Monday, January 25, 2010

New Role for Community Developer

My year is finally on the go, after two days of planning about the year ahead in the Community Space (RLabs) we heard that there will be more projects coming into the space so that mean I will have new rolls for the year :-)

Here is the project that will be involve in this year:

- Social Media Training
- Social Media Consulting
- Mobile Citizens Journalism
- Mobile Counselling
- Community Innovation Academy
- Business Incubator
- Senior Mobile Sessions (SMS)
- Sustainable Mobility Project
- Social Media Surgeries
- RLabs Fellows
- RLabs Modelling

The key rolles that I will focus and be responsible for is the Social Media Surgeries and I will start working on that soon at this point I cant give to musch infoI will keep you updated as that project unfolds. Social Media Consulting and Strategy is one of the projects that I did last year and this years, focus is to get 10 clients for the first half of the year. The other one is the Mobile Counselling Service (MOCO) that provides mobile counselling to people in Western Cape in the area of substance abuse.

4 Open Heart Surgery In Vangate Mall

Take a quick look at my previous post and you will see one of my responsibilities for 2010 is to head up the Social Media Surgery, but it came sooner as I expected. Rlabs has a heart for our communities, so we decided to launched Africa’s first Social Media Surgery in Vangate Mall (Bridgetown) this past weekend. The idea was to bring social media to public where the community could sign up gmail, facebook,twitter,youtube and flickr accounts free of charge. I was very excited and nervous at the same time I did not know what to expect and what the right way was to do the surgery,but at the end of the day it was a job well done. The team made it look so easy and as if we doing this for years well done Rlabs team.

What is Social Media Surgery:

The promotion of Social Media use to support the community and volunteering groups in an area. The surgeons are the facilitators that want to empower the community with the Tools available on the World Wide Web.

Who is the Surgeons:

ex drug addicts and ex gangsters that have completed the course: Social Media for Social Change and various other training at Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT). These trainers and facilitators are under the supervision of an IT lecturer currently completing his Doctorate at CPUT Marlon Parker.

From 9am-5pm we had 47 people who visited the social media surgery besides the few that just asked question what the outreach was about. The process was that people walked into the surgery where they had a one on one consulting with surgeons for about 15-20 minutes. The one on one with the surgeons gave the public a chance to ask question on social media. The tool that most of the people signed up for was email accounts and facebook and a few people knew about twitter and flickr.

Innovation To Empower Communities:Social Media Factory

The next project that I will manage in RLabs space is the social media strategy and consulting for Corporates, NGO’s and Small Businesses etc.

After a back to back meeting with two potential clients myself and Marlon Parker having a general discussion to see in which direction we want the project to grow. Marlon was talking and he mentioned something about social media factory and immediately I told him this is it. We unpacked this social media factory and we came up with bringing our mom2.0, reconstructed and the house wives to be part of the social media consulting and strategy to generate some income. The goal is to have 10 clients signed up for this project before the end of June. So this is a great opportunity for Corporate, NGO’s and Small businesses to help reconstruct our communities and growing you Organisation at the same time with the use of social media

Read more the Social Media Factory