On Friday, Feb. 14th, I had the pleasure of delivering a workshop in Windsor to workers from the settlement and housing sectors. It  was held at the United Way of Windsor Essex County offices and hosted by the Applied Social Welfare & Research Group – York University in partnership with the Homeless Coalition of Windsor Essex County. The workshop was titled Building Capacity Within the Housing and Settlement Sector. We put together an array of social media tools and presented examples of how social media is transforming how we work, learn and communicate with our stakeholders.  I was very pleased that Marco Campana, Online Capacity Development Coordinator from the Ontario Coalition of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI) was able to participate as co-presenter. Marco has a wealth of experience in e-service delivery and a solid understanding of the challenges faced by workers in the settlement sector. OCASI has an award winning online site called Settlement.Org. The site is rich in social media content and is a portal for people seeking accurate information on settlement and immigration issues.

Marco and I organized the workshop with a wiki (a pbwiki). We used the wiki to organize all our resources and to model how wikis are such an effective tool for collaboration and planning. One of our goals was to provide participants with a planning tool that they can use to begin the strategy and implementation process within their organization.The document was first introduced to me at the Social Tech Training Conference that I attended in the summer of 2008. If there is one document worth having in your kit bag of tools, this document is it. The Web of Change and MaRS organization sponsored this event along with leading edge groups across Canada and the United States.

One of the key points we we wanted to leave with the workshop participants was the importance of starting small and developing a strategy to explain the benefits of using these simple, meaningful and necessary tools in their respective organizations.

I corralled Colleen and Heather from the Homeless Coalition after our workshop and asked them to share a few comments about what they learned. Their comments has helped me sort through what worked and how the workshop can be improved. Thanks Colleen and Heather!  A complete video of the workshop was made and I will post portions of it once I complete the post editing process.

A few of the agenda topics we covered in our workshop included:

• Trends in the Non Profit, Business, Library and Education sectors
• The Tools Your Using Right Now
• What is Blogging Anyway
• Practical Examples (the kitchen sink)
• Ning, VoiceThread, Mindmeister – Integration Platforms
• Overview of Web 2.0
• Web 2.0 Planning Document (Web of Change)

I learned quite a bit from this workshop. For one thing, I’m going scale back on presenting so many social media tools and spend more time on a few tools that I believe might apply immediately to the needs and interests of practioners. Taking time to present some basic web 2.0 information is very necessary as it lays the foundation for understanding the concepts and language. I can see that having the morning to set “web 2.0 context” and present an overview of how others are using the tools, followed by hands on experimenting and learning to use the tools in the afternoon would be a good plan.

On a final note, I’ll be sure to use the Web 2.0 planning document as it reinforces the importance of developing a plan and examining clearly the connecting and starting points for implementing social media tools in your organization.

Brent Presentation, Services