engagement with people not attending conference. I shared some thoughts on it here:

This was my third time at NCASC and each year I leave exhausted with a lot more to think about (and a head full of more ideas) than when I arrived. I usually meet a few people in person that I’ve not met before, my favourites this year were @jaimeelewis @mroutled and @philblogs and I was also delighted to see far more real life networking inspired by twitter connections. [As an aside I do believe that the #socialcare sector is finally realising the potential of #socmed].

Ever the optimist, despite having my bid for a social media session rejected in 2011, like a dogged determined stubborn one woman show with a belief for something better, I persevered. This year I was successful in my bid to run a social media session at NCASC 2012. The focus was Social media as a tool for citizen and community engagement and three years after starting talking online about the value of social media, and two years since RiPfA had started to use social media to engage people with our work and coproduce content, we had the opportunity to talk to other people about it. I was given the foyer bar area, in a lunchtime slot, up against some brilliant alternative sessions including another RiPfA one led by @gerrynos and @rich_w talking about our joint work on user-led organisations. Let’s just say I wasn’t optimistic about expected attendance.

What happened next really surprised me, people arrived, and more people arrived and more people arrived until there was standing room only:

Even better people participated; I didn’t want a session on social media to involve me talking at people, so it was really rather important that people shared their thoughts and ideas. I was also at that point in conference myself where I thought if anyone else talked at me my head might explode; I’m quite a kinaesthetic learner who heavily relies on the left side of my brain, and there had been lots of words but little else at that point – good words mind, but lots of information broadcast. So I was delighted that the audience participated and also engaged people not in the room through using twitter. My slides are below:

Social media as a tool for citizen and community engagement #NCSAC 2012 Workshop from George Julian

I’ve had lots of great feedback following that session, lots of energy and ideas, lots of people sharing the value of social media for their roles as Councillors, Directors, Service Managers and Service Providers. Community Care profiled the session and some of the discussion with it here. I’ll put some more thoughts down about the session in due course but for now I promised to share the slides, so they’re up.

I know I said it last year, and I could always be accused of being overly optimistic, however, it does genuinely feel like social care is *finally* beginning to recognise, and hopefully realise, the value of social media.

Unpaid research work

For years there has been concern in the research world about ethics of paying people to participate in research, whether it is necessary and how much is appropriate. In social care research there is a growing expectation that those who access services should receive some sort of payment or honorarium for participation in research work. This seems completely reasonable to me, if people give their time they should be rewarded accordingly.

Therefore I was a little concerned when I looked into the latest addition to research jobs added to Guardian Jobs today. Having been involved with recruitment for a couple of projects recently I’ve been interested to see what else is out on the market. Today I did a search on Guardian jobs and found the following:

There were 99 jobs added in the last day, when ‘research’ was the search term. Over half of them (53 jobs) were unpaid, voluntary posts or interns and a couple more just offered expenses as a daily rate.

Maybe I’m over egging this, but that’s over half of those posts being offered without pay. I’m sure that the experience will be valuable for people, and I’m sure there are other perks to such a role, but I can’t help but think people are taking advantage of the current economic climate to get some cheap labour. I’m also not convinced that it will do research, it’s reputation or uptake, any real benefit if people without the relevant skills or experience are involved. I’m not doubting there will be some very well qualified people applying for these posts, it’s a tough job market at the moment, but it doesn’t feel right to me.

What do you think? Have you been an intern/are you an intern? Do you have interns and voluntary workers working for you?

Don’t count the days, make the days count

Unless you are living in a cave, there is a good chance that you will know that the 30th Olympiad, London 2012, opened in a spectacular ceremony on Friday night. I’ll not talk about that, there are some excellent reviews about it online, my Mum’s take was that it was ‘fantastic but too long’, my Gran wanted to see more of the Queen and went to bed after the first hour, I watched it yesterday and loved it.

I’m not quite sure why but I really like the Presidenti of the IOC, Jacques Rogge. He reminds me of a friendly grandfather figure and he is often giving sound advice. His gem from the Opening Ceremony was this:

‘And to the athletes I offer this thought, your talent, your dedication and commitment brought you here, now you have a chance to become true Olympians. That honour is determined not by whether you win but by how you compete’

I love the sentiment, I love how everyone interviewed in the first couple days have talked about the success being in making it to perform at the Olympics, even people who have not qualified for further action.

Yesterday was the first full day of Olympics action and it was also the day that my Dad’s bestmate’s daughter got married. He and Mum received their invite to the wedding months ago, none of us thought Dad would be around for it as at the time he was seriously ill. A couple weeks ago Dad’s chemo was stopped, so I was stood down as Mum’s reserve date and the hope was that he would make it himself. This was really important for him and definitely something that he wanted to do. I spoke to my parents yesterday morning and they were all set for the wedding, Dad was still very tired and not feeling one hundred percent but he was up for it.

An hour later I got a phonecall from Mum; Dad had been sick. This is a relatively new development for Bobby, even throughout his chemo he has been nauseous but not suffered from vomiting. Yesterday wasn’t the first time that it had happened, although it was his worst episode and it completely wiped him out. Mum was in a little bit of a panic, she was torn between attending the wedding or staying home with Dad, she was calling to ask whether I’d come over and stay with him. My Saturday plans were shelved and over to the folks I went.

Bobby was looking really quite rough when I got there, but him and I both played it down until Mum had gone – at which point we had an honest conversation. He is concerned that the tumour is growing, it has started bleeding again, he knows that there is nothing more that can be done and I think he is a little bit scared. That said, he was also just exhausted. Bobby was packed off to bed and I settled down to watch the Olympics.

I was so grateful that there was something so engrossing and engaging on TV to take my mind off things. Later on that afternoon Dad surfaced and we spent hours watching the coverage together. We were armchair pundits of the highest standard, Olympic standard in fact.

As I sat thinking about the dedication, effort and hours of fighting that these athletes put into making it to the Olympics, I can’t help but draw parallels to my Dad’s last five years, the effort and hours of fighting. As the sign in front of their television proclaims ‘Don’t count the days, make the days count’, Dad may not be training for an Olympics, but I thought Jacques Rogge’s words were equally applicable, it’s not whether you win in the end, it’s how you compete.