Social Media for Social Good presentation – BCACL 2012

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Jules and Aaron had a great time presenting to about 60 people at BCACL on all kinds of social media and why it’s important to support each other to become citizens of the online community.   We looked at ideas about what gifts people with disabilities might bring to those communities, and why they need us, and what challenges there might be in getting and sustaining access, and what the roles of organizations might be in supporting them.   Perhaps the most fun part was at the end when we talked about how people make fun of us: “Are you tweeting a picture of your pie again?”  “Did I really need to know you’re at Starbucks?”  Just the night before a group of Executive Directors came upon us walking home and said they had been concerned about whether we were okay as we hadn’t tweeted anything for a whole hour!    So we got our new social media friends to help us generate a list of what we might say when people make fun of us.

All in all, out of the presentation at least one agency went on Facebook, and about 25 started up twitter accounts.   Feedback was great – we were told that we made it all really accessible and not so scary, and that people had a different sense of why this might be important to themselves, their organizations and to social justice movements.

Our presentation is downloadable at SlideShare – in fact, it’s just been upgraded as one of the most talked about slideshare presentations on Facebook, with almost 600 views in 4 hours!   We’ve been asked if we’d consider travelling to other organizations and doing this workshop, and we’d love to talk to you if you’re interested in that.

We believe we are surrounded by evidence of kindness, sharing and abundance.   If you’d like to share any of the articles or illustrations (not photographs of people or works which are obviously by individuals, who have only given us permission for here) from the 101 Friends blog  you are welcome to do so for the uses of non-profits or social justice organizations, giving credit to www.101friends.ca – a note letting us know either in the comments or by email or twitter would be great!   Copies of our books, posters and media works for use by groups are available at www.spectrumpress.ca  Inquiries about workshops or facilitation can be made to aaron@spectrumsociety.org  Spectrum is a charity, although Spectrum Press and Learning are Social Enterprises, and donations to our work can be made here – specify Research Training and Development if it matters to you, otherwise it’ll be used where it’s most needed.  You can subscribe to our blog as a blog on wordpress, or as a monthly newsletter at the link above.